An anthology is appraised as much for what it excludes as what it includes because the process of exclusion best reveals the aesthetics and politics of the editor. This task perhaps becomes even more challenging when one attempts to put together an anthology of Indian poetry in English. As any devoted reader of Indian poetry in English — or this column — would be aware, it is a strange behemoth, with a rather complicated history. It flourishes and continues to expand in the maddening intersection of languages, politics, caste, gender, class, and a million other forces that define India.
Nevertheless, several attempts have been made to come up with definitive anthologies of Indian poetry in English. Some of the best-known in this century are 60 Indian Poets (New Delhi: Penguin, 2008) and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (London: Bloodaxe Books, 2008), both edited by Jeet Thayil; The Harper Collins Book of English Poetry (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2012) and Modern English Poetry By Younger Indians (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2019), both edited by Sudeep Sen; These My Words: The Penguin Book of Indian Poetry (New Delhi: Penguin 2012), edited by Eunice de Souza and Melanie Silgardo. The mammoth The Penguin Book of Indian Poets (2022), edited by Thayil, also joins this endless list.
14 International Younger Poets
Edited by Philip Nikolayev
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Art and Letters, 2021
These anthologies are driven by the scholarship of their editors as well as a cartographic instinct among Indian poets and poetry lovers — to determine what exactly might be Indian poetry in English. 14 International Younger Poets (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Art and Letters, 2021), edited by Philip Nikolayev, also seems to be governed by this instinct.
Born in Russia, Nikolayev now lives in the US — but he has travelled several times to India and has devoted considerable time and energy to Indian poetry in English. One of his early books was Dusk Raga, published in 1998 by Writers Workshop in Kolkata. Nikolayev has also served as a mentor to several Indian poets, including me — he wrote the introduction to my book of poems Visceral Metropolis (New Delhi: Red River, 2017).
In the introduction to the current volume Nikolayev explains the process through which the current volume — which includes seven Indian and seven American poets —came about. On January 16, 2021, he hosted a Zoom reading of these poets, all aged between 24 years and 35 years.
“The virtual reading was a success: our video quickly received thousands of views and positive readings in social media,” writes Nikolayev. “Even more remarkably, the 14 poets, who did not know each other before the reading, found themselves instantly drawn to each other’s company. They launched a chat group and began discussing poetry and possible collaborations.” The book finally emerged from this syncretic group of collaborators.
However, this does leave a few questions unanswered. How did Nikolayev decide on which seven Indian poets — and there must be a few thousand — to choose for his reading? Was there an open submissions call for the reading, or the book, making it a democratic process? What aesthetic or political qualities was the editor looking for? Nikolayev does not use the Introduction to set out any pedagogy that might be useful for readers, poets, or future editors and scholars. This also makes it difficult for us to locate the book in the ocean of the endless books and anthologies of Indian poetry in English.
In the Introduction, Nikolayev also claims: “Its poetic pluralism reveals a polymorphous resonance.” This is not the mere hyperbole of an editor for his volume. The Indian poets he has included are among the best younger poets in the country—Chandramohan S, whose work has made significant contributions to Dalit poetry, and Avinab Datta-Areng, who is perhaps the most-awaited debut of this year, among others. The American poets in this volume — Raquel Balboni, Justin Burnett, Blake Campbell, Emily Grochowski, Paul Rowe, Andreea Iulia Scridon, and Samuel Wronski — were completely unknown to this reviewer. One must thank Nikolayev for bringing them to an Indian audience.
Among the Indian poets in the volume, Susmit Panda’s work stands out for his metrical experiments. Of the eight of his poems included in this volume, three are sonnets and two are embedded sonnets — a form devised by Nikolayev, in which a sonnet is extracted from surrounding text. Of Panda’s traditional sonnets, “Life and Love” is the most moving.
Ate. Prayed. Loved. Saw, was seen. I chose. Arose.
So nights have been. And now night is. And dreams
Await these eyes. My glasses on my nose.
My shiftless hand upon the thousand reams,
and all the world is still my noiseless hope.
The staccato and the internal rhymes of the early lines mould themselves into longer meditations, almost imperceptibly, revealing the sure hand of the poet.
Perhaps this book would have benefitted if a reader could track how these young poets influenced each other, what feedback they provided on others’ work, and how that changed the final forms of the poems. Nevertheless, lovers of poetry will keep a lookout for the future work of all the poets in this collection.
Uttaran Das Gupta’s novel Ritual was published in 2020. He teaches journalism at OP Jindal Global University in Sonipat, Haryana.