An Anthology of New Indian English Poetry.

Perry, John Oliver

A positive attitude - it's half full, not half empty - is best for critically surveying An Anthology of New Indian English Poetry. The selection of eighteen poets with almost always five poems each, as the editor Makarand Paranjape claims, constitutes "the first anthology . . . of the second generation of post-Independence Indian English poets . . . born mostly between 1950 and 1970." Actually only two are now under thirty, half are over forty. These are poets whose books for the most paint have been already reviewed in these pages, indicating their general acceptability. Since so much bad Indian English poetry reaches print, still often self-published, with a little that is honestly good and some excellent, we can be pleased, after all, with an adequately full cup!

In a brief preface Paranjape makes the "very bold statement" that "Modernism is dead" and says these poets "celebrate not conformity, but difference." Yet, surely in part because Paranjape naturally chose the safer, conventionally acceptable works, there is a prosy sameness droning through most of the poems. As in English-language anthologies from elsewhere these days, we get much writing about not writing, thinking, seeing, or hearing very acutely and fleeting exercises in various modes and moods. Despite occasional Indian topicality - saris, Bombay's Marine Drive, the Ganga, gritty Delhi, allusions to race and colonialism, widows in white, a Hindu marriage, Sanskrit, Holi - almost none of these poems probes a sharply particularized Indian (i.e., necessarily regional) experience. (Look for different types of exceptions in Prabhanjan Mishra's and E. V. Ramakrishnan's poems.) These are upper-middle-class urban and urbane poets, mostly accepting a painless, at worst nostalgic, alienation from the common life around them, not romantically seeking to join it or to revive past mores or a traditional style culturally remote from them. Both love and lust are restrained, with little tragic sense beyond the rough, potentially feminist honesty of Tara Patel.

Other criteria than dates and acceptability apparently constricted this selection, for altogether it offers few surprises with respect to style as well as to names. More critically, Paranjape's anthology fails to include the main established "second generation" poets for a variety of unacceptable reasons. The great preponderance of those chosen were just published by Rupa from 1990 to 1993! Thankfully excluded were several of Rupa's less serious or most boring poets like Pradip N. Khandwalla, Shanta Acharya, Anna Sujatha Mathai, and Ashok Mahajan (despite also his superficial Goan Vignettes from Oxford in 1982). The Rupa commercial publishing venture (with lesser echoes from Disha and Viking Penguin) has indeed changed the shape and scope of contemporary Indian English poetry, but surely earlier and less readily available sources than these (the sole sources employed) would just as adequately and more fairly represent the second wave, yielding space for, say Lakshmi Kannan or Ajit Khullar or Sunita Jain. Over two hundred poets were read by Sudeep Sen for his recent WLT survey, "New Indian Poetry: The 1990s Perspective" (68:2 [Spring 1994], pp. 272-80). Of thirteen poets selected by Sen from his short list of thirty, all but one (possibly Pakistani) have been accounted for in Paranjape's collection; and Sen adds four more "who could have just as easily been featured," of whom again only one was not chosen by Paranjape.

Despite these prior corroborating testimonies, only six of Sen's chosen thirteen actually appear in Paranjape's volume: Vikram Seth and Sujata Bhatt being eliminated because of their high reprint price; Manohar Shetty, Sanjiv Bhatla, and Rukmini Bhaya Nair because they refused to be included. Unfortunately, those important voices who declined reprint permission were probably reacting to Paranjape's widely publicized problems in requesting Eunice de Souza's poems for his previous anthology stretching from 1827 to 1988, Indian Poetry in English (Macmillan India, 1993; see WLT 68:3, p. 635). Melanie Silgardo (from Sen's alternative list) is missing because "her poetry is not easily available in India," despite being one of three in a well-known Bombay group chapbook of 1978.

The other two major omissions are the diaspora Indian voices of Meena Alexander (b. 1951) and Aga Shahid Ali (b. 1949); "though not as well known as they ought to be," they were supposedly eliminated because their first books appeared "as early as in the seventies." Those were, however, relatively juvenile chapbooks, but another reason may have operated for these exclusions: to represent presumably the best of the "second generation" of poets, both Alexander and Ali had already appeared, as had Manohar Shetty (b. 1953), Vikram Seth (b. 1952), and Imtiaz Dharker, in Paranjape's earlier 1832-1988 anthology (as also, seriatim and for the same good reasons, in the recent post-Independence anthologies by Paniker, Mehrotra, Sarang, Daruwalla). Probably Dilip Chitre (b. 1938), Eunice de Souza (b. 1940), and Saleem Peeradina (b. 1944) - as well as the unmentioned Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (b. 1947) - are rightly excluded, being well established in many earlier anthologies as the younger of the "first generation" poets. However, also listed and eliminated among those "well-known for decades" is Imtiaz Dharker (b. 1954), whose first important book, Purdah, is dated 1988!

If one questions whether Dharker, born in Lahore, Pakistan, though married to an Indian Hindu and long resident in Bombay, qualifies as Indian, then what about those diaspora Indians who have rarely lived in their birth country? Such national lines remain difficult to draw, and so a poet's wish to be considered an Indian English writer may be the most important but not the single or sufficient criterion. Similarly, neither date of publication nor date of birth should alone define who is a relatively new poet. Perhaps, however, older poets who are as good as most of the younger ones need not be included on grounds of their fewer future decades for developing "promise." Although the young up-and-coming C. P. Surendran may have been unknown until Viking's Gemini H of 1994, still Man Mohan Singh, somewhat older, could well have been eliminated because his Village Poems of 1982 (Arnold-Heinemann) was followed by the only ornithologically interesting Bird Poems in 1989.

More positively, Paranjape selected from a "forthcoming" (i.e., 1993) Disha book four out of five poems by Suma Josson (b. 1951), one of the lesser lights given space here, who had previously published only four poems in a 1982 Writers Workshop chapbook. More crucially, the very interesting and promising work by the Oriyan poet Prabhanjan K. Mishra (b. 1952) is here, though his first book, Vigil (Rupa, 1993), is not noted as published. One other poet, Desmond L. Kharmawphong (b. 1964), is included though lacking a book, perhaps to represent Khasi poets in English along with the more likable Khasi, Robin S. Ngangom (b. 1959). These additions help provide enough new wine to enjoy, as long as one does not expect the more established "second generation" to make a full cup.

John Oliver Perry Seattle