Poetry notes

Toru Dutt (1856–1877) is the first Indian English poet whose verse still lives as literature. She wrote in French and English, died at twenty-one, and left Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan (1882, posthumous) — Puranic and epic episode recast in English ballad stanzas. “Lakshman” is the Aranya-kanda crisis: Rama has gone after the golden deer; a false cry in Rama’s voice reaches the hut; Sita orders Lakshman to go; he has been commanded to guard her; she insults him until he traces the magic line (the lakshman-rekha of later telling) and leaves. The poem is a dialogue, not a narrator’s summary of the Ramayana. Sita speaks first; Lakshman answers; she wounds him; he yields and blesses her. Ravan never appears. The abduction is the shadow after the last line.

Sita’s first movement is panic dressed as duty. The cry “means death’s final throes”; delay is “impious”; if they cannot save Rama they can share his death. She calls Lakshman “dear friend” and “brother,” then, when he will not move, “blind dumb stone.” Lakshman’s answer is reason and loyalty together. “Videhan Queen,” he says: no demon can match Rama; the cry is “delusive,” a trick of the foe; Rama “has a work,—he cannot die”; Rama himself ordered the guard. The forest is full of giants “who on their wrongs and vengeance brood.” That is the military and the theological argument: stay.

Sita’s second movement is the exam’s sharp edge. She will not hear weal as a plea for lingering. Coward? Only brave when the leader stood beside him, like a cloud that needs the sun. Then the darker charge: perhaps he wants Rama dead and the wife for himself — “one brother takes / His kingdom,—one would take his wife!” She will not survive her love; fire or water, she follows Rama. Choose a noble name or “falsehood, treachery, and guilt.” The gentle Sita of the opening is gone: “Flames from her eyes shot forth and burned.” Dutt does not soften the insult. That is the point of giving Sita English speech: the epic wife becomes a dramatic voice under fear.

Lakshman is broken, not angry. The words “lacerate” like “poisoned swords.” He still does not blame her feeling, only her rash judgement. He will commit the soldier’s crime of leaving his post so that she may be less wild. Before he goes he traces “a magic circle” with an arrow: nothing evil may cross; she must not step out “for aught.” He forgives her, smiles sadly, and asks the sylvan gods to watch until the brothers return “arm in arm.” He strides out; a vulture screams. Form: rhymed octaves, Victorian ballad diction (hark, succour, dastard, trow) carrying Indian epic matter — Unit 1’s “classical tradition plus colonial language” in one lyric. In an RTC, name the speaker (Sita or Lakshman), the false cry, the rekha, and the insult about the wife. Do not retell the whole Ramayana.

Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949), the “Nightingale of India,” publishes The Golden Threshold (1905), then The Bird of Time and The Broken Wing. “The Bangle Sellers” is a bazaar lyric in four stanzas. The speakers are the sellers themselves, carrying “shining loads to the temple fair.” They do not argue; they display. Each later stanza matches a colour of glass to a stage of a Hindu woman’s life. Unit 1’s warning still holds: the song can freeze into “picturesque India.” In the exam, still take the craft seriously — refrain, colour, three ages — then say what the poem does not ask (the seller’s wage, the buyer’s choice).

Stanza 2 — the maiden. Silver and blue as the mountain mist; flushed like the buds that dream on the brow of a woodland stream; aglow with the bloom of new-born leaves. The girl is not yet the wife; the bangle is first green, tenderness, possibility. Stanza 3 — the bride. Colours of sunlit corn, of fire, of the marriage-fire itself; tinkling, luminous, tender, “the flame of her marriage fire,” and then bridal laughter and bridal tear. Desire and sacrament sit on the same glass. Do not put the bride’s cheek or a bird’s heart in stanza 2 — those images are not in the poem. Stanza 4 — the middle years. Purple and gold-flecked grey, for her who has “journeyed through life midway,” who has cradle and household and the fruit of the womb, and still some pride of beauty. The lyric ends on fulfilled wifehood, not on widowhood or labour. That limit is part of what later poets (Das, Deshpande, Dai) write against. Form: song-stanza, anaphora, colour-symbol. In an answer, do not write “Naidu praises Indian culture” and stop. Map three women, three palettes, one fair.

“Palanquin Bearers” is a still shorter song: two stanzas of six lines, the bearers’ work turned into music. A palanquin is a covered litter; the men under the poles carry a woman — on this lyric, a bride. The voice is “we,” like the bangle sellers. The job of the poem is simile piled on simile until the load feels weightless. That is the paradox: hard labour sung as lightness.

Stanza 1 is light and gay: flower, bird, laugh, “a pearl on a string.” Stanza 2 softens: “Softly, O softly”; she hangs like a star in the dew of the song, springs like a beam on the tide, then “falls like a tear from the eyes of a bride.” The last simile lets a drop of sorrow into the procession — leaving home, or the gravity of marriage — without breaking the song. Refrain and rhythm imitate the swaying step. Beside “The Bangle Sellers,” this lyric has no three-age scheme; it has one journey and one precious cargo. Beside Ezekiel, it has no sceptic in the room. If an RTC prints “Lightly, O lightly,” name the bearers, the bride, and the labour-as-song. Do not call it a nationalist ode; it is a decorative processional lyric of early IWE.

Meena Alexander (1951–2018) was born in Allahabad, spent part of childhood in Kerala and in Sudan, and wrote as a poet of the United States and of memory. “Her Garden” is from House of a Thousand Doors (1988). The “her” is the grandmother the speaker never met in life. There is no bazaar and no epic dialogue. Free verse, short lines, a Kerala house and a monsoon wind. This is Unit 1’s post-1950 lyric: private, diasporic, the dead woman as a bridge of memory between generations.

The garden is not a pretty pastoral. Mountains “crackle” with flint; the cicada “bristles” and “does not sing”; mulberry trees, “gnarled like her hands,” start a “long slide seawards.” The speaker imagines the grandmother under the leaves, “hot fruit splashed to her eyes,” a blindness cleaned in a solitary house, trees climbing out of bark toward a rock “black and bare” unlike anything else in the homeland. She likes to think the grandmother died in the day, face heavenward, asking little of the sun; light mirrors itself “as if on water, soundlessly.” Losing the body, she “crept into her own soul and she slept.”

The close is the claim. Goats leap the cracked garden walls; the cicada shunts sparks; the speaker remembers a woman who “died so long before my birth that we are one,” as a sky disowned by sun and star, “a bleakness beneath my dreams,” and then “a rare fragrance as of dry mulberry pierced by this monsoon wind.” Death is not a temple-fair colour. It is dryness, wind, and an intimacy that skips the living meeting. In an answer, hold: grandmother’s garden; mulberry; cicada that does not sing then sparks; unity with a woman never seen; monsoon. Quote two or three lines only. Do not confuse this lyric with Naidu’s decorative garden of Indian womanhood.

Nissim Ezekiel (1924–2004) is the hinge of poetry after 1950 (Unit 1, lesson 8). A Time to Change (1952) is the date; “Night of the Scorpion,” from The Unfinished Man (1960), is the set proof. A childhood memory in a village house: rain, a scorpion, the mother stung, peasants crowding in, the father trying every remedy, the speaker watching. Blank-looking free verse, almost reportage, until the last two lines turn. There is no harp of India and no temple fair. The English is clear, slightly formal, and full of other people’s speech.

Ten hours of rain; the scorpion crawls under a sack of rice; it bites and is gone — “diabolic tail in the dark room.” Peasants come “like swarms of flies,” lanterns, candles, giant scorpion-shadows on the walls. They click their tongues. They say the poison will “purify” the flesh of desire, the spirit of ambition; previous birth, next birth; may the sins be burned away. They buzz, they search, they hope the creature will sit still. The father — “sceptic, rationalist” — tries powder, mixture, paraffin on the bitten toe and a match. A holy man performs rites. The mother groans on the mat for twenty hours. The child-speaker is the quiet centre: he does not preach; he records.

Then the sting loses its fire. The mother speaks: “Thank God the scorpion picked on me / And spared my children.” That is the volta. All night the room has been theology, magic, science, and noise. The one sentence that is simply love is the woman’s. Ezekiel does not mock the peasants into nothing; he lets their chorus stand, then lets the mother undercut every theory. Irony without hatred is his modern Indian English. In an RTC, name: rain and rice-sack; peasants’ karma-talk; father as rationalist; mother’s last lines. Do not call the poem “superstition versus science” and stop — the mother is neither priest nor chemist.

Arun Kolatkar (1932–2004) wrote in Marathi and English. “The Bus” opens Jejuri (1976, Commonwealth Poetry Prize): a sequence about the pilgrimage town of Khandoba in Maharashtra. The set poem is not a hymn. It is the state-transport ride to the holy place. Tarpaulin flaps buttoned against the sun; a bumpy road; an old man in spectacles. The pilgrim-speaker sees not the landscape but his “own divided face” in those glasses. Modern Indian English poetry after Ezekiel: camera eye, no Naidu gold.

The bus is closed, hot, impersonal. Whatever countryside exists is shot to pieces by the canvas and the ruts. The one human fixture is the old man — maybe a priest-bound passenger, maybe just another body. His spectacles become a joke and a theology: two little windscreens in which the younger man is split. At the end of the ride you get off; you do not “step inside the old man’s head.” Arrival at Jejuri does not mean communion. You have travelled next to someone and remained two skulls. That coolness is Kolatkar’s piety: look hard, do not fake fusion with the sacred or with the neighbour.

Hold for the exam: Jejuri as pilgrimage book; “The Bus” as the threshold poem; tarpaulin, bump, spectacles, divided face; getting off without entering the other mind. A question on “poetry after 1950” can pair this with Ezekiel: both strip the decorative India; Kolatkar adds the road and the god’s town as a place you merely arrive at. Quote a short visual patch (flaps, glasses, divided face). Do not write a tourist paragraph on Khandoba’s legend unless the question asks for the whole sequence.

Mamang Dai, from Pasighat, Arunachal Pradesh, writes land, river, and Adi memory in English. The set lyric is “The Sorrow of Women,” grouped on this paper with An Obscure Place: Five Survival Lyrics — poems of a region the rest of India often files as margin. Walk the lyric in three moves. First the men talk in a public “they”: hunger, an “unquenchable fire” burning in the heart, land, war, the “big things” men die for. Second the woman-speaker turns to one man: “My love, what shall I do?” She is already thinking how she may lose him to that public fire. Third, women’s knowledge: the house and the waiting remain when the mountain calls the men away. Survival here is not a slogan. It is hunger plus a life that outlasts the speech of war.

The sorrow is collective and then suddenly intimate. Dai does not decorate hill women as Naidu decorates bangle-buyers. There is no temple fair. There is political weather — insurgency, nation, the obscure place — pressed into a love sentence. The lyric sits beside Temsula Ao’s Nagaland stories in Unit 3: Northeast English that refuses to be folklore only. In an RTC, name the talking men, hunger and fire, the beloved at risk of war, and women’s knowledge that outlasts the speech. Pair with Alexander if the question is “women’s voices”: Alexander’s dead grandmother and garden; Dai’s living fear of losing a man to the public fire.