“Each in his Prison Thinking of the Key”: A Compoetical Study of the Indian Connection to "The Waste Land"

A close reading of T.S. Eliot’s high modern poem The Waste Land (1922) reflects the influence of the ancient Indian philosophy and mythical structures on the mind that created the masterpiece. References may be found in the poem to the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Bhagvad Gita, Patanjali’s Yoga Sūtras, early Buddhist texts and episodes from Mahabharata. This should not surprise any reader of Eliot who is aware of his deep interest in Asian philosophies – especially Chinese, Japanese and Indian – during his studies at Harvard, and the influence that teachers like Irving Babbit, Charles Lanman, James Woods – each one expertized in one or the other branch of Indian philosophy – left on him. The very texture of the fabric of The Waste Land is conceptualized as an amalgamation of Indian and Western culture. Prof. G. Nageswara Rao in his famous article “The Upanishad in the Waste Land” states that two out of the five section-headings of the poem are borrowed from Indian sources. This paper is essentially a study in compoetics i.e. comparative, compound poetics, making space for possibilites of alternative critical / theoretical approcahes to co-exist besides the ones establsihed by the canon. In its quest for this, the paper tries to examine (i) how an alternative archetypal source of the poem can be found in Indian mythology. (ii) what does Eliot have to borrow from the Vedic/ Upanishadic philosophy and Patanjali’s Yoga Sūtras while rendering his vision of the Western civilization in the poem, and (iii) how relevant are these borrowings a century later.