The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry.

Perry, John Oliver

Dedicated to its prematurely deceased, multitalented, second-named editor, the long-deliberated Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry was to be but an initial step toward bringing together a substantial and representative selection of modern - i.e., twentieth-century - poems from the major Indian languages. In the present volume fifteen languages were chosen, including the relatively minor Sindh and Dogri and Assamese, represented by only one poem each, and Punjabi (two). By far the largest linguistic group is composed of the twenty (entirely post-Independence) Indian English poets, not counting several who appear only as translators and several more who translate themselves. Long touting itself as India's most important literary language, Bengali is next with sixteen poets, while Hindi gets fourteen; but, admittedly reflecting the taste and respective mother tongues of the two editors, Marathi also gets sixteen and Kannada fourteen. From five to eight poems are translated from Telugu, Gujarati, Malayalam, Oriya, and Urdu, while Tamil, another rich literary language much used and translated by Ramanujan, gets ten.

The total array of 125 poems by as many poets can, however, but barely suggest the full parade of significant poetry by Indian writers in this century - the earliest here being published about 1910. Since the much-needed textual and background apparatus includes a very generous (thirty-seven-page) set of "Select Notes on Poets and Translators" (a few poets' bios are missing), some specific cultural-linguistic information in "Notes to Poems" (ten pages), and Dharwadker's twenty-three-page "Afterword" focusing on "Modern Indian Poetry and Its Contexts" (twentieth-century national and regional literary movements, classical Indian and foreign literary influences, and diverse, changing, and mixed sociocultural worlds), the total number of pages left for these 125 poems is only 172. Surely, had the publisher been willing - still a hope for a subsequent edition - an additional dozen significant poets could have been included ("we have omitted many prominent and famous names," among them Sarojini Naidu), ideally with three or four poems from each to give a clearer sense of these poets' individual achievements and their varying styles of thought and meaning.

For dozens of years poets, editors, publishers, and patrons have urged that more attention be given to translation so that all of India - and the world - can better appreciate the enormous variety of work being done, for, as last year's special India issue of WLT (Spring 1994) stated, "India is represented here, as elsewhere abroad, almost solely by Indian English writing." Indicating how recent the countervailing effort has been, of all the 105 carefully selected, edited, and often specially made translations (a total of twenty-two by Ramanujan, twenty-one by Dharwadker), some twenty-five are from manuscripts, while "nearly fifty of the translations have been published in Indian, American, Canadian, and British magazines in the last fifteen years" (including Dharwadker's group in the Winter 1989/90 TriQuarterly and both editors' in the "Another India" issue of Daedalus, Fall 1989), with thirty more drawn from previous book collections. The selection also takes full account of the increasing influence of women in poetry, thirty-two being included to broaden and heighten the total effect.

Thoughtfully considered, the arrangement of this necessarily slender collection greatly enriches the interplay among the poets and languages and various stylistic movements by suggestively juxtaposing (and no doubt selecting) poems with similar themes but obviously contrastive attitudes and means. Surely also by design, few poets are represented here by their best-known "old chestnuts." Eight master themes are designated, more often than not by the title of one poem from the group: "On Reading a Love-Poem" (self-reflexive poetry does not, however, at all dominate in this group or elsewhere); "A Pond Named Ganga" (mostly about life in the village and countryside); "Household Fires," (by far the largest group, with twenty-eight poems highlighting couples - married or not - families, mother-daughter and father-daughter relations, and such); four character sketches or dramatic monologues of city workers, citizens, and "The Master Carpenter"; twenty somewhat moralistic poems around the theme "What Is Worth Knowing"; a group of (mostly symbolic) animal poems accompanying "The Doe in Heat"; sixteen poems about "The Possessed City"; and, significantly throughout, many poems protesting various wrongs - mostly feminist and caste/poverty but also religious, environmental, war, Hiroshima, incivility, classism - including eighteen in the final section, "Do Something, Brother." Thus, these Indian poems affirm their relevance to historical, social, and moral changes in the twentieth century, along with the usual modernist expressions of alienation, boredom, and introversion.

Although Indian English poets have often been more widely known than regional-language poets, for many decades the former were almost ritualistically compared to their disadvantage with the latter - often by employing the assumption that only one's mother tongue, having originally structured the events and feelings of hearth, altar, kitchen, bedroom, market, and street, can adequately embody them in poetry. With these fine translations now bringing the two together, some testing of that critical judgment and the theory supporting it can occur. A careful, credible, and creatively pleasurable reading can here be made, encompassing a wide variety of parables, allegories, riddles, elaborate conceits, detailed descriptions, dramatic monologues, narratives, moral urgings, meditations, complaints, protests, and sundry other conventional and newly minted lyric forms gathered from major regional languages. But naturally, in such a small collection major poetic effects can be demonstrably achieved in only a spotty way, and so a cumulative general judgment is impossible. Furthermore, we still lack the necessary sense of the rich regional (desi) and broader cultural (marga) literary traditions to which some of these poems refer, for even in the work of those early and midtwentieth-century poets striving for an experimental, surrealistic, or "new" poetry, a preceding local or regional literary context is operating, at the very least negatively, by contrast. Interestingly, however, probably by the editors' wise design, very few poems required notes about their use of traditional forms.

Several weaker Indian English choices are clearly less powerful, convincing, imaginative, less creative with language and perception, than the stronger examples from the regional languages, even in translation. On the whole, however, each poem stands up well in close juxtaposition with those from the other group. The excellent achievements of many different sorts in both groups cooperate rather than compete in suggesting the enormously diverse, profound, and complex poetic consciousness appropriately to be anticipated in modern multicultural India.

John Oliver Perry Seattle