Indian English After the English
the post-colonial English blues
The questions,
The English or English?
English Medicine or Allopathy?
Allopathy or Homeopathy?
Homeopathy or Anandaiah medicine?
always flicker here
like the restless flame
on Mahatma Gandhi’s Tomb
with the teasing definite article
or hidden mischief of the
alluring coordinating conjunction.
My Experiments with truth of
a handful of hidden nuances
sandwiched in the crevices
of this colonial tomb in the
corridors of our patriotic psyche,
crawl in and out
with their spindly legs,
alluring our the proficient hands
that hold the letters of the nation.
The English’ alphabet’s
the integral subject of
our academe’s perennial
present continuous tense,
with we being it’s
green-bunched predicates
the verbal action of which
incessantly flows in
our flamboyant veins,
with our ever-fresh status
of being direct objects
with clenched fists of
our syntactical fury against
the perennial noontides.
The tireless struggles
to shake off it’s hold
ends in those grace marks
our own teachers give
in the final exam results.
The perfectly grammatical active voice
with those intransitive verbs of
our passive voice still whine at the
scattered, and greying
colonial foundation stones
that grin in ubiquitous plentifuls
at our chronic addiction
to vocal and aural tips
of our higher education’s
anglicised body.
My son proudly salutes
to our royal flag in the
school Independence day costume
looking at the brimming
Aphrodite chocolate basket,
it’s holder being
the Sanskrit teacher,
who calls him aside
after the momentous flag hoisting
and tells off,
Yatho Hasta thatho Drishti,
Yatho Drishti thatho Manah
Yatho Manah thatho Bhaava,
Yatho Bhaava thatho Rasa
But again the embarrassed English grammar
blinks on the school’s peeling Black board
that whitens only in strokes of
momentary chalk scripts
in his Grammar class.
In the visions of those winkless motifs
of my subconsciously preoccupied notions,
a mason always leisurely spreads
the-vengeful faced lichen-tinted bricks
from this Good Earth for the intensified,
tense future tense of a de-Anglicised grammar
on the flickering pages of my academe.
On the shifting sands of the Suryalanka Beach
the last flock of gray-winged Gulls explode
a take-off heading west, leaving behind
those rhythmic cackles of crystalline intonation
of a non-ethereal language.
About the Author
Sreekanth Kopuri is an Indian poet from Machilipatnam. He is the Current poetry editor for The AutoEthnographer Journal Florida, Writer in Residence, Athens and a Professor of English. He was a Pushcart Nominee for his poem “Coffeying the Day into the Song of Solomon” for 2023. He physically recited his poetry in Oxford, John Hopkins, Heinrich Heine, Caen, Banja Luka, Gdanski and many universities. His poems appeared in Two Thirds North, Arkansas Review, A Honest Ulsterman, San Antonio Review, Chicago Memory House, Tulsa Review, Digging Press Journal, Expanded Field, South Broadway Journal, Contrapuntos, Untethered Review, A New Ulster, Vayavya, American Diversity Report, Plants & Poetry, Burrow, Rational Creature, Nebraska Writers Guild, Poetry San Jose, Oddball Magazine, to mention a few. His book Poems of the Void was the winner of Golden Book of the year 2022. Kopuri was deeply influenced by Jayanta Mahapatra’s poetry.
