Political Poetry

Some argue that speaking of love, equality, or beauty in poetry is itself a form of politics. They claim that every poem is, in essence, political. But then, if that is the case, is there any need to identify certain poems separately as “political poems”? I believe there is.

There are moments in history when the demands of the time are such that merely speaking of love, equality, or beauty is not enough. One has to speak directly. One has to protest injustice without hesitation. Poems that articulate such direct and explicit protest are what we generally identify as political poetry.

But, how should such poetry be written? To answer this question, one must first ask another question: what is the purpose of writing such poetry? The purpose is to carry protest to a wider audience and to inspire people to resist. If only a handful of people can understand the protest, can that protest truly fulfil its purpose? That is why excessive obscurity or suggestiveness often does not work in political poetry. If the state kills people, evicts hawkers without rehabilitation, or unleashes violence on farmers and teachers, is there much value in writing highly allusive poems about these realities? At certain moments, poetry must look power directly in the eye and speak without ambiguity.

The difficulty is that, looking around us, it seems that contemporary young poets in India do not give much importance to poetry that directly engages with politics. Many of them write poems of implied or symbolic resistance, but avoid poems in which protest is explicit. Rabindranath did not follow this path. Whenever protest became necessary, he wrote poems in a loud and unmistakable voice. Some may argue that such poems aesthetically do not equal many of his best works. That may well be true. Yet these poems, too, have crossed the boundaries of their own historical moment. Time and again, people have carried their lines into the streets—in slogans, on posters, through voices, and through art.

I say all this because our present moment, too, seems particularly suited for the writing of political poetry. Yet we have not been able to publish even a single political poem in Poetry India so far. Have young poets in our country, apart from Dalit, Adivasi, and some Muslim poets, begun to forget how to write political poetry?

There will no longer be an opportunity to publish political poetry in Poetry India, because this is its final issue. Owing primarily to a lack of time, we are, for the moment, discontinuing the publication of Poetry India. However, we do hope to publish a future volume collecting some of the poems that have appeared online.

Angshuman Kar

July 2026