Poetry
An overlooked category of Indian writing in English is poetry. Rabindranath Tagore wrote in Bengali and English and was responsible for the translations of his own work into English. Other early notable poets in English include Derozio, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Toru Dutt, Romesh Chunder Dutt, Sri Aurobindo, Sarojini Naidu, and her brother Harindranath Chattopadhyay.
A generation of exiles also sprang from the Indian diaspora. Among these are names like Agha Shahid Ali, Sujata Bhatt, Richard Crasta, Yuyutsu Sharma and Vikram Seth.
In modern times, Indian poetry in English was typified by two very different poets. Dom Moraes, winner of the Hawthornden Prize at the age of 19 for his first book of poems A Beginning went on to occupy a pre-eminent position among Indian poets writing in English. Nissim Ezekiel, who came from India's tiny Bene Israel Jewish community, created a voice and place for Indian poets writing in English and championed their work.
Their contemporaries in English poetry in India were Jayanta Mahapatra, Gieve Patel, A. K. Ramanujan, Arun Kolatkar, Dilip Chitre, Eunice De Souza, Kersy Katrak, P. Lal, Kamala Das, and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, among several others. The younger generation of poets writing in English include Smita Agarwal, Makarand Paranjape, Nandini Sahu, Vattacharja Chandan, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Ranjit Hoskote, Sudeep Sen, Hemant Mohapatra, Jeet Thayil, Mani Rao, Jerry Pinto, Abhay K among others.
Read more about this topic: Indian English Literature
Famous quotes containing the word poetry:
“It is at the same time by poetry and through poetry, by and through music, that the soul glimpses the splendors found behind the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings tears to one’s eyes, these tears are not the sign of excessive pleasure, they are rather witness to an irritated melancholy, to a condition of nerves, to a nature exiled to imperfection and which would like to seize immediately, on this very earth, a revealed paradise.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“A story of particular facts is a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful; poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which it distorts.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
“That was a way of putting it not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)