Sandten / Karmakar / Knebel Doeberitz Contemporary Indian English Literature

Contexts - Authors - Genres - Model Analyses
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-3-8233-0503-3
Verlag: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 325 Seiten

Reihe: narr STUDIENBÜCHER LITERATUR- UND KULTURWISSENSCHAFT

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.

Prof. Dr. Cecile Sandten ist Inhaberin der Professur für Anglistische Literaturwissenschaft an der Technischen Universität Chemnitz. Dr. Indrani Karmakar ist wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin an der Professur für Anglistische Literaturwissenschaft an der Technischen Universität Chemnitz. Prof. Dr. Oliver von Knebel Doeberitz war Professor für British Cultural Studies an der Universität Leipzig.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Sandten, Cecile

Karmakar, Indrani

Knebel Doeberitz, Oliver von

Leseproben

1.2 Contemporary 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...