Indian English Poetry: A Study Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

Indian English poetry is a translator's version
Of India and theme of Indianness,
A visitor's understanding of India,
An insider's tryst with Indian poetry in English
And the Indians would not have accepted it
Had it not shown the doors of knowledge
Based on fact and reason,
Had it not opened the door of the world.

Whatever see you, that is British and European,
The house, the school, the college,
The university, the court and the police station,
The roadway and the hospital,
The water pump, the electric power,
The telephone, the post-office and the cinema hall,
The radio, the newspaper and the press
And had it been so, we would have told about
The making of the rock-built temples.

Even if there was Indian English verse,
It was because they had access to British masters,
The colonial people or the administrators
And without having read in schools and colleges,
They could not have verses, at least tried
Just for them reading them and their books,
Can the Indian verse-writers have their existence
In love isolation?

Indian English poetry, what is Indian in
English poetry, how is it Indian,
Say you, how can it be called Indian English poetry,
If the speakers are not English, if they are natives,
But had they not read Spenser, Wyatt, Drayton,
Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Herrick,
Dryden, Pope, Gray, Blake, would they have,
Had they not Arnold, Tennyson, Browning, Hardy,
Wordsworth, Keats, would they have verses
Had they not read Eliot, Pound and Eliot?