Part 21 of The Poetry Pulse’s 100-part journey through India’s poetic heritage.Bharathidasan, the modern Tamil poet whose name honours Subramania Bharati, used poetry to argue for social equality, rational thought, Tamil language and women’s freedom. His work belongs to a period when literature became an active participant in debates about caste, education, identity and social reform. This essay …
Part 20 of The Poetry Pulse’s 100-part journey through India’s poetic heritage.Toru Dutt’s “Our Casuarina Tree” is a deeply personal poem in which a familiar tree becomes a symbol of childhood, memory and the people who are no longer present. The poem moves from vivid description of the tree to reflections on time and loss. This article explores its imagery and emotional structure without reprodu…
Part 19 of The Poetry Pulse’s 100-part journey through India’s poetic heritage.Kuvempu, the celebrated Kannada poet and thinker, argued through his literary vision for a humanity larger than narrow divisions. His idea of universal human belonging is associated with the phrase “Vishwamanava,” often rendered as “universal human.” This article explores the ethical and literary significance of that v…
Part 18 of The Poetry Pulse’s 100-part journey through India’s poetic heritage.Dushyant Kumar helped bring the Hindi ghazal into a sharper conversation with public life. His poetry often gives voice to frustration with injustice, broken promises and the distance between official claims and ordinary experience. This article explores the form and themes of his socially engaged ghazals without repro…
Part 17 of The Poetry Pulse’s 100-part journey through India’s poetic heritage.Jaishankar Prasad’s patriotic poetry draws on landscape, memory and collective aspiration. “Himadri Tung Shring Se” evokes the towering Himalayas and turns the mountain landscape into a call for courage and awakening. Rather than reproducing the full poem, this article examines its central imagery and the way geography…
Part 16 of The Poetry Pulse’s 100-part journey through India’s poetic heritage.Lal Ded, also known as Lalleshwari or Lalla, is a foundational voice in Kashmiri mystical poetry. Her short sayings, commonly called vakhs, explore the body, the self, spiritual discipline and the search for truth. They circulated through oral tradition, and wording can vary between collections and translations. This r…
Part 15 of The Poetry Pulse’s 100-part journey through India’s poetic heritage.Rabindranath Tagore’s Bengali poem often translated as “The Golden Boat” presents a speaker, a harvest and a boat that can carry away the gathered grain but not the speaker. The scene becomes an image of impermanence: labour produces something valuable, yet the worker may remain separated from the fruits of that labour…
Part 14 of The Poetry Pulse’s 100-part journey through India’s poetic heritage.Amrita Pritam’s Punjabi poem “Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu” is one of the most powerful literary responses to the violence and displacement of the 1947 Partition. The speaker addresses the eighteenth-century Punjabi poet Waris Shah, associated with the tragic love story of Heer and Ranjha, and asks him to rise and witness…
Part 13 of The Poetry Pulse’s 100-part journey through India’s poetic heritage.Nissim Ezekiel’s “Night of the Scorpion” recounts a night when a mother is stung by a scorpion and the village gathers to respond. The poem observes the community’s explanations, rituals and the mother’s suffering with a mixture of affection, irony and restraint. It is a powerful example of Indian English poetry findin…
Part 12 of The Poetry Pulse’s 100-part journey through India’s poetic heritage.Harivansh Rai Bachchan’s Madhushala is a landmark of modern Hindi poetry, built around recurring images of the tavern, cup, drink and cupbearer. These images can suggest pleasure, mortality, equality, spiritual searching and the desire to escape rigid divisions. The work’s repeated structure makes it memorable in recit…
