Literary tradition is vital and precious, which poets must adhere to, obtain or surrender to, in order to find their own place in the spectrum. Tradition is perceived to be a dynamic notion by the twentieth century poet and literary critic, T.S. Eliot, who, in his seminal essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)” opined that “no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.” The importance of literary tradition in the formation of individual talent cannot be undermined as it necessarily involves “the historical sense” and “a perception, not only of the pastness of the past but its presence”. Poetry anthologies, in India and elsewhere, have enabled literary tradition to thrive in continuity, not as a force to be observed blindly, but as something to be adhered to with critical self-awareness. They have also played a key role in cultivating and reorganization of literary canons contingent on dominant beliefs, socio-political milieu, contemporary taste, and other variables.

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While earlier anthologies in India largely privileged select city-based anglophone voices, later efforts increasingly attempted to foreground marginal, peripheral and multilingual voices, thereby widening and enriching the country’s literary and cultural imagination. In this context, the Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English (2020–2025), edited by Sukrita Paul Kumar and Vinita Agrawal, emerges as one of the most inclusive and representative contemporary anthologies, bringing together established as well as emerging voices across regions, generations, languages and aesthetic orientations.

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The significance of the Yearbook also lies in its departure from the predictable frameworks of many earlier anthologies. By accommodating poets across regions, identities and linguistic influences, the Yearbook opens Indian poetry in English to wider cultural realities, formal experimentation and contemporary concerns.

 

Espousing the lenses of ‘pluralism’, these Yearbooks include diverse voices marked by different identifiers. These works ardently reveal the resilience and the fortitude of humanity through times of uncertainty, existential disquiet and psychological unmooring, share and transmit hope, vision and light that revitalise the drive to live and create. The poems seem to come from a state of mind where personal memory, ecological anguish, linguistic plurality, collective history and socio-political turmoil all coalesce and get reflected underneath a disrupted yet appealing surface.

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These collections, assembled around an array of themes, have a common aesthetic and by filtering, assembling and re-situating the disparate voices, bring them to the notice of a highly discerning readership. Anthologies like Yearbook are giving a wider representation of India through pages in Indian poetry in English with a profound emphasis on the creative awareness, literary taste, intellectual discourse, and multiplicity of beliefs that sustain the democratic core of our nation.

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Structurally similar and unified by the desire to bring quality Indian English poetry “under one roof” (The Hindu) and create a dynamic archive of poetry written in and from India, including those settled abroad, the five volumes of Yearbook produced so far are books that epitomize beauty, rhythm, honesty, deeper truths and the joy of pure living. All of the editions go through a blind reviewing process done by a collective selection through a panel of poets, publishers, editors and literary figures. This selection method aims at protecting Indian English poetry from metropolitan bias, coterie circulation, and uneven documentation. A blind process gives the Yearbook a democratic literary seriousness: ‘the poem matters before the poet’s reputation’ (Yearbook’25), 

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The five volumes of Yearbook of Indian poetry spanning 2020-2025 are structurally similar and feature selected pieces out of individual poetry submissions, as well as editor’s choicest recommendations. The sections ‘Beacon light’, ‘Commemoration’ and ‘Sharaddhanjali’ are to be seen as exercises in time-binding whereby the founding members, the brilliant voices of the past, poetic stalwarts and the current generation are seen in continuity for carrying forward the unique features of survival, humanitarian values and cultural meanings in current time with succinct introduction of contributing poets. Admired for their “dispassionate and unbiased choices’ Yearbooks have not been merely ‘record-keeping’ the best of Indian poetry written in English annually, but have also been bridging the periphery and the centre and have helped in setting some realistic benchmarks for the sustenance of quality poetry in English in India.

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Rarely one comes across an anthology prepared with much meticulousness and transparency that can speak for its age, decisive moments and community and voice concerns before culture and democracy. Initiated with a desire to be a fertile ground for ‘establishing the aesthetics of Indian poetry in English’ (‘Blurb’, Yearbook 21) Thematically diverse, the poems of this edition traverse several terrains reflecting on imperialism, political consciousness, gender inequality, subaltern defiance, mental health, childhood traumas, reclaiming myths, climate change and so among many. Many of the poems reflect upon the post-colonial subject’s ambivalent relationship to the language.

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Maaz Bin Bilal’s poem “Urdu” shows how language becomes a hybrid space in a post-colonial scenario where meanings are negotiated rather than thrust upon. The poet as a post-colonial subject, employs code-switching, code-mixing, indigenous vocabulary to disrupt standard English usage. Thus, Indian English poets have ‘remade’ the language to express their realities. English for contemporary poets continues to be an ambivalent space where they determinedly question and resist homogenization and celebrate ‘cultural polyvalency’ with an aim to give global visibility to their indigenous languages by resorting to conscious interplay, mimicry and parody.

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A poet with the “Hyphenated identity” as Meenakshi Mohan was referred to by her grandmother, could also be seen as ‘chat masala’ acquiring, carrying multiple identities and yet proclaiming an individual self, “a pinch of this and nip of that/an eclectic mix”, and the strong admission in the end “I am a child of the universe”. 

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Catalogue poem like Sahana Ahmed’s “The Other Queens of Calcutta” presents a postmodern collage where juxtapositions, puns, parody create satirical portraits mingling food, politics and identity through dark humour and word play. 

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It’s indeed reassuring that the stream of good poetry doesn’t always flow in straight lines or from the familiar dominant channels but also emerges from the zig zag routes, lesser-known quaint cities, towns and villages that invariably expand our understanding making us aware of multiple perspectives to an issue. Sukrita Paul Kumar’s “Dialogues With Ganga” carries  generational grief and apprehensions for global peace and harmony in the face of ruthless epidemic that left the poet wondering the future of the universe through the ravages. The poet wants the life-giving goddess to fill the “void with music/ of your fast moving waters.” The poet invoking the powerful, yet compassionate goddess feels blessed and transformed, eventually absolved of the compulsory movement through different births. 

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Flipping through the pages one is struck by the recursive prose poem of Karan Kapoor helplessly reconnoitring and exploring the trapped identity of his father peeling layers like that of an onion’s, decoding one trap after another. Breaking the myth of a (hu)man’s boundless potentiality, the poem philosophically concludes that nothing remains there in the end.

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The 2022 edition of Yearbook is notable for curating voices that are intense, nuanced and unabashedly critique the outmoded, established beliefs and proudly proclaim their cultural legacies. Subtly imbuing gender/ caste/ class discourse, legality and political violence in “Water Ghazal” Basudhara Roy writes: “Even Ganga could not keep the sons she birthed,/A man-God had ordained this escheat of water.”(Yearbook 2022)

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The 2023 edition of Yearbook is remarkable for its archival ambition as it houses two hundred selected verses belonging to established as well as new poets and therefore makes an apt dedication to the “symphony of diverse voices in Indian Poetry.” Published by Pippa Rann Books, an imprint of Salt Desert Media Group, U.K., the 2023 edition has an attractive cover design depicting a  half-sun rising from a body of water, with rippling black lines below it. The design is restrained, almost meditative and suggestive of dawn and renewal and possibilities of rebirth, ephemerality and continuity. That visual metaphor is useful for reading the anthology for its covert messages. The poems appear to be suggesting that despite all adversities or chaos there would still be ‘gardens laden with cherry blossom’. A major attraction of this edition is its explicit celebration of Nissim Ezekiel in his centenary year, hailed as the father of modern Indian poetry in English and a foundational figure of postcolonial Indian Writing in English. This remembrance, it may be argued, suggests a conversation to ensue between contemporary poets and the historical beginnings of Modern Indian English verse. As an unexpected reward readers can read the renowned maestro’s poem “The Second Candle” in his handwriting.  This edition also includes poems of yet another preeminent poet Bibhu Padhi who, unlike many of his contemporaries denounced the western model of writing poetry and sought to answer the questions of the ‘self’ by further dwelling on the non-human natural world and the world of human travails. The anthology’s strength lies in its thematic span. Many of the poems seem to be swirling back to the family, not for emotional sanctuary but as a place of legacy, absences, everyday intimacies, safety, the toil and memory. The recurring mention of mother and father figures in the editors’ note are not only for biographical figures; rather they represent cultural and emotional archives working through parents. Kitchens, pounded rice, silk sari, hair, Jasmine, Marigolds, waiting fathers, mother’s dreams, generational resemblances, remembered grandparents, Ambassador car are structures of feeling that enter into poetry. Devashish Makhija’s “fathers” is a portrait etched in memory reminding one of their father’s selflessness and enduring love: “they wait on scooters/at right angles to the sun/measuring the slowness of/the summer heat/against the rapidly approaching bright/future they wish upon their sons.” (49) Vinita Agrawal’s poem “Stroke” is a delicate articulation of “loss” and “longing,”, rendering it a sombre tribute to father figures whose benign shade is profoundly missed by their loved ones: “Loss, a Peepul tree, will take roots inside my chest. /For years it will grow-leaf by leaf. For years the earth will feel heavier”(Yearbook’23). The poem stands out for the felicity of phrasing, intense thought and lingering pathos.

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Yearbook 2024-2025 is a culmination of Indian poets’ enunciation of what Gramsci meant by referring to literature as ‘resistance’ and a ‘counter hegemonic discourse’. Indian poets have ‘re-claimed’ their voices and feel liberated to exercise linguistic, cultural, ethnic diversity through a consistent interplay of defamiliarization, Indianization, reconstruction of myths, tonal hybridity, adaptation of local rhythms, centralizing of oral traditions, infusing of local narratives, self- conscious/ ironic/ sceptical/ voices and post humanistic choices. The formal diversity in the Yearbook is inspiring for poetry enthusiasts as each edition would familiarize them with different forms such as haibun, haiku, senryu, ghazal, prose poetry, concrete poetry, typographic poetry, definition poem, and free verse as part of the volume’s formal range. The unconventional treatment meted out to language, fonts, spacing, placement, ideas and large-scale borrowings from regional languages ensure that the landscape of Indian poetry in English has widened through its negotiations and interactions with other linguistic, literary and cultural traditions. The “Foreword” by the erudite editors reads like a manifesto addressed to the global community of critics and detractors, who have always questioned the legitimacy, quality, aesthetic choices as well as cultural/ linguistic inter connections of Indian poetry in English, which are precisely the elements that have been responsible for its identity and authenticity. This is further explained as:“The easy flow of Bhasha-words, the inclusion of Indian idiomatic tone and the proverbial tenor, Indian mythic references, the use of the Ghazal form and even doha(s) are all indicative of the mind getting free from colonial hang ups.”(15) Continuing with their avowed aim of bridging the gap between the past and the current generation of poets, the Yearbook marked 2024 as the birth centenary year of poet and critic Keshav Malik by publishing his poem and by sharing his philosophy that “poetry is the foremost sense-maker of experience.”Awarded  poet, critic, translator, K. Satchidanand’s felicitation as a beacon of light is truly commendable as his long activism in language politics has helped Indian Poetry in English ‘re-imagine’ its identity in relation with its glorious knowledge traditions. Further, to make Yearbook a resource for researchers, educationists, to help them navigate the “churning currents” and to apprise them of the ‘rich thematic and linguistic polyphony’ of the field, a well-researched article by poet, academic Basudhara Roy is a welcome edition as it fulfils the gap that often occurs due to non-availability, non-accessibility, low publicity and insipid response accorded to poetic works due to some unavoidable reasons.

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Thus, the five editions of Yearbook are legitimate records, creative archive, partial literary history and a reliable source for pan India spread poetic ethos, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, from Gujrat to the Northeast, voicing the sentiments, aspirations, anxieties and uncertainties and chronicling the creative journeys in the best possible manner. In order to make it more representative, a segment comprising of poems translated from vernaculars into English may be introduced. Further, an interview of a poetic personality will enable aspiring poets to learn the art and craft of poetry from the luminaries of the field. A wider representation from Dalit, tribal, diverse gender and subversive voices from oral traditions will promote more intellectual and cultural engagement. In the final analysis, the Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English is a committed and much needed endeavour to preserve the diversity and solemnity of contemporary Indian literary ethos.