Under the impact of the west and of English literature, there arose, in 19th century India, a new kind of poetry. It differed markedly from the poetry that immediately preceded it in the turbulent years of the Mughal decline and the English expansion. It must be stressed that the devotional literature of Bhakti and Sufism which had flourished at an early time had an important influence on the poets of modern India.

In the old Sufi and Bhakti poetry the figure of the beloved stood for God. But devotional poetry was not very characteristic of the I8th century which came under the influence of a highly conventionalized style of erotic poetry. Here and there we do encounter some great Sufi and Bhakti poets and singers in that age of turbulence. In Sind, Shah Abdul Latif of Bhit, in the Punjab, Waris Shah in the deep south, the Telugu composer Tyagaraja who set his thousands of devotional poems to matchless Carnatic music.

The Sufi saint Shah Abdul Latif of Bhit and his Punjabi contemporary Waris Shah took Hindu folk tales of their own regions, the love stories of Sasui and Punhoon and of Hir and Ranjha. They embroidered into them a deeper Sufis tic interpretation and thus they produced the classics known as the Risalso of Shah Abdul Latif and Hir-Waris.

Both tapped the deep pathos of popular love stories to give a spontaneous touch to Sufi preaching. Hir Waris turns on an extra marital affair. The headman’s daughter Hir is forcibly separated from the cattle-herd Ranjha by her kinsfolk and married off to a husband to whom she acts coldly. Her continuing attachment to her lover who roams the country as a Jogi ends in a tragic series of deaths.

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Shah Abdul Latif embroidered upon several folk stories of Sind. Of these, the pathetic love story of Sasui and Punhoon, set against the background of the parched desert, is the most popular among the Sindhis, Shah Abdul Latif’s treatment of the well known theme begins when Sasui’s “husband, a stranger from Baluchistan named Punhoon, is secretly taken away by his kinsfolk at night on fleet-footed camels.

The girl crosses the trackless desert of Sind and the bare mountains of Baluchistan, alone in search of her husband. She loses her life amidst the sands in a quest that embodies for Shah Abdul Latif the devoted man’s untiring search for God.

Shah Abdul Latif sees in Sasui’s unremitting struggle into the last the difficult path of the Sufi striving to obliterate the distinction between himself and God. But he and other poets of his sort are something of an exception in that troubled age. The 18th century and the early part of the 19th century are marked by a conventional poetry in most of the Indian language, inspired not so much by deep devotion as by decadent eroticism.

The social crisis accompanying the decline of the Mughal Empire left a deep imprint on the literature of the age. A sense of decadence pervaded the literature of practically every major language in Northern and Southern India before the new prose and poetry emerged under the impact of Western influence.

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This was especially true of the Urdu poetical literature that came into its own in the 18th century. From its birth in Delhi around 1700 it showed the signs of a profound moral crisis, indicating the misfortunes of the aristocratic Muslim society which patronized the poetry.

New forms were adopted in Bengali poetry; Michael Madhusudan Dutt gave shape to the new Indian poetry with his Bengali epic in blank verse, Meghnad Badh Kavya. Gradually every other language, including the Urdu language in which Ghalib left his heritage, was enriched by poetry of the new form. Ghaiib’s rebellious disciple, Hali was one of the first to rebel against the convention of the ghazal.

In the preface to his Flow and Ebb of Islam better known as Musaddas-e-Hali he exposed the defects of the older erotic poetry pitilessly. His Musaddas which expressed the new spirit of Islam under the influence of the reformer Sir Saiyid Ahmed Khan narrated the glories and decline of Islam while giving trenchant expression to the aims and ideals of reformers. While Altaf Husain Hali was establishing the new poetry in Urdu, Narmadashankar Lalshankar and Bhartendu Harischandra were doing the same

Gujarati and Hindi respectively Narmad and Bhartendu are remembered today mainly as the makers of modern Gujarati and Hindi prose, but they also brought a new spirit to the poetry in these two languages. Narmad, a social rebel, gave the stirring nationalist call to Gujarat- ‘Jaya Jaya Garabi Gujarat’-‘ in his poem Downfall of the Hindus

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Bhartendu Harishchandra left his poems mainly in Braj Bhasha, popularising nationalism in Hindi. The Balasore trio-‘ phakir Mohan Senapati, Radhanath Ray and Madhusudan Rao-did for Oriya poetry what Madhusudan Dutt had done or Bengali Poetry. Following Dutt, they imported the blank verse, the sonnet and the individual epic into Oriya and they expressed their love for the heritage and natural beauty of Orissa through the new genres.

But it was Rabindranath Tagore who best represented the new spirit in India. It was he who accompli shed the naturalisation of the humanist and rationalist values of the West in Indian literature. He did not make any forced adaptation of foreign models.

Instead, the influence of the Upanishads and of Kalidasa, of Vaishnava lyricism and the rustic folk songs, were organically blended in his poetry with Western influences. This achievement brought him world­wide recognition and in 1913, the Nobel Prize.

He was not merely a poet, he wrote novels, short stories, plays, essays and literary criticism, all of which reached maturity in his hands. In due course his writings influenced the various Indian languages through direct reading or translations from the Bengali original. It may be truly said therefore that with him modern Indian literature came of age.

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Tagore was indebted to that poetic tradition, but his assertion that the world was real went much further and it contained a scientific and humanistic core of benefits. It expressed itself in his love of his country, but it was not narrow of patriotism. His patriotic ideal, which embraced the whole of humanity and was inspired by the spirit of reason and freedom, found expression in a famous poem of the Gitanjali which won him the Nobel Prize.

The age in which he lived and worked saw the rise of several other poets who enriched Indian literature with their distinctive poetical works. Subramanya Bharati, the greatest poet in modern Tamil, was greatly encouraged by his example. Bharati’s Kuyil Pattu, a collection of songs of love, may be taken to be the counterpart to Tagore’s Gitanjali.

He also wrote Swatantra Pattu, an equally influential collection of songs of freedom. The three great contemporary Malayalam poets, Kumaran Asan, Ulloor S. Parameswara Iyer and Vallathol Narayana Menon, also exuded the same new spirit. Together they created what a historian of Malayalam literature calls the ‘golden age of romantic poetry’ in that language.

Among other contemporaries of Tagore must be mentioned Bhai Vir Singh, a Sikh poet whose Punjabi masterpiece, Rana Surat Singh depicts a widow’s spiritual journey in search of her dead husband.

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Narsinhrao Divatia, a Gujarati poet who wrote an incomparable elegy on his son’s death in 1915 and the Hindi poets of Chhayavad, Jai Shankar Prasad, Nirala and Sumitra Nandan Pant, who were inspired by Tagore and the European symbolists to introduce a mystic and romantic subjectively in the Hindi poetry of the 1920s.

The account of modern Indian poetry would remain incomplete without a reference to Mohammed Iqbal, who furrowed a course different from that of Tagore. During the prolonged crisis that overpowered the Turkish Caliphate in the second decade of the 20lh century, he emerged as a poet of Pan-Islamism in the Urdu language. Later he wrote several works in Persian which gave him a certain recognition in the Islamic world outside India.

With Bal-e-Jibril he returned to Urdu again. Although at first an outspoken nationalist, he came by 1930 to advocate a separate homeland for the Muslims in India. He died in 1938, leaving behind a poetical heritage rich in spirituality and informed by the spirit of Islamic revivalism.