The Penguin Book of Indian Poets — a feast of literature

It is a truth universally held in India that while novelists might win acclaim, big advances and gleaming trophies, poets are the monarchs of literature. Kolkata’s schoolchildren can recite odes by Rabindranath Tagore or Jibanananda Das by heart, Delhi’s citizens grew up quoting Urdu shers (couplets), and my Tamil friends have the rich storehouse of ancient classical Sangam poetry at their fingertips.

India truly speaks, writes and thinks in many tongues: it is a country of more than 400 listed languages, with 24 of these, including English, spoken by more than a million native speakers. Some studies claim that Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu are nearly 4,500 years old. Against those centuries of tradition, it has long been a challenge for Indian poets who wrote in English, a language that arrived in the 17th century, to join others at the table. But in the past century, these poets have become a force, their English casually confident, their imaginations both deeply rooted as well as increasingly global.

The Penguin Book Of Indian Poets, an anthology of poems exclusively written in English, is vast in scope and ambition. The book’s editor, Jeet Thayil — an acclaimed novelist and poet himself — first collected the works of Indian poets in a 2005 anthology for Fulcrum magazine, and followed this with The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets in 2008. For his latest project, Thayil has selected the work of 95 poets (49 women, 45 men) from across the country and the Indian diaspora, and he is steely in his determination to claim each of these writers as truly Indian.

“Three quarters of a century separate the oldest poet, born in 1924, from the youngest, born in 2001. The dates service as bookends in a movement’s unlikely coming of age,” Thayil writes in the introduction. He argues persuasively that by the 21st century, a new generation of Indian poets had ushered in “a flowering, an uprising” of creativity, which complemented the work of 20th-century modernist poets in the west. In the hands of the poets Thayil highlights here, English ceases to be the language of India’s former colonisers; rather it has the force of a rushing young river that has joined up with the ocean of older Indian languages.

For the reader who has never encountered Indian poetry in English before, this anthology is an absolute feast. Its range of subjects is vast, from Goya to ghosts, mythology to climate change; its sprawling geography covers Missoula to Gurgaon, London to the jungles of Rajasthan; and the skill of the poets at this literary baithak (gathering) is clear, whether they’re re-weaving ancient legends or freely borrowing from the Beats for inspiration.

“The land where I was born has tendered loving words to me: / A score and more of wonders burn here between sea and sea,” the late Vijay Nambisan writes in “A Gift of Tongues”, one of the great poems about the love of language, the desire to steal words out of the mouths of others. In “Indian April”, the late Meena Alexander, who died in 2018, writes to and about the American beat poet Allen Ginsberg travelling in Rajasthan, and honours the mixed traditions and geographies that made her a poet: “Holy, the waters of the Ganga, Hudson, Nile, Pamba, Mississippi, Mahanadi . . . ”

Other poets play with the idea of belonging and exclusion. In “Against Robert Frost”, Mamta Kalia, who was born in 1940 in the temple town of Vrindavan, and who writes with lightning grace in both Hindi and English, declares: “I can’t bear to read Robert Frost. / Why should he talk of apple-picking / When most of us can’t afford to eat one?” 

In parts, the anthology takes a furious turn, dipping into the bloody pages of recent Indian history. One poet, Hamraaz, writes his dissident verse — “Abrogated, In Praise of Azaadi”, written and published in 2019-2020 — “as a fictional character who writes poetry”, because: “The reality of life in a police state, even an inefficient one, is that it can creep into our imagination.” This moment in Indian history — a time of riots and persecution, lynchings and fear — has old roots, as K Srilata reminds us in her poem, “Gujarat, 2002”: “All those burning afternoons later, / there’s still no hint of rain, / only news, / of another lynching . . . ”

Running through these is a stream of other histories and landscapes. In “Lascar”, Ranjit Hoskote references the movement of migrant labour from Mumbai to Liverpool to London in 1889, using the image of the Indian sailors who manned British ships, carrying with them “a whiff of scurvy, a hint of rats in the hold, / hulls battered by typhoons . . . ” 

The Penguin Book Of Indian Poets is a major anthology, one that places Indian poets on the map as a force and as a family. It needs companion volumes of poets who write in the many other Indian languages. But Thayil’s case that Indian poets who write in English fully belong — both to India and the world — is made by the dazzling work in these 800-plus pages. These are voices that are rich, rooted, disruptive — and free.

The Penguin Book Of Indian Poets edited by Jeet Thayil, Penguin, 908 pages

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