History of Indian Literature in English

History of Indian Literature in English is a concise yet comprehensive account of the origin and growth of various literary trends in Indian literature in English over the last two centuries. In a very lucid style, it analyzes the various literary and non-literary influences on this literature. It discusses the landmark authors under four subheads: poetry, drama, fiction and prose. The book also tries to place those authors in the literary traditions to which they belong. This book is meant primarily for students of B.A. English Honours and M.A. English in Indian universities, though it can also be used by a person interested in the origin and growth of Indian literature in English. It can also be used as a textbook for the National Eligibility Test (NET) and State Level Eligibility Test (SLET).

Editor, translator, poet and critic, Dr. Ravi Nandan Sinha has published poetry and literary criticism in India and elsewhere. He has over ten books to his credit. He has also translated poetry, fiction and history which the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, National Book Trust India, New Delhi and the Publications Division of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, New Delhi have published. He has been a Jury Member on the awards committee of Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi for its Translation Prize. Formerly, he was Head, Postgraduate Department of English, St. Xavier's College (Autonomous), Ranchi. Dr. Sinha is also an experienced editor who, since 1987, has been editing The Quest (ISSN 0971-2321), one of the foremost Indian academic journals.

This book is meant primarily for students of B.A. English Honours and M.A. English in Indian universities, though it can also be used by a person interested in the origin and growth of Indian literature in English. It can also be used as a textbook for the National Eligibility Test (NET) and State Level Eligibility Test (SLET).

The book divides the history of Indian literature in English into four genres: poetry, fiction, drama, and prose. Since a writer is influenced by his milieu, a brief account of the non-literary background has also been given.

I would like to thank Dr. O.P. Budholia, Professor, Jiwaji University, Gwalior, Dr. Sumana Ghosh and Dr. Mamta Choudhary of the English Department, St. Xavier's College, Ranchi for their valued suggestions.

Indian literature in English, or Indo-Anglian literature as it is sometimes called, is one of the most visible results of the coming of the English language to India. It is also the youngest of all other Indian literatures. It enjoys certain privileges such as having a pan-India presence and acting as the voice of India internationally. It has made the world familiar with the Indian way of life, culture, thought and world view. Despite all these unique features, it shares with other Indian literatures the essential quality of being Indian. Although it began its journey as a pale shadow of British literature, in course of time it acquired a distinct voice of its own. One can even go to the extent of saying that Indian literature is one, though written in many languages. Indian literature in English, therefore, is no different from Hindi or Marathi or Tamil literature in the sense that it shares the same concerns and expresses the same cultural and social reality as literatures in languages born in India do. S. Abid Husain in his The National Culture of India says that culture of a society embodies "the sense of ultimate values which a certain society has and according to which it wants to shape its life." According to him, the ultimate values that have shaped the Indian mind over the millennia are chiefly two: "the capacity for contemplation which dominates all other mental powers, and the capacity to see and apprehend unity in diversity." This is the reason why Indians regard harmony, and not struggle, as the fundamental principle on which their moral order is based. Indian literature in English, as indeed all our literatures, expresses our moral vision born out of this innate sense of harmony and balance that we as a society have.

The story of Indian literature in English began some two hundred years ago when Sake Dean Mahomet (1759-1851) wrote in English an account of his travels across India. He gave his book a rather long title: The Travels of Dean Mahomet, a Native of Patna in Bengal, through Several Parts of India (1794). Dean Mahomet was an Indian emigrant to England. Before that, he had travelled extensively across India and wrote a book about his various experiences of people and places. Indian poetry in English appeared a couple of decades later. The first Indian poems in English by poets like Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809-1831) were published in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. These poems were often imitative and were modelled on the work on British poets, especially the Romantics. The novel and drama came much later. It was only in 1864 that Rajmohan's Wife, the first true Indian novel in English was published. It is Bankimchandra Chatterjee's only novel in English after which he switched over to Bengali and became one of the greatest novelists in Bengali. Drama had a rather slow start. Though the first Indian play in English was The First Parsi Baronet (1866) by C.S. Nazir it was only much later that dramatists of the calibre of Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo appeared on the scene.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages