7 Introduction/Background/Evolution of Indian English Poetry

Abdul Mubid Islam

Introduction

A probe into the aetiology of Indian English literature reveals that the impact of the West in shaping its foundations is undisputed. The presence of the West and more so of the East India Company and their collective efforts to promote and spread English in a country like India that has been markedly characterised by a multiplicity of languages is in itself intriguing. The enthusiasm demonstrated by the Indians towards the spread of English in India accentuated the policy of the British to go ahead in rendering meaning to their proposed venture.

The growth of Indian English literature is the attempt of a re-awakened national spirit to find a new mode of self-expression. In other words, Indian English literature begins with a spirited effort to re-discover India’s glory in the past. It is quite remarkable that scholars like Sir William Jones who founded the Bengal Asiatic Society as early as 1784, H.T.Colebrooke who authored “Degist of Hindu Law on Contracts and Succession” and James Prinsep were scholars with a passion for oriental culture. They were the representative white men in India who were not just persuaded by imperial motives of expanding their territories but also perpetually strived for a consummation of the Indian ethos.

M.K.Naik in his book The History of Indian English Literature catalogues the following as factors that prepared the climate for the growth of Indian writing in English:

The pressing need for Indian clerks, translators and lower officials in administration;
With the rise of the Evangelical Movement in Britain, the ideal of spreading the word of Christ among the colonised natives assumed vital importance for some Englishmen;
The functioning of missionary schools which taught English besides the vernacular languages;
The secret motive of dismantling the sanctimonious tenets of Hinduism and the pretention that the spread of English would serve the purpose of a potent weapon to civilise the Indians whom they regarded as lesser breeds without any law;
The East India Company also thought that the spread of English education among the natives would lead to the assimilation of Western culture by the Indians and that this would stabilize the administrative set up.

In addition, there were certain other factors that prepared the climate of for the growth of Indian English literature. In the first place, it was Raja Rammohan Roy who championed the cause of English education. In his famous “Letter on English Education”, addressed to the then Governor-General Lord Amherst in 1823, Roy vehemently argued against the establishment of a Sanskrit school in preference to one imparting English education. In 1816, Roy established an association to promote European science and learning which led to the foundation of The Hindu College at Calcutta on 20th January, 1817. Secondly, it was Macaulay’s famous Minute on Education of 1835 that intensified the pace of what Roy had advocated so far. Lord William Bentinck, the then Governor-General, accepted the extremist stance and recommendations of Macaulay in favour of English education and in 1835 unequivocally declared that the great object of the British government ought to be the promotion of European literature and science among the natives of India, and all funds appropriated for the purpose of education would be best employed on English education alone.

However, Sir Charles Wood tried to correct the extremism of this policy and in his Despatch of 1854 observed that the object of extending European knowledge to all classes of people must be realised by means of adopting the English language in the higher branches of instruction and by that of the vernacular to the great mass of people. This led to the establishment of the first three Indian Universities—those of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras—in 1857. Thus, the growth of the Universities was one of the cardinal factors that prepared the groundwork for the resurgent Indian genius which within a short duration ushered in a renaissance in various fronts: political, social, cultural and literary. With the passage of time, the initial hiccups that surfaced with the introduction of English in India gradually subsided for the better. Thus, what we have today is a body of Indian writing in English that has transcended spatial barriers to disseminate to the world the patterns of Indian life and thought and its trans-cultural felicities.

The entire gamut of Indian English poetry or Indo-Anglian poetry (as it was so called during the pre-independence era) spanning nearly a hundred and fifty years, written by the British serving in India and on Indian themes, began during the 80s of the eighteenth century. In general, the history of Indo-Anglian poetry began with Henry Louis Vivian Derozio who was half- Indian and half- Portuguese. As a teacher of English in the Hindu College, Calcutta, he inspired a number of young and dynamic youths with a love for the English language and literature. The first quarter of the nineteenth century was the period of incubation for Indo- Anglian poetry and Derozio was then the moving spirit. The publication of Indo-Anglian poems by Indian poets like Kashi Prasad Ghose, Gooru Churn Dutt, Rajnarayan Dutt, M.M.Dutt assumed prominence during the second quarter of the century. The famous Minute of Macauley on Indian education which popularised the teaching of English language in the vernacular medium further helped to promote the growth and development of Indo-Anglian poetry.

It is worth mentioning that Indo-Anglian poetry took shape under the enervating influences of English romanticism which accounted for the excessive preoccupation of the then Indian poets with romantic themes and subject matter. It learned to lisp in the manner of Byron and Scott in the poems of Derozio, M.M.Dutt and others. The deeper tone and accents of romanticism were caught by poets who came later during the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Govind Dutt, the father of Toru Dutt was the first to introduce the introspective vein in poems like ‘Romance’ and ‘Wordsworth’ respectively. The process of assimilating romanticism in all its variegated aspects continued well on into the century and even later. Shelley, for instance, found his earliest and best disciple in Tagore. At the same time, the impact of Victorian poetry was being felt on the Indo-Anglian scene.

Genuine lyric poetry and lyrical narrative poetry both of the Romantic and Victorian type came fully into vogue in the last quarter of the nineteenth century with the generation of Toru Dutt. “A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields” by Aru and Toru Dutt was published in 1875. Toru Dutt’s “Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan” was published in 1882 followed by R.C.Dutt’s “Lays of Ancient India” and his renderings of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata that were published in 1894, Manmohan Ghose’s “Love Songs and Elegies” (1898) and Sri Aurobindo’s “Songs to Myrtilla” (1895) and Sarojini Naidu’s “The Golden Threshold” (1905) were some of the prominent works that echoed the Romantic and Victorian sentiment. While the other poets of this quarter continued in the Romantic and Victorian strain, or even emulated the satirical tradition of Dryden and Pope, Manmohan Ghose, Sri Aurobindo and Sarojini Naidu who had spent their impressionable years in England when the Decadent poets dominated the scene, revealed the strong influence of this trend in their early poems. It is interesting to note that ‘decadence’ became the main feature of both Manmohan Ghose’s and Sarojini Naidu’s poetry. However, the introduction of Indian themes gave a new vitality to Naidu’s poetry. Sri Aurobindo very soon surpassed the manner of his “Songs of Myrtilla” and blazed a new trail in poetry which many were to follow later. The last quarter of the nineteenth century is, on the whole, the golden period of Indo-Anglian poetry.

It would be quite unjust if we do not take into consideration the contribution made by the stalwarts of Indian English poetry who in the first place solidified the edifice of a literature which catered to the then public taste. English literature is a foreign literature but its appropriation to suit the Indian condition by improvising it is something quite commendable. Eminent and prolific writers like Raja Rammohan Roy, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, Romesh Chunder Dutt and Sri Aurobindo and Rabindranath Tagore among many others made possible the concept of an Indian literature in the English language for which all later generation of writers stand indebted till date.

Raja Rammohan Roy: (1774-1833)

The renaissance in modern Indian literature begins with Raja Rammohan Roy (often called ‘the father of Bengal Renaissance’) who was born in Bengal on 22nd May 1772. It was when working with Digby, a British Official that Raja Rammohan Roy completed his mastery of the English language. Leaving company service, Roy returned to Calcutta in 1814 and started the Atmiya Sabha and also launched himself on the consciousness of the Calcutta society. What stirred him to action was the plight of the Indian widows, the darkness of superstition, the miasma of ignorance and the general backwardness of the country. Although attracted by Christianity, Roy realised that the bigoted Christians were as conceited as the bigoted Hindus. With the starting in 1821 of Sambad Kaumudi, a weekly paper, Roy was able to make a bolder and more sustained onslaught on the forces of prejudice and reaction.

In the first place, Rammohan Roy was an intensely religious man, a Hindu Brahmin who felt that quintessential Hinduism is identical with quintessential Islam and Christianity. He was also aware that to spread the gospels of humanity was the message of all these great faiths and it was with this universal outlook that he formed the Brahmo Samaj. Roy’s idea was to unite India through the common worship of one God by the members of all denominations. In the second place, he was a great humanist and a social worker who waged a battle against the monstrous custom of Suttee. Fortunately enough, the unanimous agreement with Lord William Bentinck, the then Governor-General of British India, made it possible to abolish Suttee in 1928.

As a writer, Roy edited periodicals in three different languages—The Brahummunical Magazine in English, Sambad Kaumudi in Bengali and Mirat-ul-Akhbar in Persian. The earliest of his writings on religion were in the form of translations: An Abridgement of the Vedanta and Renderings of the Upanishads. He wrote his first original essay in English with the title “A Defence of Hindu Theism”. This was followed by “A Second Defence of the Monotheistical System of the Vedas”. His works on the plight of women in orthodox Hindu society were numerous and deserves credit.

Roy never literally engaged in poetry which might lead the reader to ponder on the logic of introducing him in this module. The logic is that he was the guiding star of Indian English literature and that although he himself never dabbled in poetry, he solidified the very edifice of a literature that has intrinsic merit and depth.

Henry Louis Vivian Derozio: (1809-1831)

The first Indian poet of note, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio was the son of an Indo-Portuguese father and an English mother. After completing his schooling, he first tried his hand at journalism before quitting the Hindu College at Calcutta as a lecturer. His fearless spirit of inquiry, indomitable courage, his reformist idealism and his romantic enthusiasm fired the imagination of the then young generation.

Derozio’s poetic career was very short lived. He published two volumes of poetry: Poems and The Fakeer of Jungheera: A Metrical tale and Other Poems. His most successful poems are his sonnets which show a strong influence of British romantic poets in theme, sentiment, imagery and diction along with some traces of neo-classicism. His satirical verse “Don Juanics’ and the long narrative poems clearly indicate his special affinity with Byron.

The Fakeer of Jungheera is an extremely competent narrative of the tragic life of Nuleeni, a high-caste Hindu widow, rescued from the funeral pyre by a young robber-chief whose love she returns. In this fast moving tale, Derozio skilfully employs different metres to suit the changing tone and temper of the narrative.

A noteworthy feature of Derozio’s poetry is the burning nationalist zeal which is somewhat quite phenomenal. His poems “To India—My Native Land”, “The Harp of India”, and “To the Pupils of Hindu College” have an unmistakable authenticity of patriotic utterance. Derozio was also a pioneer in the use of Indian myths and legends as well as of Western classical myths. However, as fate would have it, he unfortunately died of Cholera in 1831 at the age of twenty two. Nevertheless, his contribution to Indo-Anglian poetry is undoubtedly grand and high.

Romesh Chunder Dutt: (1848-1909)

Romesh Chunder Dutt began his career first as a novelist writing in Bengali with works like The Lake of Palms, The Slave Girl of Agra, Todar Mall, Sivaji and Pratap Singh. His The Lake of Palms and The Slave Girl of Agra are English renderings of the original Bengali version. The other three were translated into English later by his son Ajay Dutt. Among the various meritorious historical surveys that he had made, those important include A History of Civilization in Ancient India, The Economic History of British India and A Brief History of Ancient and Modern Bengal.

It is however as a translator of Indian poetry into English verse that R.C.Dutt’s significance needs to be taken into account. As a poet, he rendered into English representative Sanskrit poetry sacred as well as secular from the Rig Veda to the later classical period of Kalidas and his successors. As a translator, Dutt was face to face with a host of difficulties. He had to strive hard for elevating the level of his translations to such a degree where not only should the originality of the matter be preserved but also the handling of the foreign language should be of substance and merit. Although he did not succeed in retaining the originality of the matter and manner of both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, he did however succeed in introducing these Indian epics to millions of English readers who otherwise would have never heard of them. His position in Indian English literature will always be seen as a novelist and a poet vested with an outstanding potential to make the translated material as effective as possible.

Sri Aurobindo: (1872-1950)

Sri Aurobindo’s career is a glorious chronicle of progress from that of a patriot to poet, yogi to seer. Being an accomplished classical scholar, the hallmark of Aurobindo’s poetry is a mystical experience which he describes as “Narayana Darshana” (or to envision the visage of God). His long poetic career spanning sixty years yielded an impressive volume of verse of several kinds: lyrical, narrative, philosophical and epic.

His early “Short Poems” celebrates the themes of love, sorrow, death and liberty in a typically romantic style and is coloured by the writer’s acquaintance with Greek literature. The note of rapturous mystic awareness in “Short Poems” is unfolded in pieces like “Invitation” and “Revelation”. Besides, in “Short Poems”, Aurobindo attempts reflective and symbolic verse. The ‘Poems in New Metres” contains some of his best known mystical lyrics like “The Bird of Fire”, “Thought the Paraclete”, and “Rose of God”. The longer poems of the early period are three complete narratives: “Urvasie”, “Love and Death” and “Baji Prabhou”. “Urvasie” which is written in blank verse deals with the Indian legend of King Pururavus and his love for the celestial damsel Urvasie. The use of similes, set descriptions and the grandiloquent diction elevates it to the level of Milton’s grand work Paradise Lost. The central theme of “Love and Death” is love and the poem is based on an ancient Hindu legend of Puru, son of the rishi (sage) Bhrigu and his beloved Priyamvada, the daughter of the celestial nymph Menaka. Here again, an essentially lyrical narrative is unsuccessfully sought to be given an epic colouring. The poem is characterised by Miltonic similes and Latinised diction. “Baji Prabhou” which deals with military heroism is founded on the historical incident of the heroic self-sacrifice of Baji Prabhou Deshpande who to cover Sivaji’s retreat, held the pass of Rangana for two hours with a small company of men against twelve thousand Mughuls.

Sri Aurobindo experimented much with the quantitative metre (hexameters). His two most ambitious efforts in quantitative hexameters are “Ilion” and “Ahana”. The “Ilion” is set against the backdrop of the Trojan War and deals with the clash between Achilles and the Amazonian Queen Penthesilea. On the other hand, “Ahana” is the Divine Dawn who descends into the world and is greeted by the ‘Hunters of Joy’, ‘The Seekers of Knowledge’, and ‘The Climbers in Quest of Power’.

In fact, Aurobindo’s entire poetic career can be seen as a long and hectic preparation for the writing of his magnum opus “Savitri”. “Savitri” is a re-telling of the well-known legend of Prince Satyavan and Savitri his devoted wife who rescues him from death. It is a story of pure and unconditional love conquering death. In “Savitri”, Aurobindo invests the major characters with a symbolic significance and also adds a new dimension of a highly complex inner action. “Savitri” is the symbol of transformed humanity and can be seen to have scaled the heights of cosmic consciousness. “Savitri” glorifies Love Eternal—the form of Love that conquers Death itself. Savitri tells Death:

My love is not a hunger of the heart

My love is not a craving of the flesh

It came to me from God, to God returns

(Savitri)

An epic of immense strength, it is divided into twelve books and the twelve books in turn are again divided into three parts. From all accounts, Sri Aurobindo stands as the first major poetic voice in the annals of Indian English verse—an honour justly conferred upon him judging by the degree and range of his varied achievements—be it the lyric, the narrative or the epic mode.

Rabindranath Tagore: (1861-1941)

Hailed by Mahatma Gandhi as ‘the Great Sentinel’, Rabindranath Tagore was one of those versatile men of his age who was a poet, dramatist, novelist, short story writer, composer, painter, thinker, educationist, nationalist and internationalist. As a poet, Tagore presents a case of literal bilingualism. With the exception of a solitary poem “The Child” (1931) and a few verse epigrams originally written in English, he wrote mostly in Bengali and creatively translated some of his works into English with such remarkable success that his very first effort won him the coveted Noble Prize for literature in 1913. One must note that W.B. Yeats on whose recommendations Tagore won the Prize for his English translation of “Gitanjali” was himself awarded the coveted Prize much later in 1929.

It was by sheer accident that Tagore began his career as an Indian English poet. In 1912, some of his translations of Bengali poems into English fell into the hands of William Rothenstein and William Butler Yeats who hailed them rapturously. This inspired Tagore to write poems in English. It is to Tagore’s authorship that the following works are attributed:

Gitanjali (1912), The Gardener (1913), The Crescent Moon (1913), Fruit-Gathering (19160, Stray Birds (1916), Lover’s Gift and Crossing (1918), The Fugitive (1921), Fireflies (1928) and Poems (1942)

As an Indian English poet, renowned mainly for translating his work into English, Tagore’s interests rest chiefly on God and devotion, love and childhood. “Gitanjali” is concerned with devotion and its motto is as the poet says, “I am here to sing the songs”. These songs although firmly rooted in the ancient tradition of Indian saint poetry yet reveal a highly personal quest for the divine characterised by a great variety of moods and approaches. Tagore’s emphasis is on the omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience of the Almighty. Besides, Tagore asserts that the search for the divine is at best understood in the largeness of His creations that give form to the world in all its dimensions. Although the path through which the divine is to be sought is strewn with thorns, Tagore is at once willing to tread this path;

Like a flock of homesick cranes

Flying night and day back to their mountain-nest,

Let all my life take its voyage to its eternal home

In one salutation to thee

(Gitanjali)

In “The Gardener”, Tagore tried his hand on the theme of love in all its variety and complexity and here he was certainly influenced by the English poet Robert Browning though his setting, unlike Browning, is invariably rural and feudal. Tagore is both subjective and objective in his love poems. He is able to present both the male and female point of view in love. In “The Crescent Moon”, the chief motif is childhood. Looking at the child with adult eyes, Tagore mostly gives the reader the typical romantic view of childhood explicated much in the manner of the famous English romantic exponent William Wordsworth.

Tagore’s verse in English is essentially lyrical in quality and his subjects are the elemental subjects of all lyric poetry—God, Nature, Love, Childhood, Life and Death. His is a poetry steeped in the Indian ethos because he has delved into the deepest recesses of the Upanishads. His style at its very best skilfully controls the pliant rhythms of free verse combining the feminine grace of poetry with the virile power of prose. It is a style that derives its strength from the subtly controlled tension between its easy colloquial idiom and stark simplicity on the one hand and the antique flavour or archaisms and the strange colourfulness of the feudal imagery of king and prince, chariot and sword, garland and gold on the other hand. At his best, Tagore remains a poet with a delicate sensibility deeply Indian in spirit.

Overview of the Twentieth Century:

The first quarter of the twentieth century produced a number of poets who continued to write in the Romantic and Victorian strain. A.F. Khabardar, N.V.Thadani, Nizamat Jung, Harindranath Chattopadhayaya and Ananda Acharya exploited Indian or oriental thought and legend and wrote in the typical Indian manner. But there were other Indo-Anglian poets who responded to the trend that was now perceptible in English poetry—Georgianism; Robi Dutt, Joseph Furtado, P. Sheshadri, G.K. Chettur and Kabragi revealed a Georgian love of colloquial idiom and of a simple and forthright handling of poetical themes.

The second quarter of the twentieth century may be said to be that of humanism and mysticism. V.N. Bhushan, M.Krishnamoorty, S.R.Dongerkery upheld the humanistic trend while Nolinikanta Gupta, Dilip Kumar Roy, J.Krishnamurthi, Nishikanto and Themis carried forward the tradition of mystical poetry. Poets like Nilima Devi, B.Rajan, R.R.Shreshta and B.Dhingra showed a love of compact expression and a quest for new techniques. In addition to the ‘progressive’ manner of the 30s, there had also been an attempt to incorporate Surrealism into the texture of Indo-Anglian Poetry.

The third quarter of the twentieth century has been seen as the further strengthening of modernist as well as neo-symbolist trends. Poets like B.B. Paymaster and Adi K. Sett has continued to write in the well established Indo-Anglian tradition but the Calcutta Writer’s Workshop has published the work of poets like Kamala Das, V.D. Trivedi and A.K. Ramanujan and Nissim Ezekiel and others which revealed significant developments on modernist lines in Indo-Anglian Poetry. The trend towards neo-symbolism is seen in the works of poets like Nahar, Themis and Prithuindra.

The last quarter of the twentieth century has been mainly dominated by the experimentation mode not only with themes but also with style. This trend owes a great deal to the socio- political and economic condition of a post-independent India thriving hard to make its mark in the global arena. The issues taken up by poets like Ezekiel, Mahapatra, Jussawalla, Daruwalla, Kolatkar, Shahid Ali and Dharker quintessentially reflects the present Indian scenario. With the advent of modernism and the popularization of the thematic preoccupations of post-modernism, these poets have laboured with exceptionally finesse to give voice to a new Indian ethos that faithfully delineates the lived experiences of the Indians in this modern techno-crazed world. While on the one hand, some of these poets are sceptical about cultural heritage in the context of progress, on the other hand, some are equally doubtful about forging a unique identity along set standards. Philosophical inquisitiveness has been the forte of poets like Sri Aurobindo and M.M. Dutt; but this inquisitiveness takes a different aura in the hands of the later poets who sees in human life the potential to question back that which is pristine and divine. Jussawalla for instance harps upon the possibility of losing one’s own identity in Missing Person while Kolatkar defames Indian mythical sanctity in Pie-Dog. The notion of a grand poetics is subverted with the rise of subaltern studies which brags the notion of questioning the very authenticity of history—for history being basically a narrative.

The sole purpose of this Unit so far is to introduce the reader to the wide array of thematic aspects dealt in Indian English Poetry. In doing so, the Unit does not adhere strictly along the lines of chronology as is evident in the structuring of the modules. This is due to the reason that while considering the richness and variety of Indian English Poetry, a mere socio- political and economic background seems to dwarf the prospects of engaging fully with the intellectual preoccupations of the poets. Nevertheless, one cannot completely brush aside the background given the fact that it serves as a starter for a heavy meal in literature. The point here is to not only analyse the poems of particular poets but also to list out the subjective responses induced in the minds of the reader. For poetry (no matter how modern or post modern) immediately titillates the emotive response of the reader thereby compelling him/her to use the vagaries of empirical understanding which he/she brings to bear on the poem itself. The modules in this unit have been structured with this ulterior motive but one should always supplement his/her reading of the texts with similar works. At this level, the reader is expected to move beyond the plane of superficial comprehension and should have the knack of grasping every tit-bit of the poems such as structure, tone, rhythm, figures of speech and so forth. In short, the reader must expand the horizon of understanding and should always remain alert to the seeming contradictions offered by the subject.

The structuring of the Unit itself is an attempt to help the reader come out of the jaded canonical standards which has so far been in vogue. The fluidity of the modules, it is hoped, will enable the reader to engage more creatively. The overlapping of the poets in the modules should come as a necessary adjunct as to the multiplicity of thematic explorations done by the poets. The main idea is to acquaint the reader not on the exclusivity of the poet in engaging one particular theme but to illuminate the dexterity of these selected poets to engage in multiple themes and thereby make him/her capable enough to gauge the similarities and differences of the respective poets in their handling of the themes.

Welcome aboard on such a scintillatingly creative journey!

(Abdul Mubid Islam)

The chapter incorporated in this unit have been designed in an unconventional frame as the themes used by the poets are given more importance. Suffice it to say, all the modules will deal with different themes explored by the Indian English poets. However, a brief introduction to the poets in each module would precede the content as it becomes crucial to familiarize the reader with the poet/subject beforehand.

chapter 2 entitled “Treatment of Nature in Indian English Poetry” includes poems like “Coromandel Fishers”, “In Praise of Henna”, “Gulzaman’s Son”, “Wolf”, “Suddenly the Tree” and “Our Casurina Tree”.

chapter 3 entitled “The Female Imagination: Early Indian Feminism and the Role of Society” includes poems like “Advice to Women”, “Eunice”, “Purdah 1”, “An Introduction”, “The Looking Glass” and “The Dance of the Eunuchs”.

chapter 4 entitled “Identity/Home/Space” includes poems like “Migrations”, “The Exile”, “Island”, “Minority Poem”, “Purdah 2” and “Snowmen”.

chapter 5 entitled “Memory/Voice” includes poems like “Breaded Fish”, “Learning Urdu”, “The Captive Air on Chandipur-on-sea” and “To My Native Land”.

chapter 6 entitled “History/Nation/Politics” includes poems like “Sea Breeze Bombay”, “Approaching Santa Cruz Airport, Bombay”, “Dhauli”, “Freedom”, “Ash” and “Ode to H.H.Nizam of Hyderabad”.

chapter 7 entitled “New Experimentations in Indian English Poetry’ includes poems like “Traffic lights”, “Pie-Dog”, “The Right Word”, “Hunger”, “Very Indian Poem in Indian English” and “The Railway Clerk”.