Author(s): Deepankar Jaluthariya

Abstract Many anthologies of Indian women’s writing emerged in the 1990s ___ Susie Tharu and K Lalitha’s two-volume Women Writing in India. 600 B.C. to the Present (1993), Arlene K Zide’s In Their Own Voice: The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary Indian Women Poets (1993) and Eunice de Souza’s Nine Indian Women Poets. (1997) This century has seen the emergence of new gender neutral anthologies of Indian English poetry such as Eunice de Souza’s Early Indian Poetry in English: An Anthology (2005) and Both Sides of the Sky: Post Independence Indian Poetry in English (2008), Jeet Thayil’s 60 Indian Poets and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (2008) and most recently Sudeep Sen’s The Harper Collins Book of English Poetry (2012).

Amidst all these anthologies a historical reckoning of women’s poetry from the nineteenth century to the present times was getting deferred. As many new women’s voices appeared in Sen’s 2012 anthology it was necessary, to map the women’ voices that had emerged from the 1960s. For the women poets, modernism meant something quite different from the literary modernism of Eliot and Auden. It meant a reconfiguration of identity in postcolonial terms. In this they were inextricably linked to the concerns of their colonial as well as their nationalist predecessors such as Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu respectively.

Keywords: Nascent Nationalism, Repertoire, Modern inclinations, Derivative, Multilingualism, Blatant honesty, Inner turmoil, Alienation, Frustrations, Nostalgia

DOI: Available on author(s) request.

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Pages:66-74