City as Kaleidoscope: Indian English Poetry in Plural Contexts

The book makes an extensive study of the cityscape, which has emerged as significant metaphor for the understanding of Indian reality. The thematological concerns of the poets make it abvious that the city compels them to think about it some time or the other in their poetic career. The word cities of the poets present multiple images, both positive and negative,of the city in Indian poetry.  The first chapter gives a brief account of the image of the city in Indian literature. The examples of orthogenetic and heterogenetic cities have been given from classical Indian literature as well as western literature for this purpose The next two chapters deal with the word-city as reflected in the poems of male poets like poems of male poets like Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, Arun Kolatkar, Narayan Surve, P. Lal, Pritish Nandy, Sureah Dalal, Nagarjun and others ChapterIV deals with the typology of the city as created by the female poets as varied as Kamala Das, Amrita Pritam, Mamta Kalia, Tara Patel, Imtiaz Dharker and other. The study suggest that the poetic response to the city has been Kaleidoscopic in its vast expanse and the conventions of literature are the medium of understanding between the poets and their readers and through them between a culture and its people.