The new poets: self-expression, modernism, nature, and myth in Indian English poetry
Introduction
The phrase “New Poets” refers not simply to a group of writers who appeared after an earlier generation. It describes a transformation in the ways Indian poets used language, memory, form, and subject matter. The New Poets wrote in a period marked by the end of colonial rule, the formation of a modern nation, rapid urban change, new educational institutions, political uncertainty, and the continuing influence of European and American modernism. Their poetry is therefore located between inheritances. They inherit English as a colonial language, but they also inherit regional languages, oral traditions, epics, devotional practices, local histories, family memories, and the textures of ordinary Indian life.
K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar’s chapter “The ‘New’ Poets” is important because it does not understand modern Indian English poetry as a simple imitation of English literature from Britain. Iyengar recognizes the poet’s linguistic difficulty, but he also sees that difficulty as a creative opportunity. The Indian poet can use English to express experiences that were not originally part of the language’s colonial literary history. This blog addresses four connected questions: the poets and works associated with the modernist anthology activity; Iyengar’s statement that an Indo-Anglian poet strives for self-expression in English; the major features of Jayanta Mahapatra’s poetry; and the ways A. K. Ramanujan and Arun Kolatkar represent nature and myth. The argument is that Indian English modernism becomes significant when English is reshaped by Indian places, bodies, memories, social realities, and cultural traditions.
The poets and the modernist anthology
The classroom material identifies a representative group of five poets: Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, A. K. Ramanujan, Jayanta Mahapatra, and Arun Kolatkar. This selection is valuable because it presents modern Indian experience from several angles. Ezekiel represents the urban, ironic, and self-conscious voice; Das brings an intimate and openly feminine consciousness; Ramanujan joins memory to family, language, history, and myth; Mahapatra turns Odisha’s landscapes and social realities into meditations on poverty, desire, death, and spirituality; and Kolatkar observes religion and ordinary life through a visual, skeptical, and often comic imagination.
The wider anthology relevant to this discussion is Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets. Oxford University Press describes the volume as a selection of modern Indian poetry in English with biographical and critical introductions. The verified contents list the following twelve poets: Nissim Ezekiel, Jayanta Mahapatra, A. K. Ramanujan, Arun Kolatkar, Keki N. Daruwalla, Dom Moraes, Dilip Chitre, Eunice de Souza, Adil Jussawalla, Agha Shahid Ali, Vikram Seth, and Manohar Shetty.
It is useful to distinguish this twelve-poet anthology from the five-poet classroom selection. Kamala Das appears in the supplied classroom group, but she is not among the twelve poets listed in Mehrotra’s anthology contents. This difference does not weaken her importance; rather, it shows that anthologies are acts of selection and argument. The classroom activity expands the field by placing Das beside the anthology’s poets and by emphasizing the importance of women’s self-expression.
The supplied classroom material also associates “Night of the Scorpion” with Ezekiel, “An Introduction” with Kamala Das, and “A River” with Ramanujan. These poems are particularly useful for explaining the New Poets because they bring ordinary experience, local geography, multilingual identity, and social criticism into English. Their writing demonstrates that modern Indian poetry does not have one single tone. It may be intimate or detached, spiritual or skeptical, ironic or emotional, traditional or experimental. What unites these poets is the effort to make poetry answer to lived experience rather than to an abstract idea of “Indianness.”
Snippets of their writing
The writings of the New Poets justify their inclusion in a modernist anthology because their poems join personal experience to wider social and cultural questions. Their modernism is not merely a matter of unusual lineation or experimental punctuation. It also appears in their willingness to make the ordinary significant, to question inherited conventions, and to bring private consciousness into contact with public history.
In Nissim Ezekiel’s “Night of the Scorpion,” the arrival of the villagers is described through the following image:
The phrase “swarms of flies” is vivid and faintly ironic. It suggests movement, noise, confusion, and collective activity. Ezekiel does not simply dismiss the peasants as foolish. Their repeated religious language expresses fear and a desire to help, even though it cannot actually cure the mother. The poem therefore holds several perspectives together: superstition, rational observation, communal feeling, and the child’s memory. At the end, the mother says:
This statement changes the emotional balance of the poem. The mother’s response is not an explanation of the scorpion or a ritual attempt to control evil. It is an expression of maternal love and self-sacrifice. Ezekiel’s poem is modern because it neither celebrates tradition uncritically nor rejects it from a superior position. It observes how different forms of belief coexist within one household and allows the final word to belong to the mother’s love.
Kamala Das’s “An Introduction” presents a different kind of modern self. The speaker insists on the legitimacy of her Indian, regional, female, and linguistic identity:
The lines connect language with place and identity. Malabar is not an ornamental geographical reference; it is part of the speaker’s sense of origin. The distinction between the languages she speaks, writes, and dreams in also shows that identity is not contained by a single linguistic system. Das makes English carry the pressure of a multilingual interior life. Her self-expression is also a challenge to the expectation that women should hide their desires, wounds, or anger. The female self becomes a serious poetic subject rather than an object described by male writers.
A. K. Ramanujan’s “A River” begins with a geographical and cultural location:
The lines bring together a real city, religious architecture, literary tradition, and collective memory. Yet Ramanujan does not remain satisfied with inherited praise. The dry river is described in physical terms:
The expression “sand ribs” gives the river a body. It makes the landscape appear exposed and vulnerable. Ramanujan then criticizes the poetic tradition that notices only spectacle:
The sentence is simple, but its moral force is considerable. Earlier poets celebrate the river when it becomes dramatic, while the ordinary people who suffer during floods disappear from the poem. Ramanujan therefore connects nature with social responsibility. To write about a river is also to ask whose experience is remembered and whose suffering is ignored.
Jayanta Mahapatra’s “Hunger” presents the painful relation between poverty, sexuality, and power. The poem contains the disturbing lines:
The falling sky suggests the speaker’s sudden moral burden. The girl’s body is described through images of thinness, coldness, and vulnerability. Mahapatra’s language is deliberately uncomfortable because the poem confronts the social conditions in which poverty makes the young woman vulnerable to sexual exploitation. The poem does not offer the reader a safe position outside the event; the speaker’s own gaze and desire become part of the ethical problem.
Arun Kolatkar’s poetry places nature and religion beside the ordinary world. In “The Priest,” the priest waits in a concrete landscape:
The image is physical and almost comic. The priest is not shown as a distant spiritual authority but as a body waiting beside a wall. Later, the bus passes with a sudden material force:
The humor does not simply destroy the sacred. It suggests that religious experience is always embedded in dust, transport, hunger, poverty, and ordinary accidents. These snippets show why the New Poets matter: they make English respond to local speech, social conflict, bodily experience, regional memory, and forms of belief that cannot be reduced to one official literary tradition.
| Poet | Representative Works Associated with the Selection | Distinctive Contribution |
|---|---|---|
| Nissim Ezekiel | “My Cat,” “For Love’s Record,” “Case Study,” “Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher,” “Paradise Flycatcher” | Urban consciousness, irony, disciplined form, and self-examination |
| Jayanta Mahapatra | “A Rain of Rites,” “Hunger,” “Hands,” “The Abandoned British Cemetery at Balasore,” “Of That Love” | Odisha, poverty, sexuality, history, death, and spiritual unease |
| A. K. Ramanujan | “The Striders,” “Self-Portrait,” “On the Death of a Poem,” “Chicago Zen” | Multilingual memory, family, cultural distance, and analytical irony |
| Arun Kolatkar | “Woman,” “Suicide of Rama,” “Irani Restaurant Bombay,” and poems from Jejuri | Skepticism, visual detail, popular speech, pilgrimage, and the sacred in ordinary life |
| Keki N. Daruwalla | “Hawk,” “The King Speaks to the Scribe,” “Fish Are Speared by Night,” “Chinar” | Violence, power, history, and predatory or harsh nature |
| Dom Moraes | “Autobiography,” “Words to a Boy,” “Prophet,” “Future Plans” | Exile, loneliness, memory, and cosmopolitan experience |
| Dilip Chitre | “Pushing a Cart,” “Of Garlic and Such,” “The Felling of the Banyan Tree,” “Father Returning Home” | Urban alienation, translation, family, and the fragility of modern life |
| Eunice de Souza | “Feeding the Poor at Christmas,” “Miss Louise,” “Advice to Women,” “Meeting Poets” | Gender, Catholic identity, domestic life, and sharp social irony |
| Adil Jussawalla | “Land’s End,” “Evening on a Mountain,” “Halt X,” “Freedom Song” | Dislocation, fractured identity, political unease, and experimental form |
| Agha Shahid Ali | “Postcard from Kashmir,” “Snowmen,” “The Dacca Gauzes,” “The Previous Occupant” | Kashmir, memory, loss, exile, and cultural belonging |
| Vikram Seth | “Guest,” “The Humble Administrator’s Garden,” “Evening Wheat,” “Unclaimed” | Formal control, travel, observation, and cultural difference |
| Manohar Shetty | “Fireflies,” “Foreshadows,” “Gifts,” “Domestic Creatures,” “Moving Out” | Everyday objects, intimacy, uncertainty, and understated modern life |
Iyengar’s Statement and the Problem of Self-expression
Iyengar writes:
The phrase “particular and peculiar perplexity” refers to the historical situation of Indian English writing. English in India is not an entirely neutral medium. It was strengthened by colonial education, administration, missionary institutions, and the cultural authority of Britain. At the same time, English became part of Indian intellectual and literary life, and many Indian writers acquired it as a major language of education, professional communication, and artistic expression. The poet therefore confronts a double condition: English is historically associated with colonial power, yet it is also available as a language in which Indian subjects can speak, question, remember, and create.
Iyengar’s statement should not be interpreted as meaning that an Indian poet is permanently trapped in a foreign language. His larger argument is that English can become an Indian literary instrument when it is shaped by Indian experience. The poet may bring into English the rhythms of another language, the structure of a local story, the idiom of domestic speech, the imagery of a regional landscape, the emotional force of a religious tradition, or the pressure of a particular social history. The language is inherited, but its literary possibilities are not fixed. Self-expression occurs through transformation.
Iyengar also emphasizes the importance of bilingualism. Many Indian poets write in English while thinking through regional languages, oral cultures, classical texts, and local forms of memory. This does not require the poem to insert regional words mechanically. A poem may be deeply Indian through its situation, rhythm, assumptions, moral questions, and structure of feeling even when its vocabulary is standard English. In this sense, the question is not whether the poet uses English but what the poet makes English do.
The idea can be demonstrated through Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, and A. K. Ramanujan. They share English as a medium, but they use it to construct very different selves. Ezekiel turns English toward urban irony and domestic observation. Das uses it to claim bodily and emotional authority. Ramanujan uses it to mediate between languages, traditions, disciplines, and memories. Their differences show that “self-expression in English” is not a single style. It is a continuing negotiation between language and experience.
Nissim Ezekiel: Urbanity, Irony, and Disciplined Expression
Nissim Ezekiel is often associated with the development of modern Indian English poetry because he brought a strong sense of craft, urban life, intellectual self-consciousness, and controlled irony into his poems. The University of Hyderabad’s Indian Writing in English Online project describes him as a pivotal figure in the cultural life of Bombay/Mumbai, where he worked as a poet, editor, critic, and teacher. This context matters because Ezekiel’s poetry is not an abstract representation of “India.” It is shaped by the modern city: its crowded spaces, linguistic mixtures, professional routines, loneliness, and divided identities.
“Night of the Scorpion” demonstrates how Ezekiel makes an ordinary Indian memory into a complex modern poem. The mother’s scorpion bite, the villagers’ superstition, the father’s rational attempts, and the child’s observing consciousness are all placed within the same domestic event. The poem does not force a final judgment between rationality and faith. Instead, it shows how a family and a community respond to fear. The language remains clear and controlled even when the subject is emotionally charged. This balance between sympathy and irony is central to Ezekiel’s modernism.
The same self-consciousness appears in poems such as “Background, Casually,” where the speaker’s relation to India, Jewish identity, urban experience, and social belonging is marked by distance and irony. The poem’s title itself suggests a complicated relationship to personal history. “Background” may refer to the social and cultural conditions behind the speaker, while “casually” suggests an attempt to speak without melodrama. Yet beneath the casual manner lies an awareness of exclusion, difference, and the difficulty of claiming a national identity in a simple way.
Ezekiel’s English is therefore Indian not because it abandons formal discipline, but because it uses discipline to represent a specific modern consciousness. He does not need to imitate the rhythms of a regional language overtly. His Indian context appears through situations, social relations, religious plurality, urban speech, and his refusal to turn India into a picturesque object for an external reader. Iyengar’s statement is justified because Ezekiel makes English serve a self that is Indian, urban, modern, and internally divided.
Kamala Das: The Female Self as Resistance
Kamala Das gives Iyengar’s statement a gendered and bodily force. In “An Introduction,” the speaker rejects the demand that poetry should be detached from the individual. She speaks of her color, birthplace, languages, sexuality, marriage, and emotional life. By announcing “I am Indian, very brown,” she resists the pressure to present Indian identity through abstract national symbols or through an idealized feminine image. The poem insists that a woman’s body and voice are legitimate subjects of serious poetry.
The statement “I speak three languages, write in / Two, dream in one” is particularly important for understanding self-expression. It suggests that the self is multilingual even when the poem is written in English. The language of writing is not identical with the language of speech or dream. Das’s use of English creates a space in which the private self can confront social authority. She can address the conventions of marriage, the expectations placed upon women, and the restrictions on female desire in a language that was once associated with colonial education and male institutional power.
Iyengar describes Das as a “new phenomenon” in Indo-Anglian poetry and emphasizes her “fiercely feminine sensibility.” He also notices her pointed diction, nervous rhythm, and tendency to divide phrases and meanings across lines. This observation can be read formally: the broken line becomes an image of a fractured consciousness. The speaker’s identity is divided by the roles assigned to her—wife, mother, daughter, Indian woman, poet, and desiring subject—but the poem uses that division to create a new poetic authority.
Das’s poetry also complicates the idea of confession. Her first-person voice is powerful, but it is not merely private autobiography. It opens questions about patriarchy, respectability, language, and the politics of who may speak about the body. “My Grandmother’s House,” for example, transforms a remembered domestic space into an image of emotional loss and the hunger for love. “Hot Noon in Malabar” joins climate, landscape, memory, and desire. In these poems, place is never just scenery. Malabar becomes part of the speaker’s emotional geography.
Iyengar’s criticism of Das is also worth considering. He admires her intensity but warns that repeated hurt, disillusionment, and cynicism may become mannered. This qualification does not cancel her importance. It shows that the New Poets must be read critically rather than celebrated without reservation. Das’s achievement is that she makes self-expression a form of resistance, but her poetry also asks how a repeated performance of pain can become a recognizable literary style. Her English is transformative precisely because it exposes the pressure of speaking from within and against social conventions.
A. K. Ramanujan: Multilingual Consciousness and Cultural Memory
A. K. Ramanujan offers perhaps the clearest example of the layered linguistic situation described by Iyengar. He wrote in English while also working with Kannada, Tamil, classical literature, folklore, anthropology, and translation. The anthology material records Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s account of Ramanujan’s “outer” and “inner” forms: English and his academic disciplines provide formal structures, while his first years in India, regional languages, folklore, and cultural memories provide images and substance. This does not mean that Ramanujan simply translates Indian material into English. His poetry allows multiple systems of knowledge to interact.
In “A River,” Ramanujan begins from a recognizable Indian city and a familiar literary tradition, but he questions the tradition’s selective memory. The Vaigai River is connected to temples and poets, yet the river’s floods have consequences for ordinary people. By comparing the descriptions of old and new poets, Ramanujan exposes a recurring problem in literary representation: poets may be attracted to dramatic images while ignoring the human suffering that makes those images possible.
His self-expression is reflective rather than purely declarative. The speaker does not announce a simple cultural identity. Instead, he observes how the past enters the present through language, family, architecture, ritual, and remembered stories. Poems such as “Self-Portrait” suggest that identity is composed of images reflected back by others. The self is not completely transparent to itself. In “The Striders,” a small creature becomes an occasion for attention, but the poem’s precision also reveals the poet’s desire to understand how perception creates meaning.
Ramanujan’s modernism therefore depends upon distance and intimacy at the same time. He is close to Indian traditions, yet he does not accept them uncritically. He can enter a cultural memory and examine it as a scholar, translator, son, and modern individual. His English is a meeting place rather than a replacement for regional languages. Iyengar’s statement is justified because Ramanujan turns the historical problem of English into a poetics of relation: the poem becomes a space where different languages, times, and cultural memories remain connected without becoming identical.
A Critical Note on Jayanta Mahapatra
Jayanta Mahapatra’s poetry is strongly rooted in Odisha, but it would be limiting to call it merely regional poetry. Odisha in Mahapatra is both a physical location and a moral, historical, and psychological landscape. Rivers, temples, coastlines, heat, monsoon, fishermen, women, cemeteries, religious rituals, and ordinary households become means of exploring guilt, desire, loneliness, poverty, memory, death, and spiritual uncertainty. His poems are local in their imagery but wide in their ethical reach.
A central feature of Mahapatra’s writing is the transformation of landscape into consciousness. The landscape does not sit passively behind the speaker. Heat may express exhaustion; a river may suggest time and mortality; a temple may contain both faith and social exclusion; a cemetery may make colonial history visible; and the sea may become a space of desire, danger, and moral ambiguity. Mahapatra’s physical world is therefore never simply picturesque. It is charged with human conflict.
“Hunger” and the ethics of looking
“Hunger,” from A Rain of Rites, is among Mahapatra’s most difficult poems. Lyrikline identifies the poem as part of the 1976 collection and preserves its disturbing language. The poem presents a fisherman who offers his fifteen-year-old daughter to the speaker. The title operates on several levels. It refers to material poverty, sexual desire, the father’s economic desperation, and the speaker’s own troubled appetite. The poem refuses to keep these forms of hunger separate.
The lines “The sky fell on me, and a father’s exhausted wile. / Long and lean, her years were cold as rubber” register the speaker’s shock. The sky, normally associated with openness and transcendence, becomes a weight that falls upon the speaker. The girl’s body is described through hard and impersonal images. Her youth has been reduced by poverty to something that can be offered, evaluated, and purchased. The phrase “a father’s exhausted wile” indicates not simple villainy but a desperate and morally destructive strategy produced by deprivation.
The poem is ethically complicated because the speaker is not an innocent observer. He is implicated in the encounter. His consciousness experiences disgust, desire, guilt, and helplessness at the same time. Mahapatra does not allow the reader to stand comfortably outside the scene and condemn only the fisherman. The speaker’s gaze is also part of the economy in which the girl becomes vulnerable. This self-implication prevents the poem from becoming a conventional social-reform statement. It creates a disturbing awareness of how poverty and privilege entangle the observer with the suffering he recognizes.
At the same time, a critical reader must ask whether the girl is given enough independent voice. The poem is powerful because it exposes exploitation, but the girl is largely seen through the speaker’s perspective. This is one of the representational limits of the poem. Its ethical seriousness should not prevent us from examining the gendered structure of its gaze. Mahapatra’s achievement lies in producing discomfort, but the reader must still ask who speaks, who is seen, and who remains silent.
Odisha, Memory, and Spiritual Unease
In “Indian Summer,” Mahapatra uses heat and stillness to create a world in which physical climate becomes an expression of psychological and spiritual tension. Indian summer is not only a season. It becomes a pressure on the body and mind, a condition in which time seems slowed and ordinary life acquires an atmosphere of exhaustion. Domestic images, ritual details, death, and desire exist together. The poem’s spiritual world is not secure. Faith appears alongside doubt, and religious symbols do not eliminate suffering.
This ambivalence is characteristic of Mahapatra. He does not represent religion as either pure truth or simple superstition. Temples and rituals carry historical and emotional power, but they also exist within societies marked by poverty, caste, gender inequality, and fear. A religious landscape may offer consolation while also revealing the distance between spiritual ideals and social reality. Mahapatra’s poetry is therefore spiritually searching without being conventionally devotional.
“A Rain of Rites,” the title poem of the collection, suggests that ritual is connected to memory, repetition, and the attempt to give form to experience. Rain may cleanse, obscure, renew, or intensify the landscape, while rites connect the individual to inherited practices. Yet the poem’s title also leaves open the possibility that ritual can become a covering over unresolved pain. Mahapatra’s poetry repeatedly asks whether inherited forms are capable of responding to modern loneliness and social injustice.
History and the Haunted Landscape
“The Abandoned British Cemetery at Balasore” brings colonial history into the present through a landscape of decay. The cemetery is a material reminder that empire once occupied Indian space through institutions, bodies, administration, and violence. In abandonment, the site seems to have lost its political power, but memory continues to inhabit it. The decaying colonial monument becomes part of the local landscape, showing that independence does not erase history from the earth.
Mahapatra’s historical imagination is not celebratory. He is interested in what remains after political events have apparently ended: the dead, the poor, the women, the abandoned structures, and the memories that official histories prefer to make invisible. The cemetery therefore works as more than a symbol of death. It is also a site where colonial and postcolonial time overlap. The present is haunted by what has not been adequately mourned or understood.
Style and Critical Importance
Mahapatra’s style is often restrained, fragmented, and image-driven. His poems do not always explain their meanings directly. Silence, hesitation, and abrupt transitions are important parts of their effect. The reader is frequently placed inside an atmosphere before being given a clear argument. This technique is appropriate to his subjects because guilt, desire, faith, poverty, and memory do not resolve themselves neatly.
His poetry can be read as socially committed because it confronts poverty, exploitation, gender inequality, and historical injustice. However, it does not become propaganda. Mahapatra avoids simple moral formulas. The speaker may be implicated; the religious figure may be both meaningful and limited; the landscape may be beautiful and oppressive; and the past may be both remembered and forgotten. This complexity gives his poetry its critical force.
Mahapatra’s work also raises questions about the representation of marginalized people. “Hunger” exposes the violence of poverty, but the girl’s silence reminds us that even sympathetic poetry can reproduce unequal structures of looking. A critical note must therefore acknowledge both the poem’s ethical power and its limits. Mahapatra is not valuable because he offers a perfect political voice for every oppressed subject. He is valuable because he forces the reader to confront the discomfort of seeing, desiring, remembering, and judging within unequal social conditions.
Overall, Mahapatra’s poetry joins regional rootedness with existential reflection. Odisha is not a decorative setting but the ground from which his questions arise. His poems show how a local landscape can contain colonial history, religious memory, economic deprivation, gendered experience, and universal concerns about death and human isolation.
A. K. Ramanujan and Arun Kolatkar: Nature and Myth
A. K. Ramanujan and Arun Kolatkar are both New Poets who draw upon Indian cultural materials, but neither treats tradition as a fixed or unquestionable inheritance. Both poets bring nature and myth into contact with modern skepticism, memory, urban experience, and the ordinary world. Their difference lies in emphasis. Ramanujan often examines nature through social memory, ethical observation, family, and cultural structures. Kolatkar places myth under the pressure of physical detail, popular speech, humor, and the visual encounter with pilgrimage.
Ramanujan: Nature as Ethical and Cultural Memory
In “A River,” nature is not an isolated object of beauty. The Vaigai is linked to Madurai’s temples, poets, seasonal changes, human bodies, and public memory. The river’s drying “to a trickle / in the sand” and its “sand ribs” make it appear vulnerable. The image is not simply romantic. It suggests that nature has a body and that the human treatment of nature involves ethical consequences.
Ramanujan’s criticism of the poets who “only sang of the floods” is also a criticism of selective representation. The flood is visually dramatic, but its effects fall upon ordinary people whose suffering does not become part of the literary image. Ramanujan’s poem therefore asks what a responsible nature poem should do. Should it celebrate beauty alone, or should it record the social realities connected to the landscape? His answer is clear: nature and human experience cannot be separated.
This approach differs from a romantic tradition in which nature offers escape from society. For Ramanujan, the river leads back to society. It makes visible the relation between poetic tradition and social neglect. His nature poetry is therefore modern because it questions the inherited conventions through which nature is described. The poem retains cultural memory—Madurai remains a city of temples and poets—but it refuses to repeat that memory without criticism.
Ramanujan’s treatment of myth is similarly analytical. Myth survives through family stories, rituals, proverbs, temples, classical texts, and linguistic memory. It is neither dead history nor an unquestioned sacred truth. It continues to shape the modern self, but it may also expose contradictions within family and society. In poems such as “Self-Portrait,” identity appears as something seen through reflections, inherited images, and other people’s descriptions. In “The Hindoo: the Only Risk,” cultural identity is approached through irony and self-consciousness rather than through a simple assertion of religious belonging.
Ramanujan’s multilingualism deepens this treatment of myth. He understands that a story changes when it moves between languages and contexts. The English poem may carry the residue of Kannada or Tamil, but it also reorganizes that material through a new rhythm and structure. Translation is therefore not only a linguistic activity; it becomes a model for cultural identity. The self is made through crossings, partial memories, and relations among different systems of meaning.
Ramanujan does not idealize tradition. He recognizes its beauty and its authority, but he also notices its exclusions. The same cultural memory that preserves a myth may conceal caste, gender, poverty, or social suffering. His poetry is modern because it allows the past to speak while questioning the forms of power that the past may contain.
Kolatkar: Myth, Materiality, and the Profane
Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri is a sequence about a pilgrimage centre in Maharashtra associated with Khandoba. The collection follows a modern visitor through temples, rocks, hills, shrines, buses, priests, beggars, ruins, and local legends. Kolatkar does not present Jejuri as simply sacred, but neither does he reduce it to a place of superstition. He writes from the position of an empathetic skeptic: a visitor who questions belief but recognizes the human need for meaning, community, and continuity.
The poem “A Scratch” expresses this ambivalence:
The boundary between god and stone is both a religious question and a poetic question. A stone may be an ordinary object, a sacred object, or a surface upon which a story is created. Kolatkar’s language does not settle the matter. Instead, it keeps the reader within uncertainty. Myth remains meaningful even when the modern observer cannot accept it literally.
In “The Priest,” the priest waits beside a culvert wall, and the language emphasizes the body rather than spiritual grandeur. The priest becomes hungry, tired, and materially vulnerable. His religious role does not remove him from poverty. When the bus passes and “paints his eyeballs blue,” the scene becomes comic, but the humor has a serious function. It brings the sacred down into the world of public transport, dust, noise, and accidental violence. The sacred is not destroyed; it is made visible as something that exists within ordinary material life.
Kolatkar’s nature is similarly concrete. Hills, rocks, cactus, sunlight, dust, and ruins are not passive scenery. They shape the visitor’s experience and generate the myths attached to Jejuri. The landscape appears worn and desolate, but every stone may produce a legend. Nature is therefore connected to language and cultural memory. A rock is not only geological matter; it can become a deity, a shrine, a historical remainder, or a prompt for skepticism.
Kolatkar’s myth-making is also democratic. He does not focus only on major gods or prestigious Sanskritic narratives. He attends to local deities, marginal figures, priests, old women, beggars, and ordinary workers. The outsider’s movement through Jejuri reveals a culture that is both sacred and economically difficult. The poem “The Old Woman,” for example, forces the visitor to confront his own impatience and privilege. Her question—what else can an old woman do on hills as wretched as these?—turns a minor encounter into a moral challenge.
The collection’s modernism comes from its visual precision and its refusal of elevated poetic language. Kolatkar uses short lines, unexpected pauses, colloquial expression, and cinematic shifts of attention. He can move from a myth to a pothole, from a deity to a bus, from a temple to a hungry priest. This structure prevents the reader from maintaining a stable separation between high and low, sacred and profane, nature and culture, or belief and doubt.
E. V. Ramakrishnan describes Kolatkar as a bilingual poet whose Jejuri is a poetic search for the sacred through the profane. The essay argues that the poems resist the separation between the human and non-human, the worldly and divine, and the ordinary and extraordinary. This description is useful because Kolatkar’s skepticism is not simply destructive. His doubts allow him to see the forms of life and connection that official religious or literary language may overlook.
Comparison between Ramanujan and Kolatkar
Ramanujan and Kolatkar share an interest in the way cultural memory enters modern consciousness, but they create different poetic experiences. Ramanujan is often more meditative and analytical. He examines how traditions are remembered, translated, and ethically tested. His river becomes a social archive, and his myths become fragments through which the modern self understands its divided inheritance. Kolatkar is more immediate and visual. His poems proceed through encounters with objects, bodies, sounds, and movements. His myths arise from stones, shrines, roads, buses, and local stories.
A.K. Ramanujan
- Examines nature through social memory, ethical observation, and cultural structures.
- Refuses to sing only of the river’s floods; exposes the social neglect in romanticizing nature.
- Places myth beside modern anthropology, family structures, and translation, keeping the past ethically tethered to the present.
Arun Kolatkar
- Highly visual and concrete; proceeds through raw encounters with objects and bodies.
- Refuses to treat hills and temples as timeless spiritual scenery; presents an active, material reality.
- Places myth right beside hunger, poverty, comic accidents, and material decay, finding the sacred in ordinary life.
Both poets resist romanticizing nature. Ramanujan refuses to sing only of the river’s floods; Kolatkar refuses to treat hills and temples as timeless spiritual scenery. Both also resist treating myth as a sealed inheritance. Ramanujan places myth beside anthropology, family, language, and modern doubt. Kolatkar places it beside hunger, poverty, comic accidents, and material decay. Their poetry is therefore neither anti-traditional nor traditionally devotional. It is exploratory.
Their work also expands the meaning of “Indian” poetry in English. Indianness does not appear only through mythological names or regional settings. It appears through the organization of perception, through the relation between oral and written culture, through the ethical questions raised by social life, and through the ability to bring multiple languages and traditions into a modern poetic form. Ramanujan and Kolatkar show that writing in English can involve translation without being reducible to translation. The poem becomes a new cultural space where inherited materials are questioned, reassembled, and made contemporary.
Conclusion
The New Poets made Indian English poetry modern by making it answer to lived experience. The anthology associated with Arvind Krishna Mehrotra brings together twelve poets whose voices differ in religion, region, generation, gender, style, and subject. The classroom selection adds Kamala Das to this conversation and emphasizes the importance of women’s self-expression. Together, these poets demonstrate that Indian English poetry is not one unified tradition but a field of negotiations among English, regional languages, memory, history, myth, modernity, and individual consciousness.
Iyengar’s statement that an Indo-Anglian poet strives for self-expression in English identifies the central creative problem of this literature. The poets inherit English, but they do not leave it unchanged. Ezekiel turns it toward urban irony and domestic memory; Das makes it the language of a woman’s body, desire, and authority; Ramanujan makes it carry multilingual memory and ethical reflection; Mahapatra uses it to confront poverty, sexuality, history, death, and spiritual unease; and Kolatkar makes it observe myth through stones, buses, priests, hills, and ordinary life.
Their achievement is not that they produce an English poetry that is purely Indian or purely Western. Their achievement is that they make the contradiction productive. English becomes capable of expressing Indian experience because the poets alter its subjects, rhythms, assumptions, and structures of attention. The New Poets show that self-expression is not merely the declaration of a private identity. It is also the creation of a language in which a society can recognize its memories, conflicts, landscapes, myths, and silences.
Works cited
Das, Kamala. Summer in Calcutta. Everest Press, 1965.
Ezekiel, Nissim. The Exact Name. Eurasia Publishing House, 1965.
Iyengar, K. R. Srinivasa. Indian Writing in English. 5th ed., Sterling Publishers, 1985.
Kolatkar, Arun. Jejuri. Clearing House, 1976. Reprinted by New York Review Books, 2005.
Mahapatra, Jayanta. A Rain of Rites. University of Georgia Press, 1976.
Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna, editor. The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets. Oxford University Press, 1993.
Ramanujan, A. K. The Striders. Oxford University Press, 1966.
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