Reading Resistance: My Notes on Five Poems from Postcolonial Indian Literature
Introduction
This semester we studied a group of poems that all seem to be doing one thing in different ways: pushing back against something. Sometimes it is the state, sometimes it is caste, sometimes it is patriarchy, sometimes it is the strange leftover habits of colonial language, and sometimes it is the pull of a country you are trying to leave but cannot fully leave. I want to use this post to work through five questions we were given, one poem or poet at a time. I am writing this mostly from what we read in class and from the poems and articles I went through, and I am trying to think out loud rather than give a polished textbook answer.
I have organised each answer under main points and sub points so the argument is easier to follow, and I have pulled in short quotes from the poems themselves and from the critical material wherever they help make a point clearer. Some of these ideas connect with each other in ways I did not expect until I sat down to write, so I will point that out when it happens.
Question 1: Bergson's Theory of Laughter and Pravin Gadhvi's "Laughing Buddha"
Bergson's Theory of Laughter applied to Pravin Gadhvi's "Laughing Buddha"
I. Bergson's Basic Argument About Laughter
Before I could even attempt to read Gadhvi's poem properly, I had to sit with Henri Bergson's essay on laughter for a while, because the poem's whole effect depends on knowing what "comic" even means in a philosophical sense. Bergson was not interested in jokes in the ordinary way. He wanted to know what conditions have to be present before a human being finds something funny at all, and his answer is more mechanical than I expected.
A. Laughter is strictly human
Bergson opens with a very simple claim, that "the comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human." We do not laugh at a mountain or a river. If we ever laugh at an animal or an object, it is because we have noticed some human gesture or shape hiding inside it. So laughter always points back at people, never at nature on its own.
B. Laughter needs an absence of feeling
The second condition is what gets called an anesthesia of the heart. Bergson says plainly that "laughter has no greater foe than emotion." His example of the man slipping on the street stuck with me the most.
- We laugh at the fall itself, because it looks clumsy and mechanical.
- The moment we learn he has broken his leg, the laughter stops, because now we feel pity instead of distance. So comedy needs the viewer to step back and look almost like a scientist, not like someone who actually cares about the person in front of them.
C. Laughter is a social gesture with a corrective purpose
Bergson also argues that laughter is never really a private act. It needs, in his words, an "echo" — a kind of shared understanding with other people who are also laughing. Society uses laughter as a mild, humiliating punishment to correct people who are behaving in a way that threatens the group's need for flexibility and cooperation.
D. The mechanical encrusted on the living
This is the idea I found most useful for reading Gadhvi. Bergson describes this as "something mechanical encrusted upon the living." Life demands constant change and adjustment, so when a person or a situation becomes rigid and repeats the same fixed pattern without adjusting to reality, it becomes comic. This shows up in three smaller ways according to Bergson:
- Absentmindedness, where someone keeps repeating an old habit even though the world around them has changed.
- The permanent grimace, where a face freezes into one expression and stops reflecting the living person underneath it.
- The body overriding the soul, where a physical accident interrupts something serious or dignified.
E. Inversion and reciprocal interference
Bergson also names two structural patterns that guarantee comedy.
- Inversion, where roles are completely reversed, like a prisoner lecturing a judge.
- Reciprocal interference of series, where one single event can be read in two completely separate ways at once, and both readings make sense on their own terms.
II. Applying Bergson's Ideas to "Laughing Buddha"
Now, when I bring these ideas to "Laughing Buddha," something strange happens, because the poem is not comic in the light sense at all. It is dark and it hurts to read. The poem is about India's first nuclear test in 1974, done on the day of Buddha's birthday, and the whole operation was actually codenamed "Smiling Buddha" by the government. Gadhvi's poem is short but heavy, and the key lines for me are: "Buddha laughed! / What a proper time! / What an auspicious day!" followed almost immediately by "There was a laughter on his / Lips and tears in his / Eyes." That single contrast is really the whole poem.
A. The permanent grimace as state propaganda
If I use Bergson's idea of the mechanical face, I can read the government's use of the name "Smiling Buddha" as exactly that kind of frozen mask. A smile that never changes according to circumstances stops being a real human expression and becomes closer to a mechanical mould. The state takes the most famous symbol of peace in Indian history and forces one unmoving expression onto an act of violence, which fits Bergson's description of the permanent grimace almost exactly.
B. The anesthesia of the heart in the nuclear age
The anesthesia of the heart fits disturbingly well here too. To celebrate a nuclear explosion and to name it after the Buddha requires the scientists and politicians involved to switch off a large part of ordinary human feeling, at least for that moment. That is very close to what Bergson says is required for comedy, except here it is being used to describe something genuinely horrifying rather than funny. This, I think, is the poem's biggest trick. It borrows the machinery of the comic — the mask, the numbness, the reversal of meaning — but instead of producing a laugh in the reader, it produces something closer to a sick recognition.
C. Historical inversion
There is also a form of Bergson's inversion built into the real history behind the poem. The man who preached non-violence becomes the name attached to the most violent weapon a country can build. As one analysis of the poem puts it, the poem "grapples with this grotesque juxtaposition," where "radical, anti-caste, peaceful spiritualism is hijacked and replaced by the mechanical, destructive reality of the modern nation-state." That is a complete reversal of everything the name Buddha is supposed to mean, and Bergson would likely call this kind of topsy-turvy situation naturally comic in structure, even though the content here is tragic rather than light.
D. Reciprocal interference of two series
I also see Bergson's idea of two independent series colliding at work in the poem. On one side sits the spiritual series, where a smile or laugh means enlightenment, peace, and the end of suffering. On the other side sits the political and military series, where a successful test means national pride and geopolitical power. The word "Buddha" is being used by the state to mean one thing, while the rest of the world understands it to mean something almost opposite, and the collision of these two meanings at the exact moment of the blast produces the poem's dark, satirical effect.
III. Why the Poem Still Feels Tragic Rather Than Funny
A. The tears undercut the laugh
Gadhvi never lets the reader settle into pure irony. The line "He was dumb that day" right after the mention of tears tells me the Buddha's laughter is not really laughter at all in any joyful sense. It reads more like grief that has been forced to wear a laughing mask.
B. Laughter as a corrective gesture turned back on the state
Bergson says laughter exists to correct people who are behaving rigidly. In this poem, I think Gadhvi flips that function around. The poem itself becomes the corrective gesture, aimed not at an individual but at the state apparatus that tried to dress up violence as peace. The poem is not trying to make us laugh; it is trying to make the state's own mechanical hypocrisy visible, so the reader reacts with discomfort rather than amusement.
IV. Small Structural Details in the Poem That Reinforce This Reading
The poem describes the blast as "underground," a detail worth pausing on, since it suggests something hidden and secretive rather than open, which stands in direct contrast to the openness and clarity usually associated with Buddha's teaching. The line "Buddha laughed!" is repeated three times through the poem, almost like a refrain, and this repetition performs Bergson's idea of mechanical repetition on the level of the poem's own language, except here the repetition is used to force the reader to sit inside an unresolved image rather than to produce an ordinary comic effect.
The direct question the poem asks — "At whom?" — is never answered, and that silence pushes the reader into the same discomfort Buddha's laughter creates instead of offering a tidy explanation to relax into. Finally, the title plays on the popular figure of the "Laughing Buddha," usually associated with good fortune and simple, comforting joy, and Gadhvi deliberately attaches that comforting image to a nuclear test, turning a familiar symbol of luck into something far darker the moment it is placed beside violence.
😂 BERGSON'S FIVE IDEAS APPLIED TO "LAUGHING BUDDHA"
🎭 Permanent Grimace
State names a nuclear test "Smiling Buddha" — a frozen mask of peace pressed onto an act of violence.
❄️ Anesthesia of the Heart
Celebrating a nuclear blast requires switching off ordinary human feeling — comedy's prerequisite applied to horror.
🔄 Historical Inversion
The apostle of non-violence becomes the name of the most violent weapon — a complete topsy-turvy reversal.
⚡ Two Series Colliding
Spiritual series (enlightenment) vs. military series (national power) — collision produces dark satirical effect.
😢 Tears Undercut the Laugh
The poem borrows comic machinery but produces sick recognition — corrective laughter aimed at the state, not a person.
Question 2: Meena Kandasamy's Ekalavya and the Modern Dalit Student
I. The Original Myth and Its Caste Logic
This question asks me to connect something Kandasamy said in an interview to her short poem "Eklavyam," and once you read the interview quote, the poem stops feeling like a retelling of an old myth and starts feeling like something much more immediate and angry.
A. The story in brief
Ekalavya, a young man from a forest-dwelling community, wants to learn archery from Dronacharya, the royal teacher, but Dronacharya refuses to teach him because he is not from the Kshatriya or warrior caste. Ekalavya trains alone in front of a clay image of the teacher and becomes better than Arjuna, Dronacharya's favourite student. When Dronacharya finds out, he demands Ekalavya's right thumb as his fee, permanently ending his skill with the bow.
B. Why the myth still matters
- It shows merit being punished rather than rewarded once that merit belongs to the "wrong" caste.
- It shows how an institution — here the guru-shishya or teacher-student system — can be built to protect upper caste privilege rather than actual talent.
- It has survived for centuries inside Hindu tradition as an example of noble guru devotion, which means the injustice was never hidden. It was celebrated.
II. Kandasamy's Reading of Ekalavya in Her Interview
A. Ekalavya as "the typical Dalit"
In her 2008 interview with Ujjwal Jana, Kandasamy calls Ekalavya "the typical Dalit," and says he is "actually better than the best when it comes to talent and hard-work," but "he doesn't have access to the best resources," and his "success is envied by caste-Hindu students and 'upper' caste teachers, who have the power to crush him." This single quote does three things at once for me.
- It updates the ancient myth into the present tense.
- It names the modern equivalents of Dronacharya as teachers and institutions.
- It insists that talent alone can never fully protect a Dalit student from systemic sabotage.
B. The bitter guru-dakshina of modern education
Kandasamy extends this further, saying that "modern-day Ekalavyas are being forced to pay a bitter guru-dakshina to educational institutions," and that "the price they pay is much greater than a thumb." From what I understand, she is talking here about the disturbingly high rate of suicide among Dalit students in Indian higher education, which she elsewhere connects to what she calls "academic terrorism."
C. Education as a closed door
She describes the situation as a choice between what gets called "Do Not Enter and Drop Out," meaning Dalit students are often kept out of institutions altogether, and where they are let in, structural discrimination pushes many of them to leave before they graduate. This framing turns Ekalavya's severed thumb from a single ancient injustice into something ongoing and current.
Meena Kandasamy's "Eklavyam" — myth as modern accusation against institutional caste discrimination
III. Reading the Poem Through the Interview, Line by Line
Kandasamy has said her poem "essentially tries to invoke the militancy of Ekalavya's character" and was "written as a call to arms." With that intention in mind, I want to walk through the poem almost line by line.
A. "This note comes as a consolation"
- The word "consolation" is used ironically here. A true consolation would restore what was taken, but instead the poem reads more like a strategy briefing than sympathy.
- This matches her own description of wanting to "remind him that there are a lot of ways in which he can get back at the system," rather than simply mourning his loss.
- By refusing pure sympathy, the poem denies Ekalavya — and by extension the Dalit reader — the passive identity of victim.
B. "Besides, fascist Dronacharyas warrant / Left-handed treatment"
- Calling Dronacharya "fascist" collapses the distance between the mythical guru and the modern institution.
- In the interview she names the real-world Dronacharyas directly as the "caste-Hindu students" and "'upper' caste teachers" who have "the power to crush" a talented Dalit student.
- The phrase "left-handed treatment" plays on the English idiom for insult or rejection, while also literally pointing to Ekalavya's one remaining, undamaged hand.
C. "You don't need your right thumb, / To pull a trigger or hurl a bomb"
- This is the poem's most militant image, and it matches Kandasamy's own description of the poem as a "call to arms."
- She has said she wants to tell the oppressed "that they shouldn't grin and bear it, that they should revolt," and that the poem's underlying message is "we will get back, we will hit back."
- The trigger and the bomb are symbolic of modern collective resistance replacing the old, individual heroism of archery.
- Scholars connect the image of the "left hand" to left political movements and organised resistance, since the bow belonged to the very system that betrayed Ekalavya, while the trigger belongs to a completely different, modern register of struggle.
IV. Wider Themes Connecting the Poem and the Interview
A. Poetry as subversion of language itself
Kandasamy tells Jana that she chose poetry because "language is the site of all subjugation and oppression," and that poetry alone has "the power of being extremely subversive." "Eklavyam" enacts this belief directly, since it takes a Sanskritic, Brahmanical myth — told for centuries in the language of the oppressor — and repurposes it in plain, weaponised English to serve the oppressed instead.
B. Autobiography and collective history as resistance
She insists her writing is "very, very autobiographical" even when it draws on myth, because it "stems out of who I am, and what happened to me." At the same time, she uses "biography as a tool to retrieve our lost history." "Eklavyam" fuses both of these impulses. It recovers a suppressed history — retelling Ekalavya's story from his own point of view rather than the Pandavas' — while carrying the poet's own anger at the ongoing academic persecution of Dalit students.
C. Why this matters to me as a reader
Reading the poem next to her own words about wanting Dalit writing to be a call to arms rather than another sad autobiography changes how I see the tone completely. It is not really about revenge against one teacher. It is about refusing to accept that talent should ever have to be paid for with a part of your own body, or in the modern case, with your mental health or even your life.
Question 3: Confessional Poetry and Kamala Das's "An Introduction"
I. What Confessional Poetry Actually Is
Confessional poetry is a style that came out of American poetry in the late 1950s and 1960s, through poets like Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, and W. D. Snodgrass. Before this movement, a lot of English poetry kept some distance between the poet and the speaker of the poem. Confessional poets broke that distance on purpose.
A. Core features of the style
- Autobiographical honesty, where the speaker is understood to be the actual poet rather than an invented character.
- A first person, intimate voice, using "I" constantly and speaking almost directly to the reader.
- Taboo subject matter, including mental illness, sexuality, the body, marriage, and trauma, spoken about openly rather than hinted at.
- A therapeutic quality, where writing functions as a release rather than as a distant, polished performance.
- Plain, conversational diction, closer to natural speech than to formal poetic convention.
B. Why this style suits protest writing
These features together make confessional poetry an ideal tool for a writer who wants to resist silence. Where society demands discretion, the confessional poet insists on disclosure. Where society hides the female body and female desire, the confessional poet describes them in plain words instead.
II. Kamala Das and the Confessional Tradition
Kamala Das is regularly placed beside Plath and Sexton as one of the earliest and boldest confessional voices writing in English from India. Her confession is not simply personal catharsis, though. Reading "An Introduction," published in her collection Summer in Calcutta (1965), I get the sense that her "I" keeps widening until it speaks for every Indian woman trapped inside marriage, domestic duty, and enforced modesty.
III. Confession as Resistance in the Poem
A. Resistance through language
- Das opens the poem by describing how she was told, "Don't write in English, they said, English is / Not your mother-tongue," by critics, friends, and even relatives.
- Instead of apologising, she claims the language as her own, saying, "The language I speak, / Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses / All mine, mine alone."
- She compares her right to speak this way to something completely natural, since "it is useful to me as cawing / Is to crows or roaring to the lions."
- By converting a supposed mark of inferiority into a badge of authenticity, she sets the pattern for the rest of the poem — since if she can decide what language belongs to her, she can also decide what body, role, and desire belong to her.
B. Resistance through the body
- The poem describes her early marriage with unusual physical honesty for its time, in the lines "he drew a youth of sixteen into the / Bedroom and closed the door, He did not beat me / But my sad woman-body felt so beaten."
- This distinction matters, since it shows that violence against women is not only physical assault but also the psychological crushing of a girl forced into a woman's role before she is ready.
- Puberty itself is described almost as something that happens to her from outside, since "my limbs / Swelled and one or two places sprouted hair," which shows how quickly a young body becomes property claimed by others the moment it becomes visible.
C. Resistance against imposed gender roles
- The "categorizers" — meaning family and society — demand that she "Dress in sarees, be girl / Be wife," and "Be embroiderer, be cook, / Be a quarreller with servants. Fit in."
- This list reads almost like a job description with no space left for an actual person underneath it, exposing how reductive and mechanical the patriarchal idea of womanhood really was.
- When she tries to escape this by cutting her hair and wearing her brother's clothes, the response is not concern but a warning — "Don't play at schizophrenia or be a / Nympho," which shows how any woman stepping outside the script gets pathologised as unwell or deviant.
D. Resistance through a universalised self
- In the closing section, her "I" absorbs every contradictory identity at once: "It is I who laugh, it is I who make love / And then, feel shame... I am sinner, / I am saint. I am the beloved and the / Betrayed."
- If she can claim every opposite identity as her own, then no single label imposed by society can hold her anymore.
- The final line, "I too call myself I," feels quiet but very firm, declaring that she already has an independent identity rather than asking permission for one.
Kamala Das — confessional honesty as an act of resistance in 1960s India
IV. Stylistic Techniques That Reinforce the Resistance
A. Free verse as rejection of convention
The poem uses no fixed metre or rhyme scheme, which mirrors her refusal to be confined by social roles with a refusal to be confined by formal poetic rules as well.
B. Enjambment as breathless urgency
Her run-on lines spill over from one line to the next without pausing, imitating the rush of a confession that has been held back for too long and can no longer be contained.
C. Anaphora and repetition as self-assertion
The repeated use of "I am," "It is I," and "mine" throughout the poem works almost like a chant of self-ownership, driving the claim to selfhood into the reader through sheer repetition.
D. Colloquial diction
Das avoids ornate, "poetic" language in favour of plain, direct speech, such as "Why not leave / Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins," which keeps the poem feeling like an unfiltered outburst rather than a crafted performance.
V. The Poem's Place Within Das's Career and Its Wider Significance
"An Introduction" comes from Das's first collection, Summer in Calcutta (1965), and is generally regarded as the clearest and most direct expression of her self-reflective, confessional voice. Writing this openly about a woman's body, her marriage, and her desire — in English, in India during the 1960s — was itself a significant act of resistance, independent of the poem's specific content, because very few women poets writing in English at that time were given the cultural space to write about themselves with this level of honesty.
Question 4: Nissim Ezekiel's "The Patriot" and Sharma's Reading of It
I. Unpacking Sharma's Claim
The quote we were given from Sharma claims the poem works on three levels at once: satirising a fractured postcolonial identity, showing the linguistic leftovers of British rule, and capturing an odd kind of optimism that does not fully make sense given everything the speaker has just admitted. I want to test each part of this claim against the actual text.
II. The Linguistic Legacy of British Colonialism
A. Broken syntax as the residue of empire
- Lines like "Why world is fighting fighting" and "I am simply not understanding" reproduce the grammar of a speaker who learned English as an inherited, external tool rather than a native language.
- The doubled verb, the missing articles, and the continuous tense used where simple present is expected are all recognisable features of English as it settled into Indian speech after two centuries of colonial administration and education.
B. Reading the newspaper to "improve" English
The speaker admits, "Every day I'm reading Times of India / To improve my English Language." English here is not a birthright but something still being chased, imported from a colonial press that continues operating, in altered form, long after formal British rule ended.
C. The Shakespeare allusion
The line "Friends, Romans, Countrymen, I am saying (to myself) / Lend me the ears," borrowed from Mark Antony's speech in Julius Caesar, is the clearest marker of this linguistic legacy. An ordinary Indian citizen, discussing local politics and Gandhi, instinctively reaches for Shakespeare to make his point persuasive, showing that colonial education planted specific canonical texts so deeply that they surface even in casual, half-remembered form.
III. Satire of a Fractured Postcolonial Identity
A. Praising Indian wisdom while craving English approval
- The speaker declares "Ancient Indian Wisdom is 100% correct," and scolds the "modern generation" for "Too much going for fashion and foreign thing."
- In the very next stanza, he admits to reading an English newspaper specifically to sharpen his command of a foreign tongue.
- This is an exact, self-defeating irony — the speaker condemns others for imitating the West while performing that very imitation himself, without noticing the contradiction.
B. The lassi versus wine substitution
- He offers a traditional drink as morally superior, saying lassi is "Better than wine," and adds, "Not that I am ever tasting the wine."
- The comparison itself, framed defensively against wine, shows that the foreign standard is still the unspoken measure against which Indian identity has to prove itself.
C. National unity undercut by regional prejudice
The speaker claims universal brotherhood, saying "Gujaratis, Maharashtrians, Hindi Wallahs / All brothers," but immediately adds "Though some are having funny habits," quietly reintroducing the very regional stereotyping he claims to reject.
IV. Absurd Optimism and Unresolved Contradictions
A. World peace as a casual aspiration
The speaker treats geopolitical conflict with the same casual tone he uses for lassi and digestion, asking "What do you think of the prospects of world peace?" right after discussing "Pakistan behaving like this, / China behaving like that." This flattening of register produces the absurd optimism Sharma describes — a belief that peace is simply a matter of goodwill, floating free of any real political analysis.
B. "Ram Rajya is surely coming"
The speaker's confident prediction that "One day Ram Rajya is surely coming" sits directly beside his own admissions of communal friction, linguistic insecurity, and casual acceptance of ongoing international hostility. He never notices that his optimism is not supported by anything he has just described, which is exactly what gives the ending its bittersweet, satirical charge.
C. Tolerance as an unfinished solution
The closest thing to a resolution in the poem is "Still, you tolerate me, / I tolerate you," which is a modest, almost resigned virtue rather than genuine harmony. It captures the unresolved, in-between condition of a newly independent nation still working out what unity actually means in practice.
V. How Style Reinforces the Argument
Ezekiel relies on anaphora, seen in the repeated "Why" in "Why world is fighting fighting / Why all people of world," which intensifies the speaker's genuine bewilderment. He also uses colloquial dialect that imitates real spoken Indian English, and ironic juxtaposition, placing serious subjects like war beside trivial ones like digestion and lassi. Each device keeps the poem simultaneously funny, sympathetic, and quietly tragic, which is exactly the combination Sharma's quotation describes.
Nissim Ezekiel's "The Patriot" — broken English as postcolonial condition
Question 5: Paradox in Rachna Joshi's "Leaving India"
I. What a Paradox Is and Why the Poem Needs It
A paradox is a statement or image that looks self-contradictory on the surface but reveals a deeper truth once examined closely. Migration itself is paradoxical — leaving a country does not mean leaving it behind, and finding a cleaner, freer life abroad does not automatically mean finding a fuller one. Joshi's short poem "Leaving India" builds almost its entire structure out of contradictions like this.
II. The Paradox of the "Clean" but Empty New World
A. Cleanliness as a warning sign
- The speaker says "North America was clean, sanitized / almost sterile. Everything / swept orderly and shining."
- The word "sterile" is usually associated with hospitals and the absence of life, not with an appealing home, so the very quality that should make the new country desirable gets quietly reframed as a kind of deadness.
B. Beauty that is only a picture
- The speaker admits to seeing "Beautiful pictures," reducing the landscape to something seen rather than felt.
- She then adds, "Everything smelt of plastic and perfume" — both artificial substitutes for something natural, suggesting that a place can be visually perfect and emotionally hollow at the same time.
III. The Paradox of the "Stark, Ugly" but Magnificent Homeland
A. Holding opposites without choosing
The line "India is stark, ancient and ugly, / Magnificent, uplifting or degrading" places "ugly" directly beside "magnificent" without trying to resolve the tension between them.
B. Why the contradiction feels more real
Because the speaker never reconciles these opposing words, the reader senses this discomfort is closer to lived truth than the smooth, single-toned comfort described earlier about North America.
IV. The Paradox of Freedom as Absence
A. Freedom from history as a kind of loss
The lines "In North America, there were / No ruins, No myths, no ghosts. / This really seems brave new / Naked world" should logically describe liberation, yet the tone feels unsettled rather than celebratory. A world free of history reads not as paradise but as unnervingly empty.
B. The "brave new world" allusion
This phrase echoes both Miranda's line in Shakespeare's The Tempest and Aldous Huxley's dystopian novel Brave New World, where a technologically perfect society turns out to be spiritually hollow. Joshi seems to borrow this already-ironic phrase on purpose, so a phrase historically used for wonder now describes unease instead.
V. The Paradox of Denial and Inescapability
A. Active denial, passive persistence
The closing lines read, "We may deny history, family and tradition / But somewhere / Five thousand years of continuous civilisation / Lie in wait like a doting grandparent." The speaker's denial is active, but what survives that denial is passive and patient — simply waiting rather than needing to be reclaimed.
B. The grandparent simile
Comparing five thousand years of civilisation to "a doting grandparent" fuses affection and confinement into a single image. A doting grandparent is loving and utterly inescapable, and the simile suggests that the pull of history is experienced simultaneously as comfort and as a kind of trap.
Rachna Joshi's "Leaving India" — the impossibility of leaving five thousand years behind
VI. Why the Title Itself Is a Paradox
"Leaving India" promises a completed action, matching the clean departure the speaker initially describes. But the poem's actual content proves the opposite — since physical relocation is easy while emotional and historical departure is, according to the poem's own final image, essentially impossible. The title states a fact about geography while the poem quietly disproves it as a fact about identity.
VII. The Poet's Own Lived Position Adds Another Layer to the Paradox
Rachna Joshi has lived in both North America and India, and has published several collections including Configurations, Crossing the Vaitarani, Travel Tapestry and Monsoon and Other Poems, so the poem's back-and-forth comparison between the two places is not an outsider's guess but reflects an actual lived movement between them. The line "We may deny history, family and tradition" shows that the pull of India is not always wanted or consciously chosen; the poem openly admits that people actively try to leave these things behind, yet the very next line insists that history still "lies in wait," present even inside that denial — which is itself a paradox: the past cannot be escaped simply by refusing to acknowledge it. Placing the gentle, warm image of history as a "doting grandparent" immediately after calling India "stark" and "ugly" is exactly the kind of contradiction the whole poem is built around, refusing to let either the harshness or the warmth cancel the other one out.
📊 FIVE POEMS: THE FORM EACH RESISTANCE TAKES
| Poet & Poem | What Is Being Resisted | How the Resistance Works |
|---|---|---|
| Gadhvi — "Laughing Buddha" | State propaganda dressing violence as peace | Borrowing comic structure to expose mechanical hypocrisy |
| Kandasamy — "Eklavyam" | Caste discrimination in education | Weaponising myth as a call to arms, not consolation |
| Kamala Das — "An Introduction" | Patriarchy, enforced silence, imposed identity | Confessional disclosure — the body and language claimed as self |
| Ezekiel — "The Patriot" | Colonial linguistic legacy; fractured postcolonial identity | Satire through broken English — irony the speaker doesn't notice |
| Joshi — "Leaving India" | The myth of clean departure and fresh start | Paradox — history waits like a doting grandparent, not a foe |
Self-Reflection
Going through these five poems for this assignment changed how I read poetry a little. Before this, I usually looked for one central meaning in a poem and tried to defend it with quotes. These poems pushed back against that habit. Applying Bergson's theory to Pravin Gadhvi's Laughing Buddha felt remarkably natural, as the poem embodies laughter as a force of awareness and social critique. This connection enhanced my appreciation of both the poem's depth and the relevance of literary theory. Kandasamy's poem is comforting and threatening in the same breath.
Reading Kamala Das and Ezekiel back to back also made me notice something about voice. Das takes ownership of a broken, mixed English and turns it into proof of selfhood. Ezekiel's speaker uses a different kind of broken English, and it becomes proof of a nation still finding its feet after independence. I had not connected language and identity this closely before, and now I will pay more attention to how a poet's grammar and word choice carry meaning, not just the images or the plot of a poem.
Working on Kandasamy's Eklavyam alongside her interview was probably the most useful part of the exercise, because it showed how a short, ten-line poem can carry an entire argument once placed next to the poet's own words about caste in education. It reminded me that a poem is rarely finished on the page and keeps growing once you read around it.
Joshi's poem left a different impression. I had never thought about paradox as something a whole poem could be built on, rather than one clever line. Once I looked for it, I could see it shaping almost every stanza — comfort against meaning, order against history.
Overall, this assignment taught me to be more comfortable with poems that do not resolve neatly, and to treat contradiction in a text as something worth examining rather than explaining away. That is a shift I want to carry into how I approach literary analysis going forward, in this course and beyond it.
Closing Thoughts
Gadhvi gives laughter mixed with tears, using Bergson's own vocabulary of mechanical repetition against a civilisation that refuses to change.
Kandasamy gives comfort mixed with threat, turning an old myth of noble sacrifice into a modern accusation against institutions that still extract the same price under different names.
Kamala Das gives shame turned into fearless self-claim, using confessional honesty about her body and her language as an act of resistance rather than simple disclosure.
Ezekiel gives broken English carrying sincere hope, letting satire and genuine warmth exist inside the very same lines without resolving the tension between them.
Joshi gives comfort without meaning set against meaning without comfort, refusing to let either continent win the argument about where a real life should be lived.
None of these poets settle for a single, clean answer to the questions they raise about identity, caste, gender, language and belonging, and that refusal to resolve seems to be the real point each of them is making, whether through laughter, myth, confession, satire or paradox.
✊ FIVE FORMS OF RESISTANCE IN POSTCOLONIAL INDIAN POETRY
Gadhvi
Laughter as dark corrective
Kandasamy
Myth as call to arms
Kamala Das
Confession as self-claim
Ezekiel
Broken English as satire
Joshi
Paradox as lived truth
📚 Works Cited
Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell, Project Gutenberg, 2 Jan. 2006. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4352/4352-h/4352-h.htm
Das, Kamala. Summer in Calcutta. Everest Press, 1965.
Ezekiel, Nissim. Collected Poems 1952–1988. Oxford University Press, 1989.
Jana, Ujjwal. "The Struggle to Annihilate Caste Will Be Victorious: Meena Kandasamy in Conversation." Postcolonial Text, vol. 4, no. 4, 2008.
Joshi, Rachna. "Leaving India." The Dance of the Peacock: An Anthology of English Poetry from India, edited by Vivekanand Jha, Hidden Brook Press, 2013.
Kandasamy, Meena. Touch. Peacock Books, 2006.
"Laughter by Henri Bergson." EBSCO Research Starters: Literature and Writing, EBSCO Information Services, 2022. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/literature-and-writing/laughter-henri-bergson
Paranjape, Makarand. "Post-Independence Indian English Literature: Towards a New Literary History." Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 33, no. 18, 1998, pp. 1049–56. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4406729
This analysis reads five poems from postcolonial Indian literature — by Kamala Das, Nissim Ezekiel, Meena Kandasamy, Pravin Gadhvi, and Rachna Joshi — through the frameworks of Bergson's theory of laughter, confessional poetry, mythic retelling, postcolonial satire, and paradox.
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