What makes Ardhakathanaka fascinating and important is the fact that it is perhaps the first autobiography in an Indian language. Originally written in 1641 A.D., and in verse, using a colloquial mix¬ture of Brajabhasha and the eastern dialects of Hindi, it is the self-revelation of a Jain merchant-poet, Banarasidas, who lived in the heyday of the Mughal rule.
The editors of this anthology have stated that their aim was ‘to represent only such (poets) as embody in effective idiom the native sensibility’. One can, indeed, discern in all the poets, from old stalwarts to new voices, the milieu in which Indo-English poetry is being written today. They all reflect, in one way or another, the dilemma of the Indian ethos into which they have been born, and the contemporary Western philosophical influ¬ences, particularly Sartrean Existentialism, to which they are prone.
Marilyn French is one of a new breed of critics, per¬haps not yet fully accepted in the conventional circles of literary criticism, because of her very specific (and all-pervading) bias. As a feminist critic of literature, she en¬visions part of her function as that of reinterpreting the pil¬lars of Western literature. Shakespeare is of course one of these. Shakespeare created a large stageful of women characters, ranging from fiery Margaret and Lady Macbeth to clever Portia and waif-like Ophelia.
Alexander Blok was born in 1880 in St. Petersburg and died there in 1921. The dates are as important as the country in which was born. His life spanned the four most tur-bulent and cataclysmic decades in Russian history—the years of terror and sedition let loose by the angry young rebels, the suffocating years when ‘Pobedonostsev…
Ever since the subject burst upon him in the latter half of his first novel The Foreigner (1968), Joshi has with single-minded dedica¬tion and growing artistic re¬sourcefulness been excoriating the Bitch Goddess— that implacable deity of gross material success who may serve the flesh but’ always extracts its pound of conscience and often leads to utter ruin.
This, the fourth and final volume of a series, presents in English translation a selection of contemporary verse in Assamese (20 poets; 30 poems), Gujarati (28 poets; 29 poems), Malayalam (30 poets; 60 poems), Telugu (17 poets; 23 poems), and Urdu (19 poets: 54 poems). Each section begins with an editorial introduction—by Nabakanta Barua for Assamese, Jhinabhai Desai for Gujarati, Ayyappa Paniker for Malayalam, I. Panduranga Rao for Telugu, and Gopichand Narang for Urdu—and concludes with brief biographical notes on the poets represented.