Colonial Tradition and the Postcolonial Talent: Notes on Daljit Nagra’s Poetry

This short article focusses on Daljit Nagra’s poetry, which not only intriguingly appropriates colonial literatures but has arguably become part of postcolonial Britain’s literary canon by now. In what follows, I first briefly assess the relevance of his verse to postcolonial studies, while also rapidly reviewing some of the critical work previously published on it. Then I turn to his significant but generally overlooked relationship with Rudyard Kipling’s oeuvre, which is maintained throughout Nagra’s three Faber poetry collections and interestingly positions him in a postcolonial tradition of implicit or explicit responses to Kipling’s literary texts. Though necessarily brief, my examination of Nagra’s persistent engagement with Kipling attempts to offer a stepping stone for future analyses, which, I argue, would considerably contribute to the study of the politics of his intertextual poetics