WHAT ‘IS' INDIAN POETRY?

A milestone and a doorstopper, this ambitious anthology brings together 94 poets whom India can claim as its own

- Poorna Swami

Any book that claims to anthologise ‘Indian’ literature, in a way, sets itself up for failure. What does it even mean for a piece of writing to be Indian? Is it the author’s citizenship? Her manner of speech? Cultural references that bind her words to a place with rigid borders?

The Penguin Book of Indian Poets, edited by Jeet Thayil, is aware of these landmines. A beautiful compilation of Indian poetry in English from the 1950s to the present, it steels itself against its own grandiose title. Here is a book made of poets living and dead, those who migrated and even those who were born elsewhere. Among the 94 poets (49 of them women), we are forced to resist a shorthand for what ‘Indian poetry’ is.

Thayil says in the foreword that the book builds on 60 Indian Poets, which he edited for Penguin back in 2008. In the new iteration, however, form is no longer the organising principle. The world had changed drastically, Thayil writes, and “democracy and reality were under attack”. The anthology then necessarily captures a palpable conversation between catastrophe and hope.

The first poet in the book, almost obviously, is Nissim Ezekiel, widely considered the father of modern Indian poetry in English. His poems clearly reveal a period of discovery and wrestling. On the one hand, their lines bear the scaffoldings of British poetic meter but, on the other, are punctured by the muckiness of Bombay’s daily grind.