Thoughts on Indian Writing in English and The Reuel Prize, Amita Paul and me as a critic.

A lot of people tell me you can't judge poetry. But of course you can. We can and do, meaning mankind. If that was not so I would not have read the entire Epic of Gilgamesh or the Bible or Beckett's How It Is and other books that are really tough to read like Brothers Karamazov from cover to cover. Having read a lot of poetry and getting rather tired of most Indian poets who are called great the best thing that happened to me recently was to come across the poetry of Amita Paul. We came across excellent writers and poets in The Significant League. The ones who got the prizes to me are like a who's who of Indian Poetry in English today starting from Santosh Bakaya and going on to Lopa Banerjee and then Vijay Nair and Lily Swarn and Daipayan Nair and then including Geethanjali Dilip and Reena Prasad. Along with them were young greats like Udita Garg and Dev Mishra and Rinzu, Ritamvara Bhattacharya, Neel Kamal, Joie Bose, Minerva Sarma and Harnidh Kaur who does not exist on my list anymore, Mallika Bhaumik and Aakriti Kuntal who were all powerful poets . Two Malayalis we gave upcoming poets prizes to were ungrateful but I have no regrets. The we here refers mainly to me, Reena, Santosh and Gauri. This year we have been joined by Satbir Chadha and Sunita Singh. In fiction there was Shabir Ahmad Mir and my daughter Joanna Sarah Koshy and in non-fiction again Lopa and in criticism Rukhaya MK Anilkumar Payyappilly Vijayan and CB Mohandas and in translation Bina Biswas. My friend Raman Lakshman who passed away unknown is another example of the skewed Indian poetry scene.

But my point is that apart from the so-called mainstream to which I don't know if these poets are considered as belonging to or not these poets mattered a lot to me as did many others like Atindriyo Chakraborty - poets I found powerful voices, recognised or unrecognised.

I was recently given an introduction to Commonwealth Literature in which while Santosh and Lily and probably Lopa figured as did the Reuel Prize but none of these other poets or writers I mentioned above including the ones who are closer to the mainstream are mentioned.

I now know poets like Sudeshna Mukherjee Ipsita Ganguli Deepti SinghSunil Kaushal Vineetha Mekkoth (mentioned in that article I spoke of) and M Padma Shri, not to mention ones like Akhila Rajesh Smitha Vishwanath Anju Kishore - all good poets. I now also know ones like Jagari Mukherjee and Prabha Prakash and Pratyush Mishra Ananya Chatterjee Jayachandran Ramachandran Poulome Mitra Shaw (a rough diamond) Himali Narang and so many others like this who write powerful poems and are powerful poets. This makes me wonder at the discrepancy between the so called world of accepted poets in India and the real world of poetry, where these poets I named are the ones who also actually matter along with a hundred or a thousand or million others, as much if not less than the ones who are famous today, but these are unknown or relatively less known.

In an Indian or international world that I envisage a poet like Amita Paul would be as respected and honoured as a T.S. Eliot but the fact that I meet her only now and recognise her greatness to be of such magnitude that I have to write this to laud her and that she is unknown makes me feel ashamed of the doyens of Indian English poetry. Same with many others I named, or have not named, as I don't have the time and energy.

The only solution is to go on being a T.S. Eliot myself, a 'Bishop', a critic of the Indian English poetry scene who fiercely critiques it to make people aware that Indian English poetry is not just mainstream canonical poetry anymore but a vast ocean, perhaps the best in the world, and it is shameful that all these writers are struggling to bring out books, get proper publishers, make money through writing etc. All I can say is that if the West had a Pound, a Stevens, a Zukofsky, a Hart Crane, a William Carlos Williams, a David Jones, and a Geoffrey Hill and the Black Mountain poets like Charles Olson etc., we too have not only the main stream writers like Bond but a Santosh Bakaya to offer him company, or a Keki N Daruwalla or Adil Jussawalla or Arvind Krishna Mehrotra or Gieve Patel and Jayanta Mahapatra but an Amita Paul, the sharp witty edge of a Gauri Dixit, a Koshy AV, a Ravi Shanker N, a Sreekumar K, a Prathap Kamath and, yes, a Madhumita Ghosh, and these are all not ordinary poets or writers but as important, and should be recognised and brought into the canon or prominence or eminence as others who are already there, or supposedly are better. And there are many more.

The gap can be bridged only if people recognise that quality matters more than quantity and come forward to support and sponsor such writing and make their voice not just heard but heard as much as it should be, as much as that of others are getting heard, urgently, with immediate effect.

 This is a kind of summing of five to six years of TSL and Reuel and Nissim prizes, especially this year's. I really think that while people in the West valued huge attempts like A, Patersen, Mercian Hymns, Anathemata, The Bridge, the Cantos, Wasteland, and other long mini epic poems that attempted grand themes of great virtuosity and seriousness, or long poems. India looks down on Indian English poets who try that kind of High Modernist thing in English. I wrote three long poems that were all published in an award winning foreign blog but got no serious critical study on it, except by the fellow poet who published them. Your poems too cry out for in depth commentary. People instead go for the small well wrought poems based only on pleasing imagery but this kind of pigeon-holing or bracketing of poetry into a house with only one room is anathema to me, so I have come to rather ignore the Indian English poetry scene. A Parthasarathy with The Rough Passage had at least vaulting ambition but now I don't know what people have beyond the idea of the well written short or brief poem, a necessity media driven, pushing down quality . Of course there are a few exceptions like the Ballad of Bapu which in intent is weightier than Seth's Golden Gate any day but what else is like that I really don't know.