Indian poetry in English



Henry Louis Vivian Derozio is considered the first poet in the lineage of Indian English Poetry. A significant and torch bearer poet is Nissim Ezekiel and the significant poets of the post-Derozio and pre-Ezekiel times are Toru Dutt, Sarojini Naidu, Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo. Some of the poets of Ezekiel's time are A K Ramanajun, Dom Moraes, R Parthasarthy, Jayant Mahapatra, Kamala Das, Dr.Krishna Srinivas, Keki N Daruwala, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Arun Kolatkar, Dilip Chitre, Vikram Seth, etc. But academic critics and scholars have been rather lukewarm about studying several less known and current poets like O.P. Bhatnagar, I.K. Sharma, Maha Nand Sharma, Krishna Srinivas, Mani Rao, P.C.K. Prem, Srinivas Rangaswami, Dwarakanath H. Kabadi, D.C. Chambial, P. Raja and scores of others "unpolluted by the public school morals and stances." These poets write with an awareness of their milieu and environment rather than British or American rhetoric or intellectual attitudes like alienation or exile. They share the central core of contemporary realities of Indian life. Recent Indian English poetry adds to, what O.P. Bhatnagar terms as, a process of collective discovery, affirming its richness, sensitivity and cultural complexity. If we examine the potential of the poery-making mind in English, applying whatever literary crit4eria, we should now discover aspects of the essentially assimilative genius of the Indian people, snf a celebration of the vast chorus of voices that make Indian literature sing.