This Comprehensive Study Of The 'Makers' Of Indian English Literature Ranges From The Sporadic But Landmark Voices Of The Nineteenth Century To The Spurting Creativity In The Post-Rushdie, Contemporary Scenario. The Contributors, Unswayed By The Increasing Threat Of Publisher - Media Offensive To Appropriate The Critical Function, Firmly Adhere To The Time-Tested Tradition Of Explorations. They Interrogate Inflated Reputations, Underscore Unnoticed Achievements, And Probe The Mush Contested Inadequacy Of Indian English Poetry And The Paucity Of Indian English Drama. The Literary Discourse Is Largely Focused On Tradition And Avant-Garde, Indigeneous Roots And Western Influences, Colonial And Post-Colonial Perspectives, And Self-Indentity And Heterogeneity (Even Hybridity) In Indian English Writing. The Volume Also Investigates The Problematic Of Using The English Language To Filter And Indian Experience, Especially In Terms Of Departures From Standard English Constructions, Semantic Neologisms, Nativization Of The Language, And Cross-Cultural Significations. It Scrutinizes The Three Alternative Of Transcreation, Etymological Use And Transliteration For Moulding The English Language Into An Indian Cast. Despite An Increasing Number Of 'Unmaker'S Of Indian English In Indian Society (As Argued In The Last Essay), The Book Paradoxically Posits How The Indian English Writing Has Come Alive As A Vibrant, Autonomous Constituent Of Contemporary International English.

The Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures series offers stimulating and accessible introductions to definitive topics and key genres and regions within the rapidly diversifying field of postcolonial literary studies in English. It is often claimed that unlike the British novel or the novel in indigenous Indian languages, Anglophone fiction in India has no genealogy of its own. Interrogating this received idea, Priyamvada Gopal shows how the English-language or Anglophone Indian novel is a heterogeneous body of fiction in which certain dominant trends and recurrent themes are, nevertheless, discernible. It is a genre that has been distinguished from its inception by a preoccupation with both history and nation as these come together to shape what scholars have termed 'the idea of India'. Structured around themes such as 'Gandhi and Fiction', 'The Bombay Novel', and 'The Novel of Partition', this study traces lines of influence across significant literary works and situates individual writers and texts in their historical context. Its emergence out of the colonial encounter and nation-formation has impelled the Anglophone novel to return repeatedly to the question: 'What is India?' In the most significant works of Anglophone fiction, 'India' emerges not just as a theme but as a point of debate, reflection, and contestation. Writers whose works are considered in their context include Rabindranath Tagore, Mulk Raj Anand, RK Narayan, Salman Rushdie, Nayantara Sahgal, Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, and Vikram Seth.

The Making of Indian English Literature brings together seventeen well-researched essays of Subhendu Mund with a long introduction by the author historicising the development of the Indian writing in English while exploring its identity among the many appellations tagged to it. The volume demonstrates, contrary to popular perceptions, that before the official introduction of English education in India, Indians had already tried their hands in nearly all forms of literature: poetry, fiction, drama, essay, bio­graphy, autobiography, book review, literary criticism and travel writing. Besides translation activities, Indians had also started editing and publish­ing periodicals in English before 1835. Through archival research the author brings to discussion a number of unknown and less discussed texts which contributed to the development of the genre. The work includes exclusive essays on such early poets and writers as Kylas Chunder Dutt, Shoshee Chunder Dutt, Toru Dutt, Mirza Moorad Alee Beg, Krupabai Satthianadhan, Swami Vivekananda, H. Dutt, and Sita Chatterjee; and historiographical studies on the various aspects of the genre. The author also examines the strategies used by the early writers to indianise the western language and the form of the novel. The present volume also demonstrates how from the very beginning Indian writing in English had a subtle nationalist agenda and created a space for protest literature. The Making of Indian English Literature will prove an invaluable addition to the studies in Indian writing in English as a source of reference and motivation for further research. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Tracks the establishment of a national literature in English for independent India over the course of the twentieth century

In recent years American readers have been thrilling to the work of such Indian writers as Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth. Now this extravagant and wonderfully discerning anthology unfurls the full diversity of Indian literature from the 1850s to the present, presenting today’s brightest talents in the company of their distinguished forbearers and likely heirs. The thirty-eight authors collected by novelist Amit Chaudhuri write not only in English but also in Hindi, Bengali, and Urdu. They include Rabindranath Tagore, arguably the first international literary celebrity, chronicling the wistful relationship between a village postal inspector and a servant girl, and Bibhuti Bhushan Banerjee, represented by an excerpt from his classic novel about an impoverished Bengali childhood, Pather Panchali. Here, too, are selections from Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, R. K. Narayan’s The English Teacher, and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children alongside a high-spirited nonsense tale, a drily funny account of a pre-Partition Muslim girlhood, and a Bombay policier as gripping as anything by Ed McBain. Never before has so much of the subcontinent’s writing been made available in a single volume.

The Indian subcontinent has produced some of the world's greatest writers, and a body of literature unsurpassed in its sustained imagination, impassioned lyricism and sparkling tragi-comedy. Now Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West have collected together the finest Indian writing of the last fifty years. Published to coincide with the anniversary of India's independence, it is an anthology of extraordinary range and vigour, as exciting and varied as the land that inspired it. Including works by: Mulk Raj Anand Gita Mehta Anjana Appachana Ved Mehta Vikram Chandra Rohinton Mistry Upamanyu Chatterjee R. K. Narayan Amit Chaudhuri Jawaharlal Nehru Nirad C. Chaudhuri Padma Perera Anita Desai Satyajit Ray Kiran Desai Arundhati Roy G. V. Desani Salman Rushdie Amitav Ghosh Nayantara Sahgal Githa Hariharan I. Allan Sealy Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Vikram Seth Firdaus Kanga Bapsi Sidhwa Mukul Kesavan Sara Suleri Saadat Hasan Manto Shashi Tharoor Kamala Markandaya Ardashir Vakil

For anyone interested in the story of English in India, or in the finest English storytellers of India, this is the essential companion. This book is a history of two hundred years of Indian literature in English. It starts by looking at the introduction of English into India s complex language scenario around 1800. It then takes up the canonical poets, novelists, and dramatists, as well as a few unjustly forgotten figures, who have made significant contributions to the evolution of Indian literature in English. The book comprises twenty-four chapters, written by some of India s foremost scholars and critics. Each chapter is devoted either to a single author (Kipling, Tagore, Sri Aurobindo, R.K. Narayan), or to a group of authors (the Dutt family of nineteenth-century Calcutta; the Indian diasporic writers of the twentieth century), or to a genre (beginnings of the Indian novel; poetry since Independence).

The Indian English Novel of the New Millennium is a book of sixteen pieces of scholarly critique on recent Indian novels written in the English language; some on specific literary trends in fictional writing and others on individual texts published in the twenty-first century by contemporary Indian novelists such as Amitav Ghosh, Kiran Desai, Aravind Adiga, K. N. Daruwalla, Upamanyu Chatterjee, David Davidar, Esterine Kire Iralu, Siddharth Chowdhury and Chetan Bhagat. The volume focuses closely on the defining features of the different emerging forms of the Indian English novel, such as narratives of female subjectivity, crime fiction, terror novels, science fiction, campus novels, animal novels, graphic novels, disability texts, LGBT voices, dalit writing, slumdog narratives, eco-narratives, narratives of myth and fantasy, philosophical novels, historical novels, postcolonial and multicultural narratives, and Diaspora novels. A select bibliography of recent Indian English novels from 2001–2013 has been given especially for the convenience of the researchers. The book will be of great interest and benefit to college and university students and teachers of Indian English literature.

Translations from Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Tamil and the South sit alongside writing in English, bringing to light the greatest and most engaging writers from India's recent history. With introductions to the writers and their work, this is an electic and enlightening anthology of Indian writing.