Contemporary Indian English Literature E-Book
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- Serie: narr Studienbücher LITERATUR- UND KULTURWISSENSCHAFT
- Sprache: Englisch
Contemporary Indian English Literature focuses on the recent history of Indian literature in English since the publication of Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children (1981), a watershed moment for Indian writing in English in the global literary landscape. The chapters in this volume consider a wide range of poets, novelists, short fiction writers and dramatists who have notably contributed to the proliferation of Indian literature in English from the late 20th century to the present. The volume provides an introduction to current developments in Indian English literature and explains general ideas, as well as the specific features and styles of selected writers from this wide spectrum. It addresses students working in this field at university level, and includes thorough reading lists and study questions to encourage students to read, reflect on and write about Indian English literature critically.
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Cecile Sandten / Indrani Karmakar
Contemporary Indian English Literature
Herausgeber:innenfoto: Cecile Sandten © Petra Hammermüller / Indrani Karmakar © Dibakar Mollique / Oliver von Knebel Doeberitz © Universität Leipzig, SUK
DOI: https://doi.org/10.24053/9783823395911
© 2024 • Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KGDischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen
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ISSN 2627-0323
ISBN 978-3-8233-8591-2 (Print)
ISBN 978-3-8233-0503-3 (ePub)
Contents
1Introduction – Contemporary Indian English Literature: Contexts – Authors – Genres – Model AnalysesIndrani Karmakar and Cecile Sandten, Chemnitz University of Technology
1.1Contemporary Indian English Literature: Contexts
India is made up of many ‘Indias’: many people, many cultures and many languages. India is a multifaceted and diverse country, where people speak and write in a variety of languages. Thus, it is also described by the simple but now-cliché term “unity in diversity” (cf. Wandel 2004), coined by the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, in his book Discovery of India (2004 [1946]). India is a federal union, currently consisting of 28 states and 8 Union Territories; 110 different languages are spoken in the country. Apart from English, which has been one of the official languages since 1954 and is often used as a bridge language among Indians, there are 21 major or scheduled languages in India, each with its own system of pronunciation and writing. In some states, more than one major language is spoken and in several states, many different minor and tribal languages exist, for instance, in the northeastern state of Bihar. In addition, many different dialects are spoken all over India. Moreover, different languages have, at different times, been ‘privileged’ — have carried the most power and prestige.
The ancient language of Sanskrit, no longer a spoken tongue, remains important as the language of the great Hindu literary epics and scriptures, including the Ramayana, the Bhagavadgitaand theMahabharata.
The Ramayana, along with the Mahabharata, is the most influential Sanskrit epic that tells the story of the hero Rama, the prince of Ayodhya and his devoted wife Sita. Its composition is ascribed to the poet Valmiki (c. 300 BCE) and contains in its current form 24,000 couplets. The prince is banned from the kingdom of Ayodhya and lives in exile with his wife and his half-brother Lakshmana. The stories revolve around Rama’s fight against the demon king Ravana together with the ingenious monkey-general Hanuman. The Ramayana’s popularity persists in dances, songs, performances, comics and TV series. Bhagavadgita, translated as ‘The Beautiful Song by God’, is a 700-verse Hindu scripture that is part of the epic Mahabharata. It is considered to be one of the holy scriptures of Hinduism.
The Urdu language dates back to the time when Muslim nations from the north and west invaded and settled in India. It developed as a result of the interaction between the soldiers of the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire, who spoke Indian languages and Persian. Over time, a mixture of these languages emerged as a new language: Urdu. Hindi, a modern descendant of Sanskrit, is now spoken by roughly one-third of India’s population and is considered the most-spoken minority language. In this regard, it is important to note the development of the so-called “Hindi belt” that runs through the centre of India, dividing the country linguistically into Hindi-based and Dravidian-based languages, including, among the latter, Tamil. English was imported by the British when they invaded and colonised India and it remains a much-used language among the educated and the elite. The poet A. K. Ramanujan (1929–1993) describes how Sanskrit and English were his “father-tongues”, used by his father — English, to help him understand the imposed orderliness of colonial India and Sanskrit, to understand the stars, which he watched from the roof-top of the house — while his mother used her “mother-tongues”, Tamil and Kannada, to help him maintain vivid contact with the exciting “ordinary” world which surrounded his home “downstairs” (Ramanujan 1996: 449–450).
The British first arrived in “India” (then the Indian subcontinent) as traders in 1589, although it was not until 1848, after more than two centuries of trade and colonisation, that India was declared part of the British Empire, also being referred to at the time as the “Jewel of the Crown”. Accordingly, Burton Stein writes: “In 1858, following the Mutiny and seemingly as a direct outcome, the East India Company was dismantled and its powers of government passed directly to the British Crown” (Stein 1998: 239).
The great Indian Mutiny and Civil Rebellion of 1857 “was to reverberate through all the relations of the British Indian empire for the next ninety years. Large numbers of sepoys,” Indian soldiers serving under British orders, “in the Bengal army rose against British rule and set out to restore a variety of previous ruling dynasties” (Stein 1998: 226).
From the 1840s on, English became widely used as an official language, for instance, in universities. To this day, English remains one of the two official languages of India (alongside Hindi) and, in many ways, the language of the middle classes across the country, with over 129 million English speakers (Harvard Political Review n.p.).
1.2Contemporary Indian English Literature: Genres and Authors
The linguistic diversity described above is reflected in India’s rich literary output in all its many languages. Indian English literature, however, has a literary tradition that has grown and evolved over the past century. From the 1930s to the present, Indian English literature has also been shaped by the political and social changes that formed modern India when British colonisation was still a shaping power that was fought against but also embraced — in particular the English language — at least by an English-educated elite. In his essay “Minute on Indian Education” (1835), English historian and colonial administrator Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859) formulated the essential goals of the colonial education programme as an expression of an anglocentric sense of mission. Although wholly ignorant of Sanskrit or any other Indian language, he believed that “[a] single shelf of good European library [is] worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia” (Macaulay 1979 [1835]: 349). He further called for an image of the Indian according to British taste: “Indian in blood and colour but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” (Macaulay 1979 [1835]: 359).
This paradox — writing in the language of the coloniser — can be observed in the earliest examples of Indian English literature, which can be traced back to the 1860s, specifically, to Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s (1838–1894) novel Rajmohan’s Wife (1864), a text made available serially in the magazine Indian Field. More significantly, however, this paradox appeared to become particularly prevalent in the 1930s, when a small group of Indian writers began to experiment with the English language. These writers were Mulk Raj Anand (1905–2004), Raja Rao (1908–2006) and R.K. Narayan (1906–2001), who were part of a cultural and intellectual movement that sought to redefine Indian identity and culture. They were British-educated and wrote in English, which was seen as a tool to assert modernity and reach a wider audience. They also aimed to convey their message to the British colonisers, who had not only imposed the English language on India but had also subjugated the entire country to British rule. This early phase of Indian English literature was marked by a focus on such themes as identity, culture and, more broadly, tradition and the question of how to address these issues vis á vis a modernist literary movement that the writers of that time sought to employ. Influenced by writers such as Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster and T.S. Eliot and utilising a modernist style of writing, they infused their texts with a decidedly Indian setting and voice. For instance, in Mulk Raj Anand’s social problem novel Untouchable (1935), Anand criticises the abominable effects of the caste system in India through the experiences of the novel’s protagonist Bakha, an 18-year-old latrine sweeper. Apart from focusing on an outcaste’s life, Anand writes in English, which he infuses with a strong Punjabi flair.
The term “Indian English literature” thus already comprises three aspects: a possible or supposed Indianness, a specific form (here the modernist novel) and the use of a non-Indian language as a creative language (cf. Riemenschneider 2005: 8f.).
The post-World War II period, including the Empire’s decline in the 1940s and 1950s, saw the emergence of a new generation of Indian English writers, including Nirad C. Chaudhuri (1897–1999), Khushwant Singh (1915–2014) and Kamala Markandaya (1924–2004), in addition to Anand, Rao and Narayan, who continued to write in a socially critical (Anand), philosophical (Rao) and more light-hearted but nonetheless critically observant mode (Narayan). These writers continued to explore themes of identity, culture and the conflict between tradition and modernity, that is, the question of ‘Indianness’ in their writings, but they also engaged with the political and social changes that characterised India during that time. They wrote about the impact of colonialism, the struggle for independence and the challenges of nation building after India gained independence in August 1947. However, they also had to address the question of partition and its aftermath — the most traumatic experience during the time of independence — as depicted, for instance, in Singh’s novel Train to Pakistan (1956). Their works around that time were marked by a sense of disillusionment and a search for meaning in a rapidly changing world.
The 1960s and 1970s, however, saw the emergence of a new literary movement in Indian English literature, known as Indian Writing in English. Topics addressed included the recurring problems of language and style as well as the rather critical question of the impact of Europe on the Indian imagination (cf. Guptara 1979: 18–34). Moreover, writers like Anita Desai (1937–), Nayantara Sahgal (1927–) — who was also a political activist — Kamala Markandaya (1924–2004) and Shashi Deshpande (1938–) used their works to explore a range of political and social issues, including communalism, poverty and (gendered) oppression, concentrating specifically on women as their main characters. During this time, the ‘political novel’ became more generally a prominent tool with which writers addressed their political and social concerns. This movement was additionally marked by a focus on the experiences of the Indian diaspora: Indians or Pakistanis who had migrated to countries like Great Britain, the U.S. or Australia and had formed Indian or Pakistani communities there. They therefore explored themes such as displacement, diaspora and exile. Writers like V.S. Naipaul (1932–2018) and R.K. Narayan (1906–2001) wrote about the experiences of Indians who had migrated to other parts of the world and the challenges they faced in adapting to new cultures and identities.
Following these writers came Salman Rushdie (1947–) who, in his now-classic Midnight’s Children (1981), heralded a new literary phase by focusing on postcolonial issues and migration in a writing style known as magic realism, which combines fantastical elements with realist details.
“Magic realist novels and stories have, typically, a strong narrative drive, in which the recognizable realistic mingles with the unexpected and the inexplicable, and in which elements of dream, fairy-story, or mythology combine with the everyday, often in a mosaic or kaleidoscopic pattern of refraction and recurrence” (Drabble 1998: 603).
This paved the way for new writers from the Indian subcontinent and abroad who were writing in English to explore new topics and styles. The 1980s were initially characterised by a more common theme: the question of how to place the Indian English novel within a national cultural context. This was interrupted by the postcolonial discourse introduced by Edward Said and his seminal study Orientalism (1978) as well as others, especially leading Indian critics and theorists such as Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, along with the subsequent publication of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), which contributed to the departure from the predominantly realist mode of the Indian English novel that had been practised since the 1930s. Consequently, the 1980s and 1990s saw a shift in Indian English literature towards postcolonialism. This literary movement was marked by a focus on the legacy of colonialism and the on-going impact of colonialism on Indian society. Such writers as Arundhati Roy (1961–), Amitav Ghosh (1956–) and Vikram Seth (1952–) have explored themes of power, identity and resistance. They have also critiqued the colonial past and the continuing influence of colonialism on Indian society.
The 21st century has seen a continuation of the themes and movements that have characterised Indian English literature, in particular, the question of the ‘Indianness’ of the works produced by Indian English writers. However, women writers who have appeared on the international literary scene have also brought about a shift towards a more global perspective. These include American Jhumpa Lahiri (1967–), American-based Kiran Desai (1971–) and Delhi-based Manju Kapur (1948–), who explore themes of migration, diaspora and identity in addition to bringing a decidedly female perspective to the fore. Further, with a number of prolific female writers, Indian English literature has experienced an upsurge in ‘feminist’ literature in India, in what is undoubtedly an Indian feminist trajectory. Writers like Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (1956–), Anuradha Roy (1967–) and Shobhaa De (1948–) have investigated the experiences of women in India and the ways in which these women are shaped by society: struggling against patriarchal oppression on the one hand, while, on the other, exploring female identity and womanhood.
Post-millennial writing in English from India and the diaspora has once more changed, as a consequence of the seemingly unrestrained introduction of media and IT technology on the Indian subcontinent. Writers are thereby invited to employ other forms of writing in conjunction with the new technologies, in what is referred to as ‘Indo chick lit’. Novels like Rome-based Kaushik Barua’s No Direction Rome (2017) or New York-based Nikita Singh’s Love@Facebook (2011) attest to these new, however commodifying forms of writing, making use of ‘oriental’ markers such as yoga, Indian spices, saris, bright exotic colours, meditation, bindis or tattoos of Indian deities, but also making reference to Facebook and the internet, thereby depicting an ‘Indo chick’ for global reception of a neo-liberalised India.
A bindi is a brightly coloured dot (usually red) worn in the middle of the forehead by people in South Asia and the Indian subcontinent, particularly within Hindu and other religious communities.
Writing from socially critical, geographically, culturally and linguistically diverse positions, it has become obvious that Indian English writers have felt particularly drawn to the narrative form, that is, the modern, postcolonial and diasporic Indian English novel.
Analogously, India to date also has a strong poetic writing tradition with similar developments as outlined for the novel. Spanning over a century, Indian English poetry began with the works of Indian poets like Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), the first non-European and the first poet to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 and Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949), who wrote in English during the early 20th century. Indian English poetry has evolved over time and has been influenced by a variety of cultural and linguistic traditions, including English Romanticism and modern British and American literature, as well as Indian poetry in other Indian languages. Within this framework, Indian poets have incorporated elements of Indian mythology, culture, language and history into their works. Some notable Indian English poets include A.K. Ramanujan (1929–1993), Kamala Das (1934–2009), Nissim Ezekiel (1924–2004), Dom Moraes (1938–2004), Arun Kolatkar (1932–2004), Jeet Thayil (1959–), Vikram Seth (1952–) and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (1947–), among others. In her free-verse poem “An Introduction”, published in her 1965 poetry collection Summer in Calcutta, Kamala Das poetically renders important the question of language. She affirms her idea of the freedom of the writer to use any language in which they feel comfortable, thus highlighting the relationship between place, language and identity. In this poem, the speaker’s strategy is to ask rhetorical questions. The irony contained in the questions implies a mockery of the addressee’s world view and value system by decidedly highlighting the speaker’s own situation and her “joys”, “longings” and “hopes”:
[…] Why not let me speak in
Any language I like? The language I speak,
Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses
All mine, mine alone.
It is half English, half Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest,
It is as human as I am human, don’t
You see? It voices my joys, my longings, my
Hopes, and it is useful to me as cawing
Is to crows or roaring to the lions, […]. (Das 1965: 59, ll. 9-17)
Given the pluralistic traditions of India, Indian English poetry is, similar to the novel, variegated in terms of themes, topics and styles, often also critically exploring social inequalities, city life and the writer’s search for self.
Turning to the genre of drama, however, the situation is slightly different than it is with the novel or poetry. The Indian theatre tradition has a rich and diverse history spanning over 5,000 years. It is believed to have originated during the Vedic age (c.1500–500 BCE). More precisely, Indian theatre evolved from the Sanskrit theatre of the 2nd century BCE. This theatre tradition included dramatic narratives, music and dance, and was derived from the concept of “natya”, the Sanskrit word for drama (Westlake 2017: 30). Sanskrit theatre served as a template for other theatrical forms that developed on the subcontinent, among them, the Natya Shastra, an ancient treatise on performing arts believed to have been written by Bharata Muni, an ancient sage (cf. Dace 1963: 249). It covers various aspects of theatre, including acting, stagecraft and music. Yakshagana, a traditional theatre form that originated in the state of Karnataka, is known for its vibrant costumes and makeup as well as its use of music and dance. Kathakali, perhaps the most well-known theatre practice, is a traditional dance-drama form renowned in the state of Kerala. It also uses elaborate makeup and costumes and employs very extravagant and set facial expressions and physical movements to convey emotions. Nautanki is a popular form of musical theatre that had its origins in North India. It is famous for its use of folk songs, dance and comedy to tell stories. Bhavai, a folk theatre form from Gujarat, puts satire and humour into practice to address social issues, whereas Jatra, a popular folk theatre form from Bengal, draws on music, dance and drama to tell stories (cf. Farley et al. 1993).
India’s linguistic and cultural division into different regions, as described above, also resulted in a diversity of theatrical traditions. Non-commercial, regionalised folk theatre and its various traditions were performed throughout India up until the establishment of the British Raj, the period of British colonialism in India from 1858 to 1947 (Stein 1998: 239). However, theatre in India saw significant changes during and after British colonisation. The British introduced Western theatre forms, including English plays, opera and ballet, which then were performed in India during the colonial period. Theatre performances in English in India thus began to develop in the early 19th century with the staging of English plays performed by British companies. The actors and plays came from London and served as role models for the playhouses in the colonies, including the institution of the popular proscenium stage typical of the architecture of London theatres (cf. Singh 1996: 121). The plays were introduced to entertain the British colonisers and bring a piece of their homeland to India, in particular to Calcutta, the cradle of English theatre in India. As Jyotsna Singh writes,
[…] such a re-creation of London’s theatrical scene in Calcutta signalled the transportation of British civilisation and culture from the metropolis to the new colony. Starting in 1775, when the Calcutta Theatre or the New Playhouse opened under the patronage of the then Governor General Warren Hastings, and continuing for a period of about a hundred years, English theatres in Calcutta entertained a largely British audience of officers, merchants, clerks and “adventurers” associated with the East India Company and later with the civil service. (Singh 1996: 121)
As Singh points out, “[i]n their early years, these were exclusive playhouses, determined to insulate themselves from the natives, so that even the ushers and doorkeepers at the Calcutta Playhouse were English” (Singh 1996: 122). Only gradually did these theatres open their doors to Indians, though only to elite, aristocratic Indians (cf. Singh 1996: 122). “By the mid-Victorian period, […] the ‘English-educated’ Bengali middle class as well as the property owning and trading rich had been exposed to English theatrical ideas and conventions and to Shakespeare fairly extensively” (Raha in Singh 1996: 123). In this context, Singh elucidates that,
[…] such an interest in Western drama coincided with the official colonial policy of promoting the English language and literature in India. As the British consolidated their presence in India, the impulse to educate the natives gained a wide consensus because it was based on an awareness that the rulers could only rule by co-opting a native elite as a conduit of Western thought and ideas. (Singh 1996: 123)
Thus, the British education policy, in keeping with its “civilising mission”, began with Shakespeare as the hallmark of English culture and education. Concomitantly, during the early colonial period, Indian theatre was suppressed by the British, who viewed it as uncivilised and unrefined. During the later period, however, the British increasingly encouraged the development of Indian theatre as a means of cultural exchange and as a way of promoting their own cultural values, in particular through Shakespeare (cf. Gillies et al. 2002: 259–283).
The first English play written and performed by an Indian was The Persecuted by thinker and Christian convert Krishna Mohan Banerjee (1813–1885), which was staged in Calcutta in 1830. However, it was only in the mid-20th century that Indian English theatre began to gain prominence as a distinct genre. One of the major changes that occurred during the period before independence was the emergence of ‘modern Indian theatre’, which set out to combine Western and Indian theatrical forms. This new form of theatre was influenced by social and political changes in India, including the Indian independence movement and the rise of social reform movements. Some key figures who contributed to the development of modern Indian theatre include Rabindranath Tagore, who wrote plays that blend Indian and Western styles and B. V. Karanth (1929–2002), who experimented with traditional Indian theatre forms by fusing them with modern theatre techniques.
Post-independence theatre in India continued to flourish, with many new voices emerging and much experimentation with different forms and styles. The National School of Drama, established in 1959, played a significant role in the development of modern Indian theatre by training new actors, directors and playwrights. Some prominent playwrights who contributed to the development of Indian English theatre include Girish Karnad (1938–2019), Vijay Tendulkar (1928–2008), Mahesh Elkunchwar (1939–), Rukhsana Ahmad (1948–), Manjula Padmanabhan (1953–), Mahesh Dattani (1958–) and Arvind Gaur (1963–) as well as some of the notable playwrights of more recent years, such as American Rajiv Joseph (1974–), Anupama Chandrasekhar and Annie Zaidi (1978–).
Early playwrights wrote dramas that reflected the social and political issues of their times and often blended Indian and Western cultural influences, addressing, in a vibrant and dynamic mode, the socio-political and cultural context of modern India. This tradition of blending techniques and portraying social-critical concerns continued into later decades: Tughlaq (1964), by Girish Karnad, for instance, is a historical play depicting the political and social issues of 1960s India. The play is set during the reign of Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlaq, a controversial figure in Indian history and explores themes of power, idealism and betrayal. Harvest (1997) by Manjula Padmanabhan, a well-known Indian playwright and novelist, is a dystopian play that tackles the issues of globalisation, capitalism and consumerism in modern India. The play conveys the story of a poor Indian family that ‘sells’ one of its members to a wealthy Westerner as an organ donor. Pakistani-British Rukhsana Ahmad’s political play A Peasant of El Salvador (1982) reflects the issues of social justice, human rights and globalisation in modern India, and Hypatia (1992) by Sadanand Menon is a historical play that delves into the issues of gender, power and philosophy in ancient Greece. Theatre has thus also contributed significantly to the development of critical voices within the framework of Indian English literature.
As Anjali Roy (2000: 70) observes when looking at pre-independence writers and something that has quite frequently been commented upon as Indian writers’ coinages, the nativisation “of words, syntax or metaphors — are means of resisting English’s regulatory function in the colonial context”. This notion of how to use the English language creatively has been picked up by many writers in many genres over the past four decades. Raja Rao’s famous 1938 “credo” of conveying “in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own” and of infusing “into our English expression […] [the] temper of Indian life” (in the preface to Kanthapura), seems to still be relevant and has become the defining characteristic of all literary genres in Indian English literature. Consequently, Indian English writers employ social criticism, write about political issues, such as the awakening of India, the caste system or the upheavals during the pre-independence and post-independence periods, the domestic situation and gender aspects, as well as the desire, even if outside of India, to be indigenously grounded in India and to express this grounding, voiced through specific formal-aesthetic devices, word-jugglery, verbosity and a specific Indian or South Asian touch.
1.3Contemporary Indian English Literature: This Volume
A fundamental concern underlying this volume on Contemporary Indian English Literature: Contexts — Authors — Genres — Model Analyses is to acknowledge and highlight the contexts and current ideas that inform the field of Indian English literature within two broader frameworks. Accordingly, this volume is structured around two groups of writers and texts: one from the 1980s to the 2000s and the other from the 2000s to the current day.
The preceding brief outline of contemporary Indian English literature and the overall outline of this volume serve as a useful general guide for students studying Indian English literature at a BA or MA level at a German university. More precisely, however, the essays in this volume cover a wide range of contexts, authors and genres as well as model analyses of selected texts. The primary objective is to provide students with an introduction and guide to more contemporary texts and approaches to Indian English literature. That being said, no claim is made that this volume provides complete coverage of Indian English literature — this would be impossible to achieve in a single publication. Nonetheless, we take pride in the fact that this volume includes a large number of authors, ranging from well-known writers, such as Salman Rushdie, Shashi Deshpande, Amit Chaudhuri, Amitav Ghosh, Sujata Bhatt, Githa Hariharan, Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai and Aravind Adiga, to emerging writers, including Mohsin Hamid, Manu Joseph, Gautam Malkani, Anuradha Roy, Imtiaz Dharker, Abhishek Majumdar, Annie Zaidi and Pankaj Mishra. The ‘Further Reading Lists’ and ‘Study Questions’ provided in each chapter, along with reader-friendly info boxes, which provide students with visually straightforward information, will be particularly useful in helping students develop ideas and engage with the specific texts they may be required to read as part of their course work.
This book has thus been designed to provide German students of English and American Literature, Cultural Studies, Media- and Communication Studies as well as other related fields with a useful background of contexts for and basic information on Indian English literature as well as on the writers and concepts that have been chosen for the individual chapters, which are each followed by a selection of close readings. Our aim is to focus on the diversity that characterises contemporary Indian English literature by drawing attention to the historical, literary and cultural contexts this volume now reflects. The essays collected in this volume present a qualitatively and thematically broad spectrum of the field of Indian English literature and are all specialised studies in their own right, highlighting the manifold creative output of the writers upon whom the papers focus. Apart from discourses related to aesthetic notions, postcolonialism is one of the most prominent discourses, as it is part of a lively, sometimes conflicting, but pervasive Indian reality.
Accordingly, Part I: From the 1980s to the 2000s begins with David Walther’s chapter on “Salman Rushdie – East, West”, which introduces students to postcolonial concerns in Rushdie’s works, such as the troubled identity of post-independence India and the precarious status of migrants and diasporic characters as well as economic and cultural imperialism, while also examining Rushdie’s formal-aesthetic strategies, such as magic realism and the grotesque. Specifically, students are provided with Rushdie’s biographical background, which places him within the larger context of Indian and global literature while explaining his literary and cultural significance. The chapter presents a categorised list of Rushdie’s works, highlighting the primary themes he addresses. Subsequently, Walther discusses Rushdie’s stylistic techniques, such as his use of hybrid language, syncretic postmodernism, archaic oral techniques, magic realism, grotesque satire and intertextuality. The analysis focuses on Midnight’s Children (1981), considered a significant text in postcolonial studies. It highlights the varied imagery used in the book, such as the perforated sheet, chutnification and fissured skin, as well as its self-reflexive narration and incorporation of cinematic techniques.
Indrani Karmakar’s chapter on “Writing Women in India: Critical Perspectives on Shashi Deshpande’s Selected Fictions” concerns the literary works of Shashi Deshpande, a prominent Indian writer who first emerged in India’s anglophone literary scene in the 1970s and continues to garner critical attention. Foregrounding recurring concerns — women’s subjectivity, motherhood, intergenerational relationships — in Deshpande’s fictional writings (with a brief reference to her non-fiction works), Karmakar’s chapter emphasises how Deshpande’s literary texts speak to the larger socio-political context of postcolonial India. Within this framework, it shows how Deshpande gives particular attention to the idea of the ‘new Indian woman’, as explored and excavated throughout her texts by their dramatisation of a curious oscillation between tradition and modernity, a dichotomy that has its origin in the early 20th century nationalist discourse on the woman’s ‘home’ and the ‘world’. Focussing on The Binding Vine (1993) and Small Remedies (2000), Karmakar demonstrates how Deshpande’s texts evince this dialectic of home and the world, one that assumes new valences in postcolonial and, most especially, post-liberalised India.
Monika Fludernik’s chapter entitled “Ephemera and Amit Chaudhuri’s Radical Modernist Aesthetic” introduces students to the works of Amit Chaudhuri, an important literary figure in contemporary Indian English literature, whose novels, as Fludernik argues, deserve more critical attention. The relative paucity of critical works on Chaudhuri’s novels, according to the author, can be attributed to the novels’ complete departure from postmodernism and magic realism evident in more popular ‘stars’ of Indian English fiction, namely Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy or Amitava Ghosh. What Chaudhuri’s fictions offer, in contrast, is an intimate engagement with literary modernism redolent of both British modernism and the particular modernist aesthetics espoused by the earlier generation of Indian English writers such as Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan and Raja Rao. Analysing three of Chaudhuri’s novels — A Strange and Sublime Address (1991), A New World (2000) and Friend of My Youth (2017) — Fludernik illustrates how Chaudhuri embraces a ‘radical’ modernist aesthetics in his decisive rejection of plot and ‘storification’.
In “The Female Body in Indian Women Writers’ Short Stories”, Ellen Dengel-Janic argues that the short story genre’s adaptability has allowed Indian women writers to experiment with various themes, styles, modes and narrative strategies. Using two short stories as examples, Dengel-Janic illustrates how Indian women writers have made a distinct contribution to the tradition of short story writing. Consequently, the chapter demonstrates how the short story in India is, at once, rooted in tradition but, at the same time, explores new themes and formal innovations. Engaging with Githa Hariharan’s “The Remains of the Feast” (1994) as an exemplary short story that challenges ideas of femininity and gendered identity via the representation of the ageing female body, Dengel-Janic introduces students to the story’s narrative and discursive production of the body in/as text, which emerges as transgressive of class, caste and gendered norms and boundaries. In contrast, in the Odia short story “Lata” (1986 [1993]) by Binapini Mohanty, the protagonist is a young woman and the female body is shown at its greatest vulnerability.
Odia is an Indian language spoken primarily in the state of Odisha, India.
The chapter thus highlights the politics of representation in conjunction with the aesthetics of the short stories, which are explored in a conjoined mode to show how they tease out silenced aspects of women’s existence.
Maitrayee Misra’s “A Study of Select Contemporary Indian English Dramas” analyses the emergence of experimental and innovative plays in the post-independence era, particularly after the 1960s, which, due to their focus on performance, gained considerable success in India. Within this framework, Misra examines Mahesh Dattani’s Final Solutions (1993). Additionally, the chapter addresses the emergence of women dramatists following Second Wave Feminism in India and discusses Poile Sengupta’s Mangalam (1993) as an example of this trend, thus demonstrating how these two plays offer a depiction of Indian reality and ethos. The author argues that both plays can be considered ‘condition-of-India’ dramas.
Cecile Sandten’s “Contemporary Indian English Women Poets: The Diasporic Experience in the Poetry of Sujata Bhatt and Imtiaz Dharker” begins by outlining Indian English poetry from 1945 to the present and defining such concepts as hybridization and diasporic identity. Subsequently, Sandten argues that it is possible for the two poets selected to creatively explore and negotiate ‘border-territories’ or ‘imaginary homelands’ by shifting the focus of the creative writing process to other cultural, historical, regional and/or linguistic backgrounds and settings. By introducing Sujata Bhatt and Imtiaz Dharker, two contemporary women poets who embody ideas of dislocation, bilingualism and transculturation in their writing, this chapter is aimed at providing students with a fresh and critical perspective on the poetry of anglophone South Asian women through close readings of selected poems, while at the same time fostering a critical awareness of diaspora, transculturality and hybridity.
Part II: From the 2000s to the Present begins with Asis De’s “Stories at the Crossroad of Histories: Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace”. De introduces students to Amitav Ghosh (1956–), the first-ever Indian anglophone writer to receive India’s prestigious ‘Bharatiya Jnanpith’ literary award (2018) for an outstanding contribution to literature and literary philosophy. As De contends, Ghosh’s novels highlight socio-cultural interconnections at several points in time and space, effortlessly blurring the boundaries of class, language, religion and ethno-national identity. The chapter is divided into four sections, with the first providing an overview of Ghosh’s works, the second exploring themes in The Glass Palace, the third analysing short passages from the novel and the conclusion commenting on the novel’s educational value.
With Oliver von Knebel Doeberitz’ “The Darkness and Beyond: Post-Millennial Trends in Anglophone Indian Fiction”, the new millennium is introduced, a period which has propelled India to the very centre of global debates and recognition. As von Knebel shows, these developments have found ample reflection in the fields of anglophone Indian fiction, where authors in India and in the Indian diaspora in the West alike explore, screen and grapple with this mediated image of India in the new millennium. With a focus on the changing image of India in novels from the 1990s to the early 2000s, the author evinces that whereas Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) focuses on the misery of the poor and their survival in a neoliberal and increasingly globalised India of the 21st century, Manu Joseph’s Serious Men (2010) is concerned with a portrayal of the Dalit people that leaves traditional literary depictions of passive suffering behind and instead represents a Dalit individual in his fight for recognition and wealth. A new shift in the perception of British Asians in Britain, von Knebel avers, is provided in Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (2006), which is less concerned with the interaction between the migrant community and mainstream society, a dominant theme in diasporic fiction since the 1960s, but rather foregrounds everyday life and internal struggles within the South Asian diaspora in London.
Anna M. Horatschek’s “Anuradha Roy: Female Identities and Nation Building in India” scrutinises gender issues within the context of India’s cultural and religious diversity. Despite official bans on crimes such as rape, child marriage, widow burnings, ‘honour killings’ and other forms of violence against women, these continue to occur. Horatschek uses Anuradha Roy’s five published novels — An Atlas of ImpossibleLonging (2008), The Folded Earth (2011), Sleeping on Jupiter (2015), All the Lives We Never Lived (2018) and The Earthspinner (2021) — to explore the intersection of gender, sexuality, religion and politics. The chapter identifies four central themes: 1) Indian feminism and individual emancipation, 2) nation-building, 3) identitarian histories and 4) global contexts. Horatschek argues that the novels depict the struggles of women in multiple cultural and social contexts in India while simultaneously amplifying their global interconnectedness. The chapter concludes with the suggestion that Roy’s novels resist any simplistic portrayal of India as a postcolonial exoticist alterity.
Miriam Nandi’s “The South Asian Refugee Novel in English” introduces students to the central themes of migration and exile in South Asian anglophone literature. Given the transcultural, global and potentially cosmopolitan character of anglophone Fictions of Migration (Sommer 2001), Nandi focuses on South Asian (rather than Indian) novels that represent and negotiate the so-called ‘refugee crisis’, including Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017), Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty (2020) and Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019). The novels centre on forced migration and border crossing in a world where peace and prosperity are limited to a small elite with Western passports. Nandi provides in-depth analyses of each novel, drawing attention to their narrative modes and forms of writing. She also contextualizes the global refugee crisis, focusing on climate change refugees in South Asia and provides background information on each writer as well as definitions of key terms, such as refugee, migrant, exile and diaspora.
Hannah Pardey’s “New India, New Realism? Narrating Socio-Economic Change in Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty (2020) and Pankaj Mishra’s Run and Hide (2022)” examines how these two novels represent the “New India” through a narrative mode she terms “liminal realism”. This mode, Pardey argues, is different from the social realism of earlier Indian English novelists, as it is positioned between fiction and non-fiction and creates a documentary or journalistic style that reflects the effects of global capitalism in India. Through a close reading of the texts, Pardey demonstrates how Amnesty employs embedded letters, local newspaper articles and online forum discussions to ‘document’ a day in the life of an undocumented Sri Lankan immigrant in Sydney, while Run and Hide mixes fiction and journalism and references the author’s non-fiction works, while also including a meta-fictional discussion on writing about socio-economic changes. The chapter concludes by encouraging students to explore Adiga and Mishra’s novels within the larger history of anglophone Indian literature.
Ariane de Waal’s “Big Other and Big Brother: State Violence, Surveillance and Censorship in Contemporary Indian English Drama” maps out three starting points for researching contemporary Indian drama in English: playwriting awards, theatre festivals and international collaborations. The chapter focuses on two contemporary Indian playwrights who write political plays in English: Abhishek Majumdar, whose The Djinns of Eidgah (2012) addresses the Kashmir conflict, and Annie Zaidi, whose Untitled 1 (2018) is set in a dystopian future of all-encompassing state surveillance. De Waal argues that these two plays exemplify two divergent dramatic strategies for representing, reflecting on and resisting the abuse of state power. While the Indian state functions as a potent yet invisible ‘Big Other’ in Majumdar’s play, Zaidi stages the state as an omnipresent and overpowering ‘Big Brother’. Both playwrights draw on storytelling and myth to explore tactics for resisting state violence, surveillance and censorship. The author approaches the plays through the tools of dramatic analysis as they are taught in the English Studies curriculum, but also indicates how traditional dramatic theory falls short of adequately capturing the dramaturgy and dynamics of Indian English drama.
Finally, we would like to conclude this introduction by paying tribute to our friend and co-editor, Oliver von Knebel Doeberitz, who conceived this project and worked on it with his characteristic diligence and dedication, but passed away most unexpectedly and far too soon. This book is for you, Oliver.
1.4Works Cited
Dace, Wallace (1963). “The Concept of ‘Rasa’ in Sanskrit Dramatic Theory.” Educational Theatre Journal 15 (3), 249–254.
Das, Kamala (1965). Summer in Calcutta: Fifty Poems. Delhi: Rajinder Paul.
Drabble, Margaret (1998). The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Farley, Richmond P./Swann, Darius L./Zarrilli, Phillip B. (1993). Indian Theatre: Traditions of Performance. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
Gillies, John/Minami, Ryuta/Li, Ruri/Trivedi, Poonam (2002). “Shakespeare on the stages of Asia.” In: Wells, Stanley/Stanton, Sarah (eds.). The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 259–283.
Guptara, P. S. (1979). “The Impact of Europe on the Development of Indian Literature.” Review of National Literatures 10, 18–34.
Macaulay, Thomas Babington (1979). Macaulay’s Speeches: A Selection. New York: AMS Press.
Nehru, Jawaharlal (2004). The Discovery of India. New Delhi: Penguin.
Ramanujan. A. K. (1996). The Collected Essays. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Rao, Raja (1938). Kanthapura. Westport: Greenwood Press.
Riemenschneider, Dieter (2005). The Indian Novel in English: Its Critical Discourse 1934–2004. Jaipur: Rawat Publications.
Roy, Anjali (2002). “Making New Words/Worlds: Options for the Indian Novelist in English.” In: Narasimhaiah, C. D. (ed.). Makers of Indian English Literatures. Delhi: Pencraft, 69–82.
Singh, Jyotsna (1989). “Different Shakespeares: The Bard in Colonial/Postcolonial India.” Theatre Journal 41 (4), 445–457.
Sommer, Roy (2001). Fictions of Migration: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie und Gattungstypologie des zeitgenössischen interkulturellen Romans in Großbritannien. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier.
Stein, Burton (1998). A History of India. London: Blackwell.
Wandel, Reinhold (2004). India — Unity in Diversity. Berlin: Cornelsen.
Part I: From the 1980s to the 2000s
2Salman Rushdie — Between East and WestDavid Walther, Greifswald University
But human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase. Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to the death. (Rushdie 2010: 12)
Abstract
Salman Rushdie’s work remains a required area of study in any compilation of English Indian literature. His writing introduces students to postcolonial concerns such as the troubled identity of post-Independence India, the precarious status of migrants and diasporas, as well as economic and cultural imperialism, while also confronting them with literary modes such as magic realism and the grotesque. Furthermore, his style synthesizes a wide array of literary influences, bridging the gap between postmodern narrative techniques and archaic oral tradition, high and popular culture, East and West. The chapter is split into three sections. The first part provides students with a biographical contextualization, locating Rushdie in the wider context of Indian as well as world literature while explicating on his literary and cultural relevance. A categorized list enumerates his oeuvre, providing mention of the primary topics Rushdie deals with. The second part elaborates on Rushdie’s stylistic specifics: hybrid language, syncretic postmodern and archaic oral techniques, magic realism, grotesque satire and the high level of intertextuality prevalent to his work. The third part consists of a model analysis in which Midnight’s Children (1981) will be introduced as a key text of postcolonial studies, deriving much of its force from its varied imagery — the perforated sheet, chutnification, fissured skin — its self-reflexive narration and the interleaving of cinematic technique.
2.1Biography and Relevance
The human experience is marked by cracks. In today’s divisive world, sieged by tribalism and the clamoring for essential identities, to stand between the lines and occupy such fractures is both vital and dangerous, as the life and literary recognition of Sir Salman Rushdie shows. Born in Bombay on June 19th, 1947, Rushdie has since become one of the most influential authors hailing from the Indian subcontinent.
Bombay was renamed to Mumbai in 1995, divesting itself of the colonizer‑given name ‘Bombay’, ‘Mumbai’ being a reference to the Indian goddess Mumbadevi. However, while moving away from its colonial heritage, the new name also “signalled an attempt to reimagine the city as an exclusively Hindu‑Marathi place”, thereby leaving out its Muslim constituency entirely, reflecting a concomitant rise of Hindu nationalism (Herbert 2008: 140f.). Thus, Mumbai, much like Bombay, remains a troubled name. Rushdie himself varies in how he approaches this renaming, grappling with it in both his fiction and non‑fiction. While keeping the decolonization aspect in mind, I will nevertheless use ‘Bombay’ in this chapter, as it features heavily in the model analysis of Midnight’s Children.
As part of an affluent Muslim family, Rushdie was given privileged access to a high level of education, spending a part of his childhood at The Cathedral and John Connon School, Bombay, before leaving for Europe. There he first studied at Rugby School, Warwickshire, and later took history at King’s College, Cambridge. It is this early distance to the country of his birth that marks him as a part of the Indian diaspora — i.e. members of the Indian community who have migrated or settled outside of India — and which has contributed so strongly to the great influence he has had on spreading Indian English literature across the globe. Much of his work is characterized by the task of recapturing the country of his birth, while also staking out the difficulties of leaving it behind, having to find a place in a new, oftentimes hostile world. Indeed, Midnight’s Children (1981) and The Satanic Verses (1988), the novels which have indelibly carved Rushdie’s name into the literary landscape, deal with this dual desire in turn. Both novels shine a light onto the two sides of Salman Rushdie commonly perceived: on the one hand, the terrific author whose command of postmodern techniques, magic realism and narrative traditions helped catapult Indian literature onto the world stage through his epic of post‑Independence India; on the other hand, the man embroiled in death threats and book burnings, who spent ten years hiding from assassins in the wake of what has since come to be known as the Rushdie Affair, a sordid event of both cultural and political significance.
As Midnight’s Children is part of the model analysis, it suffices at this point to say that this novel is a seminal work which has won multiple prizes since its publication, among them the Booker of Bookers and that it has been adapted for both the screen and the stage. Furthermore, of all of Rushdie’s works, Midnight’s Children has received the greatest level of academic attention, given that its stylistic and topical preoccupations prefigure much of his later writing, while affording scholars a multiplicity of analytical approaches, be it through the lens of postcolonialism, gender, postmodernism, or numerous other perspectives. It was, in any case, the incredible success of Midnight’s Children that allowed Rushdie to quit his job as a copywriter for an advertising agency and become a fulltime writer.
Although rich in narrative potential and certainly well received, it was not Shame (1983), the allegorical novel about Pakistan following Midnight’s Children, which pushed Rushdie once more into the spotlight, but TheSatanic Verses (1988). The aftermath of the book’s publication has become infamous, giving rise to a heated debate over creative freedom, authorial limits and the question of the sanctity of religious belief. While there were many speaking out in Rushdie’s defense, the fundamentalist fringe of the Muslim community took umbrage at what they considered to be blasphemy. Book burnings took place across the world, effigies of Rushdie’s likeness were incinerated on television and The Satanic Verses was banned in twelve countries (Netton 1996: 20), including the country of his birth, India. In a sad irony, it was on Valentine’s Day of 1989 when the religious leader of Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini, called out a fatwā, declaring Rushdie to be an enemy of the Faith to be executed, an order that would exact tragic deaths over the course of the following years. It took a decade of hiding, passionate speeches in his defense by notable literary names such as Günther Grass and Harold Pinter and numerous appeals to politicians to intervene before the threat to his life subsided to a level that saw him appear again more publicly. Unsurprisingly, large parts of his work from those ten years — Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) and The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995) — are colored by the creative limitations placed on story tellers in the former and being forced to write in dark and destitute conditions in the latter novel.
After several incognito visits to the US, Rushdie settled permanently in New York in 1999, right at the turn of the millennium. Although his new novels since then have continued to deal with the topic of migration and identity, their geographical focus has shifted like their author, now spanning to various degrees the entire globe from the Indian subcontinent to Britain and, later, America. Overall, then, at the moment of this writing, Salman Rushdie is able to look back on a literary output comprising fourteen novels, a short story collection, a memoir, a non‑fictional account of Nicaragua, as well as numerous other essays and articles, many of which have been printed and reprinted in newspapers around the world. His writing has inspired a generation of writers as varied and globe‑spanning as Amitav Gosh, Arundhati Roy, Emma Tennant and Zadie Smith (Kreutzer n.d.: 3). As a member of the Indian diaspora and a fierce defender of cosmopolitanism and democracy and having a foot in both the East and the West, Salman Rushdie, as he himself has noted, represents the comma between both worlds (Goonetilleke 2010: 131). He lives in the space where one ceases to articulate being one or the other and instead resolves oneself to being an uneasy amalgamation of both — an unfixed identity of vacillation and constant movement: indeed, the “shaky edifice we build out of scraps” (Rushdie 2010: 12).
2.2Works and Topics — An Overview
If one were to read Rushdie biographically, one could trace the moments at which the topical occupation of his work changes to the monumental incisions in his life. There is, in many cases, a geographical aspect to his stories that correlates with his own circumstances, which makes it a tempting proposition to categorize his work accordingly. Rushdie himself has done so when he published his short story collection East, West (1994) — a series of nine stories, divided in three parts: those of the East, those in‑between and those of the West — and it provides a serviceable structure applicable to his work in general, which will be followed in this section.
2.2.1East
Of all the stories taking place in the Eastern hemisphere, Midnight’s Children (1981) remains the most famous. Adapted for the stage in 2003 by the Royal Shakespeare Company and the screen in 2012 by Deepa Mehta, it has since established itself as a hallmark work of postcolonial literature. The model analysis following the style section will introduce this work and the tragicomic life of its protagonist Saleem Sinai in more depth, specifically the tight link between Saleem and the country of his birth. For the story of Saleem is also the story of post‑Independence India — a nation facing the task of recreating itself from the vestiges of its colonial and pre‑colonial past. The novel uses the intimate relationship between Saleem and India to provide insights into this momentous time of change, steering the reader’s attention towards the attempt (and impossibility) of uniting all these linguistically diverse peoples under the banner of one nation, while simultaneously grappling with religious fundamentalism and the pressing question of how much democratic idealism can be sacrificed to the darker side of the project of nationhood.
Published two years after Midnight’s Children, Shame (1983) directs our attention to the second country born from partition, farcically called Peccuvistan, a country riven with strife in which the dictators Raza Hyder and Iskander Harappa are vying for control. The story follows the lives of Omar Khayyam and Sufiya Zinobia, one a lecherous doctor born from three mothers, the other a girl whose mental development was arrested at the age of nine. Throughout the narrative, Rushdie places these polar opposites along an axis of shame: Omar’s life and wish for a marriage to Sufiya represents the ultimate end of shamelessness, whereas Sufiya in her childish purity grows more beast‑like as the metaphorical shame of her countrymen suffuses her. While Shame
