Indian Poetry

Indian poetry in English began with the imitation of English Romantic poets but gradually Indo-Anglian poets began to write on Indian themes based on Indian contexts and Indian social scenario. Indo-Anglian poetry has received world recognition and some of the poets are held in high esteem. This anthology containing 35 essays is an attempt to represent the gamut of Indian poetry in English, both pre-Independence and post-Independence, from diverse critical perspectives. The thirteen poets covered in this anthology include Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Toru Dutt, Rabindranath Tagore, Sarojini Naidu, Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, and Kamala Das. The essays in the book offer innovative perspectives and touch upon different aspects of Indian poetry in English. The tone of the essays varies from personal to argumentative to objectively discursive. The book, with diverse and thought-provoking essays, will be highly useful for undergraduate and postgraduate students of English Literature. Besides, those who are interested to know about Indian Poetry in English will find the book quite illuminating and interesting.

This edition is a revision of the classic, which has become the standard work on the subject. Five chapters covering the 1990s have been added with an updated chronlogy. These discuss a number of more recent poets, along with one chapter on the late Agha Shadid Ali.

Until now, the study of American Indian literature has tended to concentrate on contemporary writing. Although the field has grown rapidly, early works—especially poetry—remain mostly unknown and inaccessible. Changing Is Not Vanishing simultaneously reinvents the early history of American Indian literature and the history of American poetry by presenting a vast but forgotten archive of American Indian poems. Through extensive archival research in small-circulation newspapers and magazines, manuscripts, pamphlets, rare books, and scrapbooks, Robert Dale Parker has uncovered the work of more than 140 early Indian poets who wrote before 1930. Changing Is Not Vanishing includes poems by 82 writers and provides a full bibliography of all the poets Parker has identified—most of them unknown even to specialists in Indian literature. In a wide range of approaches and styles, the poems in this collection address such topics as colonialism and the federal government, land, politics, nature, love, war, Christianity, and racism. With a richly informative introduction and extensive annotation, Changing Is Not Vanishing opens the door to a trove of fascinating, powerful poems that will be required reading for all scholars and readers of American poetry and American Indian literature.

Contributed articles.

Contributed papers at a writers' workshop held in Calcutta, West Bengal.

Poetry from "an enrolled Choctaw/Chickasaw bilingual poet ..."

Indian writing in English, especially fiction, continues to capture the attention of readers all over the English-speaking world. Conversely, the strong and flourishing tradition of poetry in English from India has not impacted the contemporary world in the same manner as the fiction. This book creates a debate to highlight the well-grounded and confident tradition of Indian Poetry in English which began almost two hundred years ago with the advent of the British. Individual essays on poets before and since the Indian Independence focus on the poetry of Derozio, Tagore, Aurobindo and Naidu right down to the modern and contemporary poets like Ezekiel, Mahapatra, Ramanujan, Kolatkar, Das, Moraes, Daruwalla, de Souza, Jussawalla and Patel who ushered in a change both in terms of subject matter and style. On either side of the Atlantic, this book which includes a substantial Introduction, Select Bibliography and Index is of value to scholars, teachers and researchers on Indian Poetry in English.

This book maps the journey of the Indian poetic imagination—in Hindi, Panjabi and Indian English—from its original quasi-spiritual longings to its activist interventions in the public domain. As Indian poetry of the post-1990s gravitates towards a non-Orientalised postcolonial nationalism, it seeks to rewrite and disseminate the shifting coordinates of nationalist imagination in terms of the dissent of the subaltern discontents of the nation. The book is interdisciplinary: it studies Indian poetry from the new emerging imperatives of postcolonialism, new historiography (subaltern, dalit and diasporas), nationalism, and cultural studies. Covering the two major north Indian languages—Hindi and Punjabi—along with poetry in Indian English, the book is a close textual study of about 150 poetry collections in these languages. It is path-breaking in its study of secular poetry written in the so-called vernaculars, with critical attention to its participation in the political as well as cultural processes of nation-making. This cutting-edge book should be of interest to scholars of Indian writings in English, Hindi and Panjabi, gender studies, dalit and diaspora studies, postcolonial poetry and to students reading South Asian literature and culture.