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An Anthology of New Indian English Poetry. Makarand Paranjape, ed. New Delhi. Rupa. 1993 (released 1994). xviii + 121 pages. Rs95. ISBN 81-7167-112-8.
A positive attitude--it's half full, not half empty--is best for critically surveying An Anthology of New Indian English Poetry. The selection of eighteen poets with almost always five poems each, as the editor Makarand Paranjape claims, constitutes "the first anthology...of the second generation of post-Independence Indian English poets...born mostly between 1950 and 1970." Actually only two are now under thirty, half are over forty. These are poets whose books for the most part have been already reviewed in these pages, indicating their general acceptability. Since so much bad Indian English poetry reaches print, still often self-published, with a little that is honestly good and some excellent, we can be pleased, after all, with an adequately full cup!
In a brief preface Paranjape makes the "very bold statement that "Modernism is dead" and says these poets "celebrate not conformity, but difference." Yet, surely in part because Paranjape naturally chose the safer, conventionally acceptable works, there is a prosy sameness droning through most of the poems. As in English-language anthologies from elsewhere these days, we get much writing about not writing, thinking, seeing, or hearing very acutely and fleeting exercises in various modes and moods. Despite occasional Indian topicality--saris, Bombay's Marine Drive, the Ganga, gritty Delhi, allusions to race and colonialism, widows in white, a Hindu marriage, Sanskrit, Holi--almost none of these poems probes a sharply particularized Indian (i.e., necessarily regional) experience. (Look for different types of exceptions in Prabhanjan Mishra's and E. V. Ramakrishnan's poems.) These are upper-middle-class urban and urbane poets, mostly accepting a painless, at worst nostalgic, alienation from the common life...