What Is Indian English Poetry? (As Per Poets' Thematic Crux) Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

What is Indian English poetry?

Poetry if it is love for India and free discussion for Derozio, love dreams for Michael Madhusudan carried with the whiffs of an Englishman, romantic wisps and whiffs for Manmohan, yogic flashes and sadhna for Aurobindo together with the spirit of a rebel and a.cold logician having a flair for Latinized diction, the quest for identity and the theme of Indianness for Nissim, faded romanticism and mediocre flirts with it, physics and its light and darkness chapters together with the Big Bang theory for Jayanta, tragedies and tragic concepts for Daruwalla, man and woman in love in Khajuraho or Ajanta- Ellora figurines together with a study of Vatsyayana's Kamsuttra for Kamala and Shiv K.Kumar, dharma-artha-kama-moksha, a Rajneeshite shisya of the Rajneesh Ashrama, a modern girl desperate and distraught with materialism taking to the recourse of dharma-yoga, but the yogi there in the ashrama not a yogi, but a bhogi, a dhongi.

Poetry of the missing man is that of Adil jussawalla's, the Parsi man cuts the mythic ice as for re-settlement locating from Iran or Persia as does Daruwalla so often with his references to Fire Hymns and the Doongar Vari on which the Parsis expose their dead. But Adil's is of Eklavya and Karna, a poet of Bombay describing his return from England, the sojourn and travels into Europe. As for Dilip Chitre father keeps travelling, journeying by train. Jayanta's is a study in absurdity, nihilism, existentialism and nothingness. On reading him, there arises a question, why is he absurd, nothing is what, what it is, is nothing? To read him is to be sad and sorry, devastated and distraught. Nothingness, nothingness is the theme he reaches at.

Nissim is but an Indian Maharashtrian Jew who keeps saying, I don't know, don't if ask you him about Indian thought and culture, trend and tradition, way of living and temperament, mood and mentality; history and culture, thought and idea. Indian thought, culture, metaphysics, religion, philosophy, he does not, does not know them at all. An alien insider he keeps watching around. A minority boy he is a Jew but with Marathi as his lost tongue re-found; a poster boy of modernism pasting placards of.

Kamala seems to be a yogan but is not, a modern girl in saffron clothes and with a rosary but a shisya of the fake yogi, dhongi Indian baba. A modern fed up with modernity and modern living, she is but a Rajneeshite speaking of sambhoga to smadhi or just like the dissatisfied heroines of D.H.Lawrence.

Shiv K.Kumar is a late bloomer, a late starter starting poetry late in life when on the threshold of fifty, emotion and feeling seem to be dead, dried down and devoid of he writing the poems, dabbling in sexuality and intellectuality just like Lawrence himself, Lady Chatterley's husband. Better it is to view the frescoes of Ajant-Ellorah, the Konark Sun Temple, man and woman in love frescoed in stone or terracotta plates of baked clay.

To Daruwalla, poetry is Parsi view of life, poetry is a policeman's affair, a tragedian's concepts. Poetry is an attempt to define tragedy, how the elements of it, ingredients composing it. Violence, curfew, bloodshed, vengeance, wrath, hatred, enmity, rumour, accident, riot, communal frenzy, etc. form the crux of his poesy. Disease, death, disaster, are the points of his discussion. To be verbose and bombastic is the poetic target of Daruwalla. The kite, the eagle, the vulture, the hawk, add to his mythic space and are the code words of his poesy. But the question is, why is he so unsentimental?

Indian English poets had not been Indian, but Indian poets in English, Indian not, Indo-English, Indo-Anglican, Indo-Anglian in the beginning. They are not poets born, but have become in course of time, have evolved, come of age after practicing it, learning to like, struggling, serving and sustaining themselves, the self-published, self-styled poets of Indian English verse, had not been poets, but rhymers, copiers, parodists, imitators, derivers, borrowers, poetasters, non-poets and commoners turning into poets in the absence of a tradition, the so-called practitioners of Indian poesy in English, coming from different socio-economic strata and ethno-linguistico group.