Between Stone and River: What the New Poets Taught Me About Speaking Indian in English
The New Poets: Indian experience finding a modern voice in English.
Introduction: Encountering the New Poets
Before this unit, when I heard the word "modernism," I mostly thought of Eliot's broken city streets or Pound's clipped, image heavy lines. I assumed modernism was something that happened in London and Paris, and that Indian English poetry simply borrowed the leftovers of that movement a little late and a little imitatively. Our classroom sessions on the New Poets changed that assumption for me in a fairly direct way. I began to see that Indian English poetry had its own reasons to break away from the past, its own local pressures, its own gods, rivers and hunger to write about, and its own way of using a borrowed language to say something that had never quite been said in English before.
This blog answers four questions from this unit. The first asks about the poets we finalized for a modernist anthology activity in class, and the works and snippets that justify calling them new. The second takes up K. R. S. Iyengar's idea that the Indo-Anglian poet strives for self-expression in English, tested against three poets. The third asks for a critical note on Jayanta Mahapatra. The fourth asks for a comparative note on A. K. Ramanujan and Arun Kolatkar, especially how they handle nature and myth.
I am treating these four questions as one connected argument, because that is honestly how they felt in class. Iyengar's statement about self-expression is the theory behind the whole unit, and Mahapatra, Ramanujan and Kolatkar are three of its clearest examples in practice. My argument is simple. The New Poets did not throw away Indian tradition, myth or religious memory. They carried these things into a modern, often uneasy, often ironic English, and in doing that, made English capable of holding something genuinely Indian.
Video: Introduction to Indian English Poetry and Modernism
1. The New Poets and Our Modernist Anthology
As part of our classroom activity, we worked through a set of poets who were being considered for inclusion in a modernist anthology of Indian English poetry. According to my class notes, the final list runs to ten names: Shahid Suhrawardy, Jayanta Mahapatra, P. R. Kaikini, Shiv K. Kumar, A. K. Ramanujan, Arun Kolatkar, R. Parthasarathy, Keki N. Daruwalla, Dilip Chitre and Imtiaz Dharker. The notes are careful about how these ten are grouped. Suhrawardy is described as an early modernist figure, Kaikini belongs to that same early modernist context, and Dharker is marked separately as a contemporary modernist and postmodern voice writing from a British and diasporic position. The remaining seven poets, Mahapatra, Kumar, Ramanujan, Kolatkar, Parthasarathy, Daruwalla and Chitre, form the core of what we usually mean when we say "the New Poets" in the strict sense, the generation that published its major work through the 1960s and 1970s.
Before I go through their works, it is worth asking what actually earns a poet a place on this list. Our notes give four features that keep repeating: striking individuality, sharpness of expression, a tone of defiance and non-conformity, and a kind of angularity, meaning broken or unconventional form instead of smooth, decorative verse. Alongside this, the notes list a longer set of characteristics: free verse instead of strict rhyme, irony, realism, psychological depth, an urban and modernist outlook, attention to ordinary people and contemporary problems, and the placing of Indian culture and mythology inside a modern context. None of these poets show every single feature to the same degree. What connects them is that they were all, in their own way, refusing the ornamental, nationalist, moralising English poetry that came before them.
📜 THE TEN POETS OF THE MODERNIST ANTHOLOGY
Shahid Suhrawardy
Early Modernist | Essays in Verse (1937)
P. R. Kaikini
Early Modernist | Songs of a Wanderer (1936)
Jayanta Mahapatra
New Poet | Relationship (1980)
Shiv K. Kumar
New Poet | Subterfuges (1976)
A. K. Ramanujan
New Poet | The Striders (1966)
Arun Kolatkar
New Poet | Jejuri (1976)
R. Parthasarathy
New Poet | Rough Passage (1977)
Keki N. Daruwalla
New Poet | Under Orion (1970)
Dilip Chitre
New Poet | Says Tuka (1991)
Imtiaz Dharker
Contemporary | Postcards from god (1997)
Shahid Suhrawardy, whose collection Essays in Verse appeared in 1937, is treated in our notes as an important early modernist voice, someone whose work already resisted the conventional spiritual or Romantic mode that dominated earlier Indian English poetry. My class notes are honest about a limitation here. The handwritten page carrying his poem snippet was not fully legible, so instead of guessing at missing words, the original handwritten note has been preserved as an image rather than typed out as a quotation. I am respecting that decision rather than inventing lines that were never confirmed.
P. R. Kaikini creates a similar problem, and again I want to be upfront about it instead of smoothing it over. The notes place him in an early modernist context and preserve a fragment that begins "Yesterday, when my young heart," after which the handwriting becomes too unclear to transcribe with confidence. A general web search connects Kaikini's name with a collection called Songs of a Wanderer from 1936, but this connection could not be verified against the exact lines in our notes, so I am mentioning it only as background, not as something confirmed by classroom material.
Some pages of Indian English modernism survive only in fragments, and honesty about that gap matters as much as the poems themselves.
Once we move past these two transitional figures, the notes give us much clearer ground. Jayanta Mahapatra is represented through "Dawn at Puri," and I will look at this poem closely in Section 3. Shiv K. Kumar is represented by "Indian Women," from his 1976 collection Subterfuges, and the verified snippet reads:
"In this triple-baked continent
women don't etch angry eyebrows
on mud walls."
🔍 READING "INDIAN WOMEN" — SHIV K. KUMAR
📌 Poem Snippet: the image of women who do not "etch angry eyebrows" on mud walls.
🖼️ What the Words Show: a picture of quiet, almost invisible women, women whose anger, if it exists at all, never becomes visible protest.
⚙️ Modernist Feature: compressed, ironic imagery instead of direct moral statement.
💡 My Interpretation: Kumar is not romanticising rural India here. The "triple-baked continent" already suggests heat, hardship and repetition, and the missing angry eyebrows tell us more about silence and suppressed feeling than any explicit complaint could.
A. K. Ramanujan is represented by "A River," first published in The Striders (1966):
"In Madurai,
city of temples and poets,
who sang of cities and temples,"
🔍 READING "A RIVER" — A. K. RAMANUJAN
📌 Poem Snippet: Madurai introduced through its double identity as a city of temples and a city of poets who wrote about temples.
🖼️ What the Words Show: a place defined almost entirely by inherited poetic description rather than by direct, lived observation.
⚙️ Modernist Feature: irony built into the very rhythm of repetition, "temples and poets" echoed by "poets who sang of cities and temples."
💡 My Interpretation: Ramanujan is quietly warning us that we are about to receive a very literary Madurai, and the rest of the poem breaks that literary picture apart with drought and flood.
Arun Kolatkar appears through "A Scratch," part of the Jejuri sequence (1976):
"what is god
and what is stone
the dividing line
if it exists
is very thin
at jejuri"
🔍 READING "A SCRATCH" — ARUN KOLATKAR
📌 Poem Snippet: a direct, almost blunt question about the boundary between a sacred object and an ordinary one.
🖼️ What the Words Show: the speaker is not rejecting religion, but he is not accepting it uncritically either.
⚙️ Modernist Feature: conversational, unpunctuated, almost prose-like free verse, closer to speech than to devotional poetry.
💡 My Interpretation: this is one of the sharpest moments of doubt in the whole anthology, because it does not resolve into either belief or disbelief. It leaves the line "very thin" rather than absent, which is the more honest position.
Dilip Chitre is represented by "Determined to Tell Lies," alongside his translation project Says Tuka (1991), which brought the seventeenth century Marathi saint poet Tukaram into English and earned Chitre the Sahitya Akademi Translation Prize in 1994:
"Determined to tell lies
People are able only to tell the truth,
Said Rahman"
🔍 READING "DETERMINED TO TELL LIES" — DILIP CHITRE
📌 Poem Snippet: a paradox where the determination to lie somehow still produces truth.
🖼️ What the Words Show: an ironic, almost proverb-like observation about human speech and intention.
⚙️ Modernist Feature: irony carried through a spoken, attributed voice, "Said Rahman," rather than an abstract philosophical statement.
💡 My Interpretation: Chitre is playing with the gap between intention and outcome, fitting his larger bilingual and translational habit of putting two systems of meaning, Marathi and English, belief and doubt, next to each other and letting the friction do the work.
Imtiaz Dharker closes the classroom list, represented by "Postcards from God (1)," from her 1997 collection Postcards from god:
"Yes, I do feel like a visitor,
a tourist in this world
that I once made."
🔍 READING "POSTCARDS FROM GOD (1)" — IMTIAZ DHARKER
📌 Poem Snippet: a divine speaker describing itself as a visitor and a tourist in its own creation.
🖼️ What the Words Show: distance, even estrangement, between a creator and the world it made.
⚙️ Modernist Feature: the epistolary or letter-like voice, using an everyday, almost casual register ("visitor," "tourist") for a theological subject.
💡 My Interpretation: Dharker uses this ironic voice to ask why a divine presence would feel so absent from ordinary suffering, connecting her back to the same questioning spirit we see in Kolatkar's stone and god.
R. Parthasarathy and Keki N. Daruwalla complete the group of seven core New Poets in our notes, though no specific poem snippet for either of them survives in the handwritten material I was given. Parthasarathy's major work, Rough Passage (1977), is structured in three sections, Exile, Trial and Homecoming, and traces a personal journey of cultural displacement and eventual return. He is also significant as the editor of Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets (1976), the anthology that did more than any other single publication to fix this generation's reputation as "new." Daruwalla's collections, from Under Orion (1970) through The Keeper of the Dead (1982), are described in the notes through stark imagery, philosophical scepticism and an unsentimental engagement with violence, drought and historical suffering.
Reading across all ten poets together, I noticed that the classroom activity was not simply collecting famous names. It was building a case for a particular kind of poetry, one where individual voice matters more than inherited form, and where Indian material, a river, a temple town, a saint poet's verses, a woman's silence, gets handled with modern, sometimes uncomfortable honesty. What separates these poets is where they point that honesty. Mahapatra points it toward history, religion and death in Odisha. Ramanujan points it toward memory and inherited myth. Kolatkar points it toward pilgrimage and everyday scepticism. Daruwalla points it toward violence and historical decay. Dharker points it toward gender, faith and displacement. The shared method is irony and free verse, but the individual targets differ, and that is what stops the anthology from feeling like ten poets writing the same poem.
2. "An Indo-Anglian Poet Strives for Self-Expression in English"
K. R. S. Iyengar, whose landmark study Indian Writing in English (1962) remains one of the founding critical accounts of this literature, argued that the Indo-Anglian poet strives for self-expression in English. When I first read this line, I understood it far too narrowly, as if it just meant that Indian poets wrote personal or autobiographical poems in the English language. Our classroom discussion pushed me toward a wider reading, and I think that wider reading is the more accurate one.
Self-expression here does not simply mean confession. It means the harder task of finding a way for an English sentence to carry an Indian landscape, an Indian memory, an Indian god or an Indian silence without that sentence collapsing into either a stiff imitation of British poetic manners or an artificial, over-explained translation. English arrived in India through colonial rule, and for a long time Indian poets who wrote in it produced verse that sounded, quite understandably, like a slightly delayed copy of English Romantic or Victorian models. The New Poets faced a genuinely difficult question. How do you use a language that was never designed to hold your specific rivers, your specific temples, your specific hunger, and still make it say something true and your own?
I want to test this idea against three poets from our list, Mahapatra, Ramanujan and Kolatkar, because together they show three different solutions to the same problem.
✨ THREE SOLUTIONS TO IYENGAR'S CHALLENGE
Mahapatra
Self-expression is regional and bodily. His English carries the physical, uncomfortable detail of Odishan religious life without softening it into exotic imagery.
Ramanujan
Self-expression is a negotiation with memory. His English poems test inherited cultural stories against ordinary, unglamorous fact.
Kolatkar
Self-expression is sceptical and observational. English becomes a tool for close anthropological observation, refusing to resolve whether ritual means what devotion assumes.
Self-expression in English: language transformed by Indian experience, not simply borrowed from it.
None of these three poets treat English as a neutral, transparent window. Mahapatra bends it toward the physical facts of Odisha. Ramanujan bends it toward memory and inherited narrative. Kolatkar bends it toward observation and doubt. In each case the English sentence starts to carry rhythms and silences that only make sense once you know Puri, Madurai or Jejuri. That, I would argue, is what Iyengar meant, once his statement is tested against real poems rather than treated as a slogan.
3. Jayanta Mahapatra: Poetry of Place, Hunger and Unease
Jayanta Mahapatra, who lived from 1928 to 2023, was born in Cuttack, Odisha, and worked for much of his life as a teacher of physics before becoming one of the most significant Indian English poets of his generation. He wrote in both English and Odia, and in 1981 he became the first Indian English poet to receive the Sahitya Akademi Award, for his 1980 collection Relationship. I am mentioning this biographical detail only briefly, because what actually matters for this note is how his poetry works, not the shape of his career.
Our notes describe Mahapatra as a close observer of people and things, someone whose poetry combines regional experience with much larger, almost universal questions about hunger, poverty, death, religion and identity. "Dawn at Puri" is the poem we studied most closely in class, and it is a striking demonstration of how a very specific, local scene can carry a much bigger argument.
"Endless crow noises
A skull in the holy sands
tilts its empty country towards hunger."
🔍 READING "DAWN AT PURI" — JAYANTA MAHAPATRA
📌 Quote: the poem opens on sound before image, crow noises filling the air of a sacred town at first light.
🖼️ Explain the Image: a skull lying in sand that is described as holy immediately connects two things we usually keep apart, religious purity and physical death.
⚙️ Explain the Technique: Mahapatra compresses an entire argument into a small number of words. The skull "tilts" its "empty country," turning a single skull into a symbol for a whole landscape of want.
🏛️ Connect to Modernism: concrete, unsentimental imagery, free verse without decoration, irony built into the placement of "holy" next to "hunger."
🇮🇳 Connect to Indian Experience: Puri is one of the most sacred pilgrimage towns in India, home to the Jagannath temple. Mahapatra writes from inside this religious geography, not from outside it.
💡 My Interpretation: Mahapatra refuses to let sacredness cancel out suffering. The skull is in the "holy sands," not despite the sands being holy but within that holiness, which forces the reader to hold both facts at once.
Video: Jayanta Mahapatra — Life, Poetry and the Odishan Voice
The rest of the poem, as our notes describe it, keeps building this same pattern through the temple, the cremation ground and the figures of widowed women who appear near the sacred site. Mahapatra is not writing a poem that condemns religion, and he is not writing a poem that simply celebrates it either. He is placing devotion and material suffering side by side and refusing to look away from either one. Poverty is not treated as background detail here. It sits directly beside faith, and the poem's quiet power comes from that refusal to separate the two.
I think this is where Mahapatra earns his place among the New Poets most clearly. Our notes list several features associated with this generation, realism, concrete detail, psychological depth, the placing of Indian culture inside a modern, questioning context, and "Dawn at Puri" demonstrates every one of these without ever stating them directly. Mahapatra does not tell us that religion and poverty exist in tension in Puri. He shows us a skull tilting toward hunger and trusts the image to carry the argument. That trust in image over statement, and the discipline of free verse that avoids decorative rhyme, is what separates this poem from the more ornamental religious or nationalist poetry that came before his generation.
What makes Mahapatra's work feel distinctly his own, rather than a general example of modernist technique, is his loyalty to Odisha as a specific place. He does not use Puri as a generic symbol for "India" or for "the sacred." He writes it as a real town with real crows, real sand and real widows, and the poem's larger meaning grows out of that specificity rather than despite it. This, I think, is the clearest answer to the question of why Mahapatra matters. He shows that a regional, almost provincial subject, one small dawn in one small town, can hold a genuinely large and unresolved human question, the coexistence of belief and hunger, without needing to leave that town or that language behind.
Mahapatra's Puri: where sacred landscape meets hunger, death and human suffering.
4. A. K. Ramanujan: Nature, Memory and Myth
A. K. Ramanujan lived from 1929 to 1993 and worked for much of his career as a professor at the University of Chicago, where he was also a poet, linguist, folklorist and translator. Our notes describe him as one of the most influential modern Indian English poets, someone whose work draws heavily on Indian cultural memory while relying on modern, largely Western poetic techniques of economy and understatement. What interests me most about Ramanujan is how carefully he handles inherited tradition. He does not simply reject it, and he does not simply repeat it either. He tests it.
"A River," which first appeared in his 1966 collection The Striders, is the clearest example of this testing in our notes. The poem opens by introducing Madurai through its literary reputation:
"In Madurai,
city of temples and poets,
who sang of cities and temples,"
🔍 READING "A RIVER" — A. K. RAMANUJAN
📌 Quote: Madurai is introduced twice over as a place defined by poetry about temples.
🖼️ Explain the Image: the repetition of "temples" creates a slightly closed, self-referring picture, poets singing about the very temples that made the city famous.
⚙️ Explain the Technique: this repetition is a set up. Ramanujan uses irony to question romanticised descriptions of nature, contrasting traditional praise with images of drought, flood and real human cost.
🏛️ Connect to Modernism: undercutting an inherited literary convention with concrete, unglamorous fact — a very modernist move.
🇮🇳 Connect to Indian Experience: generations of Tamil poets really did write about the river in reverent terms, so Ramanujan is pointing at a real gap between literary habit and lived reality.
💡 My Interpretation: what Ramanujan does here is not cynicism. He is saying that love and reverence are not enough on their own, that a river which floods and drowns families deserves more than praise, it deserves honest attention.
This is where I think "A River" becomes such a strong example of what our notes call the New Poets' habit of placing myth and culture inside a modern context. Ramanujan does not discard the poetic tradition of Madurai's river. He keeps it fully present in the poem, then places beside it the drought seasons and the flood seasons that the older poems tend to skip over. Nature, in his hands, stops being a stable backdrop for cultural pride and becomes something closer to what it actually is, unpredictable, sometimes generous and sometimes devastating.
Ramanujan's wider body of work, including poems like "Obituary" and "Small-Scale Reflections on a Great House," shows the same pattern of testing family memory and inherited stories against present, often smaller and more awkward realities. His English carries an unusual economy, short lines, careful pauses, very little decoration, which our notes connect with his scholarly training as a linguist and folklorist. He is, in a sense, doing to poetic tradition what a careful researcher does to an old legend, respecting it enough to record it accurately, while still asking what it leaves out.
5. Arun Kolatkar: Jejuri, Stone and Sacred Doubt
Arun Kolatkar, who lived from 1932 to 2004, wrote in both Marathi and English, and our notes describe his poetry through irony, sharp imagery, colloquial language, fragmentation and an unsentimental treatment of religion and everyday life. His major English work, Jejuri (1976), is a sequence of thirty-one poems built around a pilgrimage to the town of Jejuri in Maharashtra, home to the local deity Khandoba. Rather than presenting this pilgrimage as an occasion for devotion, Kolatkar uses close, almost documentary observation to expose the gap between religious meaning and the physical, sometimes shabby, sometimes comic material reality of the pilgrimage site.
"what is god
and what is stone
the dividing line
if it exists
is very thin
at jejuri"
🔍 READING "A SCRATCH" — ARUN KOLATKAR
📌 Quote: a direct question about the difference between a god and an ordinary stone, asked in the plainest possible language.
🖼️ Explain the Image: there is barely any image here at all in the conventional sense, just a bare philosophical question laid out line by line.
⚙️ Explain the Technique: the lack of punctuation and capital letters, along with short, almost stammering lines, gives a conversational, thinking-aloud quality rather than formal devotional tone.
🏛️ Connect to Modernism: religious experience presented through ordinary, concrete detail, and irony used to question conventional ideas about sacredness, without announcing a firm conclusion.
🇮🇳 Connect to Indian Experience: the practice of treating certain stones as manifestations of a deity, sometimes marked only by a smear of vermillion, is a real and widespread feature of folk religious practice in Maharashtra.
💡 My Interpretation: the phrase "if it exists" is more important than it first appears. Kolatkar is not saying that god and stone are the same thing. He is admitting uncertainty about whether there is even a dividing line to look for, which feels less like disbelief and more like honest, slightly uneasy agnosticism.
What Kolatkar does across the whole Jejuri sequence, and what "A Scratch" captures in miniature, is a refusal to settle the question of sacredness one way or the other. He does not mock pilgrims, and he does not join them in easy devotion either. He stands in the middle, noticing dust, stone, priests, tourists and ritual objects with the same careful attention, and letting the reader feel the discomfort of not knowing quite how to read any of it. This unsentimental, observational stance is, I think, the clearest example in our whole anthology of what the notes mean by "angularity," a jagged, unresolved shape instead of a smooth devotional or a smooth anti-religious argument.
Kolatkar's Jejuri: between sacred belief, stone, landscape and modern scepticism.
6. Ramanujan and Kolatkar: Nature and Myth Compared
Reading Ramanujan and Kolatkar side by side, I noticed that both poets refuse the older, more Romantic habit of describing Indian nature and myth as simply beautiful or simply sacred. Neither of them, though, refuses tradition in the same way, and that difference is worth spelling out rather than flattening into a general statement that "both poets are ironic modernists."
📊 RAMANUJAN vs. KOLATKAR: NATURE AND MYTH
| Dimension | Ramanujan | Kolatkar |
|---|---|---|
| Relationship to Nature | Built through memory and inherited narrative | Built through direct, physical observation |
| Relationship to Myth | Tests inherited poetic praise against present fact | Questions whether sacred objects differ from ordinary ones |
| Tone | Intellectual, slightly melancholic | Fieldwork-like, open irony, less melancholy |
| Method | Like a researcher checking an old legend | Like a careful traveller describing what is actually there |
| Tradition Cited | Tamil literary culture and river mythology | Maharashtrian folk religion at Jejuri |
| Resolution | Open — tradition honoured and questioned simultaneously | Open — belief neither embraced nor dismissed |
Despite these differences, both poets share a larger move that I think defines this whole unit. Neither of them treats nature as a stable, comforting backdrop, and neither of them treats myth as something that simply demands belief. Both place old stories, a poetic river tradition for Ramanujan, a folk deity's stone for Kolatkar, inside a modern, questioning consciousness, and both let that questioning stay open rather than resolving it into either full belief or full rejection. This is exactly what our notes mean when they say that no true poet can fully escape tradition or fully escape the present. Ramanujan and Kolatkar are rooted in specific, real traditions, Tamil literary culture and Maharashtrian folk religion, and at the same time they remain restless inside those traditions, unwilling to accept them without question.
Nature and myth in two modernist visions: memory and tradition on one side, observation and doubt on the other.
7. What the New Poets Changed for Me
Before this unit, I would have said that modern poetry meant leaving tradition behind, that the whole point of being "new" was to reject whatever came before. Studying Mahapatra, Ramanujan and Kolatkar has made me less confident about that assumption. What I now think, and what I would defend in an exam or a viva, is that these poets were not running away from tradition at all. They were staying close enough to it to argue with it honestly, which is a much harder and, I think, a much more mature position than simple rejection.
🌿 WHAT EACH POET TAUGHT ME
Mahapatra
A sacred town can hold hunger and death without either cancelling the other out.
Ramanujan
A river can carry centuries of poetic praise and still flood a village, and a poem can hold both facts at once.
Kolatkar
A stone can raise a real philosophical question about belief rather than settling it one way or another.
None of these poets gave me comfortable answers, and I think that discomfort is exactly the point. Iyengar's phrase about self-expression makes more sense to me now than it did at the start of this unit, because I can see specific poems doing the work of that phrase, bending English around Odisha, Madurai and Jejuri instead of forcing those places to sound like somewhere else.
I also came away with a different sense of what "Indian" means in Indian English poetry. It is not a fixed set of images, temples, rivers, myths, that a poet decorates a poem with. It is a set of real, sometimes uncomfortable relationships, between belief and poverty, tradition and present fact, inherited religion and honest doubt, that these poets keep working through in English without fully resolving. That unresolved quality is what I will remember most from this unit.
Video: Indian English Poetry — Tradition, Modernity and the New Poets
Conclusion
Bringing these four questions together, I think the classroom anthology activity, Iyengar's statement, Mahapatra's Puri and the comparison between Ramanujan and Kolatkar all point toward the same conclusion. The New Poets of Indian English poetry did not simply copy Western modernism, and they did not simply abandon Indian tradition either. They found a way to hold both at once, using free verse, irony and concrete imagery borrowed partly from modernist technique, and pointing that technique toward specifically Indian material, a temple town, a river tradition, a pilgrimage site, that could never have come from anywhere else.
This, I think, is the real answer to Iyengar's claim that the Indo-Anglian poet strives for self-expression in English. Self-expression, in the case of Mahapatra, Ramanujan and Kolatkar, is not a matter of writing about personal feelings in a foreign language. It is the harder, more interesting project of making English bend around Indian landscapes, Indian myths and Indian doubts until the language starts to sound like it belongs there. Indian English modernism, on the evidence of this unit, is not a delayed copy of a Western movement. It is what happens when English is finally asked to carry weight it was never originally built to carry, and, in the hands of poets like these, manages to carry it anyway.
Tradition is not abandoned, it is rewritten through the experience of the present.
📚 Works Cited
Chitre, Dilip. As Is, Where Is: Selected Poems. Poetrywala, 2008.
Chitre, Dilip. Says Tuka: Selected Poems of Tukaram. Penguin Books India, 1991.
Chitre, Dilip. Travelling in a Cage. Clearing House, 1980.
Daruwalla, Keki N. The Keeper of the Dead. Oxford University Press, 1982.
Daruwalla, Keki N. Under Orion. Writers Workshop, 1970.
Dharker, Imtiaz. Postcards from god. Bloodaxe Books, 1997.
Iyengar, K. R. Srinivasa. Indian Writing in English. Sterling Publishers, 1962.
Kolatkar, Arun. Jejuri. Clearing House, 1976.
Kumar, Shiv K. Subterfuges. Oxford University Press, 1976.
Mahapatra, Jayanta. Relationship. Greenfield Review Press, 1980.
Parthasarathy, R., editor. Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets. Oxford University Press, 1976.
Parthasarathy, R. Rough Passage. Oxford University Press, 1977.
Ramanujan, A. K. The Striders. Oxford University Press, 1966.
Suhrawardy, Shahid. Essays in Verse. 1937.
This analysis explores Indian English Modernism and the New Poets — examining how Jayanta Mahapatra, A. K. Ramanujan, Arun Kolatkar and their contemporaries bent the English language to carry genuinely Indian weight | Paper 202: Indian English Literature, Post Independence | MKBU
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