Manmohan Ghose, Aurobindo Ghose, Rabindranath Tagore, Sarojini Naidu, Harindrananth Chattopadhyaya and a host of others are the poets of the pre-1947 period of Indian English poetry. On the one hand the British had been the masters then while on the other the freedom struggle had been going in full swing. People led by the celebrated personalities, having learnt the lessons in nationalism and nationalistic consciousness from them were using the weapon against the same masterly English who taught the lessons to them. Apart from the agitation and protest, demonstration and strike, even during those days, we could find the exponents of poetry who were more or less closer to the Raj, whatever say we with regard to the British. Had they been against Gandhi, they could have crushed brutally if compared with the foreigners ruling India during the medieval times. English just remained an elite language knowledgeable to a handful of affluent persons which is but a drawback of our society divided across the caste and creed lines. A few in the proximity to them got benefited while the rest could not avail of that opportunity.

All the poets or poetesses whom we intend on discussing are the privileged few of the British times. Had Sarojini been not to England, could she have thought of becoming a poetess? Rabindranath’s visit to England too occasioned the translating of Gitanjali into English. Manmohan Ghose and Aurobindo Ghose too received their education in England. Most of the English poets or poetesses represent the India of metropolitan towns and they continue to think in their own way rather than the common-manly approach. What it is painful is this that Sarojini remained a poetess till the time of marriage through a love-affair and after the culmination of that, all the notes vanished away. She joined politics and forgot poetry. The nightingale did not remain a songbird, but turned it into a politician. Aurobindo too had been a nationalist before the shifting of loyalties and his power flowered actually in yoga, poetry emanating as yogic reflexion.

A quote from K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar will prove the point:

Numberless are the other practioners who have in the main followed ‘tradition’, but no more than a bare mention of some of these can be made at the fag end of this chapter: Dhan Gopal Mukherjee (Rajani,1961,and Sandhya,1917); N.V. Thadani (Triumph of Delhi,1916, and Krishna’s Flute 1919); A.F. Khabardar (The Silken Tassel, 1918); Sir Nizmat Jung (Sonnets, 1918); S.S. L. Chordia (Seeking, 1925; Chitor, 1928); T Basker (Passing Clouds, 1932); R. Appalaswami (Songs and Lyrics, 1935); R.A. Mishra (Life’s Fantasia, 1938); S.R. Dongerkery (The Ivory Tower, 1943); Sabita Devi (Phantasies, 1953); Nilima Devi (When The Moon Died, 1944); Subho Tagore (Rubble, 1936, and Flames of Passion, 1944); Fredoon Kabraji (A Minor Georgian’s Swan Song, 1945); Cyril Modak (Jawaharlal Nehru and Other Poems, 1946); Lotika Basu (White Dawns Awakening, 1950); Nanalal Dalpatram (The Perennial Fruit, 1953); K.S. Ramaswami Sastri (A Vision of India, 1954); Elsa Kazi (Terrestrial and Celestial Echoes, 1960); Burjor B. Paymaster (The Last Farewell, 1960); G.B. Ramamchandra Rao (Wings and Warbles, 1965); Karan Singh (Welcome, The Moonrise, 1965); R.M. Challa (Beauty and the Poet, 1969); and Gopal Singh (The Unstruck Melody, 1969). A random garner from some of the above titles might give a rough idea of the variety and richness of this body of verse.

(K R Srinavasa Iyengar, Indian Writing In English, Sterling Publishers Private limited, New Delhi , Reprint 1993, p..637-38)

While discussing ‘The Gandhian Whirlwind: 1920-1947’ chapter, M.K. Naik comments:

Among other writers of verse of the period may be mentioned K.S.R. Sastry (The Epic of Indian Womanhood, 1921; The Light of Life 1939); N.M. Chatterjee (Parvati, 1922; India and Other Sonnets,1923); A. Christina Albers (Ancient Tales of Hindustan, 1922; Himalayan Whispers,1926); D. Madhava Rao (Madhavi-Lata, 1923); S.L. Chordia (Seeking and Other Poems, 1925; Chitor and Other Poems,1928); M.U. Malkani and T.H. Advani (The Longing Lute, 1925); M. Krishnamurti (Song of Leaves, 1927; Love Sonnets and Other Poems,1937); Uma S. Masheswar (Among The Silences, 1928; Southern Idylls, 1939); .J.R.P. Mody (Golden Harvest, 1932; Verses, Grave and Gay,1938), Nilima Devi (The Hidden Face 1936); SubhoTagore (Peacock Plumes, 1936; May Day and Other Poems, 1945); Baldoon Dhingra (Symphony of Love,1938; Comes Ever the Dawn, 1941), S.R. Dongerkery (The Ivory Tower, 1943), Fredoon Kabraji (A Minor Georgian’s Swan Song 1944); H.D. Sethna (Struggling Heights,1944) and Serapia Devi (A Book of Beneficient Grief and Other Poems,1945; Rapid Visions, 1947).

(M.K. Naik, A History of Indian English Literature, Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 1982, p.146)

Though there is something in K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, but M.K. Naik just makes a passing reference to them, who lie in bracketed with the titles of the books merely. These books are rarer to be found, traceless, nowhere to be found and even if they found, Gokak or Iyengar, but Naik heard about from them. At least Naik could have photocopied and gifted to one or two libraries if he could not enlighten upon. The history of modernism in Indian English poetry can never be started with P. Lal, Nissim Ezekiel and others of their company abruptly as the novice critics state it today. M.K. Naik too is a poet of the Bombayan school. I wonder many of the Bombayan men could be poets or poetesses just with one or two collections of poems, but why could they be not? They may take, even the govt. of India, but I do not. Just with a book or two in the beginning, Kamala Das did marvels.

As we have failed to maintain our archives and museums, so we say it in the absence of records that there were no poets during the pre-independence period. There were of course many good poets, but took we no notice of them. Had the people not supported, Aurobindo, Sarojini, Tagore and others could not have been poets in sole isolation.

Stray Birds by Tagore is one of the collections of poems which contain in the briefest poems of Tagore which may also be called the capsule poems as for the brevity of presentation and these have been dedicated to one named T.Hara of Yakohama. A few of these can be noted in:

1

Stray birds of summer come to my window to
sing and fly away.
And yellow leaves of autumn, which have no
songs, flutter and fall there with a sigh.

2
O Troupe of little vagrants of the world, leave
your footprints in my words.

3
The world putts off its mask of vastness to its
lover.
It becomes small as one song, as one kiss of the
eternal.

4
It is the tears of the earth that keep her smiles
in boom.

(Stray Birds, Macmillan India, 2001, p.7)

There are some 326 ideas, thoughts or images, smallest units of poems in Stray Birds which are really his Japanese birds or maybe they the sparrows with chirps picking the grains scattered around. Stray Birds, in other words, is a book of dispersed meditations put into one, two or three liner stanzas.

Let us mark a one-liner. In a single-liner like this, the poet Rabindranath Tagore tells about the Creator and his delight of creating in poem no. 46:

God finds himself by creating.
(Ibid, p.15)

The poet says that he cannot choose the best as the best chooses. Here what the poet says as a juggler the same has been by Coleridge before him and by Nissim later on. Something he has taken from hearsays, something from proverbs and sayings:

20
I cannot choose the best.
The best choose me.

21
They throw their shadows before them who carry
their lantern on their back.

22
That I exist is a perpetual surprise which is life.

23
“We, the rustling leaves, have a voice that
answers the storms, but who are you silent ? ”
“I am a mere flower.”

24
Rest belongs to the work as the eyelids to the eyes.

25
Man is a born child, his power is the power of growth.
(Ibid, p.11)

Stray Birds as small collection contains in the scattered, but condensed meditations and reflections of the poet. One small unit is independent of another. We may see a few of them:

10
Sorrow is hushed into peace in my heart like the
evening among the silent trees.

11
Some unseen fingers, like an idle breeze, are
playing upon my heart the music of the ripples.

12
“What language is thine, O sea? ”
“The language of eternal question.”
“What language is thy answer, O sky?”
“The language of eternal silence.”

13
Listen, my heart, to the whispers of the world
with which it makes love to you.

14
The mystery of creation is like the darkness of
night – it is great. Delusions of knowledge are like
the fog of the morning.
(Stray Birds, ibid, p.9)

Tagore’s Lover’s Gift And Crossing is a joint collection of poems released by Tagore and the success of Gitanjali overshadows these as one can mark the influences of it and its admirable success. The collection is a renewed attempt of the author to put up afresh in the light of the success gained through Gitanjali.

Lover’s Gift which consists of sixty prose stanzas is a booklet of love and its feelings and the poet as a lover expressing love - the feelings of his heart, personalizing or impersonalizing them. Published in 1918 by Macmillan, a joint collection, a two-in-one, the first half representing Lover’s Gift and the second Crossing, is the text in hand. Having gifted the things, the lover is crossing over the stream to return back to. The poet as the speaker of Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Maud just imagines in a various mood of his, the things of his heart coming out and he saying to his imaginary ladylove so emotionally. The poet opening his heart before and the beloved all silent, is the thing, the heart brimming with and he laying them bare, lyrically, going sentimental. Tagore’s Crossing is like Tennyson’s Crossing The Bar and C.G. Rossetti’s Up-hill and here the poet preparing mentally to be with the steersman, the helmsman or the boatman, who is none but the God and the poet praying to humbly to take him across the shore. Crossing, a collection of some 78 prose-poems, is a collection of going and meeting, sometimes on the roadway all alone, taking the name of His and fearing and going, but He seeing it all, helping strangely. There is one problem in going through the verses of Rabindranath and that is the lack of change in his poetic style. Barring sentimentality, one cannot look for anything new in his poetry.

The second stanza of the collection, Lover’s Gift presents the things going within his heart:

II
Come to my garden walk, my love. Pass by the
fervid flowers that press themselves on your sight.
Pass them by, stopping at some chance joy, which
like a sudden wonder a sunset illumines, yet eludes.
For love’s gift is shy, it never tells its name, it
flits across the shade, spreading a shiver of joy
along the dust. Overtake it or miss it forever. But a
gift that can be grasped is merely a frail flower, or a
lamp with a flame that will flicker.

(Lover’s Gift And Crossing, Macmilan India, 2001, p.8)

Though full of aesthetic beauty and sense, Tagore is somewhere sensual too in his poetic expression:

VIII
There is room for you. You are alone with your few
sheaves of rice. My boat is crowded, it is heavily
laden, but how can I turn you away ? Your young
body is slim and swaying ; there is a twinkling smile
in the edge of your eyes, and your robe is coloured
like the rain-cloud.

The travellers will land for different roads and
homes. You will sit for a while on the prow of my
boat, and at the journey’s end none will keep you
back.

Where do you go, and to what home, to garner
your sheaves? I will not question you, but when I
fold my sails and moor my boat I shall sit and
wonder in the evening - Where do you go, and to
what home, to garner your sheaves?
(Ibid, p.11)

The prosaic poems of Lover’s Gift contain in the same feelings which we in find in Gitanjali and one can see the influence of it on all the texts which Tagore has written in English in the aftermath of it as because the poems full the same type and tenor of expression and have been cast in the same mould too. Lover’s Gift the title too is apt and suggestive. Here the poet-lover goes on reflecting on love and beauty. His heart is full with and is brimming no doubt, sometimes with the flowers, sometimes with the love-letters to give to.

The untitled stanzas as the separate poems go in their own way:

I
The suns breaks out from the clouds on the day when
I must go.
And the sky gazes upon the earth like God’s wonder.
My heart is sad, for it knows not from where comes
its call.
Does the breeze bring the whisper of the world
which I leave behind with its music of tears
melting in the sunny silence? or the breath of the
island in the far-away sea basking in the
Summer of the unknown flowers?

III
The wind is up, I set my sail of songs,
Steersman, sit at the helm.
For my boat is fretting to be free, to dance in the
rhythm of the wind and water.
The day is spent, it is evening.
My friends of the shore have taken leave.
Loose the chain and heave the anchor, we sail by
the starlight.
The wind is stirred into the murmur of music at this
time of my departure.
Steersman, sit at the helm.
(Ibid, p.54)

Had Tagore not taken the help of the Englishman friends and well-wishers, he could not have succeeded. Several scholars have helped him in translating the texts. The same Yeats who supported him with his all favor before the giving of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 detached himself from him, how could it be? People say that Yeats had been envious of him, but this is not the thing. Had it been, Yeats would not have written the preface to Tagore’s Gitanjali, matching it with his poetry, on a par with no doubt. Actually, Yeats had not been satisfied with the loose and repetitive sentimentality of Tagore coming out in the books after Gitanjali which we can ourselves see it. The success of Gitanjali occasioned the other slim texts in English. Tagoe too could not keep the bonding with Yeats intact. Had he appreciated his poetry, it would have been a good critical piece, but Tagore took to it not. Tagore’s English had not been good enough too to be called of that standard. Instead of it, he carried the things well. The bhakti-yogi is there in Gitanjali approaching the Invisible with his garland of love-lyrics and utmost devotion. The humility seen in prayer is the hallmark of Gitanjali.

Crossing, to some extent, is a Gitanjali in a changed version as because many of the poems relate to the application of same myth, mythology, discourse, philosophy, spirituality and metaphysics applied in earlier. The same discourse in the form of a humble prayer leads to the Unknown Divine as for the resolving of the unsaid questions of life and the world. The devotee knows it that the tangles can never be resolved, but the fears of the unknown pathway disturb the heart and mind of his. Death too is the greatest fear and the terror of it, who can ever say it? His Hindu view of life in a secular form is available for ready reference. Tagore as a Vaishnavite singer is a poet of maya and love and he can never think of renunciation. Through love, devotion and humility, he wants to approach the Unapproachable Divine.

An example from Crossing will suffice it to say:

LXII
When bells sounded in your temple in the morning,
men and women hastened down the woodland
path with their offerings of fresh flowers.
But I lay on the grass in the shade and let them pass
by.
I think it was well that I was idle, for then my
flowers were in bud.
At the end of the day they have bloomed, and I go to
my evening worship.
(Ibid, p.84)

Swami Vivekananda’s poems have come as In Search of God And Other Poems; a compilation of several poems writte in English directly, a few translated into. In Search of God, The Song of The Free, Misunderstood, My Play is Done, No One to Blame, The Cup, Hold on Yet a While, Brave Heart, The Song of The Sannyasin, To an Early Violet, The Living God, Requiescat in Pace, To the Awakened India, To the Fouth of July, kali the Mother, Angels Unawares, Peace, To My Own Soul, etc. are the poems which have been inducted into this work. We generally cannot expect for a romantic piece from a saint, but here lies To An Early Violet, really an astounding nature poem.

The last stanza of To An Early Violet may be taken into account:

Change not thy nature, gentle bloom,
Thou violet, sweet and pure,
But ever pour thy sweet perfume
Unasked, unstinted, sure!
(Swami Vivekananda, In Search of God And Other Poems, Advaita Ashrama, Calcutta, 1981, p.19)

To see the whole scenario in the eyes of Vinayak Krishna Gokak is to see as thus,

“The first quarter of the 20th century produced a number of poets who continued to write in the Romantic and Victorian manner of the Indo-Angian poets. Meherjee, A.F. Khabardar, N.V. Thadani, Nizamat Jung, Harindranath Chattopadhyaya and Ananda Acharya exploited India or oriental thought and legend and wrote in that typical Indian manner. N.W. Pai produced a romance in blank verse, The Angel of Misfortune in 1905. Ananda Acharya was, in particular, considerably influenced by Tagore’s English renderings of his own poetry, for Acharya wrote several prose-poems in the manner of Tagore. But there were other Indo-Angian poets who responded to the new trend that was now perceptible in English poetry — Georgianism; Robi Dutt, Joseph Furtado, P. Seshadri, J. Vakil, G.K. Chettur, S.K. Chettur and Kabraji reveal a Georgian love of the colloquial idiom and of a simple and forthright handling of poetical themes.”
(The Golden Treasury of Indo-Anglian Poetry, Selected and Edited, ibid, p.21)

Indian English poetry though a study in slender anthologies and minor voices has been coming down to us as a thin trickle of poesy, never dry and useless. The problem is there with the ramshackle critics of nondescript Indian English poetry as they fail to locate the older authors and their compositions. Had it been so, we would have read newer poets or practitioners of poesy in our classes.

“The second quarter of the 20th century may be said to yield a richer harvest. V.N. Bhushan, S.R. Dongerkery, T.P. Kailasam, M. Krishnamurti and A. Menezes continue the humanistic trend. Nolini Kanta Gupta, Dilip Kumar Roy, E.L.Vaswani, J. Krishnamurti, Nirodbaran, K.D. Sethna, Nishikanto and Themis carry forward the tradition of mystical poetry. A third group, consisting of poets like Manjeri Iswaran and P.R. Kaikini, who used to write in the Romantic tradition, have now changed over to modernistic techniques and others like Nilima Devi, B. Rajan, R.R. Shrestha, and B. Dhingra, who show a love of compact expression and new techniques from the very beginning, reveal new developments in this field. The ‘progressive’ manner of the thirties is seen in some of the poems of Saklatvala, Appal Swamy and Humayun Kabir. Nirodbaran has produced a few surrealist lyrics.” - Vinayak Krishna Gokak in his ‘Introduction’ to The Golden Treasury of Indo-Anglian Poetry. (Ibid, p. 21)

It will wrong to say that there were no poets in the pre-independence period. The problem a full-length idea of the whole genre. A single poem cannot do justice to a poet who is almost unknown and whose poems the critics lies with the critics who are absenting and in the case of the absentees, whatever a layman prescribes that turns into our ordeals. My point is this that you at least try to prescribe the single book authors of the post-independence period rather than concentrating on the moderns of today. Let the students have prescribe them not, which they themselves have not seen, nor have perused as they do not have a full-length study of Indian English poetry. The poets of the gap period need to be perused deeply. The connecting link should be ignored in such a way.

We read the poems of Aurobindo, have we ever tried to study K.D. Sethna, Punajala, Nolini Kanta Gupta, Nirodbaran, Nishikanto, and other Aurobindonians? It is true that the Aurobindonian School of poetry flourished under the leadership and guidance of Maharshi Aurobindo and his Pondicherry Ashrama. But the problem is this that the yogi nurtured them not so well and hos towering personality overshadowed them. Even he is unresponsive to the poetry of Manmohan Ghose. Had he kindled the poetic fire in them to catch up the generated light, they could have been biographed as the famous practitioners of Indian English poetry and could have brought laurels to the Pondicherry School.

Apart from Sarojini and Aurobindo, Harindranath Chattopadhyaya too is not less than and his genius can be marked in shorter lyrics which have come down to us for our study. One such poem is Noon:

The moon a mystic dog with paws of fire
Runs through the sky in ecstasy of drouth
Licking the earth with tongue of golden flame
Set in a burning mouth

It floods the forest with loud barks of light
And chases its own shadow on the plains
Some secret Master-hand hath set it free
Awhile from silver chains

At last towards the cinctured end of day
It drinks cool draughts from sunset-mellowed rills,
Then chained to twilight by the Master’s hand
It sleeps among the hills.
(The Golden Treasury of Indo-Anglian Poetry, ibid, p.194)

J. Krishnamurti, Swami Ram Tirtha, T.L. Vaswani, Brajendra Nath Seal, K.S. Venkataramani, etc. are the historical stuffs that just we refer to casually with passing references, but we need to take them seriously as because we cannot sidetrack their historicity and relevant significance to connect and continue with.

G.K. Chettur, S.K. Chettur, V.N. Bhushan, Manjeri S. Isvaran, P.R. Kaikini, Humayun Kabir, etc. also need to be perused as we cannot do away with our historicity and poetic tradition. Instead of referring, we need to elaborate the discussion. Had they not to take up, they could have discarded them from incorporating or assembling in to show the collective strength. The Indian critics have to re-think it if they really want to learn from and improve upon and if one says that one knows it all then nothing to say to.

To work on Indian English poetry is not an easy job as a library visit becomes a must as for the things of its nondescript history and tradition which none has cared to anthologize and even if these are, lie buried deep like the statues into the columns and pillars of the terracotta temples in ruins or as the pale sheets of paper lying in some undusted library shelves and racks.