The New Generation: Mapping the Modernist Turn in Indian English Poetry
An assignment blog based on classroom discussions with Prakriti Ma'am on the "New Poets" of Indian English literature
There is a particular moment in the history of Indian English poetry when the genteel, ornamental verse of the early twentieth century gives way to something sharper, stranger, and far more self-aware. This is the moment of the "New Poets" a generation that refused inherited romanticism and insisted, instead, on individuality, irony, and an unflinching engagement with the present. In our recent classroom discussions, we traced this shift through its defining characteristics striking individuality, sharpness, a tone of defiance and non-conformity, and angularity and through the poets who embodied it. Their work was broadly split into two impulses, as our notes categorised them: the poetry of protest and the poetry of escape.
This blog attempts to answer four questions that emerged from that discussion, using the poets, texts, and critical vocabulary we built together in class.
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Nissim Ezekiel, the pioneer of the modernist shift. Source: India Content |
1. The Anthology Activity: Poets We Chose and Why
As part of an in-class activity, we were asked to imagine ourselves as editors compiling a modernist anthology of Indian English poetry one that would represent the "New Poets" through their most defining works. After much debate, the following poets and texts made the cut, largely because each one satisfied our four working criteria: use of Indianised English, concrete realism, bilingual tension, and radicalism in voice and social disruption.
His debut collection, Essays in Verse (1939), was chosen as the opening text of the anthology fittingly, since it is often read as one of the first true gestures toward a modernist idiom in Indian English poetry. Suhrawardy himself claimed his poems "do not emerge from any deep spiritual experience," which is precisely what makes them interesting: they are wilfully secular, urban, and self-conscious. A representative fragment we discussed:
We also looked at his collection The Indian Tragedy, where he "stirs the backyard gutter of urban vulgarity and pathetic futility," borrowing modernist techniques of allusiveness, multilingual layering, and terseness to communicate a sense of disgust with contemporary life a clear instance of angularity and defiance.
P. R. Kaikini
Kaikini's Flower-Offering (1934) and his rhythmic prose-poems earned him a place in the anthology for a different reason: he represents the poetry of witness. Poems like Shanghai (1939) and The Recruit (1940) respond directly to world events the Quetta earthquake, the Sino-Japanese war, the outbreak of the Second World War and register only "disintegration and chaos." Yet by the time of The Passionate East (1947), a more hopeful note creeps in, as though the "war-ravaged waste land was to be cultivated after all." The critic Michael Roberts's observation that Kaikini's poetry "looks out at the world of science, politics, and everyday life" and "expresses a passionate sense of right and wrong" was central to our decision to include him.
Relationship (1981) was selected as Mahapatra's representative text a poet we returned to repeatedly for his rootedness in Odia culture and his meditative, elegiac tone.
We included Trapped Falls in Sky (1976), his Sahitya Akademi Award–winning collection, alongside Articulate Silences (1970). A short extract from A Letter from New York justified his place:
"Are you Puerto Rican and a new Indian? I look for the feathers on my scalp... No, a brown Indian from the land of Gandhi."
This moment of self-interrogation being asked to perform an identity, and refusing the caricature is exactly the "East-West encounter" that defines Kumar's poetic project.
The Striders (1966) and Jejuri's companion in spirit, Relations (1972), were chosen alongside his poem "A River," which we discuss in depth in Question 4. Ramanujan's economy of language and his fusion of classical Tamil aesthetics with modernist English verse made him an obvious anthology inclusion.
No anthology of this kind could exclude Jejuri (1976), the 31-poem cycle built around a pilgrimage to the temple town dedicated to Khandoba. Its dry wit and deconstruction of devotion are best captured in this fragment from "A Scratch":
"What is god and what is stone, the dividing line if it exists is very thin at Jejuri, and every other stone is god or his cousin."
Rough Passage, structured in three movements Exile, The Trial, Homecoming was included as the anthology's meditation on linguistic alienation and the search for belonging in a "colonially fractured consciousness."
We chose poems such as "Before the Word," which stages fear and worship as pre-linguistic states: "Though there were no words, fear had a voice with many echoes; worship was quieter, adoration spoke only through the eyes or knees." Daruwalla's collections Under Orion (1970) and Crossing of Rivers (1976) earned him a place for their unflinching portrayal of floods, drought, and epidemics.
His bilingual output Kavita (1960) in Marathi and Travelling in a Cage (1980) in English represented the anthology's "bilingual tension" criterion most directly. His dialogic poem "Determined to Tell Lies" (a conversation with a figure named Rahman about truth, silence, and religion) was chosen for its philosophical compression.
Finally, Postcards from God (1997) and Purdah and Other Poems (1989) rounded off the anthology, representing the diasporic and feminist edge of the tradition. A key extract:
"Yes, I do feel like a visitor, a tourist in this world that I once made... looking for landmarks from another, promised past."
Together, these ten poets and their chosen texts form a fairly complete cross-section of what "New Poetry" in India looked like protest and escape, tradition and rupture, English and its regional shadows.
2. "An Indo-Anglian Poet Strives for Self-Expression in English": Unpacking Iyengar
K. R. S. Iyengar's observation that the Indo-Anglian poet "strives for self-expression in English" is deceptively simple. It suggests a double labour: the poet is not merely writing in English, as a matter of convenience or education, but is actively wrestling the language into a shape that can carry an Indian selfhood it was never designed to hold. English becomes less a neutral medium and more a site of negotiation between inherited colonial vocabulary and lived, local experience. This connects directly to Iyengar's larger point (which we discussed in relation to tradition): that "no true poet can escape tradition" or "the pressure of the present," and that the poet's task is to relate "the immediate present to the living past" and, if possible, to "a future that is in a process of becoming."
Three poets from our syllabus illustrate this struggle for self-expression particularly well:
A. K. Ramanujan is perhaps the clearest case. As a scholar-poet steeped in classical Tamil poetics, he consciously imports the akam (interior) and puram (exterior) modes of ancient Tamil verse into English free verse. His poem "A River" refuses the "romanticised poetic tradition of celebrating rivers," offering instead a "stark, unembellished portrayal" of the Vaigai drying to a trickle, "baring the sand, ribs, straw, and women's hair clogging the water gate." This is self-expression achieved precisely by bending English toward an indigenous, classical sensibility rather than an inherited Victorian one.
Arun Kolatkar demonstrates the same struggle from the opposite direction as a poet equally at home in Marathi and English, who chose, in Jejuri, to write in English about a resolutely local, vernacular, Marathi-Hindu religious experience. His "economy of language, dark wit, and fascination with the grotesque in the ordinary" is his way of making English answer to an experience a pilgrimage to Khandoba's shrine that English literary convention has no ready vocabulary for.
Shiv K. Kumar, meanwhile, dramatises the identity dimension of this self-expression most explicitly. In "A Letter from New York," the speaker is asked to perform a foreign, exoticised identity ("Are you Puerto Rican?") and instead insists on a specific, self-authored one: "a brown Indian from the land of Gandhi." This is Iyengar's thesis almost literalised the poet using English precisely to assert a selfhood that resists the assumptions built into the language and the gaze of the English-speaking listener.
In all three cases, the "strife" Iyengar names is not incidental it is the very engine of the poem.
3. A Critical Note on the Poetry of Jayant Mahapatra
Jayant Mahapatra occupies a distinctive place among the New Poets as a bilingual poet of Odisha, whose work is inseparable from the landscape, religiosity, and social fabric of that region. He has been described in our discussions as "the close observer of man and things" a phrase that captures both his patience as a poet and his refusal to look away from difficult, often painful, human detail.
Rootedness in place and culture. Mahapatra's poetry is deeply rooted in Indian specifically Odia culture. He does not merely set his poems in Odisha; he allows the region's religious rituals, poverty, and social textures to structure his imagery. This produces what our notes call "an ironic reflection of religion, culture, and social life of Odisha," most memorably in his poem Dawn at Puri, which captures the spiritual and physical desolation of India's holy spaces crows, dogs, and aged widows dressed in white "become haunting emblems of mortality and religious endurance."
Poetic sensibility. His verse is marked by sharp lyrics and sensitive, emotional notes, often built around images that linger for instance the line from Listening: "Every man, every beast trapped, deaf in his own sleep." The sense of entrapment and silence here is characteristic; Mahapatra's poems frequently dwell in states of waiting, dreaming, and unanswered questioning, as in Waiting: "Why death? Why Pain? Why this wistful dreaming about the axis of the Past?"
Thematic range. His major works Indian Summer, Hunger, Bare Face, Shadow Space, Waiting, A Rain of Rights, Dawn at Puri, Life Signs, A Whiteness of Bone, and Land explore human relationships, marriage, morality, human nature, and even nationalism, but always filtered through Odisha's specific social reality rather than through abstract nationalist rhetoric.
Poetics. Mahapatra was explicit about what poetry meant to him: "Poems are meant to be shared. Poetry, like love and like the demand for happiness, has its own urgency. You cannot kill poetry." This urgency is what elevates his regional subject matter into something universal as our notes put it, he "transforms regional experience into a universal meditation on human frailty and ethical consciousness."
In sum, Mahapatra's critical achievement lies in refusing to treat regional experience as merely local colour. Odisha, in his hands, becomes a lens onto larger questions of mortality, faith, and endurance which is precisely why he belongs so centrally to the "New Poets" canon.
4. A. K. Ramanujan and Arun Kolatkar: Nature and Myth Reimagined
Among the New Poets, A. K. Ramanujan and Arun Kolatkar stand out for the sophistication with which they handle nature and myth not as decorative backdrops, but as sites of ironic, often deflationary, revelation.
A. K. Ramanujan: Myth as Structure, Nature as Fact
Ramanujan was not simply a poet but a scholar-linguist, folklorist, translator, and playwright and this scholarly temperament shapes his verse. His poetry draws deeply on his awareness of Hindu heritage and consciously employs the akam (interior/personal) and puram (exterior/public) frameworks of classical Tamil poetics, giving his English poems an unusual structural depth: even a poem that looks like a simple description is often organised around this inside/outside tension.
Nowhere is this clearer than in his celebrated poem "A River," set in Madurai "city of temples and poets." Ramanujan deliberately subverts the romanticised poetic tradition of celebrating rivers. Where earlier poets (he pointedly notes "the old poets" who "sang only of the floods") had turned the Vaigai into a symbol of national beauty and spiritual purity, Ramanujan instead offers blunt, seasonal realism: the river dries to a trickle in the summer, "baring the sand, ribs, straw, and women's hair clogging the water gate at the rusty bars," and then, without warning, turns destructive in flood. Myth (the river as sacred, timeless) is deliberately punctured by nature observed with scientific, almost forensic precision. This is Ramanujan's characteristic move across his body of work in poems like "Of Mothers, Among Other Things," he similarly deconstructs inherited, almost mythic memory (his mother's past) with the same tender but unsentimental precision. His criticism follows the same instinct: essays like "Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?" and, most famously, "Three Hundred Ramayanas," argue that no single telling of a myth is authoritative "no text is original, yet no telling is a mere retelling... the stories are there, always already." Myth, for Ramanujan, is not fixed heritage but a living, endlessly reinterpreted process and nature is the terrain on which that process is tested against reality.
Arun Kolatkar: Myth Deconstructed Through the Grotesque and the Ordinary
Kolatkar approaches the same territory religion, myth, landscape from an almost opposite angle: irony, deadpan humour, and a fascination with the grotesque in the everyday. Emerging from Bombay's "Little Magazine" movement of the 1960s–70s, Kolatkar's poetry rejects both romantic nationalism and religious sentimentality in favour of a fragmented, cosmopolitan, and ironic mode.
His masterwork, Jejuri (1976), is the clearest illustration of how he treats myth and nature together. Composed after a 1963 visit to the temple town dedicated to the folk deity Khandoba, the 31-poem cycle uses minimalist language and surreal imagery to deconstruct religious experience rather than celebrate it. In "A Scratch," he collapses the boundary between the sacred and the merely geological:
"What is god and what is stone, the dividing line if it exists is very thin at Jejuri, and every other stone is god or his cousin."
Here, nature (stone, hillside, landscape) and myth (the god Khandoba, the pilgrimage itself) are shown to be almost indistinguishable not because the world is saturated with the sacred, but because sanctity, in Kolatkar's ironic vision, is often an accident of naming and habit rather than of essence. Other poems in the collection, such as "Chaitanya" and "The Doorstep," extend this into "layered portraits of faith, decay, and the passage of time" nature (weathering stone, decaying temple architecture) becomes the silent record of how devotion erodes, is commodified, or simply persists out of habit.
Reading Them Together
Both poets refuse inherited, reverential ways of writing about the natural and the mythic. Ramanujan does this through scholarly precision showing the river as it actually behaves, and myth as an ever-shifting narrative rather than a fixed truth. Kolatkar does it through irony and the grotesque showing the sacred and the mundane, the god and the stone, as barely distinguishable. In both cases, the New Poets' larger project is visible: myth and nature are not retreated into (as "poetry of escape" might suggest) but interrogated, in the spirit of the "poetry of protest" angular, unsentimental, and resolutely modern.
Concluding Thoughts
What unites all these poets from Suhrawardy's urban disgust to Dharker's diasporic irony, from Mahapatra's Odisha to Kolatkar's Jejuri is precisely the "striking individuality," "sharpness," and "tone of defiance" our classroom notes identified at the outset. They are new not because they discarded India, or myth, or tradition, but because, in Iyengar's words, they refused to escape any of it choosing instead to relate "the immediate present to the living past," in a language that they had to fight, poem by poem, to make their own.
Prepared for Prakriti Ma'am's class discussion on the New Generation Poets of Indian English Literature.
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Work Cited:
- Banerjee, Santanu. A.K. Ramanujan's Poetic Theory and Practice. Oxford UP, 2016.
- Dharker, Imtiaz. Postcards from God. Bloodaxe Books, 1997.
- Ezekiel, Nissim. Collected Poems. Oxford UP, 1989.
- Iyengar, K. R. S. Indian Writing in English. Macmillan, 1962.
- Kaikini, P. R. Flower-Offering. Thacker, 1934.
- Kolatkar, Arun. Jejuri. Clearing House, 1976.
- Mahapatra, Jayanta. Dawn at Puri. [Poem]. The Little Magazine, 1970.
- Narula, S. C. “IMAGES OF POETIC REALITY: AN EXPOSITION OF KEKI N. DARUWALLA’S POETRY.” Journal of South Asian Literature, vol. 22, no. 2, 1987, pp. 161–71. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40872971. Accessed 31 Aug. 2026.
- The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan. Oxford UP, 2006.
- The Indian Contribution to English Literature. Macmillan, 1945.
