Defining A Canon

Three Indian Poets: Ezekiel, Ramanujan, Moraes. (Second Edition) By Bruce King. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005. pp. 218. Rs. 395.

K. Narayan; William Walsh, a seventeenth century scholar, has published books on Indian English writing and on Narayan. And Bruce King, an Australian, made a name for himself as a seventeenth century scholar in American academia before taking up postcolonial literature with exemplary seriousness. He has published a book on Derek Walcott, but to us in the subcontinent his particular distinction lies in his monumental work on modern Indian poetry in English.

It is clearly a subject of continuing interest to King, for his two books on it have both been updated in their second editions. Modern Indian Poetry in English (1987; revised second edition, 2001) is the most comprehensive and critically astute survey of the subject; and the book under review, first published in 1991 and definitively augmented following the deaths of the three poets, is a complete introduction to the leading figures of the Indian English poetic canon. King seamlessly combines literary and cultural history, biography and textual analysis to produce the most valuable critical portrait of these poets.

In the case of Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004) King leaves the critical chapters as they were in the first edition, and only adds some information to round off the capsule biography of the poet, who suffered the subtle erosion of Alzheimer's disease for a full decade before his death. The reason is that his oeuvre was for all intents and purposes complete when the first edition was written: there is only one additional piece in the second edition of his Collected Poems (2005), edited by John Thieme.

Not so with the other two poets, both of whom, sadly, fell to cancer. The posthumously published poems of A. K. Ramanujan (1929-93) number ninety-three and have deservedly been accorded a separate chapter, as have the substantial body of poems that Dom Moraes (1938-2004) dashed off in a final blaze of creativity.

Ezekiel's position as the centre of the Indian English poetic canon, though, remains unassailable, and not only because he came before the other post-Partition poets. His robust yet flexible idiom, combining modernism and the deliberately unassuming Movement mode of the Larkin-Enright school, his unchauvinistic commitment to "My backward place", his engagement with socio-political ideas, have all contributed to his stature.

However, it is understandable that King should have more to say about Ramanujan and Moraes. The former's trilingual transactions (he either wrote in or translated into or from English, Kannada and Tamil), and subtle, ironic use of intellectual and historical material in suave vers libre lend themselves to intricate analysis; as do the existential complexities and the douleur underlying the lyric mythopoesis of Moraes.

If I have to raise a caveat regarding King's study it will be about the way he demarcates his historical parameters. For him modernity seems to come to Indian English poetry quite suddenly and fully fledged, with Ezekiel's first book, A Time to Change (1952). A historic rupture separates Post-Partition poets from their forebears. I find it historically more accurate to postulate a transition to modernity in the work of a modernist like Shahid Suhrawardy and a "Contemporary" (in Stephen Spender's sense) like Joseph Furtado. My thesis is elaborated in "Ancestral Voices: The Transition to Modernity in Indian English Poetry", forthcoming in Transplanted Imaginary: Literature in New Climes, edited by K. T. Sunitha (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press).

I am sure King will revise and update his books again or write new ones; I hope he will take the opportunity then to extend his parameters a little further in time--and also perhaps a little in space so as to cover the subcontinent's periphery.

Kaiser Huq is Professor, English department, Dhaka University.