Introduction

On the one hand, “Indian” languages were always already transnational, or—in more modern times—global. Regional languages encountered one another, as well as Farsi and Urdu, during Mughal conquests; the concepts of Hindi as a national language and Hindustan as a national space were both developed in response to the perceived foreign influence of the northern empire builders. Crosspollination existed between the Urdu-speaking Mughals and Farsi- and Arabic-speaking cultures, both in spoken and written literatures. Queen Elizabeth I and Emperor Akbar the Great were exchanging letters in Urdu and English through their translators before there was a British East India Company.

Still, one cannot avoid the fact that Indian English’s roots lie in English’s presence on the subcontinent as an imperial language, meant to facilitate the economic and military mechanisms of empire. As Agha Shahid Ali pointed out, the study of English literature as an academic discipline in grade school and pre-college education also had its roots in the empire’s desire to indoctrinate and inculcate its subjects. The earliest Indian poetry in English, including those poems by nationalist anti-colonial poets like Rabindranath Tagore and Sarojini Naidu, were poems that drew from the British literary tradition. It would take a new generation of Indian poets, who included the Kala Goda poets Arun Kolatkar, Adil Jussawalla, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and others, to begin developing a new Indian English aesthetic that drew not only on British influences, but local traditions as well as global ones. Other poets like Eunice de Souza, Kamala Das, and Hoshang Merchant were working contemporaneously with these pioneers, but somewhat outside the Indian literary mainstream.

Our idea with this brief portfolio was to provide a small but rich selection of poets writing in India today, ranging from the older established writers like Mehrotra, Merchant, and Keki Daruwalla all the way to younger and brand new voices. We wanted to follow this selection with a group of Indian diasporic poets from around the globe, not to codify or canonize some lineage but to give some wider idea of the notion of how language and culture translate across global contemporary conditions. For the greatest part, the diasporic poets we chose to feature are from places other than the US, the UK, and Canada.

“Indian” is the wrong word to encompass and label diasporic subjectivities of South Asians that descend from a system of indenture. When folks use the word “Indian” they mostly refer to the sociopolitical boundaries that we imagine on multicolored maps of the exotic East. We reinscribe a colonial carving of the land into distinct countries such as Pakistan, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Nepal, India, and Sri Lanka. When people from the Indian Labor Diaspora call themselves “Indian” what they mean is they descend from those brave people from the subcontinent who migrated between 1834–1917, bound by contract to be punished as laborers in the colonies. We refer to an India that does not exist today, except for in histories kept by elders: a pre-partition British India, a single landmass owned by white masters.

These colonies stretched from South Africa, Mauritius, Réunion, to the blues of the Caribbean: St. Kitts, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Belize, Guadeloupe, into the Amazon of Suriname and Guyana, and then into the wild Pacific of Fiji. In these diasporas something happened that changed us and our poetics forever. We became economic commodities, bound “coolies”—connected by what Mariam Pirbhai terms “vocabularies of indenture” and what Khal Torabully calls a poetics of Coolitude.

Our diaspora’s nuances are curiously absent in American poetry publications, as the nuances of our work are swallowed by larger hegemonic forces and patterns of American racialization. Our poetry rages with crossed seas and a hurricane’s voice, to use Kamau Brathwaite’s term when he described Caribbean “nation language.” Our English is marked by our seas and winds. The poetry of these regions developed their own rhizomatic roots, taking up from the soil influences in English that were not only British but also indigenous and colored by the societal landscapes from which they arose.

The poems that we selected to include in this portfolio include poets who have complicated relationships with the term “Indian,” either being mixed-race, having to navigate constant erasure when typified into categories, or those for whom “India” is a bedtime story. In diasporic spaces the notion of “India” conjures a kind of atavistic purity that no longer describes the kinds of cultural contact and processes of Creolization that happen in new locations. To disavow this change and to claim an “India” of origin excludes the nuances and beauties of new space, of new cultural contacts and creations. The notion of a culturally pure India is a dangerous weapon leveraged to maintain social distance, as in some cases it fans anti-Muslim and anti-Black politics. This applies equally to diaspora as well as to Indian national space. India of pre-1838 remains akin to legend in the Caribbean, a place described in stories and songs as “bahut pahile ke baat hai, eke-go rajah rahal” or “a long time ago lived a king.”

When coming to this idea of Global Indian English poetry, we had to think on each of these words and detangle the cultural baggage that they each bear. There is no such thing as cultural purity—Indian or not. There is no one single way of being a diasporic Indian poet that marks an English that will be globally consistent. This is the beauty of such poetry, of collecting the disparate and showing connections and resonances, dissonances, and disconnections. We wanted to be sure that voices with these complicated 
relationships could resonate or disharmonize together in this portfolio. The poets included herein represent neither cohesion nor diversity, in fact there is nothing represented in these pages except exemplary poems from people with complicated relationships to the words global, Indian, and English either in combination or separately.