Artikel
Welcome to Indian poetry - May 2004
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18 januari 2006
And yet, Indian poetry exists, and has managed admirably to endure – even flourish – decades after Tagore. In a country with 22 constitutionally recognised languages and a mind-boggling number of minority and tribal languages, it is obviously impossible to speak of Indian poetry as a monolith. Almost every observation runs the risk of becoming a falsification in the context of the language from the neighbouring area!
But at the risk of generalisation, a brief overview might be useful: Indian poetry in the early twentieth century was, not surprisingly, a resolutely public poetry, imbued by a zeitgeist of fervid patriotism. In the 1930s the Progressive Movement with its strong Marxist spirit ushered in a critique of uncritical nationalism, making way for gritty realism and irony. Gradually, the Indian counterpart of Western modernism also made its presence felt. The unitary public voice was fractured by a polyphony of individual voices that tried to articulate the acutely modern experience of disjunction, doubt and existential unease. Traditional metres collapsed to be replaced by freer forms. Western literary models offered inspiration, as did vast indigenous resources, ranging from folk to Vedic, Bhakti to classical Sanskrit poetry. The result was a scene of dynamism, complexity and ferment, richly varied and far from derivative.
Post-Independence poetry has been further shaped by the rising importance of women’s voices as well as those from the lowest echelons of caste and class hierarchies. For the generation of poets born after Indian Independence in 1947 – ‘midnight’s children and grandchildren’ as they are often termed – colonial India is the stuff of history books. But in a country of multiple colliding realities – of cutting-edge Information Technology and starvation deaths, of Bollywood and the Babri Masjid – there is clearly no dearth of challenges to provoke the poetic imagination.
Mapping such a plural scene is necessarily an eclectic enterprise. This domain doesn’t claim to offer you more than a glimpse – certainly not the definitive picture, if indeed such a thing exists – of the present landscape.
Our first edition presents two important contemporary poets – {id="2725" title="Keki Daruwalla"} (English) and {id="2740" title="Vasant Abaji Dahake"} (Marathi). They are seasoned practitioners, literary representatives of two important Indian languages, poets with arrestingly modern sensibilities and a considerable body of work behind them.
We also have a rich assortment of material that will furnish interested readers with a more comprehensive idea of their work: an – {id="2700" title="essay"} on Dahake’s work, an {id="2689" title="interview"} with Daruwalla as well as a {id="2693" title="personal statement"} on his poetics, in addition to an {id="2694" title="article"} on his craft as myth-maker.
With these two poets we hope to offer you an interesting entry-point into the vast, varied, unruly, obstinately unmappable terrain of the contemporary poetry scene in India.
For most of the world, modern Indian literature is synonymous with the novel. Mention poetry, and after a pause – a long pause – you might be able to elicit the word, ‘Tagore’.
But that’s if you’re lucky.
You could attribute it to several factors: the ubiquitous marginalisation of poetry, the caprices of media attention, the pervasive reluctance to listen to contemporary voices from a notoriously ‘ancient’ civilisation, the policies of mainstream publishers. But there’s no denying that popular perception regards Indian poetry as the dowdy, low-profile cousin of the Indian novel.And yet, Indian poetry exists, and has managed admirably to endure – even flourish – decades after Tagore. In a country with 22 constitutionally recognised languages and a mind-boggling number of minority and tribal languages, it is obviously impossible to speak of Indian poetry as a monolith. Almost every observation runs the risk of becoming a falsification in the context of the language from the neighbouring area!
But at the risk of generalisation, a brief overview might be useful: Indian poetry in the early twentieth century was, not surprisingly, a resolutely public poetry, imbued by a zeitgeist of fervid patriotism. In the 1930s the Progressive Movement with its strong Marxist spirit ushered in a critique of uncritical nationalism, making way for gritty realism and irony. Gradually, the Indian counterpart of Western modernism also made its presence felt. The unitary public voice was fractured by a polyphony of individual voices that tried to articulate the acutely modern experience of disjunction, doubt and existential unease. Traditional metres collapsed to be replaced by freer forms. Western literary models offered inspiration, as did vast indigenous resources, ranging from folk to Vedic, Bhakti to classical Sanskrit poetry. The result was a scene of dynamism, complexity and ferment, richly varied and far from derivative.
Post-Independence poetry has been further shaped by the rising importance of women’s voices as well as those from the lowest echelons of caste and class hierarchies. For the generation of poets born after Indian Independence in 1947 – ‘midnight’s children and grandchildren’ as they are often termed – colonial India is the stuff of history books. But in a country of multiple colliding realities – of cutting-edge Information Technology and starvation deaths, of Bollywood and the Babri Masjid – there is clearly no dearth of challenges to provoke the poetic imagination.
Mapping such a plural scene is necessarily an eclectic enterprise. This domain doesn’t claim to offer you more than a glimpse – certainly not the definitive picture, if indeed such a thing exists – of the present landscape.
Our first edition presents two important contemporary poets – {id="2725" title="Keki Daruwalla"} (English) and {id="2740" title="Vasant Abaji Dahake"} (Marathi). They are seasoned practitioners, literary representatives of two important Indian languages, poets with arrestingly modern sensibilities and a considerable body of work behind them.
We also have a rich assortment of material that will furnish interested readers with a more comprehensive idea of their work: an – {id="2700" title="essay"} on Dahake’s work, an {id="2689" title="interview"} with Daruwalla as well as a {id="2693" title="personal statement"} on his poetics, in addition to an {id="2694" title="article"} on his craft as myth-maker.
With these two poets we hope to offer you an interesting entry-point into the vast, varied, unruly, obstinately unmappable terrain of the contemporary poetry scene in India.
© Arundhathi Subramaniam
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