India

Abstract

The Indian literary terrain is criss-crossed with narratives that interrogate dislocations and relocations in personal and political terms, from diasporic, regional and gender positions, constructing the unresolved dilemmas of ‘identities’ and ‘home’. Pre and post-independence histories are reinterpreted, in many works, to problematise a desired secular and pluralistic present of the Indian nation. Several anthologies of poetry on the Indian English scene engage with personal experience, oblique perspectives on truth and the journey of understanding of a concerned persona. A few volumes bind the reader through the honesty of the speaking voice, displaying control over poetic form, resisting commonplace statements of meaning. The Oxford India Ramanujan, edited by his wife, Molly Daniels Ramanujan, is an anthology of the writings of the late A.K. Ramanujan (1929–1993), poet, translator and folklorist, who brought a linguist’s precision and rigorous scholarship to his work, and evoking his own expatriate distance from family and roots, in laconic and spare phrases in his poetry. The volume is a comprehensive collection of his collected and uncollected poems, his translations from ancient Tamil and Kannada poetry and his own notes and essays. The anthology has been rated as the the Best Translation in the Contemporary Poetry Review awards of 2003. Yeti Books (the first international imprint from Calicut, Kerala), a recently founded publishing house, which also hopes to redress the marginalisation and neglect of the publication of poetry in India, has brought out Dom Moraes’s Typed with One Finger. In this collection we listen to a more approachable poetic voice, when compared with his early collections of verse. Connected by the theme of travel, poems in this India