Meena Alexander, Sujata Bhatt, and Imtiaz Dharker are three contemporary women poets whose achievements represent the fruition of Indian poetry in diaspora. Many common tropes in the biographies of these women, as well as engagement with a variety of similar themes in their poetry, lend themselves to a productive comparison of their lives and works. Alexander, Bhatt, and Dharker were born in the 1950s, in the generation immediately following independence. Alexander and Bhatt were born in India, while Dharker was born in Pakistan. Though belonging to different regions of South Asia and speaking distinct languages, their early lives were marked by migrations precipitated by the travels and migrations of their families. While Alexander's father's career in meteorology led to her crossing the Indian Ocean for Sudan, around the time of her fifth birthday, Bhatt's father moved to the United States and subsequently settled there in pursuit of greater opportunities in his chosen field of virology. Dharker's family immigrated to Scotland when she was only a year old. This first childhood passage was followed for all three women by other migrations. These experiences of multiple border crossings, and the sedimentation of various languages in their poetic works, establishes a basic kinship between these poets.

Mother Tongues, Colonial Languages, and the Hybrid Tongues of Poetry

South Asian poets in diaspora whose poems map complex relationships with their mother tongues, languages of colonial inheritance, and languages of myriad spaces they have inhabited, Alexander, Bhatt, and Dharker are poets who grew up steeped in the traditions of their regional Indian languages – Malayalam, Gujarati, and Urdu respectively. They developed an ambivalent relationship to the English language, steeped as it is in the history of colonial oppression, and yet, paradoxically, this became the language of creative expression for them. For Sujata Bhatt, there is an additional element of complexity in the introduction of German to this already complex linguistic history. Bhatt married a German writer and has made Bremen, Germany, her home. Her poetry therefore has to negotiate her relationship with three languages: Guajarati, her mother tongue; English, the language of primary creative expression; and German, the language of her adopted country in adult life.

Imtiaz Dharker's bilingual sensibility was shaped by her encounter with English in Scotland and her exposure to Urdu as the language of her home.