Debasish Lahiri’s Transgressive Ontologies

Abstract

One of India’s internationally accclaimed poets writing in English, Debasish Lahiri is making the universe his home, his concept art inviting more associations with Simon Armitage’s poetry than those echoing from the title of the Poet Laureate’s 2002 book (The Universal Home Doctor). An academic teaching at Kolkata Universiy, Lahiri has a sense of the past which takes him back into the imaginative Middle Ages and further on into Euroasia’s mythologies, where the motley threads of present cultural diversity resolve into subconscious archetypal unity. The passion for the haunting past, shared with his contemporaries (See Katy Shaw’s Hauntology. The Presence of the Past in Twenty-First Century English Literature), serves lessons both of political historicity and spiritual immanence. Lahiri shows an erudite’s sensitivity redeemed by a feast of sensuous imagery and by an uncommon capacity for lexical inventivity.