Five Indian English Poets

In This Comparative Study Of Five Indian English Poets The Main Thrust Is On Content Analysis Of Their Poems With A View To Identifying The Degree Of The Indian Experience And Sensibility As Expressed In Them. The Choice Of English As The Medium Of Creative Expression Especially Poetry Makes The Indian English Poet'S Credentials Suspect Because The Question Of The Indian Sensibility Does Not Become An Issue In The Case Of The Regional Writers In India. As Vrinda Nabar Appropriately Observes, One Does Not Lose One'S Indianness Automatically Only Because One Writes In English Which Is An Acquired Language For The Indian Writer. What Needs To Be Emphasised Is Whether The Total Nalive/Deshi Heritage Is Rejected In Favour Of Some Alien Sensibility. The Present Study Tries To Define The Indian Sensibility And Also Briefly Traces Its Development In The History Of Indian English Poetry. In Doing So It Does Not Attempt A Value Judgement On The Poets Under Consideration, Namely, Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, Arun Kolatkar, Dilip Chitre And R. Parthasarathy, Who Have Now Been Accepted As The Doyens Of Indian English Poetry. The Book Offers Practically A Poem-By-Poem Discussion Of The Works Of These Five Poets In A Fresh Perspective.

The Poets Discussed In This Volume Are Vivekananda, Toru Dutt, Rabindranath Tagore, Sarojini Naidu, Nissim Ezekiel, Kammala Das, A.K. Ramanujan, T.R. Rajasekharaiah, O.P. Bhatnagar, Sugathakumari, Melanie Silgardo, Eunice De Souza And A Ew Others.

Contributed papers at a writers' workshop held in Calcutta, West Bengal.

Jeet Thayil's definitive selection covers 55 years of Indian poetry in English. It is the first anthology to represent not just the major poets of the past half-century - the canonical writers who have dominated Indian poetry and publishing since the 1950s - but also the different kinds of poetry written by an extraordinary range of younger poets who live in many countries as well as in India. It is a groundbreaking global anthology of 70 poets writing in a common language responding to shared traditions, different cultures and contrasting lives in the changing modern world.Thayil's starting-point is Nissim Ezekiel, the first important modern Indian poet after Tagore, who published his first collection in London in 1952. Aiming for "verticality" rather than chronology, Thayil's anthology charts a poetry of astonishing volume and quality. It pays homage to major influences, including Ezekiel, Dom Moraes and Arun Kolatkar, who died within months of each other in 2004. It rediscovers forgotten figures such as Lawrence Bantleman and Gopal Honnalgere, and it serves as an introduction to the poets of the future.The book also shows that many Indian poets were mining the rich vein of 'chutnified' (Salman Rushdie's word) Indian English long before novelists like Rushdie and Upamanyu Chatterjee started using it in their fiction. It explains why Pankaj Mishra and Amit Chaudhuri have said that Indian poetry in English has a longer, more distinguished tradition than Indian fiction in English. The Indian poet now lives and works in New York, New Delhi, London, Itanagar, Bangalore, Berkeley, Goa, Sheffield, Lonavala, Montana, Aarhus, Allahabad, Hongkong, Montreal, Melbourne, Calcutta, Connecticut, Cuttack and various other global corridors. While some may have little in common in terms of culture (a number of the poets have never lived in India), this anthology shows how they are all bound by the intimate histories of a shared English language.

This anthology is a wide-ranging collection of 83 poems. The poets include Derozio, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Toru Dutt, Harindranath Chattopadhyaya, Nissim Ezekiel, Pritish Nandy and P. Lal. Notes on the poets accompany the text.