Configuration of space in the poetry of Meena Alexander and Anna Sujatha Mathai

Abstract

The present thesis focuses on two poets from Tiruvalla, Kerala - - Anna Sujatha Mathai (b.1936), and Meena Alexander (b.1951). Belonging to the Marthoma community of Tiruvalla, they have carved out a niche for themselves in Indian English writing. Anna Sujatha Mathai, an extensively travelled poet, is settled in New Delhi. She has been publishing poetry for more than three decades and has four volumes of poetry to her credit: Crucifixions (1970), We The Unreconciled (1972), the Attic of Night (1991), and a collection of poems in the book Life-On My Side of the Street and Other Poems by Anna Sujatha Mathai: Dialogue and Other Poems by Priya Sarukkai Chabria (2005). Born outside Kerala, she studied at the Universities of Delhi, Edinburgh, Bangalore and Minnesota. Her mother tongue is Malayalam, but her writing is confined to English. She has taught at Delhi University and had been involved with the theatre. Her poems have been translated into several European and Indian languages, and she has given poetry-reading sessions at various places, including The House of Culture, Stockholm, and the Danish Writers Union, Copenhagen. She has also worked as professional social worker in England and America. Her latest collection of poems, written over the last decade reveals a struggle to find meaning and illumination in dark and difficult years (Daruwalla x). K.R.S. Iyengar includes her with other poets like Sunita Jain, Rina Sodhi and Meena Alexander in his comprehensive study of Indian Writing in English (728). In the Introduction to her latest collection of poems (Life-On My Side of the Street and Other Poems), Daruwalla calls her poems lyrical and meditative at the same time and draws the reader s attention to the fluency, effortlessness and cadence in them. Though Daruwalla calls her a painter of bleak landscapes, he discovers an inner strength in her poems (ix- x).