Indian English Poetry

The English Language in India

Before Asian Indians could write poetry in English, two related conditions were necessary. First, the English language had to be sufficiently Indianized to be able to express the reality of the Indian situation; second, Indians had to be sufficiently Anglicized to use the English language to express themselves. The first of these two conditions, the Indianization of the English language, began much before the second, the Anglicization of Indians. Hence, though the first Indian poet to write in English was Henry Derozio, in the early nineteenth century, the Indianization of English had begun about three centuries earlier, in 1498, when Vasco da Gama, sailing from Lisbon, landed in Kerala. It was almost another century before the first Englishman came to India, but by the time Father Thomas Stephens arrived in Goa in 1579, a considerable body of Indo-Portuguese words were already being assimilated into English. Such lexical borrowing accelerated with the increasing British presence in India after 1599 when the East India Company was launched. For nearly 150 years after the charter of the East India Company, Englishmen in India wrote only travel books for the public and journals and letters in private. Nevertheless, by the end of the seventeenth century, a number of Indian words had been naturalized into English. The following is a selection from G. Subba Rao’s catalog in his book Indian Words in English (1969):

Amuck, Arrack, Bazaar, Bandicoot, Brahmin, Bungalow, Calico, Cash, Cheroot, Chintz, Chit, Compound, Cooly, Dhobi, Divan, Dungaree, Fakir, Ghee, Guru, Gunny, Hakim, Hookah, Imam, Jaggery, Juggernaut, Maharaja, Mongoose, Nabob, Pariah, Pucka, Punch, Pundit, Shampoo, Shawl, Tank, Toddy, Yogi, Zamindar.

Because the functional and pragmatic context of the language changed in India, English began to adapt itself to its new environment. This nativization process continued as the use of English increased, as schools were established to teach it, and as the number of Indians using it increased.

More important than this large-scale lexical borrowing was the fact that, by the end of the eighteenth century, Englishmen in India had started to write poetry on local Indian subjects, whereas earlier, they had written only travelogues, journals, and letters. Of these Englishmen in India, the most important was Sir William Jones (1746-1794), one of the first British Indian (or Anglo-Indian) poets. An accomplished linguist and translator, his familiarity with Indian traditions is reflected in his eight hymns to the various Indian deities. These poems are strictly Indian in both style and theme; in writing them, Jones demonstrated for future Indian poets that the English language could be a fit vehicle for Indian subject matter. Hence, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, the prospective Indian English poet inherited not only an English whose expressive range had been enlarged by a substantial lexical borrowing of Indian words but also an English which, as British Indian poets such as Jones had shown, was richly amenable to Indian subject matter.

The second precondition, the Anglicization of Indians, began when the British became a powerful colonial power in India. This happened more than 150 years after the East India Company was chartered. In 1757, the British won the historic Battle of Plassey, which gave them control of Bengal. In 1772, they assumed the Diwani, or revenue administration, of Bengal, and in 1790, they took over the administration of criminal justice. Not until the British had changed from traders to administrators did the large-scale Anglicization of India begin. This Anglicization around the turn of the eighteenth century was marked by several crucial events. First, in 1780, India’s first newspaper, Hickly’s Bengal Gazette, was published in English. Second, in 1817, Raja Rammohan Roy, a prominent social reformer, helped found the Hindu College of Calcutta, which later, as Presidency College, became the premier educational institution of Bengal. Third and most important, by 1835, the British government had laid the foundations of the modern Indian educational system with its decision to promote European science and literature among Indians through the medium of the English language. The result was that English became, in India, as in other British colonies, a passport to privilege and prestige.

A study of the social and cultural contexts of Indian English poetry reveals several important insights into its origin. First, Indian English poetry began in Bengal, the province in which the British first gained a foothold. In addition, Indian English poetry was an urban phenomenon centered in Calcutta. In fact, for the first fifty years, Indian English poetry was confined entirely to Bengalis who were residents of Calcutta. Then, gradually, it moved to other urban centers, such as Madras and Bombay; even today, Indian English poetry is largely urban. Finally, because English was an elite language in India, Indian English poets belonged to the upper class. Thus, in its early years, most of the practitioners of Indian English poetry came from a handful of prominent Calcutta families.

Critical approaches

There are basically three ways of approaching Indian English poetry: as an extension of English poetry, as a part of Commonwealth poetry, or as a part of Indian poetry. The first approach is largely outdated today, while the second, though still current, has gradually yielded to the third.

When Indians first began to write poetry in English, they were outnumbered by Eurasians and Englishmen who also wrote poetry on Indian subjects. Hence, poetry by Indians was not distinguished from poetry by non-Indians. Indeed, both types were published by the same publishers, the Indian subsidiaries of British publishers such as Longman or Heinemann, or by the English newspapers and magazines of India, which were usually owned and edited by Eurasians or Englishmen. Most Indian English poets were educated by Englishmen in Anglophone schools; like other English poets, they studied English literature. Because India was a part of the British Empire, Indian English poets did not have a strong national identity, and their early efforts were considered to be a tributary of the mainstream of English literature. Anglo-Indian literature was the term used to denote their poetry, the implication being that this was English literature with Indian themes. The term referred primarily to the literature produced by Englishmen and Eurasians in India, though it also included work by “native” Indians. The first scholarly work on Anglo-Indian literature was Edward Farley Oaten’s A Sketch of Anglo-Indian Literature (1908), a condensed version of which was included in the Cambridge History of English Literature (1907-1914), edited by A. C. Ward. Oaten’s primary concern was with English writers such as Jones, Sir Edwin Arnold, and Rudyard Kipling, and Oaten only made a passing reference to Indian writers in English. With India’s independence from Britain and the withdrawal of the British from India, Anglo-Indian literature, defined as literature written by Englishmen in India, more or less came to an end. On the other hand, literature by Indians in English increased, gradually evolving into an indigenous tradition for itself. Consequently, Oaten’s approach became untenable in dealing satisfactorily with Indian English literature. Nevertheless, it continues to have a few adherents—among them George Sampson, who, in The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature (1970), contends that Indian English literature is a tributary of mainstream English literature.

Another approach, initiated by scholars in England in the early 1960s, is to consider Indian English literature as a part of Commonwealth literature or the literature of former British colonies and dominions such as Canada, Australia, the West Indies, and countries in Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, based at the University of Leeds, has done much to foster such an approach. Later, academics in the United States attempted to see Indian English poetry as a part of a global literature in English. The journal WLWE: World Literatures Written in English represents this approach. These approaches are fairly useful when the focus is large, and the scholar is located in the United States or the United Kingdom, but they share the problem that the literature of the various nationalities have little in common and often belong to different traditions: for example, Nigerian English literature and Australian literature. Nor does such an approach serve very well when one literature, such as Indian English poetry, is studied in depth. It then becomes clear that labels such as “Commonwealth literature” or “world literature in English” simply help to provide a forum for this literature in Western academia and that detailed study is still pursued by nationality.

The most widely accepted approach to Indian English poetry is to regard it as a part of Indian literature. This approach might seem the obvious one, but it took nearly a century to gain wide acceptance and is not without its problems. In the first place, there is no such thing as Indian literature per se: Indian literature is constituted of literature in the several Indian languages, including Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, and Marathi. Most of these piences of literatures however, have their roots in the Sanskrit tradition of Indian literature which flourished from roughly 1500 BCE to 1500 CE. After the latter date, the regional literature in the various Indian languages emerged. Hence, it is possible to argue that a unified tradition in Indian literature does exist. Once that is granted, the task of the critic is to place Indian English literature into such a framework. Considering that English is not traditionally an Indian language, that is not easy although at the time that Indian English literature began to emerge, there was a renewed efflorescence in the other regional languages of India as well. Moreover, the “renaissance” of regional literatures occurred under a stimulus similar to the one that caused the emergence of Indian English literature—namely, the impact on India of British rule, Western knowledge, and the English language. It is reasonable, then, to regard Indian English poetry as a limb of the larger body of Indian poetry, a creation of the same sensibility that has produced other regional-language poetry in India since the nineteenth century.

This approach was first propounded by Indian critics during the 1930s and 1940s, the most influential among them being K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, whose Indo-Anglian Literature (1943) was the first book-length discussion of Indian English literature. Iyengar used the term “Indo-Anglian” to distinguish this literature from Anglo-Indian literature and to suggest that it was a part of Indian literature. In his introduction to Indian Writing in English (1982), Iyengar mentions that the phrase “Indo-Anglian” was used “as early as 1883 to describe a volume printed in Calcutta containing ’Specimen Compositions from Native Students.’” Probably, “Indo-Anglian” was merely an inversion of “Anglo-Indian,” used to distinguish the poetry written by Indians from that of the Englishman. Alongside the term “Indo-Anglian,” “Indo-English” was also used by critics who did not like the former. Both terms were used until the early 1970s, after which Indo-English gradually acquired greater acceptance. The term “Indian English” was used from the 1960s as synonymous with “Indo-English.” It is being used increasingly in preference to other terms.

Henry Derozio

Henry Derozio (1807-1831) is generally credited with being the first Indian English poet. His father was of Portuguese descent, and his mother was an Anglo-Indian. Derozio was Indian not only by birth but also by self-definition. This was especially remarkable because Derozio, a Christian, was reared among Eurasians and Englishmen, and many of his Hindu Bengali contemporaries strove hard to identify themselves with the British. Derozio’s love for India is revealed in several of his poems. In his short life of twenty-three years, Derozio had a remarkable career as a journalist, a teacher at Hindu College, a leading intellectual of his day, and a poet. He has often been compared to John Keats.

Derozio wrote short poems for several magazines and newspapers of his day, but only one volume of his poems, The Fakeer of Jungheera (1828), appeared during his lifetime. A selection of his poems, published in 1923 by Oxford University Press, has subsequently been reprinted. As a poet, Derozio showed great promise, though he did not live to fulfill it. His poems reveal the great influence of the English Romantic poets, particularly Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott. Derozio’s sonnets and short poems, such as “To India My Native Land” and “The Harp of India,” are his most accomplished works. His ambitious long poem, The Fakeer of Jungheera, is an interesting attempt to fuse the Byronic romance with the realities of the Indian situation. Despite the fact that Derozio’s output was uneven and meager, he is counted as one of the major Indian English poets for both historical and artistic reasons.

Kasiprasad Ghose

A contemporary of Derozio, the Indian English poet Kasiprasad Ghose (1809-1873) published The Shair and Other Poems in 1830. Ghose has the distinction of being the first Hindu Bengali Indian to write English verse. He continued Derozio’s efforts to deal with Indian subjects in his poems. An interesting example is his semicomic poem “To a Dead Crow,” in which Ghose uses the unglamorous, common Indian crow as a subject. The persona Ghose created for himself was that of the Shair, or the poet in the Indian Persian tradition, indicating that although he wrote in English, his stance was that of an Indian poet.

Michael Madhusudan Dutt

Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824-1873), whose long narrative poem The Captive Ladie (1849) was published about twenty years after Ghose’s book, is an interesting figure in Indian English poetry. Dutt is remembered today not as an English poet but as the first and one of the greatest modern Bengali poets. After his failure at English verse, he turned to Bengali, his mother tongue. Dutt’s case is frequently cited by those critics who believe that Indians cannot write good English poetry and should write only in their mother tongue. Since Dutt, there have been several other poets who began to write in English but turned to their native languages after being dissatisfied with their efforts in English. Dutt is also interesting because, though he acquired fame as a Bengali poet, he was extremely Anglicized. He not only converted to Christianity but also married an Englishwoman and qualified for the bar in England.

Other early poets

Another family of the Dutt name brought out The Dutt Family Album in 1870, featuring about two hundred pieces by Govin Chunder Dutt (1828-1884), his two brothers, and a nephew. Earlier, the whole family had converted to Christianity and, in 1869, had left India to live in England and other parts of Europe. The volume sheds light on the literary atmosphere prevailing in the aristocratic Dutt family, which was to produce another generation of poets in Govin’s daughters, Aru and Toru Dutt. Another notable poet of this time was Ram Sharma, born Nobo Kissen Ghose (1837-1918), who published three volumes of verse between 1873 and 1903. Sharma, who practiced yoga for several years, tried to bring an Indian religious dimension to Indian English poetry.

In this period, Indian English poetry moved out of Bengal for the first time with the publication of the Bombay poet B. M. Malabari’s Indian Muse in English Garb (1876). Soon, Cowasji Nowrosi Versuvala’s Counting the Muse (1879) and A. M. Kunte’s The Risi (1879) were published in Bombay and Poona, respectively. Though still an upper-class hobby, Indian English poetry was slowly spreading to metropolitan centers outside Bengal.

The poetry of the first fifty years of Indian English poetry (1825-1875) is generally considered imitative and derivative by critics. Certainly, the poems from this period, which are usually anthologized, do not show signs of very great talent. A judgment on the quality of these poets, however, must not be passed hastily because most of their books are out of print, and hence, not easily available for critical scrutiny.

Toru Dutt

There is almost complete critical consensus that the talent of Toru Dutt (1856-1877) was an original one among Indian English poets. Like Derozio, she died young, and like Emily Brontë, her life has been the object of as much interest as her poetry. Toru Dutt left for Europe with her family when she was thirteen and attended a French school in Nice with her elder sister, Aru. The Dutts then moved to Cambridge, England, where Toru participated in the intellectual life of the university. Though converted to Christianity and very Anglicized, the Dutts felt alienated in England, and they returned to Calcutta four years after they had left, when Toru was seventeen. In 1874, soon after their return, Aru died. Earlier, when Toru was nine, her elder brother Abju had died. One year after her sister’s death, Toru published A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields (1875), which also featured eight pieces by Aru. These poems, “renderings” from the French, were enthusiastically received in India and England and soon went into three editions, the third published by Kegan Paul, London, with a foreword by Arthur Symons. In that same year, 1875, Toru took up the study of Sanskrit, and ten months later, she was proficient enough in it to think of producing “A Sheaf” gleaned from Sanskrit fields. This volume was published in 1882, after her death, as Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, with a foreword by Edmund Gosse. Meanwhile, she had written one French novel and left incomplete an English novel, both of which were published after her death. Weakened by tuberculosis, she died in 1877 at the age of twenty-one.

The most significant aspect of Dutt’s literary career was her return to her Indian heritage after her sojourn in the West. In Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, she converted popular myths from the Rāmāyaṇa (c. 500 BCE; The Ramayana, 1870-1874), the Mahābhārata (c. 400 BCE-200 CE; The Mahabharata, 1834), and the Purāṇas into English verse. In this, she pioneered a way for several later Indian English writers who had similar problems regarding their literary identity. Dutt’s English versions, except in a few instances, are without condescension to the original and without authorial intrusions. In addition to longer “ballads” and “legends” from Sanskrit mythology, Dutt wrote short lyrics, odes, and sonnets. The best of these, probably her best single poem, is “Our Casuarina Tree.” This poem, reminiscent in both form and content of Keats’s odes, is about the beautiful Casuarina tree in the poet’s garden at Baugmaree. The tree, by the end of the poem, becomes a symbol not only of the poet’s joyous childhood but also, through an extension in time and space, of the poet’s longing for permanence and eternity. The poem is a masterpiece of craftsmanship, a fine blending of thought, emotion, and form. Though her output as a poet was not particularly prolific, A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields and Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan show sufficient accomplishment to entitle Dutt to her place in the pantheon of Indian English poets.

Sri Aurobindo Ghose

Sri Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950) probably has the best claim to be regarded as the greatest Indian English poet. In a poetic career of more than fifty-five years, his output and range were truly staggering. Sri Aurobindo wrote lyrics, sonnets, long narrative poems, poetic drama, and epics. He was fluent in a variety of conventional meters, such as iambic pentameter and hexameter, and he also experimented with quantitative meter and mantric poetry.

His reputation rests most securely on the posthumously published Savitri (1954), an epic of some twenty-four thousand lines. In Savitri, Sri Aurobindo used the story of Savitri’s conquest of death in The Mahabharata—a story that has influenced Indians for centuries as an exposition of perfect womanhood—and expanded it to create his epic. In this epic, Savitri realizes her divine potential as a human being and, like Christ, defeats death; after her conquest of death, she returns to earth as a symbol of what humanity can achieve. A mystic and a seer, Sri Aurobindo claimed merely to have described his own palpable experience in writing the poem. In his “Letters on Savitri,” which are attached to the authoritative edition of the poem, Sri Aurobindo says that the work was written under the highest possible poetic inspiration, which he called “over-mind poetry,” a state in which there was no effort on his part and in which he was merely the scribe of a “vision” which descended, perfect and complete, upon him. Savitri, one of the longest poems in the English language (it is roughly twice the length of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, 1667, 1674), is the most discussed poem in Indian English literature. It took about fifty years to finish—from the germ of the idea to the final written product—and a complete reading demands a long time; nevertheless, year after year, it continues to attract and challenge critics, students, and readers.

As Savitri is the most discussed Indian English poetic work, Sri Aurobindo is the most discussed of the Indian English poets. His was a multifaceted personality—he was a seer, mystic, Vedantist, poet, philosopher, revolutionary political activist, literary critic, and thinker. Like many other major Indian English poets, he was born into an upper-class Anglicized family and was educated in England. Finding himself completely Westernized, he strove to find his roots, to realize himself, after returning to India. Remarkably successful in this, he is considered one of the greatest thinkers of modern India. As a poet, he was extremely well-versed in the European tradition of literature as well as the Indian tradition. Sri Aurobindo was fully conscious of what he was doing as a poet; he had a comprehensible theory of poetry and a clear view of what he sought to accomplish, both formally and thematically. His appraisal of the nature of poetry is clearly formulated in The Future Poetry (1953), and it is with this knowledge that his later, more difficult poetry is to be approached. Sri Aurobindo’s poetry is easily available in the centenary edition of his Complete Works (1972).

Sarojini Naidu

If Sri Aurobindo is the greatest Indian English poet, Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949) is certainly the most popular, accessible, and moving—in a sense, the best Indian English poet. Naidu’s poems are all songs, meant more to be heard than read. She is a lyric poet whose work shows a mastery of rhyme and meter. Her typical poem is short, usually consisting of fewer than twenty lines, although she did write some long sequences of short poems. The chief quality of her poetry is melody—the sound and sense combine to produce emotion, as in music. Within this musical lyric paradigm, Naidu is extremely versatile. Like Rabindranath Tagore, she was a truly all-Indian poet, drawing upon the poetic traditions of several Indian languages and inspired by different regions of India and by different religious traditions.

The most remarkable feature of Naidu’s poetry is its complete authenticity as Indian poetry. She achieves an Indian quality of both form and content without the slightest self-consciousness. She uses both the rhythms and the conventions of Indian folk songs as inspiration for much of her poetry. The range includes songs of professions (“Palinquin Bearers,” “Wandering Singers,” “Indian Weavers”), love songs (“Indian Love-Song,” “Love-Song from the North,” “A Rajput Love-Song”), lullabies (“Cradle-Song,” “Slumber-Song for Sunalini”), seasonal songs (“The Call of Spring,” “Harvest-Song,” “The Coming of Spring”), and devotional songs (“Lakshmi, the Lotus-Born,” “Hymn to Indra, Lord of Rain,” “Songs of Kanhaya”). Naidu’s imagery, too, is strikingly Indian, transferred into English from conventions in Indian poetry. In “A Rajput Love-Song,” for example, she says, “O Love! were you the keora’s soul that haunts my silken raiment?” and “O Love! were you the scented fan that lies upon my pillow?” Both of these images are stylized and sophisticated, not naïve or simplistic. Naidu also uses discourse-types from Indian folk songs: Some of her songs are monologues, others duets, and still others are communal songs in several separate voices and in chorus. Naidu uses several Indian words as well as quotations from Indian languages to enhance the Indian flavor of her poems. These words and quotations, however, are harmonized completely in the poem and not used indiscriminately. All in all, Naidu’s attempts to locate herself in an Indian tradition of poetry were highly successful.

During Naidu’s lifetime, four volumes of her poems were published: The Golden Threshold (1905), The Bird of Time (1912), The Broken Wing (1917), and The Sceptered Flute (1943), a collection of the first three books. The Feather of the Dawn (1961) was published by her daughter after Naidu’s death. Naidu’s poetry shows no major change or development from her first to her last book; although the tone becomes more somber, the metric felicity is the same. Naidu was chiefly a love poet, and her poetry explores the many facets of love as outlined in the Sanskrit tradition of love poetry: love in union, love in longing, love in separation; the pain of love, the joy of love, the sin of love, the desire of love; earthly love, divine love. Toward the end of her career, she became increasingly a bhakti, or devotional, poet, expressing in poem sequences her transcendent love for the Almighty. Although her work is unpopular with a number of recent Indian English poets, Naidu remains the most critically acclaimed Indian English poet after Sri Aurobindo.

Rabindranath Tagore

Aside from Sri Aurobindo and Naidu, the period from the 1880s to the 1920s produced two other major poets. Chief among these is Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). Strictly speaking, Tagore is not considered an Indian English poet. He wrote only one long poem, The Child (1931), directly in English, writing all of his other works in Bengali, translating some later into English. Nevertheless, it was Tagore’s 1912 English rendering of his famous Bengali poem Gitanjali (1910) that won him the Nobel Prize in 1913. After that, Tagore “translated” several of his works into English, deviating considerably from the originals in the process. These renderings to English pose a unique theoretical problem for the student of Indian English poetry: Should these works be regarded as originals or as translations? This problem has not been solved satisfactorily, but the consensus is that they are translations. Tagore, as the greatest Bengali writer, obviously belongs rightfully to Bengali; his influence on Indian English poets, however, is so great that he cannot simply be ignored in that area of study. The least that can be said is that Tagore is another example of a bilingual poet, a phenomenon not at all uncommon in the traditionally multilingual society of India.

Manmohan Ghose

Another important poet of this period is Sri Aurobindo’s elder brother, Manmohan Ghose (1869-1924). Some of Ghose’s early poems appeared in Primavera (1890) while he was still in England. During his lifetime, only one volume of his verse, Love Songs and Elegies (1898) appeared, but when he died, he left in manuscript several volumes of poetry—short poems; two incomplete epics, Perseus, the Conqueror and Adam Unparadised; and one long, incomplete poetic drama, Nollo and Damayanti. After his death, his longtime English friend Laurence Binyon published some of these lyrics as Songs of Life and Death (1926), prefaced by a memoir of Ghose. Recently, Calcutta University published Ghose’s complete poems in five volumes under the supervision of his daughters. Ghose’s life was tragic. Returning to India after a completely English upbringing, he found himself out of place—in his own words, “de-nationalized.” His wife’s health had deteriorated, and she died after being paralyzed for years. Finally, the poet himself went blind. The most common criticism of his poetry is that it is totally un-Indian in form and content. This is largely true, though he did try to write his long poetic drama, Nollo and Damayanti, on an Indian theme. Ghose came close to being an English poet despite being Indian, but at that, too, he was doomed to fail. Today, despite his metric virtuosity, neither do his poems appeal to Indian readers nor has he found a place in the canon of English poetry. Ghose, at best, is uneasily an Indian English poet. His example, unfortunately, has not deterred other Indians from completely Westernizing themselves.

Twentieth century: 1920s–1950s

The period from the 1920s to the 1950s was marked by a great efflorescence of Indian English poetry. It produced literally scores of poets, each with several volumes of verse to his or her credit. For the first time, a large mass of Indian English poetry was created, no longer confined to the upper class. Unfortunately, though this period produced a large quantity of poetry, it has been neglected by critics, primarily because the modernist poets of the 1950s were so united in their aversion to their predecessors.

Though this period produced a large quantity of poetry, it is the most neglected and underrated period in Indian English poetry. The chief reason for this is the severe reaction against this poetry by the post-1950s poets. Indeed, contemporary Indian English poets have been so united in this aversion that most recent anthologies totally omit the poets who came to maturity in the preceding generation. Although it is common in literature for the present generation to react against the previous generation, this reaction has reached allergic proportions in contemporary Indian English poetry. Much of the poetry of the period from the 1920s to the 1950s is becoming scarce—many of the publishers of that era are now defunct, and no serious attempt has been made to preserve these texts. Few libraries outside India possess texts from this period, and even in India, they are scattered in different places. Consequently, the poets of this period have received very little critical attention.

The best-known poet of this period is Harindranath Chattopadhyaya (1898-1990). Starting with his Feast of Youth (1918), he regularly published volumes of verse and poetic drama into the 1960s. He was easily one of the most prolific poets in Indian English poetry. The range of his content was very diverse, covering a whole spectrum of ideologies from extreme Aurobindonian idealism to revolutionary Marxist materialism. His formal range, however, was limited; he usually wrote rhymed, metric verse, which, though competent, is sometimes predictable and cloying.

Most of the other poets of this period can be divided into three groups: the Aurobindonian and religious poets, the lyric and Romantic poets in the tradition of Naidu and Tagore, and the poets whose work reflects a transition from this Romanticism to the modernity of the post-1950s poets.

This period produced several poets who were inspired by Sri Aurobindo; they are sometimes called the Pondicherry school because they lived in the Aurobindo ashram in Pondicherry and were disciples of Sri Aurobindo. The most famous of them are K. D. Sethna (1904-2011) and Dilip Kumar Roy (1897-1980). Others, also inspired by Sri Aurobindo, are Nirodbaran (1903-2006), Nolini Kanta Gupta (1889-1983), Prithwi Singh Nahar (1898-1976), Anil Baran Roy (1901-1952), Punjalal (1901-1985), and Romen Palit (1920-unknown). Some of their poetry has seemed obscure to readers because of its mysticism. Other religious and devotional poets are Ananda Acharya (1881-1945), T. L. Vaswani (1879-1966), and Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986).

The largest number of poets in this period practiced the lyric, Romantic mode of Naidu and Tagore. It is perhaps because of these two poets that the impact of European modernism on Indian English literature was considerably delayed. Many of these neo-Romantics were professors of English in India; examples are P. Seshadri (1887-1942), N. V. Thadani, Shyam Sunder Lal Chordia, Govinda Krishna Chettur (1898-1936), Armando Menezes (1902-1983), Humayun Kabir (1906-1969), V. N. Bhushan (1909-1951), and P. R. Kaikini. There are many more, and their total output is massive. Their poetry has long been out of fashion, seeming effusive and quaint, but certainly not all of it can be dismissed outright, as has often been the case.

Several poets of this period affected the transition from Romanticism to the modernism of the post-1950s poets. These transitional poets introduced concrete, commonplace imagery, irony, the language of common speech, and a personal, psychological dimension to Indian English poetry. Probably the earliest “new” poet of Indian English was Shahid Suhrawardy (1890-1965), whose Essays in Verse (1937) was avowedly influenced by T. S. Eliot and other modernists. Though some of his poetry seems to be merely self-conscious muttering and vague, allusive cerebration, Suhrawardy certainly brought a new tone to Indian English poetry. His work, however, was lost to most Indians after he migrated to Pakistan after the partition of India in 1947. Another poet who struck a new, realistic note was Manjeri Iswaran (1910-1968). Bharati Sarabhai created a sensation in English literary circles with her poetic drama The Well of the People (1943), in which she used several of Eliot’s techniques.

Joseph Furtado (1872-1947) was another talented poet of this period who experimented considerably with language. Though he was predominantly a lyric poet, he brought an element of realism and rustic humor to Indian English poetry. His chief contribution was his use of Indian English pidgin and code-mixed varieties in poems such as “Lakshmi” and “The Old Irani.” In these poems, Furtado not only anticipated contemporary poets such as Nissim Ezekiel, who exploit pidgin in their poetry but also helped to bring the language of Indian English poetry closer to the language of the bilingual speech community in which English is actually used in India. What is interesting is that Furtado’s use of pidgin, unlike Ezekiel’s, is not parodic or condescending; whereas for Ezekiel, the joke is at the expense of an Indian variety of English, for Furtado, the comedy derives from authentic characterization.

A revolution in taste

During the 1950s, the dominant tone in Indian English poetry shifted from Romanticism to irony. The revolution in taste did not occur overnight, but once established, its impact was swift and sweeping. What had been minority voices suddenly became the majority: A whole generation rejected its immediate past. This rejection is nicely voiced in Nissim Ezekiel’s first book, A Time to Change, and Other Poems (1951).

The new poets were a vocal group and did not hesitate to denigrate openly their predecessors. P. Lal, for example, attacked Sri Aurobindo at length, though Lal retracted his strictures a few years later; dividing readers into those who could appreciate Sri Aurobindo and those who could not, Lal firmly placed himself and the poets of his generation in the latter category. This debunking of poetic ancestors continued. In the influential article “The New Poetry,” published in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (July 1968), the poet Adil Jussawala required fewer than three pages to dismiss Indian English poets from Derozio to Naidu, claiming that the best Indian English poetry was being written by poets of his generation. Eight years later, R. Parthasarathy, another contemporary poet, introducing his now widely used anthology Ten Twentieth Century Indian Poets (1976), reiterated Jussawala’s claims. Many other poets of this generation echoed the notion that theirs was the only Indian English poetry worthy of the name. However, these “new” poets soon divided into two main factions: those who practiced the dominant ironic mode and those who preferred a more traditional lyricism and Romanticism.

Besides Ezekiel, some of the poets who practice the ironic, clipped mode are Parthasarathy, A. K. Ramanujan, Gieve Patel, Shiv K. Kumar, Arun Kolatkar, and Jayanta Mahapatra. A typical poem in this mode involves an alienated speaker observing a typically Indian situation with detachment. Examples are numerous: In Keki Daruwala’s “Routine,” a police officer cynically regards yet another violent mob that he has to disperse. In Ezekiel’s “Background, Casually,” the poet assesses ironically his own lack of identity. In Kolatkar’s Jejuri (1974, 1976), a place of pilgrimage is seen through the eyes of a detached and nonconformist visitor. Mahapatra’s “The Whorehouse in Calcutta Street” shows a detached, self-critical observer recording his impressions of a brothel. In “Homecoming,” Parthasarathy records his homecoming experience with self-critical irony. In “Naryal Purnima,” Patel sits apart, commenting on a religious tradition from which he is alienated. In “Obituary,” Ramanujan views the death of his father with ironic detachment. The same paradigm repeats itself. The situation is Indian; the observer is a self-critical, detached outsider. The poets use this mode to write both about themselves and, as in Mahapatra and Daruwala, about the external world. Often, as in Kamala Das, the early poems of A. K. Mehrotra, or in Pritish Nandy, the irony turns to anger. Most of these poets write free verse in a language that is as precise and close to “standard” English as possible. Exceptions, such as Ezekiel’s poems in Indian English, are usually parodies.

There were, however, some poets who chose to write in the lyric and Romantic strain. The chief practitioners of this mode include V. K. Gokak, Keshav Malik, Karan Singh, Shankar Mokashi-Penekar, and, in their later works, Lal and Nandy.

Indian women poets

In the final years of colonial rule and even in the first decade after Independence, there were far fewer women poets in India than men. In the 1960s, Kamala Das (1934-2009) established her reputation by writing striking, confessional poems exploring female sexuality and arguing for women’s sexual rights. However, it was not until the middle 1970s that works by women poets began appearing in significant numbers. The Bird’s Bright Ring: A Long Poem, by Meena Alexander (1951-2018), was published in 1976, and her collection Without Place, in 1978. In 1979, the Goan Eunice de Souza (1940-2017) published her first volume, Fix. The telling portraits of de Souza’s fellow Catholics made this book not only the writer’s most controversial but also probably the most distinctive of her many fine works. Fix is also important in that it was published by Newground, a cooperative started by three poets, including Melanie Silgardo (b. 1956), another of the many outstanding women writers who came to the attention of readers late in the 1970s.

It should be noted that controversial ideas and radical views were also expressed by women writing in the regional languages, such as the Bengali poet and social worker Maitreyi Devi (1914-1990), who voiced her concern for peasants and for Tribal peoples and Amrita Pritam (1919-2005), whose poems in Punjabi focus on the mistreatment of women after her native area of India became part of Pakistan. Pritam herself settled in India, and her experiences help to explain why there are so many more women writers in India than in Muslim Pakistan. However, in We Sinful Women: Contemporary Urdu Feminist Poetry (1991), seven Urdu women poets protest the ongoing repression of their gender by the religious and civil authorities of Pakistan. This collection was recognized throughout the world as an important expression of feminist feeling within the Muslim world. Wisely, the editor of this collection, Rukhsana Ahmad, had made wide circulation of the volume possible by translating all of the poems into English and printing her versions beside the Urdu originals.

Although not all female writers who have emerged since the 1960s are preoccupied with sexuality, feminism, or social justice, they are far more concerned with such issues than with that of language, which loomed so large in the minds of the first postcolonial generation of writers. It now seems to be generally accepted that English is no longer to be regarded as the language of an oppressor but instead is seen as a convenience, as a common means of expression, which can be adapted to reflect everyday life on the Indian subcontinent and which will probably ensure a much wider distribution of one’s work than publication in a regional language. On the other hand, those who choose to write in one or another of the regional languages are no longer faced with almost insurmountable difficulties in finding a translator. As Vinay Dharwadker comments in his preface to The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry (1994), there are now a great many excellent translators actively seeking new materials for new audiences throughout the world. Whether they write in regional languages or in English, Indian poets of both genders can now aspire to international distribution.

Writers and the wider world

If Partition displaced some writers, many more left their native areas as international travel became less costly and as opportunities for them to study and teach abroad multiplied. Since the new multiculturalism among Western readers was creating a rapidly expanding market for works by Indian writers, whether written in English or translated into English, it was only natural that those writers would go west to meet this new and highly appreciative public, some of them to visit or to stay for a time, some of them to remain permanently.

Agha Shahid Ali

These new developments made the old nationalistic objections to writing in English seem irrelevant; now, the question was whether or not the writers of the diaspora should even be classified as Indian writers. The English-language Muslim poet Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001), for example, was born in Delhi, grew up in Kashmir, and returned to Delhi for his education before moving permanently to the United States in 1976. One might expect exile to be the theme of Ali’s poems. However, he drew upon his own experiences primarily as a basis for his definition of the human condition. Wherever people live, Ali suggested, they are subject to change, and as a result, they will suffer from a sense of loss and longing for what is past.

Dom Moraes

Displacement and loss are also major themes in the poetry of Dom Moraes (Dominic Frank Moraes, 1938-2004). Born in Bombay, educated there and at Jesus College, Oxford, Moraes was a great success in England, both personally and professionally, from the time his first book of poems, A Beginning (1957), written when he was only nineteen, won the 1958 Hawthornden Prize. However, he did not feel at home there or in his native Bombay, where he finally settled after a journalistic career that took him all over the world. Like Ali, Moraes believed that one always feels like an exile, even if technically one is “at home.” Before his death in 2004, he authored two books with Sarayu Srivatsa, and in 2012, his poetry was featured in Selected Poems, edited by Ranjit Hoskote.

Keki N. Daruwalla

Keki N. Daruwalla (b. 1937) would agree. Although he was born and educated in India and made his home in New Delhi, Daruwalla does not feel any sense of stability. Again and again, he points out in his poetry that no place on earth is exempt from change. What bothers him about history, which Daruwalla defines as no more than a record of changes, is that it records public events rather than private tragedies. In “Hawk” and “A City Falls,” Daruwalla stresses his conviction that what transpires in the life of an individual, caught in cataclysmic change is more significant than what happens to a city or even to a society. Daruwalla continued to write into the twenty-first century, publishing novels such as Swerving to Solitude: Letters to Mama (2018).

Vikram Seth

In his revised edition of Modern Indian Poetry in English (1987), Bruce King credits Vikram Seth (b. 1952) with altering the Western world’s attitude toward Indian poetry in English, which up to that point had been classified more as a hobby for a few readers than as part of mainstream English literature. Seth’s volume The Humble Administrator’s Garden (1985), so delighted the London reading public, King explained, that critics began talking about including the title poem in future anthologies of English poetry. Their approval was due as much to Seth’s evident rejection of the excesses of modernism in favor of a more polished style as to his captivating wit. Seth was soon just as popular in New York as he had become in London, and with the publication of his novel in rhymed verse titled The Golden Gate: A Novel in Verse (1986), he gained an international reputation.

Seth is a typical representative of the new cosmopolitanism among Indian writers. He was born in Calcutta and eventually made his home in New Delhi. However, Seth was educated at Oxford, Nanjing University in China, and at Stanford University in California, where for several years he also was an editor for the Stanford University Press. Tibet was the setting of Seth’s award-winning travel book, From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet (1983). Perhaps it was not surprising that his verse novel, which is set in San Francisco, drew criticism in India for not being “Indian” enough. These critics were happier with Seth’s story of an Indian family, the best-selling novel A Suitable Boy (1993). Seth continued publishing poetry, such as The Elephant and the Tragopan (2013) and Summer Requiem: A Book of Poems (2015), and children's novels, like The Louse and the Mosquito (2020).

Sujata Bhatt

Wherever they live and whatever their subject matter, however, it is evident that Indian poets remain conscious of their roots. For example, Sujata Bhatt (b. 1956), who was born in Ahmedabad of a family originally from Gujarat, was educated in the United States and eventually made her home in Germany. However, not only does she translate Gujarati poetry into English, but she also uses Gujarati words and even whole lines of Gujarati in her own poems. It has been pointed out that good intentions do not necessarily make for good poetry. Often, Bhatt’s bilingual experiments do not work. Nevertheless, her attempts to express the multicultural experience must be noted, and some of her poems, especially those in Brunizem (1988), are very good indeed. She continued publishing poetry in the twenty-first century, including A Colour for Solitude (2002), Pure Lizard (2008), and Poppies in Translation (2015).

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Indian poetry written in English, as well as regional poetry translated into English, was at last attaining the recognition it deserved. Critics were enthusiastic about the new generation of Indian writers; publishers in Great Britain and in the United States were anxious to bring out their works; and readers throughout the world were becoming familiar with poets hitherto unknown to them. In this case, at least, change was all for the better.

Bibliography

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Mund, Subhendu. The Making of Indian English Literature. Routledge, 2022.

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