Indian English Poetry and Fiction (A Critical Evaluation)

The essays in the Volume are by very established as well as up-coming scholars and the readers will relies the substantial values of the insights that the pieces contain. Most anthologies published carry a great load of articles on fiction writers who often are already familiar and researched. This anthology strikes a balance between poetry and fiction. It focuses upon relatively unknown poets whose poetry and fiction. It focuses upon relatively unknown poets whose poetry merits serious consideration for reason either of stylistic parameters or of thematological nemesis. Essays on poetry carry comparative, historical and formalistic approaches in relation to distinguished poets like Rabindranath Tagore, Nissim Exekiel and Vikram Seth. The editor’s interview with Charu Sheel Singh is added to bring Variety and focus of perspective to what a creative writer feels about literature in question.

N.R. Gopal (born 1964), Ph.D. from kashi Vidyapith, is an Associate Professor of English at Government Degree college, Kaffota (H.P.). He was awarded Research Associateship in 2000 by the Inter-University Centre, IIAS, and Shimla. He was also awarded a Minor Research Project on an inter-disciplinary study entitled "Freud’s Psychological Categories and Harold Bloom’s Literary Theory" by UGC in 2002. He was selected for Dr. Y.S. Parmar award in Literature in 2010 and for Vidya vidyavishardin 2013.

He is the author of A Critical Study of Novels of Anita Desai [1995].

S.Sachar, PH.D. (H.P.). He has published research papers, poems and article in distinguished and scholarly journals, anthologies and newspapers. He is also a member of Akhil Bharatiya Sahitya Parishad, Rachna Manch and United Writers Association.

EMERGING TIDES: CRITICAL ESSAYS ON INDIAN ENGLISH FICTION AND POETRY
The essays in this Volume seem to me to be growingly assertive. They attempt to build on the conviction that Indian literature in English is no more an abortive dream insinuated by the British Raj; rather it is an Indian dream gradually coming to its own and realising its sinews of strength and fibres of conviction. The vital point for Indian writing in English has been that the language has provided a whole set of new categories good enough to understand an ancient culture; it has also helped heal up the scars that fanatic sentiments emanating from regional languages have often inflicted. English has definitely put India on the world map of literary production.

Doctors N.R. Gopal and Suman Sachar deserve more commendation than is due as they make us familiar with a bunch of scholars who are coming up well, consolidating the secondary text of the studies in Indian Literature in English. India has long and healthy traditions fictionalised Narrative-Puranas being supreme in terms of historiographical imagination, mythological projection, and genealogical narration of the gods and goddesses, exhibiting the best of the admixtures of illusion and reality with multiple layers of both. The first phase of Indian English novel tried to bring in sociological resurgence of an ancient society divided by all kinds of archaic laws. The tradition has continued down to Ananthamurthy’s Samskara. However, the partition of the country, and a later migratory wave, when some of the best telent of the country favoured settlelments abroad or decided to continue to belong to both-the country of their origin and the country of their migration-has created a distinct sensibility, diasporic in some respects, in the literature in question.

Literary discourse grows out of certain value-concerns the discovery of which in a new way is the conscious or unconscious ground plan of creative writers. The credit goes to the infinite semantic pluralism of cultural symbols that show an endlessness of meaning-generation. All literary discourses, generic manifolds, acquire their force a power from the nature of sabda evolved through thousands of years of labour. Literature of successive generations differently plethora of possibilies, structural wholes and even destructures plethora of possibilies emanating out of the sabda. This only testifies that sabda is Brahma-the seemingly finite characterizing the infinite within its tiny manifolds. The process of the nativisation of English continues and will continue. Sanskrit was not invented by our ancient Rishis; it was discovered by them within themselves through sadhana. However, its (Sanskrit) vicious nexus with power-structure in ancient and medieval India deprived masses from being familiar with it, much less understand and re-incarnate it. The epistemological foundations of Sanskrit are not logico-empirical as they may be said to be of English. Sanskrit is founded upon a transcendental trans-logical epistemology whose alphabet-vowels, consonants, syllables-depict the breathing process of an upon a transcendental trans-logical epistemology whose alphabet-vowels, consonants, syllables-depict the breathing process of an unseen God who can only be partially intuited, if at all. Western tradition also has semblance of such burdens when it equates the word with the logos. The articulate orientation of the word in Greek were sociological and empirical whereas in India, the word has been part of the sacred tradition that has shown tremendous possibilities of assimilation and reproduction. The novel as a game is temporal extension of sabda in terms of exteriority-interiority-exteriority paradigms displaying idea and event as its camouflaging activities. In order that a creative tension comes live between plot and character, India novel in English has opted for a plot whose governing parameters have episodic inter-linkages with a permanents locus situated in-between radiating although. The plot enjoys an ontological and telic freedom that allows characters to function not under a maneuvered but carry out their atelic freedom within a teleological. Such an arrangement accepts identity-relations, accommodates them, and even annuls them where differential play is undergoing a mortgaged existence. All multi-ethnic, plural, multi-racial, multi-caste, multi-caste, multi-religious societies have got to adopt episodic plot as the sole means of their survival, else characters will break in relation to a situation and vice versa. The Fiction Section discovered Anita Desai’s novels as key emergence of contemporary times showing how the tensionalised universe may not be marginalized and how the saving graces can best be the governing motif of a story in life as well as in literature.

Poetry is the filtered filament of years of meditation, and therefore, its word carries a surplus in its orientationary capacities. This has its parallels In myth-in Purusha-Sukta of the Rig-Veda where three-fourth of the Purusa is visible and the rest invisible. The myth is repeated in the Bhagavad-Gita where Krishna declares Himself to be beyond the scope of words as they are feeble to carry Him through. That is precisely the nature of word in poetry. Tagore and Ezekiel occupy major focus in the Poetry section though they stand in contrast to each other. The one made the Word sacred, the other secularized within it, but that the way two poets had made use of lexicological import of words is different. One is the poet of the Vedic lore, makes his sabda live and breathes the life of thousands of years, the other places the word in an urban locale with empirical Muses governing. Articles on Bhatnagars’s Poetry and those on K.C. Prem and those on K.C. Prem and Som P. Ranchan indicate that their poetry can no more be sidelined or underestimated. They have successfully continued the endless journey of the word (yatra) through transcendental, temporal, sociologically situated conditionalities that produce infinite variants of the eternally present. Dr. N.R. Gopal has obviously asked some intelligent questions on creativity and method. While he deserves congratulations with the reminder to keep on growing, my answers, to his queries certainly do not carry the populist version of what poetry and method are all about. However, I have answered queries in the earnest in the earnest hope that they make sense within the epistemological paradigm of a trans-linear framework which man and God can co-habit and mutually share. I commend this anthology for what it achieves, thank editors, and expect that further researches would grow out of this endeavor.

**Contents and Sample Pages**