Post-Independence Indian

Poetry
Context
• Pre-Independence Poetry
• Romantic
• Idealistic
• Nationalistic
• Mythical and legendary
• Spiritual and universal

• Post-Independence Poetry
• More rooted in the present
• Cultural and social realism
• Concrete rather than abstract style
• More critical
• More relevant to common readers
Shiv K. Kumar (1921-2017)

• Poet, playwright, novelist, and short story writer

• He was born in Lahore, British India
• modernist in style
• Received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1987 for his collection of poems Trapfalls in the Sky (1986)
• Received the Padma Bhushan in 2001
• Poetry
• Articulate Silences (1970)
• Cobwebs in the Sun (1974)
• Subterfuges (1976)
• Woodpeckers (1980)
• Trapfalls in the Sky (1987, Sahitya Akademi award)

• The Last Wedding Anniversary (1975, play)

• The Bone’s Prayer (1979, novel)
Major poems
• “Indian Women”
• “Kali”
• “My Correspondent”
• “Pilgrimage”
• “Days in New York”
• “Woolgathering”
• “A Tibetan Refuge Woman”
• “At Whorehouse”
• “Broken CoIumns”, a sequence of twelve poems
• “Lear to Cordelia”
Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004)

• Poet, playwright and editor born in Mumbai

• Received Sahitya Akademi Award in 1983 for Latter Day Psalms and Padma Shri in 1988
• Time To Change and other Poems (1952)
• Sixty Poems (1953)
• The Discovery of India (1956)
• The Third (1959)
• The Unfinished Man (1960)
• The Exact Name (1965)
• Snakeskin and Other Poems, translations of the Marathi poet Indira Sant (1974)
• Hymns in Darkness (1976)
• Latter-Day Psalms (1982)
• Collected Poems 1952-88 (1989)
• Essays
• “Should Poetry be Read to Audience?”
• “Naipaul’s India and Mine” – Ezekiel’s essay that responded to Naipaul’s book An Area of Darkness (1964)
Major Poems
• Night of the Scorpion
• The Doctor
• Case Study
• Poster Prayers
• The Traitor
• Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher
• Latter-day Psalms
• The Railway Clerk
• Enterprise
• Goodbye Party For Miss Pushpa T.S.
• In India
• In the theatre
• The Professor
• The Company I Keep
• Background Casually
Jayanta Mahapatra (b. 1928)

• Bilingual poet and essayist from Cuttack, Odisha

• Part of the trio of poets, along with A K Ramanujan and R Parthasarathy
• The first Indian English Poet to receive the Sahitya Akademi award (In 1981 for Relationship)
• Received Padma Shri in 2009
• Major Poetry Collections
• Rain of Rites (1976) – Much acclaimed collection of poems; major poems are:” Dawn at Puri,” “Hunger,” etc
• Relationship (1980, a long poem) - Epigraph drawn from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”
• Life Signs ( 1983) – Includes the poem “Evening Landscape by the River”
• A Whiteness of Bone (1992)
• Shadow Space (1997)
• Bare Face (2000)
• Land (2013)
A.K. Ramanujan (1929-1993)

• Major Indian poet, scholar and author, a philologist, folklorist, translator and playwright
• Born in Mysore
• A group of his poems are called Hindoo Poems
• Awarded Padma Shri in 1976
• The Striders (1966)
• Relations (1971) – Includes “Love poem for a Wife”
• Samskara (1976) – Translation of UR Ananthamurthy’s novel
• “Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?” (1990) - essay
Arun Kolatkar (1932-2004)

• Poet from Maharashtra

• Wrote in both Marathi and English, often mixing myth, allegory and contemporary history
• Jejuri (1976)
31 poems describing his visit to a religious place called Jejuri in Maharashtra, where the deity is Khandoba, an incarnation of Shiva

• Two more collections in English: Kala Ghoda Poems and Sarpasastra

R. Parthasarathy (b. 1934)

• Editor, translator, anthologist and critic

• Born in Tirupparaiturai, Tamil Nadu
• Rough Passage (1977)
• Translated the Tamil epic Chilappathikaram into English
• Edited the popular anthology Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets
Kamala Das (1934-2009)

• Indian English poet and a leading Malayalam author

• Born in Punnayurkulam, Thrissur to V. M. Nair, a former managing editor of Malayalam daily Mathrubhumi, and
Nalapat Balamani Amma, a renowned Malayalam poetess
• Wrote short stories and autobiography in Malayalam; intense poems and explicit autobiography in English
• Assumed the name Kamala Suraiyya after her conversion to Islam in 1999; also known by her one-time pen name
Madhavikutty
• Her open and honest treatment of female sexuality, marked her as an iconoclast in her generation
• Shortlisted for Nobel Prize for Literature in 1984
• Confessional and autobiographical elements
• Summer in Calcutta (1965)
• “An Introduction”
• “My Grandmother’s House”
• “The Sunshine Cat”
• “The Dance of the Eunuchs”
• “In Love”
• “Winter”
• “Too Early the Autumn Sight”
• “The End of Spring”
More Works

• The Descendants (1967, poetry; includes the poems “The Looking Glass”, “The Maggots”, “Substitute”,
“The Conflagration”)
• The Old Playhouse and Other Poems (1973, includes “The Stone Age”, “Gino”)
• My Story (1976) - An autobiographical book; originally published in Malayalam, titled Ente Katha; a
chronologically ordered narrative written in a realist style
• Alphabet of Lust (1977, novel)
• The Anamalai Poems (1985, poetry)
• Padmavati the Harlot and Other Stories (1992, collection of short stories)
• Only the Soul Knows How to Sing (1996, poetry; includes “The Rain”)
• Yaa Allah (2001, collection of poems)
• “My Mother At Sixty-six” (1999, Poem)
Keki N Daruwalla (born 1937)

• Major Indian poet and short story writer in English language born in Lahore
• One among the Parsi quartet, others being Adil Jussawalla, K.D. Katrak and Gieve Patel
• Awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, in 1984 for his poetry collection The Keeper of the Dead
• Awarded Padma Shri in 2014
• Apparition in April (1971)
• Crossing of Rivers (1976)
• Winter Poems (1980)
• The Keeper of the Dead (1982)
• Landscapes (1987)
• A Summer of Tigers (1995)
• Night River (2000)
• Map-maker (2002)
• The Scarecrow and the Ghost (2004)
Dom Moraes (1938-2004)

• Jewish poet, autobiographer, travel writer and journalist

• His first collection A Beginning won him the Hawthornden Prize in 1958
• My Son’s Father (1968) and Never at Home (1992) are his autobiographies
• Key
• The Garden
• Autobiography
• Words to a Boy
• Letter to My Mother
• Voices
• Absences
• Rendezvous
• Spree
• Architecture
Adil Jussawalla (b. 1940)

• An influential presence in Indian poetry in English; is also a critic

• Born in Mumbai in a Parsi family
• His collection of poems Trying to Say Goodbye was conferred the Sahitya Akademi Award 2014
• After two books of poetry, Land’s End (1962) and Missing Person (1976), turned to journalism
Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001)

• Agha Shahid Ali was a Kashmiri Muslim born in New Delhi

• Ali is best known in the U.S. and identified himself as an American poet writing in English
• Poetry collections
• Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals (2003)
• Rooms Are Never Finished (2001)
• The Country Without a Post Office (1997)
• The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems (1992)
• A Nostalgist’s Map of America (1991)
• A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987)
• The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987)
• In Memory of Begum Akhtar and Other Poems (1979)
• Bone Sculpture (1972)
Major Poems

• The Wolf’s Postscript to ‘Little Red Riding Hood’

• Even the Rain
• Tonight
• I See Chile in My Rearview Mirror
• Taxidermist
• Stationery
• Ghazal
• Snowmen
• Shaving
Meena Alexander (b. 1951)
• Meena Alexander was born in Allahabad, in a Syrian Christian family from Kerala
• In her childhood, the family shifted to Sudan
• Now she lives in New York
• She is known for lyrical writing that deals with migration, its impact on the subjectivity of the writer, and the sometimes violent
events that compel people to cross borders
• Her poems frequently confront the difficult issues of exile and identity
• Poetry Collections
• House of a Thousand Doors (1988)
• Birthplace with Buried Stones (2013)
• Quickly Changing River (2008)
• Raw Silk (2004)
• Illiterate Heart (2002)
• Poems
• Muse
• Cadenza
• Central Park
• Carousel
• Night Theater
• Lost Language
• Novels
• Nampally Road
• Manhattan Music
• Fault Lines
Vikram Seth (b. 1952)

• Vikram Seth is an Indian poet, novelist, travel writer, librettist, children's writer, biographer and memoirist
• He was born in Calcutta, India, in 1952
• He has received several awards including Padma Shri, Sahitya Akademi Award, Pravasi Bharatiya Samman,
WH Smith Literary Award and Crossword Book Award
• Poetry
• Mappings (1980)
• The Humble Administrator's Garden (1985)
• All You Who Sleep Tonight (1990)

• Major poems
• All You Who Sleep Tonight • Round and Round • Promise • Unclaimed • Distressful Homonyms • Interpretation • Protocols • The
Wind • Prandial Plaint • From California • The Frog and The Nightingale • Progress Report • At Evening • The Tale of Melon City