Indian English literature
Encyclopedia
Indian English literature (IEL) refers to the body of work by writers in India
who write in the English language
and whose native or co-native language could be one of the numerous languages of India
. It is also associated with the works of members of the Indian diaspora
, such as V.S. Naipaul, Kiran Desai
, Jhumpa Lahiri
and Salman Rushdie, who are of Indian descent.
It is frequently referred to as Indo-Anglian literature. (Indo-Anglian is a specific term in the sole context of writing that should not be confused with the term Anglo-Indian
). As a category, this production comes under the broader realm of postcolonial literature- the production from previously colonised countries such as India.
, titled Travels of Dean Mahomet; Mahomet's travel narrative was published in 1793 in England. In its early stages it was influenced by the Western art form of the novel
. Early Indian writers used English unadulterated by Indian words to convey an experience which was essentially Indian. Raja Rao
's Kanthapura is Indian in terms of its storytelling qualities. Rabindranath Tagore wrote in Bengali and English and was responsible for the translations of his own work into English. Dhan Gopal Mukerji
was the first Indian author to win a literary award in the United States
. Nirad C. Chaudhuri
, a writer of non-fiction, is best known for his The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian
where he relates his life experiences and influences. P. Lal
, a poet, translator, publisher and essayist, founded a press in the 1950s for Indian English writing, Writers Workshop
.
R.K. Narayan is a writer who contributed over many decades and who continued to write till his death recently. He was discovered by Graham Greene in the sense that the latter helped him find a publisher in England. Graham Greene and Narayan remained close friends till the end. Similar to Thomas Hardy
's Wessex
, Narayan created the fictitious town of Malgudi
where he set his novels. Some criticise Narayan for the parochial, detached and closed world that he created in the face of the changing conditions in India at the times in which the stories are set. Others, such as Graham Greene, however, feel that through Malgudi they could vividly understand the Indian experience. Narayan's evocation of small town life and its experiences through the eyes of the endearing child protagonist Swaminathan in Swami and Friends
is a good sample of his writing style. Simultaneous with Narayan's pastoral idylls, a very different writer, Mulk Raj Anand
, was similarly gaining recognition for his writing set in rural India; but his stories were harsher, and engaged, sometimes brutally, with divisions of caste, class and religion.
. Rushdie with his famous work Midnight's Children
(Booker Prize 1981, Booker of Bookers 1992, and Best of the Bookers 2008) ushered in a new trend of writing. He used a hybrid language – English generously peppered with Indian terms – to convey a theme that could be seen as representing the vast canvas of India. He is usually categorised under the magic realism
mode of writing most famously associated with Gabriel García Márquez
.
Vikram Seth
, author of A Suitable Boy (1994) is a writer who uses a purer English and more realistic themes. Being a self-confessed fan of Jane Austen
, his attention is on the story, its details and its twists and turns.Vikram Seth
is notable both as an accomplished novelist and poet. Vikram Seth's outstanding achievement as a versatile and prolific poet remains largely and unfairly neglected.
Shashi Tharoor
, in his The Great Indian Novel
(1989), follows a story-telling (though in a satirical) mode as in the Mahabharata
drawing his ideas by going back and forth in time. His work as UN official living outside India has given him a vantage point that helps construct an objective Indianness.
Other authors include Richard Crasta, Manoj Das
, Vikram Chandra
, Anita Desai
, Kiran Desai
, Arundhati Roy
, Gita Mehta
, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
, Upamanyu Chatterjee
, Samit Basu
, Raj Kamal Jha
, Jhumpa Lahiri
, Bharti Kirchner
, Khushwant Singh
, Vijay Singh
, Tarun Tejpal, Amit Chaudhuri
, Amitav Ghosh
, Vikas Swarup
, Anil Menon
, Rohinton Mistry
, Suketu Mehta
, Kiran Nagarkar
, Bharati Mukherjee
, Preeti Shenoy
, Vandana Singh
, Chetan Bhagat
, Abhay Kumar
and Lakshmi Raj Sharma
.
The views of Rushdie and Amit Chaudhuri
expressed through their books The Vintage Book of Indian Writing and The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature respectively essentialise this battle.
Rushdie's statement in his book – "the ironic proposition that India's best writing since independence may have been done in the language of the departed imperialists is simply too much for some folks to bear" – created a lot of resentment among many writers, including writers in English. In his book, Amit Chaudhuri questions – "Can it be true that Indian writing, that endlessly rich, complex and problematic entity, is to be represented by a handful of writers who write in English, who live in England or America and whom one might have met at a party?"
Chaudhuri feels that after Rushdie, IWE started employing magical realism, bagginess, non-linear narrative and hybrid language to sustain themes seen as microcosms of India and supposedly reflecting Indian conditions. He contrasts this with the works of earlier writers such as Narayan where the use of English is pure, but the deciphering of meaning needs cultural familiarity. He also feels that Indianness is a theme constructed only in IWE and does not articulate itself in the vernacular literatures. He further adds "the post-colonial novel, becomes a trope for an ideal hybridity by which the West celebrates not so much Indianness, whatever that infinitely complex thing is, but its own historical quest, its reinterpretation of itself".
Some of these arguments form an integral part of what is called postcolonial theory. The very categorisation of IWE – as IWE or under post-colonial literature – is seen by some as limiting. Amitav Ghosh
made his views on this very clear by refusing to accept the Eurasian Commonwealth Writers Prize for his book The Glass Palace
in 2001 and withdrawing it from the subsequent stage.
The renowned writer V. S. Naipaul
, a third generation Indian from Trinidad and Tobago
and a Nobel prize
laureate, is a person who belongs to the world and usually not classified under IWE. Naipaul evokes ideas of homeland, rootlessness and his own personal feelings towards India in many of his books.
Jhumpa Lahiri
, a Pulitzer prize
winner from the U.S.
, is a writer uncomfortable under the label of IWE.
Recent writers in India such as Arundhati Roy
and David Davidar
show a direction towards contextuality and rootedness in their works. Arundhati Roy, a trained architect and the 1997 Booker prize winner for her The God of Small Things
, calls herself a "home grown" writer. Her award winning book is set in the immensely physical landscape of Kerala
. Davidar sets his The House of Blue Mangoes in Southern Tamil Nadu
. In both the books, geography and politics are integral to the narrative. In his novel Lament of Mohini http://www.lamentofmohini.homestead.com (2000), Shreekumar Varma
http://www.shreevarma.com touches upon the unique matriarchal system and the sammandham system of marriage as he writes about the Namboodiris and the aristocrats of Kerala.
, Toru Dutt
, Romesh Chunder Dutt
, Sri Aurobindo
, Sarojini Naidu
, and her brother Harindranath Chattopadhyay
.
A generation of exiles also sprang from the Indian diaspora. Among these are names like Agha Shahid Ali
, Sujata Bhatt
, Richard Crasta, Yuyutsu Sharma
and Vikram Seth
.
In modern times, Indian poetry in English was typified by two very different poets. Dom Moraes
, winner of the Hawthornden Prize
at the age of 19 for his first book of poems A Beginning went on to occupy a pre-eminent position among Indian poets writing in English. Nissim Ezekiel
, who came from India's tiny Bene Israel
Jewish community, created a voice and place for Indian poets writing in English and championed their work.
Their contemporaries in English poetry in India were Jayanta Mahapatra
, Gieve Patel
, A. K. Ramanujan
, Arun Kolatkar
, Dilip Chitre
, Eunice De Souza
, Kersi Katrak, P. Lal
and Kamala Das
among several others.
Younger generation of poets writing in English include Rukmini Bhaya Nair
, Smita Agarwal
, Makarand Paranjape
, Vattacharja Chandan
, Arundhathi Subramaniam
, Ranjit Hoskote
, Sudeep Sen
, Jerry Pinto
among others.
is symbolized in the Prakalpana Movement
. During the last four decades this bilingual literary movement has included Richard Kostelanetz
, John M. Bennett
, Don Webb, Sheila Murphy
and many others worldwide and their Indian couterparts. Vattacharja Chandan
is a central figure who contrived the movement. Prakalpana fiction is a fusion of prose, poetry, play, essay, and pictures. An example of a Prakalpana work is Chandan's bilingual Cosmosphere 1http://smashwords.com/b/46742 (2011).
Some bilingual writers have also made significant contributions, such as Paigham Afaqui
with his novel Makaan
in 1989.
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
who write in the English language
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
and whose native or co-native language could be one of the numerous languages of India
Languages of India
The languages of India belong to several language families, the major ones being the Indo-European languages—Indo-Aryan and the Dravidian languages...
. It is also associated with the works of members of the Indian diaspora
Non-resident Indian and Person of Indian Origin
A Non-Resident Indian is an Indian citizen who has migrated to another country, a person of Indian origin who is born outside India, or a person of Indian origin who resides permanently outside India. Other terms with the same meaning are overseas Indian and expatriate Indian...
, such as V.S. Naipaul, Kiran Desai
Kiran Desai
Kiran Desai is an Indian author who is a citizen of India and a permanent resident of the United States. Her novel The Inheritance of Loss won the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award...
, Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri is a Bengali American author. Lahiri's debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies , won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and her first novel, The Namesake , was adapted into the popular film of the same name. She was born Nilanjana Sudeshna, which she says are both...
and Salman Rushdie, who are of Indian descent.
It is frequently referred to as Indo-Anglian literature. (Indo-Anglian is a specific term in the sole context of writing that should not be confused with the term Anglo-Indian
Anglo-Indian
Anglo-Indians are people who have mixed Indian and British ancestry, or people of British descent born or living in India, now mainly historical in the latter sense. British residents in India used the term "Eurasians" for people of mixed European and Indian descent...
). As a category, this production comes under the broader realm of postcolonial literature- the production from previously colonised countries such as India.
History
IEL has a relatively recent history, it is only one and a half centuries old. The first book written by an Indian in English was by Sake Dean MahometSake Dean Mahomet
Sake Dean Mahomed was a Bengali traveler, surgeon and entrepreneur who introduced the Indian curry house restaurant in Britain, and was the first Indian to have written a book in English. He also established "shampooing" baths in Great Britain, where he offered therapeutic massage,The word...
, titled Travels of Dean Mahomet; Mahomet's travel narrative was published in 1793 in England. In its early stages it was influenced by the Western art form of the novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
. Early Indian writers used English unadulterated by Indian words to convey an experience which was essentially Indian. Raja Rao
Raja Rao
Raja Rao was an Indian writer of English language novels and short stories, whose works are deeply rooted in Hinduism. Raja Rao's semi-autobiographical novel, The Serpent and the Rope , is a story of a search for spiritual truth in Europe and India...
's Kanthapura is Indian in terms of its storytelling qualities. Rabindranath Tagore wrote in Bengali and English and was responsible for the translations of his own work into English. Dhan Gopal Mukerji
Dhan Gopal Mukerji
Dhan Gopal Mukerji was the first successful Indian man of letters in the United States and winner of Newbery Medal 1928...
was the first Indian author to win a literary award in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
. Nirad C. Chaudhuri
Nirad C. Chaudhuri
Italic textNirad C. Chaudhuri was a Bengali−English writer and cultural commentator...
, a writer of non-fiction, is best known for his The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian
The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian
The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian is the autobiographical work of one of India's most controversial writers -- Nirad C. Chaudhuri. He wrote this when he was around fifty and records his life from his birth at 1897 in Kishorganj, a small town in present Bangladesh...
where he relates his life experiences and influences. P. Lal
P. Lal
Purushottama Lal was an Indian poet, essayist, translator, professor and publisher. He was the founder and publisher of Writers Workshop in Calcutta, established in 1958.-Life and education:...
, a poet, translator, publisher and essayist, founded a press in the 1950s for Indian English writing, Writers Workshop
Writers Workshop
Writers Workshop is a Calcutta-based literary publisher founded by the poet-professor P. Lal in 1958. Over the next few decades it published many new authors in urban literature of the post-independence period. These authors later became big names.-History:...
.
R.K. Narayan is a writer who contributed over many decades and who continued to write till his death recently. He was discovered by Graham Greene in the sense that the latter helped him find a publisher in England. Graham Greene and Narayan remained close friends till the end. Similar to Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy, OM was an English novelist and poet. While his works typically belong to the Naturalism movement, several poems display elements of the previous Romantic and Enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural.While he regarded himself primarily as a...
's Wessex
Wessex
The Kingdom of Wessex or Kingdom of the West Saxons was an Anglo-Saxon kingdom of the West Saxons, in South West England, from the 6th century, until the emergence of a united English state in the 10th century, under the Wessex dynasty. It was to be an earldom after Canute the Great's conquest...
, Narayan created the fictitious town of Malgudi
Malgudi
Malgudi is a fictitious town in India created by R.K. Narayan in his novels and short stories. It forms the setting for most of Narayan's works. Starting with his first novel, Swami and Friends, all but one of his fifteen novels and most of his short stories take place here...
where he set his novels. Some criticise Narayan for the parochial, detached and closed world that he created in the face of the changing conditions in India at the times in which the stories are set. Others, such as Graham Greene, however, feel that through Malgudi they could vividly understand the Indian experience. Narayan's evocation of small town life and its experiences through the eyes of the endearing child protagonist Swaminathan in Swami and Friends
Swami and Friends
Swami and Friends is the first of a trilogy of novels written by R. K. Narayan, a celebrated English language novelist from India. The novel, which is also Narayan's first, is set in pre-independence days in India, in a fictional town called Malgudi...
is a good sample of his writing style. Simultaneous with Narayan's pastoral idylls, a very different writer, Mulk Raj Anand
Mulk Raj Anand
Mulk Raj Anand was an Indian writer in English, notable for his depiction of the lives of the poorer castes in traditional Indian society. One of the pioneers of Indo-Anglian fiction, he, together with R.K...
, was similarly gaining recognition for his writing set in rural India; but his stories were harsher, and engaged, sometimes brutally, with divisions of caste, class and religion.
Later history
Among the later writers, the most notable is Salman Rushdie, born in India, now living in the United KingdomUnited Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
. Rushdie with his famous work Midnight's Children
Midnight's Children
Midnight's Children is a 1981 book by Salman Rushdie about India's transition from British colonialism to independence and the partition of India. It is considered an example of postcolonial literature and magical realism...
(Booker Prize 1981, Booker of Bookers 1992, and Best of the Bookers 2008) ushered in a new trend of writing. He used a hybrid language – English generously peppered with Indian terms – to convey a theme that could be seen as representing the vast canvas of India. He is usually categorised under the magic realism
Magic realism
Magic realism or magical realism is an aesthetic style or genre of fiction in which magical elements blend with the real world. The story explains these magical elements as real occurrences, presented in a straightforward manner that places the "real" and the "fantastic" in the same stream of...
mode of writing most famously associated with Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America. He is considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in...
.
Vikram Seth
Vikram Seth is an Indian poet, novelist, travel writer, librettist, children's writer, biographer and memoirist.-Early life:Vikram Seth was born on 20 June 1952 to Leila and Prem Seth in Calcutta...
, author of A Suitable Boy (1994) is a writer who uses a purer English and more realistic themes. Being a self-confessed fan of Jane Austen
Jane Austen
Jane Austen was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature, her realism and biting social commentary cementing her historical importance among scholars and critics.Austen lived...
, his attention is on the story, its details and its twists and turns.Vikram Seth
Vikram Seth
Vikram Seth is an Indian poet, novelist, travel writer, librettist, children's writer, biographer and memoirist.-Early life:Vikram Seth was born on 20 June 1952 to Leila and Prem Seth in Calcutta...
is notable both as an accomplished novelist and poet. Vikram Seth's outstanding achievement as a versatile and prolific poet remains largely and unfairly neglected.
Shashi Tharoor
Shashi Tharoor
Shashi Tharoor is an Indian politician and a Member of Parliament from the Thiruvananthapuram constituency in Kerala...
, in his The Great Indian Novel
The Great Indian Novel
The Great Indian Novel is a satirical novel by Shashi Tharoor. It is a fictional work that takes the story of the Mahabharata, the epic of Hindu mythology, and recasts and resets it in the context of the Indian Independence Movement and the first three decades post-independence...
(1989), follows a story-telling (though in a satirical) mode as in the Mahabharata
Mahabharata
The Mahabharata is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India and Nepal, the other being the Ramayana. The epic is part of itihasa....
drawing his ideas by going back and forth in time. His work as UN official living outside India has given him a vantage point that helps construct an objective Indianness.
Other authors include Richard Crasta, Manoj Das
Manoj Das
Manoj Das is an Indian award-winning author who writes in Oriya and English.Manoj Das, a profilic author,he is India's foremost short story writers. He writes both in Oriya and english and is a proffesor of English at the Sri Aurobindo International University, Pondicherry.Manoj Das was born in a...
, Vikram Chandra
Vikram Chandra
Vikram Chandra is an Indian writer. His first novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, won the 1996 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Best First Book....
, Anita Desai
Anita Desai
Anita Mazumdar Desai is an Indian novelist and Emeritus John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...
, Kiran Desai
Kiran Desai
Kiran Desai is an Indian author who is a citizen of India and a permanent resident of the United States. Her novel The Inheritance of Loss won the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award...
, Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy is an Indian novelist. She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her novel, The God of Small Things, and has also written two screenplays and several collections of essays...
, Gita Mehta
Gita Mehta
Gita Mehta is an Indian writer and was born in Delhi in a renowned Oriya family of freedom fighters. She is the daughter of Biju Patnaik, an Indian independence activist and a Chief Minister in post-independence Orissa. Her younger brother Naveen Patnaik is presently the Chief Minister of Orissa...
, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an Indian-American author, poet, and the Betty and Gene McDavid Professor of Writing at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program....
, Upamanyu Chatterjee
Upamanyu Chatterjee
Upamanyu Chatterjee is an Indian Bengali author and administrator, notable for his work set in the milieu of the Indian Administrative Service, especially his novel English, August. He was born in Patna, Bihar and was educated at St. Xavier's School and St. Stephen's College, in Delhi...
, Samit Basu
Samit Basu
Samit Basu is the author of five novels: The Simoqin Prophecies, The Manticore's Secret and The Unwaba Revelations, the three parts of The GameWorld Trilogy, a fantasy trilogy published by Penguin Books, India, Terror on the Titanic a YA novel published by Scholastic India, and Turbulence, a...
, Raj Kamal Jha
Raj Kamal Jha
Raj Kamal Jha is an Indian novelist and journalist.Jha was born in Bihar and was raised in Calcutta, West Bengal, where he went to school at St. Joseph's College, Calcutta...
, Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri is a Bengali American author. Lahiri's debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies , won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and her first novel, The Namesake , was adapted into the popular film of the same name. She was born Nilanjana Sudeshna, which she says are both...
, Bharti Kirchner
Bharti Kirchner
Bharti Kirchner is an Indian American author.Bharti Kirchner is the author of eight books—four novels and four cookbooks—and has been publishing since 1992. She has written numerous articles and essays on food, travel, fitness, and lifestyle. She has won two Seattle Arts Commission literature...
, Khushwant Singh
Khushwant Singh
Khushwant Singh is a prominent Indian novelist and journalist. Singh's weekly column, "With Malice towards One and All", carried by several Indian newspapers, is among the most widely-read columns in the country....
, Vijay Singh
Vijay Singh
Vijay Singh, CF , nicknamed "The Big Fijian", is a Fijian professional golfer who was Number 1 in the Official World Golf Rankings for 32 weeks in 2004 and 2005. He has won three major championships and was the leading PGA Tour money winner in 2003, 2004 and 2008...
, Tarun Tejpal, Amit Chaudhuri
Amit Chaudhuri
Amit Chaudhuri is an internationally recognised Indian English author and academic. He is currently Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia.-Life:...
, Amitav Ghosh
Amitav Ghosh
Amitav Ghosh , is a Bengali Indian author best known for his work in the English language.-Life:Ghosh was born in Calcutta on July 11, 1956, to Lieutenant Colonel Shailendra Chandra Ghosh, a retired officer of the pre-independence Indian Army, and was educated at The Doon School; St...
, Vikas Swarup
Vikas Swarup
Vikas Swarup is an Indian novelist and diplomat who has served in Turkey, the United States, Ethiopia, the United Kingdom, South Africa and Japan, best known for his novels Q & A and Six Suspects.-Early life:...
, Anil Menon
Anil Menon
Anil Menon is a leading Indian writer of speculative fiction. His short stories and reviews have appeared in Strange Horizons, Interzone, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Chiaroscuro, Sybil's Garage, Apex Digest and other magazines. In 2009, Zubaan Books, India's leading feminist press, published...
, Rohinton Mistry
Rohinton Mistry
Rohinton Mistry is an Indian-born Canadian writer in English. Residing in Brampton, Ontario, Canada, Mistry is of Indian origin, originally from Mumbai, Zoroastrian and belongs to the Parsi community. Mistry is a Neustadt International Prize for Literature laureate .-Biography:Rohinton Mistry was...
, Suketu Mehta
Suketu Mehta
Suketu Mehta is a writer based in New York City. He was born in Kolkata, India, and raised in Bombay where he lived until his family moved to the New York area in 1977. He has attended New York University and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.His autobiographical account of his experiences...
, Kiran Nagarkar
Kiran Nagarkar
Kiran Nagarkar is an Indian novelist, playwright, film and drama critic and screenwriter both in Marathi and English, and is one of the most significant writers of postcolonial India....
, Bharati Mukherjee
Bharati Mukherjee
Bharati Mukherjee is an award-winning Indian-born American writer. She is currently a professor in the department of English at the University of California, Berkeley.-Background:...
, Preeti Shenoy
Preeti Shenoy
Preeti Shenoy, née Preeti Kamath, is a painter and writer from Pune, India.- Biography :During her school years Preeti studied in Kendriya Vidyalayas all over India, due to her father's constant job transfers, and this contact with different cultures and languages may have had an influence in her...
, Vandana Singh
Vandana Singh
Vandana Singh is an Indian science fiction writer. She currently works at Framingham State College in Massachusetts.-Short Fiction:* The Woman Who Thought She Was A Planet and other stories includes two previously unpublished stories: "Conservation Laws" and "Infinities" * "The Room on the Roof"...
, Chetan Bhagat
Chetan Bhagat
Chetan Bhagat , is an Indian author, columnist, and speaker. Bhagat is the author of five bestselling novels, Five Point Someone , One Night @ the Call Center , The 3 Mistakes of My Life , 2 States & Revolution 2020: Love, Corruption, Ambition...
, Abhay Kumar
Abhay Kumar
Abhay Kumar is an Indian author, poet, artist and diplomat. His book River Valley to Silicon Valley tries to draw the portrait of a modern young Indian...
and Lakshmi Raj Sharma
Lakshmi Raj Sharma
Lakshmi Raj Sharma is an Indian author, novelist, and academician. He teaches English literature and literary theory. He is currently a Professor at the Department of English and Modern European Languages at the University of Allahabad, Allahabad. Recently his novel The Tailor’s Needle was...
.
Debates
One of the key issues raised in this context is the superiority/inferiority of IWE (Indian Writing in English) as opposed to the literary production in the various languages of India. Key polar concepts bandied in this context are superficial/authentic, imitative/creative, shallow/deep, critical/uncritical, elitist/parochial and so on.The views of Rushdie and Amit Chaudhuri
Amit Chaudhuri
Amit Chaudhuri is an internationally recognised Indian English author and academic. He is currently Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia.-Life:...
expressed through their books The Vintage Book of Indian Writing and The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature respectively essentialise this battle.
Rushdie's statement in his book – "the ironic proposition that India's best writing since independence may have been done in the language of the departed imperialists is simply too much for some folks to bear" – created a lot of resentment among many writers, including writers in English. In his book, Amit Chaudhuri questions – "Can it be true that Indian writing, that endlessly rich, complex and problematic entity, is to be represented by a handful of writers who write in English, who live in England or America and whom one might have met at a party?"
Chaudhuri feels that after Rushdie, IWE started employing magical realism, bagginess, non-linear narrative and hybrid language to sustain themes seen as microcosms of India and supposedly reflecting Indian conditions. He contrasts this with the works of earlier writers such as Narayan where the use of English is pure, but the deciphering of meaning needs cultural familiarity. He also feels that Indianness is a theme constructed only in IWE and does not articulate itself in the vernacular literatures. He further adds "the post-colonial novel, becomes a trope for an ideal hybridity by which the West celebrates not so much Indianness, whatever that infinitely complex thing is, but its own historical quest, its reinterpretation of itself".
Some of these arguments form an integral part of what is called postcolonial theory. The very categorisation of IWE – as IWE or under post-colonial literature – is seen by some as limiting. Amitav Ghosh
Amitav Ghosh
Amitav Ghosh , is a Bengali Indian author best known for his work in the English language.-Life:Ghosh was born in Calcutta on July 11, 1956, to Lieutenant Colonel Shailendra Chandra Ghosh, a retired officer of the pre-independence Indian Army, and was educated at The Doon School; St...
made his views on this very clear by refusing to accept the Eurasian Commonwealth Writers Prize for his book The Glass Palace
The Glass Palace
The Glass Palace is a 2000 historical novel by Indian writer Amitav Ghosh. The novel sets in Burma, India, and Malay, spans a century from the fall of the Konbaung Dynasty in Mandalay, through the Second World War to modern times...
in 2001 and withdrawing it from the subsequent stage.
The renowned writer V. S. Naipaul
V. S. Naipaul
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad "V. S." Naipaul, TC is a Nobel prize-winning Indo-Trinidadian-British writer who is known for his novels focusing on the legacy of the British Empire's colonialism...
, a third generation Indian from Trinidad and Tobago
Trinidad and Tobago
Trinidad and Tobago officially the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago is an archipelagic state in the southern Caribbean, lying just off the coast of northeastern Venezuela and south of Grenada in the Lesser Antilles...
and a Nobel prize
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
laureate, is a person who belongs to the world and usually not classified under IWE. Naipaul evokes ideas of homeland, rootlessness and his own personal feelings towards India in many of his books.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri is a Bengali American author. Lahiri's debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies , won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and her first novel, The Namesake , was adapted into the popular film of the same name. She was born Nilanjana Sudeshna, which she says are both...
, a Pulitzer prize
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...
winner from the U.S.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, is a writer uncomfortable under the label of IWE.
Recent writers in India such as Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy is an Indian novelist. She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her novel, The God of Small Things, and has also written two screenplays and several collections of essays...
and David Davidar
David Davidar
David Davidar is an Indian novelist and publisher. He is the author of two published novels, The House of Blue Mangoes and The Solitude of Emperors . His third novel, Ithaca will be published in September 2011. In parallel to his writing career, Davidar has been a publisher for a quarter century...
show a direction towards contextuality and rootedness in their works. Arundhati Roy, a trained architect and the 1997 Booker prize winner for her The God of Small Things
The God of Small Things
The God of Small Things is the debut novel of Indian author Arundhati Roy. It is a story about the childhood experiences of fraternal twins whose lives are destroyed by the "Love Laws" that lay down "who should be loved, and how. And how much." The book is a description of how the small things in...
, calls herself a "home grown" writer. Her award winning book is set in the immensely physical landscape of Kerala
Kerala
or Keralam is an Indian state located on the Malabar coast of south-west India. It was created on 1 November 1956 by the States Reorganisation Act by combining various Malayalam speaking regions....
. Davidar sets his The House of Blue Mangoes in Southern Tamil Nadu
Tamil Nadu
Tamil Nadu is one of the 28 states of India. Its capital and largest city is Chennai. Tamil Nadu lies in the southernmost part of the Indian Peninsula and is bordered by the union territory of Pondicherry, and the states of Kerala, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh...
. In both the books, geography and politics are integral to the narrative. In his novel Lament of Mohini http://www.lamentofmohini.homestead.com (2000), Shreekumar Varma
Shreekumar Varma
Shreekumar Varma is an Indian author, playwright, newspaper columnist and poet, known for the novels Lament of Mohini , Maria's Room , Devil's Garden: Tales Of Pappudom , The Magic Store of Nu-Cham-Vu and the historical book for children, Pazhassi Raja: The Royal Rebel...
http://www.shreevarma.com touches upon the unique matriarchal system and the sammandham system of marriage as he writes about the Namboodiris and the aristocrats of Kerala.
Poetry
A much over-looked category of Indian writing in English is poetry. As stated above, Rabindranath Tagore wrote in Bengali and English and was responsible for the translations of his own work into English. Other early notable poets in English include Derozio, Michael Madhusudan DuttMichael Madhusudan Dutt
Michael Madhusudan Dutt or Michael Madhusudan Dutta was a popular 19th century Bengali poet and dramatist. He was born in Sagardari , on the bank of Kopotaksho [কপোতাক্ষ] River, a village in Keshobpur Upozila, Jessore District, East Bengal . His father was Rajnarayan Dutt, an eminent lawyer, and...
, Toru Dutt
Toru Dutt
Toru Dutt was an Indian poetess who wrote in English and French.-Childhood:Toru Dutt was the youngest girl of Govin Chunder Dutt, a retired Indian Officer. She was born on the fourth of March 1856...
, Romesh Chunder Dutt
Romesh Chunder Dutt
Romesh Chunder Dutt, CIE was an Indian civil servant, economic historian, writer, and translator of Ramayana and Mahabharata.- Formative years :...
, Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo , born Aurobindo Ghosh or Ghose , was an Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru, and poet. He joined the Indian movement for freedom from British rule and for a duration became one of its most important leaders, before developing his own vision of human progress...
, Sarojini Naidu
Sarojini Naidu
Sarojini Naidu , also known by the sobriquet The Nightingale of India, was a child prodigy, Indian independence activist and poet...
, and her brother Harindranath Chattopadhyay
Harindranath Chattopadhyay
Harindranath Chattopadhyay was an Indian English poet, an actor, and a member of the 1st Lok Sabha from Vijayawada constituency. He was the younger brother of Sarojini Naidu.-Life:...
.
A generation of exiles also sprang from the Indian diaspora. Among these are names like Agha Shahid Ali
Agha Shahid Ali
Agha Shahid Ali was a Kashmiri American poet...
, Sujata Bhatt
Sujata Bhatt
Sujata Bhatt is an Indian poet, a native speaker of Gujarati.-Life and career:Bhatt was born in Ahmedabad, and brought up in Pune until 1968, when she emigrated to the United States with her family. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa, and for a time was writer-in-residence at the...
, Richard Crasta, Yuyutsu Sharma
Yuyutsu Sharma
Yuyutsu R.D. Sharma is a widely traveled Nepali/Indian writer who was born at Nakodar, Punjab and grew up in Nakodar and later at Nangal Township of Shivalik ranges of Mahabharata Hills where his father worked. He moved to Nepal at an early age and now writes in English and Nepali...
and Vikram Seth
Vikram Seth
Vikram Seth is an Indian poet, novelist, travel writer, librettist, children's writer, biographer and memoirist.-Early life:Vikram Seth was born on 20 June 1952 to Leila and Prem Seth in Calcutta...
.
In modern times, Indian poetry in English was typified by two very different poets. Dom Moraes
Dom Moraes
Dominic Francis Moraes , popularly known as Dom Moraes, was a Goan writer, poet and columnist. He published nearly 30 books.-Early life:...
, winner of the Hawthornden Prize
Hawthornden Prize
The Hawthornden Prize is a British literary award that was established in 1919 by Alice Warrender. Authors are awarded on the quality of their "imaginative literature" which can be written in either poetry or prose...
at the age of 19 for his first book of poems A Beginning went on to occupy a pre-eminent position among Indian poets writing in English. Nissim Ezekiel
Nissim Ezekiel
' was an Indian Jewish poet, playwright, editor and art-critic. He was a foundational figure in postcolonial India's literary history, specifically for Indian writing in English....
, who came from India's tiny Bene Israel
Bene Israel
The Bene Israel are a group of Jews who migrated in the 19th century from villages in the Konkan area to the nearby Indian cities, primarily Mumbai, but also to Pune, and Ahmedabad. Prior to these waves of emigrations and to this day, the Bene Israel formed the largest sector of the subcontinent's...
Jewish community, created a voice and place for Indian poets writing in English and championed their work.
Their contemporaries in English poetry in India were Jayanta Mahapatra
Jayanta Mahapatra
Jayanta Mahapatra is one of the best known Indian English poets.By all standards, Mahapatra's tryst with the muse came rather late in life. He took to writing poetry when he was into his 40s...
, Gieve Patel
Gieve Patel
Gieve Patel is a poet, playwright and artist, as well as a practicing doctor.-Early life and education:Gieve Patel was born in 1940 in Mumbai. He was educated at St Xavier's High School and Grant Medical College...
, A. K. Ramanujan
A. K. Ramanujan
Attipat Krishnaswami Ramanujan was a scholar of Indian literature who wrote in both English and Kannada. Ramanujan wore many hats as a Indian poet, scholar and author, those of a philologist, folklorist, translator, poet and playwright. His academic research ranged across five languages: Tamil,...
, Arun Kolatkar
Arun Kolatkar
Arun Balkrishna Kolatkar was a poet from Maharashtra, India. Writing in both Marathi and English, his poems found humor in many everyday matters. His poetry had an influence on modern Marathi poets...
, Dilip Chitre
Dilip Chitre
Dilip Purushottam Chitre was one of the foremost Indian writers and critics to emerge in the post Independence India. Apart from being a very important bilingual writer, writing in Marathi and English, he was also a painter and filmmaker.-Biography:He was born in Baroda on 17 September 1938...
, Eunice De Souza
Eunice De Souza
Eunice de Souza is a contemporary Indian English language poet, literary critic and novelist. Among her notable books of poetry is Women in Dutch painting .-Early life and education:...
, Kersi Katrak, P. Lal
P. Lal
Purushottama Lal was an Indian poet, essayist, translator, professor and publisher. He was the founder and publisher of Writers Workshop in Calcutta, established in 1958.-Life and education:...
and Kamala Das
Kamala Das
Kamala Suraiyya was a major Indian English poet and literateur and at the same time a leading Malayalam author from Kerala state, South India...
among several others.
Younger generation of poets writing in English include Rukmini Bhaya Nair
Rukmini Bhaya Nair
-Biography:Rukmini Bhaya Nair received her Ph.D at the University of Cambridge. She specializes in cognitive linguistics and critical theory. She is a professor of Linguistics and English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. She is the...
, Smita Agarwal
Smita Agarwal
Smita Agarwal is a poet and professor of English at the University of Allahabad, India. In 1999 she was a writer in residence at the University of Stirling in Scotland, and the University of Kent in England....
, Makarand Paranjape
Makarand Paranjape
Makarand Paranjape is an Indian poet and professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India.-Early life and education:...
, Vattacharja Chandan
Vattacharja Chandan
Vattacharja Chandan , is a bilingual writer, poet, composer and mail artist. He was born in 1944 in the small town of Tamluk , which was the ancient Indian port of Tamralipta in West Bengal. Chandan came to Kolkata after finishing his high-school studies at Tamluk Hamilton High School...
, Arundhathi Subramaniam
Arundhathi Subramaniam
Arundhathi Subramaniam is a woman poet and writer and web editor based in Mumbai.Arundhathi Subramaniam has published three collections of poetry: On Cleaning Bookshelves and Where I Live and Where I Live: New & Selected Poems brought out by Bloodaxe Books in 2009...
, Ranjit Hoskote
Ranjit Hoskote
Ranjit Hoskote is a contemporary Indian poet, art critic, cultural theorist and independent curator.-Early life and education:...
, Sudeep Sen
Sudeep Sen
-Life and work:Sen studied at St Columba's School and read literature at Hansraj College Delhi University. As an Inlaks Scholar, he received a master's degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York...
, Jerry Pinto
Jerry Pinto
Jerry Pinto is a Mumbai-based Indian writer of poetry, prose and children's fiction in English, as well as a journalist. His noted works include, Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb which won the Best Book on Cinema Award at the 54th National Film Awards, Surviving Women and Asylum and Other...
among others.
Alternative writing
India's experimental and avant garde countercultureCounterculture
Counterculture is a sociological term used to describe the values and norms of behavior of a cultural group, or subculture, that run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day, the cultural equivalent of political opposition. Counterculture can also be described as a group whose behavior...
is symbolized in the Prakalpana Movement
Prakalpana Movement
The Prakalpana Movement of Kolkata was sparked off in the Bengali language on September 6, 1969, by Vattacharja Chandan with the assistance of Dilip Gupta and Asish Deb. They later declared the day as "Prakalpana Day" because to them "the earth stood still" on the natal day of the movement...
. During the last four decades this bilingual literary movement has included Richard Kostelanetz
Richard Kostelanetz
Richard Kostelanetz is an American artist, author and critic.He was born to Boris Kostelanetz and Ethel Cory and is the nephew of the composer Andre Kostelanetz....
, John M. Bennett
John M. Bennett
John M. Bennett is an American experimental text, sound, and visual poet.- Writing and publishing :As well as steadily producing and distributing his own work, Bennett, through "Luna Bisonte Prods", a small press founded in 1974, has published thousands of limited edition items by writers who...
, Don Webb, Sheila Murphy
Sheila Murphy
Sheila E. Murphy is an American text and visual poet who has been writing and publishing actively since 1978. She currently lives in Phoenix, Arizona.She earned:...
and many others worldwide and their Indian couterparts. Vattacharja Chandan
Vattacharja Chandan
Vattacharja Chandan , is a bilingual writer, poet, composer and mail artist. He was born in 1944 in the small town of Tamluk , which was the ancient Indian port of Tamralipta in West Bengal. Chandan came to Kolkata after finishing his high-school studies at Tamluk Hamilton High School...
is a central figure who contrived the movement. Prakalpana fiction is a fusion of prose, poetry, play, essay, and pictures. An example of a Prakalpana work is Chandan's bilingual Cosmosphere 1http://smashwords.com/b/46742 (2011).
Some bilingual writers have also made significant contributions, such as Paigham Afaqui
Paigham Afaqui
Paig̲h̲ām Āfāqī , also written Paigham Afaqi pr Paigham Afaqui is the literary name of Akhtar Ali Farooquee , an Indian writer, known particular for his Urdu novels and short stories....
with his novel Makaan
Makaan
Makaan is a Urdu novel by Paigham Afaqui that was first published in 1989 and first published in English in 2002.It is now well recognized as an important Indian novel and a step forward in Indian fiction and a significant part of Indian literature....
in 1989.
See also
- Indian literatureIndian literatureIndian literature refers to the literature produced on the Indian subcontinent until 1947 and in the Republic of India thereafter. The Republic of India has 22 officially recognized languages....
- List of English poets from India
- Stephanian School of LiteratureStephanian School of LiteratureStephanian School of Literature refers to a body of fictional works written in English, mostly novels written by the alumni of St. Stephen's College, Delhi....
- Literature from North East IndiaLiterature from North East IndiaLiterature from North East India refers to literature of Languages of North East India, and also the body of work by English-language writers from this region. North-East India is an under-represented region in many ways...