God, Save From Indian English Poets Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

God, Save From Indian English Poets



My God, wherever are You,
Are You listening to me,
As here lie I on the hotline,
Reporting You, Your staff reporter perhaps,
May take me for,
Save me, save me from Indian English poets and poetesses,
English not, Indian poets,
Calling themselves
Wyatt, Spenser, Drayton, Shakespeare,
Milton, Herrick, Herbert, Donne, Marvell,
Pope, Dryden, Johnson,
Blake, Gray,
Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge,
Tennyson, Arnold, Browning,
Hopkins, Eliot, Auden, Pound, Yeats.

God, save me, save me from Indian English poets,
If one calls oneself a Wyatt another a Spenser,
If one thinks of oneself as Shakespeare another Milton,
If one Herrick another Herbert,
If the one Donne another Andrew Marvell,
If one is a Wordsworth another a Keats
And lo, you take him not for the English John Keats
Nor the English Wordsworth,
But an Indian Wordsworth is he,
A carbon copy, a ditto,
Trying to follow him,
But mind it gentleman, Wordsworth Wordsworth,
Keats Keats.

My God, in this conference of the Indian English poets and poetesses,
Full of Indian Wordsworths, Keatses, Shakespeares,
Donnes, Arnolds, Eliots,
How lonely and sidetracked feel I
And they letting me not present my paper
'On Indian English duplicate poets,
A study in humour and satire',
Hearing about the topic on the anvil,
They coming collectively to thrash me,
Push me out of the conference hall
To bolt the doors to be out
And I kept waiting,
Overhearing them!

I heard them say in whispers,
Which but smiled I to hear it,
One was addressing another comrade
As Pushkin, Mayakovsky,
One participant another as Wordsworth
While the other complimenting him
By calling Keats,
Though was not,
One was calling another Eliot
Who was but not,
Just interpreting Eliot's references
To classical Sanskrit
While one was calling another Matthew Arnold
But he too was not,
Missing with the text like,
The Scholar Gipsy.

Lucky enough to notice a few poetesses,
Out of which a few looking traditional
And a few modern,
Ultra modern, up-to-date and fashionable
Using hi-fi, good-bye, bye-bye,
Please and thank you instantly,
But to my notice saw I greeting them one another
As Sylvia Plath, Judith Wright, Anne Sexton,
Demanding women's rights,
Talking of liberation, torture and exploitation,
Proposing as for the husband to obey
As an orderly and to cook food,
Keeping them as henpecked hubbies,
Making the troublesome and quarrelsome in-laws out
And reading their papers and poems on latest topics,
As such, the confessional, lesbianism, suppression of womanly rights.

God, God, save me, save me,
Save me from Indian English poets,
English not,
A slip of tongue is it, my Lord,
Fail me not in the interview board,
As Indian English is but mine,
An exercise in written English, not spoken English,
As it is not even in a village of town of India,
A link language is it,
Linking the South with the north,
A library-consulting language,
Looking up words in the dictionary,
Using pidgin-English,
Milk in water, water in milk
Like an Indian milkman mixing water
With the water from the wayward pond,
Who may turn into a muscleman politician someday
So complaining I not against,
I twisting and turning the tongue to speak in English,
Like an Englishman
On the B.B.C, London, the Voice of America, Washington,
I marking and emulating them
Like Gandhiji in London
Into the toes in to be an Englishman,
In the shirt, coat, pants and boots
In the initial stage of his life,
Which but every guy likes it to be in his youth,
A blunder of age is it.

To my astonishment and amazement, which but I could not believe,
What am I seeing,
Proclaimed I, on seeing them,
A mass, a motley of people,
Speaking in dialects,
Aryan, Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Chinese,
Into the attires of their own
The multi-ethnic, racial and linguistic people,
Not of one mind, one culture, one behaviour,
But varied and diverse
In their talk, speaking and pronunciation,
Using vernaculars
And meeting at the fair ground,
Even pronouncing in English
With the accent and stress of the native mother tongue,
Speaking English like Hindi, Bengali, Oriya,
Punjabi, Assamese, Urdu, Gujarati, Marathi,
Tamil, Telugu, Malyalam,
Santali, Munda and other tribal languages.

My God, You try to understand me, said I to myself,
If You understand not, who will me,
My feeling is this that let them be,
What they want to be
They will not listen to me,
So many people, so many ways, is the thing lastly,
I know it well that they are translating,
Their mind, thought and idea,
As a translator we may welcome them,
God, say to them not, as they may in the negative,
But to me, they cannot be English poets and poetesses
Which they are after so madly,
Surely are poets, but of a type,
Not like that exactly,
Maybe it that they have to enter into a marriage alliance
With an English girl or boy,
Emigrating to, taking the diaspora dais to call themselves
English poets.

God, save me, save me from the Indian English poets,
If they hear it, they will not leave me
As mad they are after poesy,
Never willing to accept themselves
As Indian poets,
But the English poets,
The intoxication of Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley and Browning,
Shakespeare, Milton, Donne,
Eliot, Tennyson,
They cannot dispel it so easily
Their maya,
I mean the English, English poets,
The Indian boys and girls in the jeans and the T-shirts
With the goggles upon the eyes,
Failing the English in their sense of linguistics and phonetics,
So much stylistic and fashionable,
City-bred and modern,
Up-to-date, slangy and catchy,
Just like the interpreters, fashion designers and models
And frankly speaking, theirs is an English,
Read and reared in convent schools,
But mine is an Indian English.

COMMENTS OF THE POEM

So no one wants to write another Shakuntala? The poem about the hermits blows my mind. The falling scene mesmerizes me. But I know why you have to write this. It's good you did. Would you be so kind as to read my poem Hide & Conquer. It's very brutal & crass, but I'll leave a true judgment up to you, please? Thank you.

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