INDIAN POETRY IN ENGLISH: DOM MORAES, KEKI DARUWALLA, EUNICE DE SOUZA, ADIL JUSSAWALLA, GIEVE PATEL

Abstract

Poetry written in the version of the language has little less than two centuries of history behind it. When Henry Derozio wrote his poems in this nearly 175 years ago in Kolkata and Bhagalpur-on-the-Ganga, he extolled the greatness of the ancient civilization and its sorry plight in his own times, in the process, making history as the first nationalist poet of India. In his poem To My Native Land, he wrote:My country! In thy day of glory pastA beauteous halo circled round thy brow,And worshipped as deity thou wast -Where is that glory, where is that reverence now?From this early specimen, one can readily form a definition for in of which poetry is an important part: it reflects an ethos, although written in the language. Down the decades it has been variously called Anglo-Indian, Indo-Anglian and Indo-English, before settling down for the appellation, Indian English, the latter having been fixed by the Sahitya Akademi, the National Academy of Letters of India, which has recognized as one of the languages, giving it the stamp of official approval. However, comes under the category of Asian in English in the USA and other Western nations, and Commonwealth Literature in the UK and its dominions, and largely under the rubric of colonial and post-colonial literature in a loose definition, for those who follow the latest literary theories. These shifts give an indication of the ambiguity of its identity as passed through the stages of colonialism and Independence. Its final settling down, marks its somewhat stable status after Independence - proclaiming that it finally belongs to the nation. Poets like Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Joseph Furtado, Armando Menezes, Tom Dutt, Romesh Chandra Dutt, Sri Aurobindo (Aurobindo Ghosh), Sarojini Naidu, her brother Hareendranath Chattopadhyaya, Manjeri S. Iswaran and other poets spanned the one hundred years from Derozio's untimely death at twenty-two in 1831, to the present. Rabindranath Tagore, though known for his poetry in Bengali, wrote poetry in too, though only very few would look at him as an poet.It is quite paradoxical that poetry took on a definite character of its own and flourished as part of what we now call only after the colonizers left the land. For that very reason, this poetry that gradually grew into a considerable body of work in the corpus of had to interrogate its own existence and relevance in a foreign language to begin with. The strong stand taken in favour of as an language by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime Minister of India and the founder-president of the Sahitya Akademi, helped poetry in redefine itself and assume its role in the of the nation contributing significantly in nation-building.Of the different ways of looking at and its categorization, the most significant is to follow literary trends. In the case of the poets discussed here, we begin with the early Modernist and Modernist trends, pass on to the after-Modemism (not postmodernist in the Western sense) phase, and then to the contemporary scene (of the last two decades, roughly).Modem poetry can be viewed as defining the relationship of the self with the outside world, the material aspects having been subjugated to subjective memory. It is the inner world of the poet, the psychological, spiritual entity that matters; not the actual world outside. The poet can take off from even an insignificant sight, sound or smell, and create an imaginative space within his head, which he, almost whimsically, commits to paper. The latter phase of Modernism, on the other hand, began to dwell on the actual state of affairs outside; however, the approaches were almost similar. …