Essay on the Brief History of Indian Poetry in English

Indian poetry in English is said to have begun with Henry Louis Vivian Derozio who was not only a poet but also a teacher of poetry. Curiously enough, Derozio was not an In­dian in the real sense of the term, for his father was a Portuguese and if he had inherited from his Indian mother a love of India and a strong patriotic fervour, he had also inherited from his father’s side an equally strong prejudice against Indian culture and Hinduism.

He was in fact too Western and Christian in outlook to think and write as an Indian and yet his poetry remains one of the earliest manifestations of a phenomenon which was destined to assume a great deal of importance and significance in the Indian literary scene in the years to follow, namely the phenomenon of Indians writing poetry in English.

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As it happened with Derozio, this poetry turned out to be in the hands of most poets of the last century an Indian extension of the poetry of the English Romantics and Victorians. It might however, be too sweeping a generalization to say that Indian poetry in English of the last century was imitative or derivative or that it was more echo than voice.

What really happened was that the creative impulses of the English-educated Indians, stirred as they were by the poetry to which they were exposed drew their sustenance and momentum from the same tradition and they tried to create a new poetry out of that experience and inspiration. In other words, they continued that tradition on the Indian soil even as many British and American poets did on their respective soils.

The charge of imitation or derivativeness will be valid only if the Indian poets writing in the Indian languages had tried to follow the British forms, models and traditions and not when the poets were writing in English. The only argument against these poets can be that being Indian they should have written not in English but in one of their own native languages.

But even this argument turns out to be spe­cious when one remembers that the choice of the medium is not something that is dictated by considerations of patriotism or nationalistic or racial ethics but by an inner compulsion, the same compulsion which made Joseph Conrad, a Pole by birth, to write in English, a Zubin Mehta turn a virtuoso in Western music rather than in Indian Music and an R.K. Narayan become a writer in English and only in English.

The most important fact to be reckoned with is that the Indian creative genius has blos­somed in the English language with a success which cannot be questioned or challenged and India, like other erstwhile British colonies such as Africa or the Caribbean has produced poets, novelists, playwrights, columnists, masters of the epistolary art, political pamphleteers and orators who, while at times have been the envy of their British and American counterparts, have not at all been inferior to them either in their mastery of the English language or the literary form. There is in fact sufficient justification for the claim that the centre of gravity for English literature is no longer England and that it has shifted to other countries like Africa and India.

Critics like V.K. Gokak have discussed the question whether early Indo-Anglian poetry is nothing more than a wagon hitched to the engines of English poetry but have ultimately discarded such a view and preferred to believe that the Romantic, Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite movements made their impact always belatedly on the early poets and that no one-to-one correspon­dence can be established between the various stages of develop­ment shown in the Indian-English poetry of nineteenth century and the different stages of those movements in England.

As Gokak righty observes, one has to recognize the important fact of literary history that these movements had made no less an impact on the poetry of America, Australia and Canada. It would perhaps be even more correct to say that the literatures of these countries were not altogether indigenous growths, but what grew out of the English or European literary tradition which the English and French-speaking immigrants had carried with them as part of their cultural inheritance.

In fact, the view that the new literatures begin in imitation, develop into assertive nation­alism and mature into an independent national tradition has called for considerable correction even in the case of Australia and Canada. For example A.D. Hope has claimed that the early stage is of isolation from the parent stock and that it is only in the hands of writers of greater ability who appeared in later stages of maturity that the national literature is re-integrated with the parent tradition.

Hope sees these so called national literary traditions as only regional varieties of the European tradition of which English literature itself is part. It seems, there­fore, more sensible to leave most of these generalizations alone and take a more common sense view of these literary phenomena which have operated in the Commonwealth countries.

Whether it is Australia and Canada where the immigrants had brought with them their English and European and cultural, literary heritage or India where the English-educated creative writers had become heirs to the same English and European tradition through their exposure to those literatures, it is futile to think of their literature in terms of imitation or derivativeness.

Rather, one can always look for influences, direct, subtle and uncon­scious, echoes, resonances and reverberations from the great English poets as always one does in the case of the native British poets themselves. Discovery of influences and echoes need not again lead to theories of imitation or derivation. When one speaks of Milton as ‘the poetical son of Spenser’ or discovers the deep and pervasive influence of both Spenser and Milton on Keats does one question the excellence of their individual talents?

It is in this spirit that an approach has to be made to the study of these poets provided, however, due attention is paid to the various socio-cultural factors which have played a vital role in shaping the sensibilities of the writers in these countries. As far as India is concerned, the entire phenomenon has to be related to the great Renaissance which came in the nineteenth century in the wake of the Western impact.

One of the greatest consequences of the Western impact on India was an awakening of national consciousness, a rediscovery of her cultural heritage. Neither the advent of Christian churches all over the country and large conversions to the new religion nor the introduction of English education which brought with it new socio-political doctrines as well as a rationalistic view of life’ had in any way resulted in the destruction or even disruption of Indian culture. Contrary to biased Western thinking, ancient Indian culture was not the culture of blind faith or superstition but a composite one which, though complex and heterogeneous, had in it strong scientific, technological and rationalistic components, along with intellectual, aesthetic and spiritual components.

All that the country needed was an awakening to the realities of the country’s cultural past. This awakening was brought about, paradoxically through the introduction of English education which made it possible for great minds like Raja Rammohan Roy and Swami Vivekananda to re-examine the country’s cultural and spiritual values and articulate them in English.

They found in the En­glish language an excellent medium of rediscovery and creative statement. This turned out to be the experience of many a great mind of the age which therefore produced a good number of eminent orators, poets, novelists and pamphleteers like Surendranath Bannerjee, Gopalakrishna Gokhale, Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, Balgangadhar Tilak, Aurobindo, Srinivasa Sastri, Toru Dutt, Bankim Chandra, Romesh Chunder Dutt and Rabindranath Tagore.

While most of them were great patriots stirred by a nationalistic fervour and reformistic zeal, they drew the sustenance for their outpourings in prose, verse or the spoken word as much from their passionate love of the English expression as from larger motivations related to the freedom movement and social regeneration. They loved to speak and write in English and the desire to write creatively in English came to them in the most natural way, which was matched by an astonishing ability and skilled use of the language.

What was most important and significant, they remained perfectly Indian in thought, feeling, emotion and sentiment even when they spoke or wrote in English. In other words, English was their chosen medium of expression but the operative sensibility was always Indian. These are the basic facts to be recognized in any study or assessment of the early writers and the choice of themes or forms in their writings are only secondary in the order of importance. The latter does, however, deserve a brief consider­ation in the context of the present discussion for reasons of further clarification and better understanding.

The need for a short discussion of the themes of the early Indian English poets arises from the fact that many of the hasty judgements and easy generalizations made in respect of these poets have been based on the themes on which they wrote. The fact that their poetry found its themes in the Indian landscape, in the Indian rural scene and in Indian history, mythology or folklore has been held against them, the argument being that they had failed to come to terms with the Indian social realities and to show an awareness of the events and changes that were taking place around them including the First World War and its aftermath.

Again the same critics complain that the Indian muse fell willy-nilly into the hands of those who were either involved in the freedom struggle or were in the forefront of religious revivalism. While it is not difficult to see the contradiction in these views, it must be remembered that poets like Sri Aurobindo, Rabindranath Tagore and Sarojini Naidu wrote with an intense awareness of not only the country’s socio-political needs but also its spiritual needs.

The criticism that the early Indian poets had no dark regions to explore, no crises spiritual or moral to resolve, no traumatic wreckages to solve can hardly be true of Aurobindo or Tagore or Swami Vivekananda, though Vivekananda’s moral and spiritual concerns have found their fullest expression in his letters and speeches rather than in his poetry which was not very prolific or voluminous. Neither Aurobindo nor Tagore had any need to follow Gerard Manley Hopkins or Thomas Hardy for both of them had far richer and a more ancient cultural and spiritual heritage to fall back upon and deeper springs of mystical experience and more radiant spiritual illumination to turn to for their inspiration and ideas than Hopkins or Hardy.

It must be remembered that Aurobindo’s best works including Savitri and the plays were by no means romantic escapes into mythological or legendary pasts but sublime re-interpretations which have a positive and defini­tive message for an age which has been threatening to degen­erate into a spiritual wasteland.

Again, Aurobindo even while he wrote with India in his very bones, was also writing from the experience of a long and intense exposure to the English and European classics. Young Aurobindo who practically grew up in England and had his education in Cambridge was steeped in those classics and his early poetry shows the unmistakable influence of Spenser, Milton and the Romantics on the one hand and that of Dante and the Greek and Latin masters on the other.

The early poems exemplify his sensuous and romantic attitude towards life and Song to Myrtalla is typical of a young muse which had blossomed under the influence of Milton and the Romantics. But a poem like Revelation testifies to the fact that even the early Aurobindo was not always sensuous and romantic and that the sparks of divinity and spirituality inherent in the young poet had asserted fairly early in life, that is during the Cambridge period. The poem suggests the sudden leaping up of the consciousness of divinity in the poet:

Someone leaping from the rocks

Past me ran with wind-blown locks

Like a startled bright surmise

Visible to mortal eyes.

We have again poems like The Divine Hearing and Krishna which are in the tradition of the Indian devotional and mystical poetry with its deep pre-occupation with the struggle of the human soul or Jivathma to become one with the Divine or Paramathma, invite a comparison with the poetry of Edward Thompson and Hopkins. Lines such as the ones quoted below certainly have a Hopkinsian quality.

At last I find a meaning of souls’ birth

Into this universe terrible and sweet

………………………

I have seen the beauty of immortal eyes,

And heard the passion of the Lovers’ flute,

And known a deathless ecstasy’s surprise

And sorrow in my heart for ever mute.

A careful study of the early poems of Aurobindo reveals the fact that the seeds of spirituality and mysticism were already in him when he was in England, long before the transformation that is said to have taken place during his Baroda period when he suddenly became aware of his Indian heritage. Here was a poet who was not imitating his English or European masters but was unconsciously rising to the heights to which they had risen and then surpassing them by drawing heavily on his own inner resources which were the gifts of a rich spiritual inheritance.

The shorter poems of Aurobindo do reveal a great poet in the making, a poet who, beginning as an inheritor of whatever was great and beautiful in the English and European poetical tradi­tions, was later destined to become an heir to the best legacies of Indian spirituality and mysticism.

There is in fact in the poetry of Sri Aurobindo a happy synthesis of not only the West and the East, the European and the Indian, the Romantic and the classical but also of philoso­phy and poetry, of spirituality and sensuousness. His poetry is too complex to admit of easy analysis and too original and individual to fit into slots and groupings.

It stands apart and on its own and it has to be studied against the background of his cultural and literary inheritance on the one hand and his own intellectual growth and spiritual maturity on the other. More importantly, his poems have to be studied not as individual poems alone but as parts Of a larger whole which include his magnum opus, Savitri as well as his Life Divine and Future Poetry, for all his works put together are an expression of a large single vision, the vision of a future world where the evolutionary pro­cess would have reached its culmination in the enactment of Life Divine and in the birth of a new poetry, the poetry of the Over-mind.

The poet who comes closest to Sri Aurobindo in the kind of synthesis referred to above is Rabindranath Tagore who is again one of the finest flowers of the Indian Renaissance. Though Tagore belongs, like Sri Aurobindo, more to the twentieth century than to the nineteenth, he represents the new tradition which emerged on the Indian cultural and literary scenes at the turn of the century as a consequence of the impact of the West and the introduction of English education in the country.

Like the leading spirits of the English Renaissance in the sixteenth century who brought to bear on the literary activities of Elizabeth’s England both the inspiration and scholarship of the Greek and Latin classics thereby enriching and giving a new direction to the poetry, drama and prose writings of the age, writers like Aurobindo, Tagore, Toru Dutt, Bankim Chandra and Romesh Chunder Dutt engaged themselves in a creative activity which brought into play the best in the East and the West.

These writers who had become heirs to two traditions, had absorbed the cultures and literatures of both India and England and developed minds and sensibilities which were products of a happy fusion of ideas, values and world views drawn from both the inherited and the received cultures. They wrote with the joy of discovery, of their own cultural and liter­ary heritage and of a new medium.

The emergence of the novel in India, for instance, both in English and the Indian languages at the turn of the century was one of the consequences of the fusion of cultures and literary traditions as well as some signifi­cant socio-cultural transformations which took place in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and not the product of imi­tative or derivative processes or of a simple transference as is commonly believed.

Though Tagore wrote primarily in Bengali he had a mas­tery of English too which impelled him to translate his writings into English and also write creatively in English. In him were combined the poet, dramatist, a master of the art of the theatre, orator, singer and lyricist par excellence. More than everything else, he was a patriot, philosopher, mystic and visionary and unlike Aurobindo he was a man of the world who enjoyed life and all its gifts till the last, for he had said,

This life is sweet I do not wish to die

I wish to live the ever-living life of man.

His Gitanjali which won for him the Nobel Prize is a col­lection of poems, rather a garland of devotional songs con­ceived and composed in the style of the songs which belong to the Indian bhakti tradition. Like the great Vaishnava and Saiva mystics such as Jayadeva, Purandaradasa, Meera, Andal and Manickavachakar who were gifted singers intoxicated with the love of the Divine, Tagore has poured out in these verses his devotion to the Almighty, his ecstatic love of the creator and his mystical experience of the divine, his communion with God.

It is the poetry of pure faith and love, of belief and conviction which tells us that the human body is the temple of the soul and that the human soul is the temple of God. The songs, bringing home to us a sense of the infinite and the eternal and a realization of the illusory nature of the phenomenal world which is but a maya , part of the Lords’ endless lila, assert and re-assert time and again the immortality of the soul. Most of the thoughts and ideas enshrined in these songs carry with them the essence of the Indian bhakti tradition with their repeated references to the Indian concept of man-god relationship conceived in terms of Jivatma and Paramatma and the vedantic concept of the im­minent god.

What is most significant about the Gitanjali songs is that while they are basically rooted in the Indian bhakti tradition they show strong affinities to the mysticism of William Blake, to the myth-making poetry of Shelley, to the Nature poetry of Wordsworth and again to the religious experience recorded in the poetry of Hopkins and Whitman.

The agony and the ecstasy of the poet’s mystical experience, his longings and yearnings find many parallels in the religious poetry of the West including that of Donne. Again, while the images and concepts as well as the touches of nature description are highly reminiscent of Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley, the songs are very Indian in spirit.

They are prayer songs, incantations which have a Vedic quality. In the words of K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar they are “half a prayer from below and half a whisper from above; the prayer evoking the response, or the whisper provoking the prayer, and always prayer and whisper chiming into song”. The singer looks upon himself as a lifeless flute “which comes to life when the Lord of Brindavan plays upon it – forever piping songs, forever new”.

This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.

In the words of Srinivasa Iyengar again “the- human soul is not only God’s temple, it is also Krishna’s flute. Life’s vicissitudes are but new melodies played by the Lord”. (Indian Writing in English, pp. 110-111). While Gitanjali is full of songs which record the soul’s long journey towards God-realisation leading to self- realisation and articulate the feelings of joy and sorrow, hope and despair, the pleasure and pain experienced by the speaker, it has also songs of another sort. There are songs which pray for the country’s redemption and the general welfare of the world as for instance in the song which begins “Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high.”

There are also songs which raise their voice against blind worship, idolatry and cowardly escapes from one’s duties and responsibilities as in the song “Leave this chanting and singing and see thy god is not before thee”.

It is very characteristic of these nineteenth century Renaissance men – Vivekananda, Aurobindo and Tagore that with all their devotional fervour, religious faith and spirituality they had unmistakable strains of rationalistic thinking and humanism which made them think in terms of the regeneration of mankind through social revolution, through evolution into higher states of being.

Tagore has left behind him many other treasures of pure poetry besides Gitanjali. The Gardener is again a collection of love songs which are at once sensual and mystical, romantic and philosophical. The following song is typical of the treatment of love in the collection.

I swept aside the veil from my face, I tore the ruby chain from my neck and flung it in his path. I know well he did not pick up my chain; I know it is crushed under his wheels leaving a red stain upon the dust, and no one knows what my gift was nor to whom. But the young prince did pass by our door, and I flung the jewel from my breast before his path.

The Gardener takes us into a delightful new world of beauty and romance, almost a garden of Eden where life seems to be in a primordial state of purity and innocence and yet not without its pains and sorrows, despairs and consolations. Also, we have another collection of poems in The Crescent Moon which are poems on the childhood state. They take us into the world of innocence, where everything is perceived with a childlike sense of wonder and capacity for unsullied joy.

Like Blake, Wordsworth and Walter de la Mare, Tagore found in children a mystical quality, closeness to the divine, the immortal and the essence of true wisdom and humanity. It is typical of Tagore the mystic that he chose to translate the poems of Kabir who was one of the most interesting personalities in the history of Indian mysticism. Tagore’s translations of Kabir’s poems, while they introduce the works of a great Indian mystic of the fifteenth century, bear ample testimony to the mystical genius of Tagore himself and his remarkable ability to recapture in the English language both the substance and the spirit of the Hindi texts of Kabir which had been translated into Bengali by Kshiti Mohan Sen. Reference must be made too to the fact that Tagore’s plays which, though they were excellent theatre and great stage successes, must be considered as dra­matic poems.

The poetry of plays like The Cycle of Spiring and Chitra derive as much from the tender feelings and emotions inspired by youth and beauty, the colours and sounds of the spring season and the effervescence of youthful love as from the richness of the descriptions themselves loaded with a wealth of images and metaphors. Like the Gitanjali and The Gardener verses, most of his plays strike us as excellent prose poems which often breathe an air of optimism.

The verses on the spring quoted below have certainly a Shelleyan touch but they are basically songs rooted in the Bengali ritualistic tradition:

Victory to life, to joy, to love,

To eternal light

The night shall wane, the darkness shall vanish,

Have faith, brave heart.

……………….

April is awake

Life’s shoreless sea is heaving in the sun before you

All the losses are lost, and death is drowned in its waves.

Tagore was a complex genius, story-teller, playwright, actor, mystic, painter, prophet and teacher all in one but first and last he was a poet.

If Aurobindo and Tagore typified the sublimest manifestations of the great Indian Renaissance, Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu were poets whose poetical geniuses blossomed, nurtured and watered by the spirit of the same Renaissance. Neither of them can be rated poets as great as Aurobindo or Tagore but both of them have left behind them poetry which deserves our attention and admiration, for it is certainly a poetry that will endure. In fact, Toru Dutt is often looked upon as a poet of ‘unfulfilled renown’, one who would have risen to heights of greatness had she lived longer. As with Keals and Emile Bronte it is difficult to guess what her achievements might have been if she had not died so young but whatever she achieved in her all too short span of life, which ended when she was just twenty one, still in “earliest womanhood”, was certainly great enough.

Toru Dutt, the daughter of Govin Chunder Dutt, came of a family of distinguished intellectuals and poets. Born at the time of Macaulay’s Minute and William Bentinck’s channelling of all educational funds in 1835 towards the use of English education alone, Toru was among those who developed very early in life a taste and love for the English language, finding in it an excellent medium of creative self-expression.

She had the advantage of learning English in the hands of competent tutors employed to teach her and her brother Abju and sister Aru at home. Toru and Aru learnt to play the piano and to sing under an English teacher Mrs. Sinas. While the father and daughter had been converted to Christianity, the mother still remained a pious Hindu and it was under the mother’s influ­ence Toru developed an interest in and respect for most of Indian puranic tales and legends. She had the unique advan­tage of being exposed to two cultures at once, European and Christian culture and Indian and Hindu culture.

The double exposure had brought about only a synthesis of cultures and not any conflict or tension. Added to these influences she had enough and more to draw upon from the literary tradition in the family, for her father Govin and her uncle’s Hur Chunder Dutt and Girish Chunder Dutt, her cousin Omesh Chunder Dutt were all poets and writers, Romesh Chunder Dutt being the most distinguished and famous. The Dutts had all contributed poems to the famous Dutt Family Album which had served ‘not only as a memorial of a gifted family, but as a testimony to the character and influence of these English teachers who were the first to encourage the higher learning of English in the city of Calcutta.

Nineteenth century being the most fertile century for the growth of intellectual reform and religious reorganization, it witnessed at once the Indian involvement in English studies, creative activity in English and the growth of Western interest in oriental learning. Eminent intellectuals like Sir William Jones, Sir Edwin Arnold and Sir William Hunter were great Orient lists who created profound interest in India in their own country.

It was certainly an age of great intellectual ferment and creative climate and it was in such a period of the country’s history that the genius of Toru Dutt blossomed. Added to this was the fact that Toru had the advantage of spending long periods in France and England where she had absorbed not only the literature and culture of these countries but also the loveliness and beauty of their landscapes in various seasons. But the most significant fact was that Toru and Aru adored France and felt inspired by that country which almost claimed Toru as a Frenchwoman and yet the sisters had never lost their interest in India. They loved the land of their birth more than anything else and they re­mained very Indian in consciousness and sensibility.

It is against this background that Toru’s poetry has to be studied and understood. Her poetry seems to have grown out of a clear confluence of cultures on the one side and of her own childhood experiences in the country of her birth and abroad on the other. In the words of Padmini Sen Gupta her “idyllic childhood in the land of her birth was to mature abroad”. (Toru Dutt, Makers of Indian Series, Sahitya Akademi, 25). Toru’s love for the Indian landscape, especially her nostalgic memories of the garden house in Baugmaree is best seen in some of her ballads as in the one which is quoted by Padmini Sen Gupta.

What glorious trees! The sombre saul

On which the eye delights to rest,

……………..
………………

All these, and thousands, thousands more

With helmet red, or golden crown

Of green tiara, rose before

The youth in evening’s shadow brown.

Only someone who had watched the beautiful trees of India for hours and loved them could have written so accurately and feelingly about them. Toru’s most famous poems, “Our Casuarina Tree” and the sonnet on ‘Baugmaree’ bear eloquent testimony, in verse, to the poet’s idyllic childhood and her mystic affinity with trees. Many of the poems included in Ballads and Legends of Hindustan and in A Sheaf Gleaned in French Field are personal and autobiographical.

Though the poetry is the reality, the poet too as K.R.S Iyengar has observed “compels attention” (Indian Writing in En­glish, p.55). Even her translations from French illustrate that ‘suffering and the dark image of an incomprehensible fatality were Toru’s shadow companions’. While the most “tremblingly articulate” poem “My Vocation” was a translation, the sonnet entitled ‘A Mon Pere’ which she added at the end of the sheaf was not a translation but an original composition which has been praised by critics as one of her best poems.

Both ‘A Mon Pere’ and her equally famous poem ‘The Tree of Life’ reflect an important phase in Toru’s life when under the cloud of grief left by Aru’s death, Toru was drawn closer to her father Govin who initiated her into Sanskrit stud­ies. Learning the Sanskrit language, Toru discovered through that language the treasures of classical Indian literature, the “deep springs of India’s racial memory”.

The secret longings of her spirit found in The Ramayana, The Mahabharata and the Vishnu Purana their gratification and fulfilment and as a poet she was now on “hospitable soil” where she could write with a deeper understanding and awareness of her own cultural heri­tage, of her own roots and racial memory which did not in any way conflict with her Christian commitment and European experience. Far from it, they made for a happy synthesis as they did in the case of Aurobindo and Tagore.

Her initiation into Sanskrit studies, while it provided her all the inspiration and material for her Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan gave her also the psychic and spiritual balance she needed and helped her grow and mature both as a woman and as a poet.

Again as achievements in English verse these legends and tales deserve the warmest appreciation from many points of view. First of all, she found in these stories the right material for the expression of her own maturing poetic powers. Secondly, she successfully overcame the problems that stories of this kind with a strong supernatural element pose to the modern reader of English verse. Apart from using the art of securing for these stories that willing suspension of disbelief which constitutes true poetic faith, she transforms the mythological figures – gods, demons, and heroes – into symbols of various aspects of life and human nature. Yama in Savitri, for instance, is pictured not merely as the dark God of Death but also as the upholder of dharma.

She makes us begin to see Death itself not as a blind destructive force but as part of a vaster scheme, of some eternal laws or dharma which sustain the world. As K.R.S. Iyengar has pointed out, she has accomplished even the difficult task of giving the mystic action of the story of Prahlada in the Bhagavata “a local habi­tation and a name in English verse” and she has accomplished this not with sophistication but with “the childhood faith of the pure eternal feminine” (Indian Writing in English, p.68).

Even in the presentation of the colloquy between Sita and Lakshman, in the poem “Lakshman” and in her poem “Sita” with its rich nature descriptions and in the portrayal of Sita in her sorrow in Valmiki’s hermitage, we can see her clear understanding of the original. This poem has been praised as an ‘almost perfect poem’ and as a tribute to Toru’s mother’s genius for story-telling. The last two lines of the poem have also been interpreted as a poignant elegy on the early death of her siblings Abju and Aru.

When shall those children by their mother’s side

Gather, as mel as erst at eventide?

Toru Dutt was certainly a meteoric phenomenon on the early Indian English literary scene, brilliant and dazzling, though short-lived. Described as ‘a frail and exotic blossom which bloomed but for a short while and has left a fragrance which will never die’, Toru has certainly left behind her a volume of poems which will continue to interest lovers of poetry every­where even as they won unqualified praise from eminent poets and critics like Edmund Gosse, E.J. Thomas Mile, Clarisse Bader and James Darmesteter.

She has bequeathed to posterity not the poems alone but two novels, Le Journal de Mademoiselle D’ Arvers in French and Bianca or the Young Spanish Maiden in English which is a fragment as also some critical writing. We find in her forty pages of notes which are “so refreshingly frank, naive and critical” very interesting and perceptive comments on such great writers as Victor Hugo, M. Sainte Beuve and the French Romantic poets, though most of her evaluations are orthodox moral evaluations.

The poet who takes an exalted place along with Toru Dutt on the Indian English literary scene of the last century is with­out doubt Sarojini Naidu. She was born in a distinguished Bengali family and her father Dr. Aghorenath Chattopadhyaya was a scientist, and also a linguist and a mystic. Like Toru Dutt, Sarojini was a prodigy whose talents showed up even when she was a child and she started writing English verse showing signs of her later development as a poet of great talent.

In 1896 Sarojini was sent away to England ostensibly for a better education but really to make her forget the young doctor she was in love with, for the doctor was Govindarajulu Naidu, a non-Bengali and a non- Brahmin. But Sarojini was a rebel who defied all social conventions and caste rules and was also too strong-willed a girl to either forget the man who had won her heart or to change her decision.

Her parents had ultimately to arrange for die marriage which took place under the supervision of Sri Keshab Chandre Sen, an ardent Brahmo-Samajist After marriage Sarojini settled down happily in Hyderabad where she was exposed to a confluence of cultures which included the colourful Moghul culture. In the happy home she made, Sarojini proved an ideal mother and an ideal wife. More than everything else, Sarojini’s husband gave his young and loving wife all the freedom she needed to give full expression to her poetical genius which had blossomed during her stay in England particularly under the decisive impact of poets like Edmund Gosse.

At King’s College, London and Girton, Cambridge she came into contact with poets and critics like Arthur Symons, Edmund Gosse and the Rhymer’s Club and it was here that she met Manmohan Ghose. Her association with the fin-de-siecle English romantics helped the full flowering of her own romantic susceptibilities. Her own basic poetic stance was, according to William Walsh, invariably a delicate, almost naive, sense of romantic wonder and innocence, what Arthur Symons called, “a bird-like quality”, “a delicately evasive way of writing”.

Sarojini’s was, according to her own admission, basically of “a very fanciful and dreamy nature” and it was little wonder that she responded most readily to the inspiration of the Romantics. She was essentially a poet of passion and emotion and hence the lyricism of the Edwardians appealed to her most and stirred her poetic impulses.

It was at this crucial stage of her development and growth as a poet that Edmund Gosse advised her to avoid evoking “Anglo-Saxon sentiment in an Anglo-Saxon setting” and to turn to her own motherland for inspiration. Gosse had felt that if she continued to remain West­ern in feeling and imagery she would only be writing in a falsely English vein and that her poetry would reduce itself to deriva­tive mediocrity. Sarojini readily took the advice of Gosse and it was perhaps a pity.

Sarojini had, taken Edmund Gosse’s advice too seriously and took a decision which was to determine the nature and character of her poetic career in the years to follow. First and foremost she returned to Indian themes and by doing so she seemed to have cut herself away from an audience which could have appreciated her better if she had continued to follow her natural inclinations.

As Sankar Mokashi-Punekar points out, by following the deceptive ideal of representing the Indian locale in her poetry and of writing on Indian themes, she lost sight of the fast-changing water course of English poetry. (Critical Essays on Indian Writing in English, ed., M.K. Naik, et. al., Macmillan, 1977 p.73). She began writing for the avant garde audience which seemed to value only her Indianness and she did it even after coming back to India. Uprooted from a climate in which her poetic genius had originally blossomed, Sarojini took to writing on Indian themes and yet she was not writing for Indi­ans. Commenting on this Mokashi-Punekar goes on to say that Sarojini’s literary reputation would have been much safer if we placed her on the literary map of the England of her time, for she had really produced poetry which could compare most favourably with the best poetry of the period.

Again, the success with which she handled “a dactyllic metre so rare in English itself” and rendered it so melodious in Nightfall in the City of Hyderabad certainly places her in the English poetic tradition. It was really unfortunate that Sarojini cut herself off from a world where these talents might have matured and walked into a world where the Indianness of her poetry itself became a professional liability. But it should be said in all fairness that Indianness became in course of time an organic part of her poetry, the informing principle and not a super-added grace as is often suspected.

It should again be remembered that Indianness is only one aspect of Sarojini’s poetry and that there are other aspects which are no less important. The Indianness of her poetry refers mostly to the choice of her themes and titles. It was but natural that as an Indian alive and sensitive to the country’s legendary past as well as to the charms and beauties of its landscape and the colour and variety of its life, she wrote poems which recap­tured the innumerable facts of Indian life and landscape in a manner in which few Indian poets have recaptured them with such authenticity and power in English. Poems like ‘Indian Weavers’ picture an India which is the home of many co-existent cultures, the Hindu, the Christian and the Moghul and her unusual sensitiveness to the charms of Moghul culture, which can be explained with reference to the long years of her life spent in Hyderabad, is borne out in poems like, The Pardha Nashin and The Queen’s Rival while poems like Palanquin Bearers, Bangle Sellers, Flute Player of Brindavan and Song of Radha the Milkmaid take us back to our country’s historical and legendary past.

In fact some of these poems with all their emphasis on local colour and Hyderabad landscape appear to be “non­localised, non-temporal pieces of exotic imagination exactly in the way Kubla Khan’s pleasure-dome does” (Mokashi-Punekar, op-cit, p.74) What is particularly significant about these poems is that they picture an India which is a very inclusive one, an India in which one feels the presence at once of an ancient Hindu culture, a Buddhist culture and a medieval Moghul cul­ture all remaining together and yet apart, retaining their indi­vidualities even in the colonial and post-colonial India.

A close and integrated study of the poems in The Golden Threshold, The Bird of Time and The Broken Wing should convince the reader and the critic alike that no other poet writing in English has projected an image of India which is so suggestive, comprehen­sive and total and one is even inclined to ask if a poet could have written so much and so feelingly about her great country all because someone, say Edmund Gosse, asked her to write.

The other aspects of Sarojini’s poetry which deserve even more serious attention are (a) her passionate love of beauty (b) her love of nature (c) her lyricism (d) her mysticism and philosophy and these are aspects of her poetry which bring her close to the English Romantics, particularly Keats and Wordsworth. She had in fact a Keatsian love of beauty and a Keatsian delight in the senses. She poured out the sensuous raptures experienced by her in verses which were spontaneous and lyrical but she did not consider herself as an artist capable of great craftsmanship as is evident from some of the letters she wrote to Arthur Symons. “I am not a poet really. I have the vision and the desire but not the voice.

If I could write just one poem full of beauty and the spirit of greatness, I shall be exultantly silent for ever; but I sing just as the birds do, and my songs are as ephemeral”. (Quoted by Arthur Symons in his “Introduction” to “The Golden Threshold” pp.9-10). Her songs with their spontaneity and lyricism, with their liquidness and melody certainly had the quality of a bird-song. She was a song bird indeed who poured out her songs in unpremeditated strains.

She sang about Nature and sang on the beauty of a landscape, on the palanquin bearers and the bangle-sellers, on the Indian weavers and Coromandel fishers, on Leili or the night, and again on her own dreams and fantasies. Singing thus on an astonishing variety of subjects ranging from ‘The Indian Gipsy’ and ‘Pardha Nashin’ to ‘The Buddha Seated on a Lotus’, Sarojini was now sensuous, now human and now mystical and she always sang with an Indian woman’s sense of the evanescence of earthly riches and physical beauty.

Her Queen’s Rival is typical of the Indian way of looking at beauty: Beauty tires because it is only earthly and human and not divine. Beauty fades and dies but its permanence is assured, however through progeny. We find in her poems again a sense of the length, the weariness and endlessness of the journey of life, a journey in the dark, the sense of futility and waste that hangs over it, the sense of lone­liness that haunts the human soul – all characteristically Indian.

We hear voices, whispers, murmurs from ‘somewhere’, songs that come floating in the wind like the notes of the flute-player of Brindavan. We hear of them again and again in her poems. Also, as a woman who had tasted the bitter-sweet fruit of love even as a child, as one to whom the vision of love had come so early in life, she had chosen her life’s partner while yet a child and remained firm and steadfast in her fidelity to her first choice. In this and in her having kept her inner life a closed book even when she had been “burnt by the fires of life”, she has proved a truer Indian woman than her latter day successors like Kamala Das. Her poetry betrays no splits in personality, no letting loose of spleen or anger or a sense of frustration or alienation, though she did have her full share of sorrow in life.

Another interesting aspect of Sarojini’s poetry is that even where it offers parallels to and echoes from the great English poets, there is always a transformation of the central thought which makes it very individual and Indian. The poem ‘Coro­mandel Fishers’, for instance, has an unmistakable Shelleyan touch especially in lines such as,

The wind lies asleep in the arms of the dawn like a child that has cried all night.

And it has greater affinities with Masefield’s sea poems and Tennyson’s Ulysses than with anything in Indian literature. And yet the sentiment echoed in the lines quoted below makes it very Indian:

What though we toss at the fall of the sun where the hand of the sea-god drives?

He, who holds the storm by the hair, will hide in his breast our lives:

These lines are very reminiscent of Tennyson’s Ulysses but with a sharp note of contrast. As Prof. M.K. Naik points out in his paper “Echo and Voice in Indian Poetry in English”, ‘The Coromandel Fishers’ expresses a sentiment which is typical of the Indian mind and which presents a significant contrast to the resolve of Tennyson’s Ulysses:

My purpose holds,

To sail beyond sunset, and the baths

of all the Western stars, until I die.

To Ulysses, death is final and irrevocable, to the Coromandel Fishers it is only a return to the breast of the Almighty…” It is in instances of this kind that we find the Indian poet in English vindicating himself or herself of the very facile charge often levelled against them, namely that their poetry is an imitation of English poetry. What seems most important is that one has to make a distinction between blending of traditions and exotic transplants, between ‘echo’ and ‘voice’ and to recognise the fact that even when echoes from English poetry are loud and blatant, one can always hear the authentic voice, the still small voice of the Indian poet at least in the case of Toru Dutt and Sarojini. Close studies of poems like “Coromandel Fishers” and “Indian Weavers” leave us convinced that the real strength of Sarojini’s poetry lies in the Indianness of the poet’s mind and sensibility, an Indianness which tends to transform and even sublimate whatever the poet inherited from elsewhere. In the light of these considerations it is even difficult to believe that Sarojini would not have turned to India for inspiration and material but for the timely advice of Edmund Gosse. The kind of Indianness one finds echoing in lines like

And all our mortal moments are

A session of the infinite

(From To Buddha Seated on a Lotus)

Should always have been there in the poet’s intellectual and spiritual make-up and should have asserted itself sooner or later, for these lines reflect a mind which has inherited a view which is central to the Indian Vedantic philosophy. One is only made to feel that the awakening of her Indian consciousness was bound to have come about on its own as it did in the case of Aurobindo without the intervention of an Edmund Gosse. Finally, it must be said that Sarojini was not a conscious experimenter with the English language or even verse forms. Had she done it, she would have perhaps deserved greater praise. The oft-quoted and most praised lines from the poem ‘Leilie’ is a case in point.

A caste-mark on the azure brow of heaven

The golden moon burns sacred, solemn, bright.

The generous praise lavished by James Cousins and others on these line notwithstanding, one cannot help feeling that the poet could have replaced the word ‘caste-mark’ by an Indian equivalent like ‘kumkum’ or ‘tilak’ thereby bringing the En­glish expression closer to the idiom of the soil. But if she was not a bold experimenter she was not a blind imitator either.

Sarojini Naidu cannot be rated as a great poet in the sense in which one considers Milton, Hopkins, Eliot, Tagore or Aurobindo as great poets, but she had a voice which was au­thentic and as individual as it was Indian and it found its fullest expression in verses whose forte was their lyricism and sponta­neity. She was certainly a very gifted poet and artist in words who has not had many successors.

While Sri Ayrobindo, Toru Dutt, Rabindranath Tagore and Sarojini Naidu were the most important among the poets who emerged on the nineteenth century Indian-English literary scene and continued (with the exception of Toru Dutt) to write in the earlier decades Of the present century, there were a number of other poets who made a significant contribution to the Indian English poetry in the earlier phases of its growth though not all of them merit serious attention except for his­torical reasons.

Among the pioneers Kashiprasad Ghose was probably the first Indian to publish poems in English. The kind of poetry produced by Ghose and some of his followers and successors was by and large imitative and derivative with very little claim either to originality or innovativeness. The Shair and Other Poems, a volume of poems published in 1830, shows the unmistakable influence of Scott and the Romantics and the volume contains a few poems on Indian festivals written after the model of Sir Wiliam Jones’s poems. Poems like “The Moon in September” and “The Boatman’s Song to Ganga” have a few interesting descriptive flashes but they are too conventional and stereo­typed to make for good poetry.

The latter in fact compares very poorly with Sarojini Naidu’s “Coromandel Fishers.” Both Kashiprasad Ghose and Rajnarain Dutt who authored a lengthy poem in heroic couplets under the title “Osmyn, an Arabian Tale” in 1841 were following the literary fashions which had already become obsolete in England and their only merit was that they had studied and mastered the English metrical forms. Michael Madhusudan Dutt was certainly a far more gifted poet. Though born a Hindu he converted to Christianity and married a European lady.

He went to England to qualify for the bar but he failed as a lawyer. Madhusudan Dutt’s fame rests even now on his celebrated Bengali epic Meghnadbandha but his The Cap­tive Ladie made a mark on the Indian English literary scene recalling as it does the narrative poems of the romantics, especially of Coleridge, Byron and Scott.

Madhusudan Dutt brought out another collection of verses entitled Visions of the Past which presents the biblical theme of the Innocence, Temptation and Fall of Man. His descriptions of Satan have a Miltonic touch as in,

“…….a giant tree in mighty war

With storm on whirlwind car and fierce arrays

Blasted and crushed-of all its pride bereft”

and in

A phantom of departed splendour lone”.

Madhusudan did not live long enough for his poetical powers to mature fully but we do not know whether he would have written poetry of a different sort or better quality if he had lived longer.

Reference has already been made to the distinguished Dutt family and the famous The Dutt Family Album. Of this illustrious group Toru was easily the best and her poetry easily outshone that of even her illustrious uncle Romesh Chunder Dutt. Rornesh Chunder Dutt was without doubt a great novelist, historian and literary critic and his English verse renderings of The Ramayana and The Mahabarata and of selections from Rig Veda and again of Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhava included in his Lays of Ancient India (1894) were notable landmarks in the Bengali and Indian English literatures of the nineteenth century.

The tasks taken up by him were Himalayan and his achievement was by no means ordinary. His adoption of the Indian epics was another noticeable achievement. He was highly imaginative, efficient and skilful and his renderings of The Ramayana and The Mahabharata are said to be “clever-voiced” showing him to be a very adroit ver­sifier.

But as a poet he fell far below the mark. In a similar way the poetry of Girish Chunder Dutt and Soshi Chunder Dutt could not reach up to any significant level of achievement though their poetry showed occasional flashes of genuine feeling, au­thenticity and craftmanship as, for instance in Soshi Chunder’s famous lines on the Ganges. The one great merit which calls for recognition in the Dutts was the mastery they had acquired over the English language and the excellent command they had over the English metrical forms.

Another poet who is integral to any discussion on the nineteenth century Indian English literary scene is Swami Vivekananda. Vivekananda was basically a seer patriot and social reformer who rose to the stature of a saint. In fact he was more a humanist than anything else, for he had dedicated himself to the upliftment or mankind by awakening man from the age old slumber of ignorance and sloth, by redeeming him from the darkness of evil and blind beliefs.

At the same time Vivekananda was a scholar and man of letters whose creative genius found its fullest expression in his speeches and writings and in a comparatively moderate form in his po­etry. Though he has been acclaimed as a genuine poet both in English and Bengali he cannot be considered as a poet of stat­ure in English. Still his poetry can interest the modern reader not so much for historical reasons as for its inspirational and incantatory qualities. Poems like “The Song of the Free”, “The Living God” and “The Song of the Sannyasin” which are in the nature of exhortations carry with them the sheer force of con­viction and a saviour’s zeal. The following lines from “A Song I Sing to Thee” are characteristic of the kind of mystical expe­rience which often called for poetic utterance.

The servant am I through birth after birth.

But only one desire is left in me,

An intimacy with Thee, mutual!

Take me, О Lord! Across to Thee;

Let no desire’s dividing line present.

His “Kali, the Mother” has been compared by K.R. Srinivasa Iyenger to Subramania Bharathi’s “Oozhi-koothu” and described as “equally powerful in its evocation of the frenzy of the creatrix who turns the destroyer of the worlds”. As has been said earlier in this introduction, however, Vivekananda’s achievement was mostly as an orator and writer of prose and not as a poet.

Indian English poetry of the nineteenth century even with some of its obvious shortcomings is by no means a poetry which can be ignored or put aside as unworthy of serious study or critical attention.

In may not be the kind of poetry which the self-styled moderns would like them to have written. After all modernity itself is a very loose and nebulous term, for all that is contem­porary is not necessarily modern and a poet cannot claim supe­riority over his predecessors and forerunners just because he happens to live today and shares certain characteristics with his contemporaries. To do so will be to negate the very meaning of the historical process.

It will certainly be much more helpful to study and assess the poets of the by-gone age and those of the present age independently without placing them in a meaningless juxtapo­sition or categorization.

The poems themselves must be studied as poetry, as artefacts in verse which have crystallised out of particular socio-cultural ferments and individual experiences which are sensuous, mystical or spiritual.

It is always easy to tear a poem to pieces or deconstruct it but to understand a poem, or respond to it at several levels calls for approaches which are more constructive or creative and this should be the guiding principle of one’s approach to the study of Indian English poetry old or new.