The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets

The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets is a landmark collection not only because it catalogues the achievement of Indian poets over the twentieth-century, but because it takes an important political stance on the possibilities for Indian poets writing in English rather than using languages indigenous to India.

The anthology is edited by Jeet Thayil, a fine poet in his own right. Thayil provides a fascinating introduction to the book, which focuses on the crisis of identity for Indian poets writing in English as they shuttle between inadequate labels like ‘Indo-English’, ‘Indo-Anglian’ and ‘Indian English’. These poets have been maligned by English and Indian critics alike. Yeats advises Indian poets to refrain from writing in a language not learnt in childhood stating: ‘[N]o Indian knows English’; while the Indian poet Buddhadeva Bose suggests that his peers would be better off working out of the language ‘of the streets or … their own homes’. While contemporary attitudes are more progressive, Thayil rightly seeks to correct the slight on twentieth-century Indian poets who choose English as the language of poetic expression.

Language and how to make it work for one’s own purposes is a preoccupation of many of the poets included: from K.V.K. Murthy to Daljit Nagra, from Mukta Sambrani to Manohar Shetty. In ‘Reasons for Staying’, G.S. Sharat Chandra elides language and roses recalling Shakespeare’s rose in Romeo and Juliet. Here the poet asserts his mastery over the roses and language stating: “The language is my own, / I tell them / I own them”.
Other poets are less certain about language. In Vinay Dharwadker’s poem, ‘Words and Things’, language is an elusive thing as “[w]ords evaporate like water in a dish, / leaving you with a sense of something meant, / but not the memory of what was said”.

If the anthology challenges simplistic views of language, it also calls into question easy definitions of what it is to be an Indian poet. Poets included in the anthology always have a strong connection to India, but often have links elsewhere too. Thayil defies a narrow, exclusive view of what it is to be an Indian poet, recalling the defiance of Arundhathi Subramaniam’s poem, ‘To the Welsh Critic Who Doesn’t Find Me Identifiably Indian’:

This business about language,
how much of it is mine,
how much yours,
how much from the mind,
how much from the gut,
how much is too little,
how much too much,
how much from the salon,
how much from the slum,
how I say verisimilitude,
how I say Brihadaranyaka,
how I say vaazhapazham –
it’s all yours to measure

The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetsrejects the measuring of identity by stereotypes and assumptions about national purity. Instead in the wide range of poets represented, it offers a more expansive view on the complexity of language and identity in twentieth-century Indian poetics.