About the Book

The volume comprises fifteen perceptive essays on six major contemporary Indian poets in English, viz., Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, Dom Moraes, Kamala Das, Mamta Kalia and Imtiaz Dharker. These poets represent various significant aspects of contemporary poetic sensibility and their importance is both intrinsic and historical. These essays are marked by a uniformity of theme and approach in that they grapple with the complexities of what has now been universally acknowledged as the modernist (and for some post- and for others anti-) tradition of Indian literature in English.

In view of Ezekiel’s pioneering role in transforming the idiom of contemporary poetry, the volume specifically focuses on all the major components of his creative personality – the cross-cultural concern, the nature of expatriate experience and nuances of postcoloniality. Ezekiel’s fellow-contemporary, A.K. Ramanujan had virtually become ‘ambassador de letters’ or what he mockingly called ‘hyphen’ in Indian-American at the time of his sad demise in 1993. The four essays devoted to him explore his poetic priorities and also his technical virtuosity. Dom Moraes’s peculiar search for roots, the nature of his alienation and also his colonial psyche provide the central thrust to the essays on him. Kamala Das’s perennial search for feminine space got interrogated when she converted herself to Islam in December 1999. The essay on her (and also her personal letter included as Appendix) deconstructs her early image and sets the critical perspective right. Mamta Kalia and Imtiaz Dharker have been analysed from a feminist angle and their poetry reflects the strengths and the contradictions of Indian feminist movement. The volume on the whole shall prove a remarkable acquisition to existing scholarship.

---

Contents

---

About the Author / Editor

Surya Nath Pandey is Professor of English and Head, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication and Department of Marathi. He is also Dean, Faculty of Arts, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi. He has authored an extensively reviewed book of criticism “Stephen Spender: A Study in Poetic Growth (1982), ” published simultaneously from three continents. His other publications include “Studies in Contemporary Poets” (1998) besides edited volumes on Post-Second War Poetry, Nissim Ezekiel, Postcoloniality, Women Writing and A.K. Ramanujan. He also has to his credit scores of research papers published in national and international journals. Presently he is engaged in identifying the sites of correspondence in Bhasha Literatures.

---