Breaking from origins, hovering over boundary lines: hybridity in contemporary Indian poetry
Résumé
This paper explores how contemporary Indian poets make a constellation of traditions, languages, affiliations and influences play against each other contrapuntally in their poetry. Indian literary modernism is the product of multiple lineages and hybrid transactions. Hybridity, in the Indian context, also has to do with issues of multilingualism, bilingualism and translation – understood as an on-going process of cross-fertilization and de-territorialization that subverts the quest for origins and transcends the national. Constantly hovering over boundary lines and dissolving radical frontiers between what is “native” and “foreign”, contemporary Indian poetry articulates a hybrid space which signals the reinvention of the self and unsettles exclusive appropriations of a language, a tradition or a homeland.