Discourses on Five Indian Poets in English is a collection of 24 articles, by diverse hands, on five Indian English poets: Keki Daruwalla, Shiv K. Kumar, Pronab Kumar Majumder, Syed Ameeruddin and Aju Mukhopadhyay. In his preface, the editor of this collection, K.V. Dominic, rues on the paucity of critical output on Indian poets. He is disappointed that English poets in India ‘have been constantly ignored by the established publishers, academia as well as readers.' This appears to be the provocation for him to bring out an anthology of assorted critical essays on five poets of his choice, some of whom are among the less-known poets of our generation. Dominic fails to realise that the present age is an age of fiction; poetics of fiction has grown manifold, outstripping the evaluative critical output of the New critics who reassessed even major poets like Milton. On the creative front, for a single collection of poems, there are scores of novels which get published, read and reviewed in popular and learned journals. Fiction commands — and rightly so — a worldwide reading public. One may recall Rushdie's remark that stirred the hornets' nest that it is only in fiction Indian writing has made a dent on the outside world.
P.C.K. Prem sets the ball in motion in his first article on some reflections of these five poets. For him Shiv Kumar and Daruwalla are ‘poets of sophistication' who carry with them the influence of urban-consciousness while the other three poets whose output is prolific deal with man's puzzling, inscrutable mystery of life and man's destiny. Aju Mukhopadhyay is basically a poet of nature, fascinated by India's glorious past and heritage; Majumder's poems concern with, life, mutability, death and such eternal themes which have been the source for great poets of all time; Ameeruddin is religious by temperament and constantly experiments with the language of poetry, especially in his long poems.
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There are three essays on Keki Daruwalla. Asha Viswas examines the collection Landscapes, which shows the poet's growth to a level of maturity of vision in his creative journey: in his love of nature, love for mythic lore and in his handling of the ‘eternal, elusive and haunting change which is an aspect of nature.' Jayshree Goswami chooses Daruwalla's poem “Caries” and subjects it to a discourse analysis, applying the Hallidayan model and arrives at the conclusion that the poem illustrates the corruption in the political system. Jayaraj analyses the later poems of Daruwalla in the light of ecocriticism which is the most valid and vital approach to his nature poems. Nature is not just an outward presence, but exists — as it does in Wordsworth — to prove that human history is inextricably drawn into the cosmic elements around us.
No objective basis
Chambial examines Shiv Kumar's Thus Spake the Buddha in the light of erotic love. Taking a cue from the poet's personal life, Chambial establishes that such of those images in the poem as are related with ‘biotic acts' can be interpreted as the poet's endeavour to sublimate his repressed feelings. Such interpretations have no objective basis and they are purely conjectural. Svatek's paper on Majumder's Sparkles of Time makes a short survey on the concept of time before examining the poet's handling of what Andrew Marvel would term as ‘time's winged chariot'. “Time an uncut thread from the past/ Which is sometimes obscured by dust/ But corridor of Time never collapses...” There are eight papers on the poetry of Syed Ameeruddin, examining the themes and variations in his collections Visioned Summits and Visions of Deliverance.
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By and large the essays collected in Discourses on Five Indian Poets do not display any marked furtherance from the existing, received views on the five poets. Indiscriminate interpretations are of a general nature — mostly thematic — arrived at without a serious attempt at close examination of the language and the form of the poem.
Discourses on Five Indian Poets in English,K.C. Dominic, Authorspress, 2011, p. 311, Rs. 825.