I.3Indian English Literature
Indian English literature (IEL) is the body of work by writers
in India who write in the English language and whose native or co-native
language could be one of the numerous languages of India. Its early history
began with the works of Michael Madhusudan Dutt followed by R. K. Narayan, Mulk
Raj Anand and Raja Rao who contributed to Indian fiction in the 1930s. It is
also associated with the works of members of the Indian diaspora who are of
Indian descent.(Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia).
It is frequently referred to as Indo-Anglian literature.
(Indo-Anglian is a specific term in the sole context of writing that
should not be confused with Anglo-Indian). As a category, this
production comes in the broader
realm of postcolonial literature--the production
from
previously colonised countries such as India.
IEL has a relatively recent history, being only one and a half
centuries old. The first book written by an Indian in English was Travels
of Dean Mahomet, a travel narrative by Sake Dean Mahomet published in
England in 1793. In its early stages, IEL was influenced by the Western novel.
Early Indian writers used English unadulterated by Indian words to convey an
experience which was essentially Indian.
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English. Raja Rao (1908-2006), Indian philosopher and writer,
authored Kanthapura and The Serpent and the
Rope, which are Indian in terms of their storytelling qualities. Kisari
Mohan Ganguli translated the Mahabharata into English, the only time the epic
has ever been translated in its entirety into a European language.
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) wrote in Bengali and English
and was responsible for the translations of his own work into English. Dhan
Gopal Mukerji (1890-1936) was the first Indian author to win a literary award
in the United States. Nirad C. Chaudhuri(1897-1999), a writer of non-fiction,
is best known for his The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951),
in which he relates his life experiences and influences. P. Lal (1929-2010), a
poet, translator, publisher and essayist, founded a press in the 1950s for
Indian Englishwriting, Writers Workshop. Ram Nath
Kak (1917-1993), a Kashmiri veterinarian, wrote
his
autobiography Autumn Leaves, which is one of the most vivid
portraits of life in 20th century Kashmir and has become a sort of a classic.
(Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia).
R. K. Narayan (1906-2001) contributed over many decades and
continued to write till his death. He was discovered by Graham Greene in the
sense that the latter helped him find a publisher in England. Greene and
Narayan remained close friends till the end. Similar to the way Thomas Hardy
used Wessex, Narayan created the fictitious town of Malgudi where he set his
novels. Some criticise Narayan for the parochial, detached and closed world
that he created in the face of the changing conditions in India at the times in
which the stories are set.
Others, such as Greene, however, feel that through Malgudi
they could vividly understand the Indian experience. Narayan's evocation of
small town life and its experiences through the eyes of the endearing child
protagonist Swaminathan in Swami and Friends is a good sample of his
writing style. Simultaneous with Narayan's pastoral idylls, a very different
writer, Mulk Raj Anand (1905-2004), was similarly gaining recognition for
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his writing set in rural India, but his stories were harsher,
and engaged, sometimes brutally, with divisions of caste, class and religion.
According to writer Lakshmi Holmström, "The writers of the 1930s were
fortunate because after many years of use, English had become an Indian
language used widely and at different levels of society, and therefore they
could experiment more boldly and from a more secure position." Kamala
Markandeyais an early writer in IEL who has often grouped with the trinity of
R.K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao. The contributions of Manoj Das and
Manohar Malgoankar to growth of IEL largely remains unacknowledged.
I.3.1 Later History
Among the later writers, the most notable is Salman Rushdie,
born in India, now living in the USA. Rushdie with his famous work
Midnight's Children (Booker Prize 1981, Booker of Bookers 1992, and
Best of the Bookers 2008) ushered in a new trend of writing. He used a hybrid
language - English generously peppered with Indian terms - to convey a theme
that could be seen as representing the vast canvas of India. He is usually
categorised under the magic realism mode of writing most famously associated
with Gabriel García Márquez. Nayantara Sehgal was one of the
first female Indian writers in English to receive wide recognition. Her fiction
deals with India's elite responding to the crises engendered by political
change.
She was awarded the 1986 Sahitya Akademi Award for English,
for her novel, Rich Like Us (1985), by the Sahitya Akademi, India's
National Academy of Letters. Anita Desai, who was shortlisted for the Booker
Prize three times, received a Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel
Fire on the Mountain and a British Guardian Prize for The Village
by the Sea. Her daughter Kiran Desaiwon the 2006 Man Booker Prize for her
second novel, The Inheritance of Loss. Ruskin Bond received Sahitya Akademy
Award for his collection of short stories Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra
in
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1992. He is also the author of a historical novel A Flight
of Pigeons, which is based on an episode during the Indian Rebellion of
1857.
Vikram Seth, author of The Golden Gate (1986) and
A Suitable Boy (1994) is a writer who uses a purer English and more
realistic themes. Being a self-confessed fan of Jane Austen, his attention is
on the story, its details and its twists and turns.Vikram Seth is notable both
as an accomplished novelist and poet. Vikram Seth is also a prolific poet.
Another writer who has contributed immensely to the Indian
English Literature is Amitav Ghosh who is the author of The Circle of
Reason (his
1986 debut novel), The Shadow Lines (1988), The
Calcutta
Chromosome (1995), The Glass Palace (2000), The
Hungry Tide (2004), and Sea of Poppies (2008), the first volume
of The Ibis trilogy, set in the 1830s, just before the Opium War,
which encapsulates the colonial history of the East. Ghosh's latest work of
fiction is River of Smoke (2011), the second volume of The Ibis
trilogy.
Rohinton Mistry is an India born Canadian author who is a
Neustadt International Prize for Literature laureate (2012). His first book
Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987) published by Penguin Books Canada is a
collection of 11 short stories. His novels Such a Long Journey (1991) and A
Fine Balance (1995)earned him great acclaim.
Shashi Tharoor, in his The Great Indian Novel (1989),
follows a storytelling (though in a satirical) mode as in the Mahabharata
drawing his ideas by going back and forth in time. His work as UN official
living outside India has given him a vantage point that helps construct an
objective Indianness. Vikram Chandra is another author who shuffles between
India and the United States and has received critical acclaim for his first
novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995) and collection of short
stories Love and Longing in Bombay (1997). His namesake Vikram A.
Chandrais a renowned journalist and the author of The Srinagar Conspiracy
(2000). Suketu Mehta is another writer currently based in the United
States who authored Maximum City (2004), an autobiographical
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account of his experiences in the city of Mumbai. In 2008,
Arvind Adiga received the Man Booker Prize for his debut novel The White
Tiger.
Recent writers in India such as Arundhati Roy and David
Davidar show a direction towards contextuality and rootedness in their works.
Arundhati Roy, a trained architect and the 1997 Booker prize winner for her
The God of Small Things, calls herself a "home grown" writer. Her
award winning book is set in the immensely physical landscape of Kerala.
Davidar sets his The House of Blue Mangoes in Southern Tamil Nadu. In
both the books, geography and politics are integral to the narrative. In his
novel Lament of Mohini (2000), Shreekumar
Varma touches upon the unique matriarchal system and
the
sammandham system of marriage as he writes about the Namboodiris and
the aristocrats of Kerala.
Similarly, Arnab Jan Deka, a trained engineer and jurist,
writes about both physical and ethereal existentialism on the banks of the
mighty river Brahmaputra, and his co-authored book of poetry with British
poet-novelist Tess Joyce appropriately titled A Stanza of Sunlight on the
Banks of Brahmaputra(1983) published from both India and Britain(2009)
which is set under this backdrop evokes the spirit of flowing nature of life.
His most recent book Brahmaputra and Beyond: Linking Assam to the
World(2015) made a conscious effort to connect to a world divided by
racial, geographic, linguistic, cultural and political prejudices. His highly
aclaimed short story collection The Mexican Sweetheart & other
stories(2002) was another landmark book of this genre. Jahnavi Barua, a
Bangalore based author from Assam has set her critically acclaimed collection
of short stories Next Door on the social scenario in Assam with
insurgency as the background.
The stories and novels of Ratan Lal Basu reflect the
conditions of tribal people and hill people of West Bengal and the adjacent
states of Sikkim, Bhutan and Nepal. Many of his short stories reflect the
political turmoil of West Bengal since the Naxalite movement of the 1970s.
Many
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of his stories like `Blue Are the Far Off Mountains', `The
First Rain' and `the Magic Marble' glorify purity of love. His novel `Oraon and
the Divine Tree' is the story of a tribal and his love for an age old tree. In
Hemingway style language the author takes the reader into the dreamland of
nature and people who are inexorably associated with nature.
I.3.2. Critics on Indian English Literature
One of the key issues raised in this context is the
superiority/inferiority of IWE (Indian Writing in English) as opposed to the
literary production in the various languages of India. Key polar concepts
bandied in this context are superficial/authentic, imitative/creative,
shallow/deep, critical/uncritical, elitist/parochial and so on.
The views of Salman Rushdie and Amit Chaudhuri expressed
through their books The Vintage Book of Indian Writing and The
Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature respectively essentialise this
battle.
Rushdie's statement in his book - "the ironic proposition that
India's best writing since independence may have been done in the language of
the departed imperialists is simply too much for some folks to bear" - created
a lot of resentment among many writers, including writers in English. In his
book, Amit Chaudhuri questions - "Can it be true that Indian writing, that
endlessly rich, complex and problematic entity, is to be represented by a
handful of writers who write in English, who live in England or America and
whom one might have met at a party?"
Chaudhuri feels that after Rushdie, IWE started employing
magical realism, bagginess, non-linear narrative and hybrid language to sustain
themes seen as microcosms of India and supposedly reflecting Indian conditions.
He contrasts this with the works of earlier writers such as Narayan where the
use of English is pure, but the deciphering of meaning needs cultural
familiarity. He also feels that Indianness is a theme constructed only in IWE
and does not articulate itself in the vernacular
Dr Deobrata Prasad has very carefully taken into account all
the nuances of Sarojini Naidu's poetry.The significance of this work towards
23
literatures. He further adds "the post-colonial novel, becomes
a trope for an ideal hybridity by which the West celebrates not so much
Indianness, whatever that infinitely complex thing is, but its own historical
quest, its reinterpretation of itself".
Some of these arguments form an integral part of what is
called postcolonial theory. The very categorisation of IWE - as IWE or under
post-colonial literature - is seen by some as limiting. Amitav Ghosh made his
views on this very clear by refusing to accept the Eurasian Commonwealth
Writers Prize for his book The Glass Palace in 2001 and withdrawing it
from the subsequent stage.
The renowned writer V. S. Naipaul, a third generation Indian
from Trinidad and Tobago and a Nobel Prize laureate, is a person who belongs to
the world and usually not classified under IWE. Naipaul evokes ideas of
homeland, rootlessness and his own personal feelings towards India in many of
his books.
Jhumpa Lahiri, a Pulitzer Prize winner from the U.S., is a
writer uncomfortable under the label of IWE.
a. Poetry
An overlooked category of Indian writing in English is poetry.
Rabindranath Tagore wrote in Bengali and English and was responsible for the
translations of his own work into English. Other early notable poets in English
include Derozio, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Toru Dutt, Romesh Chunder Dutt, Sri
Aurobindo, Sarojini Naidu, and her brother Harindranath Chattopadhyay.
"Sarojini Naidu and her art of poetry" is one of the finest efforts made by Dr.
Deobrata Prasad in order to bring forth the real psyche of Sarojini Naidu
through her poetry.This book was published by Delhi-based Capital Publishing
House in 1988 in the field of 'women and Anglo-Indian literature'.
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Indian English Literature was first brought into perspective
by University of Michigan. Such a systematic work is rare to single out in
today's era. Notable 20th Century authors of English poetry in India include
Dilip Chitre, Kamala Das, Eunice De Souza, Nissim Ezekiel, Kersy Katrak, Shiv
K. Kumar, Arun Kolatkar, P. Lal, Jayanta Mahapatra, Dom Moraes, Gieve Patel,
and A. K. Ramanujan, and Madan Gopal Gandhi,Dr Avdhesh Yadav, among several
others.
The younger generation of poets writing in English include
Abhay K, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Anju Makhija, Arnab Jan Deka, Bibhu
Padhi, Ranjit Hoskote, Sudeep Sen, Smita Agarwal,
Makarand
Paranjape, Jeet Thayil, Mani Rao, Jerry Pinto, K. V. Dominic,
Meena
Kandasamy, Nalini Priyadarshni, Gopi Kottoor, Tapan
Kumar
Pradhan, Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Robin Ngangom, Vihang A. Naik,Dr Avdhesh
Yadav and K Srilata.
Modern expatriate Indian poets writing in English include Agha
Shahid
Ali, Sujata Bhatt, Richard Crasta, Yuyutsu Sharma,
Tabish
Khair and Vikram Seth.
b. Alternative Writings
India's experimental and avant garde counterculture is
symbolized in the Prakalpana Movement. During the last four decades this
bilingual literary movement has included Richard Kostelanetz, John M. Bennett,
Don Webb, Sheila Murphy and many others worldwide and their Indian
counterparts. Vattacharja Chandan is a central figure who contrived the
movement.[5] Prakalpana fiction is a fusion of prose, poetry, play,
essay, and pictures. An example of a Prakalpana work is Chandan's bilingual
Cosmosphere 1 (2011).
Some bilingual writers have also made significant
contributions, such as Paigham Afaqui with his novel Makaan in 1989
1.4 Indian Modern Literature
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The development of modern Indian literature has been marked by
certain characteristics, some of which it shares with modern literatures over
the world. There has always been in all countries and ages a conflict between
the orthodox and the unorthodox, but in India, because the new impulse was
identified with an alien culture and foreign domination, the clash of loyalties
has been sharper. The very impact of Western thought, with its emphasis on
democracy and self-expression, stimulated a nationalist consciousness which
resented the foreign imposition and searched for the roots of self-respect and
pride in its own heritage.
For instance, Rabindranath Tagore's novel Gora is a masterly
interpretation of this built-in conflict in the very nature of Indian
renaissance, a conflict which still persists and has coloured not only our
literature but almost every aspect of human life. The first outstanding Bengali
poet of the nineteenth century (and the last in the old tradition), Iswar
Chandra Gupta (1812-59), whose remarkable journal, Sambad Prabhakar, was the
training-ground of many distinguished writers.
The new era of modern Indian literatures may be said to begin
in 1800, when Fort William College was established in Kolkata and The Baptist
Mission Press in Serampore, near Kolkata. The college was founded by the East
India Company to provide instruction to British civil servants in the laws,
customs, religions, languages, and literatures of India in order to cope with
the increasing demands of fast-growing administrative machinery. Reading
material, during this time, was translated from the Sanskrit classics as well
as from foreign literature, and dictionaries and grammars were compiled.
William Carey, who was also one of the founders of the Baptist Mission Press,
himself wrote a Bengali grammar and compiled an English-Bengali dictionary as
well as two selections of dialogues and stories.
26
Later in the second half of the sixteenth century, books in
Tamil and other Dravidian languages began to be printed. Many foreign
missionaries learnt the languages of the people. They not only translated the
Bible and wrote Christian Puranas but also rendered considerable service to the
languages by compiling the first modern grammars and dictionaries. Although the
printing-press came to south India much earlier and the foreign missionary
enterprise functioned much longer and more zealously than in Bengal, the impact
of Western learning as such was comparatively slow and the resurgence of
literary activity bore fruit in its modern form much later than in Bengal.
The establishment of Hindu College in 1817 and the replacing
of Persian by English as the language of the law and the increasing use of
Bengali were other landmarks which encouraged the introduction of modern
education and the development of the language of the people. It was, Raja Ram
Mohan Roy (1772-1833) who laid the real foundation of modern Bengali prose. The
form which he gave to Bengali prose revealed its rich potentiality in the hands
of Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar (18201891) and Akshay Kumar Datta (1820-1886),
both of whom were primarily social reformers and educationists. Because they
were men of serious purpose who had much to say, they had little use for the
flamboyance and rhetoric natural to a language derived from Sanskrit, and they
chiselled a prose that was both chaste and vigorous.
Pathfinders rather than creative artists, they standardized
the medium which their younger contemporary, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
(1838-94), turned with superb gusto and skill into a creative tool for his
novels and stories. He is known as the father of the modern novel in India and
his influence on his contemporaries and successors, in Bengal and other parts
of India, was profound and extensive. Novels, both historical and social, the
two forms in which he excelled, had been written before him in Bengali by
Bhudev Mukherji and Peary Chand Mitra.
27
Mitra's Alaler Gharer Dulal' was the first specimen of
original fiction of social realism with free use of the colloquial idiom, and
anticipated, however crudely, the later development of the novel. But it was
Bankim Chandra who established the novel as a major literary form in India. He
had his limitations, he was too romantic, effusive, and didactic, and was in no
sense a peer of his Great Russian contemporaries, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. There
have been better novelists in India since his day, but they all stand on his
shoulders.
Though the first harvest was reaped in Bengali prose, it was
in the soil of poetry that this cross-fertilization with the West bore its
richest fruit. With the emotional temperament and lyrical genius, the Bengali
language is supple and musical, as though fashioned for poetry. Michael
Madhusudan Dutt (1824-1873) was the pioneer who, turning his back on the native
tradition, made the first conscious and successful experiment to naturalize the
European forms into Bengali poetry by his epic in blank verse, 'Meghnadbadh
Kabya', based on a Ramayana episode unorthodoxly interpreted, as well as by a
number of sonnets. He led the way but could not establish a vital tradition,
for his own success was a tour de force of a rare genius.
It was Rabindranath Tagore who naturalized the Western spirit
into Indian literature and thereby made it truly modern in an adult sense. He
did this not by any conscious or forced adaptation of foreign models but by his
creative response to the impulse of the age, with the result that the
Upanishads and Kalidasa, Vaishnava lyricism, and the rustic vigour of the folk
idiom, are so well blended with Western influences in his poetry that
generations of critics will continue to wrangle over his specific debt to each
of them. In him modern Indian literature came of age, not only in poetry but in
prose as well. Novel, short story, drama, essay, and literary criticism, they
all attained maturity in his hands. Though Indian literature in its latest
phase has outgrown his influence, as indeed it should, Tagore
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was the most vital creative force in the cultural renaissance
of India and represents its finest achievement.
Kolkata being the first cosmopolitan city in India to grow
under the new regime, it was natural that it should witness the birth of the
modern drama. It has still a lively stage tradition. Curiously enough, the
first stage-play in Bengali produced in Kolkata was by a Russian
adventurer-cum-Indologist, Lebedev, in 1795. It was an adaptation of a
little-known English comedy, 'The Disguise' by Richard Paul Jodrell.
Many years passed before a serious attempt was made to build
an authentic stage, mainly under private patronage. The first original play in
Bengali was Kulin Kulasarvasva, a social satire against the practice of
polygamy among Kulin brahmans, written by Pandit Ramnarayana. Ramnarayana's
second play, Ratnavali, based on a Sanskrit classic, provoked Madhusudan Dutt
to try his hand at this medium. His impetuous genius turned out a number of
plays in quick succession, some based on old legends and some social satires.
He may thus be said to have laid the foundation of modern Indian drama, as he
did of poetry, although his achievement in this form did not equal his
performance in poetry and he soon retired from the field.
His place was taken by Dinabandhu Mitra (1829-74), a born
dramatist whose very first play, 'Nil Darpan' (published in 1860), exposing the
atrocities of the British indigo planters, created a sensation, both literary
and political. Dinabandhu wrote many more plays and was followed by a
succession of playwrights among whom were Rabindranath Tagore's elder brother
Jyotirindranath Tagore, Manomohan Basu, and later, the more famous Girish
Chandra Ghosh and Dwijendralal Roy. Girish Chandra was actor, producer, and
playwright, and it is to his indefatigable zeal that the public theatre in
Kolkata is largely indebted. But though both he and Dwijendralal achieved
phenomenal popularity in their day, their popular appeal was due more to the
patriotic and melodramatic elements
29
in their plays than to any abiding literary merit. On the
other hand, Rabindranath Tagore's plays, though they had considerable literary
merit and were marked by originality and depth of thought, were too symbolic or
ethereal to catch the popular imagination.
Of the numerous languages of India perhaps Marathi was, after
Bengali, the most vigorous in its response to the spirit of the new age. This
is because of its robust intellectual tradition, reinforced by memories of the
erstwhile glory of the Maratha Empire, and partly because Mumbai, like Kolkata,
provided a cosmopolitan modern environment. Among the stalwarts who laid the
foundation of its modern literature may be mentioned the poet Keshavsut, the
novelist Hari Narayan Apte, and Agarkar, Tilak, and Chiplunkar as the builders
of prose. Apte's novels stimulated the development of the novel in some other
languages too, particularly in the neighbouring Kannada. Narmad's poetry blazed
the trail in Gujarati
Flourishing under court patronage, Urdu had made phenomenal
progress and was the most important Indian language to prosper in the
eighteenth century. But it luxuriated in its own affluence and remained aloof
from the vital currents that were sweeping the country forward in the
nineteenth century.
The development of modern Assamese and Oriya, the two eastern
neighbours of Bengali, was also late in coming and was preceded by valuable
spade-work done by the Christian missions. Orissa too had recovered its
homogeneous integrity and the intelligentsia in the regions was educated in
Kolkata and carried back with them the impact of the literary resurgence in
Bengal. Lakshmikanta Bezbarua and Padmanath Gohain Barua in Assamese, and
Fakirmohan Senapati and Radhanath Ray in Oriya were the early pioneers in their
respective fields. Kashmiri, Punjabi, and Sindhi had an even more retarded
development, partly on account of the political conditions and partly because
of the cultural
30
glamour of Urdu in regions predominantly Muslim. All the more
credit to the pioneers who held aloft the banner of their mother tongue is
Mahjur and Master Zinda Kaul in Kashmiri, Sardar Puran Singh and Bhal Vir Singh
in Punjabi, and Mirza Kalich Beg and Dewan Kauromal in Sindhi.
What is surprising is the rather late and tardy resurgence in
the four Dravidian languages, which had had a longer and a richer literary past
than the northern languages. The past has weighed more heavily on the south
than on the north in India and nowhere more heavily than on Tamil Nadu.
However, in course of time the creative spirit in these languages too responded
to the impulse of the age, in as rich a flowering as in the other languages of
India, led by Puttanna, 'Sri', and Kailasham in Kannada, by Kerala Varma and
Chandu Menon in Malayalam, by Bharati and Kalki in Tamil, and Viresalingam and
Guruzada Appa Rao in Telugu. It is worth observing that the youngest of the
Dravidian languages, Malayalam, has responded to the new age more dynamically
than the oldest, Tamil, which even now looks too wistfully to the past.
All the great events which have influenced European thought
within the last one hundred years have also told, however feeble their effect
may be, on the formation of the intellect of modern Bengal. The independence of
America, the French Revolution, the war of Italian independence, the teachings
of history, the vigour and freedom of English literature and English thought,
the great effort of the French intellect in the eighteenth century, the results
of German labour in the field of philosophy and ancient history; Positivism,
Utilitarianism, Darwinism, all these have influenced and shaped the intellect
of modern Bengal.
From the beginning of the twentieth century Indian literature
was increasingly coloured by political aspirations, passionately voiced in the
songs and poems of the Tamil poet Bharati and the Bengali poet Kazi Nazrul
Islam. The spiritual note of Indian poetry had attained a poignant and
rapturous pitch in the medieval Vaishnava outpourings.
31
Tagore's Gitanjali is the swan song of this great tradition.
The devotional content of poetry was henceforth increasingly replaced by the
political, the ethical bias by the ideological, the plaintive tone by that of
challenge and mockery, until the dominant note of Indian literature today is
that of protest.
Tagore's main impact was, however, indirect, inasmuch as it
gave confidence to Indian writers that they could achieve in their mother
tongue what had been achieved in Sanskrit or European languages. But Tagore's
influence in literature was soon overshadowed by the impact of Gandhi, Marx,
and Freud, a strange trinity. Though none of these three was a man of letters
proper, they released intellectual and moral passions and introduced new
techniques of thought and behaviour which had a profound effect on young
writers all over India.
The influence of the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo Ghose is also
noticeable among some writers, like the Kannada poets, Bendre and Puttappa, and
the Gujarati poets, Sundaram and Jayant Parekh, but beyond imparting a certain
mystic glow to their verse and confirming their faith in the reality of the
Indian spiritual experience, it has not given any new trend or horizon to
Indian literature in general.
On the whole, the impact on Indian writing of the mixed
interaction has given a much-needed jolt to the smugness of the traditional
attitude, with its age-old tendency to sentimental piety and glorification of
the past. The revolt began in Bengal, yielded a rich harvest, in both poetry
and prose, in the work of Jivanananda Das, Premendra Mitra, Buddhadeva Bose,
Manek Bandyopadhyay, Subhas Mukhopadhyay et al. In Bengal both these forms
attained an early maturity in the hands of Tagore and have since made
phenomenal progress under his younger contemporaries and successors namely
Sarat Chandra Chatterjee achieved a popularity, both in Bengal and outside,
which equalled, if not surpassed, that of Tagore.
32
Moreover, English language had a great impact on the Indians
and apart from its utilitarian value as a language of higher education in the
sciences and as a 'link language', a fair number of Indian writers, including
such eminent thinkers steeped in Indian thought as Vivekananda, Ranade,
Gokhale, Aurobindo Ghose and Radhakrishnan, have voluntarily adopted it as
their literary medium.
There has been, from Derozio in the 1820s to R. K. Narayan
today, an unbroken tradition of some gifted Indians choosing to write in
English. Many of them, like the Dutt sisters, Toru and Aru, their versatile
uncle Romesh Chunder, Manomohan Ghosh, Sarojini Naidu, and, among
contemporaries, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, Bhabani Bhattacharya, and many
others, have achieved distinction.
Some early pioneers in the Indian languages were also tempted
at the threshold of their career to adopt English for their creative writing,
partly because they owed their inspiration to English literature and partly
because they hoped thereby to reach a wider audience. Madhusudan Dutt's first
narrative poem, "The Captive Ladie", and Bankim Chandra's early novel
"Rajmohan's Wife", are classic examples. Wisely they discovered in time that
they could create best in their own language. Some English novels of R. K.
Narayan, a born story-teller with any eye for observation and the gift of
gentle irony, are superior in intrinsic literary merit to a great deal of
mediocre stuff that passes for literature in some Indian languages. On the
other hand, it cannot be denied that, as far as creative writing is concerned,
no Indian writer in English has reached anywhere near the heights attained by
some of the great writers in the Indian languages. What modern Indian
literature sadly lacks is a well-proportioned and many-sided development.
The modern Indian literature is the representation of each
aspect of modern life. Happily, despite this clamour of sophistry, patriotic
piety, and political bias, good literature continues to be written and, as it
justifies
33
itself, it helps to sharpen the reader's sensibility. Since
the time of Tagore a growing minority of intelligent critics well versed in the
literary traditions of their own country and of the West have bravely
maintained a more wholesome approach that is neither overwhelmed by the burden
of the past nor overawed by the glamour of the latest fashion. This healthy
trend of the modern Indian literature should gain in strength with a growing
realization that, in the republic of letters as in that of men, a sensitive and
well-trained critical apparatus and its judicious and fearless exercise are a
prerequisite of happy results.
34
Conclusion
The present chapter delt with a generality on Indioan
literature and Ravinder Singh's life and work.
In the first section about Literary Survey on Indian
literature, the stressed is made on brief history of India, how literature took
birth in Indian, Literature written in all 22 indian national languages and
Indian literature written in foreigh languages like Persian and the last point
concerned Indian English Literature where we focused our interest on literature
of Indian of course written in colonial language- English.
CHAPTER TWO
A LITERARY ANALYSIS OF RAVINDER SINGH'S CAN LOVE
HAPPEN TWICE AND YOUR DREAMS ARE MINE NOW.
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