Daruwalla and Mohanty. Telegraph pictures

Siliguri, Feb. 7: North Bengal University today hosted a meet-the-writers session that took the listeners to the ghats of Varanasi, where “corpse-fires and cooking-fires/Burn side by side”, and introduced them to “Musharraf Pasha” whose skin “would not fetch fifty bucks in Lhasa”.

The gathering of students sat engrossed as Keki N. Daruwalla and Niranjan Mohanty read out their own poems as well as those by other Indian writers.

Daruwalla, the winner of the Sahitya Academy Award and the Commonwealth Prize for Poetry, not only read out from his first book Under Orion (1970), but also regaled the audience with his most recent verses, like “Prayer on January 30” (2002) and “The Taxidermist’s Ditty” (2007).

Mohanty, who teaches English at Visva Bharati, read out from Ramanujan, R. Parthasarathy, Daruwalla and his own Tiger and Other Poems to present a wider picture of Indian poetry in English.

“There was a time when no one could think of English as the language of Indian poetry,” Daruwalla said. “For poetry, they said, you had to draw from mother’s milk. So, while English could be the medium of fiction, it did not get acceptance as the language of poetry. Fortunately, now the English teaching establishment has accepted us.”

Daruwalla added that women were leading the pack of new Indian poets writing in English. Both he and Mohanty were critical of the poor attention paid to poetry in contrast to the hype surrounding Indian novels in English.

“The English department is going to make the meet-the-writer sessions an annual event,” said programme coordinator Ranjan Ghosh. “In April, we will have a special lecture by Bill Ashcroft.”

Ashcroft is the author of The Empire Writes Back.