Saha

Anuska Saha

Semester 2

English Honours

UID No: 0304200114

University Roll No: 202017-11-0365

University Registration No: 017-1211-3602-20

Course: CC3

A Comparative Study of 19th and 20th Century Indian English Poetry

Historical events have irreversible consequences on the culture and collective sentiment of a

nation. India’s relationship with its colonialist past has undeniably influenced its sense of

national identity, and its effect is felt most prominently in literature than elsewhere. The

literary fabric records and voices the hopes, despairs, passions, futilities, and triumphs of

India’s journey – which is more multifaceted than the linear, fundamental phases of

revolution, freedom, and reconstruction – from a British colony to an independent nation.

Indian poetry in English exhibits a crucial shift in modes of poetic expression and patterns of

imagination between the 19th and 20th-centuries, pre and post-colonialism. From the

publication of Derozio’s first poems, the revolutionary poetry of Rabindranath Tagore and

Sarojini Naidu, to the sharp-edged directness of Ezekiel, Mahapatra, and Ramanujan, the

tapestry of Indian poetry in English is as diverse as its lived experiences.

The English language made its way into the cultural domain of 19th century India as part of

the British attempt to indoctrinate Indian native lives and “form a class of persons Indian in

blood and colour and English in taste, opinions in morals and in intellect,” (Macaulay, 1835).

Consequently, western education facilitated the cultivation of a new educated urban class that
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readily acculturated to western literary forms. It was under such cultural and political

conditions that Derozio published his first poetry collection, Poems (1827), which marked the

consolidation of his poetic identity, and catalysed the emerging stream of Indian English

poetry.

His second volume, The Fakeer of Jungheera: A Metrical Tale and Other Poems, positioned

him further among his British counterparts with its Romantic aestheticism. His application of

western literary devices to content that is Indian in its sentiment takes an Orientalist approach

in “The Fakeer of Jungheera” but reconfigures it to an Indian perspective. “To India” and

“Harp of India” are prime examples of Derozio’s fusion of British form with Indian

substance, where he takes after the sonnet tradition to articulate his mourning for his

country’s glorious literary and cultural past. The employment of archaic western diction and

literary and rhetoric devices point to the emergence of an art that is imitative in style but

genuine in theme.

Out of the same, newly awakened literary fervour arose the famous Dutt family poets, who

continued the Romantic streak in Indian English poetry with an added “introspective vein”

(Gokak 19). Toru Dutt, the family’s last poetic descendant, was well-versed in European

literary conventions. If not for her untimely death at the age of twenty-one, 19th Indo-Anglian

poetry would have had its best culmination in her work. The sublime imagery and romantic

elements of nostalgia in her poetry are distinctly personal, in contrast to the political vigour of

Derozio. Replete with a sense of biculturalism, her poetry channels personal emotional

experiences through literary motifs, both western and Indian. Her book Ancient Ballads and

Legends of Hindustan, posthumously published in 1882, is testimony to her vast knowledge

of both the west and the east, with allusions to Wordsworth’s “Yew Trees” in the self-

revealing poem, “Our Casuarina Tree” and allegorical poems about various figures of Indian

mythology dedicated to her loved ones.

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Manu Chander, in his book Brown Romantics, demonstrates how the recurring, bard-like

“poet figure” in Derozio’s poems supposedly transcends all social, geographical, and

temporal boundaries “to touch upon the universal”. Subsequently, in “The Poet’s Habitation”,

Derozio realizes the illusiveness of this endeavour and breaks off from his poetic reverie

“without describing the world to which the speaker must return” (Chander 26). The

dismantling of poetic identity that Derozio introduces is an accurate prediction of the fate of

Indo-Anglian poetry in the ensuing future.

After a century-long leap, in the course of which India had gained independence, Nissim

Ezekiel published his first book of poems, A Time to Change (1952), marking the beginning

of “the canon” of modern Indian English poetry (Dulai 4). 20th century Indian English poets

replaced imitation of and adherence to western models with an experimental and

introspective quest for personal identity, which in turn contributed to the macrocosm of

national identity. Ezekiel’s poetry, steeped in striking imagery, skepticism, and an underlying

moral tone, reflects the disillusionment and spiritual fragmentation of a nation afflicted by

post-colonial trauma. The poets that followed echoed this, enhanced by their subjective

experience in a post-imperial world.

Ezekiel’s “Enterprise” documents the journey of India’s struggle for independence and its

movement into post-colonialism in the allegory of a pilgrimage. The poem records the

disintegration of the collective identity of the group and the emergence of a singular,

subjective ‘self’ that analyses the journey in retrospect. The sense of futility and apathy that

followed independence, displacement of identity, and an honest picture of the Indian

metropolitan are all encapsulated with an ironic bend in Ezekiel’s poetry.

Ezekiel’s sense of alienation, given his cultural hybridity in a vastly Hindu country, was a

phenomenon common to all in the circle of modern Indian poets writing in English. Most of
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them descended from minority communities marginal to the Hindu majority, thus gifted with

a critical, extrinsic vision. Resisting the pressure of the revivalist demand for a literary

Renaissance in native languages, these poets strove to express the diversity of their

experiences in a language they had assimilated and thus, made their own.

Modern Indian English poetry, unlike 19th-century Indo-Anglian poetry, drew not only from

European literature but from a much larger world literature, especially the works of T.S. Eliot

and Ezra Pound. Professor at the University of Chicago, scholar, translator, and poet A.K

Ramanujan is an exemplar of the transcultural worldview of the modern Indian English poet.

His poetic discourse brims with satire and a sense of detached neutrality, which in the words

of R. Parthasarathy, “has a cold, glass-like quality” as if to “turn language into artifact.” His

later poetry observes an intermingling of medieval Dravidian traditions and motifs with the

style and tonality of western modernist poets. The use of striking imagery and non-decorative

metaphor in his poems such as “Elements of Composition” and “River” effectively parodies

the nativist sentimentalization of the past and its unfeeling blindness to the suffering it

harbours (Ramazani 87-92).

Contrary to the distant and neutral expression of Ezekiel and Ramanujan, a new volatile and

confessional style of poetry emerged in Kamala Das. Her verse was worlds apart from the

works of 19th-century women poets like Sarojini Naidu or the Dutt sisters. Das was labeled an

iconoclast with the publication of her first collection in 1965, Summer in Calcutta. Her

uncensored and robust voicing of feminine desire, and its struggle for assertion and

ownership, despite her personal tone, articulates the universal experience of womanhood in a

patriarchal societal structure. “Summer in Calcutta” presents the complex use of metaphor

habitual in modern poetry, with unconventional and transmuting imagery, to illustrate the

suffocation of female sensuality in a loveless marriage, transitoriness of sexual desire, and the

loneliness and sadness underlying such neurotic turbulence. Das also explores themes of
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ownership of language and identity in her autobiographical poem, “Introduction”, with sheer

poetic mastery and controlled expression.

The modern experimental poetry that began with Ezekiel reached its consummate form in

Jayanta Mahapatra’s work, where the poet attempts a reconciliation with his native

environment. His masterwork Relationships won him the Sahitya Academi Award in 1981,

inaugurating a new literary era for post-modern Indian English poetry.

The Indian English writer has been a vessel in the process of cultural osmosis that began in

the 19th century and continues to enhance India’s relationship with its complicated colonial

past. The Indian English poem, which began as an imitative art in Derozio, evolved into a

medium for creative expression of post-colonial disillusionment in Ezekiel, and by the close

of the 20th-century, integrated itself into the mixed identity of post-modern India. Indo-

Anglian poetry is but a single vein in the glorious body of Indian literary endeavours, as

authentic and quintessential as any other native literature to the multifarious reality of modern

India.
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