Indian varsity awards PhD on poet's poetry

Maharaja Ganga Singh University on Tuesday awarded a PhD on "Cultural Construct of Self

The PhD thesis focused on early works of the poet, mainly on the first five poetry collections viz. Enigmatic Love: Love Poems from the fairy-tale city of Moscow (2009), Fallen Leaves of Autumn (2010), Candling the Light (2011), Remains (2012) and The Seduction of Delhi (2014) and examines aspects of human and divine love, loss, poet's relationship with the city, cross-cultural undercurrents in his poems among others.

Abhay Kumar has seven published poetry collections to his credit, The Eight-eyed Lord of Kathmandu (2017) and The Prophecy of Brasilia (2018). He has won SAARC Literary Award in 2013 and was nominated for Pushcart Prize in the same year and his collection 'The Seduction of Delhi' was shortlisted for Muse India-Satish Verma Young Writers Award, 2015.

The thesis is divided into six chapters in which professor Dhawan compares fragments of poems of Abhay Kumar with those of Wordsworth, John Donne, John Keats, Robert Browning, W.B. Yeats, Rumi, Kabir, Thomas Hardy, Tagore, Ghalib, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra among others.

Maharaja Ganga Singh University was formerly known as Bikaner University.