Gabriel Okara: A Study of His Three Poems

The Mystic Drum, Once Upon A Time, You Laughed And Laughed And Laughed

                       The Mystic Drum by Gabriel Okara

By: Bijay Kant Dubey

The mystic drum in my inside

and fishes danced in the rivers

and men and women danced on land

to the rhythm of my drum

But standing behind a tree

with leaves around her waist

she only smiled with a shake of her head.

Still my drum continued to beat,

rippling the air with quickened

tempo compelling the quick

and the dead to dance and sing

with their shadows -

The Mystic Drum by Gabriel Okara is one the best dance-songs, love-songs ever composed by Okara symbolic of African art, motif, myth and mysticism, landscape and scenery, countrified greenery and forested tracts where the indigenous Nigerian communities live in, where the tribesmen beat the rhythms in their space and free air. The Mystic Drum is but a song of Nigeria, a dance song of Nigeria charming us to our core and we feel swept away with its cadence of music and wording. But it has also the other side which the poet has not told it, how fraught with.

The mystic drum, he refers to is the folklore drums sounding, beating rhythmically and the people dancing to the tune of songs and dances and romances, religious rites and practices in order to celebrate and to their jubilation; the mystic drum, he talks of is the Nigerian folk myth and motif, the African signs  and symbols and he is putting his signature over as an spectator of all. A spokesman of his tribe belongs to, he seeks to present the rhythm of life as it pulsates in, as has seen it from his childhood and has lived within its circuit as an insider feeling the warmth and vitality of it. But instead of that one in course of time naturally gets split in between sticking to the roots of nativity and the modern global culture to his realization that to balance is perhaps the best one.

The mystic drum is inside him and he keeps hearing the beats of it, the musical sounds doing the rounds, toning up the self. Hearing it, the fishes danced into the river waters flowing, men danced on lands, animals too danced, means to say that such is the impact of it and in mythology it happens, as it appears to be. Tribal painting, clay baked terracotta plates, folk dances and songs and folk things but take us to a different plane of thinking and consciousness, to the country, the woods, hills, rivers and rivers, a landscape, so natural and full of exotic flora and fauna.

But someone from the tree, lying behind it and with leaves around the waist lies in watching and waiting. She admires it all with the shaking of the head as a nod from her in admiration. And he keeps beating and beating the drum, enchanting it all. The spirits of the dead turn they alive again and seem to dancing with as the shadows in company with which but she smiles to see it with a nod.

Beating the drum, the tune takes to the lowly, strikes the things of the locale indicative of realities and the track changes it. Fishes turn into men and men into fishes as a topsy-turvy picture, a swap in images, a reshuffling. The eyes of the sky, moon and river gods are invoked, things stop to grow and the music silences a bit, seem to be stopping. Even then the same nod of approval is given by the stranger standing behind the tree.

The mystic drum stops to beat inside him and the fishes return to be fishes and men to be men. The moon, sky and the river swing back to their positions and the dead too vanish away to be in their positions and places. Things start to grow it again.

But the woman remains it here behind the tree finding herself in a different situation, roots appear to be sprouting from her feet, leaves growing on her head and smoke issuing from her nose. What has  happened to her? Why are lips parted in smile turned cavity belching darkness? The lines are mythical and mystical, full of motifs, symbols and images.

The mystic drum beating and Okara is hearing the music, the music of Africa, the music of the country and the community, the indigenous people of the world, the African diaspora and woods inhabited by exotic fauna and diverse flora. They too must have a representation of own as art symbols. His African music has really lured us, consoled the distraught soul. His myth is the myth of Africa, the myth of Nigeria, human life and the world. His motif is the motif of Africa, of Nigeria and the whole of mankind which has its roots into nativity, locale, natural landscape and ancestral village houses. On reading the poem, there grows a desire to see folk painting, handicrafts, art symbols; a desire to hear the folk songs and dances and the dancers and singers performing in their own folk attire and costumes. The drum of Okara is not the drum of his, but the drum of Africa, the drum of Nigeria and the tribesmen dancing and singing in hilarity and the music overflowing the woods and the river-banks and the villages.

And behind the tree she stood

with roots sprouting from her

feet and leaves growing on her head

and smoke rising from her nose

and her lips parted in her smile

turned cavity belching darkness.

Then, then I packed my mystic drum

and turned away; never to beat so loud any more.

There are several things to know here. Who is the woman accompanying him and hearing the music going for so long? Why is she not coming into focus or the author bringing into light rather than keeping her in the background, under the curtain, purdah and hearing the music, making her stay erect by the tree as a myth, motif, symbol or a reader? If she had been disinterested, she would not have been. Definitely, she was and this too for how long? The other thing too is this that she is feeling fatigued.

The other from all these the woman may be a representation of Western culture and the impact of industrialization and urbanization and the cutting of greenery and the depletion of exotic flora and fauna. The woman standing behind the tree may be his love for a Western beauty; the story of her annoyance or approval. Generally, the tribesmen like not to entertain the non-tribal guests and strangers during their dance performances held in the hamlets or the forest ranges. The other symbol may refer to Eve and her wrapping on with leaves to hide her guilt. A Nigeria with depleting greenery, bereft of natural scenery and forest landscapes may be also the other point of deliberation.

So many things are herein, the elements of song, dance, drama, love, sympathy, attachment, rite, ritual, myth, motif, symbol, thought, idea, reflection, faith, belief, system, society, art, culture, living, attire, costume, scenery, landscape, village-life, race, ethnicity, indigenous custom, sociology, anthropology, dark consciousness, nature mysticism, harmony, magic, pantheism, urbanity and realism. There is something of his nostalgia, something of innocence and also something of experience which but instructs as well as corrupts it all too in the end.

The refrain, the repetition of the stanza adds different meanings in different stages of the poem with the same nod:

But standing behind a tree

with leaves around her waist

she only smiled with a shake of her head.

It is a feature of tribal or indigenous dances that they like sticking the wild blooms and the leaves. Whatever be that, the poem is really beautiful to read. Music is as such alluring and alleviating and so is Okara under the impact of it. Okara reveals it not who the girl is, a foreigner Western one hinting towards colonial glitz and grandeur or a Nigeria bereft of natural imagery, flora and fauna. There is some doubt with regard to it. 

The Mystic Drum of Gabriel Okara is an African myth, a motif, an art-symbol seen through the Nigerian eyes the whole panorama of life, society and literature; the mythic base of society illustrated through the pastoral images of archetypal villages, abounding with lands and habitats full of exotic flora and fauna and the indigenous communities dwelling in. The drum beat is just a medium of pursuing into; the incantation to rein in. The drum is an art symbol which has enough power to fuse in lyricality, verve and potentiality. The poet touched by nostalgia, childhood and memories tries to look and strike it again and the music comes overflowing, overpowering him and the around. But who is the girl hearing the music? Who is she watching from being behind the tree? Who is hidden under leaves, we mean wrapped around her waist? Is she symbolic of Eve? Is she a Western girl? Or, the beloved of Okara, attached to and withdrawn from?  Or, the tribals do not allow the non-tribals during their community performances? 

Once Upon A Time By Gabriel Okara

Once Upon A Time is one of the most representative poems of Gabriel Okara, the great Nigerian novelist and poet who is famous world-wide for using African myth, motif, imagery, thought and folklore in his creative works. Apart from his attempt to grapple with African culture and Western culture, he has tried his utmost best to use the archetypal things to locate himself and map the areas geographically as well as linguistically as he cannot discern the African things, the Nigerian stuffs from his corpus and these account for his output.

The opening lines too are very attractive, full of so much vitality and warmth of communication, lively talks held, a narrative rarely expressed in poetic idioms:

Once upon a time, son,

they used to laugh with their hearts

and laugh with their eyes:

but now they only laugh with their teeth,

while their ice-block-cold eyes

search behind my shadow.

I do not know if there is a poem like this, if the poetic expression can be as such, so impressive and impelling from within, it is not a poem, but a talk, a lively conversation done with so heartily, shared with so jovially without any air of ego and hypocrisy. This is just a matter of time, just a change in temperament and in a very lively tell-tale style of deliberation says he a poetic story of life and the changing times. What was it yesterday, how is it today? How were the things then? How have they now? Whom to say? Who to hear it? It is matter of age and generation gap not all the time, but of the changing time. Tennyson has really, The old order changeth yielding place to new. Times have changed; days have changed. Now the people think in their own. The people of the old times thought they in their own way with the problems of their own. But here the context is one of change in behavior and temperament. Addressing the son, he lightens it the burden of his heart.

There was a time when they used to laugh heartily, shaking the hands warmly standing vis-a-vis, face-to-face, holding the hands in firm grip, letting it not go, but that very hand-shake and laugh are missing, which the writer expects it even now. That very joviality, glee is almost gone now. Everybody is concerned with himself. Now shake they not the hands and even if they, search the empty pockets with their left hands.

There was a time indeed

they used to shake hands with their hearts:

but that’s gone, son.

Now they shake hands without hearts

while their left hands search

my empty pockets.

Whenever he gets a break from his routined life, busy schedule of things and goes to see them, they greet him for once or twice, but for the third time never rises it again. So as a result of that he has learnt many things in life; he has come to feel in the likewise manner as time has ordained it otherwise. So, he too has changed himself when available in the office, at home, in the market or any place it may be. The pose remains the same, the same mechanical portrait pose.

And I have learned too

to laugh with only my teeth

and shake hands without my heart.

I have also learned to say, ‘Goodbye’,

when I mean ‘Good-riddance’:

to say ‘Glad to meet you’,

without being glad; and to say ‘It’s been

nice talking to you’, after being bored.

The poet has learnt to laugh with the teeth, not from the heart as the man who laughs from his heart is misunderstood now-a-days. The friends remain it not friends, they too change with time, what to say of them, the relatives too change it with changing time. If they have some purpose, they will come and if do not have, they will not. Even of the talks bore him, he says with exclamation that it is time to see you. Now with the changing time he has tried to say goodbye. Even if he wants to get rid of, he has but to say, he is glad to meet him. What a time has it come!

The poet asks his son to believe him as he sharing with his frankly. He used to be as he was and the same he wants to be back with. But the lamentation is this that they have not remained the same which they used to be. They have changed over the years and this but the law of nature. The warmth which they used to show in handshaking is now almost gone now.

The way he addresses his son as the audience, the listener charms us to the core. His poetic narration is as such that it seems Walter de la Mare’s Martha is telling stories to the children and John Masefield about the ships sailing and the call of the sea in Sea Fever.

It is rare to find a poem of such content where there is so much of hilarity, joy and expression. There is nothing as that of to be tense and laden. Laugh a hearty laugh; share you a joke. There is much to learn from it too. In this age of sick hurry and divided aims, we have no time to laugh and to share with heartily, but instead of that Arnoldian dictum, Okara tries his utmost best to regale us through his poetic lines.

The concluding lines with an address to the son is an exercise, an attempt to regain the lost glory and innocence of childhood which he lost it in course of time aging and growing with:

But believe me, son.

I want to be what I used to be

when I was like you. I want

to unlearn all these muting things.

Most of all, I want to relearn

how to laugh, for my laugh in the mirror

shows only my teeth like a snake’s bare fangs!

So show me, son,

how to laugh; show me how

I used to laugh and smile

once upon a time when I was like you.

The last four lines, ‘So show me, son, how to laugh to once upon a time when I was like you’, though a bit communicate it more. The stanza speaks of the loss of innocence and joviality, cheerfulness and merry-making, the warmth of goodwill, staring from ‘But believe me, my son to unlearn all these muting things’. 

You Laughed And Laughed And Laughed By Gabrial Okara

You Laughed And Laughed And Laughed is one of those poems of Gabriel Okara which are again a call back to Africa and African landscape doing the rounds with their populace, mannerism, language, way of life,  culture, tradition, society, dance, rhythm and musical beats. To understand him is to understand the man, the culture of the place, the environment and Okara is no exception to it. As his poems are, this too is a song of Africa, of Nigeria, the black space and he putting before the psychic things, the stories of sun-burnt earth and the Dark Continent. A black man he tries to put before his black thoughts, what it in his consciousness, but in a hearty way without doing differentiation or discrimination. In a very light way, he says all these things harmoniously. He is sure of that the things will remain as they are and we cannot the shape of things. Instead of there must be an attempt to interpret and re-interpret the same for a comprehensive understanding which the wide world may not be aware of. 

A writer of soliloquies, he tries to carry the discussion with the white listener, who keeps hearing as well as smiling and laughing and this adds to the poem and here the reader-response theory lies it implied within. Okara as a poet is of the beats, the beats of Africa, the musical beats and dance dramas and poems generally carry in the music of Africa and their vibes. To share the things of his race, caste, class, society and the country is the focal point of deliberation. What is it in black culture? What is in white society? How do they think? How do they go by? What is that binding them all into a whole? The things of interaction he seems to be carrying it forward through his lively poetic talks, conversations and dialogues. Outwardly, these are not at all solid poems, but are simple ones of representational poetry, representing the art, culture, society and landscape of Africa, more especially Nigeria, the indigenous society and trend of it. The poem too forms a basis of black literature, but the poem if we compare with William Blake’s The Black Boy, the latter will excel it. Something it is of his persona and something it is of the white people which he came to learn while living in their contact. So all those things of colonialism, post-colonialism, modernism, post-modernism, race and racism, living time-spirit, movement with time, human thought and development are inherent in him and these extend him a poetic vision of own widening the spectrum of his thought and idea, image and imagery. One from the Ijaw community of Bayelsa State of Nigeria, he is a recipient of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for 1979, Pan African Writers’ Association Honorary Membership Award for 2009 and so on.

Okara contrasting the olden black indigenous culture of Africa with the white people bring to light the issues pertaining to racism, colonialism and post-colonialism, poor life and modern advanced culture in a very light way full of laugh and joke. The tales of Africa are different from those of history, culture and living of the white peoples. So, against the backdrop of all that, addressing the white fellow, the poet says it what in engages his mind and heart. The African tales, songs and dances to the white ear may be pleasing or may not be pleasing as because this is not their arena. His songs appear harsh and jazz, too much loud just like a motor car misfiring and stopping, seem to be choking. But hearing it, you laugh and laugh. To the western white people his appearance and walk may incite bizarre opinions, many make you burst into a laughter. The indigenous songs of Africa and the African peoples they may not understand it what the song says it, what does it mean. Again, he gives a magic dance and the drums start talking, so full of loud beats and human thuds, so vocal and vociferous and hearing it the western persona covering the eyes and having covered, smiles and laughs and laughs. The poet opens the song again in full which seems to echoing around. 

The white man moves into car and sits and laughs and laughs from there. With the beating and singing of songs, skies keep unfolding, many a door opening and the skies and the earth become one and he seems to be approaching with the mystic vision of own doing the rounds which but the foreigner cannot the nuances and idiosyncrasies of the native speech-dialects and their musical rhythms. The strange listener laughs at his song and dance and movement as well as at his inside knowing it not what it is within as it is quite intelligible to him and to his mind. But his too is a space, a diaspora, a platform to perform and to rehearse and to do the recitation. The earth is his theatre, the dancing ground, the sky with the stars the lookers-on, the fishes, animals and others all, the animate and inanimate objects partaking in that which but with western logic and reasoning cannot be understood the things of the heart. The Africans take the things in their way and the white people in their own way of scrutiny and reflection as far as traditions are concerned, racial, archetypal, indigenous and ethnic. Everything is but cold and dead with no room for earthly contacts and realities in the western world. They are lost in their gala and glitz, material prosperity and mechanical living.

The words, laughed and laughed and laughed add to the beauty of the poem and as because outplays the things of racism and racial discrimination and the western observer, friend or listener is but a friendly image of his just for a cultural share though there may be the points of differences to be cited before. The starting lines just set the things going:

In your ears my song

is motor car misfiring

stopping with a choking cough;

and you laughed and laughed and laughed.

The lines themselves present the whole things for our pleasure and profit so full of observation:

And then I opened my mystic

inside wide like the sky,

instead you entered your

car and laughed and laughed and laughed
You laughed at my song,
you laughed at my walk.
Then I danced my magic dance
to the rhythm of talking drums pleading, but you shut your eyes

and laughed and laughed and laughed

The following stanzas tell of the gap between the western world and the African:

But your laughter was ice-block

laughter and it froze your inside froze

your voice froze your ears

froze your eyes and froze your tongue.

And now it’s my turn to laugh;

but my laughter is not

ice-block laughter. For I

know not cars, know not ice-blocks.

While deliberating upon the western viewpoint and the African viewpoint, the poet tells about the difference of viewing. If they are mod, sophisticated and developed, urban, mechanical and up-to-date, they have something to take in their way, but the tales of the Dark Continent, that is Africa will not be the same. There is difference in it all and these may not suit their modernity, urban life and living. But his is an open space of open living as has learnt live in communities in the villages and hamlets under the open skies without modern-day comforts and pleasures. But the western, white people have a world of their own.

My laughter is the fire

of the eye of the sky, the fire

of the earth, the fire of the air,

the fire of the seas and the

rivers fishes animals trees

and it thawed your inside,

thawed your voice, thawed your

ears, thawed your eyes and

thawed your tongue.

The poet says to him that this is the land of his where he was born; his ancestors lived and grew up. So, his is a special attachment which he cannot forgo the bare contact with the earth as he is a son of soil.

So a meek wonder held

your shadow and you whispered;

‘Why so?’

And I answered:

‘Because my fathers and I

are owned by the living

warmth of the earth

through our naked feet.’

Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie (1947-) As A Postcolonial Writer: A Study In Dream, Fantasy & Realism

(The Dreams of British Indian Kubla Khan/ The Hindustani Don Quixote of British Indian Cervantes) 

 By: Bijay Kant Dubey

AND the first grey of morning fill'd the east, 

And the fog rose out of the Oxus stream. 

But all the Tartar camp along the stream 

Was hush'd, and still the men were plunged in sleep; 

Sohrab alone, he slept not; all night long 

He had lain wakeful, tossing on his bed; 

But when the grey dawn stole into his tent, 

He rose, and clad himself, and girt his sword, 

And took his horseman's cloak, and left his tent, 

And went abroad into the cold wet fog, 

Through the dim camp to Peran-Wisa's tent. 

               ---Matthew Arnold in Sohrab and Rustum

Unbiased at least he was when he arrived on his mission,

Having never set eyes on the land he was called to partition

Between two peoples fanatically at odds,

With their different diets and incompatible gods.

“Time,” they had briefed him in London, “is short. It’s too late

For mutual reconciliation or rational debate:

The only solution now lies in separation.

The Viceroy thinks, as you will see from his letter,

That the less you are seen in his company the better,

So we’ve arranged to provide you with other accommodation.

We can give you four judges, two Moslem and two Hindu,

To consult with, but the final decision must rest with you.”

                     ---W.H.Auden in Partition poem

Sir Salman Rushdie is one of those writers of the diaspora dais and the postcolonial platform who have really shaken the foundations of our conventional thought and idea with his new found theories of coloniality, post-colonaility, nation, nationhood, nationalism, history, politics, society, art, culture, constructing and deconstructing it all, busting the myths of prejudice, hypocrisy and sham living. His thesis and anti-thesis, treatises and documents are the documents of human thought and thinking, what a logical mind argues it, refutes, contradicts and accepts it. What the historians have left it Salman Rushdie is saying all that magically applying the tools of phantasmagoria, allegory, satire, sarcasm, irony,  fun, comic and humour mocking it down, what is it history, what it politics, what it mind-set and it vested interests of the parties concerned. The freedom drama, the drama of azadi none understood it well, what it went in the making of a nation, a history; setting of human thought none could feel it then and the nation was divided mindlessly without keeping in good governance and administration in mind. A British Indian writer, Salman Rushdie is not only a novelist, but an essayist, a memoir-writer, a talk-giver, a lecture-deliverer, a paper-reader, a reviewer, a columnist and what not. He need not be introduced, as the world knows it well, who Salman Rushdie is. Educated at Cathedral and John Cannon School, Bombay, Rugby School, Warwickshire, King’s College, Cambridge, he worked as a copywriter for Ogilvy and Mather and wherefrom he started his journey of writing Midnight Children to be a full-time writer.  Grimus (1975) is the first with which he started his writing career, but it did not attract the readers. But the second, Midnight’s Children (1981) dealing with India’s tryst with freedom and history, the dawn of a democracy, nascent politics won him the Booker Prize with the scenes and happenings going within internally at the consciousness layers which the politicians, separatists and historian were not aware of what it went in the making of history and holding of debates. Shame (1983) followed in with the turmoil in Pakistan with Sikander or Iskander and Raza busy in doing politics, hatching of plots and conspiracies and Intrigues. But the Satanic Verses blew the storm, took the world by hurricanes and tempests and we cannot explain it as for what, what it disturbed the quell, calm composure. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, London, of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is one of the most famous writers of the world with so many prizes and awards and doctorates in his credit. One book after another has tumbled from the pen of the author, The Moor’s Last Sigh appeared in 1995, The Ground Beneath Her Feet in 1999, Shalimar the Clown in 2005, The Enchantress of Florence in 2008, The Golden House in 2017, Quichotte  in 2019.

It is indeed a tougher job to evaluate and assess a writer of the stature of Salman Rushdie; to comprehend his mind and vision; his psyche, persona, protagonist, mouthpiece and spokesman, as his is a complex space drawing and deriving from history, art and culture, local, national, continental and postcolonial as well, but is very difficult to say what he is, a Kubla Khan or a Dr.Faustus for the kiss of Helen or a Sohrab and Rustum fighting, a bundle of thesis and anti-thesis like George Bernard Shawian or one of contraries and contradictions? What is he indeed, a Charles Lamb of Dream Children: A Reverie or a Bollywood man under romance and fantasy? Or just like William Hazlitt's Indian Jugglers he juggling with the balls, seeing the acrobatic skills of the tightrope walkers? Or a magician, a master of black art ? Who is this writer Lawrentine, Shawian, Orwellian? Who is this hero going from Bollywood to Hollywood? Clutching freedom of speech and expression, fearing none whoever comes it on the way, so brave and undaunted and daring, this is none but Sir Salman Rushdie. A talker like George Bernard Shaw, a satirist and laugher like Cervantes creating the character of Don Quixote, a Jonathan Swift of  Gulliver’s Travels and an Orwell of his stature writing political satires rebuffing nation and nationality, racial prejudice and old theosophical mind-set using dream fantasy and magic realism. Is he the Alexander Pope and John Dryden of Indian English fiction and non-fictional prose? Or, is he a Prospero reigning in Caliban with his black art? Caliban’s magic and music he is hearing in the post-colonial period after destructing and re-constructing it all.  

“CHILDREN love to listen to stories about their elders, when they were children; to stretch their imagination to the conception of a traditionary great-uncle or grandame, whom they never saw. It was in this spirit that my little ones crept about me the other evening to hear about their great-grandmother Field, who lived in a great house in Norfolk (a hundred times bigger than that in which they and papa lived) which had been the scene—so at least it was generally believed in that part of the country—of the tragic incidents which they had lately become familiar with from the ballad of the Children in the Wood.”

                       ----Charles Lamb in Dream Children: A Reverie

Here Saleem Sinai recounts and reconnects the story of the Partition, that of the Indian sub-continent in Midnight's Children, its bifurcation, the tryst with freedom in the same manner as Charles Lamb does it in Dream Children, K.A.Abbas in The Refugee, Krishan Chunder in The Peshawar Express, Khushwant Singh in Train to Pakistan, George Orwell in Shooting An Elephant and George Bernard Shaw in Freedom.

The Partition story, how does he tell to so comically, in a funny way just one alluding to anecdotes and narratives, with the tongas, bullock-carts and trains loaded with passengers, public coming and going and ferrying, transporting, but many trespassing as pedestrians, leaving their homes and belongings, where they are going? This the politicians could not feel it then, this much they could not take to their heart. Salman Rushdie tells the same in a sarcastic manner the sardonic truths of the Partition drama of Fakru Mian and Mr.Pandit. What is strange is this none could take to feel the sensitivity of the matter   and think about the perishing people driven out of their places to take to the paths and to be the refugees.

Rushdie as Sanajaya telling the whole to Dhritrashtra what did it happen to the Kauravs and Duryodhana in the battle-field of Kurushetra. The story is almost like the same. Or, just like Abhimanyu yet to be  born on the Partition night he overhears it all the dirty politics they are doing from the mother’s womb to take action in the form of literature sometime later on.

Now the question is, the power has been handed over, the transfer of power from the British to the Indians, but will they be able to rule, is the question in askance and even they, how will? Using allegories, Sinai has shown it all, from Hindustan, Pakistan and Bangladesh to the Emergency.

Midnight's Children is a fantastic book dealing with India' tryst with midnight freedom in a novel way and the politicians sitting thereon to divide the nation for the chair, but Saleem as a child just born overhearing all that, giving an ear to the whispers and talks doing the rounds, but saying it not all as for the materials to be used in the book to come, feeling within to hold the conferences of the midnight children and to plan for a prospective future, but the things taking a turn otherwise and this is what he means to say herein with fun, satire and magic realism. A rare work of fantasy and imagination, fancy and realism, humour and distorted facts of history, it can charm as well as surprise us with the ideas germinating, opening new avenues of thought and idea. Why was India partitioned? Who partitioned? Was the chair more important than the common people? What the historians have failed to say or mean have been clipped and curtailed and suppressed, he has told them just by the way. People's governance is more important than the transfer of power. This is what he means to relay it. What had it been the expectation of the people and what did they get, come to feel?

“Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.”

                     -----George Orwell in Shooting An Elephant

I do not know if there is a book of the kind of Satanic Verses where the author takes liberties with myth and prophecies and transforms them into magical realism and paradox to suit his fantasy and narrative, a rare work of art to have been done in the history of world thought so dreamy, so visionary and allegorical at same time we read it with interest and so much profit. Why to libel and slander it? Those who are fanatical and conservative will not; those who are educated and progressive will. Was Milton's Lucifer not so? Is his Paradise Lost not?  There is so much of caricature, joke, fun, comedy and reality too in it. There is also some sense to reason and show the truths. Who Satan, what it in God, what it in the prophecy, where did prophecies come from? But people take in their own way. Salman Rushdie falls in the category of controversial writers as was D.H.Lawrence, as was Khushwant Singh.

What it comes upon the mind of Salman Rushdie, none can it about as he keeps changing places from Himachal Pradesh to Bombay to London to New York, a writer who keeps rebutting the colonial dialogues and keeps deriving and drawing from memory, remembrance, reminiscence, memoir, memento, souvenir. A world without the borders which the religionists and fanatics understand and approve of it not. Those who are shameless, how will they take to shame, delicacy and etiquette?

It is really a matter of shame even if they understand it not the geopolitical, the socioeconomic realities of the sub-continent and try it not to come to terms is but the other side of the story, but what it strikes us most is their friction, the clash in opinion and the desire to supersede each other driven by the lust for power. Though unnamed it is perhaps his no-man's land and let it be so as the indications are quite clean which country he is indicating it through his Forsterian Notes on the English Character and Where Angels Fear To Tread. Rather than shaming the nation, they could have developed as per a welfare state. What is it his characteristic feature is that he makes us burst and bubble into a laughter with his caricature and comicality.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

   Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round;

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

               -------Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Kubla Khan

Who is this Quichotte, Salman Rushdie's or Cervantes'? Whose creation is this? Don Quixote is definitely not there, but Miguel de Cervantes. Medieval chivalry not, but spy thrillers have done with the brain of the protagonist. Who the Sancho Panza telling the story in Salman's Quichotte? Who the Alanso Quijano after all in the end?

The Golden House is a story of an old billionaire coming from foreign shores to New York’s Greenwich Village to settle with his eccentric sons just on the day of Barack Obama’s inauguration, so different and varying in nature, but without anyone to look after the household till a Russian joins the caravan seconded by a filmmaking neighbour to derive and draw from the golden house. What is golden, who can but say it? To joke, make fun of is the specialty of Salman Rushdie.

What is golden about The Golden House? Is it about the presidential candidature yet to come in the years? Is it about the power of wealth or the power of politics making way to and how the end? Nationality, nationhood, citizenship, loyalty, lust of power and pelf, immigration and the quest for identity how to deal with? Who is from where and where one's own house, how to say it, who can but say it?

A house, what can it be, how can it be in the absence of a house-keeper? Is money and assets all, power and glory, gala and glitz? How to cope up with global grandeur and modernity, immigration and internationalism? Where is peace really? Is peace not a state of mind, of being complacent? Is life a study in eccentricity?

The Ground Beneath Her Feet, whose love story, where is he tagging, I don’t know, where is he Rushdie going, from Hindu India to Orpheus’ Greece to America and with his what Calibanism? How is Othello’s love for Desdemona? How the hocus-pocus, the black box and the mantra of Salman Rushdie the magician of narratives?

Imaginary Homelands, where will he take to, what will he discuss, none can say it about, what it in his mind and heart, a writer colonial-postcolonial, transgressing the boundaries of nationality and nationhood an internationalist is he constructing and deconstructing the things, taking it all in his stride,  racial pride and prejudice, immigration and refugee influx, modernity and modernism, urbanity and dislocation, myth and busting of it, classicism and classics, trend and tradition, fiction and fictional stuffs, their mind-set, behavior and mannerism to see it all in the mirror of time as passing things, the whole in a flux of generational consideration and re-consideration, review and purview. A collection of diasporic writings, it is about location and disconnection, connection and disconnection and resettlement, the essays and critical pieces are but his random reflections on the present state of things and the creative pursuits going worldwide. 

Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism is a collection of essays and writings, tidbits and chitchats, reviews, thoughts and opinions with regard to the midnight children of freedom, the sub-continental division and intra-rivalry and fracas, taking into consideration together with border skirmishes, narrow allegiances to faith and loyalties which but it all discusses he here in this work. imaginary Homelands is but about the imaginary people imagining about their homes in their own way, taking British India, Muslim India, Hindu India and it all into discussion, whatever there is to be extracted jocularly with a tinge of Hindustani English used by Kipling and Furtado. The lands are settled, not purchased, as the deeds reflect it over the passage of time and the records from the land registration office say it. Just the mutation is done. So, what to say it more?

Joseph Anton : A Memoir is a recollection, a reminiscence of the days spent in hiding, days not, years escaping the fatwa hanging over and he in order to avoid it changing locations and identity and the present book is the result of that escape and refuge for having uttered the controversial things, for doing blasphemy and for which he must bear with the capital punishment. But Salman under the disguise, pseudonym of Joseph Anton means Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov kept hiding to make a living somehow just like the hard times to give a test to and to pass through the ordeal. Joseph Anton himself living in the company of police men, security staff, intelligence men and detectives turns into a high profile boss whose movement lies it restricted. But apart from the fear of life risk, terror attack and hatred spilling into malign the self of the writer.

Who is this Joseph Anton, it is none but Rushdie himself writing under the pseudonym of and that too during the hiding time, moving from place to place, house to house in search of a safe haven, security and shelter, taking the name of Joseph from Joseph Conrad and Anton from Anton Chekhov to deal with the time of crisis and its management avoiding public gaze and averting the fatwa issued by, escorted by the security staff, detectives and intelligence men and all that anonymously. But this too could not deter him from writing, opening his mind and thoughts, as such was his guts and personality. Joseph Anton is a memoir of that period of crisis and tackling of the situation and his personality to shrug off what it came on the way to freedom of speech and expression.

The Moor’s Last Sigh, what has he to do with India, a king of Granada looking back for the last time when expelled from? Is it connected with his own exile and alienation from Bombay? Is it Babar’s looking over or that of the Hindu chauvinists’ indicative of nationalism? Whatever be that, it is a book of India, Bombay, Cochin, Granada, Goa and Pondicherry wherever the merchant ships used to land from foreign in the hoary days of the past. It is a looking, re-looking on our relationships, the bonds of history working and disenchanted with and misinterpreted. What did it happen after the demolition of the Babri mosque? The Bombay riots, the terrorist activities carried out with bombings, he thinks in the aftermath of all that, how to forge the alliances even if un-negotiable? 

Step Across This Line is a collection of columns, random reflections, tidbits, chit-chats, articles, reviews, thoughts and ideas and gossips of Salman Rushdie whose prose is but a medley of all intermixing history, nativity, politics, travel, journalism, comic, fun, caricature and humour and his conversations range from the freedom of the press to the freedom of speech and expression and he distort the things for his purpose. Allegory, phantasmagoria, caricature, laughter, jibe and joke are the chief properties of his.

His letters of freedom, everybody knows, but his love letters, we want to read them, how Saleem took them, the English and American loves rather than burkhawallis. The Rudhsie Letters: Freedom to Speak, Freedom to Write is the work under consideration.

“What is perfectly free person? Evidently a person who can do what he likes, when he likes and where he likes, or do nothing at all if he prefers it. Well there is no such person; and there never can be any such person. Whether we like it or not, we must all sleep for one-third of our lifetime; wash and dress and undress; we must spend a couple of hours eating and drinking; we must spend nearly as much in getting about from place to place. For half the day we are slaves to necessities which we cannot shirk, whether we are monarchs with a thousand servant or humble labourers with no servants but their wives. And the wives must undertake the additional heavy slavery of child-bearing if the world is still to be peopled. These natural jobs cannot be shirked. But they involve other jobs which can.”

                         -----George Bernard Shaw in Freedom

What is Salman Rushdie, I cannot say it, a writer so allegorical and phantasmagorical, so full of fancy and imagination, is he writing Kubla Khan of Coleridge or Sohrab and Rustum of Arnold? Who is who has contributed so much to the development of world thought and freedom of speech and expression, who has fought so much just as a battle commander of mankind? Hats, hats off to him, to him! The master of comedy in fiction so full of monologues and dream allegory; memoirs and remembrances, locating and re-locating the self. A historical narrativist, he is George Orwellian and George Bernard Shawian in his thought and content, spirit and emulation. The partition drama and the concept of azadi he regales it with his personal whims and reflections. If to see it otherwise, Salman Rushdie is but the John Dryden and Alexander Pope of satiric narratives and fiction of Indian-British writings. Is the last Moor the hero of the novel or the Indo-Portuguese man or the Rushdiean spokesman?

“Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium--

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.--

''[kisses her]''

Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies!--

Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.

Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,

And all is dross that is not Helena.

I will be Paris, and for love of thee,

Instead of Troy, shall Wertenberg be sack'd;

And I will combat with weak Menelaus,

And wear thy colours on my plumed crest;

Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel,

And then return to Helen for a kiss.

O, thou art fairer than the evening air

Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars;

Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter

When he appear'd to hapless Semele;

More lovely than the monarch of the sky

In wanton Arethusa's azur'd arms;

And none but thou shalt be my paramour!”

              -----Christopher Marlowe in Dr.Faustus 

Salman Rushdie who was born in Bombay, but educated in London, one who gave the volumes of literature as such Satanic Verses, Midnight’s Children, The Moor’s Last Sigh and so on of fiction and non-fiction, inclusive of novels, stories, narratives, anecdotes, reviews, memoirs, recollections, columns, pen-portraits, remembrances, reminiscences, dealing with nationality, nationhood and nationalism, freedom, liberation and slavery, hypocrisy, mentality and prejudge, ego, pride and glory so psychological and sociological deeply rooted into our socio-economic nomenclature and protocol, a writer of the diaspora dais and dislocation, self-search and identity, he is  one of the world level, inter-continental in appearance transgressing the boundaries and borders of mankind, drawing and deriving from phantasmagoria, magic realism, dream sequence and revelry, rarely to be met with and come across. He is a political satirist of the freedom of speech and expression. Just like a registrar of the land department, he knows it well that the lands are not measured, but settled and if India was partitioned it was but a foolish work and even if they quarrel, it will be very foolish to be engaged in for the burden of history, legacy of past, racial prejudices, religious differences. It will be better if deal with theory own problems, keeping in view the vikas mantra, the developmental agenda, eliminating poverty and illiteracy, reducing the job and employment opportunity. But rather than development, they still like to cling, stick to their old mind-set and ego. 

Generally, bizarre people with strange pursuits and interests and flair for come to engage the canvas of Salman Rushdie like the opera men and women. Such is the protagonist of Fury, a Cambridge-educated millionaire from Bombay with intrinsic interest for miniatures leaves for to escape from, makes a name in the puppet miniature and then moves out to America leaving his wife and child in order to tame, rein in his furies overruling him. Where to escape from himself? Is the hero an escapist, a romantic and an artistic persona who cannot adjust with the grim realities of the world and life? Is he Lawrentine or Keatsian? 

How To Submit Dissertations, Do M.Phils., Ph.Ds. On Indian English Poetry?

How To Submit Dissertations, Do M.Phils., Ph.Ds. On Indian English Poetry? (Selecting Major Or Minor Voices)

By: Bijay Kant Dubey

How to do Ph.Ds. or M.Phils. on Indian English poetry or call it Indian poetry in English? It is really very difficult to say what one approves and what one disapproves of as for the proposed synopsis. Suggestions and notes vary from person to person as per one’s studies and comprehension of the topics available to the best of one’s own mind and knowledge. One cannot be a master of all. Someone may talk of taking standard topics while someone may talk of taking writable topics. While choosing the topic of the dissertation, one keeps in view the writable substance. Will one be able to complete the project? If the materials are not available, one will not be able to write or complete the thesis. Most of the people like to choose workable topics. Nobody likes to work on a hard topic. A thesis may be done on, What To Call It, Anglo-Indian, Indo-English, Indo-Anglican, Indian Poetry In English or Indian English Poetry? Even the thesis may be inclusive of it all or may be divided into sub-theses of three different titles. The parts may look like sub-theses or different titles, but if separated. The thesis will bring to light how the idea has taken wings; how the matter has evolved over the passage of time, as for example one may take up, What Is Anglo-Indian Poetry? If the research scholar wants to take it in a different way, he may, A Study of Indo-English Poetry. What is Indian In Indian English Poetry?, may be another topic of study. Has Indian English Poetry Come of Age?, may be another title of our critical study. A History of Modern Indian English Poetry may be a general survey researchable. Were they really modern or not? Or, we have termed them so. Were they really post-colonial or we have just made them so after reading the treatises and texts of post-colonial studies? Indian English Poetry As A Study In Self-published Poets can be our topic of discussion.

One may submit a research work on Derozio now-a-days, taking the help of archival and historical facts, visiting his cemetery, going after his blood connections in a fresh light, showing the institution where he worked, what it interested him as a poet, how he borrowed from other poets. Similar is the case with Michael Madhusudan Dutt who wanted to be an English poet rather than a Bengali poet. One may study the translations of William Radice while dispensing with the topic in hand stating how he returned to his mother tongue, a perusal of his retreat. But when we turn to the corpus of translation studies made by the European scholars it baffles us. Now Derozio interests it not if we go on saying the same things and there is nothing new in it. There must be something about the institution he studied, the house where he lived, the family he belonged to, their ancestral and descendent matters.

In Gitanjali, the Soul prays to the Over Soul, the Mind to the Over Mind, the Self to the Greater Self which is but Supreme Consciousness and its realization, but how to approach the Divine? Songs Offering are but tributes to the Divine. As the petals lie embedded in a garland so are the lyrics here. The bond between the Soul and the Supreme Soul is the point of discussion.

Critics on Gitanjali: A Substantiation of Views & Opinions can be a good topic if one wants to peruse it as Gitanjali has won the hearts of the readers from time to time and it merits enough goodness to move anyone so full of prayer and devotion, fervour and piety, holistic thought and movement, myth and mysticism, universal love for mankind and humanity, so full of knowledge, light and wisdom. Now it is a part of Tagore Studies as the things are of Bose Studies, Gandhi Studies and so on.

What a fakiri in translating the songs of Kabir, what a shadhukadi language just like the present-day Bauls clad in saffrons singing the songs of Rama-Rahima! Rabindranath Tagore has indeed done a great job in translating him which but Kabir hut is a witness of all that hectic activity! A rare work of mysticism and devotion translated by any writer which he realized it and tried to assimilate in his poetry too, of which Gitanjali too is a glaring example of that.

Who is the Fakir of fakirs? God. Is it not? Where do you search Me?, I am by you, God says it.

Tagore As A Translator of Kabir: A Study can be a good thesis if one wants to work, one may have to consult the reviews and opinions of different readers put forward, gone through and noted in from time to time. One may consult what other translators say about and put forth.

When did Tagore translate the book? Who helped him in understanding, translating? I cannot all that what it went in the making of Tagore. But I can see the influence of Kabir on Gitanjali.

Had he Surdas, Mira Bai, Rashkhan, Jayasi or any one of these it would have been great.

Songs of Kabir by Tagore is really a path-breaking work widening the horizon of translation studies and while going through the saintly text of comprehensive vision and synthetic understanding of religions in a mystic assimilation, we feel it as if we were going through Kabir's own words.

Stray Birds as a collection of one, two, three and four liners is inclusive of poetic tidbits passing through as a trail of imagery, a train of  rudimentary thoughts and ideas and reflections. Stray thoughts and ideas take the canvas of the work written as a collection of short, very short, brief, very brief poems bordering on the fringe of prose and poetry, poetry and prose. Can the straight lines be called poetry? Is poetry musical thoughts?

Tagore And His Short Poems: A Study of His Poetic Bits And Pieces may be done keeping in view Stray Birds and likewise pieces.

On Translating Tagore: Translators’ Versions can be a topic if it is selected going through the works done on Tagore; the corpus of translated works.

The Gardener is actually a book of love and lyrics, of the songs sung by a heart in love. A maiden's braid bedecked with flowers and cosmetics applied on the face so lovely and perfumed going by the way resounds with the anklets jingling. The scene is one of the dancers telling Buddha of the middle path, but he is under the charm of pastoral, idyllic and amorous love. Radha's love for Krishna is the focal point as he cannot discern it classical love poetry while writing it. The garden of love is as such full of so many sweetly-scented flowers.

Fruit-Gathering too is no less than, but vibrant with the same theme applied in Gitanjali and the mode too is same as far as thought-content and thematic-stuff are concerned. Love, Love Divine is the thing the poet is concerned with and there is much of classical love poetry rather than amorous. The metaphors may differ, but the way of perceive is same. The whole world is the play-field of His and we are just effigies into the Hands of His. There is much of a tarveller's bird's eye-view, that of a wayfarer's, a pilgrim's and  a seeker after truth. In search of God is the thing of it. Where the diamond lying, how the light of it? How the light of knowledge? Who to lead unto him? How the ways of life? Who can but say it? In quest of knowledge, where have we come to? Where is God? God is within, look you, is the answer.

Savitri, the magnum opus of Maharshi Aurobindo, recreates in poetic language the tale of love conquering death, Savitri bringing back to life Satyavan from the hands of Yama, the Messenger of Death-god; the Life Divine in poetry it has borne out of his transcendental meditation and visionary brooding. An epic poem running to several books and cantos, Savitri is but the Paradise Lost of Aurobindo where the rishi is so much Vedic, Upanishadic and Puranic in his studies; where the poet is so much Miltonic and Latinized in diction.

Critics on Savitri: A Study, Critics on Sri Aurobindo: A Study, too can be our dissertations if we want to read.

A Linguistic Study of Indian English Poetry may be taken up from the linguistic point of view. The Linguistic Base of Aurobindo: A Study In Miltonic Diction, Sanskritism And Latinism can be the subject of our study. Has anybody studied Nissim Ezekiel from the language point of view? It will be an exercise in Elizabethan sonneteers, song-writers and lyric-writers. Nissim carries so much from the Elizabethan and the simple moderns. Savitri: A Latinized, Sanskritized Or Miltonitized Work? as a topic can also be ventured for an exploration. The Criticism of Savitri: What Do Critics Say? maybe also the subject of our study. Savitri, the magnum opus of Maharshi Aurobindo, recreates in poetic language the tale of love conquering death, Savitri bringing back to life Satyavan from the hands of Yama, the Messenger of Death-god; the Life Divine in poetry it has borne out of his transcendental meditation and visionary brooding. An epic poem running to several books and cantos, Savitri is but the Paradise Lost of Aurobindo where the rishi is so much Vedic, Upanishadic and Puranic in his studies; where the poet is so much Miltonic and Latinized in diction. The Pondicherry School of Indian English Poetry: A Study In Ashramite Devotional And Mystical Poets too can be studied. There were poets and poetesses even before Nissim Ezekiel. Modernism in Indian English poetry has not started with him as we think it now and the surveyors of Indian literature err in putting it forward.

Even Nissim Ezekiel had not been in light during the 1960’s as a few had been in the know of Indian English poetry and it was not Indian English poetry, but non-existent. Nissim too had just started to publish verses in English and for it the credit went to the Illustrated Weekly of India which started publishing the verses by the native Indians which appeared very bad in the initial stage and those baddies are now the stalwarts of Indian English poetry.

Even the slender poetry-works of Nissim Ezekiel too were unavailable for quite a long time. These were re-printed after a gap.

While talking about the researches, The Parrot’s Death and Other Poems (1960), Love’s the First (1962), Change! They Said (1966), Draupadi and Jayadratha (1967), The Man of Dharma and Rasa of Silence (1974), Calcutta: A Long Poem (1978), etc. are the collections of poems of P.Lal which he authored from time to time. But had Writers Workshop, Calcutta been not, could he have?

Close the Sky, Ten by Ten (1971) is the first work of Jayanta Mahapatra with which the poetic journey of his starts from followed by Svayamvara and Other Poems (1971), A Father’s Hours (1976), etc. are the books of the earlier phase. Jayanta Mahapatra As An Imagist, As A Realist, As A Feminist, A Myth-maker or An Odia Poet In An English Garb: A Study, any one of these may be the research area of perusal. The echoes of his earlier image and word-play laden poetry are heard even in his lucid prose-writings. His poetry is the poetry of the dark daughters and the doors of dreams and visionary glides.

A Rain of Rites by Jayanta Mahapatra is no doubt a fine collection of poems which as  book can be inducted into the courses of study. A Rain of Rites is the title poem of the collection named so as well as included in the text, but the way he frolics with private and personal myth and reflection that he confuses us with his image and idea, what he means and what he takes for. A small poem of some sour stanzas, it is not about the rains, but the rites raining. The Oriya scene and sight is certainly the crux of the matter. Whatever happens it, the rites will not cease, come to a stop; the Vedic chants and Upanishadic will keep continuing even during the past midday. Under heat and scorching sun, it will keep going.

Sometimes a rain comes slowly across the sky, turning upon grey clouds and breaking away into light. This is how he starts the poem, A Rain of Rites. Rains and rites keep confusing, but the reality is he has the least to dispense with the rains as these are not his concern, but the rites of Orissa, India, continuing on the sea beach, in the Jagannath temple and the people thronging. Flowers and petals offered to the deity. Some people are shaven-headed. The spectacle of the temple sight is the panorama of the poem which he transmutes so well.

The rain he has known and traded all this life is thrown like kelp on the sea beach protecting from salty ingredients and adding to the greenery. Like some shape of conscience he cannot look at, a malignant purpose in the nun’s eye.

Discussing the rites, not rains, he moves to the cloudburst, the bringing of first showers as well as the cold cloud brining this blood to face? Actually, absurdity takes over, the absurdity of life and living, why rains, why rites, why this cycle of rains and rites, rites and rains? Actually, the earth parches in the scorching sun and it vaporises to hanging cloudbursts, downpours, heavy showers, rumbling, colliding to thunders and rains dripping and dropping and the rains wetting and soaking in water for vegetation and life.

Numbly he climbs the mountain-tops of his own where his own soul quivers on the edge of answers. Who is it who brought the cold clouds? Who is it who brought blood to human face? Where were rites then? Mark it, where there is a rock-built temple there was a hill thereon.

Which still and stale air sits on an angel’s wings? What it holds his rain so hard to overcome? Who to answer his absurd questions? His rains the showers of logic and reasoning refreshing absurdity with his crosswords of puzzles and riddles.

In Jayanta the crushed flowers of the temple courtyard too have the songs of their own to sing. To see the things in contrast and contradiction is the beauty of his poetry. In one poem his good wife sleeps and snores by his side, taking her summer midday siesta full of sweating and humidity while on the other the rites with the mantric chants are heard from the distant temples and the funeral pyres keep burning at a distance. Play and inter-play keep going in his poetry.

The syllables of the rains and the blood of the rites, who to say about? What do these rains and rites mean really which but Jayanta knows it well and none the else. Something of Original Sin, something of temptation and fall has been inducted in. It will be better if we end the poem, A Rain of Rites with ‘Da, dyadhavam, damayata and datta; om shanthi shantih shantih’ as does he Eliot in The Waste Land.

A Rain of Rites by Mahapatra is a book of Orissa and Orissan landscapes; the Oriya scenarios telling of hunger, scarcity, depravity, heat and dust; rains, rituals and summers; Puri, Cuttack and Bhubaneswar. Orissa cannot be Orissa if we talk not about its temples, gods and goddesses. Word-play, imagery and photography are the primary things in understanding his poetry.

Temple as a volume is not about the temples, but is based on a newspaper item telling of hunger deaths and against the backdrop of it he has written it imagining in his own way about the sun-burnt earth, hot summer days and hunger taking a toll upon the aging couple.

Relationship as a work is just like a dream sequence as the poet keeps taking flights and escaping into the domains and landscapes unknown and beyond. This is the text for which he has got the Sahitya Akademi Award; this is the text which has won acclaim and admiration for him; his connection with Orissa and Orissan landscapes, how can he do away with, as this is the land of his birth and nativity and leaving it, where will he go? Though there is nothing more in it, it a book of a handful of leaves wherein he takes visionary glides thinking about its historicity, myth and mystery. A book of mythical context and dreamy vision, it can charm anyone who likes to go through it.

Jayanta Mahapatra; A Poet of The Dark Daughters, Jayanta Mahapatra; A Study In Man-woman Relationship, Love And Sexuality Themes, Jayanta Mahapatra As A Poet of Relationship, Jayanta Mahapatra: As Study In Oriya Connections; Oriya History, Thought & Culture, Jayanta Mahapatra: A Study In Vedic, Upanishadic Overtones & Undertones, etc. can be perused and pursued as research topics if one wants to take up.  Many do not know it that there is a thin undercurrent of Vedism, Upanishadism in the poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra.

But it pains us as well as infringes upon to see the visiting interview-takers and pseudo-litterateurs when they pressurize him for a joint photo as well as his appreciation of the incumbent’s creative pursuits.

Kamala Das As A Confessional Poet: A Study Of Her Poetry, Kamala Das As A Poet: A Study In Borrowings can form the basis of our criticism. Where did Kamala study? What it the basis of her poetry and poetic dogma, who her persona and protagonist, mouthpiece and spokesman. Has she been influenced by any poet or not? Why does she say it not? Is everything her own? Kamala Das: A Study in Sexual Overtones and Undertones, Kamala Das: A Study In Man-woman Relationship, Kamala Das: The Spiritually Sick And Ailing Soul, can we put our critical readings as thus in an experimental way rather than putting normally?

Kamala Das is one of those controversial writers who have not only enchanted with, but have defied the accepted protocol and nomenclature of our society. A female writer she often tries to resist the patriarchal hegemony coming down to us from generation to generation and her rebellion is the rebellion of a Lucifer, what the writer of male domination and possessive love, Lawrence says about in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. But how to answer, why is she a born woman? Why can she be not free? Why can she not play and dress like a boy? This is her problem.

While discussing Kamala Das and her poetry, the books and short stories of D.H.Lawrence flash upon the mind’s eye, with Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, The Rainbow, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, St.Mawr, The Fox, The Virgin and the Gipsy, Sun and so on, but what he writes in his fictional works that find a covert expression in her poems, but what he writes in his poems those are not in her works.

There was a time when the works by Arun Kolatkar were unavailable. How to search the postal address too was a problem. Only Jejuri was the thing to begin with one’s research on his poetry. Even the books by Keki N.Daruwalla, Jayanta Mahapatra, Adil Jussawalla and Kamala Das, Prof. Lal could not send them. What to say about those of K.D.Katrak and Adil Jussawalla? K.R.Srinivasa Iyengar wavered in giving the address and identity of the Indian practitioners of verse while teaching the foreigner students in England. If one goes through the history of literature written by M.K.Naik, one will find it that even Naik talks of the poems of Kolatkar yet to be picked and collected. Aurobindo’s poems were available as these appeared from his Pondicherry ashrama press. Indian English poetry suited best in anthologies of poems and stray picks and selections. 

Adil Jussawalla: A Journey From Land’s End, Missing Person To The Right Kind of Dog & Other Poems and beyond may also tempt us for a study of his modern, post-modern poetry, full of pastiche, allusion, reference and broken statements. Adil Jussawalla And His Biography: A Swapping of Poetry And Journalism can also be our topic of dissertation. Adil Jussawalla: The Missing Person of Indian English Poetry can also engage us.

Land’s End is the first book of poems which Adil Jussawalla published at the age of 22. All the poems of Land’s End have been written in England and Europe the collection ends with white peacocks which he saw in Oxford at Merton Street. Geneva is a poem of the place; A Bomb-site Seen from a Railway Bridge is all about an incident. A Letter for Bombay is another poem to relate to Bombay and his connections with it and from it the kernel of Missing Person starts with. As Jussawalla had sailed for England at the seventeen so the things started materializing with that to the culmination reached in Land’s End. Alienation after alienation deepened it inside, the first that of being a Parsi, the second that of the alienated Indian writers’ nuances and rhythms of life. Things generally change they not if nurtured along habitually or inherited so is the case with him, as goes the adage, The child is father of man, another as, style is man. The same is with Adil Jussawalla what he started in Land’s End remained with him unto the last. The style remains the same, the way of expression. Only the contents have been added in.

What it is in Adil Jussawalla, it is very difficult to say it as because he is a complex writer of the modern times, not so easily comprehensible and to be laid bare for meaning. Land's End takes him to England and Europe and he imagines of life and times in a private and personal way as a Westerner thinks and imagines, but Missing Person gives some stronghold to him. Again, just like the title he goes missing. Some forget him as a poet, some remember him as for a historical reference. But he resurfaces again for a landmark and comes upon with his Trying to Say Goodbye to be followed by The Right Kind of Dog. A poet of Bombay, he is a Bombay man and his vision dismal and bleak. The house is a motif, a recurrent image of his poetry and he searches for earnestly. A Parsi poet, he suffers from the search for identity no doubt. But his talks of Karna, Abhimanyu, Eklavya give him a sound foothold of own and he returns back to an optimism of own.

To choose an Indian English poet is to be in doubt if he is really an English poet or not or a fellow writing in an alien tongue? Similar had been the case with the Indian writers of English verse or the Indians attempting in English. Many got a chance to write and many were relegated to oblivion in the absence of promotion and many good writers shied from putting down for publicity. Since when have they given Sahitya Akademi awards? Since when the Padma awards? Let us take a note of it. Since when have we started prescribing them into the classrooms? Long back we struggled in approving Tagore and Sarojini into English syllabi and courses of studies. Frankly speaking, Indian English poetry derived and drew upon English and translation studies, Indology and Oriental Studies. Had there been any critic of it? Again to put it frankly, Indian English poetry is a study in derivative, copious and borrowings; parodied stuffs. The poets are not the poets, but commoners, poetasters rhymes, non-poets writing doggerels.

In the beginning the Indian writers of verse never used to be our favourites, but now after reading them, we have got accustomed to and we cannot without them as have started reading them, as have started liking them and they too have been in our courses of studies. When these were introduced for the first time, the people used to frown upon the derivative, parodied, copied and meaningless pieces, but now we have got an idiom to explain as because at that time even the teachers were not sure of what they were going to teach. The Internet had not been, even the mobile phone sets were not as these are in a plenty today and are accessible and available.

While interpreting the poems, we needed some authorly notes and biographical details, but the materials were not sufficient and the bigger and smaller presses too were silent about.

Whatever be that, the present volume, Crossing of Rivers  is a welcome addition and it contains in what he has been carrying it so far, the landscape and panorama of its own as reflected in his poesy demonstrating curfew, violence, accident, tragedy and so on.

When one talks of The Keeper of the Dead, one cannot leave it out, Crossing of Rivers as because both of these are coincidental and contemporary just like the twins. The imagery of the sites he had been to he has not forgotten, but has carried along to to be put up for sharing into the verse which it has come down from the poetic pen of his.

Bombay Prayers are the best hymns hummed, the best prayers ever said so hastily with utter submission and utmost confession holding the soul in strict confidence. So are the poems of personal loss and mourning together with the angst and bewilderment and the anxiety of the age he was born, that is the malaise of the times what it ailed it. Winter Poems is without any doubt a commendable work on the part of the evolving poet.

Where the author is taking to, to Naishapur, Babylon? What his connection with? Is he trying to locate and dislocate the persona? Central Asia, Middle East are the topics of his liking as for being a RAW man, a Zoroastrian; his Parsee connections. Daruwalla as a poet is concerned with Hindustani landscape and perspective. So is the case with Rudyard Kipling. Naishapur and Babylon: Poems as a poetry-collection takes us to Mesopotamia, Syria, Assyria as he cannot his connections.  Parsi heritage, lineage and connections he cannot discern it but it happened it otherwise in the course of history. Had they understood, it would not have happened.

Daruwalla As A Poet of The Mythologies And Archetypal Narratives: A Study of His Poetry can be a good topic if we choose to work on. The Parsi Psyche of The Poet: A Study In Daruwalla’s Poetry too maybe our topic of dissertation.

Riding the Himalayas is a travelogue of Daruwalla which he has after visiting the places which are dearer to him as he was born in Lahore then shifted to Ludhiana and Gujarat before settling in New Delhi. But his heart lies it in Uttarakhand and its beyond even dwelling far to Persia and beyond, to the land of Zarathustra which but he has not forgotten. But it is a pleasure to hear about Kedarnath, Badrinath and so many things; to see the scenery and landscape of Ladakh, Leh, Kargil and so on.

We had been aware of it that he would write a book on when we read about his visit in the newspapers then.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra As A Modern Indian English Poet: A Study of His Surreal Poetry can now charm us as a research topic, but there was a time when he had not too much to show and put before. Even few which he authored at a time were out of stock, out of print. While doing with his surreal poetry, one needs to peruse the works of the famous surrealists.

The Transfiguring Places by Mehrotra as a collection does not show any change in his style as he has been surreal poems and is a surrealist. In his poetry there is nothing as profound and sombre, but common and most hackneyed things are said and those too in a modern usage of expression devoid of any rasa or dhavani syndrome. Only dull and dry facts abound in with full monotony of their own as if we were in a bazaar buying or bargaining things.

There was a time when one wished to submit a research proposal on the poetry of Kolatkar long back in the nineties, but  the head of the department mumbled in approving it.

Jejuri as a poetry-work is just like the visit to the Sagar Islands during Makar Sankranti sometime in wintry mid January, the ramshackle buses generally full of old and weak people, but also with children and women going on a pilgrimage. The scene is just like that the pilgrims not all with the same piety and righteousness, virtue and purity though incorporating human beings, some serious by nature, some light will accompany to unto the end joking, chatting, laughing, regaling and sharing with, singing and dancing. but Kolatkar smitten with crisis in faith and doubt raking him too is going to, but the Divine visions are not with to endow him otherwise.

Kala Ghoda, what is it in Kolatkar's Kala Ghoda? Is it the horse of Kolatkar or of King Edward VII on horse-back? An equestrian emblem, it is; an art-piece. But those who are not of Bombay may not what he is frequenting? Kala Ghoda area, radius is the periphery of his poetry where rambled he as an art student; as a struggling artist talking, reading and passing time.

Sarpa Satra is really a good work improvising an ancient tale in a modernist idiom to teach, instruct a new moral lesson and that too with a new interpretation. The man who does not know the Mahabharatan story will not be able to comprehend the significance of the tale and its poetic relevance. Vengeance and hatred cannot be answered, reciprocated  with the same.

Even when contacted Dilip Chitre too failed in sending the Xerox copies of his poetry works. He just asked to go by the anthologies of poems published.

Dilip Chitre translates Tukaram just as a devotee-disciple of his with the saint on his lips and his heart and he doing the japa, recitation of his name. Tuka's poetry is folklorish, bhakti fold devotional poetry of the saints and fakirs of India coming down to us since times immemorial. Thus Says Tuka not, but the bhakta-shisya of Tuka, Dilip Chitre.

Pebbles on the Shore which appeared in 1981 from Writers Workshop, Calcutta is one like the many poetry-volumes of R.R.Menon who was born in 1927 in Kerala, but after graduating in chemistry and metallurgical engineering joined the Indian Administrative Service to work in various capacities. The last of his appointments was at Ranchi in the then Bihar state to be back to Bangalore to settle down. As a poet, he is private and personal as the modern verse-writers take to similar is the is the poetic flair of the poet. With the pebble count and the receding waters, the poet starts the poem in a reflective way, addressing to somebody close to him. The second poem titled On Memories too is a poem of some emotional base where the poet recollects and reminisces. The poem, My Country, My Culture is a physical penetration of India aligned with geographical variations and cultural synthesis. Tell Me is nostalgically very beautiful where the poet also says about his small swinging sister.

R.R.Menon who authored Ode to Parted Love And Other Poems, Dasavatara and Other Poems, Seventy Seven, Straws in the Wind, Shadows in the Sun, Grass in the Garden, Heart on a Shoe-String, Pebbles on the Shore, Poems 1985, Sounds of Silence and others is a poet who serves as a link between the older and the new generation of poets. Basically an engineering department student, his is a language orientation tending to science and technology and the respective terminology instead of being a writer of verses. Menon who hailed from Kerala is a poet of the modern age writing about urban and city spaces.

We should fly out, you and I,

bidding the century good-bye

to reach realms blossomed in a dream

computers construct in record time.

--- R.R.Menon in the poem Flight of the Century

(Sounds of Silence, An ICASEL Publication, Mysore, 1993, p.58)

Sounds of Silence is the first poem with which the collection begins with, a poem of some thud and verve to be noticed. In the sounds of silence, the poet hears the sound of life and living.

I had seen him in tattered clothes,

the only ones he had perhaps. His walking stick

was a crutch on which his half-leg hung.

----Rugged Faith (Ibid, p.35)

How does recognition come from? How to search for probable topics? How to go for a talent search? All these are very difficult to say about. We started working on O.P.Bhatnagar as because there were a few lines in Iyengar and Naik’s books. So was the case with I.K.Sharma who grew up at snail’s pace. We hesitated in including Hazara Singh, but considered him. Kulwant Singh Gill, Charu Sheel Singh, R.K.Singh. P.C.Katoch, D.H.Kabadi and P.K.Majumder’s books appeared from P.Lal’s Writers Workshop, Calcutta. Even M.K.Naik has a few lines about the flickers of D.H.Kabadi. Romen Basu though the critics have not so much, but is a poet of worth and excellence. Krishna Srinivas the chief editor of the international poetry journal named Poet is a Padma Sri recipient, but his poems do not figure in so abundantly or did the critics take a note of, may be it that the is more of a promoter than a creative poet and his trend is basically, spiritual, theological, metaphysical, cosmic and transcendental. Srinivas’ books have appeared from his own houses. It is a specialty of Indian English poetry that it is a study in self-publications. Baldev Mirza’ books have appeared from his own house.

There are many topics on which one can finish one’s Ph.D. if to search the un-searched or to choose from the marginalized poets. T.V.Reddy, Hazara Singh, Kulwant Singh Gill, Maha Nanda Sharma, Simanchal Patnaik, D.H.Kabadi, K.V.Venkataramana, P.K.Joy, O.P.Bhatnagar, I.K.Sharma, K.R.Srinivasa Iyengar As A Poet, The Light Verses of M.K.Naik: A Study, The Surveyors of Indian English Literature: A Study In Criticism, The Critics of Savitri: Indian And Foreigner, Indian English Poetry Criticism A Study In Reviews And Generalizations, Indian English poetry: A Study In Self-published Minor Poets And Poetesses, The Early Poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra: A Critical Study, The Latter-day Verses of Jayanta Mahapatra: A Critical Analysis, Jayanta Mahapatra As A Poet From Orissa: A Study In Oriya Connections, The Prose-writings, Essays, Letters, Views And Reviews of Jayanta Mahapatra: A Critical Study, Nissim Ezekiel As An Alien Insider: How Indian Is Indian English Poetry?, Shiv K.Kumar as A Poet: A Study In Sexual Overtones And Undertones, Purshottam Lal As A Faded Romantic: As An Evolving Poet. As Purshotam Lal was director of Writers Workshop, so it was natural for him to find the press. R.Parthasarathy: A Poet of Tamil Ethnicity And Connections. R.Parthasarathy issues and re-issues his poetry. Arun Kolatkar As A Marathi Poet: A Failed Artist As An Indian English Poet, What Is It In Arvind Krishna Mehrotra? : An Evaluation of His Poetry. If you want to work on marginalized poets, you may on The Three-liner Verses of Dwarakanath H.Kabadi: A Stylistic Interpretation. The Poetic World of D.H.Kabadi: An Interpretation too can be explored. A few M.Phil. dissertations have been done from CIEFL, Hyderabad; monographs on his poetry have appeared. The Poetic World of Simanchal Patnaik: A Study of His Verses opens a wide world of occasional verses. Hazara Singh As A Poet of Human Values: A Study of His Poetry can definitely be taken up with his writings reminiscent of the freedom movement and the history of Sikhism. One may select the writings of Stephen Gill for his research, but of late he has turned into a promoter of his poetry and a propagandist. Poetry As Peace Studies And The Poet A Peacenik: A Study of Stephen Gill can also be the topic of our study.

Sonnets & Other Poems which appeared in 1989 is a venturesome poetic attempt of Simanchal Patnaik who hails from Berhampur, Orissa, India. My Imperfect Birth is the first poem with which the book starts with followed by Waiting List, Welcome Friends To India On The Eve of 9th World Congress of Poets, Stones And Cricketers, Prepare For 21st Century, Mayor of A City, A City Through Eagle's Eyes, Almanac of Love, Arundhati Star, I'm A Fool, Law of Love, Chatterbox, Dream For Me, Lovely Lotus, Kite-Flying, Love Letter, 1000 War-Planes To Recapture Beauty, My Sophisticated Swan, Midnight, A Man of 75 Kgs 5 Kgs of Cremains After Death, Spiritual Strength, Temple of Art, Onlooker, Creator's Creations Are Multitudinous And Mysterious, Crass Materialist, Nualakebara of Lord Jagannath of Puri, Lord Krishna, Death Is The Only Reliable Spaceship, If God Becomes Enemy of Agnostic Man, Your Kin Has Gone To God's Dustbin, Electric Crematoriums, Death Is Immortal, Death's Tolling Bell, etc. are the witty and occasional verses of the poet under our perusal incorporated in this work of poesy.

O Death! I’m Prepared To Go With You is just like a rhyme written by Simanchal, a master rhymer who fails to rise above this, instead of some specimens, which have come down to us from his poetic pen:

O Death! I’m prepared to go with you,

I’ve no liking for this good-for-nothing Earth,

I’ll be saved if I’m taken sans queue,

I’ll be happy to face you, O Dear Death,

This Earth is not meant for living,

This Earth is meant for dying,

This earth is not meant for enjoying,

This Earth is meant for suffering,

This Earth is not meant for eating,

This Earth is meant for fasting,

This Earth is not meant for sane,

This Earth is not meant for insane.

The sooner I quit this Earth as per comeuppance

The better will be for me sans repentance.

(Queen of English Poetry, Sarala Publications, Berhampur, Ganjam, Orissa, 1999, p.95)

I’m A Hopeless Creature too is a poem of the same sort:

I’m a hopeless creature

With hopeless record,

With hopeless wife,

With hopeless children,

With hopeless house,

With hopeless food,

With hopeless environment,

With hopeless neighbours,

With hopeless State,

With hopeless system,

With hopeless earnings,

With hopeless winter,

With hopeless summer,

With hopeless rain,

With hopeless earthquakes,

With hopeless Earth,

With hopeless peace.

(Ibid, p.88)

Queen of English Poetry by Simanchal Panaik is one such book which ranks with Gems of English Poetry and Poetry of Himalayan Wisdom. There is nothing as that has changed over the years as the man may, but his poetry remains the same. Queen of English Poetry, published in 1999, is an addition to the corpus of Indian poetry in English written by the Indians. Prayer is the first poem to begin with followed by Mini Icon of Lord Jagannath at my House, Philosophy of Fatalism, Ideal Friendship of Lord Krishna, Crown Prince Rama's Marriage With Princess Sita, My Philosophy of Life, Flowers Have no religion, Himalayas And Mount Kailas, Universe Is An Image of Imperfection (Villanelle), O god! I'm A Pilgrim At The Gates of Your Tower, Sons And daughters of The Soil, World Peace For Survival of Man, Princess Diana's Last Journey, etc. Simanchal as a poet is one of wit and its application, knowledge and wisdom. It will be easy to collect, gather materials on Simanchal Patnaik, but to get his books will be a problem as these do not sell in markets.

When we talked of researches long back on Hazara Singh’s poetry, some asked to note it with dissent. But what startles us is this that his poem, The Person I Am Looking For is included in Maharashtra Higher Secondary English syllabus. Kulwant Singh Gill As A Poet of Symbolical Depth And Narrative Skill: A Study can also be a good topic of study. There was a time when we used to talk of researches on his poetry, but there was none to buy the theory. Kedar Nath Sharma’s Poetry: A Medley of All can be inclusive of his metaphysical, witty, ironical, satiric, worldly and unworldly poems. The books of Kedar Nath Sharma have appeared from Minerva Press, Allied Publishers. Charu Sheel Singh’s Poetry: A Study In Transcendental Meditation And Cosmic Consciousness as a topic too can be engaging.

Romen Basu As A Modern Poet: A Study of Poetry can also be selected. Someone may definitely ask why to finish the dissertation on Basu, but one should keep in mind that he is a published novelist and his poetry works have appeared from standard press. A few have done their theses on the fictional stuff and narrative structures.

The Epical Poems of Maha Nanda Sharma: A Critical Study too may be the subject of our perusal. A few scholars have submitted their doctoral dissertations on Maha Nanda Sharma. Actually, he selects the Mahabharatan characters to give an epical design and length to his poems

Sitayana by K.R.Srinivasa Iyengar presents him as a Ramayana scholar who just not follows Valmiki blindly, but tries to portray the origin, birth and development of Sita who is earth-born and not only that side by side he presents the whole saga of trouble and tribulation, the hardship she bears to outshine others as an ideal character. The topic is no doubt mythical and classical which the poet has dealt in a very creative and novel way of deliberation. C.Rajagopalachari's version too is just like that. Indeed, it is a valuable addition to Indian poetry in English.

The books of Pronab Kumar Majumder have appeared from Writers Workshop, Calcutta. If we want, we may pick up for a research study. The Mystic Poetry of Love: A Study In P.K.Majumder’s Rimis can also be chosen. Though a poet of time and time-related consciousness, here he deviates a bit from his usual themes. Rimi poetry series overflows it with the modern poetry of love in a mystic way.

 Modern Indian Poetry In English: The Writers’ Workshop Selection; An Anthology & A Credo compiled by P.Lal published in 1969 is just a poetic venture wherein the novice personae have been introduced, those who have just started to write in or the ones whose debut books are on the anvil. Modern Indian Poetry in English is not a standard anthology of poems, just the loosely--published poets not, practitioners have been dragged along, the nondescript, nowhere writers have been included in by P.Lal, who was actually in search of talent-hunt or self-satisfaction. Lal too is not a big poet himself though he has got awards for his promotion and translation works. Most of the poets were then evolving or were nowhere. Their first poems too were included in as they had the accessibility, not to say of first books. Some of the blogs or blurbs speak of having one or two collections published or are on the anvil. At that time there were no takers of Indian English poetry as it is not even spoken in homes nor has it a feeder dialect of own. So, how could we suppose it to be Indian English! Many of the so-called established poets of today have just substantiated their positions after publishing a few and it was also a fact that they go their critics easily. Indian English poetry got an impetus when the University Grants Commission, New Delhi through its committees recommended it to prescribe in their courses of studies for B.A. and M.A. Even a bit ago there were no takers of Indian English poetry in West Bengal or Calcutta University. Only British, English or American classics used to have its sway over. The other thing is this that it is very poorer, weaker and unstable in theme and versification. Most of the practitioners appear to be copycats doing the catwalks. The volume is puerile, childish and immature. Pritish Nandy had been then almost a young fellow to figure in. Similar had been the case with Meena Alexander who is perhaps in America.

The Oxford Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian  Poets by A.K.Mehrotra, we do not think it that they are the best ones, maybe it in one sense. Was Indian English not modern before Nissim Ezekiel and others? Was Writers' Workshop, Calcutta not a publishing house of self-published authors? Was Seth's book not rejected in the West initially? Since when have they become modern? Indian English poetry was not modern, but has become now-a-days after when the UGC made it compulsory in varsity courses of studies. There was none interested in derivative, parodied and copied Indian English poetry full of the echoes from the English masters. Even the college teachers were not interested in doing Ph.Ds. But when the UGC made it compulsory for career advancement and pressed the Indian materials for approval too, they started doing their dissertations. All the modern poets have evolved in course of time and are in light since their first publications.

Ten Twentieth-century Indian Poets edited by R.Parthasarathy is no doubt a good venture, but it does not mean at all there were no poets. Sometimes we doubt it that the Indian poets venturing in English as modern poets would not have been so had we searched the probable talents destroyed. The other thing is this that they are the birds of a feather flock together. The last not the least R.Parthasarathy has himself written his introduction in it. Somebody else should have it out of courtesy.

Ten Twentieth-century Indian Poets by .Parthasarathy though one of the best collections has much of camaraderie and friendship rather than what is Indian in Indian English poetry, what is modern in modern Indian English poetry and that too if English exists it in India just as a written grammatical language without no feeder dialect of it, where are the poets from?

If one writes in English, it does not mean at all that one will definitely be a great poet. There are so many great poets in Hindi, Bengali, Oriya, Assamese, Punjabi, Urdu, Persian, Arabic, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada and so on whom we know it not. Have we ever tried to introduce them? Who can ever write better criticism than the introduction given by W.B.Yeats to Tagore’s Gitanjali? And if he criticizes the latter works of Tagore, it is but criticism sake, we should not take it into the negative. Tagore can definitely be criticized for loose emotions and sentiments.

What it pains us most is this that many are just trying to make a name and fame in this virgin field of literature. Many of us who start it today start pressuring for calling them the stalwarts of poesy. Many of the research scholars who have just started to read Indian English poetry today think of themselves as the critics of it. Some even try to use their official positions to be poets and poetesses. As Indian English poetry is so is Indian English poetry criticism. The poets too are new and the critics too are so. But take it for granted that the critics of it are but the surveyors of it. The other thing which but disturbs us is this that the editors of literary journals ask the contributors to write articles on the their poetry if they are the poets of some sort which but a British or American editor will not do it perhaps though not sure of one’s own intention and motive. Indian English poetry is a study in ones and twos of the verse-practitioners. Here poems are studied, not the books. Here just anthologies are consulted and picking the poems the critics make a name, but scholarship is not in publicity and awards.