Indian writing in English, especially fiction, continues to capture the attention of readers all over the English-speaking world. Conversely, the strong and flourishing tradition of poetry in English from India has not impacted the contemporary world in the same manner as the fiction. This book creates a debate to highlight the well-grounded and confident tradition of Indian Poetry in English which began almost two hundred years ago with the advent of the British. Individual essays on poets before and since the Indian Independence focus on the poetry of Derozio, Tagore, Aurobindo and Naidu right down to the modern and contemporary poets like Ezekiel, Mahapatra, Ramanujan, Kolatkar, Das, Moraes, Daruwalla, de Souza, Jussawalla and Patel who ushered in a change both in terms of subject matter and style. On either side of the Atlantic, this book which includes a substantial Introduction, Select Bibliography and Index is of value to scholars, teachers and researchers on Indian Poetry in English.

A History of Indian Poetry in English explores the genealogy of Anglophone verse in India from its nineteenth-century origins to the present day. Beginning with an extensive introduction that charts important theoretical contributions to the field, this History includes extensive essays that illuminate the legacy of English in Indian poetry. Organized thematically, these essays survey the multilayered verse of such diverse poets as Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, Rabindranath Tagore, Nissim Ezekiel, Dom Moraes, Kamala Das, and Melanie Silgardo. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History also devotes special attention to the lasting significance of imperialism and diaspora in Indian poetry. This book is of pivotal importance to the development of Indian poetry in English and will serve as an invaluable reference for specialists and students alike.

In an ocean where myriads of rivers converge, can one sole river lend the ocean its distinct flavour? For someone who is at home with several languages, literary traditions and disciplines, is it possible for one form to criss-cross the landscape of another? In a poet’s world of mirrors, where stream and earth are sky, one may ‘sometimes count every orange on a tree’, but can one count ‘all the trees in a single orange’? In this volume, Guillermo Rodríguez explores these possibilities by analysing the works of one of India’s finest poets, translators, essayists and scholars of the twentieth century, A.K. Ramanujan (1929–1993).

Indian poetry in English began with the imitation of English Romantic poets but gradually Indo-Anglian poets began to write on Indian themes based on Indian contexts and Indian social scenario. Indo-Anglian poetry has received world recognition and some of the poets are held in high esteem. This anthology containing 35 essays is an attempt to represent the gamut of Indian poetry in English, both pre-Independence and post-Independence, from diverse critical perspectives. The thirteen poets covered in this anthology include Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Toru Dutt, Rabindranath Tagore, Sarojini Naidu, Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, and Kamala Das. The essays in the book offer innovative perspectives and touch upon different aspects of Indian poetry in English. The tone of the essays varies from personal to argumentative to objectively discursive. The book, with diverse and thought-provoking essays, will be highly useful for undergraduate and postgraduate students of English Literature. Besides, those who are interested to know about Indian Poetry in English will find the book quite illuminating and interesting.

India is the world’s largest democracy with nearly 70 years of independent existence. Its unique and ever-changing nature has sparked a great degree of academic debate, both before and since Independence. The beauty of India is that there are many kinds of Indias. Understanding the fundamentals that have given birth to such multiplicity across various segments is especially imperative in the present day, when the ‘Idea of India’ is keenly contested. Our nation has the world’s largest youth population and is undergoing tectonic social and political changes at present; therefore, understanding what directions India may take in the future is essential for every thinking individual. India Now and in Transition is an enquiry into possible futures, based on current happenings. Featuring contributions from leading thinkers and scholars in diverse fields, each essay in this volume critically analyses a major theme of India’s present, to propose the likely way ahead for our emergent nation. Covering the fields of politics and governance, economics and development, security and foreign policy, society and culture and language and literature, the book shows that—while beset with both internal and external challenges on many fronts—India isn’t waiting for its moment, it’s making its moment happen.

This collection brings together nine essays, accompanied by nine short translations that expand the assumptions that have typically framed literary histories, and creatively re-draws their boundaries, both temporally and spatially. The essays, rooted in the humanities and informed by interdisciplinary area studies, explore multiple linkages between forms of print culture, linguistic identities, and diverse vernacular literary spaces in colonial and post-colonial South Asia. The accompanying translations—from Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, and Urdu—not only round out these scholarly explorations and comparisons, but invite readers to recognise the assiduous, intimate, and critical labour of expanding access to the vernacular archive, while also engaging with the challenges—linguistic, cultural, and political—of rendering vernacular articulations of gendered experience and embodiment in English. Collectively, the essays and translations foreground complex and politicised expressions of gender and genre in fictional and non-fictional print materials and thus draw meaningful connections between the vernacular and literature, the everyday and the marginals, and gender and sentiment. They expand vernacular literary archives, canons and genealogies, and push us to theorise the nature of writing in South Asia. Literary Sentiments in the Vernacular is a significant new contribution to South Asian literary history and gender studies, and will be a great resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of History, Literature, Cultural Studies, Politics, and Sociology. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.