Which poet can be credited with pioneering post-independence Indian English…

Concept — A fact-retrieval comprehension question is settled by the passage alone. The method is to lift the key phrase out of the stem, find the sentence that carries that phrase in whatever grammatical form it takes, and read off the grammatical subject to which the phrase is attached. General reputation, how often a name appears, and outside knowledge carry no weight; only the attribution the text itself makes does.

Applying it here

1. The key phrase in the stem is "pioneering post-independence Indian English poetry".

2. The same phrase appears in the passage in its finite-verb form, inside a single sentence: "If Ezekiel pioneered post-independence Indian English poetry, Mahapatra gave it a new direction."

3. Read the attribution in that sentence: the verb "pioneered" takes Ezekiel as its subject, so the passage credits the pioneering to Ezekiel.

4. The same sentence keeps the two acts apart: founding the tradition is attached to Ezekiel, while giving an already existing poetry "a new direction" is attached to Mahapatra.

Cross-check against the other names

• Mahapatra: the text places him after the tradition exists, redirecting it rather than starting it.

• R. Parthasarathy: this name does not appear in the passage at all, and a fact-retrieval item can be answered only from the text.

• Kamala Das: this name likewise does not appear in the passage.

• The closing line, "Up to the eighties Ezekiel was considered the foremost among Indian English poets", is consistent with the founding role the passage assigns him.

Hence the poet credited with pioneering post-independence Indian English poetry is Ezekiel - Nissim Ezekiel, whose 1952 collection A Time to Change is conventionally treated outside this passage too as the starting point of the post-1947 Indian English poetic tradition.