3 The Poetics and Politics of ‘Language’ and Indian Prose

Dr. Sanghamitra Dey

Introduction

This chapter “The Poetics and Politics of ‘Language’ and Indian Prose” addresses the question of cultural politics and history as well as the question of linguistic shift in the context of the progress of English Studies in India. The module traces the history of colonial encounter in terms of the exploration of an authentic Indian self though the question of authenticity of the Indian self mediated through the prism of an alien language. The impact of English language on the collective cultural imaginary remains crucial to the question of ‘Indianness’ and the history of Indian prose writings is embroiled in historical and cultural thought. The discourses of colonialism and nationalism in the context of India’s history of colonialism addresses the strategic evolution of such ideological and cultural formations in terms of articulating Indian national identity in the form of autobiographies, biographies, travelogues, serious philosophical essays, analyses of current affairs, religious discourses, and collections of light pieces and memoirs. The module is designed to read critically the plethora of writings imbued with nationalist rhetoric by Aurobindo Ghosh, Rabindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru, Nirad C. Chaudhuri and others in the context of the process of identity formation. The poetics of language is integral to the politics of representations and the history of prose is crucial to the integration of English language.

Objectives

The chapter is designed to help you

• read critically the history of Indian English prose
• understand the important socio-cultural events/contexts instrumental to the history of emergence of prose
• position the major writers in the proper historical context
• apprehend the major texts
• understand the performative and literary concerns of the writers

Literary Representations

Non-fictional Prose

Born in Radhanagar, Bengal in 1772, Rammohan Roy was the founder and editor of two vernacular weekly newspapers, Sambad Kaumudi (Bengali) and Mir’at’l-Akhbar (Persian). As founding member of the Bengal Herald (English) Rammohan Roy mobilised popular opinion and a consequent protest against the censorship of the press by the Governor-General. His reformist zeal is expressed in the public campaigns he organised to demonstrate his opposition to sati. A morning star of Renaissance, his famous writings include four Appeals to the Christian Public (1820-3), Brief Remarks Regarding Modern Encroachments on the Ancient Rights of Females According to the Hindu Law of Inheritance (1823). The first stage of Rammohan’s English writings include the Bhagalpur letter (1809). The second stage (1816-23) begins with Translation of an Abridgement of the Vedant (1816), English versions of his Kena (1816), Isa (1816), Katha (1817), and Mundaka (1819), Upanishad expositions, A Defence of Hindoo Theism (1817) and A Second Defence of the Monotheistical System of the Vedas (1817). This fruitful period is also marked by his social awareness in the form of the tracts against sati, Translation of a Conference between an Advocate for, and an Opponent of the Practice Widow Burning (1818), A Second Conference (1820), Brief Remarks regarding Modern Encroachments on the Ancient Rights of Females according to the Hindoo Law of Inheritance (1822), and the Precepts controversy (1820-3). Behramji M. Malabari (1853-1912) and Govardhanram M. Tripathi (1855-1907) are also noted for excellent prose writings. Noted for Gujarat and the Gujaratis (1881), Notes on Infant Marriage and Enforced Widowhood (1884) Malabari brought out the weekly in English, Indian Spectator. He also edited Voices of India and East and West. Govardhanram M. Tripathi is the author of Sarasvatichandra, the first classic of Gujarati fiction published in four volumes over a period of fourteen years (1887-1901). He started writing Scrap Book in 1885 and Classical Poets of Gujarat and their Influence on Society and Morals was first delivered as a lecture in 1892 and published in 1894. The essays, ‘The Hindu Ideal of Poverty’ (1903) and ‘The Keynote of the Economics of Hinduism’ (1905), and a short story called ‘Chuni the Suttee: A Story of Hindu Life’ (1902) are examples of Behramji M. Malabari (1853-1912) and Govardhanram M. Tripathi’s growing convergence.

Rabindranath Tagore’s (1861-1941) autobiography Jiban Smriti (1911) was translated into English as My Reminiscences (1917). His English prose includes Nationalism (1917), The Religion of Man (1931). In Karmayogin, the English weekly newspaper founded by Sri Aurobindo, he combines political journalism with tracts on education and art (A System of National Education, The National Value of Art), articles on yogic philosophy (later published in The Ideal of the Karmayogin, 1918, and Man- Slave or Free?, 1922), translations from Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya and the Upanishads, and poems like ‘Who’ and ‘Invitation’. His ability to integrate rhythm and diction as the vehicle of intense thought is crucial to his concept of ‘integral yoga’ which projects liberation from the world as a first step towards the transformation of the world into a vessel of the divine being. His essays on spiritual and cultural subjects are published posthumously in Essays Divine and Human (1994). His prose writings are: philosophy (The Life Divine), yoga (The Synthesis of Yoga), scriptural exegesis (The Secret of the Veda, Essay on the Gita), sociology and political science (The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity), literary and cultural criticism (The Future Poetry, The Foundation of Indian Culture) The Life Divine (1939-40).The Human Cycle (1949). In The Ideal of Human Unity (1919, revised edition 1950), The Future Poetry (1954). The political prose gets the momentum in the writings of Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) and Jawaharlal Nehru(1889-1964). A political reformist, Gandhi’s writings include pamphlets: ‘An Appeal to Every Briton in South Africa’ (1895), ‘The Indian Franchise’ (1895), ‘Grievances of the British Indians in South Africa’ (1896). He also launched journals like Indian Opinion, Young India, Harijan. Hind Swaraj(1909) is written in the form of a dialogue between an Editor and Reader addressing the issue of Indian independence. He translated it into English himself and published it as Indian Home Rule, again from his own press in March 1910. Satyagraha in South Africa (1928), Discourses on the Gita (1930) and his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Vol. I, 1927, Vol. II, 1929) are his seminal works. Nehru wrote numerous articles, essays, and pamphlets on political, cultural and literary subjects, the most famous being Soviet Russia (1928),Whither India? (1932), Glimpses of World History (1934), An Autobiography, and The Discovery of India(1946).

Nirad C. Chaudhuri (1897-1999) is noted for works like Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse (1997), The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951), Passage to England (1959), The Intellectual in India (1967), To Live or Not to Live (1971), Calcutta in the Vanity Bag (1976), Hinduism, A Religion to Live By (1979). The East is East and West is West (edited by Dhruva N. Chaudhuri, 1996) is a collection of articles, while his last book, Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse (1997) expresses his critique contemporary British society. The three “horsemen” are individualism, nationalism and democracy responsible for the declining values of civilization. Passage to England (1959), narrating the ‘Adventures of a Brown Man in Search of Civilization’ is an interesting book on his experience of visiting England in 1955.The book is replete with comparative assessments of India and England. Rajiv Gandhi and Rama’s Kingdom (1995) is the third of a trilogy of books based on Ved Mehta’s articles on India in The New Yorker. Mehta’s The New India (1978), and A Family Affair: India Under Three Prime Ministers (1982) are replete with contemporary sensibility. Ved Mehta (b.1934) is known for John is to Easy to Please (1967), a work of literary criticism and interviews. The Craft of the Essay: A Ved Mehta Reader (1998) provides a representative sample of Mehta’s prose.

Letters

Letters provide a glimpse to the integration of personal and public life as evident in Nehru’s Letters from a Father to a Daughter. Jawaharlal Nehru’s Letters to Chief Ministers, 1947-1964 (edited by G. Parthasarathi, 1986) reveals his commitment to democratic idealism. Mulk Raj Anand’s Old Myth and New Myth: Letters from Mulk Raj Anand to K.V.S. Murti (1991) and Anand to Atma: Letters of Mulk Raj Anand to Atma Ram (1994) evidence his social purpose. The letters of David McCutchion to P. Lal (The Epistles of David –Kaka to Plalm’n: The Record of a Friendship, 1997, first published 1972), Nayantara Sahgal and E.N. Mangat Rai’s Relationship: Extracts from a Correspondence (1994), The English Language and the Indian Spirit (1986), the correspondence between the Irish poet Kathleen Raine and the Pondicherry-based poet K.D. Sethna; Letters of Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949) published in 1997: Selected Letters 1890s to 1940s, edited and introduced by Makarand Paranjape (1997) and The Mahatma and the Poetess: Letters are some of the seminal collections.

Essays (Personal, Political, Philosophical)

Essays-personal, political and philosophical add to the archive of prose writings. R.K. Narayan’s A Story-teller’s World: Stories, Essays, Sketches (1989) and A Writer’s Nightmare: Selected Essays 1958-1988 (1988), Mulk Raj Anand’s Prose Kama Yoga: Some Notes on the Philosophical Basis of the “Erotic Art of India (1991); Poet-Painter: Paintings by Rabindranath Tagore (1985); Some Street Games of India (1985, for children); The Hindu View of Art (1986, first published 1933); and Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana (1981) are some seminal works. P. Lal has produced abridged versions of the Ramayana (by Valmiki) and the Mahabharata. J(iddu) Krishnamurti (1895-1986) has written The First and Last Freedom (1954) Freedom from the Known (1969) and other works include Letters to the Schools (1981), The Flame of Attention (1985, with Dr David Bohm, a physicist), Krishnamurti to Himself: His Last Journal (1987), The Future is Now: Last Talks in India (1989) and Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti (1996), a selection from later as well as earlier work. Writings on social sciences proliferate as we see the publication of Subaltern Studies: Writings on south Asian History and Society. The first six volumes (1986-1988) were edited by Ranajit Guha. The later volumes were edited by Partha Chatterjee, Gynendra Pandey, Shahid Amin, Dipesh Chakravarty and others. Romila Thapar’s forte is her work on ancient Indian history and historiography in Interpreting Early India (1993) and Time as Metaphor of India (1996) and Cultural Transaction and Early India: Tradition and Patronage (1996). K.D. Sethna’s The Problem of Aryan Origins from an Indian Point of View is a scholarly study in pre-Vedic history. Urban history resurfaces with Pamela Kanwar’s Imperial Simla: The Political Culture of the Raj (1990), Calcutta: The Living City (edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri, 1995) and Percival Spear’s Delhi: Its Monuments and History.

The post-Independence period is marked by the increasing no of books written on India and Indiannesss from various quarters which is often viewed as a strategic choice of the postcolonial writers. To elaborate, Amitav Ghosh’s Countdown (1999) is about India after the nuclear test of Pokhran on May 11, 1998. Sasthi Brata My God Died Young (1967), India: The Perpetual Paradise (1986), Sunil khilnani’s The Idea of India (1997), Shashi Tharoor’s India: From Midnight to the Millennium (1997), Gurcharan Das’India Unbound (2000) are noteworthy contributions. An important historic landmark was the publication of the Encyclopaedia of Indian Literature (published by the Sahitya Akademi in 6 volumes (1987-1994). Dictionary of Indian Literature Vol. I Beginnings-1850 by Sujit Mukherjee (1999), Masterpieces of Indian Literature, edited by K.M. George (3 volumes, 1997), Modern Indian Literature: An Anthology edited by K.M. George (1992-1995), Nayantara Sahgal’s Point of View: A Personal Response to Life, Literature and Politics (1997), Raja Rao’s The Meaning of India (1997) add to the growing concern with the problematic of identity construction. Interrogating Post-colonialism: Theory, Text and Context (edited by Harish Trivedi and Meenakshi Mukherjee, 1996) and Harish Trivedi’s Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India (1993, 1995) focus on the Indian context. Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1993) projects a Marxist stance in his attempt to revalue the work of Edward Said whereas Makarand Paranjape’s Decolonisation and Development: Hind Swaraj Revisioned (1993) advocates a return to Mahatma Gandhi’s ideals.

Women Writers on India and Indianness

The writings by women also demonstrate the growing concern with the politics of language, imperial domination and the construction of a unique Indian identity. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and English Rule in India by Gauri Vishwanathan reveals the politics behind the study of literature which is basically used as a tool of imperialist domination. Rajeswari Sundar Rajan (Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism, 1993) and Kumar Sangari (Politics of the Possible: Essays on Gender, History, Narrative, Colonial English, 1999) examine the Indian context the way Meenakshi Mukherjee’s The Twice- born Fiction (1971) explored the issue. Feminizing Political Discourse: Women and the novel in India 1857-1905 (1997) by Jasbir Jain transcends the linguistic barriers. G.N. Devy’s first book After Amnesia: Tradition and Change in Indian Literary Criticism (1992) is also on the idea of Indianness and construction of national identity.

Short Story

The short story as a genre also contributes to the politics of representation as we witness the mingling of creative and socio-political issues, urban and rural, question of language in the collections of short stories. T. L. Natesan’s (pen-name Shankar Ram), author of The Children of Kaveri (1926) and Creatures All (1933) deal mostly with rustic life in Tamil Nadu. The selection from both the books appeared under the title The Ways of Man (1968). A.S.P. Ayyar, the novelist and playwright, published the following collections of stories: Indian After-Dinner Stories (1927), Sense in Sex and Other Stories (1929) and The Finger of Destiny and Other Stories (1932). His Tales of Ind (1944) and Famous Tales of India (1954) are reworking of ancient Indian legends. Ayyar’s recurring theme in his stories is social reform and especially the plight of woman in traditional Hindu society. S.K. Chettur’s stories in Muffled Drums and Other Stories (1917), The Cobras of Dhermashevi and Other Stories (1937), The Spell of Aphrodite and Other Stories (1957) and Mango Seed and Other Stories (1974) are based on the material collected during his official tours as a member of the Indian Civil Service. Manjeri Isvaran is noted for The Naked Shingles (1941), Siva Ratri (1943), Angry Dust (1944), Rickshawallah (1946), Fancy Tales (1947), No Anklet bells for her (1949), Immersion (1951), Painted Tigers (1956) and A Madras Admiral (1959). Raja Rao’s collection of short stories The Cow of the Barricades and Other Stories (1947) is a noteworthy contribution to the genre. Mulk Raj Anand is noted for The Lost Child and Other Stories (1934); The Barber’s Trade Union and Other Stories (1944); The Tractor and the corn Goddess and Other Stories (1947); Reflections on the Golden Bed and Other Stories (1953); The Power of Darkness and Other Stories (1959); Lajwanti and Other Stories (1966); and Between Tears and Laughter (1973). Anand has also retold traditional Indian tales in his Indian Fairy Tales (1946) and More Indian Fairy Tales (1961). R. K. Narayanan’s career as a short story writer is marked by the collections Cyclone and Other Stories (1943), Dodu and Other Stories (1943) and Malgudi Days (1943). His subsequent collections are An Astrologer’s Day and Other Stories (1947), Lawley Road and Other Stories (1956), and A Horse and Two Goats (1970). Gods, Demons and Others (1964) is a reworking of famous ancient Hindu legends.

Novelists like Bhabani Bhattacharya, Khushwant Singh, Manohar Malgonkar, Chaman Nahal, and Arun Joshi also contributed to the subsequent development of short stories. Bhattacharya’s collection of short stories, Indian Cavalcade (1948) is a re-telling of significant incidents from Indian history. Steel Hawk (1968) is a collection which sometimes lacks psychological depth and interest. Khushwant Singh is the author of four volumes of short stories.

– The Mark of Vishnu and other Stories (1950); The Voice of God and other Stories (1957); A Bride for the Sahib and Other Stories (1967) and Black Jasmine (1971). Manohar Malgonkar’s collections include A Toast in Warm Wine (1974), Bombay Beware (1975) and Rumble Tumble (1977). The stories are replete with unique perspectives on the world of army life, espionage, hunting, mining, smuggling, treasure-seeking and film-making. Chaman Nahal’s The Weird Dance and Other Stories (1965) offers a glimpse of middle-class match-making in North-Indian families. His chief instrument is ironic portrait and the Partition and its aftermath is central to his stories. We witness a wide range and variety of characters in Arun Joshi’s The Survivor (1975). Joshi offers sensitive portrayal of young eve-teasers, dotard claiming to be young, sex-obsessed rustic servant, middle aged travelling salesman etc. Ruskin Bond is known for collections of short stories: Neighbour’s Wife and other Stories (1966) My First Love and other Stories (1968); The Maneater of Manjari (1972) and The Girl from Copenhagen (1977). His subjects include pets, animals, poor and marginal people like waifs, orphans, abnormal children, adolescents and aged men. His treatment is compassionate and full of sympathy. Manoj Das, winner of the Sahitya Akademi award for his Oriya writings, has published four collections of short stories: Song For Sunday and Other Stories (1967), Short Stories (1969), The Crocodile’s Lady (1975) and Fables and Fantasies For Adults (1977).

Autobiography/ Memoirs

The tradition of autobiography was initiated with R. K. Narayan’s My Days (1975) and My Dateless Diary (1960) followed by Mulk Raj Anand’s Pilpali Sahab: The Story of a Childhood Under the Raj (1985) published as the first part of an autobiographical series, “Seven Colours of the Rainbow”. Conversations in Bloomsbury (1981) is a nostalgic narrative of reminiscences of his years in England as a young man, and the literary figures he met. Verrier Elwin’s autobiography, The Tribal World of Verrier Elwin (1964) had won the Sahitya Akademi Award. Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s autobiography, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951) and Thy Hand! Grat Anarch (1987) provide account of Chaudhuri’s childhood and student days till 1952. Chaudhuri’s narrative is replete with his concern with the British Empire and its civilizing mission in India and provides an account of the historical events of the period from a subjective perspective. Ruskin Bond’s Scenes from a Writer’s Life: A Memoir (1997) and The Lamp is Lit: Leaves from a Journal (1998) are memoirs of lyrical intensity. The Tunnel of Time (1998) is an autobiography authored by R.K. Laxman, Narayan’s younger brother. Dom Moraes has published two volumes of his Autobiography: My Son’s Father (1971) and Never at Home (1992). Kasthuri Sreenivasan’s autobiographical book Cancer Made me (1992) chronicles the saga of fortitude when faced with the disease and Climbing the Coconut Tree, (1980) is replete with humorous descriptive sketches and social realism. Other narratives include G.D. Khosla’s Memory’s Gay Chariot: An Autobiographical Narrative (1985), Firdaus Kanga’s integration of autobiography and a travelogue, Heaven on Wheels (1991), P. Lal’s Lessons, C.D. Narasimhaiah’s N for Nobody: The Autobiography of an English Teacher (1991), P.S. Sundaram’s Simple Simon (1998), Karan Singh’s Autobiography 1931-1967 (1989) comprising of two books Sadr-I-Riyasat (1980) covering the period 1953-67, and Heir Apparent: An Autobiography (1982), Vijayalakshmi Pandit’s The Scope of Happiness: A Personal Memoir(1979), .Manohar Malgonkar’s Princess: The Autobiography of the Dowager Maharani of Gwalior (1985), Apa Pant’s (1911-1992) autobiographical books, such as A Moment in Time (1974), Undiplomatic Incidents (1987) and An Extended Family or Fellow Pilgrims (1991), An Actor’s Journey (1990) by Saeed Jaffrey narrating the autobiography of an actor whose achievement is known in both India and Britain, The Fall of a Sparrow (1990) by the well- known ornithologist Salim Ali, Prakash Tandon’s Punjabi Saga: 1857-1987 (1987), The Untouchable Story by D.P. Dass (1984), Prafulla Mohanti’s My village, My Life: Portrait of an Indian Village (1973), Through Brown Eyes (1985),Changing village, Changing Life (1990), Sujit Mukherjee’s Autobiography of an Unknown Cricketer (1996), Alyque Padamsee’s memoirs, A Double Life (1999) and Wings of Fire: An Autobiography (1999) by Kalam are important contributions.

Biography

Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s biography of Max Muller (Scholar Extraordinary, 1974) and S. Gopal’s Jawaharlal Nehru (Vol. 1 1975, Vol. 2 1979) won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1976.

S. Gopal’s biography of his father, Radhakrishnan: A Biography (1989) is a notable contribution to the genre. Rajmohan Gandhi (b. 1935) is renowned for Rajaji: A Life (1997), Patel: A Life (1990), the biography of the “Iron Man” of India’s freedom struggle, The Good Boatman: A Portrait of Gandhi (1995), an impartial assessment of Mahatma Gandhi. His most famous contribution is Eight Lives: A Study of the Hindu-Muslim Encounter (1986, reprinted as Understanding the Muslim Mind in 1988). In his biography of Ambedkar, Worshipping False Gods (1997), Arun Shourie is concerned with Hindu-Muslim relations. The figure of Gandhi predominates Raja Rao’s The Great Indian Way: A Life of Mahatma Gandhi (1998). Similarly Indira Gandhi has been the subject of many biographies like S S. Gill’s The Dynasty: A Political Biography of the Premier Ruling Family of Modern India (1996), Ahmed Abbas’s Indira Gandhi: Return of the Red Rose (1966) and Indira Gandhi: The Last Post (1985), Dom Moraes’ Mrs Gandhi (1980). Tariq Ali’s An Indian Dynasty: The Story of the Nehru-Gandhi Family (1985), Pupul Jayakar’s Indira Gandhi: A Biography (1992), Inder Malhotra’s Indira Gandhi: A Personal and Political Biography (1989) are some famous works. Ramachandra Guha’s Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals and India (1999) is a biography of the great anthropologist and An American in Khadi: The Definitive Biography of Satyanand Stokes (1999) by Asha Sharma narrates the life of Samuel Evans, a social reformer and political worker. Mulk Raj Anand’s Homage to Jamnalal Bajaj: A Pictorial Biography (1989) chronicles the life of the industrialist, Pavan K. Verma’s The Man, The Times (1989) is on Ghalib and R. Raja Rao’s Nissim Ezekiel: the Authorized Biography (2000) provides an account of the poet’s life, John Lall’s Begum Samru: Fading Portrait in a Gilded Frame (1997) is a factual biography of a nineteenth century woman.

Travelogue

The first Indian immigrant, Dean Mohammed, published his travelogue The Travels of Dean Mahomet in 1794. The descriptions of travel in South India is captured in The Emerald Route (1977) and Cauveri: From Source to Sea (1975) written by R.K. Narayan and K. Nagarajan respectively. Travel within the country is a subject for writers like G.D. Khosla (Himalayan Circuit: A Journey in the Inner Himalayas, 1989), Pankaj Mishra (Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Journeys through Small Town India, 1995). A.J. Sebastian’s My Travels: My Teacher (1998) and C.Y. Gopinath’s Travels with the Fish (1998) are travelogues. Vikram Seth, Salman Rushdie, I. Allan Sealy and Amitav Ghosh are also noted for their travel writings. Seth’s From Heaven Lake: Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet (1983) replete with the pictures and the journal he kept when he returned home to Delhi via Tibet and Nepal in the summer of 1981. The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (1986) is based on the three weeks Salman Rushdie spent in Nicaragua in July 1986 as the guest of the Sandinista Association of Cultural Workers. From Yukon to Yucatan: A Western Journey (1994), a travelogue contains anecdotes of the various place visited by I. Allan Sealy during his three months travelling along the western length of North America from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. Dancing in Cambodia, at Large in Burma (1998) by Amitav Ghosh is based on Ghosh’s visits to Cambodia and Burma.

Summing Up

This module on the evolution of Indian prose has helped you to situate the various categories of prose writings in the socio-historical and cultural context discussed in the first module. As discussed earlier, you have to integrate the theoretical knowledge into the arena of specific texts, genres as well as authors to critically deal with the ideas of self, identity, national formations and representational categories. You also need to focus on the problematic of language usage and trace the history in the context of colonial encounter and the modes of resistance. The questions are designed to help you think and read critically.

Story-Board

The Poetics and Politics of ‘Language’ and Indian Prose

Introduction

• This chapter addresses the question of cultural politics, linguistic shift, the progress of English Studies in India, the discourses of colonialism and nationalism in the context of articulating Indian national identity in the form of prose writings.
• The module traces the history of colonial encounter in terms of the exploration of an authentic Indian self though the question of authenticity of the Indian self mediated through the prism of an alien language.
• The impact of English language on the collective cultural imaginary remains crucial to the question of ‘Indianness’ and the history of Indian prose writings is embroiled in historical and cultural thought.
• The discourses of colonialism and nationalism in the context of India’s history of colonialism addresses the strategic evolution of such ideological and cultural formations in terms of articulating Indian national identity.
• Autobiographies, biographies, travelogues, serious philosophical essays, analyses of current affairs, religious discourses, and collections of light pieces and memoirs etc are discussed.

Objectives

The chapter is designed to help you

• read critically the history of Indian English prose
• understand the important socio-cultural events/contexts instrumental to the history of emergence of prose
• position the major writers in the proper historical context
• apprehend the major texts
• understand the performative and literary concerns of the writers

Literary Representations

The chapter situates the question of Indiannesss in the context of autobiographies, biographies, travelogues, serious philosophical essays, analyses of current affairs, religious discourses, and collections of light pieces and memoirs.

Non-fictional Prose

• This section traces the history of Indian English non-fictional prose writings.
• Representative figures like Rammohan Roy, Behramji M. Malabari, Govardhanram M. Tripathi , Rabindranath Tagore, Sri Aurobindo, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandi, Nirad C. Chaudhuri etc. are discussed.

Letters

• Letters provide a glimpse to the integration of personal and public life.
• Such thematic concerns are evident in the letters of Jawaharlal Nehru, Mulk Raj Anand, Nayantara Sahgal and E.N. Mangat Rai, K.D. Sethna, Sarojini Naidu, Makarand Paranjape and this section deals with the genre.

Essays (Personal, Political, Philosophical)

• This section traces the history of Indian English essay writing
• The works of representative writers like Rabindranath Tagore, Sri Aurobindo, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, R.K. Narayan, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh etc. are discussed.
  Short Story
• The short story as a genre also contributes to the politics of representation as we witness the mingling of creative and socio-political issues, urban and rural, question of language.
• The collections of short stories written by Chetur, Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao, Bhabani Bhattacharya, Khushwant Singh, Manohar Malgonkar, Chaman Nahal, Arun Joshi etc.
• This section aims to address the subsequent development of short stories.

Autobiography/ / Memoirs

• This section deals with the development of autobiographical narratives and memoirs.
• Discussion of the major writers like R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Verrier Elwin, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Vijayalakshmi Pandit, Manohar Malgonkar etc. help to understand the larger concerns of nation and identity.

Biography

• This section dealing with the development of biographical narratives focus on representative authors and texts.
• The focus is on Nirad C. Chaudhuri, S. Gopal, Rajmohan Gandhi, Arun Shourie, Ramachandra Guha, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao.

Travelogue

• The first Indian immigrant, Dean Mohammed, published his travelogue The Travels of Dean Mahomet in 1794.
• This section deals with the subsequent development of the genre with R.K. Narayan, K. Nagarajan, G.D. Khosla, Pankaj Mishra, A.J. Sebastian, C.Y. Gopinath, Vikram Seth, Salman Rushdie, I. Allan Sealy and Amitav Ghosh.

Reference

• Mukherjee, Meenakshi. The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in English. New Delhi: Oxford UP,2000. Print
• Naik, M. K.A History of Indian English Literature. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1982(rpt. 2004). Print
• Naik, M. K and Shyamala A. Narayan. Indian English Literature 1980-2000: A Critical Survey. New Delhi: Pencraft, 2011. Print
• Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.
• Rajan, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan. The Lie of the Land: English Literary Studies in India. New Delhi, New York: Oxford UP, 1992. Print.
• Srivastava, Nilam. Secularism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel: National and Cosmopolitan Narratives in English. London: Routledge, 2008. Print.
• Viswanathan, Gauri. The Masks of Conquest. Delhi: Oxford India Paperbacks, 1998. Print
• Walsh, William. Indian Literature in English. London and New York: Longman, 1990. Print.