C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/8810953/WORKINGFOLDER/RAMZ/9781107090712C03.3D 45 [45-57] 23.10.2016 8:27AM 3 LAETITIA ZECCHINI Postcolonial South Asian Poetry South Asian writing in English, which has witnessed such an extraordin- ary publishing and critical boom over the last years, is still overwhel- mingly identified with the novel. Poetry in English flourished much earlier than prose, however, and the vitality, strength, and confidence of its voices are remarkable. If marginality is at the heart of this poetry's predicament, it also accounts for its creativity and its "worldliness." When Patrick Fernando, whose poetry has often been praised for con- veying a distinctly Ceylonese sensibility, expresses his impatience with a required and recognizable ethnicity, he seems to echo the impatience of other South Asian poets: "My own verse as a whole has no local idiom; yet, I hope, it has a personal style. My preoccupation is with the latter."I Poets of the Indian subcontinent refuse to be pigeonholed in neat national, linguistic, and cultural categories. Their poetry both springs from a specific locale like Dhaka, Bombay, or Lahore and is dialogically engaged with the world outside. They are not concerned with writing back to the West or writing for Bangladesh, India or Pakistan, only with honing their voice and their modernity. A convenient starting-point for modern English-language poetry in South Asia is independence: 1947 for India and Pakistan, 1948 for Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Modern South Asian poets "make it new" after independence by making a clean break with the past, and consider poetry in English published before 1947 imitative and obsolete.2 The two pioneers of modern Indian poetry in English, Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004) and Dom Moraes (1938-2004), published their first collections in London in the 1950s. A. K. Ramanujan (1929-1993), Jayanta Mahapatra (b. 1928), Kamala Das (1934-2009), Keki Daruwalla (b. 1937), Adil Jussawalla (b. 1940), Eunice de Souza (b. 1940), and the bohemian avant-garde "little magazine" frater- nity of poets such as Arun Kolatkar (1931-2004), Dilip Chitre (1938-2009), and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (b. 1947) also belong to this fairly canonized first generation of modern Indian poetry. The second generation includes 45
C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/8810953/WORKINGFOLDER/RAMZ/9781107090712C03.3D 46 [45-57] 23.10.2016 8:27AM LAETITIA ZECCHINI poets such as Jeet Thayil (b. 1959), Ranjit Hoskote (b. 1969), and Arundhathi Subramaniam (b. 1967). Most Pakistani poets in English recognize Shahid Suhrawardy (1890-1965) and Ahmed Ali (1910-1994) as their forefathers, although Taufiq Rafat (1927-1998) was the first poet to introduce a direct and modern "Pakistani idiom" in English. Like Nissim Ezekiel in India, he became a highly influential mentor for other poets in Pakistan. The second generation of Pakistani poets started writing in the 1960s and includes Maki Kureishi (1927-1995), Daud Kamal (1935-1987), Alamgir Hashmi (b. in 1935), Zulfikar Ghose (b. 1935), as well as younger voices such as Adrian A. Husain (b. 1942), Salman Tarik Kureshi (b. 1942), and Harris Khalique (b. 1966). Georges Keyt (1901-1993) is often considered Sri Lanka's first modern poet, but Ceylonese poetry in English actually gained momentum with the poetry of Patrick Fernando (1924-1983), Anne Ranasinghe (b. 1925), Jean Arasanayagam (b. 1931), and