INDIAN WRITINGS IN ENGLISH: AN OVERVIEW
Tuesday, 4th September, 2007
INDIAN WRITINGS IN ENGLISH: AN OVERVIEW
Raja Ram Mohan Roy was the first Indian to effectively express himself in black and white through English, though he was initiated to the language when he was in his teens. Thereafter, Vivekananda showed his perfect masterly over the language through his evocative prose, which made the west sit up and take notice of the greatness of Hinduism. Tagore also had written some poems in English. Jawaharlal Nehru and M.K Gandhi were also great masters of the English language. Nehru’s Discovery of India, Glimpses of World History etc are glaring testimony to not only his profound scholarship but also his absolute mastery over writing lucid prose in the foreign language.
Though Mahatma Gandhi used his mother tongue, Gujarati, to write his famous autobiography, later translated into English by his secretary Mahadev Desai under the title The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1929), he used Hindi and English with masterly skill and use. As he lived through a eventful life among his people, who were attempting to liberate themselves from moral decadence; social lethargy, political degradation, economic exploitation, and cultural subordination, Gandhi wrote, day and night, in and out of prisons, for his two journals, Young India and Harijan.
Rabindranath Tagore was the first Asian writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1913). Tagore represents a happy combination of the ancient Indian tradition and the new European consciousness. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his slim volume of poems entitled Gitanjali. His other known works are Gora, Ghare Baire and Galpa Guchchha.
In 1930s emerged the first major figures in the field of English literature in the shape of the “Big Three” of Indian fiction: Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao and R.K. Narayan. Mulk Raj Anand is the most westernized of the trio; Rao, while writing in English and using the genre of the novels has his roots in Sanskrit culture. R.K. Narayan’s work occupies a middle ground between the approaches of his two illustrious contemporaries.
MULK RAJ ANAND
Mulk Raj Anand’s reputation was first established by his first two novels, Untouchable (1935), which gives an account of “a day in life” of a sweeper, and Coolie (1936), which follows the fortunes of a peasant boy uprooted from the land. His trilogy, The Village (1939), Across The Black Water (1940) and The Sword and the Sickle (1942)is an epic account of the gradual growth of the protagonist’s revolutionary consciousness, which may be seen as a microcosm of India’s movement towards an awareness of the need for independence.
Raja Rao’s first novel Kantapura (1938) is his most straight forward. It gives an account of how a village’s revolt against a domineering plantation owner comes to be informed by the Gandhian ideal of non violence. Rao’s major work The Serpent and the Rope (1960) is regarded by some Indian critics as the most important Indian novel in English to have appeared to date. It has also published the short novels The Cat and Shakespeare (1965) and Comrade Kirillov (1976).
Nirad C. Chaudhari is being regarded as the most controversial of Indian writers in English. He emerged on the scene with his book The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951). When he visited England, he recorded his experiences in A Passage to England (1959). In The Continent of circle (1965) he puts forward the thesis the Aryan settlers of India became enfeebled by the climate of North India. He has also published To Live or not to Live (1970) and a second volume of autobiography, Thy Hand, Great Anarch (1987).
R.K. Narayan’s early novels include the triology Swami and Friends (1935), Bachelor of Arts (1937) and The English Teacher (1945). The novels of his middle period represent his best works; these include Mr. Sampath (1949), The Financial Expert (1952), The Guide (1958), The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961) and The Sweet Vendor (1967). They explore conflicts between traditional Hindu values and western incursions into the society. Narayan’s more recent novels include The Painter of Signs (1976), A Tiger for Malgudi (1983) and Talkative Man (1986). He has also published several volumes of short stories, including An Astrologer’s Day (1947) and Lawley Road (1956).
Vikram Seth’s first novel, A Suitable Boy has made him the most hyped-up first time novelist in the history of Indian literature. The Golden Gate, a novel in verse had hit the bestsellers’ lists in 1986-87. This was followed by three collections of verses: The Humble Administrator’s Garden, All You Who Sleep Tonight and Beastly Tales From Here and There
Salman Rushdie won the 1981 Booker Prize for Midnight’s Children (1981). The Shame (1983) approaches political events in Pakistan. He has also published Grimus (1975.) a science fiction novel and The Jaguar Smile (1987), a journal about war-torn Nicaragua and of course, the banned book – The Satanic Verses.
Anita Desai has written Fire in the Mountains (1977), Clear Light of Day (1980) and The Village by the Sea (1982), Cry the Peacock (1963), Bye-Bye Black Bird (1971) and In custody (1984). Her subtle unostentatious prose and her sensitive evocation of the inner lives of her characters make her one of the finest talents at work in the Indian Novel.
Other Novelists: The period around Independence provided Khushwant Singh and Manohar Malgonkar with the subject matter of their novels: Singh’s A Train to Pakistan (1956) and Malgonkar’s A Bend in the Ganges (1964) deal with partition. Singh’s I Shall Not Hear The Nightingale (1959) is about the movements of a Sikh family in the Punjab in the uncertain period before partition and Malgonkar’s The Princes (1963) a sympathetic account of the tragedy of a family who represents the local elite that ruled many ‘native’ states during the Raj. Kamala Markandya’s novels, which include Nectar in a Sieve (1954), A Handful of Rice (1966) and The Coffer Dams (1969), are mainly about rural and urban poverty and dispossession.
Nayantara Sahgal, a niece of Nehru, writes about the Indian elite of today and yesterday. Her novels include This Time of Morning (1965), The Day in Shadow (1971), A Situation in New Delhi (1977), Rich Like Us (1985) and Plans For Departure (1986), she was winner of the Eurasian section of the 1987 Commonwealth Writer Prize.
Although Arundhuti Roy she has written only one novel, she managed to gain international recognition as the popularity of her maiden novel; ‘The God of Small things’ transcended geographical boundaries and thereby made her presence feel among the contemporary literacy greats of the west. She also won tremendous critical acclaim for her immative use of the language and her lyrical and yet honest presentation of life and times of a Kerala village which culminated with her winning the prestigious Booker Prize ($20,000), for her debut literacy venture.
While Indian poetry in English dates back to the early nineteenth century, it is really only in the period since independence that it has come of age. Pride of place among poets writing in English must go to Nissim Ezekiel whose verse frequently explores relationships between the external world and the interior life. His volumes of verse include Time to Change (1951), The Unfinished Man (1960) and Hymns in Darkness (1976). Kamala Das writes about women’s emotions with a candour unprecedented in Indian verse and Arun Kolatkar, winner of the 1977 Commonwealth Poetry Prize for his collection Jejuri, provides a reference point for meditations on Indian life, ancient and modern. Other notable poets after Independence in English include Adil Jussawalla, P. Lal, Jayanta Mahapatra, Dom Moraes, Rajagopal Parthasarathy, G. Patel and A.K. Ramanujan. Vikram Seth has produced a virtuoso novel in verse, The Golden Gate (1986).
