History of Indian English Poetry

1. Dr. Shobhana Nair
Associate Professor ( English)
Smt. S R Mehta Arts College, Navgujarat Campus
Ahmedabad
Indian English Poetry
Semester-6
English Core : 316

2. An overview of my presentation
• Introduction, Background and Evolution of Indian English Poetry (IEP)
• The Beginnings, Pre- Independence and Post - Independence Indian English Poetry
• The Three phases of Indian English Poetry
• Prominent Poets : The Founders, Swan songs ( the first generation) and The
Cygnets ( the younger generation post-independent poets)
• Chief Characteristics of Indian English Poetry
• Dominant themes of Indian English Poetry
• The Present—> Contemporary poets and trends
• Conclusion

3. Beginnings: The Evolution of IEP
• How the colonised nation took to writing in the master’s language???
• A probe into the aetiology of Indian English Poetry :
1. Reveals the impact of the West in shaping its foundation is undisputed
2. Poetry is the first genre which came about
3. How the British Strategy of educating Indians in English language plays a
pivotal role ?

4. Factors leading to English education in India:
• The need for Indian clerks , translators and lower officials
• The Rise of the Evangelist movement—-> Spreading the word of Christ among
colonised natives
• The functioning of missionary schools
• Secret motive of dismantling the sanctimonious tenets of Hinduism
• The East India Company adopted the policy to spread English education among the
natives which would lead to the assimilation of Western culture by the Indians
• Raja Ram Mohan Roy’s letter addressed to the then Governor General Lord Amherst
in 1823 ( stressing the need for English education)
• Roy vehemently argued against the establishment of a Sanskrit school in preference to
one imparting English education

5. • In 1816, Roy establishes an association to promote European Science & Learning
which led to the foundation of ‘ The Hindu College’ at Calcutta on 20th January, 1817
• Macaulay’s famous ‘Minute on Education of 1835 intensified the pace of what Roy
had advocated so far
• Sir Charles Wood tried to correct the extremism of this policy and Despatch of 1854
emphasised on:
• Extending European knowledge to all classes of people by adopting English language
in the higher branches of instruction ( college-level education)
• Adopt vernacular languages at Primary schools
• Use of Anglo-vernacular medium for high schools
• Establishment of three Indian Universities ( Calcutta, Bombay & Madras) in 1857

6. The Beginnings
•Raja Ram Mohan Roy
•Henry Louis Vivian Derezio
•Romesh Chander Dutt
•Sri Aurobindo
•Rabindranath Tagore

7. Gamut of Indo-Anglian poetry
• The poetry written during the pre-independence era spanning nearly one hundred
and fifty years, written by the British serving in India, on Indian themes began during
the 1880s
• Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809-1831), the son of Indo- portuguese father and an
English mother is considered as the first Indian poet
• He first tried his hand at journalism before quitting the Hindu college as a Lecturer
• His fearless spirit of inquiry, indomitable courage, his reformist idealism and his
romantic enthusiasm fired the imagination of the then young generation
• His poetic career was short-lived. The two volumes of poetry he published are:
Poems and The Fakeer of Jungheera: A Metrical Tale and Other Poems
• His successful poems are his sonnets, which show a strong influence of British poets

8. Henry Louis Derozio (cont’d)
• He was heavily influenced by the British Romantic poets in theme, sentiment,
imagery and diction along with some traces of neo-classicism.
• His satirical verse, ‘Don Juanics’ and the long narrative poems indicate his special
affinity with Byron
• A noteworthy feature of his poetry is the burning nationalist zeal which is somewhat
phenomenal
• His unmistakable authenticity of patriotic utterance is manifested in his poems, “To
India- My Native Land”, ‘The Harp of India” , and “ To the Pupils of Hindu College”.
• He was also a pioneer in the use of Indian myths and legends as well as of Western
classical myths.

9. Romesh Thunder Dutt: ( 1848-1909)
• He began his career first as a novelist in Bengali
• His ‘The Lake of Palms’ and ‘The Slave Girl of Agra’ are the English translations of the
original Bengali version
• His notable contribution as a translator of Indian poetry into English verse is significant
• As a poet, he translated into English representative Sanskrit poetry sacred as well as
secular from the Rig veda to the later classical period of Kalidas and his successors
• His translations of Sanskrit poetry was outstanding and effective

10. Sri Aurobindo : ( 1872-1950)
• A Patriot, Poet, Yogi and Seer
• An accomplished classical scholar
• The hallmark of Aurobindo’s poetry is a mystical experience which he describes as “Narayana
Darshana” ( or to envision the visage of God)
• His long poetic career spanning sixty years yielded an impressive volume of verse of several kinds:
lyrical, narrative, philosophical an epic
• In his short poems like ‘Invitation’, ‘Revelation’, the note of rapturous mystic awareness is unfolded
• He also attempts reflective and symbolic verse in ‘Short Poems’
• His entire political career can be perceived as a long and hectic preparation for the writing of his
magnum opus “ Savitri”

11. Sri Aurobindo’s ‘Savitri’
• ‘Savitri’ (1916) is a re-telling of the well-known legend of Prince Satyavan and his devoted
wife,Savitri who rescues him from death. ‘Savitri’ is a story of pure and unconditional love
conquering death
• The Mother has referred to it as ‘the supreme revelation for Sri Aurobindo’s vision’
• ‘Savitri’ runs into 12 books and 49 cantos
• It is the longest poem in the English language and the poet consistently worked on it close
to five decades
• An epic poem in blank verse based upon the theology of Mahabharata has approximately
24,000 lines.
• Also known as ‘ Eternity of Words’ it presents the drama of integral self-realisation, which
is its spiritual message

12. Rabindranath Tagore : (1861-1941)
• A poet, dramatist, novelist, short story writer, composer, painter, thinker, educationist,
nationalist and internationalist
• Hailed by Mahatma Gandhi as ‘the Great Sentinel’ for his versatility
• In 1912, some of Bengali translations of Bengali poems fell into the hands of William
Rothenstein and William Butler Yeats. They inspired Tagore to write poems in English
• God, devotion, love and childhood were Tagore’s chief interests
• Tagore won nobel prize for ‘Gitanjali’,
• Tagore, the poet says. “ I am here to sing the songs’; songs firmly rooted in the ancient
tradition of Indian saint poetry. It reveals a highly personal quest for the divine
characterised by a great variety of moods and approaches

13. Overview of the Twentieth Century
• There are three phases of the 20th century Indian English Poetry
• The first quarter of the 20th century produced a number of poets who were influenced
by the Romantic and Victorian
• The second quarter gives insight into humanism and mysticism
• The third quarter is seen as the further strenghthening of modernist as well as new-
symbolist trends
• The last quarter of the twentieth century has been mainly dominated by the
experimentation mode on themes and style

14. Toru Dutt (1856 -1877)
• Born in Bengal Province to the well-known Rambagan Dutt family
• A daughter of a linguist father and a mother who loved Hindu mythology ( who translated
the book ‘The Blood of Christ’ into Bengali
• Was baptised at six after her family embraced Christianity
• Influence of Hindu system of belief can be seen in her work despite being a devout
Christian. She faced isolation and social rejection as a result of their conversion
• Moved to France I 1869, mastered French language
• The family later moved to Britain and Tour pursued her education at the University of
Cambridge
• Her first collection of poems ‘ASheaf Gleaned in French Fields’, was a volume of French
poems that she and her diseased sister translated into English

15. Toru Dutt’s popular poems
• Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan ( 1882)- a collection of translations and
adaptations from Sanskrit literature was published posthumously. Edmund Goose
wrote the introductory memoir for the collection, “ She brought with her from Europe a
store of knowledge that would have sufficed to make an English or French girl seem
learned, but which in her case was simply miraculous
• Her more popular poems include, ‘Sita’, ‘The Lotus’. ‘Lakshman’, ‘Our Casuarina
Tree, ‘The Tree of Life’, and ‘Buttoo’
• Her poems reflect the complexities of individual emotions and her successful
combinations of European and Indian cultural influences

16. Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824-1873)
• An iconic face of Bengali literature
• He brought the Western form of sonnets into Indian Literature
• Like Toru Dutt, Madhusudhan converted to Christianity and took the name ‘Michael’.
He wrote a hymn to be recited on the day of his baptism
• A long narrative poem ‘The Captive Lady’ was published in 1849
• He was the first to make what came to be called Amritaskshar Chanda ( Blank Verse)
• When he found writing in English futile, he shifted back to mastering Bengali

17. Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949)
• Called Nightingale of India or Bharat Kokila by Mahatma Gandhi for the colour,
imagery and lyrical quality of her poetry
• Her volumes of poetry includes:
The Golden Threshold ( 1905)
The Bird of Time( 1912)
The Sceptred Flute ( a collection of poems) ( 1928)
The Feather of the Dawn ( 1961)

18. Themes of Sarojini Naidu’s poems
• Love for Nature
• The significance and transformation of our natural world
• The lesson about life or statement about human nature
• ‘The Lotus’, a beautiful sonnet . It is associated with Lakshmi, Saraswati, brahma and
Vishnu. Hence, it is treated as a symbol of knowledge, beauty, creation and purity
• Her poems are rich with imagery and alliteration

19. Post-Independence IEP
• The chief characteristics and themes of post-independence Indian English Poetry
are:
Extensive Experimentation
Divergence from the conventional modes of expression
Exercise of liberty in form, content and use of language unlike their predecessors who
expressed Indian themes in the Romantic and Victorian modes
Themes include alienation and exile, the crisis of personal identity, cultural identity,
childhood memories, familial relations and love; nostalgia for the past and cultural
traditions constitute the themes of Indian Poets

20. The Major poets of post-Independence era
• Nissim Ezekiel
• Dom Moraes
• P.Lal
• Adil Jussawala
• A K Ramanujan
• R. Parthasarthy
• Gieve Patel
• Arvind Mehrotra
• Pritish Nandy
• Kamala Das
• Arun Kolatkar
• Jayanta Mahapatra

21. Adil Jussawala (1940-
• ‘Land’s end’ , his first collection of poems was published in 1962
• Missing Persons’, his second book of poems in 1976
• He did not publish another collection for thirty five years; while he has been a prolific
prose- writer too
• “He writes complex poetry- ironic, fragmented, non-linear, formally strenuous-that
evokes and indicts a dehumanised, spiritually sterile landscape, ravaged by
contradiction, suspended in a perpetual state of catastrophe”

22. Nissim Ezekiel
• An Indian Jewish poet
• A foundational figure in postcolonial India’s literary history esp. for poetry
• At the age of 28 published his first collection of poetry, ‘A Time to Change’ (60 poems)
• It became the turning point in postcolonial Indian Literature towards modernism
• He uses highly evocative and suggestive symbols and images in his poetry
• The women, the city and the nature are recurring images in his poetry
• Other images include Hills, winds, skies, sun and rain

23. Nizzim Ezekiel
• He had a particular liking for T S Eliot and Ezra Pound
• He did not much care for verse in his own language
• He believed that both craftsmanship and subject matter are equally important to a
poem
• He is of the view that best poets wait for words. He regards poem as an organic,
integrated composition
• The form, the structure, the words and phrases are important and of vital concern to
him
• Economical with language; he believed in clarity, economy and directness

24. Ezekiel - a gifted craftsman
• He has been adopting a conversational style
• The simplicity and conversational ease make his poetry memorable
• Use of colloquial idioms make his poems striking , simple, lucid , clear and expressive
• Obscurity is avoided by the poet
• ‘The Egoist’s Prayers’ shows his poetic language at its best
• Humour, Irony and Wit is his forte. He has ridiculed the absurdities and follies of the
Indian people and for this he uses humour and wit as his chief weapons
• His best poems have an indefinable pictorial quality. For instance ‘In India’ the poet
has given vivid picture of Bombay

25. Dom Moraes ( 1938-2004)
• Dominic Francis Moraes, a Goan writer has authored 30 books in English language
• His poems include ‘Absences’, ‘Spree’, ‘Rendezvous’, ‘The Garden’, ‘Key’, ‘Architecture
• He distanced himself from canons and labels
• When he showed his poems to W H Auden, the latter showered him with praises
• He has also translated from Hebrew as he stayed in Israel for 4 years. His English translations
of these poems were believed to be better than the originals
• Some of the themes of his poem include guilt, estrangement, migrations, tussles with alcohol
and his marriage and other loves.
• His poems presents the common modernist idea but he was dissatisfied with his writings. In an
interview he said, ‘ I regret that I didn’t write any worthwhile poetry for so long.’
• After ‘John Nobody’, Moraes gave up writing poetry for some time

26. Dom Moraes
• Moraes’ later poetry shows sameness and change
• The confessional not struck persistently earlier, continues to ring in his ne poems
• Private memories form a favourite subject
• ‘The Mother’ in “Letter to My Mother” is perhaps the speaker’s mother and Mother India
• His world-view never had room for social or political overtones
• Another well-defined group of poems deals with figures from myth, legend, pre-history and
history. Some of the monologues seem to have an ulterior significance for the poet
• Sex or love in its raw physicality is dominant in poems like ‘Sea’, ‘Estuary’, ‘Naiad”

27. Dom Moraes
• ‘Craston’ , stands out as one of the most achieved of Moraes’ poems. This is an
allegory of the poet and his art
• Craxton is perhaps the artistic conscience of the Poet
• ‘Serendip’, contains the title poem, comprising eight sonnets with a Prologue and an
Epilogue; two cycles of poems dealing with excavations; and a few shorter poems.
‘Serendip’, seems to be an attempt to cover the entire history of the island, from the
first wild inhabitants to the ‘grenade-gun’ culture of the modern ethnic conflict.

28. A K Ramanujan (1929-1993)
• The main themes of his poetry are family, love, despair and death
• It is full of irony, humour, paradox and sudden reversals
• Ramanujan’s poetry, ‘ reflects a touch of humanity, Indian ethos and pertinence of
life’.
• Though he lived in America, he never forgot his mother and motherland
• He always lived in the reminiscences of Indian Culture
• ‘ Indianness’ is not only a matter of diction and syntax but also of imagery, myth and
legends

29. Arun Kolatkar ( 1932- 2004)
• Sahitya akademi awards and Commonwealth prizes
• ‘Jejuri’, first collection of poem won him commonwealth prize in 1977
• His poetry reveals meaninglessness of life, loss of identity, revenge motif,
superstitious attitude
• Bilingual poet who wrote in Marathi and English
• His poems are different in structure, themes and style
• He is metaphysical, neutral, ironical and surrealistic poet with unique sensibility
• Some of his poems are ‘An Old Woman’, ‘The Bus’, ‘Chaitanya’, ‘Makarand’.

30. Kamala Das (1934-2009)
• Sahitya Akademi Award Winner
• Bilingual writer
• She wrote poems in English. She once claimed, ‘Poetry does not sell in this country’
• Her six published volumes are’Summer in Calcutta’( 1965), The Descendants’(1967),
The Old Playhouse and the Other Poems’(1973), ‘Collected poems (1984), Only the
Soul Knows How to Sing: Selections from Kamala Das (1996) and Encountering
Kamala (2007)
• Primarily a confessional poet comparable to American poets Anne Sexton and Sylvia
Plath

31. Themes in Kamala Das’ Poetry
• The failure of marriage and Sexual frustration; exploration of the female Psyche
• Failure of her Relationship and the men and Love
• Her English and Malayalam had strong feminist leanings
• Primarily autobiographical
• Her unique stylistic device employed by Kamala Das is the frequent repetition of
worlds, lines and even sections of a poem
• It emphasises an idea or an emotion
• She protested against the mimetic attitude of Colonised Indian

32. Gieve Patel (1940)
• ‘On Killing a Tree’ is one of his most famous poem from his first collection of poems
published in 1966
• Other poetical works include Poems, launched by Nissim Ezekiel
• How do You Withstand, Body and Mirrored Miroring
• The relationship between his landowning family and the tribal Warlis that worked in
their estate was a common theme throughout his work

33. Contemporary Women writers
• Sagari Chhabra
• Seeme Qasim
• Arundhati Subramaniam
• K Srilata
• Vijaya Singh
• Meena Kandasamy

34. Themes and Issues of Contemporary WW
• With the turn of the century, a new sensibility emerges- The WW speaks more as a
national/world citizen and less as an individual woman
• Awareness of belonging to the marginalised community
• Joining hands with other sub groups, who suffer at the hands of the powers
• No more confessional-existential strain . No Propaganda
• Exploratory in nature
• New approach to old ideas. For instance idea of Love
• Defining the self in relation to changing the cityscapes, objects and people

35. Themes of Contemporary Women poets …
• Self-aware, self-assured, confident, also self-critical ( evaluating one’s self and one’s
responses)
• Sensitive voices registering protest against social intolerance
• Humanism
• The idea of home
• Urbanity and consumerist lifestyle- the world of money taking over
• Academics and Feminism

36. Emerging Voices
• Arundhati Subramaniam ( b.1967) : In her poem, ’S 46 Andheri Local’ “ When I
descend (the local train) I could choose to dice carrots or a lover, I postpone the
latter”. Lover is considered one among the many mundane aspects of life such as
carrots and local trains
• Vijaya Singh (b. 1973) : She writes, “ An Elegy of Love”.She asserts that the love
experience demeans her like ‘this ballet performance/standing on the toes to reach
one another/ this impossible feat of swirling on a single toe/ the weight of the entire
body/ and not lose dignity, poise and beauty”
She finds the structure of love as oppressive as marriage

37. Sagari Chhabra & Seema Qasim
• Both the poets are raising their voices against discrimination
• ‘In Gujarat Again’ and ‘Closure’ Chhabra is seen raising her voice against
discrimination.
• Seema Qasim shares the predicament of being Indian Muslim in her poems titled, “
Indian Muslim”
• Provincial identities, linguistic divisions, language being politicised debate
• Seema talks about getting back the heritage, talks about fusion of diverse culture to
build new bonds through food, customs, celebrations etc
• To look at the common good of all rather than the differences

38. Conclusion
• Indian poets and their mastery over the language and craft
• Fruitful cross-fertilisation of the English language with Indian-culture learnt to think and
feel in English and transmute their felt-experience
• It cannot be dismissed as meaningless, unintelligent stuff of sentiments and emotions
• Innovations in form and content is visible
• Many of these writers have got international fame and acknowledgement of their craft
by offering the commonwealth prize in literature
• Indian English poetry has also found its place in the syllabi of internationally repute
universities

39. Thank you