MODERN INDIAN ENGLISH POETRY: A STUDY OF POLYPHONIC VOICES OF WOMEN POETS

Abstract

The modern era has seen the emergence of new gender neutral anthologies of Indian English poetry such as Eunice de Souza’s Early Indian Poetry in English: An Anthology (2005) and Both Sides of the Sky: Post Independence Indian Poetry in English (2008), Jeet Thayil’s 60 Indian Poets and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (2008) and most recently Sudeep Sen’s The Harper Collins Book of English Poetry (2012).  Amidst all these anthologies a historical reckoning of women’s poetry from the nineteenth century to the present times was getting deferred. As many new women’s voices appeared in Sen’s 2012 anthology it was necessary, to map the women’ voices that had emerged from the 1960s.  For the women poets, modernism meant something quite different from the literary modernism of Eliot and Auden. It meant a reconfiguration of identity in postcolonial terms.  In this they were inextricably linked to the concerns of their colonial as well as their nationalist predecessors such as Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu respectively.  The modern female poetic voices of comprise Kamala Das, Eunice de Souza, Gauri Deshpande, Tara Patel, Meena Alexander, Mamta Kalia and Smita Agarwal.  This paper traces representative voices from Kamala Das to Smita Agarwal