Chronicling the growth of English poetry in India
The Penguin Book of Indian Poets is the culmination of a 20-year project. It is a map that would be definitive in its way, at least for a decade or two. In that sense, the toil was a gift
On Rigor in Science is a one-paragraph short story written by the blind seer Jorge Luis Borges, which he credited to a fictional writer, Suarez Miranda. It is a story beloved of anthologists, for it describes with some empathy and a great deal of precision the anthologist’s lonesome dilemma. The story, in its entirety, goes something like this:
“…In that empire, the art of cartography attained such exactitude that the map of a single province occupied the entirety of a city, and the map of the empire occupied the entirety of a province. In time, those early maps were deemed unsatisfactory, and the cartographers created a map of the empire that was the size of the empire…succeeding generations, however, thought that vast map unusable. They left it untended, open to the elements of sun and rain. Even today, in the deserts of the west, tattered fragments of the map are still to be found, sheltering an occasional beast or beggar.”
As to the cartographer, so to the anthologist.
I am the editor of The Penguin Book of Indian Poets, a title whose vast purview may well extend to a map of the known world. This enormous volume expands the notion of what makes an “Indian” poet, and includes writers from all over the world. This is the fourth and final version of a project I began in 2003, with an anthology for Fulcrum ,a poetry annual edited by my friend, Philip Nikolayev. Titled Give the Sea Change and it Shall Change: Fifty-six Indian Poets, it was followed, some years later, by two expanded versions, The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (Bloodaxe) and 60 Indian Poets (Penguin India). In other words, The Penguin Book of Indian Poets is the culmination of a 20-year project. I hope and pray it will be the last anthology I edit.
Why such a hope? Because, as you have no doubt guessed by now, the anthologist does not work for money. Neither does the anthologist work for renown. (There is very little renown in poetry, and it rarely descends to editors.) So why do it? I am loathe to mention such intangibles as “love”. Instead I’ll say it felt to me like a duty, and a way to manage the enforced solitude of a pandemic: To create a map that would be definitive in its way, at least for a decade or two. In that sense, the toil was a gift.
I took as my starting point, the poetry written after Independence. More accurately, the year 1952, when Nissim Ezekiel published his first collection, A Time to Change, with the Fortune Press in London. Until Ezekiel, Indian poetry in English was a 19th-century product that had survived well into the 20th. A backward glance over the 150 years before Ezekiel turns up only four figures of note, three of them Bengali, all of them Calcuttabased: Tagore, Toru Dutt, Michael Madhusudan Dutt (no relation), and Henry Louis Derozio. In the decades that followed there was a flowering, a burst, unexpected bouquets of shit and roses, to quote Rimbaud.
For Indian poets writing in English, modernism arrived at roughly the same time as Independence, which is to say after it had already established itself as the new orthodoxy in other parts of the world. It came to regional Indian languages long before it came to English. In Marathi, to take one instance, the modernist movement attempted to recast seemingly immovable social divisions, including those of caste, in a literature that was nothing if not indigenous. These writers were in a hurry to overthrow the conventions of the Indian bourgeoisie as well as those of their former colonial masters. Later Marathi modernists (such as Dilip Chitre and Arun Kolatkar) owed their allegiance not to British but to European and American poetry, particularly to the Surrealists and the Beats.
Indian poetry in English took longer to emerge from the influence of “English” poetry — by no means a situation peculiar to verse. The most prominent Indian modernists of the fifties, Ezekiel and Dom Moraes, shaped the canon and cleared the way, but the sounds they made were British and they confined even their experimentation to the essential iamb. It wasn’t until the seventies that internationalism established itself on the English page in India, with the Clearing House editions of Eunice de Souza, Adil Jussawalla, Jayanta Mahapatra, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Kolatkar, and with the psychic weather poets such as AK Ramanujan, Kamala Das and R Parthasarathy brought to their lines. The next generation of Indian poets, the poets of the eighties and nineties in erstwhile Bombay and other cities, were more conservative in some ways than their immediate forebears, and there was a return to the canonical influence of mid-20th century British poetry. But by the second decade of the 21st century there had been a flowering, an uprising, and a new generation of poets who cared little about the usual poetry presses, who published poems on the internet and rewrote the canon in their own performative or spoken or gender-fluid image.
While most anthologies of Indian poetry tend to choose depth over breadth, I wanted this one to be different. Like shabby clubs that share membership and furniture, the same poems by a dozen or so poets have been printed and reprinted over the decades, central figures have been left out, and the perpetual reappearance of poets and poems leaves the reader with a sense of claustrophobia, of a narrow world defined by its own obsessions. Indian poetry, wherever its writers are based, should really be seen as one body of work. Towards that ambition, my anthology includes poets who live in Fiji, France, Canada, Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom — and India; 94 poets separated by the sea, presented not chronologically but with a view to verticality.
Another element that separates this anthology from the ones that have come before and the ones that will follow is a suite of extraordinary photographs taken by the reclusive and visionary Madhu Kapparath, whose brave and lonely project it was to photograph Indian poets and writers, at his own expense, over some 30 years. This has resulted in an archive of breath-taking historical scope. Many of his subjects are now dead; and the intimacy of the portraits will never be equalled. Madhu’s practice is simply to befriend the figures who interest him, and to spend time with them. When eventually he takes out his camera, it is to make the kind of portrait no parachutist-photographer could hope to emulate.
Jeet Thayil is an author and a poet The views expressed are personal