“Can I become a tree?”: Plant Imagination in Contemporary Indian Poetry in English

Abstract

Indian poetry in English has a deep engagement with plant imagination from its beginning. The discourse of plant imaginary, however, is never monolithic here. The early poems often use trees either as symbols or semantic entities. In other words, the representation of ontological identity of a tree is largely ignored in early Indian English poems barring a few remarkable exceptions. But contemporary Indian English poetry looks beyond the anthropomorphic vision of a tree and portrays plant subjectivity and plant agency. The depiction of a symbiotic relation between the human world and the arboreal world is also at the centre of this poetry. Some poems speak of plant personhood and even human aspiration for becoming a tree. The present paper critically reads the relevant poems of poets like Toru Dutt, Keki N. Daruwalla, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Gieve Patel, Dilip Chitre, Temsula Ao, Sumana Roy, Paresh Tiwari, Kiriti Sengupta among others, and explores all these issues from the perspectives of Critical Plant Studies. The paper also examines how Indian poetry in English is at times implicated in didacticism when it critiques the unprecedented botanical loss in the Anthropocene.

Keywords

• plant imagination
• plant subjectivity
• plant otherness
• anthropocene
• botanical loss