For 50 years now Ratnottama Sengupta has seen Haren Thakur adroitly create art from the humdrum of tribal life. And his stylised abstract of the dark-toned humans still makes her sit up and take note.
Haren Thakur with his painting. Photo provided by Ratnottama Sengupta
A dark, stick-like outline encompasses a human of the male species. A triangle, an oblong, a rectangle. A white patch in the midst of a sepia-green landscape. A drummer. A mother with a child holding aloft a balloon. Two women bathing in a primitive pond. A quizzical duck. A wriggling worm. Trees hills fish pigs cows fox… And, yes! A train zigzagging its way through a vast expanse of meadows. As we view the watercolours of Haren Thakur from Ranchi, you might think of the rice-white art of the Warli tribals characterised by geometric shapes that depict the rituals of everyday life. I might be inclined to revisit the painted layers on the 100,000-year laterite at the prehistoric rock shelters of Bhimbetka in the foothills of the Vindhyas in Madhya Pradesh. Another viewer might think of the ancient Sauras and the adornment of their walls in their adobe huts in Odisha. The artist himself might have recollections of the animated Santhal pats he saw being created during his student years in Tagore’s Santiniketan. However, none of Haren’s figures are simplistic. They are all stylised. And so adroitly that you are bound to sit up and take note of them no matter how many times you have come across the theme.
Art by Haren Thakur. Photos provided by Ratnottama Sengupta
Form and content come seamlessly together in the paintings that Haren Thakur will exhibit in Delhi’s Habitat Centre from April 15. The artist who mastered Art at Santiniketan — home to Santhals, the native dwellers of Bengal and Odisha — then made his living in Jharkhand, which is home to 32 tribes… Indeed, from his very beginning, the beauty in the dark skin-tone of the men and women going about their chores was the most natural rhythm of life in the bazaars and streets of Bankura Bishnupur, where his family hailed from, or in Purulia, where his father made his home.
Beyond doubt, Rabindranath’s deep affection for the Santhals and the Bauls reinforced this love. Much like Gurudev, Haren finds poetry in their tilling of the earth. In their mono-toned songs and the repetitive steps of their dance. In the fulfilment they find in the primeval life and archetypal love. And when, following in the footsteps of the Universal Poet, Haren finds beauty in a grain of sand, the everyday life ceases to be an essay in deprivation and rises to the level of art.
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And his colour palette? That too came off the walls of his hostel in Santiniketan, from the frescoes and murals by Binode Behari Mukherjee. From the brick-toned ‘canvas’ that is the prehistoric rock painting of Bhimbetka. The pigment on Haren’s brush and tubes is never loud then, never grating. It is always muted, always mellow. And the impact is heightened by Haren’s utilisation of rice paper, and Chinese ink, on watercolour.
The Nepali rice paper became his signature in 1974. Prior to that he would work the rice paper in the tempera process that was ‘Master Moshai’ Nandalal Bose’s gharana, school – or Indian shaili, style. But in that process of painting layer by layer, the rice paper would lose its original character and serve merely as a background surface.
Then, in his fourth year, for a scholarship test of the Visva Bharati University, Haren experimented by soaking the rice paper in water. It became so pliant that he could spread it out like a piece of cloth. “And its texture!” It won him the scholarship — and immense appreciation from his teachers, Dinkar Kaushik and Somnath Hore. “They said, ‘Go ahead and explore this medium and this process further. It adds a dimension that has immense possibility.”
Art by Haren Thakur. Photos provided by Ratnottama Sengupta
Fifty years have gone by since, but Haren has not given it up. Sometimes, when painting on canvas, he does apply acrylic directly on its surface. But at times, even here, he pastes rice paper on the canvas, primes it with watercolour, then inks in the forms. However he adds, “when I paint on rice paper mounted on board, I do not – cannot – use acrylic. It simply doesn’t have the capacity to be absorbed by the rice paper the way watercolour gets absorbed.” So, in such cases Haren uses transparent watercolour.
Clearly the chemistry between rice paper and watercolour is amazing. Unique.
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Circling back to the content: Haren’s understated pitch was reinforced by the Zen worldview of a teacher like Somnath Hore. The master minimalist’s use of the white, barely scratched by the red of a wound, spoke volumes — and it made Haren introspect. Once, while exhibiting the Wound series, Somnath Da had said, “I discovered such depth of emotion in the reticence of tones!” This soliloquy got deeply etched in Haren’s unconscious. And eventually it came to express itself in the rusty red of the iron oxide rich Birbhum soil; the roasted brown of Purulia’s rocky earth; the weathered green of the Bauls; the soothing blue of the open sky high above the woolly white of floating clouds.
Art by Haren Thakur. Photos provided by Ratnottama Sengupta
Flattened figures. Non-realistic features. Do you see a hint of Husain – or perhaps Paul Klee – in the abstraction of the human world? I notice a reflection of the figures encountered on Egyptian papyrus. Or the African world. Haren, on his part, reiterates his original inclination: the attraction towards the lack of artifice in Adivasi life. How else would the tribals go about their daily humdrum with a baby knotted to their back? Or float in an open pool under the sun-kissed sky? To the city-bred mind, this would be unthinkable — until Haren captions it ‘Nature’s Bathtub’!
But, notwithstanding my references, the art traditions of the indigenous people over the world have never influenced Haren. “Their art tradition is so rooted in their environment – be it of Jharkhand or of any other.” Even their pigments, brush, and surface are integral to their life. But he certainly derives inspiration from the lifestyle of the original inhabitants, he affirms.
“I have always admired their direct application, the spontaneity of their form,” Haren further explains. “But I am influenced rather by the uncomplicated lives they lead. Since I was in Santiniketan I have admired the way they connect with nature in everything they do. Their intimacy with animals is incredible – they seem to be in dialogue with the animals they domesticate! This became a part of my visual world, especially when I came to live in Ranchi. The same reality imbues the lives of the natives – Oraon, Munda, Ho, Sabar, Bedia, Lohar… They rest under the tree unconcerned about how the ‘civilised’ world looks at them. They speak with the hills, with clouds in the sky, with cattle and kids, trees and waters, rivers and streams!”
Art by Haren Thakur. Photos provided by Ratnottama Sengupta
This they do with no inhibition. Because this routine is a reality they have inherited from their ancients. “That is why I believe there is nothing more ‘Contemporary’ than this,” Haren asserts. This innate natural life, and the Santiniketan grooming, combined to forge his vocabulary, his visual language.
So, in the exhibits, you encounter an abundance of water bodies. Pools and ponds. Rivers and waterfalls. Lotus and lily. Big fish. Many small fish in its tummy. Ducks and kingfishers. Hyacinth and hayfield. All this is a natural part of the countryside that has made Haren theirs.
Interestingly there is also this play with size. In one of the frames an elephant walks down the road – and at every footfall he is greeted by a number of… ants?! Look closely and you will decipher that they are dogs!
Haren is giving you a worm’s eye view. And, in addition to the proportion, he is picturing the Hindi proverb Haathi chaley bazar, kutta bhaukey hazaar/ when an elephant walks to the market, a thousand dogs will bark! Political comment? You said it!
Stay tuned to the song of the Adivasi earth, Haren.
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Ratnottama Sengupta, formerly Arts Editor of The Times of India, teaches mass communication and film appreciation, curates film festivals and art exhibitions, and translates and writes books. She has been a member of CBFC, served on the National Film Awards jury and has herself won a National Award.
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It is clear that English is employed here not as a language on loan, but as the rich, spluttering resource of the marrow and the bloodstream.-- Arundhathi Subramaniam.
At the outset, let me make a candid statement. I am a very prosaic person, someone who in her long teaching career and academic writing as well as translation, has never ventured to write poetry myself. I might seem like the odd woman out, but somehow, I have been closely following the recent trends in which Indian Poetry in English has been rapidly spreading its wings and with new volumes being published every other day, it is now a force to be reckoned with.
Tomb of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio at the South Park Street Cemetery, Kolkata.
Recapitulating literary history briefly, it is well known that Indian English Poetry (or often called Anglophone poetry in India) is the oldest form of Indian English literature. Beginning roughly from 1850 to 1900, it went through the ‘imitative’ phase when Indian poets were primarily ‘romantic’ and tried to imitate the British masters. Beginning with Derozio[1], many poets of the time — namely Rabindranath Tagore, Sri Aurobindo, Sarojini Naidu, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Toru Dutt — were also Bengalis by birth. The poetry written between 1900 to 1947 belonged to the ‘assimilative’ period and often questions were asked why the poets didn’t write in their ‘own’ languages. Post-independence poetry was primarily experimental, and when we come to contemporary Indian English poetry, we find it becoming wholly urban and middle-class. The poets are realistic and intellectually critical in the expression of their individualised experience. They go in for precision at all levels and do not stick to one genre but experiment with multiple poetic forms.
Interestingly, I realised that a whole host of Indian English poets writing at present (some have several volumes of poetry published already, whereas others have just given birth to one or two), but coincidentally many of them happen to be Bengalis — Bashabi Fraser, Sudeep Sen, Kiriti Sengupta, Sanjukta Dasgupta, Mitali Chakravarty, Angshuman Kar, Shyamasri Maji, Basudhara Roy,Radha Chakravarty, and others. It is not a complete list at all, and what makes this study more interesting is that except for a couple of them, all these poets come from an English literature background. It is also not a coincidence that most of them teach English as their profession. So, whether it be personal lyrics, free verse, memories, experiences, observations, or even translation, the English muse therefore gives them the impetus to experiment with all forms, and at the same time helps them to move away from themes like nationalism, nature, Indian culture, love etc. that dominated Indian English Poetry in earlier times.
Bashabi Fraser receiving her CBE (2021 The Queen’s New Year Honours) from Prince Charles, now King Charles III.
Bashabi Fraser is an Indian-born Bengali and a Scottish academic, editor, translator, and writer. She is a Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing at Edinburgh Napier University. Fraser’s work traverse continents in bridge-building literary projects. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2021 New Year Honours for services to education, culture and cultural integration in Scotland, in particular for her projects linking Scotland and India. Among her several volumes of poetry the Bengal and Bengali connection comes out in volumes like From the Ganga to the Tay: a poetic conversation between the Ganges and the Tay (2009), Letters to My Mother and Other Mothers (2015), My Mum’s Sari (2019), and Lakshmi’s Footprints and Paisely Patterns: Perspectives on Scoto-Indian Literary and Cultural Interrelations (2023). Fraser has worked extensively on a project about the Bengal Partition and the angst resulting from this divide expresses itself in the following poem.
This Border Can shadow lines on the earth’s surface divide language and literature, rituals and customs, rivers…and memories?
There was a time when you and I Chased the same butterfly Climbed the same stolid trees With the fearless expertise That children take for granted Before their faith is daunted Do you remember how we balanced a wheel Down dusty paths with childish zeal Do you remember the ripples that shivered As we ducked and dived in our river Do you remember what we shared Of love and meals, and all we dared Together – without fears Because we were one In all those years Before we knew that butterflies Were free to share our separate skies That they could cross with graceful ease To alight on stationary trees On either side of this strange line That separates yours from mine For whose existence we rely Entirely on our inward eye This border by whose callous side Our inert wheel lies stultified This border that cuts like a knife Through the waters of our life Slicing fluid rivers with The absurdity of a new myth That denies centuries Of friendships and families This border that now decrees One shared past with two histories This border that now decides The sky between us as two skies This border born of blood spilt free Makes you my friend, my enemy.
Another well-established poet is Sudeep Sen who studied in New Delhi and in the United States and is a global citizen, so to say. Sudeep’s literary output is enormous and some of the titles of his volumes of poetry have subtle references to Indianness and Bengaliness embedded in them as well. Mention may be made of volumes like Leaning Against the Lamp-Post (1983), The Man in the Hut (1986), Kali in Ottava Rima (1992), Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (1997), and several others. Though he might not do it consciously, his Bengaliness remains embedded in his psyche.
Kiriti Sengupta who has been awarded the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize (2018) for his contribution to literature, is a poet, editor, translator, and publisher. What is more significant is that along with Bitan Chakraborty, he mans the publishing house Hawakal, which has already carved a niche for itself as the largest publisher of Indian Poetry in English. Several poets mentioned in this essay have seen their creations see the light of the day through Hawakal Publishers and they have done yeomen service in this regard. As an established poet, Sengupta has several volumes of poetry to his credit. His collection from 2019, called Rituals, is very different from the work readers usually read in that there is a narrative thread in many poems that is not there simply to tell a story but to ultimately present a meditation on an aspect of life and the modern world that they haven’t considered before. “Fleeing the house and leaving the doors ajar. Is it perversion or fallacy?”
In an earlier volume entitled Solitary Stillness (2018), Sengupta does not give away the traits that have pervaded his poetry, he has not forgotten his Bengali roots, and has once again drawn his poetry on the canvas of the time that has been rooted in Calcutta. As he elaborates upon this point in his professional website, here, he makes a reference to Lapierre, and indeed, the ‘city of joy’ tag sounds fake just as we read that particular poem, which is so natural, that it almost appears to have been spoken by a resident of a city, one who is not a poet. According to him, that person who complains about water logging or that person for whom any tag of romanticism about the city is bourgeois, it is nothing but a label that’s needed to promote consumerism.
Mitali Chakravarty, the indefatigable editor of Borderless Journal, wrote to me saying that she is happy I feel she belongs to Bengal, “I call myself a Bengali and a human”. Though a non-resident Bengali, her perception of her own work and Bengali cultural identity is clearly revealed in a poem published in The Daily Star (Bangladesh)[2].
Confused
I am mixed up – cannot help English and Bengali under my belt
I can read a bit of Hindi Cannot understand much of French A little Chinese …low class, they said… I am mixed up – cannot help English and Bengali under my belt
I grew up thinking I will find a way But now pidgin is all that I can say I write in English – the language borrowed from the West The language that taught us or brought us unrest The language that through The Raj spread Importing Nationalism in its tread I am mixed-up – cannot help English and Bengali under my belt
But my life is that of the non-English A probashi Bengali at best
People say I am not typical, not quite the right type A mixed-up Bengali – I said Culture is something I dread at every tread Because what Culture I have is mine - Not of a Race, a Country or Religion – Human Being is the only race to which I belong
Help protect my home, the Earth – its every drop, its every stone
In a world of 7.7 billion, can I be alone? I am mixed up – cannot help English and Bengali under my belt
Though she has been writing poetry for a long time, Mitali’s first poetry collection, Flight of the Angsana Oriole: Poemswas published by Hawakal only in October 2023. In the ‘Introduction’ to this volume, she states that her random collection of poems “are sometimes of the past” as she knew it and “sometimes of the present. And sometimes in quest of a future or a dream that she hopes will go to create a more hopeful future than the world presents to us currently.” The poems in this volume are personal; some talk of her journey through life, the world as she sees it, some even influenced by her travels across the world. She further states: “Inherent in each line is not just the influence of my experiences in many countries but the nurturing I had in India, where I was born, educated and spent the first two decades of my earthly existence.” So, poems like ‘Death of Lalon’, ‘Shivratri’, ‘Kali Rise’, ‘Shraddha‘ [last respects] and a few others do convey the subconscious Bengaliness embedded in her psyche, irrespective of where she physically resides now.
Radha Chakravarty, a prolific writer and translator, Former Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at Ambedkar University, Delhi, has recently joined the bandwagon of Indian Poetry in English with her debut collection of poems Subliminal published by Hawakal Publishers in 2023. In a detailed interview given to Mitali Chakravarty for the March issue of Borderless Journal[3], she tells us about her aims and ambitions as a poet and how most of the poems in Subliminal are independent compositions, not planned for pre-conceived anthology.
My poetry actually delves beneath surfaces to tease out the hidden stories and submerged realities that drive our lives. And very often, those concealed truths are startlingly different from outward appearances. I think much of my poetry derives its energy from the tensions between our illusory outer lives and the realities that lurk within.
Many of Radha Chakravarty’s poems express the feeling of Bengaliness in different perspectives. We read about the typically soft quilt called kantha in Bengali in the poem ‘Designs in Kantha‘ thus:
Sewn into soft, worn layers, forgotten fabric of grandmother tales – patterns of the past, secret memories, hidden designs, intriguing patterns in silk strands dyed in delicate dreamy shades— embroidered storylines in exquisite, dainty kantha-stitch.
When Mitali Chakravarty asks her why she writes in English though it isn’t her mother tongue, she answers:
Having grown up outside Bengal, I have no formal training in Bengali. I was taught advanced Bengali at home by my grandfather and acquired my deep love for the language through my wide exposure to books, music, and performances in Bengali, from a very early age. I was educated in an English medium school. At University too, I studied English Literature. Hence, like many others who have grown up in Indian cities, I am habituated to writing in English. I translate from Bengali, but write and publish in English, the language of my education and professional experience. Bengali belongs more to my personal, more intimate domain, less to my field of public interactions…. Both Bengali and English are integral to my consciousness, and I guess this bilingual sensibility often surfaces in my poetry. In many poems, such as ‘The Casket of Secret Stories,’ ‘The Homecoming’ or ‘In Search of Shantiniketan’, Bengali words come in naturally because of the cultural matrix in which such poems are embedded.
Of course, the poet also mentions that all her poetry is not steeped in Bengali. In fact, in most of her poems, Bengali expressions don’t feature at all, because the subjects have a much wider range of reference. As a globe trotter, Radha has written about different places and journeys between places.
Another debut book of poems that Hawakal Publishers brought to light in December 2023 entitled Forgive Me, Dear Papa and other poems is written by Shyamasri Maji, an Assistant Professor of English teaching at Durgapur Women’s College, West Bengal. Dedicating this collection of poems to her “incurably romantic self,” Maji feels that “being ‘romantic’ in this context is being imaginative, reflective, puerile, rebellious and emotional.” The poems are a mixed bag, belonging to different thematic issues. Some focus on a woman’s radical views on the gender hierarchies in our society, in some nature plays the role of mediator between the narrator and the world, the idea of loss of love, which is closely linked with thoughts of death, while a few poems also represent an interpersonal dialogue between the self and the other. Some of Maji’s poems focus on the role of memory whereas some are experimental in the sense that they portray a woman’s comprehension of a man’s thoughts. Stressing upon the fluidity of identities, she shows how love, pain, pandemic, separation and grief affect all human beings irrespective of an individual’s gender and sexual orientation.
Six books of published poems and twenty-five years of creative journey has been a consistent exploration by the poet Sanjukta Dasgupta as she tries to find the path of freedom from among the misleading mesmeric mazes that threaten and stifle both sense and sensibility. As a woman poet with a strong feminist stance, Dasgupta admits in an online interview given to Basudhara Roy[4]:
Though I read Bangla poetry since my schooldays, I wrote my poems in English. It was an unconscious choice. Much later I learnt that I should have been embarrassed about writing in English rather than in my home language, my mother tongue Bangla. The poems written in English kept on being born on the page with embarrassing regularity.
Writing poetry is an irrepressible urge for me. It is, in a way, far more intense than the biological labour pain. This labour pain of creativity leaves me restless till the words are born on the page. But the creative process allows endless revisions; a biological production is largely about acceptance, neither revision nor deletion are considered ethical practices. In the case of poetry, it is not about choice, it is a compulsion which is intense and gratifying and multiple revisions often lead to the emergence of the perfect product.
The title of Dasgupta’s poetry book Lakshmi Unbound (Chitrangi, 2017) is very significant. Lakshmi being an intrinsic part of the fabric of Bengali culture, the radicality and dissidence of the idea of ‘Alakshmi[6]’ will require no explanation to a Bengali reader.
She thinks the core agenda in Lakshmi Unbound is a defiant, determined search for freedom. So, it is not just deconstruction, it is an endeavour to call attention to the need to destabilize the deep-rooted stereotypes that have controlled the minds and mobility of women. In Sita’s Sisters (Hawakal, 2019), she crafts a revisionist feminist mythology by taking up familiar figures like Sita, Lakshmi, Kali, Mira and attempts to free these mythic figures from their claustrophobic space so that they can be re-invented in sync with the contemporary times.
Residing in Jamshedpur, in the state of Jharkhand, Basudhara Roy is an established poet and has several books and publications to her credit. In her own website, is stated: “Committed to an undying affair with words, Basudhara finds in poetry an epistemological and existential skylight. She writes because she feels she must test words on her tongue, pulse, moods, agitation, abstraction and satire. She is convinced that words can change the world and hence, she works at them in her own culinary way – washing, peeling, grating, pounding, baking, sautéing, kneading, roasting, often flaming them for what they might yield.”
The following poem from Stitching a Home (Red River, 2021) considers the eternal problem of a woman that plagues women writers a lot.
The Right Kind of Woman
The right kind of woman will inspire affection, regard, trust. Not promiscuity, never lust.
Bred by a mother equally right, she knows to avert her eyes to innuendoes, telling smiles.
In crowded buses, shops, streets, she knows to shut tight, bud-like, relinquish space, circumscribe limbs.
Above all, she knows the prudence of holding her tongue, of choosing silence’s worth over wordy rebellion.
Schooled to surrender in dark rooms, she knows, unasked, to feign desire, moan, stifle, sigh on cue.
On her forehead, she had a third eye to emit fire, take sides, rake storms. Last night, its lid rusted
with disuse fell out, and the right kind of woman laughed herself to death over all she had left undone, unsaid.
“Writing poetry is an isolation exercise” says Angshuman Kar, an established Bengali poet who by profession is also an English Professor at a university in West Bengal. His book of poems Wound is the Shelter (Hawakal, June 2023) is unique and different from the other volumes discussed here because the poems are all translated by the poet himself from his original Bengali poems. In the ‘Introduction’, Kar tells us that authors who translate themselves often seem to be unhappy about the task of translating their own works. The Marathi poet Arun Kolkatkar likens it to incest, — “like making love to your own daughters.” Critics of translation studies have both supported and criticised self-translation. Those who support it argue that the author knows their work the best and hence s/he is the best translator of their own work. Those who oppose self-translation argue that the author-translator takes too much liberty while translating his/her own work; thus, the translation hardly remains faithful to the original. In such a situation Kar says, “Without being critical, I must say that I love self-translation. I enjoy translating my own work, I love committing incest. It makes me a better poet…. As a self-translator, I find incest healthy. It makes me a better poet – il miglior fabbro.“
Coming to the individual poems in Wound is the Shelter, it need not be reiterated that most of them portray universal feelings but at the same time are seeped in Bengali culture as well. In “My Poems” Kar talks about Jungle Mahal, the three districts of West Bengal that are full of jungles; in “World,” he writes about blooms of a sal tree and shiuli flowers; in “Memory Card” he talks about a bus ride to reach his maternal uncle’s house in Bankura from where he went to the studio to take a family photograph — “Grandma in the middle/On either side we – three brothers, two sisters and a cousin”. In “Father” he mentions how his father’s bereavement fades with time and how his portrait adorns the wooden throne in which gods and goddesses are kept and he stands with Kali, Shiva and Durga. In “Neelkantha” he refers to Shiva; in “Park” he states how man forgets grief when he comes to a park, “That is why in a city as sad and lonely as Kolkata the number of parks is always high.” The five-part poem “Tiger” is also very powerful, “there is a tiger inside every human being” he states. Kar also mentions about the mask of a demon of Chhou dance of Purulia, the aal path in paddy fields, the Chandi mandap[7] of a small village, the man called Bhagaban Das who labours in a factory, and the man called Shubhasis Babu who rents him cars, whose voice he hears but has not seen him. Thus, even in his transcreated poems, Kar’s Bengaliness expresses itself overtly.
It is not possible to analyse the poems of each of the Bengali poets that I have mentioned above within the purview of this single essay, and so I have just selected a few of them (especially the poets who have one or two volumes to their credit at present). As mentioned earlier, though Bengali by birth, all the poets rendering their emotions in English, do often consciously or unconsciously express multicultural elements, Bengali cultural nuances, and idiomatic force in their poems. As the trend for providing glossary is passe now, much is left to the readers’ imagination, but still certain occasional Bengali words and phrases make their poems even more appealing.
After sharing my random thoughts about Indian Poetry in English in general and selectively mentioning a few Indian English poets who also happen to be Bengali and often unconsciously exude a sort of Bengaliness in some of their poems, without attempting to sound rather parochial, I wholeheartedly wish to see more volumes of their poetry being published in future. I conclude by quoting a very salient observation made by Arundhathi Subramaniam who is not wholly optimistic about the situation, but believes that despite hurdles in publishing, the voices of Indian poets writing in English would be heard [8]:
Despite the clunky discourse that continues to hover around it, however, Indian poetry in English endures, even flourishes, seventy years after Independence. Publishers may be few and far between, the royalties meagre, the critical climate thick with indifference or theoretical bluster, and the poets themselves bewildered by disputes over their identity, even their existence. But poetry, in its mysteriously resilient fashion, continues to be written, shared and discussed (if sometimes with more passion than discernment). … I am not ecstatic about the state of Indian poetry in English. (But then I am not ecstatic about poetry; only, at times, about poems.) What I do know is that Indian poetry in English is alive. And like all things alive, it engages, it annoys, it provokes, it excites. On several occasions, it has given me the jolt of wonder for which I turn to poetry in the first place.
Considering the slightly mellow tone in Subramaniam’s observation, I personally feel Indian English Poetry has become a significant force in the literary arena at present and will grow stronger with time. Seasoned poets who have several volumes of poetry published already, as well as the fresher ones whose debut volumes promise a lot more to come in future, can all look forward to seeing their ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions’ in print and carry on the legacy of Indian Poetry in English to newer heights. And sure enough, the sub-genre of Bengali Indian English poetry can be researched in greater details in future.
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[1] Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809–1831), poet and assistant headmaster of Hindu College, Calcutta, a radical thinker and started the Young Bengal Movement.
Borderless 