He is, however, apprehensive about how long the press can continue unless they find financial support.
Purushottama annamayya song full#
I plan to continue discovering new authors as long as I can, and have some major classics on the horizon as well: the completion of my father’s translation of the full 18-volume Mahabharata, never done in English before a translation of the Malay Ramayana and a translation of Annamacharya's Telugu devotional songs. What lies in the future? Ananda Lal, his son and the current editor of the press, says: The process nears completion as Writers Workshop enters its sixtieth year. He began the monumental process of translating the 18-volume Mahabharata into English in 1968. Lal was also associated with the transcreation of Indian works. Building this secular identity for poetry is something we now take for granted, but it was a struggle to make readers aware of that identity in newly independent, secular India. A significant part of Lal’s defence was also in pursuing his readers to appreciate poetry ‘for its own sake’: ‘I am not reading poetry for spiritual propaganda or propaganda of any sort, whether it plugs aspirin or bhakti’. A look at Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s anthology and his insistence on ‘the sharp-edged nature of Indian verse’ shows that there was arguably another shift in English poetry in India beginning in the 1960s, which was primarily centered around Bombay.) The second revolt was against those who, like Buddhadeva Bose, discredited creative writing in English by Indians. (For much of Lal’s insistence on modernism, however, he himself can be described as a ‘ neo-romantic’ poet. The giant that he took issue with was Sri Aurobindo who, for him, symbolised a flowery romanticism. ‘To rebel against giants, who use their excellent strength tyrannously and thereby deaden healthy growth, is a good thing,’ Lal said in the introduction to the anthology.
The first was a revolt within the inherited tradition of English poetry written in India. The early work published by Writers Workshop testifies to the challenges of the two kinds of revolt that were necessary to usher in a new poetic language. Sari borders used as book covers was a Writers Workshop publication staple (Courtesy: Amazon) The responses themselves cover a wide variety of styles, from the quirky (Lawrence Bantleman signs off as ‘Lawrence Dante Pushkin Buddhadeva Bantleman’) to the philosophical (Jussawalla finds fault with Bose’s ‘vision of history’). Much of the importance of the anthology, apart from Lal’s excellent introduction, lies in the replies given by individual poets. The answers of the respondents, along with their creative works, were published as Modern Indian Poetry in English: An Anthology and a Credo by Writers Workshop in 1969. Responding to the entry, Lal sent out letters to several Indian-English writers, asking them to respond to Bose’s allegations. Why then was he so disparaging towards his contemporary Indian-English writers? We can only speculate. He had a close friendship with some of the leading English writers of his time, such as George Oppen, and had translated the works of several poets like Charles Baudelaire and Rainer Maria Rilke, among others, into Bengali. Bose, however, was a well-meaning cosmopolitan and not a provincial nativist. The opposition to creative expression in English by Indians found its voice in Bengali poet and Lal’s contemporary, Buddhadeva Bose, who referred to Indian -English (or Indo-Anglican as he called it) poetry as ‘a blind alley lined with curio shops, leading nowhere’ in The Concise Encyclopedia of English and American Poets and Poetry (1963). The main professed aim of WRITERS WORKSHOP is to demonstrate that ‘English has proved its ability, as a language to play a creative role in Indian literature.Its publishing focuses on English creative and transcreative work by Indians, or such work as deals with, or is inspired by or has relevance for Indian life and culture.’ Purushottama Lal (1929–2010), the founder of the press, once wrote: The biographical note by the then 22-year-old is one of the many treasures that can be found in old Writers Workshop titles. He is a winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award for literature-the highest award a poet in India can receive. He has, so far, not published the short stories or the plays. Wrote a second play-a verse drama-before going to Oxford to read English.
Left for England in 1957 to study Architecture. When his first book of poems, Land’s End, was published by Writers Workshop, his author bio read:Īm 22. ‘Somebody should go to Calcutta and write a history of Writers Workshop,’ said Adil Jussawalla during a conversation. Here we revisit the contributions of Lal and Writers Workshop to Indian - English literature. Most significantly, he was also the publisher-owner of Writers Workshop in Calcutta. Lal, was a poet, translator and essayist.