Towards an Understanding of Indian Poetry in English within Indian Critical Tradition

Abstract

In a determined bid to assert my self-respect and my right to experience (not ‘enjoy’, which trivializes it) a work of art without the interference of received reputations — for, as with eating and love-making, no one can do it for another — I turned away, at least a quarter of a century ago, from the lush jungle of Western cannibalistic critical theories, hoping to find a centre of sanity in my own three-thousand-year-old inheritance. I sought to sweep away the cobwebs of Euro-centric critical theories with a broomstick from my backyard, for (a) I knew a dead author never wrote a book and (b) a book was very much there — it was there before the reader came to it and would continue to be there after he was gone. I recognized, though, more than one reader and my pluralistic tradition provided for at least five categories:

Acharya — the cultivated reader

Pandita — the learned one, but not necessarily a discriminating one

Bhakta — the devoted reader — devoted to the writer, the cause, etc.

Sadharanajana — the common reader

Alpabuddhijana — the groundling

Let noble thoughts come to us from all directions.

(The Rig Veda)

Our eldest song is a forest thought.

(Shaw Neilson)

Still from the deserts prophets come.

(A.D. Hope)