ABSTRACT
Buddhadev Bose wrote, much to the anger of practitioners of English poetry in India, that such poetry was an outcome of the anglomania which seized some upper class Indians in the early years of British rule. Sons were sent to England even before they had reached teenage, and there they spent all their formative years. Thus it was that English became the poetic vehicle of a number of gifted Indians. Sultan ‘Bobby’ Padamsee was one of those ‘sons’ sent to England when he was in his early teens. Sultan Padamsee did not publish his work in his lifetime. But he did participate actively in theatre and painting. India has tried to capture the differential of the West within its own cultural domain, not merely on the basis of a view of the West as politically intrusive or as culturally inferior, but as a subculture meaningful in itself and important, though not all-important in the Indian context.
