Indian Poetry in English.

Perry, John Oliver

Aware of "the disproportionate importance and influence that anthologies of Indian poetry in English enjoy," Makarand Paranjape carefully explains in his preface to Indian Poetry in English his dubious aims and animadversions: "Thus, my major departure from anthologies like Parthasarathy's [Oxford University Press, 1976] is in including not just earlier Indian poets in English, but placing figures like Tagore and Aurobindo at the centre." Quite apart from this and other appeals to romantic nationalist sentiment, academics as well as librarians may select the 253-page Macmillan text for its supposedly broad and deep representation of Indian English poetry, but in fact, all the truly competing recent anthologies--Paniker's, Sarang's, Mehrotra's--though shorter, include more poems and more lines of post-1945 poetry. The deceptive size derives partly from Paranjape's ambition to re-canonize the discredited, archaizing colonial lineup of those often short-lived Indian poets who vied for equality within the British canon before Independence, from Henry Derozio (1809-31) to Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949). Paranjape ignores their anachronistic romanticizing but admits that these poets are a) no longer read and b) thoroughly and repeatedly rejected both as models and as poets by almost all the respected post-Independence poets, who have been building their own appropriately multicultural Indian English poetic tradition. Furthermore, Paranjape includes and argues for the historical (not the poetic!) importance of four or five isolated mystic poets, admittedly almost never read, whom he treated for his Ph.D. in Mysticism in Indian English Poetry (1988). Six decadent, imitative examples offered in an appendix on Shahid Suhrawardy (1890-1965) indicate why his work has been unavailable, unknown, and forgotten until Paranjape's historicist eye extravagantly proclaimed "the discovery of the [not merely 'a'?!] 'missing link' between the contemporary poets and their predecessors"--but a link they never could know nor would now recognize.

Evidently the notion of tradition which Paranjape has adopted is the conventional Indian one that G. N. Devy (in After Amnesia and In Another Tongue) has criticized, which, using the term parampara, includes any habit, ritual, idea, or custom from the old and remote past, whether or not usable or used in the present. With such a quaintly historical, pre-Eliotian conception of a literary tradition with no notion of its ongoing cultural function, Paranjape orders and writes a mere chronicle of Indian-born persons who have used English to write verse or so-called prose poems. His inordinate, revivalist attention to mystics and other nonpostcolonialists has resulted in reducing the pages for more independent and more viable contemporaries, who Paranjape suggests are not historically, thematically, or biographically as edifying (so it seems) as his favorites. Despite contrary protestations, in making his selections of poets and poems he has not focused on the writers' poetic uses of language, their grasp of an actual or imagined experience with an occasional insight, image, or rhythmic phrase that marks their work as potential poetry for appropriately trained readers today.

So, the anthology, insofar as it is used in academe, will lend support to those many readers who have not learned how (or say they do not wish) to distinguish "poetry" or indeed "literature" from other writing. Without being exclusionary on narrowly estheticist or culturally elitist grounds, an enterprising academic anthology could broaden the usual canon with such widely recognized recent achievers as Meena Alexander and Vikram Seth, but probably not those slighter new voices Paranjape also adds: Agha Shahid Ali, Manohar Shetty, and Imtiaz Darkher. Rabindranath Tagore's self-translations are out of place here, especially if other translations from Indian regional languages are excluded--e.g., probably the best work of Dilip Chitre and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. Surely Dom Moraes deserves being reestablished, but both P. Lal, the preeminent publisher-supporter of this poetry, and Pritish Nandy, renowned as a publicist and editor, having graciously opted out, need not be revived for "historical" or other noncritical reasons. With more appropriate guidelines, an anthology of this size could have raised in its introduction some useful critical issues and offered a far greater and more representative selection of poems from those Indian English poets who repay close study with a finer appreciation of multicultural India rather than vague suggestions of transcendence.

John Oliver Perry Seattle