Indian Love Poems

by Meena Alexander (Editor)

According to the Kama Sutra, the erotic handbook written two thousand years ago, when the wheel of ecstasy is in motion “there is no textbook at all, and no order.” Indian Love Poems is a unique gathering of poems from across more than two and a half millennia that attempts to catalog the disordered ecstasies of love, ranging from the Kama Sutra and earlier works up to present-day India and the poets of the Indian diaspora.

Indian Love Poems features works from the classical languages of Sanskrit and Tamil and such later languages as Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam, Bengali, and English. Emerging from many Indian cultures and eras, the poems collected here reflect a variety of erotic and spiritual passions, and celebrate the powerful role of desire–both male and female–in the intricate dance of existence. From the twelfth-century female poet Mahadeviyakka to the twentieth-century Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore to such contemporary poets as Kamala Das and Vikram Seth, this glittering tapestry of lyric voices beautifully and sensually evokes the transfiguring force of love.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, India, Romance, Indian Literature, Asia

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 6, 2005

About the author

Meena Alexander was an internationally acclaimed poet, scholar, and writer. Born in Allahabad, India, and raised in India and Sudan, Alexander lived and worked in New York City, where she was Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and at the CUNY Graduate Center in the PhD program in English. She was the author of numerous collections of poetry, literary memoirs, essays, and works of fiction and literary criticism.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Given that they've got more than two millennia and a half a dozen different languages (Sanskrit, Tamil, Urdu, Hindu, Bengali...not to mention English) to draw from, it's not surprising that this volume features so many gems. Yes, there's a pretty heavy selection from the Kama Sutra, but this is hardly Burton burlesque on parade. A little something for every stage of love, consummated or otherwise. Lovely.

[Idea · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a lovely little selection of poems in English (originally in or translated from various subcontinent languages). It spans a very nice cross-section of geographies, cultures & times, ranging from the Kamasutra to Mirza Ghalib to Mīrābāī as well as more contemporary poets like Kaifi Azmi & Agha Shahid Ali. Reading across languages gives one a real flavour of how the subcontinent has treated love & its expression through the ages, down to its place even today.

[Meenakshisankar M · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a tiny-sized compendium of translation of Indian poems selected for the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poet series. The poems selected present a veritable range of emotions dealing with the ultimate passion of human beings. The poems are poignant at times, angry at times, and even witty at times. It has representation from the classical languages thousands of years old such as Tamil and Sanskrit, and from the modern Indian languages such as Malayalam, Punjabi, Oriya, Bengali too. The poems are organized to follow the trajectory of love itself – waiting, meeting, wanting and then parting. Poetry is the light for illuminating the depth of love and this book proves the point so beautifully.

[Gautam Prasad · Rating 3 out of 5]

This had poems ranging across hundreds of years from all over the subcontinent. It was fascinating to see that the content of these poems wasn’t much different from what pop songs today talk about. At times the poems were confusing and it was hard for me to understand any connection to love. But they still evoked a lot of different thoughts and ideas about the lives who wrote these down and I would sometimes fixate on things that were important to the authors such as the food they had, their lover’s place in society, or even the parallels in their lives with religious stories they would notice. It was also a nice break to focus on love and these meditations on the deep physical and mental connections between two people.

[Sumaiya Matin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a unique collection of poems translated from Sanskrit, Tamil, Urdu, Malayalam, and Bangla, that capture erotic and spiritual passions of the thing we call love.

I read a poem each morning with my cup of coffee, and I have to say, the poems woke me up more than the caffeine 😆

I loved exploring the depths of human emotion through these classics with the embedded cultural nuances. I wonder how the act of translating may have influenced the way the poems were read/experienced.

[Sarah Dunmire · Rating 3 out of 5]

Didn’t like most of them too much, but here were my favorites:
My Love by Srivara
All I Have To Do by Amaru
He Never Came to Me by Rabindranath Tagore
Comings and Goings by Rabindranath Tagore
Night Rain by Sugatha Kumari

[Shiv · Rating 4 out of 5]

There were so many great lines of poetry in this book.

[Caitlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poems about love, longing, and loss--many marked by interesting line breaks and use of white space, repetition, and references to religion.

[Manasa Madasu · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful collection.

[Renee Wiedmeyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked the diversity of poems in this collection. I enjoyed the different time period and subjects.

[Manasa Mahathi · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best Indian poetry collection. A must-read for all poets.

[Tiffany · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems range from as early as the 1st century C.E. to the contemporary and it only goes to show that love - the ecstasy of it and the pain of it; the ways of it and the loss of it - are felt the same ways then as now; across time and lands and civilizations. It is hopeful and comfortingly familiar.

Excerpts
"The skin has no memory and the memory no skin..."
-Dilip Chitre

"...the one written about is not the one that writes..."
-Ayyappa Paniker
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[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful collection of poems from the sub-continent all about falling in love, missing your love, falling out of love, meeting, parting, fighting, making up, and generally obsessing about love. The best poems come from restrictive societies where love is hard to manage -- probably because the best love poems are about longing.

[Pamela]

To seduce Nisha.