I write in English, but I did not come face to face with an Indian poem in English until, in college, at seventeen, I read Nissim Ezekiel's “Night of the Scorpion.” Ezekiel, whose first collection of poems, A Time to Change, was published in 1952, is considered the post-Independence progenitor of the genre. All English poetry previous to that – and it began to be written in the early nineteenth century – has generally been considered archaic, sentimental, and vaguely spiritual. Given my teenage understanding of poetry as generally dealing with “old, unhappy, far-off things” rather than some “familiar matter of today,” I found Ezekiel's voice in “The Night of the Scorpion” too close at hand as well as unsettlingly direct, nonchalant even. “I remember the night my mother/ was stung by a scorpion. Ten hours/ of steady rain had driven him/ to crawl beneath a sack of rice.” The poem ended in an equally familiar manner: “My mother only said:/ Thank God the scorpion picked on me/ and spared my children.” This is exactly the sort of doting thing one could expect one's own mother to say. I remember feeling for this poem, when I first read it, something approaching distaste. The poem was prosaic; it lacked the expansiveness, the rhythm, the capacity to elevate that I had come to expect from poetry.

I had forgotten my initial response to Ezekiel until many years later I came across these lines from Amit Chaudhuri's introduction to the Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature. He's talking about how some Indian poets created a modern vocabulary not through a demonstrative English or post-colonial gestures of appropriating the language, but simply by using it in an everyday way: