14 Indian English Writings in the World

Mamud Hassan

About the chapter:

This module aims to introduce learners to the emerging body of literature being produced by writers from India in the form of New English Literature. It deals with a broad range of writers from various parts of India and abroad. It traces the history of Indian English education and the trends of Indian English writing. It tries to bring out the early writings in India dates back to Raja Rammohan Roy, Sarojini Naidu, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee etc. It would also present post-Independence Indian English writings and the contemporary English writings by Indians throughout the world.

Introduction 

The study of New English Literatures is concerned with colonial and postcolonial writing which emerged in former British colonies such as: parts of Africa, Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Caribbean countries, India, Malaysia, Malta, New Zealand, Pakistan, Singapore, islands in the South Pacific, and Sri Lanka. Through the medium of English, writers from the aforesaid countries, today confront the so called mainstream English literature. India, with a huge number of writers is leading globally in the field of New English Literature. Indian English writers have been contributing much, adding new trends, themes and techniques to the English literature of the world. Regarding the contribution of Indian English writings to the world, K. V. Suryanarayana Murti has rightly mentioned in his book titled Kohinoor in the Crown Critical Studies in Indian English Literature (1987) that “The rich Indian cultural and spiritual heritage and imagination’ is like the precious Kohinoor, cut and polished, emitting its brilliant light through its myriad facets, in the Crown of English”. Indian English Literature is an honest enterprise to demonstrate the ever rare gems of Indian Writing in English. Wide ranges of themes are dealt within Indian Writing in English. While this literature continues to reflect Indian culture, tradition, social values and even Indian history through the depiction of life in India and Indians living elsewhere, recent Indian English fiction has been trying to give expression to the Indian experience of the modern predicaments.

The phrase ‘Indo-Anglian’ was used to describe the original creative writing in English by the Indians. It is the literature written by the Indians whose mother-tongue is not English. According to K.R.S. Iyengar (1973:11) there are three types of Indian writers in English, first those who have acquired their entire education in English schools and universities. Secondly, Indians who have settled abroad but are constantly in touch with the changing surroundings and traditions of their country of adoption, and finally, Indians who have acquired English as a second language. Consequently, a large number of Indians were greatly moved by the genuine desire to present before the western readers authentic pictures of life in India through their numerous writings.

Indian English literature 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 Mahomet, 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.

Indian English literature 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, Agha Shahid Ali, Rohinton Mistry and Salman Rushdie, who are of Indian descent.

History of English language and Writing in India 

Macaulay’s Minute introduced in 1833 provided for the introduction of English as a medium of instruction with the claim that “the English tongue would be the most useful for our native subjects.” While presenting his famous minute, Macaulay admitted quite candidly that he had not read any of the Sanskrit and Arabic books and yet did not desist from making such a pronouncement:

“…A single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. …All the historical information which has been collected in the Sanskrit language is less than what may be found in the paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools of England…”

Lord William Bentick announced in 1835 that the government would “favour English Language alone” henceforth and would move towards “a knowledge of English literature and Science through the medium of English language alone.” The Wood Dispatch of 1854 proclaimed the establishment of the Universities at Bombay, Madras and Calcutta and thereafter made the English language accessible to students, professors and also the officials of Government offices. In the arena of literary studies too English began to assert itself.

Early Indian English Writing- Poetry 

The first literary texts in English emerge  from  Bengal.  Raja  Rammohun  Roy  (177401833), the progressive advocate of English civilization and culture, wrote numerous essays and treatises, which were collected in a complete volume in 1906. But it seems that poetry was the genre that first took flight in the Indian imagination, the best-known nineteenth-century poets being Henry Derozio (1809-31), Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1827- 73), Toru Dutt (1856-77), her cousin Romesh Chunder Dutt (1848-1909), and Manmohun Ghose.

Henry Derozio and Michael Madhusudan Dutt started out writing epic verse in English, but returned to his native Bengali later in life. The poems of Toru Dutt (1855-1876) who died at the age of 21, have received academic acceptance as the earliest examples of Indian literature written in English. Toru Dutt not only composed poetry in English, but more interestingly translated French poetry as well. Her best works include Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan. However, the most famous literary figure of this era was Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913 for his book Gitanjali, which is a free rendering of his poems in Bengali. Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949) was a great poetess whose romanticism charmed readers in India and Europe. Her Golden Threshold (1905) and The Broken Wing (1917) are works of great literary merit. Aurobindo Gosh (1872-1950) was a poet philosopher and sage for whom poetry was akin to a form of mediation. His epic, Savitri and Life Divine (2 vols.) are outstanding works in English literature.

Early English Writing- Novel 

Bankim Chandra Chatterjee‟s Rajmohan’s Wife (1864) was the first English novel written by an Indian. His works brought a certain space and stature to Indian novels in English. The period after the First World War has been considered the second period. In the first decade after the war, S.K. Ventaramani, Shankar Ram and A.S.P. Ayyer were the novelists who came to the fore. After them comes the emergence of the great ‘Trio’- Mulk Raj Anand, R.K.Narayan and Raja Rao, who are considered as the finest painters of Indian sensibilities. They tried to revive the ancient tradition of the Epics and Puranas of India.

Post-Independence Indian English Writings 

The Post-Independence Era, which is the third phase has a two-fold effect on Indian writing in English. The radical changes like poverty, hunger, death, disease etc., which were brought about by the Partition of the country, on the one hand made the writers dream about a finer future and on the other hand widened their vision, sharpened their self-examining faculty. Thereby provided fertile soil for many novelists to flourish and a considerable number of novels were produced. Some prominent writers of this period are -Bhabani Bhattacharya, Manohar Malgonkar, Kushwant Singh, G.V. Desani, and others. Another important feature of this period was the growth of Indian women novelists. Their appearance added a new dimension to the Indian English Novel. The chief figures are Ruth Pawar Jhabvala, Kamala Markandaya, Nayantara Sahgal and Anita Desai.

After the 1960s there was a thematic and technical shift in focus in the Indian English fiction owing to the influence of the modern British novel. There was the impact in the post-war period on the populace that gave rise to psychological disorders, loss of moral values and the disturbance to man’s peace of mind. This agonized existence of modern man is sympathetically explored by Anita Desai and Arun Joshi and this changed the face of Indian English novel. It is with the novels of Arun Joshi and Anita Desai that a new era in the Indo- English fiction began and also witnessed a change in the treatment of psychological themes. Chaman Nahal is also another major novelist of repute who belongs to this period.

After 1980 is the period of so-called ‘new’ fiction which includes new novelists like Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Shashi Deshpande, Shashi Tharoor, Amitav Ghosh, Amit Choudhary, Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, Arvind Adiga and others. These novelists heralded a new era in the history of Indian English Fiction. They experimented with new themes and techniques. Vikram Seth has experimented even with the form of the novel. His novel The Golden Gate (1986) is written in the form of verse. Arundhati Roy, Arvind Adiga and Kiran Desai got Man Booker Prize for their debut works. All the novelists of this period have proved that Indian English fiction is conspicuous, prolific and unique.

Some of the Major Writers in Indian English 

Some of the major Indian English writers and their notable works which have been widely recognised in India and abroad are discussed below.

Rabindranath Tagore 

It would be inapt to appropriate him as a writer of English because he wrote with equal felicity and grace in Bengali. As a matter of fact he was not known as a writer alone but as an equally accomplished poet, playwright and painter. He was above all a visionary, a man who conceived institutions like Vishwabharati and gave to the world an ingenious model of Education. The Home and the World (1919), The Wreck (1921) and Gora (1923) have all been translated from Bengali to English. However, the book that made Tagore a world literary figure fetching for him the highest honour that can be accorded to a litterateur, the Nobel in 1913 for his famous poem Gitanjali. After that his other works and Gitanjali were translated by literary scholars into major languages of world. To his credit, there is a long list of poems and plays, both in Bengali and English which had made his place among the world’s greatest writers.

Sri Aurobindo 

Unlike Tagore, Sri Aurobindo  wrote  originally  in  English,  more  justly  deserving  the  title of mystic and visionary with such well-known works as Savitri (1936) and The Life Divine (1939-40), Initially, Sri Aurobindo embarked on a career in the Indian civil service with a degree in the classics from King‘s College, Cambridge. The years of Anglicization came to an end when he rediscovered Indian religion and philosophy; after a period of nationalist activity, he established an ashram in Pondicherry, where he began to write his epic-style philosophical works and acquire a large religious following.

Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, that like Goethe’s Faust took about fifty years in the making, needs to be seen as the culmination of the nineteenth century spirit of synthesis and spiritual enterprise. Savitri, running into 23813 lines in three parts with 12 books and 49 cantos is presumably the longest single poem in the English language.

 R. K. Narayan (1906–2001)

R. K. Narayan’s first book is Swami and Friends (1935). In this novel, he created the fictitious town of Malgudi – a small South Indian town. Except for his work, Waiting for Mahatama, which features the Quit India Movement of 1942, current political issues do not figure in his writings. The Dark Room (1938) is the story of Savitri married to a callous husband Ramani. The Guide (1958) was one of his most appreciated works. It tells the story of Raju the guide and his love for Rosie whom he first meets as a client’s wife.

R. K. Narayan contributed over many decades and continued to write till his death. He was discovered by Graham Greene in the sense that the latter helped him find a publisher in England. Greene and Narayan remained close friends till the end. Similar to the way Thomas Hardy used 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 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 

Mulk Raj Anand started his career with the novel Untouchable (1935). It was a unique work because the convention of Indian works having the highborn and the privileged as central protagonist was broken down. The hero, Bakha is a low caste sweeper boy and the novel is a description of the experiences that he undergoes in one day and as they impinge on his consciousness. The structure of the novel draws extensively from James Joyce’s Ulysses in the use of stream- of – consciousness technique. His other novels, The Village (1939), Across the Black Waters (1940), and The Sword and the Sickle (1942) are also works with a reformative agenda.

Raja Rao 

Raja Rao has produced four novels and a collection of short stories.Some of his famous writings are – Kanthapura (1938), The Serpent and the Rope (1960), The Cat and Shakespeare (1965) and Comrade Kirrilov (1976) and The Cow of the Barricades (1947- short story collection). Kanthapura is the story of a South Indian town that is affected by the Civil Disobedience Movement. What is interesting about the book, however is the narrative technique used by Rao. The story is told through the voice of the old woman inhabitant of the village who uses the structure of the traditional folk epic, the puranas. The book fuses the spirit of the traditional religious faith of the village with that of the Nationalist Movement.

Khushwant Singh 

Khushwnt Singh’ name is bound to go down in Indian literary history as one of the finest historians and novelists, a forthright political commentator, and an outstanding observer and social critic. In July 2000, he was conferred the “Honest Man of the Year Award” by the Sulabh International Social Service Organisation for his courage and honesty in his “Brilliant incisive writing”. His two novels: Train to Pakistan (1956: Published as Manomajra) and I Shall not Hear the Nightingale (1959) depict the human tragedy behind the Partition of India in 1947. The Train to Pakistan is one of the most familiar partition novels, which has presented the theme of violence, the pain of separation, communal hatred among various communities of Mano Majra immediately after the partition of India.

SalmanRushdie 

Among the later writers, the most notable is Salman Rushdie, born in India, now living in the UK. 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. This is a postmodern novel which reveals ‘the unreliability of historical discourse. (Lindsay) The protagonist of the novel, Salim is presented as a fragmented soul who is suffering from identity crisis and the horrific tales of Mother India during the partition.

Midnight’s Children took its title from Nehru’s speech delivered at the stroke of midnight, 14 August 1947, as India gained its Independence from England. In 1983, Rushdie published the novel Shame, described by himself as “a deeply satirical fairy tale about Pakistan’s ruling circles”. It was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1984. On September 26, 1988, Rushdie published his novel The Satanic Verses for which he had to face the ire of many Islamic nations. Since the declaration of a formal fatwa against him by the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini he has lived in an undisclosed location in London from where his subsequent works have come out.

V. S. Naipaul 

V. S. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2001. In his writings, he tries to revive his connection with the past. He is separated from India by two generations. His three travel books – An Area of Darkness (1964), Indian: A Wounded Civilisation (1977) and India: A Million Mutinies (1991) – are directly based on his visits to India and his experiences there. His most famous writing is A House for Mr. Biswas which was written in 1961. The Modern Library ranked this novel 72 on lists of the 100 best English language novels of the 20th century. Time magazine included the novel in its “Time 100 best English Language Novels from 1923 to 2005. His novels represent an acute sense of anxiety born of displacement.

A. K. Ramanujan 

A. K. Ramanujan sought to interpret the interior landscape of Tamil and Kannada Poetry and frame a newer poetics from those. Since the very beginning of the sixties, he had been living in the USA. In his lifetime he has published three volumes of poetry – The Striders (1966), Relations (1971) and Second Sight (1986) and fourth volume appeared posthumously under the title, The Black Hen (1995). Ramanujan’s Speaking of Siva, Hymns for the Drowning, and Poems of Love and War, are in many ways reflective of the process of his coming to terms with his racial burden. Professionally trained as a linguist, Ramanujan’s insight into Indian folk and poetic narrative combined with his skill at translating from the Indian languages remains yet unmatched.

NayantaraSehgal 

Nayantara Sehgal was one of the first female Indian writers in English to receive wide recognition. Her fiction deals with India’s elite responding to the crisis engendered by political change. She was awarded the 1986 Sahitya Akademi Award for English, for her novel, Rich Like Us (1985), by the Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Letters. Some of her other notable works are- A Time to be Happy (1963), This time in Morning (1965), Mistaken Identity (1988) etc.

Kamala Markandaya 

Kamala Markandaya is a prolific writer with ten English novels to her credit. Many of her novels deal with the theme of East-West encounter and in them the characters are drawn from both India and England. Most of her novels present the nostalgic longings for India through various characters. Some of her important novels are – Some Inner Fury (1995), Possession (1963), The Coffer Dams (1969), The Nowhere Man (1972), The Golden Honeycomb (1977), Pleasure City (1982) etc.

Her first novel, Nectar in a Sieve (1954), an Indian peasant’s narrative of her difficult life, remains Markandaya’s most popular work. Her next book, Some Inner Fury (1955), is set in 1942 during the Indian struggle for independence. It portrays the troubled relationship between an educated Indian woman, whose brother is an anti-British terrorist, and a British civil servant who loves her. Marriage provides the setting for a conflict of values in A Silence of Desire(1960), in which a religious middle-class woman seeks medical treatment, without her husband’s knowledge, from a Hindu faith healer rather than from a doctor.

Anita Desai 

Anita Desai, who was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times, received a Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain and a British Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea. She has published eight novels till date of which the most famous are: Cry, the Peacock (1965), Clear Light of the Day (1980) which was shortlisted for the Booker Award and Fire on the Mountain (1977). Her other famous novels are Bye-Bye, Blackbird (1971), Voices in the City (1965). In her writings, Desai frequently used subjects like cross cultural contact between the east and the west and the resultant sense of alienation and frustration in her dominant characters.

Arun Joshi 

Arun Joshi has got Sahitya Akademi Award for his novel The Last Babyrinth in 1982. Arun Joshi has four novels to his credit: The Foreigner (1963), The Strange case of Billy Biswas (1971), The Apprentice (1974) and The Last Labyrinth (1981). The Foreigner (1963) deals with a young hero, after experiencing life and love in America, is back in Delhi, at last persuaded by a humble office worker that sometimes detachment lies in actually getting involved. The Strange Case of Billy Biswas (1971) is the story of a young, rich, American-educated Indian who ends up in the wilderness of central India living as a semi-naked “tribal” seeking a meaning to things above and beyond all that everyday civilization can provide. The Apprentice (1974), Joshi’s third novel, takes his search for understanding man’s predicament one step further toward the transcendental. Its central figure is a man essentially docile and uncourageous whose life more or less parallels the coming into being of postcolonial India.

Kiran Desai 

Kiran Desai is the daughter of Anita Desai. She was educated in India, England and the US. Her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998) won a 1998 Betty Trask Award, and her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss (2006), set in the mid 1980’s in a Himalayan village, won the 2006 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. The story revolves around the inhabitants of a town in the north-eastern Himalayas, an embittered old judge, his granddaughter Sai, his cook and their rich array of relatives, friends and acquaintances and the effects on the lives of these people brought about by a Nepalese uprising. Running parallel with the story set in India it also follows the vicissitudes of the cook’s son Biju as he struggles to realise the American Dream as an immigrant in New York.

Vikram Seth 

Vikram Seth is a diasporic writer who has demonstrated his expertise in both prose and poetry. He is the author of The Humble Administrator’s Garden (1983), The Golden Gate (1986), All you who sleep Tonight (1990) and A Suitable Boy (1994). He is such 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. A Suitable Boy is one of the longest novels in the world literature; it runs into nearly fourteen hundred pages and earned for Seth the title of “a neo Tolstoy”. Vikram Seth is notable both as an accomplished novelist and poet.

Amitav Ghosh 

Another writer who has contributed immensely to the Indian English Literature is Amitav Ghosh who is the author of The Circle of Reason (his 1986 debut novel), The Shadow Lines (1988), The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), The Glass Palace (2000), The Hungry Tide (2004), and Sea of Poppies (2008), the first volume of The Ibis trilogy, set in the 1830s, just before the Opium War, which encapsulates the colonial history of the East. Ghosh’s latest work of fiction is River of Smoke (2011), the second volume of The Ibis trilogy. He was awarded Sahitya Akademi award for The Shadow Lines (1988). In the novel The Shadow Lines he has come up with the concept that the national boundaries are merely ‘political fiction’. According to A. N. Dwivedi, “In his novels Amitav remains a wandering internationalist, disowning the theory of cultural centrality – that ‘a culture is rooted in a single place’. (Dwivedi, Diasporic Writings in English, 7)

Rohinton Mistry

Rohinton Mistry is an India born Canadian author who won Neustadt International Prize for Literature laureate (2012). His first book Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987) published by Penguin Books Canada, is a collection of 11 short stories. He  is  the  author  of  three  novels: Such a Long Journey (1991), the story of a Bombay bank clerk who unwittingly becomes involved in a fraud committed by the government, which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, Overall Winner, Best Book, A Fine Balance (1996), set during the State of Emergency in India in the 1970s, and Family Matters (2002), which tells the story of an elderly Parsi widower living in Bombay with his step-children. Such a Long Journey and A Fine Balance were both shortlisted in previous years for the Booker Prize for Fiction, and Family Matters was shortlisted for the 2002 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

Shashi Tharoor 

Tharoor is an acclaimed writer, having authored 15 bestselling works of fiction and non- fiction since 1981, all of which are centred on India and its history, culture, film, politics, society, foreign policy and many more. 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 a UN official, living outside India has given him a vantage point that helps construct an objective Indian-ness. His other works are- India: From Midnight to the Millennium (1997), Bookless in Baghdad (2005), Inglorious Empire (2017) etc. He was awarded Commomwealth Writers Prize for his novel The Great Indian Novel (1989).

Arundhati Roy 

Her novel The God of Small Things (1996) tells the story of the Syrian Christians of Kerala and went on to win the Booker Prize in 1997. Set in Kerala in the 1960s, the book is about two children, the twins Estha and Rahel, and the dreadful consequences of a critical event in their lives, the accidental death-by-drowning of a visiting English cousin. In a delightful and lyrical language, the novel paints a vibrant picture of life in a small South Indian town. In response to India’s testing of nuclear weapons in Pokhran, Rajasthan, Roy wrote The End of Imagination, a critique of the Indian government’s nuclear policies. It was published in her collection The Cost of Living, in which she also crusaded against India’s massive hydroelectric dam projects in the central and western states  of Maharashtra, Madhya  Pradesh and Gujarat. In January 2006 she was awarded the Sahitya Akademi award for her collection of essays, ‘The Algebra of Infinite Justice’.

Conclusion 

Now, Indian English writings are a part of Commonwealth literatures and Post-Colonial studies throughout the world. This new literature in English is regarded as an important component of world literature. In spite of diverse cultures, races and religions, it has successfully recaptured and reflected the multi-cultural society. As a result, it has created a widespread interest both in India and abroad. Indian Writers – poets, novelists, essayists, and dramatists have been making momentous and considerable contributions to world literature since the pre – Independence era, the past few years have witnessed a gigantic prospering and thriving of Indian English Writing in the global market. Indian English Literature has attained an independent status in the realm of world Literature. There are critics and commentators in England and America who appreciate Indian English novels. Not only are the works of Indian authors writing in English surging on the best‐seller list, they are also incurring and earning an immense amount of critical acclamation. If we see the list starting from Mulk Raj Anand,  R. K. Narayan, Anita Desai, Sarojini Naidu, Toru Dutt to Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Allan Sealy, Amitav Ghosh, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chitra Banerjee, Arundhati Roy, Vikram Chandra ‐ the list of fine Indian writers are contributing to the New English Literature is long and deserves much more importance throughout the world. The international literary awards like The Booker, The Pulitzer, The Sinclair won by Indian novelists exemplify that they have been appreciated even by the western critics. “It is now recognized that Indian English literature is not only part of Commonwealth literature, but also occupies a great significance in the World literature. Today it has won for itself international acclaim and distinction”.