CHAPTER I Women Poets in Indian English Poetry

CHAPTER I Women Poets in Indian English Poetry: The Past and the Present Indian English poetry is now more than one hundred and seventy-five years old if we recall the date of the publication of Derozio’s book of poems entitled Poems. The book Poems appeared from Indian famous city of Calcutta in 1827. Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, born in 1809, was the son of an Indo-Portuguese father and an English mother. He was a conscious and curious child who started writing in his early age. He worked for few days as a clerk in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and at Bhagalpur on an indigo plantation. He tried to search his fortune in journalism also but could not succeed. He became a lecturer at Hindu College, Calcutta. Here, his free, frank and fearless personality bloomed and curious nature came forward. His spirit of inquiry, his passion-for ideas, his reformistic idealism and his romantic enthusiasm and temperament fired the imagination of many a students to a great extent. 2 Derozio was revolutionary not only in his iconoclastic ideas but also in his effort to initiate a new form of literary composition. Indian English poetry, in fact, has offered over the period of one hundred and seventy-five years a chequered history of growth and development that continuously made, unmade and remade itself through constant experiments in matters of themes and styles. Indian English poetry has undergone several phases of experimentations resulting in varied phenomena a ceaseless poetic activities that vouch for the inner strength of the succeeding poets. The social reforms, the individual ecstasies^ the agonies of living personae as well as mythical characters, love and nature, rejuvenation of legends and metaphysical queries are some of the themes that have been treated and projected by Indian English poets during both the pre-Independence and post-Independence periods. A host of stylistic innovations have marked the growth of Indian English poetry from its inception during the cofinfoal days down to the post-Independence and post-modern periods. That Indian English poetry is not isolated from the global trends very much corroborated by the fact that it has incorporated in itself the manifestation of the feminist 3 movements that swept through Europe, America, Canada and Australia since 1960s. Since then there appeared the poetry of Kamala Das, Eunice de Souza, Mamta Kalia, Tara Patel, Imtiaz Dharker, Channayne D’Souza, Suzata Bhatt and a few other women poets who boldly upset the phallogocentric discourse of Indian English poetry by introducing in it a new array of thematic contents like woman’s protest against patriarchal mores and attitudes. For the first time in Indian English poetry, the women poets of post-Independence and post-modern period portrayed in a subversive idiom their desires, lust, sexuality and gestational experiences. They enriched Indian English poetry with a worth of new themes and experiences. They developed a new innovative iconoclastic discourse to portray their repressed desires. Thus a new form of feminist poetry emerged and grew to give Indian English poetry new strength, new diversity and new potent signs of maturity and newer forms of approximation to contemporary issues and reality of social and political changes • that have overtaken the course of human civilization during the period moving towards the new millennium. The pre-Independence period is also of more importance to understand the basic foundation of the 4 making of Indo-English poetry in general beginning from 1827 to 1947. Indian English poetry during its pre- Independence period produced a host of poets from Derozio to Harindranath Chattopadhyay but paradoxically enough only two women poets published their poems. Thus, the discourse that developed in Indian English poetry during the pre-Independence period was predominantly phallogocentric. Torn Datt died at the early age of twenty one and her poems were published posthumously. We can safely say that Indian English poetry really graduated from imitation to authenticity with Torn Dutt (1856-77). The third and youngest child of Govin Chunder Dutt, Torulata, born a Hindu was baptized along with the other members of the family in 1862. She learnt English at a very early age and reading and music were her chief hobbies. Sailing for Europe in 1869, she spent a year in France, studying French, and was thereafter in England for three years. Returning to India in 1873, she died of consumption four years later, at the age of twentyone. One of her father’s sonnets contains a remarkable pen-portrait of her: Puny and elf-like, with dishevelled treeses / Self-willed and shy... / Intent to pay her tenderest addresses / To bird or cat,—but most intelligent.” The fifty odd letters she wrote to her 5 English friend, Miss Martin, reveal an interesting personality. There is inevitably much in them of the usual school-girl gossip about the trivial minutiae of daily life— news of the calving of a cow and the killing of a large snake; and at one place one finds her demanding a mosquito curtain for her canaries; but there is something much more also: a sad awareness of the passing of time and strange intimations of maturity, as, for instance, when she declares ‘I am getting quite old, twenty and some odd months and with such an old-fashioned face that English ladies take me for thirty.’ For one living so sheltered a life she shows a surprisingly lively interest in the social and political scene. When a European who had killed his syu is reported to have been fined only two Pound, she comments indignantly: ‘You see how cheap the life of an Indian is in the eyes of an English judge’(Harihar Das 1921, p.5). Her comments on book she reads show a well-developed critical sense. She wonders why Hardy’s heroines ‘generally marry the men they loved the least’. An impish sense of humour too breaks out occasionally, as when, on being chided by an elderly relative for not getting married yet, she replies demurely, ‘I was only waiting for your permission.’ 6 Her study of Sanskrit during the closing years of her life brought her nearer to the springs of her own culture, she ceased to be a totally English woman. She now realizes how grand, how sublime, how pathetic our legends are; and during the last few months of her life, she writes, ‘strange to say I do not much relish the idea of leaving Calcutta. I am very fickle, for it was I who regretted the most leaving England. I wonder why this is so.’ As we know that a tender hearted girl that she was, her poetic output would have been rare had she only been allotted a little longer span of life. Like Ram Sharma’s hers also was a similar attitude of ambivalence towards Britain and loved the British ways yet she had a penchant for the Indian mythology. It is very curious fact that though she was a Christian convert, she had deep love for Indian legends and classics. She has extensively exploited some of the native myths and legends in her Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan which were posthumously published in 1882. M.K Naik's evolution of her achievement is too pertinent to be overlooked: What is most impressive about Torn Dutt’s poetry is its virtually total freedom from imitation (in contrast with Kashi Prasad Ghose and M.M. Dutt) at an age when most writers are in their artistic swaddling 7 clothes... Her best work has the qualities of a quiet strength of deep emotion held under artistic restraint and an acute awareness of the abiding values of Indian life (Naik, pp 40-41) The poetry she produced was mostly based on ancient Indian legends. Even then in one of her poems, entitled ‘Savitri’, Dutt recreates a bold woman who chooses her own bridegroom, and engages herself in a long pursuit to win back her husband’s soul from Yama, the supernatural king of death. She asserts the rights of her individual self: ‘He for his deeds shall get his due As I for mine: thus here each soul Is its own friend if it pursue The right;...’ Torn Dutt can be considered the first Indian English poet to make an extensive use of Indian myth and legend, though scattered references to these had been employed by her predecessors. Furthermore, her treatment of these legends reveals, on the whole, an instinctive understanding of the spirit underlying them, though as a recent Christian convert living in a half-anglicized environment at home, she occasionally betrays certain inadequacies. She sings of Savitri’s matchless wifely devotion, her faith in the s . 8 omnipotence of fate and her belief in Maya. Her two ballads—Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan deal with the archetypes of Indian womanhood, Sita and Savitri’s four narrate the legends of youngsters. Dhruva, Buttoo, Sindliu and Prahlad, one recounts a legend about the goddess Uma; and Lakshman and King Bharata are the other characters that figure here. As this list indicates, Toru Dutt is the first Indian English poet to make an extensive use of Indian myth and legend. The other woman poet Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949) was an equally talented poet whose artistic gifts clashed With her political involvement. She published several love lyrics in which, however, the patriarchal mode of the subordination of woman in the love relationship between man and woman is repeated. Politically, she was a freedom- fighter who fought for the sake of the country and the people of her own country. Before participating in social activities, she had brought out her first volume, The Golden Threshold which was followed by The Birth of Time, The Broken King and the collected poems, The Sceptered Flute.

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