~Rupa Rao (New Jersey)
Literary history remembers poets and philosophers, but rarely does it remember someone who is both in equal measure. Indian English writing has produced many poets, yet the tradition of the poet‑philosopher remains thin.
Except for Sri Aurobindo and Rabindranath Tagore, most who claimed the title remained poets alone—singers of emotion, chroniclers of culture, critics of society, but not architects of a philosophical system.
It is in this gap that the genius of Dr. Jernail Singh Anand asserts itself. With an opus of over 200 books and 20 epics, Dr. Anand is not merely prolific; he is a phenomenon who compels us to rethink tradition. He does not write within tradition—he traverses it. From Valmiki and Vyasa to Homer and Milton, from Dante to Whitman, the epic imagination has always sought to give moral shape to chaotic times.
After Tagore, Indian English literature largely abandoned the epic as an impossible form. Dr. Anand has reclaimed it—and made it contemporary. His most enduring work, ‘Lustus: The Prince of Darkness’, exemplifies this achievement. If Milton’s Satan sought sympathy, Lustus demands accountability. Lustus is the neo‑mythological figure of our age—charismatic, technologically empowered, morally unmoored.
As critic Basudeb Chakraborti observed, had Dr. Anand written only Lustus, he would still be immortal. Lustus is not a character; he is our civilization in its satanic overreach.
Through concepts such as AI King Craza, Overlap as purgatory for morally ambiguous souls, Associate Responsibility as a counter to Karma, and a Magna Carta between gods and Craza recognizing the machine as the sixth element of creation, Dr. Anand expands mythology to confront the ethical and technological crises of the future.
He calls this Neo‑mythology—his most original contribution to world literature. What further distinguishes him is his theory of Bio‑Text, developed with Iranian scholar Dr. Roghayeh Farsi. Bio‑Text proposes that a text is not an autonomous artefact but a living extension of the author’s biological and ethical life. The poet’s life becomes the text. In an age of literary games and ethical neutrality, this is a radical, almost Gandhian repositioning.
His call for an Ethical Alphabet—E for Ethics, K for Kindness—and a Solemn Pledge for graduating students (“I shall not allow my knowledge to harm the cosmic society”) is not peripheral activism but integral to his poetics. Comparisons with Indian tradition are illuminating. We have many poets of great lyrical power, but few who dared to philosophize. Tagore gave us a religion of humanity; Aurobindo envisioned the superman.
Dr. Anand offers an Ethics of Survival with Dignity for the Anthropocene. Where others wrote poems, he built a system: 20 epics, a dozen recently dedicated as Epicasia to Serbia—earning his name on the Poets’ Rock, honorary membership of the Serbian Writers Association, and awards such as the Seneca Award (Italy), Charter of Morava (Serbia), and the Franz Kafka and Maxim Gorky distinctions. World literature today is trapped between rootless experimentation and nostalgic traditionalism. Dr. Anand shows a third path.
He is deeply Indian, steeped in Vedic spiritual and philosophical tradition, yet converses effortlessly with Western thought—from Whitman, on whom he wrote his doctorate, to Seneca. He is traditional not because he repeats tradition, but because he continues it and lende iyt a new makeover for his era.