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20th CENTURY INDIAN ENGLISH SHORT STORIES AND POETRY SEMINAR PAPER – THE INFLUENCE OF WEST IN INDIAN ENGLISH POETRY Natasha Negi Indian English literature refers to the body of work by writers in India who write in the English language and whose native or co-native language could be one of the numerous languages of India. An overlooked category of Indian writing in English is poetry. Indian English poetry is remarkably great. Indian English poetry is the oldest form of Indian English literature. Swami Vivekananda, Swami Ramtirtha, Swami Yogananda, Sri Aurbindo and Rabindranath Tagore left a body of poetry which is glorious summation of India’s cultural spiritual and methodological heritage which dates back to the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Gita. In their poetry they endeavored to nativize English language in order to make it a befitting instrument for the expression of Indian sensibility. If studied in depth, one will know that it also represents various phases of development of our multitudinous cultural and national life right from the beginning till the present. It has three phases of development. The first phase is majorly responsible for generating Indian English poetry. This phase is also called the imitative phase because the efforts of the poets were imitative and derivative of English poetry, though they successfully gave a new direction to Indian poetry in English by writing on Indian history, myths and legends. The poets of the first phase of Indian English poetry have thoroughly followed the British Romantics and Victorian poets. The early pioneers include Henry Derozio, Michael Madusudan Dutt, Toru Dutt, B.M.Malahari, S.C.Dutt and R.C.Dutt. They were the trend setters who began to poetize the Indian echoes in a foreign language. The second phase of poets is the assimilative. This period starts from 1947. They were compulsive nationalist seeking to project the renascent consciousness of India caught in the historical conflict, turmoil and change in the process of the attainment of political freedom in 1947. Heart-searching probing of the cultural inheritance became the genuine concern of the poets of assimilation. The early poets were projecting landscapes, moods, fancies and dreams, while their followers sought a more radical assurance of their sense of origins and their sense of destiny. Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu constitute characteristics of both the two phases, in that they share their predecessor’s individual nostalgia as well as their successor’s sense of crisis and quest of identity. The third is the experimental phase, which begins after the Independence. This phase led to a conspicuous outbreak of poetic activity demanding the urgency of national self-definition and reflecting a painful heart-searching. The modern poets suddenly lifted from an exclusive to an extensive range of creative experience. They rose from a conservative to a cosmopolitan culture, to confront the new shape of things and acquire a new view of human destiny. The age changed and thus required a new perspective. There was much experimentation in an effort to achieve modernity. Modern techniques derived from such English craft men as Eliot, Auden and Dylan Thomas, as well as from the film Industry and the advertising industries were being used. Moreover, the modern Indian English poets have also been greatly influenced by Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Ezra pound, W. B. Yeats. This experimental approach, this quest for originality and newness, this stress on individuality and the rejection of all that is traditional often led to fantastic results. The celebrated modern day Indian English poets include Don Moraes, Nissim Ezekiel, P.Lal, Kamala Das, A.K.Ramanujan, Krishna Srinivas, Mahanand Sharma and others. However, the rising new poets have evolved a distinct idiom to express their voices; they use irony as a great weapon in their poetry. The celebrated modern day Indian English poets include Don Moraes, Nissim Ezekiel, P.Lal, Kamala Das, A.K.Ramanujan, Krishna Srinivas, Mahanand Sharma and others. However, the rising new poets have evolved a distinct idiom to express their voices, they use irony as a great weapon in their poetry. New poets like Shiva K. Kumar, Daruwalla, Grieve Patel, Arun Kolatkar, and I. H. Rizvi etc. excel in the use of the ironic mode. They do not blindly follow the British or the other parts of west. In the paper I have talked about selected poems of Henry Derozio, Toru Dutt and Ramanujan. Through few portions of their works I want to highlight the deep influence of the West in Indian English poetry. Henry Derozio was the first “Anglo-Indian” to have written poems in English. It is not a fact unknown that Derozio’s poems involve a genuine love and reverence for his native land. He desperately wishes to come to her rescue. Though not an Indian in the strictest sense of the word, his anxiety as well as his concern for India is almost palpable when we hear him plead or pray in his poems. As a poet, he has been appreciated for his simplicity of language, the absence of ornamentation and of course for his spontaneity and sincerity. A critic, S. Kripalani describes him as “on a cusp between the Romantics and the Victorians.” Hence, I want to draw his similarities or influences from the west which gradually emerged in his poetry. Derozio’s The Harp of India opens on a gloomy note as the poet invites his readers to visualize an “unstrung” and neglected harp hanging from a “withered” bough. This instantly reminds one of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 in particular wherein the poet describes, though in a different context, a similar leafless branch. Also it has striking similarities with Thomas Moore’s ballad in which a harp hangs “mute” on Tara’s wall and Sydney Owenson’s The Lay of an Irish Harp. Also, the use of the word ‘minstrel’ in Derozio’s poems, like The Harp of India and To India—My Native Land , in a title as well, is a strong reminder of a rich Indian oral literature and the many wandering minstrels singing songs of freedom to awaken the motherland and her people. At the same time, a similarity can also be drawn from Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel. Derozio through The Harp of India wanted to awaken his fellow beings and make them aware of the surroundings. The harp was a source for the clarion call for waking up the citizens from their slumber. As he mentions –“Harp of my country! Let me strike the strain!” His awakening call seems to have been influenced from P.B.Shelly’s Ode to the West Wind. However, if he has been influenced by other poets or made use of the harp like British Romantic poets, he has in turn also inspired many by both his poems and his teachings. Further, I have discussed one of the most popular poems of modern Indian English writing, Our Casuarina Tree. The poem is written by the celebrated poetess Toru Dutt; which was published in 1881. It is a perfect example of craftsmanship. In this poem Toru Dutt celebrates the majesty of the Casuarina Tree and remembers her happy childhood days spent under it and revives her memories with her beloved siblings. She has been praised for the neat structure of this poem, her skilful use of some of the most common figures of speech like simile, metaphor, personification and also for the rhythm and of course the content. The conclusions that I want to draw from Dutt’s poetry is the deep influence of West in her poem. Toru Dutt was well versed in both English and French as she lived for a long period of her life in both England and France and wrote poetry in both the languages. Elements of both these languages are seen in her poems, as there is a tragic sensibility that is uniquely French and stoic lyricism in the description of her poems that is a part of the English tradition.To begin with, in Our Casuarina Tree, she describes the scene that is before her when she looks out of her window, by which a reader may be reminded of the title of Robert Frost’s poem Tree at My Window. Then, in the opening stanza itself Toru Dutt describes her beloved Casuarina tree almost photographically, savoring the beauty of every branch, every blossom and every leaf. The Dutts’ Casuarina tree is an entity that stands tall with its “rugged trunk, indented deep with scars”, perhaps somewhat like Thomas Gray’s “rugged elm” or Tennyson’s popular, “All silver-green with gnarled bark”. Also, time and again Toru Dutt has been compared to Keats for the beauty of her verse. This clearly shows that Dutt was an avid reader of poetry who not only appreciated what she read but evidently also remembered verses and images that touched her most, stored them in her memory and which shows in her works. In the poem, Dutt personified the tree and throughout the poem endeavored to immortalize it. She shows how the Casuarina tree is a constant reminder of her irreparable personal loss. Through the tree she mourns her loss and she hopes that the “eerie speech” may reach the un-traversed terrain of the dead. The comparison that Toru draws between this moaning and the breaking of the waves on a shingle beach underlines too boldly her reliance on poets of the West, particularly on Matthew Arnold and his Dover Beach. Then, Wordsworth as well, it is evident, has never been too far away from Toru Dutt’s mind and heart. In the poem, she hopes that the tree will be remembered for ever as the yew trees of Borrowdale which were immortalized by Wordsworth and are still remembered.

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