Poetry politics and culture: essays on Indian texts and contexts Kumar, Akshaya

This book maps the journey of the Indian poetic imagination in Hindi, Panjabi and Indian English from its original quasi-spiritual longings to its activist interventions in the public domain. As Indian poetry of the post-1990s gravitates towards a non - Orientalised post colonial nationalism, it seeks to rewrite and disseminate the shifting coordinates of nationalist imagination in terms of the dissent of the subaltern discontents of the nation. The book is interdisciplinary: it studies Indian poetry from the new emerging imperatives of post colonialism, new historiography (subaltern, dalit and diasporas), nationalism, and cultural studies. Covering the two major north Indian languagesHindi and Punjabialong with poetry in Indian English, the book is a close textual study of about 150 poetry collections in these languages. It is path-breaking in its study of secular poetry written in the so-called vernaculars, with critical attention to its participation in the political as well as cultural processes of nation-making.