A Brief Survey of Indian English Poetry

INSIGHT Journal of Applied Research in Education

Vol. 24, No. 1, 2019
ISSN 0975-0665

A BRIEF SURVEY OF INDIAN ENGISH POETRY

Rasak Annayat

Abstract
Indian English poetry is the oldest form of Indian English literature, which has the attained,
both fecundity and excellence. It represents various phases of development of our multitudinous
cultural and national life right from the beginning of the nineteenth to the mid-nineties of the
twentieth century. It has three phases of development. In the first phase there is a number of co-
development which is responsible for generating Indian English poetry. The modern Indian
English poets have imitative Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Ezra pound, W. B. Yeats. They have also the
guardian streets to the new Indian poetry. There are some talented contemporary poets also who
are composing their work keeping with the recent social problems of Indian. These poets are
PritishNandy, Rabindranath Menon DilipChitre, Sharat Chandra, K. D. KatrakGauriDespande,
Nandy is “innovative and profuse” in his poetry.
Keywords: Humanism, Indianness, philosophy.
Introduction

I ndian English poetry is the oldest form of Indian English literature, which has the
attained, both fecundity and excellence. It represents various phases of development
of our multitudinous cultural and national life right from the beginning of the
nineteenth to the mid nineties of the twentieth century. It has three phases of
development. In the first phase there is a number of co-development which is
responsible for generating Indian English poetry. The early pioneers-HenryDerozio,
Michael MadusudanDutt, Toru Dutt, B.M. Malahari, S.C. Dutt and R.C. Dutt-were the
trend setters who began to poetize the Indian echoes in a foreign language. Although
their efforts were imitative and derivative of English poetry, they successfully gave a
new direction to Indian poetry in English by writing on Indian history, myths and
legends. This phase is called imitative phase. The poets of 1850 to1900 were trying how


Assistant Professor (on contract), Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, NIT, Srinagar

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to establish this part of poetry. They have followed the British Romantics and
Victorian poets.
The second phase of poets is the assimilative. This period starts from 1947.
They were compulsive nationalist seeking to project the renascent consciousness of
India caught in the maelstrom of historical conflict and turmoil and change, and
culminating in the attainment of political freedom in 1947, self-expression was all
important to the poets of imitation self-definition, accompanied by heart-searching
probing into the cultural inheritance became the genuine concern of the poets of
assimilation. The early poets were projecting landscapes, moods, fancies and dreams,
while their followers sought a more radical assurance of their sense of origins and
their sense of destiny. Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu constitute a kind of watershed
between these two phases, in that they share their predecessor's individual nostalgia
as well as their successor’s sense of crisis and quest of identity. Toru Dutt is the
inheritor of unfulfilled renown and the saint poets. Swami Vivekananda, Swami
Ramtirtha, Swami Yogananda, Sri Aurbindo and Rabindranath Tagore left a body of
poetry which is glorious summation of Indian's hoary cultural spiritual and
methodological heritage which dates back to the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Gita.
In their poetry they endeavoured to nativize English language in order to make it a
befitting instrument for the expression of Indian sensibility.
The third is the experimental phase, which begins after the Independence.
There has been a conspicuous outbreak of poetic activity demanding the urgency of
national self-definition and reflecting a painful heart-searching. Rajyalaxmi said:
Our models have been neither exclusively Indian nor British, but
“cosmopolitan. Europe, Africa, America and Asia have all become a part of our
cultural consciousness, offering impetus and stimulation. Our poets have been
suddenly lifted from an exclusive to an extensive range of creative experience. They
have been raised from a conservative to a cosmopolitan culture, to confront the new
shape of things and acquire a new view of human destiny. The age has changed and
requires a new image. This has been largely met by the poet.
The modern Indian English poets have imitative Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Ezra
pound, W. B. Yeats. They have also the guardian streets to the new Indian poetry. The
new poet has their faith in a vital language to compose their poetry. The new poetry
by Indian poets adhere their own principles. There is much experimentation in an
effort to achieve modernity. Modern techniques derived from such English craft men
as Eliot, Auden and Dylan Thomas, as well as from the film Industry and the
advertising industry is being used. This experimental approach, this quest for
originality and newness, this stress on individuality and the rejection of all That is
traditional often leads to fantastic results. There is much “image-hunting” and “word-
hunting” in contemporary Indian English poetry. But there are a number of good
poets also like Don Moraes, Nissim Ezekiel, P. Lal, Kamala Das, A.K. Ramanujan,
Krishna Srinivas, Mahanand Sharma and others. Amalendu Bose writes:

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Modern poets in their poetry are free to use English which is not mechanically but
organically out of a natural inwardness which gives a poem its immediacy of
experience. The poets of the modern time have been suddenly lifted from an exclusive
to an extensive range of creative experience. They have been raised from a
conservative to a cosmopolitan culture to confront the new shape of things and to
acquire a new view of human destiny. The age has changed and requires a new
change. This has largely been met by the poet. They have no influence of the British
poets and they have their aim at working in their own way. They prefer originality
and experiment in word-craft intensity and strength of feeling, clarity in thought
structure and sense of actuality, freshness, sensibility, concrete, experience, trained
intelligence and vitality are essential for good poetry.
Good poetry is not always lucid and clear. Nevertheless, the amateur poet
ought to aim at clarity and lucidity concrete and relevant images are usually superior
to vogue immensities, simple disciplined forms within which much freedom can be
exercised, help the poet to discover what he feels more than sprawling accumulation
of lines. Rhyme and other devices may be discarded only if structural compensations
and very special effects are provided instead. Development within a poem is a sign of
maturity in the poet” Modern poets like Nissim Ezekiel, A. K. Ramanujan, R.
Parathasarthy, K. N. Daruwalla, O. P. Bhatnagar, JayantaMahapatra, Kamala Das,
Monika Verma, Gauri Deshpande (2002) and many others have revealed tension in
their respective poems. Their poetry has inborn Indianness. Although some of them
like A. K. Ramanujan settled outside India but even then they explore in their poetry
their roots in India. K. N. Daruwalla rightly thinks: -
Then why should I tread the Kafka beat or the wasteland
When mother you are near at hand one vast, sprawling defeat.
Modern poetry is full of ironic remarks. The new poets have used irony as a
great weapon in their poetry. New poets like Shiva K. Kumar, Ramanujan, Daruwalla,
Grieve Patel, ArunKolatkar, Kamala Das, and I. H. Rizvi etc. excel in the use of the
ironic mode. They have not the blind followers of British English. They have evolved a
distinct idiom to express their voice. They have succeeded to nativize or indianize
English in order to reveal typical Indian situations. Shiva K. Kumar uses the apt idiom
to describe the abominable practice of floor crossing in an Indian politician:
“Vasectomized of all genital urges for love and beauty he often crossed floors as his
wife leaped across beds.”
Krishna Srinivas has been a leader of world poetry; He is endearingly called
“Krishna” by poets and poetry lovers. The sweet fragrances of the flowers of poems
were in fact indicating towards a full ripe fruit which is given to us by him in the form
of “Dance of the Dust”. He is rooted with the Indian sensibility and therefore one
cannot appreciate his creative genius without a sense of sympathy, spiritual feeling
and sensibility for he is intensely committed, dynamic, profound, symbolic,
philosophical, prophetic and above all, spiritual. He operates at a high level without

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attempting at deliberate mystifying. Science, metaphysics and history in his poetry

coalesce to form a refreshing imagistic pattern; he makes philosophy takes into its fold
several sciences. His poetry like Emerson, R. N. Tagore and Sri Aurbindo has
mysticism, classical and prophetic element. His poetry couched in a natural intonation.
It has the act of catalyst for spiritual awakening the structure of his pivot ideas provide
a sharp ethical and psychological insight into the fabric of the present-day moral
culture. His poetic output consists of “Dance of Dust,” “Maya” “Everest”, “Beyond,”
“Sonnets”, “Five Elements”, “Sankara”, “Ramanuja”, “Madhva”, “Christ”,
“Mohammad,” “Mahavir”, etc. His entire poetry is mystical, metaphysical, spiritual
and cosmic. Like Sri Aurbindo he is the exponent of realizing supra-consciousness
through poetry. His poetry exhibits his vast knowledge of Vedanta, Upanishads,
Bhagvad Gita, mysticism, pantheism, Muslim philosophy, Christianity, history,
geography, geology, astronomy, modern science and different languages. His poetry
has religious mission mysticism and pantheism is the two important characteristics of
his poetry. He condemns the Western materialistic values and holds out the hope of
redemption to dust – ridden, lust torn men and women in following the spiritual
values of the East: Despair not; You and dust anon must Fix the lease of
rigmarolewww.ijsrp.org And hush the wrath of wormy wars and crack its typhus in an iron
tomb Its keys buried millions of fathoms deep. (Dance of Dust)
Nissim Ezekiel is an outstanding poet of post–Independence India. A brief
survey of this large body of poetry is essential for a proper understanding of the poet’s
art, of his major themes, and of the evolution of his genius. His poetical works are- A
Time to Change (1952), Sixty Poems (1953), The Third (1959), The Unfinished Man, (1960),
The Exact Name, (1965), Hymns in Darkness (1976), and Collected Poems 1952-88 (1989).
He is a versatile genius and the most outstanding Indian English poet. He is a great
love poet and his poetry reveals a gradual evolution of his art and genius. A number
of major themes run through his poetry gaining in depth and intensity with each
successive volume that he has published. No theme recurs so frequently as the theme
of love and sex. There are highly sensuous descriptions of the human body and of
love-making in the bed. His treatment of the act of love, and of the charms of the
female body, is characterized by extreme frankness. This has exposed him to the
charge of being a poet of the body, of the female anatomy, of wallowing in sex, but
such criticism is superficial and unjust. He is certainly neither a Platonist nor romantic
dreamer, nor does he object the claims of the body. His all poems have a great impact
on the readers. For example: Don’t curse the darkness Since you’re old not to, But don’t be
in a hurry To light a candle either. The darkness has its secrets Which light does not know? It’s
a kind of perfection. While every light Distorts the truth. (Hymns in Darkness). A. N.
Dwivedi rightly remarks: “Ezekiel‟s experimental poem, “A very Indian poem in
Indian English”, clearly visualizes the reality of situation in Indian society. It enacts a
real situation for the use of “BabuAngrezi or what we roughly call today “Indian
English”.

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Kamala Das is one of three most significant Indian poets writing in English
today, the other two being Nissim Ezekiel and Ramanujam.She is one of the members
of poetic trinity of Indian English poets. The other two are Nissim Ezekiel and A. K.
Ramanujam Her important poetic works are „Summer in Calcutta, “The Descendants
(1967) “The old Playhouse‟ and other poems most of her poems deal with the theme of
unfulfilled love and yearning for love. „The Dance of the Eunuchs‟ is a good example
of a poem dealing with the theme: It was hot so hot before the eunuchs came to dance, wide
skirts going round and round, cymbals Richy, Dashing, and anklets jingling, jingling Jingling
beneath the fiery gulmohur, with Long braids flying, dark eyes flashing, they danced and They
dance; oh they danced till they bled …. In the poem she finds an objective correlative in
“The Dance of the Eunuchs” to represent the theme of suppressed desire within. The
dance of the eunuchs with their wide skirts going round, “cymbals /richly clashing
and anklets jingling, jingling…….” is contrasted with their vacant ecstasy suggesting a
gully between the external, simulated passion and the sexual drought and rottenness
inside. The contrast is sustained all through the poem. The dance of the eunuchs is a
dance of the sterile, and therefore, the unfulfilled and unquenchable love of the
woman in the poet. In The Freaks too the theme is the same. “In the hands of Kamala
Das and Sunita Jain, the poetry of protest is largely personal; in the case of
MamtaKalia and Eunice De Souza (1973), it becomes ironical as well.” Some critics
think that Kamala Das is an obscene poet but it is not so she has presented in her
poems the reality of life. She says that: “Love is beautiful whatever four lettered name
the puritans call it by. It is the foretaste of paradise. It is the only pastime that
involvesthe soul.” Her personal no doubt is given to carnal hungers and suffer like
tragic protagonists the catastrophe inflicted upon them by their own doings. Kamala's
own disgust and failures led her to a frantic search for the mythic Krishna, the ideal
lover, in whom she could establish eternal bond. This search made her aware of the
need to study all men: “all at once the plot thickened with a researcher’s hunger for
knowledge, I studied all men.” Since the quest has, by and large failed in her case, sex
is no more than a “mindless surrender” or a heartless participation not a “humming
fiesta.
Jayanta Mahapatra needs no introduction; perhaps any discussion is
incomplete without reference to his poetical works. Physicist, Bi-lingual poet and
Essayist.JayantaMahapatra hold the distinction of being the first Indian English poet to
have received the Sahitya Academy Award (1981) for “Relationship”. In his poetry,
Mahapatra sings of the hearts and minds of many things of nature, on the basis of his
sincere love for all creation, poverty, deprivation, social injustice, the plight of the
Indian woman prostitution recurs in his verses. He says, “All things happen around
me‟. He cannot ignore them and write about the “better things” of life. ----- about the
lives of upper classes. His belief in poetry as a social reality sets him of from other
contemporary poets writing in English. JayantaMahapatra like many other Indian
poets writing in English is bilingual. R. Parthasarthy rightly points out, “The true

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poets among Indo–Anglian seem to be those who write in English as well as in their
own language. They are poets in their own Right who have something significant to
say, and know how to say it, both in English and their native tongue. They are not out
to “sell” their poetry through a skilful manipulation of words and the employment of
Sophisticated techniques. Mahapatra belongs to this small group of genuine poets. He,
too, is a bilingual writer, the secret of whose success lies in his not disowning his
Indian inheritance, and not falling a pray to what has been called a feeling of
alienation. He has, by and large, steered dear of the pitfalls listed above and the result
is an unmistakable authenticity of tone and treatment.” Mahapatra’s sensibility is
essentially Indian, but he does not create the impression of indianness by bringing in
such traditional items as tigers, snakes, snake-charmers, jugglers, crocodiles etc. He is
really Indian because he does not consciously try to be Indian and thus is to able to
avoid many a hackneyed cliché and posture. His indianness is seen at its best in his
poems about Orissa, where the local and the regional are raised to the level of the
Universal. “Oriya Landscapes”, “Evening in an Orissa Village”, The “Orissa Poems”,
“Dawn at Puri” etc. are Oriya first and therefore, Indian too. Of how many other Indo-
English poets could we say something like this with equal validity? In Mahapatra’s
best work, the language is English, but the sensibility and not only subject-matter is
Oriya, writes K.A. Panikar. “An examination of the recurring images in Mahapatra’s
poems reveals that he is Oriya to the core. The sun of the eastern coast of Indian shines
through his poems. The eastern sea sends its morning wind through them. Mahapatra,
a child of the sun and sea, delights in invoking the god of fire and the god of water in
poems like “Sunburst”, “The Exile”, “Indian Summer Poems”, “This Stranger”, “My
Daughter” and “The Beggar”. Puri is a living character in several of their poems. „The
Temple‟, „The Priest‟, „The Beggar‟, „The Fisherman‟, „The Crow‟ there rise before
us in all their objective reality and concreteness and then slowly transform themselves,
almost imperceptibly, into monument like images and symbols. ‟ R. Parathasarathy
and ArunKolatkar are the two great poets to compose their poems on the themes of
Indian social problems. There is a group of Parsi poets also who contributed
contemporary Indian English poetry. The notable contributions to contemporary
Indian English poetry; the group comprises K.N.Daruwalla, Gieve Patel and
AdidlJassawalla.There is also a group of new poets called „academicians,‟ and Shiv K.
Kumar, JayantaMahapatra, A. K. Mehrotha, O. P. Bhatnagar, A. N. Dwivedi,
NiranjanMohanty, SaleemPeeradina, Syed Amanuddin, Syed Ameeruddin, R. C.
Shukla, S. C. Dwivedi and many others belong to this group.A.K. Mehrotra is
primarily an experimentalist in „surrealism‟ (a French movement of the 1920s) who
makes his poetry out of “incongruity, choice and free association. Both Mahapatra and
Mehrotra are addicted to the drug of imagery. O. P. Bhatnagar‟s ironic vision comes at
vividly in his poetry, and A. N. Dwivedi is a social realist having a keen eye on the
socialand political developments around him. In their innovative application of
language and rhythm. Dwivedi and Syed Amanuddin come close to each other. This is

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how Syed writers in of his poems: - Love me for what I am /I love you what you are /Let’s
create a culture of younme.
There are some talented contemporary poets also who are composing their
work keeping with the recent social problems of Indian. These poets are pritishNandy,
Rabindranath Menon DilipChitre, Sharat Chandra, K. D. KatrakGauriDespande,
Nandy is “innovative and profuse” in his poetry. After Rabindranath Tagore, he is one
great poet who has produced prose poems packed with Kamala Das, GauriDespande
and Monika Varma are of good stature; Lila Ray and Margret Chatterjee are also of the
same rank and status. “The Female of the Species.” Where her female feelings come
out vividly. Sometimes you want to talk About love and Despair and the ungratefulness of
children A man is no use whatever them Similar is the case with some male poets too. Of
such poets, we may mention PranabBandyopadhyay, S. C. Saha, C. S. Singh, Ravi
Nandan Sinha, R. C. Shukla I. H. Rizwi, D. C. Chambial, I. K. Sharma, R. K. Singh, B.
K. Dubey, Suresh Kohli, MahanandSharma (1991) and a few others. Many male and
female poets mentioned cursorily here demonstrate their poetic talent and aptitude,
not necessarily the fulfillment that befalls with maturity of mind and commitment to
art. (1976.2004)
Conclusion
To sum up, we can say that in the ancient period the body of Indian English
poetry has certainly been greater during this period than in any later era. P. Lal has
brought out a book over 130 poets with the title Indian Poetry in English an Anthology in
which he has composed selected poems of new poets. The poetry of this period ranges
from personal emotion and lyricism to complex linguistic experiments, dry
intellectualism, and satire. It has a new urgency of utterance but even than it is not
possible to escape this poetry completely from tradition. This penetrates deeper and
deeper into the poet consciousness and influences their observations of the living
present and past, thus runs into the present and shapes our future. Our racial
traditions, issuing from the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Ramayana, the Mahabharta,
the devotional saint poetry, the treasure house of Indian myth and legend, the
memory of our racial or local history, have shaped modern poetry. Sri
ParamhansaYogananda, Mahanand Sharma and Krishna Srinivas represent the
mystical and spiritual tradition of India in their poetry. But they are not mere
traditionalist. Their poetry is a fine coalescence of tradition and modernity. Even poets
like Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, R. Parathasarthy, ArunKolatkar,
JayantaMahapatra, Gieve Patel, K.N. Daruwalla, Kamala Das, Shiva K. Kumar and
many others can not completely get rid of tradition. The modern poets deal with the
concrete experiences of men living in the modern world but the concreteness of
experiences is influenced by “the aroma of the private life of the experiencing self.”
P.K.J Kurup remarks: “They are mostly concerned with themselves and the
surroundings allied to them. Their poetry records the artists own life history and his
struggle against himself. They centre themselves within their selves is an attempt to

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discover their roots, both as individuals and as cultists, and during the process of
which Endeavour their poetic personality appears undisguised. Viewed in this
perspective the poetry of most of the new Indian poets in English reveals a tension
resulting from their acute self-awareness and the restraint imposed upon them by the
hostile environment and becomes a private quest for values and an effort to peer into
the dark abysmal contents of the poet’s own mind.”
References
Jha, Pashupati: “Poetry of Protest and Indian Women Poets”, in the (Ed) Book Verma, M. R. &
Aggarwal K. A.: Reflections On Indian English Literature: New Delhi, Atlantic.
Singh, R. K: The Poetry of KekiN.Daruwalla: jaipur, 2002 Book Enclave, pp.13.
Kamala Das, “The Descendants”, Calcutta; Writers Workshop 1967.
Kamala Das “The Old Polyhouse& other poems”, Madras; Orient Longman 1973.
Singh, R.K: “Introduction an article reviewing the poet’s works”, Creative Forum: vol. IV,
No. 1-4, Jan – Dec., 1991, pp. 13-15.
JayantaMahapatra, “The Lahorehouse in a Calcutta Street” anthologized in R.
Parathasarathy, Ed, Ten Twentieth Century Indian Poets New Delhi: Oxford 1976.
Sharma, I. K. “New Indian English poetry”, An Alternatives (Ed) Vedic: Jaipur, Book
Enclave, 2004, pp. 369
Verma, M.R & Aggarwal, K. A.: Reflections on Indian English Literature (Ed) New Delhi,
Atlantic Publishers & Distributors. pp.130.
Tilak, Raghukul: “New Indian English Poets and Poetry”: New Delhi- 5, Rama Brothers, pp.
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