Vision and Verve Sayed Ameeruddin’s Visioned Summits and Visions of Deliverance

With the Post-World War II dismemberment of the British empire, Commonwealth Literature began to shed off the Cinderella syndrome mainly with fiction leading the way. Gradually, poetry also followed suit. Poets like Sarojini Naidu, H.C.Chattopadhaya, Sri Aurobindo Ghosh and Nissim Ezekiel had already initiated the process, a new generation of writers catalyzed it, and fresh sprouts began to appear on the Indian soil. The recent short-listing of Arun Mehrotra for the award of the prestigious Oxford Lectureship in Poetry, at least symbolically, shows that Indian poetry in English has now attained adulthood, while some individual writers pursued the course on their own in different parts of the country, institutional support from two main quarters contributed significantly to this creative activity. Through his astute advice and personal example the tireless P. Lal guided and promoted a host of young writers under the banner of the ‘Writers Workshop’ founded in Calcutta in 1950. Later on, Krishna Srinivas founder of the World Poetry Society and the Editor of its International monthly, launched in 1960, played the patron-saint to another band of young poets. He wrote encouraging introduction for them, and facilitated their access to inter-continental readership through his magazine. Sayed Ameeruddin is a worthy inheritor and promoter of this legacy. Gifted with a quick imagination and confident of his word-power, he has earned a distinctive place for himself among the present generation of Indo-Anglican Poets. Two of his collections are under review here.