We are made to assume, by the available works on the history of Indian writing in English, that all the writers of yesteryears have been identified, analyzed and assessed exhaustively and nothing more remains to be explored. However, there have been several Indian writers who wrote good amounts of literature in English, but still, the literary world is not aware of such writers and their works. This book introduces four such unknown Indian writers in English, who deserve to be recognized, honoured and brought to the mainstream academia. The irony is that the writers introduced in this book are not strangers! They are reputed and renowned in Kannada literary terrains but are unknown as English writers in India.

Winner of the 2010 Guardian First Book Award: a groundbreaking reassessment of English cultural life in the thirties and forties. In the 1930s and 1940s, while the battles for modern art and modern society were being fought in Paris and Spain, it seemed to some a betrayal that John Betjeman and John Piper were in love with a provincial world of old churches and tea shops. Alexandra Harris tells a different story: eclectically, passionately, wittily, urgently, English artists were exploring what it meant to be alive at that moment and in England. They showed that “the modern” need not be at war with the past: constructivists and conservatives could work together, and even the Bauhaus émigré László Moholy-Nagy was beguiled into taking photos for Betjeman’s nostalgic An Oxford University Chest. A rich network of personal and cultural encounters was the backdrop for a modern English renaissance. This great imaginative project was shared by writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics, and composers. Piper abandoned purist abstracts to make collages on the blustery coast; Virginia Woolf wrote in her last novel about a village pageant on a showery summer day. Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen, and the Sitwells are also part of the story, along with Bill Brandt and Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Cecil Beaton.