A Gallery of Portraits In Poetry

A Gallery of Portraits In Poetry (Indian English Poets)

Bijay Kant Dubey 

Indian English poetry

There is nothing as Indian English poetry

Though some have called it

As is there anything

Like British English,

King’s or Queen’s Standard,

Not even the local one

And what it pains us is this

It is nowhere spoken in India,

Nor does it have a feeder dialect

To vitalize it

And even it is, it is but written English,

Grammatical English,

Solve the grammar exercises

And try to be correct,

Speak you not,

Even if you, you will keep mugging,

Haltingly, full of hitch and obstruction?

Indian English poetry has a history of its own,

It is but a part of India Studies,

Indian culture,

Indology, Asiatic researches, Oriental studies,

Sanskrit studies,

But rather deriving from,

It has differently

In the negation of Indian art and culture,

Thought and philosophy,

Indian themes and delineation,

To Western theories and texts,

But fails to be of that order

And submission,

Standard and presentation,

Somewhere weaker no doubt.

There is nothing as Indian English language,

If it is not spoken anywhere

How to call it Indian English,

A misnomer is it,

Is there anything like

Zimbabwean English, South African variety,

There is nothing,

Nothing like this,

Indian English is nowhere,

Nowhere practiced.

Which is but Bihari English,

Bengali English,

Oriya English,

Assamese English,

Punjabi English,

Haryanvi English,

Delhite English,

Kashmiri English,

Himachali English,

Hindustani English,

Pakistani English,

Maharashtrian English,

Gujarati English,

Rajasthani English.

Which is but Naga English,

Sikkimese English,

Lepcha English, Bhutia English,

Nepali English,

Manipuri English,

Arunchali English,

Mizo English,

Santhali English,

Munda English,

Sindhi English,

Marwari English.

The speakers of English

Here in India

Come from different

Linguistic groups,

Indo-Aryan, Dravidian,

Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Chinese

Affiliations

And that is why

The Anglo-Indians switched

Over to local languages,

Barring the foreign elements

So strong

On the people of

Pondicherry and Goa,

Telling of Portugal and France.

Even the Bhojupurains

Speaking in English,

The rough and tough people,

Clumsy and uncouth,

The indentured labourers

And their sons and daughters

In Mauritius, Kenya and others,

The predecessors of V.S.Naipaul,

Coming to Gorakhpur,

Tracing the roots,

So are Magadhi, Angika and Maithili speakers

Of Bihar,

The Hindi dialects.

The Mad & Maniac Poet

Poetic frenzy took to

Michael Madhusudan Dutt

And he like an Englishman started thinking

And behaving,

A poet under the draughts of

English education and culture,

European way of life

As did Gandhi emulate the English,

So did he write,

The Captive Ladie,

But fame did not come to him as usual

And he turned to Bengali,

Really, a great poet

Who had talent,

But the times had not been his.

Savitri And the Age After

Rather than calling the pre-independence period

Or the post-independence period

Of Indian English poetry,

I would like to call it

The age of Savitri and the age after,

Aurobindo’s Savitri,

The golden age of epics

A return to Vedism, Upanishadism and Puranism,

The ashrama trend,

Vedic literature

Whose fragrance is it

In Jayanta Mahapatra too

But in a  different way.

There Were Poets Before

There were poets before Nissim and his friends

Whom we know them not

And remember we not,

As we call him

The father of modernism in Indian English poetry,

Modernism is not at all related to poetry,

It comes from all the streams,

Fashion, apparel, time, manner and etiquette,

Understanding and comprehension,

Experience, hearing and learning,

Tour and travel,

Mutual exchanges.

P. Lal Has Not Done Justice

P.Lal has not done justice

To the poets of the beginning,

Those at the start of modernism

In Indian English poetry,

Just in the fifties,

Adi K.Sett, P.R.Kaikini and others.

Writers Workshop, Calcutta founded in 1958

Is but a factory of poets,

P.Lal just published them

Taking the charges,

Served literature

As for talent search

As well as damaged it too.

To Khushwant Singh, it was just

Like the vanity publication

And many papers reviewed them not

Taking to be a commoners’ press

And publication.

Kamala Das

A sadhvi or a yogan

In the ashrama,

Rajneeshite.

Freudian,

Lawrentine

Or one of Vatsyayana?

Who she is,

A poetess of love

Or sex and bodily lover,

One of flesh,

Confessing relationships

Erotic and sensual?

Kamala Das not a yogi, but a bhogi,

Just like a fraud and fake

Indian babji

Taking ganja

In the ashrama

With his disciple love.

Kamala Das too is the same,

One of Lawrentine guru-shisya prem,

A Rajneeshite disciple

Talking of sambhoga to samadhi,

Sex to bliss,

A modern-age yogan

In the rudraksha rosary.

She is not a Mira, but a Radha,

A Radha,

Mad after duplicate Krishna,

False and fraud Krishna,

A love woman,

A hysteric gone mad

And her works of kaam-vasana.

Purshottam Lal

Purshottam Lal is first of all

A promoter

Rather than a poet,

A romantic not,

But a faded and jaded romantic,

Even in the negation of Aurobindo

Seems to be drawn to metaphysics,

A poet of a mediocre merit,

But famous

Or has evolved in course of time

As others have,

But emboldening his stature

Just as a translator

Of the Mahabharata. 

Nissim Ezekiel

Nissim Ezekiel, a poet of Bombay

Like his Bombayan friends,

He is of Bombay,

Writing about Bombay,

A Maharashtrian Jew

His mind and heart lies it in Israel,

Suffers from the quest for identity,

How far Indian is his Indian English poetry,

Devoid of Indian thought, culture and tradition,

Myth, mysticism and spirituality,

Religion, ethics, religion and philosophy,

He treads a path of his own,

A modern man

From the city spaces,

That too from metros and mega cities

Telling about city-life and living,

Townsliving, art and culture,

Manners and ethics,

Not the rural countryside

Where dwells it the soul of India

Into the nondescript, far-off villages

Of hamlets and thorps

Clustered and littered around

Over a vast stretch of land.

The Poetry of Nissim

Nissim as a poet and his poetry,

Poetic themes of his,

What to say it,

Nissim is a poet of

Pleasantries and good manners,

Doublespeak and irony,

Just cutting with his tactics,

A poet of please and thank you,

Bye and goodbye,

On saying please,

I love you, I like you,

How are you?, I am fine, how you,

So nice of you,

See you again,

An Englishman in India,

If not, a London returned,

Wanting to date,

But the heart a Jewish heart,

Papa wills cold,

Wanting to see a film in the cinema hall

With the beloved,

To write love-letters to her

Under the pretext of meeting

Or exchanging books,

Out in the a park,

Meeting with and talking to

And reading

The Elizabethan lyrics and metaphysical,

Forget me not,

Your name

I am writing on the sea-beach,

Going to see his coy mistress

And awaking he not with the rising sun.

The Drawbacks of Nissim

Though he lived in India,

But lived as a minority man

Without understanding India,

Indian culture,

The history of the land,

Its thought and philosophy,

Religion and spirituality,

Morality and ethics,

Cosmology ad theology,

A Jew was he

Jewish ditto

Without smacking in the aroma

Coming from the Vedas, the Upanishads

And the Puranas,

Right or wrong,

Mythical or reasonable,

At least we could have heard

His comments.

Nissim suffers from the quest for identity,

An Indian in India

Under question,

Whether a foreigner or Indian,

Just like Dom,

But the theme of Indianness

Bails him out

And he is a poet of

The urban space,

The city-bred culture and ethics,

City-dwelling and culture,

Birthday gift, marriage party, tea party,

Outing, love-marriage,

Picnic and honeymoon,

The talks of his.

Nissim is of the Gandhian freedom fighter

A follower of satya, ahimsha and swaraj,

Going on the ways,

In the khadi cap, dhoti, kurta

And with a bamboo lathi in hand,

Drawing pension after independence,

Decorating the dais,

Of Gujarati English,

Saying hi-hello to Miss Pushpa,

Giggling and grinning with

Ad chuckling,

Doing bye-bye to Pushpa

At the airport,

A foreign returnee he

Giving tips to her in departing for

The overseas.

Nissim

Doing the drama

With a scorpion bite,

Gathering people

And showing to,

Making a fuss out of

Ad the critics after,

The whole of India

And the academics,

Just the scorpion bite

The thing of discussion,

The thing of poetic debate and deliberation,

M.K.Naik deliberating,

The others too into the footsteps of his.

Jayanta Mahapatra

Jayanta Mahapatra is the first poet

To have received the Sahitya Akdemi award

For his book, Relationship

Which is but a fragment of

Whitman’s Leaves of Grass

To show connection with

Odisha and the Odias,

The Ganga and Kalinga dynasties.

The sea and the Konark Sun Temple,

The sea beach and the Jagannath Puri Temple,

The Khandagiri caves,

Dhavalgiri,

The River Daya,

The Chilika Lake,

He remembers them in his poetry.

There are different aspects of his poetry

And for it his poetry is complex,

Flimsy, photographic,

Imagistic and picturesque,

But not descriptive at all,

Abstract and terse,

Difficult to mean them.

A poet of Odisha, its topography and demography,

Scenes and sites

He is a poet of the place,

A poet of silence,

Of the sea-beach,

Summer-noons,

Lonely countryside,

The veiled woman.

A poet feministic,

Realist,

Eco-centric,

Image-maker,

He clings to the roots of nativity

As well as his base of subject,

We mean physics,

Dealing with light and darkness,

The origin of the universe.

Nothingness, angst and bewilderment,

Skepticism and atheism,

Existentialism

Engage the poetic space

Of the poet

And he lapses in dreams,

Landscapic and vacant,

A dreamer and a visionary.

The space and its vacuum,

Endless skies

The realm of his reflection,

Light breaking at dawn

And retreating at twilight,

Strike the poetic mind

And he loses in.   

  

A Reading of Keki N.Daruwalla

Keki N.Daruwalla the Parsi poet

From Lahore,

Displaced and dislocated,

Searching for roots,

Finding place

In the IPS

Of the U.P.,

Mostly the Uttarakhand region,

A DIG promoted

To switch over

To the RAW

To membership

Of the Minorities Commission

After retirement.

A Sahitya Akademi award winner,

A Padma Shri,

Daruwalla

Is a poet of the brave heart

Dealing with tragedy and drama talk mainly,

Painting violence, wrath, human anger,

Malice, envy,

Vengeance, jealousy;

Curfew-clamped towns with

The shoot at sight orders,

Riots and tension  brewing;

The flood-hit areas

Under water,

Submerged or drowned,

Muddy waters swirling

And inundating,

Flowing above the danger level.

A poet of the night of the jackal,

The wolf howling,

Bloody, brutal and bestial,

He returning

When it is dark

With the hunter,

One of the kite, vulture and hawk,

The Towers of Silence,

He thinking of the laws of nature,

Wild and mystical,

Calm and ruffling,

He marking the tiger

With the rifle in hands.

A poet verbose and bombastic,

He is wordy and textured,

Old, archaic and obsolete,

Unsentimental

And unemotional,

Hard and tougher,

Deriving and drawing from

The RAW visits and studies

Even going to Iran,

Searching the roots of Zoroastrianism

And the stuffs of international relations

Which the RAW men have to undertake

For diplomacy and reading.

P.Lal’s Friends

P.Lal’s friends,

The birds of a feather flock together,

The same first poem writers

Or the first book authors,

The ramshackle poets not,

But poetasters, rhymers, non-poets and commoners

Are the poets of modern Indian poetry in English,

Getting prizes one by one

And the branded critics recommending them.

After finding none as the buyers and takers of their poetry,

Poetry not exactly, but the verses,

They founded Writers’ workshop, Calcutta

To publish themselves

Or those who contacted them

Or got the favour with

Rather than representing the whole of India,

Represented they a coterie,

A section of acquaintances,

The Bombayans, the Calcuttans

And the Madrasis,

A factory of Indian English poets and poetesses

Leaving as the burden of the anonymous critics

Rather than historiographing them,

Biographing in who’s who?

Whom Did He Not Publish?

Whom did he not publish,

P.Lal published Kamala, Pritish,

Daruwalla,  Jayanta,

Adil, Katrak,

Vikram,

Whose books did he not bring out,

Those of Shiv K.Kumar,

Lawrence Bentleman?

Dom Moraes

A woman-lover, a wine-drinker and a chain-smoker

Dom thought of himself

An Englishman,

But was an Indian,

A Goan Christian,

Though he tried to be

A Dylan Thomas,

But could he be,

A journo he was.

Adil Jussawalla

Adil Jussawalla

After publishing Land’s End and Missing Person

Went he missing

And resurfaced after

A thirty-five year break,

With his new launches

The Right Kind of Dog and Trying to Say Goodbye.

A Parsi poet, he is of

Broken statements,

What he wrote about,

The half-said words and sentences,

Broken rhythms of earlier verse

Just brought in confusion

And we failed to mean

All that in his verses.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

Arvind though in the white glistening beards

Long and flowing

Is not the Tagore,

But it looks to be,

One from Lahore

And the English Deptt. of Allahabad Univ.,

A poet surreal,

A writer of a few,

Inclusive of tidbits, chit-chats

And the trifle

Though he had been a contestant

For the Professor of Poetry

For Oxford,

Which he perhaps deserved it not

Though got the lobbies with

To be in the picture.

Hurriedly Called We

In a hurry, a haste,

A huff,

Called we them

Modern Indian English poets,

But they were not,

Are not even,

As India had been in search of,

Just to represent

The literary taste in India

And the feedback to be returned

To the West,

They are but P.Lal’s findings,

P.Lal’s not,

But C.R.Mandy,

The Editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India.

Reading bad verses

Submitted by the Indians,

The mind eroded it, corroded it

And the moderns were not so

As they are,

These are the poets of today

Evolved and developed

From there

Otherwise could not have been

The poets of India.

Modern Poetry

Modern poetry is the poetry of exile and alienation,

Angst and bewilderment,

Dislocation and displacement,

Annihilation and deconstruction,

Malaise and crisis.

Without reading Eliot, Yeats, Auden,

Spender, MacNeice,

We cannot talk of modernity and modernism

In Indian English poetry.

Modern Indian English Poets

Modern Indian English poets

Just make a mockery of

Indian hunger,

Want and scarcity of foodstuffs,

The mud-housemen,

Slum-dwellers and cottagers.

Isms In modern Poetry

There are several isms and tendencies

In modern English poetry

Which Indian English poetry cannot escape it

As they derive and draw from

The mainstream

And keep track of

Imagism, surrealism, symbolism,

Decadentism and lyricism

And poetry-movements

And the ‘ies’,

The thirties, the forties and the fifties,

Running as thus.

Has Poetry Died With R.Parthasarathy’s Anthology of Ten Indian English Poets

Has poetry died with the publication of R Parthasarathy’s

Ten Indian English Poets,

Will there be no more poets after

Which is but a wrong notion

And what it hurts me is this that

R.Parthasarathy writes about himself

In the same,

None but he himself

About his own poetry?

Is Indian English Poetry A One-book Ph.D.?

Indian English poetry is a one-book Ph.D.,

Where to get material from,

The books not available,

The poets unrecognized,

Whose whereabouts unknown?

Rabindrananth Tagore’s Gitanjali

Is one-book Ph.D.,

R.Parthasarathy’s Rough Passage,

Vivekananda’s In Search of God & Other Poems,

Intermixing their poetry with prose.

Anglo-Indian Poetry, Indo-English Poetry, Indian Poetry In English Or Indian English Poetry?

Is it Anglo-Indian poetry to Indo-English poetry,

Indian poetry in English or Indian English poetry,

This is how Indian English poetry has evolved

All through the ages,

It was European

Then turned it anglicized of Indianized

Now the theme of Indianness bails it out

For the translation

Contemporary Indian English Poetry today

There are different types of poets into

The realm of Indian English poetry,

One is of the Writers Workshop, Calcutta publications,

Another of the independently published authors,

Another of the media-propped and lucky draws,

Another of the book houses,

But one should keep it in mind

That Vikram Seth’s first book was

Also rejected in the West

And it was by P.Lal’s press.

Strange Is It That You're Talking About English Poetry From The Northeast

Strange is it to hear about

That you’re talking about

English poetry from the northeast,

You say it,

Is there anything like

Indian English poetry

And if it is not

Then how to talk of

English poetry from the northeast,

Poetry not in oral dialects,

But written English,

From Nagaland, Assam, Sikkim,

Manipur, Mizoram, Meghalaya,

Tripura?

Now I can see it

That the academics from academia

Will manoeuvre and manipulate it

The level

To be poets and poetesses

If not

Then poetasters, rhymers, petty poets

Writing doggerel

To come to light

Through politics or poetry

As the so-called Indian litterati

Are editing literary journals

To be poets, critics, reviewers,

Research guides, university professors

And external examiners for the Ph.D.

The Seven Sisterly States, if You Are From The Northeast

If you are from Nagaland, sing of it,

The land of the nags,

Its tradition and modernity,

If from Manipur, tell us

About the myth and mystery of it,

If from Sikkim, tell us

About the land of Buddha and Buddhism,

The art, culture and language of it,

If from Assam, tell us about

The Karbis, the Bodos and others,

The Bihu songs and dances,

Kamrupa-Kamakhya,

If from Mizoram, about ancient tradition

And the shift to Christianity

And also the Burmese borders,

If from Arunachal the land of the rising sun,

The monastery and the passes

Leading to China,

If from Meghalaya, the clouds glistening

And the rains.

There Is Nothing As English Poetry From The Northeast

There is nothing as English poetry

From the northeast,

Actually, the academics

After marking the authority absent

And literary vacuum prevailing,

The students and teachers are trying

Their best to be poets

Of India fame

Through the branding

Northeast English poetry,

But one should mark it

Fame is not all,

Awards is not all,

Think of those who are scholars

But without recognition,

Without name and fame,

Without any awards in their bag.

Indian English Poetry—A Re-assessment & Revaluation

Indian English poetry, as the history and origin of it,

Shows it

Is but a study in

Slender anthologies and minor voices,

The first poem writers,

The first book authors

And those who are going to write.

The trend continues in,

Of contributing a few

And contributing it,

One calling oneself a poet or poetess

Of state-level not,

But India-level,

An editor introducing

The acquaintances of his.

The critic too a no-man

And the verse practitioner too a no-man

And Indian English poetry

A study in no-men,

Even those who do researches

On Indian English poetry

Start calling themselves poets and poetesses,

Is it not a repudiation of morality and ethics?

Indian English Poetry Itself

Indian English poetry itself

Is a study in

Self-styled poets and poetesses

Proclaiming writers,

Say, who is not,

Sri Aurobindo’s books arrived

From his Pondicherry Ashrama,

Vivekananda’s Ramkrishna Mission,

P.Lal’s from his Writers Workshop?

Even Arun Kolatkar, Adil Jussawalla,

Dilip Chitre and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

Enjoined

As for clearing house, Pune,

A joint collaborative venture

Of self-styled poets,

As there had been no takers

Or buyers of their theories then.

What you see Nissim Ezekiel today

He was not,

Today we extol him,

But know it not the base

As his was of one of

The Elizabethans and the Metaphysicals,

Thomas Wyatt, Edmund Spenser and Shakespeare,

Marvell and Donne

And this is about his love poetry.

While in the latter written later on

He plays with irony and humour,

Tries to smile,

Laugh,

Gesture,

Mock at and burst into

Guffaws and laughters,

Chuckling and grinning

Insider not,

But outsider.

Do You Know That?

Do you know

That K.R.Srinivas Iyengar, V.K.Gokak and M.KNaik,

They too are writers of verse,

But we read them not,

Which but we should have.

Only Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, Jayanta Mahapatra,

They cannot form the course of our studies,

We need to include the poets

Of the forties and the fifties,

A few more from the Pondicherry School

Can also be studied

Together with Aurobindo,

Which but do we not.

     

There Was A Time

There was a time when the researchers

Like it not to do their theses

On evolving Indian English poetry

And even by the way

Some did their works on Indian themes,

The English departmental teachers

Old and sober,

Schooled in classical and British texts

Used to frown upon

As for something Indian

And frankly speaking, the dull and bogus professors

Used to take up Indian English.

To day it is a matter of funding,

People taking money for major and minor projects

From the UGC

As it has pressurized the teachers

For the Ph.D. programmes

And publications,

Seminars and symposia

And workshops

Relevant under the Career Advancement Scheme.  

English Is Here

English is here

Of the Purdahwalli, the ghumtawalli,

The burkhawalli

And if this be the picture,

How to call oneself modern,

An Englishman?

Medievalism cost heavy

Upon us

And we paid the price

For intra-conspiracies and rifts,

The invaders looted and plundered India

All that was good in India.

The woman under the veil

Like the missing person

Saying it not her name

Or the name of her husband,

Just the tattoo saying it,

Backward, uneducated and below the poverty level.

There Were No Takers Or Buyers of Indian English Verse

There were no takers or buyers

Of Indian English verse then,

O takers of them,

No buyers of their theories,

People had not been in knowledge

That there existed one

Like Nissim Ezekiel or P.Lal.

But when the UGC made it essential

To introduce the Indian poets

And the Ph.D. a must for promotion,

The teachers started exploring possibilities,  

For Ph.Ds.,

Not on British literature.

But on Indian matters,

Be it the first class or third-class matter,

But the Ph.D. essential

Not for knowledge,

But for career advancement,

Do it somehow.

From the eighties the departments

Have started to read,

Before that it used to be sporadically

As we are today,

Indian English poetry,

Kamala Das, Kamala Das, Nissim Ezekiel, Nissim Ezekiel.

Decline of Poetry In The Modern Age

With the advancement of science and technology

In the modern age,

The age of information technology,

Some say it,

Poetry has declined in the modern age.

The Trend of Today

The poets of today, I mean the contemporary times

Are involved in mutual-praise and admiration,

One praising another,

One beats one’s own drums,

One writes about oneself.

Any edit the journals just for to be poets,

Just to get articles published

On their poetry,

I know them,

I can name them,

You call me a poet,

I shall too call you,

Where have we gone to?

Poetry of The Hollow Men, Modern Hollow Men

Poetry of the hollow men,

Modern hollow men,

Read we,

Write we,

The poets as the hollow men,

The readers as the hollow men

All but hollow and shallow

From within,

Modern men the hollow men,

Mechanical and technical.

Science or Poetry?

Science or poetry,

Fact or fiction,

Faith or doubt,

Whom to attach to

As science too not less than?

For a man of physics,

Poetry is in physics,

One for of mathematics

It is in mathematics.

The world is not the creation

Of poetry,

But of science too

And the poet is not all.