Variegated Voices: Indian English Poetry Today

Words empower.

When words are poems, they speak louder. Poetry empowers, enlightens, heals. It provokes, disrupts, and disturbs. It is an amazing multitasker. Like air, it rushes in to fill the empty spaces within our soul; like water, it soothes and heals; like fire it burns, it makes us rebel; and like the earth – it nurtures, nourishes our souls. Poetry becomes elemental to life.

April 2020 – when the world suddenly stopped, we found ourselves suspended in a time bubble that was different from all that we have experienced till now. Time was available in plenty but it was wrapped in fear, disillusionment, depression, and insecurity. Death lurked at the corner; loss became the rule of the day. This was the period that made me more keenly aware of the restorative powers of poetry. We read, wrote, and shared poems with other poetry enthusiasts and it continues to date. Poetry retained our sanity. It helped us engage more meaningfully with the world around us. It still does.

Since then my engagement with Indian English poetry has evolved into something deeper and indispensable. I am fascinated by the emerging and existing poets voicing their concerns, marking resistance, celebrating life, and much more. I am drawn by the richness of their subject, and the variety of their timbre. The multi-ethnic, linguistically plural Indian society has added a unique localism to these poetic voices from India, palpable in their use of indigenous images and vocabulary. There is a celebration of the local even while the themes are global. This celebration of the local is also visible in the rise in the translation of poems from other Indian languages into English, adding to the diversity of Indian poetic voices available in the English language.

Indian poetry in English has always fascinated me because of the nature of its trajectory. A genre that began as a reflection of British poetry, as seen in the English poems of Michael Madhusudan Dutta or Sarojini Naidu, it has travelled a long distance to find its niche. It has burst into life in full throttle and engaged with the world and its pluralities. The road to maturity has been paved by poets like Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, Dom Moraes, and their contemporaries and later poets have successfully carried forward that legacy, enriching it with their distinctive voices. But this is a history that is quite well known. It is time now to look at the newly emerging voices from India. These voices are diverse. While Meena Kandasamy protests against Dalit oppression, Huzaifa Pandit, the young poet from Kashmir engages with the anxiety of violence that grips his valley. Sumana Roy’s poetry brings a freshness that is born out of her acute ecological sensitivity along with a perceptive understanding of oppression within the society.  The new brood of Indian poets writing in English is not scared of engaging with the ugly and disturbing. They are as comfortable in challenging the absolutist voices, to speak about the oppression and injustice as they are to celebrate the beauty of life in its various forms.

The poetry anthologies that have been published recently speak of the richness of Indian English poetry. While Nabina Das, herself a powerful poet, curates an anthology of Dissent Poetry, Srividya Srikumar brings out a volume of erotic poems, The Shape of a Poem. Kiriti Sengupta, another significant voice of Indian English poetry has also brought out two anthologies recently – Hibiscus an anthology of poems on healing, and Shimmer Spring, an anthology with ‘light ‘ or ‘illumination’ as its theme. One more important anthology has been Open Your Eyes, edited by Vinita Agarwal, which contains poems on climate change and ecology. These are just a few anthologies among a larger number of poetry volumes that have come out in recent years or are in the making.

Does it help to have poets as publishers of poetry? Kiriti Sengupta of Hawakal, Dibyajyoti Sarma of Red River Press, Linda Ashok, founder of RLFPA Publishers, Sarbajit Garcha of Copper Coin Publishing definitely prove it to be so. These independent publishers, many among them being award-winning poets, have been serving poetry both as poets and also by producing beautifully made anthologies by contemporary poets. One cannot talk of publishers of poetry without mentioning the Writers Workshop that has been steadily launching prominent voices of Indian poetry since 1958. Founded by P.Lal and now with Ananda Lal at the helm, Writers Workshop has almost singlehandedly revolutionized poetry publication in India since its inception. The exquisitely handcrafted covers add to the aesthetic of the volumes.

With so much happening in the Indian poetry scenario, it is important to give individual attention to each of the rising or established voices. Though it is a monumental task, in this monthly column of ‘Poetspeak’, I shall spotlight one poet each month. It is an endeavour to facilitate further discussion on contemporary poets of India and acknowledge the powerful voices that are emerging from the country.

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