He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have.

– The Unknown Citizen
(To JS/07/ M/ 378 This Marble Monument Is Erected by the State)
By W.H.Auden

Contemporary Indian English poetry does not refer to the post-independence period of India merely, the evolving practitioners of the genre of literature growing then, striking of the roots, seeking approbation from the West, but to the novices about to hone in, practice and perfect to be called future masters, trend-makers or setters. Even though we call it contemporary Indian English poetry, it is not so, when did it exist a type of poetry reminding us like that of the English remnant? Did we ever speak English in our homes? We just kept distances as for being the different race and community irrespective caste, class, community and ism. Sometimes Brahminism, sometimes Aryan belief and adherences kept us far from, secluding from them, as for beef-taking and wine culture. The natives too appeared as untouchables as for their manner, way of life and living, culture, thought and tradition. The purdah system and rampant medievalism too wreaked havoc. The Brahmins too did commit a mistake in coming to terms with them. India too had been impregnable, exotic, vast and varied, full of dissimilarities, but one thing bonding them into a whole. Different regions had different regional languages and dialects which we failed to understand so easily, the north and the south were separated from and their languages of a different stock, but Sanskrit did it marvels in bringing about a compromise and reconciliation. The northeast had been exotic and tribal and hilly, wooded and dark, full of tribes, hence the forays were deep and difficult, but somehow that too was done.

When we talk of being contemporary, questions arise with regard to our being modern, modernistic, post-modern and contemporary. Had we been modern, modernistic, post-modern and up-to-date? Perhaps no, not is the answer. We had been too much conservative, orthodox and superstitious. Even if the city people of the urban space were, the bristling townsmen of some hectic activity, but not well-to-do and modern, frank, bold and daring.

But in course of time detaching ourselves with the Ramlila, Krishnalila and religious shows and performances, we turned to the radio, circus, orchestra, cinema, cycle, wrist watch, fashion and designing and the cemented housing which but also added to our life-style and thinking. We started meeting in the cinema halls stealthily cutting across societies and their taboos; we started talking about modern art of life and living, etiquette, good manners and polished language.

To talk of contemporary Indian English poetry is to discuss the arrival and entry of the poets and poetesses many of whom are self-proclaimed writers and authors. Who is not a self-published poet? P.Lal’s mediocre verses too have been published from Writers Workshop, Calcutta. It is true that he took money as for publishing the new poets and poetesses which were in Khushwant Singh’s eyes something like that of vanity publications. But Khushwant Singh too is mistaken as because he extols Vikram seth whose work too was rejected by the West and it saw the light of the day from P.Lal’s Writers Workshop, Calcutta. If this be the case, what more to say about?

Most of the modern established poets were then the unknown faces wanting to get a breakthrough. They wrote their first poems and got a place in the anthology as for friendship and shortage of writers. Just a writer of one anthology turned into a poet and this one can see in R.Parthasarathy. Rabindranath Tagore too got the prize for Gitanjali on the recommendation of William Butler Yeats and his friends and afterwards the others came in handy to add to and to strengthen his stature as a poet in English. The visit to England too occasioned it. Had his brother been not in England, he would not have and the things could have turned otherwise. Vivekananda too has written a few poems in English and this too forms a base of pre-independence time of Indian poetry in English as his is a thing of the Advaita Vedanta and a personality so known world-wide. Though he was not for poetry, he wrote a few off-handedly as the saints continue to be the singers of some sort and poetry breaks free from the heart of the wandering yogi. The path of sadhna is not at all easy to follow up; the recourse to it is tedious and tiresome, a long way to go.

There is too much competition in other languages where there are many aspiring to be poets, but in the tribal languages, one who writes will be definitely be a litterateur as there is a dearth of the writers in these oral, scriptless tongues and dialects. Similar is the case with Indian poetry in English. There is none who speaks it at all in his home or whose mother tongue is English. There is none to recognize the ones professing it. So, there was a problem in the past as for who would recognize the poets writing in English and the poets who chose to write in English were the small writers of verse indeed. We do not if the theses of Iyengar and Naik are publishable on British literature. It is difficult to write on purely English things as it is tougher to deal and dispense with the language and thinking in a novel way and there we are no doubt weak on the mother tongue point, relating to nuances, idiosyncrasies, syntax and vocabulary; British or American trend , type, tenor and tradition, as ours is Indian. Today most of the Ph.Ds. take up the Indian English literature. There are no critics from India whose critical theories have got the attention as much as the works of Lionel Trilling, Graham Hough, E.M.W.Tillyard, Stopford A.Brooke, A.C.Bradley, James Reeves, B.Ifor Evans and others have got.

The poets of the fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties and the last decade of the twentieth century are the spans of time to be taken into consideration. Actually, we never heard like that before. It is Jayanta Mahaptra’s Relationship from which the English poets of India started getting Sahitya Akademi awards for anything written in English. The Padma Shris and Vibhushans too have furthered the cause in some way. Though Ruskin Bond may be a good fictionist of repute, but he too is a poet of some type, big or small. An Anglo-Indian, he wants to recreate through, but has failed to recapture the rhythms of poetry in his slim collections. Karan Singh too has authored a few collections of poems. Krishna Srinivas too promoted Indian English poetry through his journal named Poet, published from Madras. Even the stray poems of A.C.Sahay, Niranjan Mishra, R.N.Sinha and others of the same group can be found in the issues of The Indian P.E.N. edited by Nissim Ezekiel, but he likes it not to assess and evaluate the small names.

Nissim Ezekiel, Jayanta Mahapatra, Purshottam Lal, Kamala Das, Keki N. Daruwalla, Dilip Chitre, Arun Kolatkar, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Adil Jussawalla, Pritish Nandy, A.K. amanujan, R. Parthasarathy, Gieve Patel, Shiv K. Kumar, Kamala Das, Keshav Malik, Agha Shahid Ali, etc. are the poets of the pre-independence period and they too are not the poets born, but have evolved in due course of time. They also came to light through self-publication and propaganda in the sense that P. Lal pedalled the things, did the propaganda through his Writers Workshop, Calcutta miscellany and credo. K.V.S. Murti, R.R. Menon, Narenderpal Singh, M.N. Sharma, D.H. Kabadi, Romen Basu, Kulwant Sigh Gill, Sarbeswar Samal, Pronab Kumar Majumder, Hazara Singh, T.V. Reddy, P.C. Katoch, R.K. Singh, O.N. Gupta, I.H. Rizvi, Charu Sheel Singh, Simanchal Patnaik, Kedar Nath Sharma, Vijay Vishal, H.S.Bhatia, Stephen Gill, Har Prasad Sharma, Kadar Nath Sharma, Amarendra Kumar, P.K. Joy, etc. are the poets of the contemporary times. While maintaining courtesy, the poets such as Nissim, Jayanta and Daruwalla have sent their poems to be included in small journals as per editorial request, but they take not their names in their volumes published with the acknowledgements.

There are the poets of different affiliations, some belong to the Bombay group, some to the Calcutta group and some to the Madras group and the critics from these places continue to back up while the rest of India remains untouched, out of the reach. The politics of poetry and the poets, only those who deal with it can tell about. Something also depends on name and fame. If one does not get the limelight in time, it may be difficult for one to continue with one’s creativity.

It is very difficult to judge here into the realm of Indian English poetry who is a major writer and who a minor poet as because the majors have evolved out of the list of the minors in this way or that way; none sure of that. There are no parameters to be judged upon; England’s English, the Indian native critics, are the things to be dispensed with. One may call with pride the name of Arun Kolatkar who too is not a famous poet, but has become, as there was a dearth of good poets. Dilip Chitre is a standard Marathi poet, but his poems are a few in English, but he is also an Indian English poet. Many have just changed over after their appearance in the anthology of P. Lal. Some have been made poets and some left behind. Now a few can say about Lawrence Bentleman.

We do not know if the so-called modern poets and poetesses describe the real India rather than being privately personal and self-centered. They weave the private myths individually and have nothing to do with reality, fact and fiction; societal truths and confrontations. They describe an India of plazas, pizzas and shopping malls; mutlit-complexes, city centers and parks; lives in flats, full of the gala and glitz which one just sees in the urban places. Urban space, townsman’s living, congested are, traffic jam, night party, birthday gift, song and dance are the things which engage them most. Late night parties, picnics, honeymoons, wedding bells, catwalks, fashion shows, gala events, parks, dating, love affairs, bouquets of flowers, Valentine’s Day, cyber cafes, mobile phone handsets, hobbies, tours, journeys, travels, hotels, restaurants, lodges, liquor brands, jogging, health and hazards and outings dot the speeches. Drug addiction, flesh trade, woman trafficking and others ail us poorly and we start seeing civilization in a poor light if all those continue to happen in our society.

If we take up the modern poets, we shall come to mark it that most of them are the poets who have come from not the mainstream of Indian thought, culture and tradition. Nissim Ezekiel is a Jew, Keki N. Daruwalla a Zoroastrian and Jayanta Mahapatra a Christian and so are Adil Jussawalla, Gieve Patel and K.D. Katrak, the same Zoroastrians. The other modern Indian English poets and poetesses too are not at all Indian from the ancient lore point of view as they interpret it not the rural India scattered on a vast secluded area, impregnable and inaccessible. They depict an India of towns, townships, cities, mega cities and metropolitan areas which remain full of, compact and congested. From a writer of lyrics, Pritish Nandy turned into a media baron and perhaps forgot poetry. Even Parthasarathy is a one poetry book author and this forms the basics of poetry. Instead of, they are differently Indian even though seeing with askance and skepticism. Indian English poetry lags behind in presenting India in its essence. Physical and natural descriptions can hardly be found in the smaller, thinner texts tendered to us from time to time. There had not been the readers of Indian English poetry, even of Aurobindo’s Savitri and Tagore’s Gitanjali. Just the people used to see them from the heritage point of view. Now the people are trying to read the texts as are prescribed from for textual readings in their courses of studies and also for that the teachers are searching Indian topics to finish their Ph.Ds., but there was a time when the British-classic read old-timers used to frown upon seeing them and used to consider those dissertations as third-rate stuff, purely Indian, not at all English. Kamala Das’ is a poetry of kaam-vaasana; sambhoga to samadhi which arouses sexual desires and dreams in a confessional way. As a poetess, she is Freudian and Lawrentian though she says she is very original, but is not, is erotic, carnal and sensual. Hers is an expression of the girl of the bazaar; a study in sex and sexual relations. There is very much of gay love and bonding; lesbianism in her. Man-woman relationships engage her most. To level the charges against her good husband and to prove him characterless is the job of Kamala. Actually, she behaves like a painted lady and hers is a painted love, artificial and mechanical and is media-savvy. Kamala is just like a character of D.H. Lawrence, a girl gone into hysterics and is abnormal too. Frankly speaking, she can go to any level as for getting name and fame. Obscenity, nudity, pornography, possessive love and blue reels are the chief properties to deal and dispense with.

Modern Indian Poetry in English is not a standard anthology of poems, just the loosely-published poets not, practitioners have been dragged along, the nondescript, nowhere writers have been included in by P. Lal, who was actually in search of talent-hunt or self-satisfaction. Lal too is not a big poet himself though he has got awards for his promotion and translation works. Most of the poets were then evolving or were nowhere. Their first poems too were included in as they had the accessibility, not to say of first books. Some of the blogs or blurbs speak of having one or two collections published or are on the anvil. At that time there were no takers of Indian English poetry as it is not even spoken in homes nor has it a feeder dialect of own. So, how could we suppose it to be Indian English! Many of the so-called established poets of today have just substantiated their positions after publishing a few and it was also a fact that they go their critics easily. Indian English poetry got an impetus when the UGC through its committees recommended it to prescribe in their courses of studies for B.A. and M.A. Even a bit ago there were no takers of Indian English poetry in West Bengal or Calcutta University. Only British, English or American classics used to have its sway over. The other thing is this that it is very poorer, weaker and unstable in theme and versification. Most of the practitioners appear to be copycats doing the catwalks. The other thing is this that it is very poorer, weaker and unstable in theme and versification. Most of the practitioners appear to be copycats doing the catwalks. The volume is puerile, childish and immature. Pritish Nandy had been then almost a young fellow to figure in. Similar had been the case with Meena Alexander who is perhaps in America.

The Search by Kamala Das may be quoted in full:

For changing into a crone, shoot me down.
For not making way for people, young, and
hungrier than I, shoot me dead. I am bold
But I own no gun; no license either.
My life lies unclaimed, like a sick dog’s lunch
gone cold, and congealed in a warped tin plate.
I know no hunger; the flavours of love
or even its wild fragrance no longer
attract. If I am consciousness, it’s
time to switch me off. The face of truth I have
neither recognized nor known. My days and
nights had all the airiness of a dream.
Was life a sweetmeat eaten in a dream?
Only my search seems real, only the search
is eternal. The walls within my mind
bear no moderns. Only a few gaudy
Calendar gods my dear grandmother once,
a long, long time ago, did introduce
to me. I am ordinary, I know
ordinariness spreads unbeknown, as
Grey in the hair and wrinkles on the skin.

(The Indian P.E.N., January-March 1993, 54th year of publication, Editor: Nissim Ezekiel, Associate Editors: Rameshchandra Sirkar, Persis Anklesari, Bombay, p.14)

When we too started reading Nissim’s Night of The Scorpion, Poverty Poems-2, Philosophy, Island, Woman And Child and Torso Of A Woman, Kamala’s An Introduction, The Freaks, Composition and The Old Playhouse, Lal’s A Leaf, Life, The Simplest Love and Not Dangerously, Perhaps, Ramanujan’s The Striders, Another View of Grace, Obituary, Breaded Fish and A Plant, Daruwalla’s Ruminations 1, The Ghaghra In Spate, Death of A Bird and The Professor Condoles, Kumar’s Indian Women, A Mango Vendor, Married Too Long, Insomnia and At A Psychedelic Art Exhibition, Parthasarathy’s Delhi and Homecoming, Jayanta’s Dawn at Puri, Again, One Day, Walking By The River, The Mountain, Snow In Iowa City and Fear of My Guilt, I Bid You Farewell and Pritish Nandy’s Speak What Is Darkness and Calcutta If You Must Exile Me for the first time in the Honours courses of studies in the eighties, we were speechless in going through the poems as we the students could not take the poem so heartily as these sounded like something never English. We had not heard about them before. Even the teachers were not in the know of these practitioners of verse through somehow one used to read them as a literary essay while doing M.A. When we started having a tryst with, we wondered if those were poetry pieces quite readable as because the qualities found in the poetry of Wyatt, Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare, Donne, Marvell, Herbert, Herrick, Traherne, Vaughan, Pope, Dryden, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Arnold, Tennyson, Swinburne, Hardy, Lawrence, Mare, Masefield, Davies, Eliot and Auden and Spender were rarely available in them. Now we have become accustomed to, so we like to go through the stray poems of Indian English poetry where the poets go missing, the volumes unavailable and forgotten. It is even difficult to procure the books by R.Parthasarathy. Even Jayanta’s Relationship too is not easily available, nor that of Parhasarathy’s Rough Passage. But what pains us most is this that some researchers as well as teachers go to meet Jayanta just for to be photographed with him and to post the interview on the internet.

A.Chittaranjan Sahay used to edit Kavita India from Muzzaffarpur has several volumes of poesy to stake a claim for being included in the history of contemporary literature. Smoke, Pure Smoke by A. Chittaranjan Sahay also figured in The Indian P.E.N. issue:

Night fell,
The rain came, and under
The cover of the clouds
The glum city breathed in
Not dust swept from the roads
But smoke, pure smoke.
Smoke of coal
Smoke of kerosene
Smoke of faggots
Smoke of saw-dust —
That within illiterate doors
Of rooms with no windows
Or ventilators,
Or trace of oxygen,
Created a scene of red watering eyes,
And of asthmatic
Suffocation.

(Ibid, p.18)

Ravi Nandan Sinha used to edit The Quest from Ranchi and has a few collections in his name to claim authorship. To A Child In A War-Torn City is definitely a fine poem from Ravi Nandan Sinha:

Were you dreaming of blue skies
And soft winds when your night
Was ripped into shreds
By metal shaped smooth like your toys?
Cuddled against the warm
Familiar form of your mother,
What were you thinking
When the eyeless missile deposited
Boiling light at your doorstep?
Forever will the scorched womb
Hold you.
Forever will sad eyes
Wait for you
To step out into the sun.

(Ibid, p.25)

Stephen Gill who is an Indo-Canadian is a poet of peace, love and humanistic faith and this forms the basis of his poetry. Instead of being complex, he is very much simple, smooth and easy-going. Sometimes we doubt if this is poetry, but he says all that very powerfully. There is thought and idea in him; beauty of truth and goodness, which a few have said so plainly.

A few of the haikus from Stephen Gill’s collection, The Flowers of Thirst can be quoted as for our reading:

For you
often I have tried to write,
but alas!
Many more wounds exist
than love’s wound.

(The Flowers of Thirst, Stephen Gill, Cornwall, Ontario, Canada, p.84)

1.
Your eyes:
a peep into Paradise
or a lake.

2.
Without you
life a leafless tree;
love is the sap.

3.
The rays of your dreams
sauntered into my yard;
joys danced again.

(Ibid, p.85)

4.
Your lips:
glow of the setting sun;
fresh spring dawn.

5.
Snow flurries outside,
lyrics from your lips inside…
so such paradise!

6.
Clouds arrive
spring reddens your lips;
wine-filled glasses before me.

(Ibid, p.86)

Charu Sheel Singh who has Tapascharanam, Tapascharanam: Suka Deva Ki Pida, Songs of Life And Death, The Indian Hero, Creation Cocktail and others is a professor who teaches at Mahatma Gandhi Kashi Vidyapith, Benares and is meditative enough. He meditates to put down on paper, purely meditational things of Indian philosophy. Creation Cocktail is one such book of verse from his hand which we can see after going it. The earth as a woman and a mother are the things of discussion here and so he has tried to describe endless and eternal creation. But the wits and conceits fuse they not well even though he tries his utmost best. The poet apart from drawing from Hindu thought and tradition, yoga and reflexion goes to the extent of using and applying in Buddhist philosophies. Syllogistic progression which it is found in Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress is available in him in a different way other than love and its ethics. The bindu, the dot, we mean the zero is the thing of his discussion; one which comes to after so much of dhyana-chintana (meditation-contemplation). But Charu lacks in lyrical flow and rhythmic incantation, sometimes turns to prosaic patterns and assimilations. To read him too much is to feel excess of everyhting is bad, too much of anything spoils it all.

We are happy to find it that Kabir’s ghats where Ramananda taught him indirectly just with a mere touch of his body and Aldous Huxley’s visits of the old religious town with an inquisitive heart have flourished in Charu Sheel Singh and he definitely feels enriched by these.

A few opening stanzas from the narrative poem can be put as for our citation and example:

Petrified silence grew
into directional depths of
hemispheres percolating the
being of an empty space.
There is a point of Destiny
at the Centre call’d
bindu that cuts across
the enveloping dark
of a weeping Earth
who is a woman too
waiting to be a mother.
The seven chariots
gyrate round the Diamond
Body of Buddha who is
the pneumbrial refulgence
of a terrestrial space.
The chariots carry the
iron-wheel of desire into
the secret coteries of
their masters’ primitive
minds.
The circumferential regions
get breaths of life out
of the bindu which in
turn magnifies and
grows in weight, proportion,
measure and depth into
the psychic zones of beings.

(Creation Cocktail, Charu Sheel Singh, Vishwajnana Adhyayan Sansthan, Varanasi, 1997, p.1)

I.K. Sharma had been a very small poet in the beginning, had just ones or twos as thinner, slick and slim collections of poesy, but has evolved with the gliding, sliding passage of time and has come of age after substantiating his position and stature which an Indian poet writing in English often does it so. Let us take Sharma’s Dharamsala and Other Poems and The Shifting Sand-Dunes. The former is of forty pages in total and the latter too is so, out of which a few are readable and a few not, which is but the side picture of Indian writing in English. Whatever be it our criticism of his, let us pick up a few poems for our perusal and study.

The last poem of the slim volume, 21st Century may be taken into consideration and it is a good poem indeed, with a lot of irony and reflection, fancy and crippling of imagination:

Clipping the wings of time
I leap into you, my dream girl!
my fingers are arching
to slide into your dressing gown,
they are burning
to touch your warm virgin milk,
my mouth is afire, longing
to plant kisses as many
as there are pores on my body,
I wish to turn you over and over
so we together make
a blue-eyed son.
The elderly voice however scares me
and says:
dreamgirls conceal snake near their breast;
it silently glides and hunts
the one who bends
to find his ambrosia there.

(Dharamsala And Other Poems, I.K. Sharma, Skylark Publications, Aligarh, 1993, p.44)

The second stanza contains in the elderly advice of restricting from being lapsed into, skign to resist temptation shown. The dreams were never own, nor will they be in future, so are the temptations of the 21st century envisaged by the revellers. I.K.Sharma is not a simple man, but is full of tricks which can dodge anyone. A poet ironical and critical, he flows and floats in his own style, which we can ourselves come to mark them.

The title poem, The Shifting Sand-Dunes may be quoted in full:

It was a clear night.
The moon was full,
the wind was gay and in high gear.
I was in the thick of the desert
alone, sand-girt.
The dunes that were dead an hour back
began to twitch and move
like nomads in search of new homes;
the whispering procession of sand
made its slow, cold, encroachment
upon the silent pits,
the resting cattle shuffled,
and the swirling sand sealed
their half-heard voices for ever
in their own familiar yard.
The game of making, unmaking pits
went through the night,
by sunrise
the wind had lost its morning tang
and the moon hung —
a poor husk of light.

(The Shifting Sand-Dunes, I.K. Sharma, Jaipur Publishing House, Jaipur, 1976, p.22)

A leader’s portrait lies herein, as sketched and drawn by Sharma for pour perusal. The small poem, The Leader interprets him the best as for how is he a magician of words, a skilled craftsman, sly and cunning:

He gave them a loud call
like a cock in a lane
announced on the air:
dawn is not far-off.
The early risers followed him
stumbled, and found:
he walks with his back towards them
hides the rising sun.

(Ibid, p.10)

Death is a Siren is one of the poems included in Paradise Returned & Other Poems can be put as an example to present how the poet Kedar Nath Sharma uses and applies in wit, humour , irony and conceit to ridicule the metaphysics:

Death is a siren,
which sounds but is not heard.
I have lived the morning
I have delved in the night.
Between them both I have shelved the day
the peaceful or turbulent or resonant.
The journey has been vibrant
and meandering most.
Miry, dusty and pock marked
have been the ways;
I have trudged on
Graduating the milestones of death.

( Paradise Returned & Other Poems, Kedar Nath Sharma, Allied Publishers Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi, 2014, p.73)

Kedar Nath Sharma as a poet is pseudo-metaphysical; a conglomerate; a Jack of all trades, but master of none. The tittle poem Paradise Returned is a mockery of the Paradise Regained of John Milton.The poet wants to regain the paradise through rocket launchers and satellites. Perhaps some Alexander Pope is on the way of completing The Rape of The Lock, a mock-herroic poem. Similar is the case with Kedar Nath Sharma who is not at all Miltonic, but Popean here in this poem, just like the John Donne of The Sun Rising poem.

Vijay Vishal who actually hails from Amritsar, but has taught at Baijnath, Himachal Pradesh is a fine poet of polished irony and humour and this is his forte and flair for, rarely to be marked into the realms of Indian poesy in English. Both of his books, Speechless Messages and Parting Wish appeared from Writers Workshop, Calcutta. Here the poem has been reprinted from Speechless Messages in a new revised collection of poems and reviews jointly which he has scribbled not, but tagged together and has got in return for his creative writing, all those opinions, comments and reviews too have been included in a single format book, retitled so, as Creation and Evaluation, inclusive of both of these.

The poem, Cactus can be a fine example:

Pansy, marigold and rose,
No takers for their beauty
Cactus-collection is the rage,
Flowers are not in favour
Thorns prick the drawing-rooms!
Exchanged
As gifts of love
Exhibited with puff and pride,
Freezing all fine feelings.
Depravity, deformity
Cold cunning
Of modern mind,
Sprouting up
In cactus-craze.

(Creation and Evaluation, Dr. Vijay Vishal, Popular Book Depot, Jaipur, Second Revised Edition, 2014, p.61)

The pain of passing, parting hangs heavy on the heart of the poet and it breaks out in the form of lyrics of love, fulfilled and unfulfilled. Though he likes to take to irony and humour, but is a lover in essence.

The poem, Smile Eternalised from Parting Wish can be cited in:

Years and years back
You parted company
On the call of destiny
With a smile on your lips
Greeted death with grace.
Ah!
That blooming face
Etched in my memory
Echoing a speechless message:
      “Smile while alive
        And smile out of life!”
(Ibid, p. 130)

H.S. Bhatia (1936-) who used to teach at A.S. College, Khanna, Punjab has authored a few collections of poems in English, as such The Burning Petals, The Necklace Wild, The Music Comes and others. In a lyrico-dramatic way, the poet describes the transition from the 20th to the 21st century, following music and dance. The music of life is the music of the world felt in poetry. The music comes from the within and is contributory to life-consciousness.

1.
O sweet child!
O sweet, sweet child!
Dance, dance on this palin,
O dance awhile, dance!

2.
Here on this plain
there’s a dance:
dance of fairies
dance of men.

Assorted beauties
their limbs throw,
limbs white and black flow.

Muscles twitch
and trembles the earth
with every tread
of toes and toes.

Here in the white light
glamour grows;
every smile
a proud head blows.

Fairies dance on moonish grass
leaving their trails behind,
as children cramp on the grass,
leaving their fire behind.

(The Music Comes, H.S. Bhatia, Sita Publications International, Khanna, Punjab, 1997, p.9)