FOREWORD to An Anthology of Modern Indian English Poetry

 

                                                    FOREWORD

                                          

Each anthology is a marker of it’s time and trends, but this anthology, conceived as a sequel to The Golden Treasury of Indo-Anglian Poetry (1970), is an extension of poet-critic V.K. Gokak’s  work “consisting of modern and modernist poets,” as poet-professor Veeresh Badigar emphasizes.  Gokak’s anthology included selected poets and poems from 1828 to 1965, and several poets from 1965 onwards, without excluding some of the avant-garde signatures of modern Indian English Poetry, such as A K Mehrotra, P Lal, Nissim Ezekiel, R Parthasarathy, Adil Jussawalla, Dilip Chitre, Arun Kolatkar, A K Ramanujan, Pritish Nandy, to name a few, needed to be re-viewed in perspective, possibly with the same historical value and contemporary interest that prompted Gokak to make his anthology.

 

Through his selections poet-editor  Badigar underlines the contributions of several poets of the late 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s who were widely acclaimed for their structure and texture. He also adds newer poets who never left India and yet proved their poetic prowess and linguistic competence comparable with the native speakers of English.

 

Poets such as Gopal Honnalgere, P Raja, I K Sharma, R K Singh, O P Bhatnagar, T V Reddy, Smita Agarwal, P C K Prem, D C Chambial, and others are all steeped in Indian milieu, ethos and culture. In fact with their different verses they contribute to the making of, and exposure to, Indian reality which does not deny our present day norms, values, and perceptions.  Their poetic communication re-defines, too, their indigenous contexts, and personal and cultural identities, memories and inwardness, as also noticed in, say, Kamala Das, Eunice de Souza, Shiv K Kumar, Dilip Chitre etc.  Almost all of them reveal their mind and self, whatever their experimentation in terms of form and content, to divine the new Indian sensibilities.

 

The poet-editor of the anthology thinks with the legacy of the past and responsibility to the present as he includes a dozen living voices and accords their poems a literary status. He seeks to introduce to the new generation of readership the poets who not only developed and established the genre of Indian English Poetry but also made it internationally visible and acceptable as  distinct from native writing in English.

 

I feel glad to have become a part of the volume which should be noticeable for the editor’s vision, taste for the different and the bold, eye for the contemporary ways of living and thinking, and attempt to re-imagine what it means to live with each other in the 21^st century literary ecosystem.  I am confident the community of  researchers and scholars the world over will find the new anthology significant , readable and useful as a record and document.

                                                                            

                                                                                                --R K SINGH

 

(Formerly Professor of English, Dept of Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology—ISM, DHANBAD-826004)

 

 

 

An Anthology of Modern Indian English Poetry, ed. V R  Badiger. Agra: Current Publications, 2020. ISBN 9789390253272