An Exploration of the Aesthetic Tension in Selected Indian English Poetry

Indian poetry in English has undergone multiple transformations since its inception. It has evolved from its imitative phase of Western poetry to a position where it would be a serious scholarly error to not judge it on its own merits. This paper explores the selected poetry of Indian English poets and highlights how from an aesthetic point of view the poetry has metamorphosed to a position where it redefines the standards of Western aesthetics and demands judgement that requires the consideration of native socio-economic, political and cultural factors. The paper does so by questioning the fundamental ideas about aesthetics that have gone unchallenged for centuries by bringing in the question of postcoloniality that is specific to Indian English writing in general, and Indian poetry in English in particular. A paradigm of postcolonial aesthetics is imagined from the critical ideas of theorists like Bill Ashcroft, Adam Chemeielwski, Ayyappa Paniker and Keki N. Daruwalla which are then imposed on the selected poetry of Sarojni Naidu, A. K Ramanujan, Kamala Das, Rajagopal Parthasarathy, Jayanta Mahapatra etc to point out that the aesthetics of Indian English poetry lies in its giving “value” to the subjects beyond “beautiful” and “sublime” through the “materiality of the language.”