Essay on the Poetries of Indian English Literary

The number of poets who have emerged on the Indian English literary scene in the recent years is certainly amazing and it is nothing but considerations of space and time which stand in the way of discussing all of them. We have G.S. Sharat Chandra, Deba Patnaik, Meena Alexander, Lakshmi Kannan, Sivakami Velliangiri, Aga Shahid Ali, Hoshang Merchant, Dr. A. Padmanaban and a host of others who have produced consid­erable measure of good poetry. Dr. A. Padmanaban, formerly of the Indian Administrative Service, for instance, has produced volumes of poems like Rain Drops, Lighting a Candle and Buddha which reveal a genuine poetic talent and visionary perception of the present day civilization.

Another name to be remem­bered is Vikram Seth, the young California-settled Indian who has shot into global fame through the publication of his sensa­tional verse novel The Golden Gate. Though the success of The Golden Gate has been more as a novel than as poetry, the work interests us as a new kind of modern poetry which the author has made accessible to the common man restoring it at the same time to the older stanza and metrical forms.

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It must be remembered all the same that the phenomenal success of The Golden Gate has pushed into the background a more important work of his which should really establish his reputation as an outstanding poet, namely The Humble Administrator’s Garden (1987). This collection brings us poems very different from the cynical satirical poems of the New Poets, especially the Workshop poets. In the words of Dr. Makarand Paranjape,

There is an air of ease and affability that pervades his poetry; it is relaxed, unhurried — and rich in texture — like a mellow, full-bodied wine. The poise and confidence of the poetry is almost neo-classic, but without the least sense of self-impor­tance. (“The Return of Involvement” in Kavyabharati Number 2, 1989, p.42).

Paranjape’s article draws attention not only to an important aspect of Vikram Seth’s poetic personality but to the way in which some of the recent poets are quietly bringing about a change in Indian English poetry redeeming it from the private traumas of the search for an identity which one finds in the poetry of the sixties and seventies. Indian English poetry seems to be now moving in a direction different from the directions it took in the hands of the Workshop Poets and their followers.

It is clear therefore that Indian English poetry has, in the course of its 150 year old history, shown variations and divergences which make generalizations of any kind difficult. Classifications and generalizations, whether vertical-chronologi­cal or horizontal-thematic, are found to be inadequate and mis­leading.

It is also difficult to place the poets and their works in any identifiable tradition except that all of them both the old ones and the new, have built up a tradition in which the writers, even while they had their roots in English literary traditions, used the English literary forms and wrote in the English lan­guage, could still aspire to be distinctly Indian. One hears in their poetry, in the midst of echoes from their Western prede­cessors and counterparts, an authentic voice, a voice which is at once Indian and personal.

The operative sensibility which in­forms their writing is unmistakably Indian except where it has been blunted or destroyed by the writer who has consciously turned Western in his intellectual and emotional make-up. However, critical assessments of the poets and their works have not shown any stability or consistency, one of the reasons being the absence of a sound critical tradition.

If a sound critical tradition has not evolved in spite of a long period of academic preoccupation with this literature it is not so much because of the absence of good critics as because of strong preconceptions, prejudices and personal factors standing in the way.

It is dis­tressing to note that when poets become anthologists they carry their prejudices both in the choice of poets and in the harsh judgements they pass on other anthologists as has happened, for instance, in Eunice D’ Souza’s sneering reference to the selections made in V.K. Gokak’s The Golden Treasury of Indian Poetry in English. Unfortunately even overseas critics who are expected to be more unbiassed and objective are often edu­cated by these ‘modernists’ to reject Aurobindos, Toru Dutts and Tagores though the genius of all these poets was discovered and brought to light only by British critics.

There have been, however, Western critics like David McCutcheon who, with a better understanding of the Indian psyche and Indian cultural heritage, have refused to share the prejudiced views constantly aired forth by P. Lai and his group in respect of the earlier poets. (Cf. McCutcheon’s article, “Indian Poetry in English” in Considerations, ed. Meenakshi Mukherjee).

An important question that raises itself in any serious discussion on Indian Poetry in English is: Have the Indian English poets made a conscious search for an organic form for their poetry and if so, how successful have they been in their at­tempts? Form in poetry is often felt to be either organic or imposed. Form is organic when it springs from content and it is imposed when it is a rigid frame to which content has to accommodate itself.

In short lyric poems, form and content seem to be inseparable and even the Elizabethan sonnets, for instance, in which the content had to be fitted into definite structures, whether Petrarchan or the Shakespearean modifica­tion, show spontaneity and fluidity which make it difficult to decide whether the form is organic or imposed.

Though the form took precedence in the sonnet, the ode and the pastoral elegy in the hands of the Elizabethans and the Romantics, Toru Dutt, Aurobindo and Sarojini Naidu chose their ‘forms’ under certain inner compulsions which were creative rather than imi­tative. Even the choice of the medium arose from a natural and compulsive urge to write in a language which had become theirs and once the choice had been made in respect of the language, they were drawn into the literary traditions which had been built into that language.

It was thus that their poetry fell in line with Elizabethan, Miltonic and Romantic traditions and not because of any desire on their part to imitate the great poets whom they had read or admired. The lyrical outpourings of Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu seem to have found their most appropriate form in the sonnet or the ode but often in forms which were less rigid and conventional too. Aurobindo who wrote sonnets, odes and other less conventional lyrics also cast his Savitri in the epic mould.

While one can attribute his choice of the epic form to Homeric, Dantesque and Miltonic influ­ences, the greater truth to be accepted is that the nature of the vision and inspiration as well as his purpose in writing on that great theme demanded that the style was in the tradition of Vedavyas, Valmiki and Kalidasa which would put the poem again in the Indian epic tradition.

‘Form’ again is not only structural but also textural. While it includes it the larger structure or plot alone it also has ele­ments such as diction, meter, syntax, etc., and Indian English poets cannot be said to have been innovative in their handling of these elements of ‘form’. They have certainly not been as innovative as the Indian English novelists — novelists like Raja Rao, Narayan and G.V. Desani or like the African Chinua Achebe or Amos Tutuola making bold experiments with narrative modes, diction, syntax or even rhythms.

One rarely comes across in Indian English poetry, either old or new, metaphors or images which strike the reader as very Indian nor transliterations of vernacular expressions, proverbs and pithy sayings as one finds them in the novels. This difference may, however, be attributed to the fact that the novel being nearer life, its structure can more easily admit of the creation of an idiom and patterns of syntax and rhythm which are closer to the speech habits of a community or the very language of the soil.

But it cannot be denied that such Indianization of the language is possible in poetry too and that the transference of the authentic Indian experience into poetry will always call for the creation of an authentic Indian English idiom. In the final analysis, all efforts in this direction will be only part of the poet’s search for an organic form.

While some of these considerations may argue against the claims of Indian English poetry for a distinctiveness deriving from its Indianness, they cannot argue against its quality as poetry. We do have in this branch of Indian literature poetry which is not only pure but also great. If pure poetry is some­thing that “induces in the well-tuned mind a condition akin to that of the silent mystical contemplation which is the supreme form of prayer”, we have certainly instances of such poetry in Sarojini Naidu, Aurobindo and Nissim Ezekiel.

These poets do communicate to the reader, if not always a mystical or semi- mystical condition, an experience which is total. If pure poetry as Middleton Murry has described it in his well-known essay on the subject is to be had in “words which do communicate a thought and the emotional ‘field’ which it excites from the mind of the poet to the mind of the reader”, if transference is complete and entire, we have this kind of poetry in Sarojini Naidu, Sri Aurobindo and Nissim Ezekiel.

Since thought and emotional field are inseparable, ‘thought’ will always be an intrinsic part of the emotional field in the poet’s mind and a corresponding emotional field is bound to be excited in the reader. If this is the nature of poetic experience, the word in the poet’s mind partly arises out of the emotional field, partly is fitted to convey it deliberately. As will be illustrated with reference to some of the individual poems in this anthology, Indian poetry in English does often show the power to recreate in any well-tuned sensibility an organic unity of mental experience of which man in his ordinary moments is deprived.

However, not all the poets may stand these tests though they may have a number of other merits which may recommend them to a place in the world of poetry. But a few poets like Aurobindo, Sarojini, Tagore, Ezekiel and Mahapatra do stand the tests, for it is not infrequently that one comes across in their works instances of good poetry, poetry which is not merely verbal magic but has the power to communicate a total experience:

In vain thou temptest with solitary bliss

Two spirits saved out of a suffering world,

My soul and his indissolubly linked

In one task………….

To bring god down to the world on earth we come,

To change the earthly life to life divine.

(Lines from Aurobindo’s Savitri which describe Savitri’s de­termination to resist the temptation of eternal bliss or Elysium and return to the earth with Satyavan by her side)

For us the travail and the heat

The broken secrets of our pride,

The strenuous lessons of defeat,

The flower deferred, the fruit denied,

But not the peace, supremely won,

Lord Buddha, of thy Lotus throne.

(From ‘Sarojini Naidu’, “To a Buddha seated on a Lotus”)

At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable. Thy infi­nite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine. Ages pass, and still thou pourest and still there is room to fill.

(From Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali)

When finally, we reached the place

We hardly knew why we were there

The trip had darkened every face

Our deeds were neither great nor rare

Home is where we have to gather grace.

(From Nissim Ezekiel’s Enterprise.)

Illustrations of this kind are not wanting in Indian English poetry to show that many of the poets, even if they have not succeeded in producing poetry which has an organic form, in­variably succeed in finding a form which is most appropriate to the good themes they choose and is capable of giving an artistic shape to their thoughts, feelings and sensibilities.