Indian English Literature has come a long way from the Travels of Dean Mahomet (1794) to contemporary writers like Amitav Ghosh, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kunal Basu and Basabi Fraser. The English language has been appropriated by Indians and has evolved as 'half English, half Indian, funny perhaps, but. honest'. Indian writing in English has made a place for itself in world literature and has questioned the monolithic nature of the English literary canon by making its way from the periphery to the centre. Indian Writing in English: A Reassessment provides a fresh look at some of the issues encountered in the reading Indian Writing in English in the wake of a wide farrago of ideological movements at the turn of the century. Fourteen scholarly articles in this anthology seek to assiduously analyse the protean identity of this branch of literature that has undergone dynamic shifts in principles and priorities, sense and sensibilities.
Dr Rumpa Das is Associate Professor & Head, Department of English, Maheshtala College. An alumnus of Jadavpur University, she has around 40 international and national publications and has edited a book on Women in Indian Writing in English and another on The Partition of India: Historical & Literary Perspectives (Avenel Press). Besides writing on Gender, Cultural & Media Studies, she also publishes poems, fictional and non-fictional prose.
Madhumita Biswas teaches as a Guest Lecturer at Maheshtala College. She graduated with Honours in English from Presidency College, Kolkata and completed M.A from Presidency, University. Currently pursuing MPhil from the University of Calcutta, she dabbles in creative writing and has had her poems and articles published in various newspapers, magazines and anthologies, notably Inspired by Tagore (2012) published by British Council and Sampad and One Hundred Poems for Peace (2006) published by Seagull.
This volume owes its origin to the endowment of the University Grants Commission which had extended financial assistance for the UGC Sponsored National seminar on the topic 'Indian Writing in English: A Reassessment', organised by our college. The editors are deeply obliged to the UGC, and offer deep acknowledgement to the Governing Body, Principal, colleagues, students and non-teaching members of Maheshtala College, as well as the collaborating college, Shahid Anurupchandra Mahavidyalaya for the support and cooperation they have extended to make the seminar and its proceedings thereof a success.
'Indian Writing in English: A Reassessment' is a collection of fourteen articles which focus on the multifarious nuances of Indian English literature which is a relatively new phenomenon in the Indian literary panorama, having only a two hundred year old history of its own. A clear colonial derivative, Indian Writing in English, however, has carved a niche of its own in the arena of world literature, chiefly owing to the critical acclaim won by its practitioners. Indian English literature makes use of non-linear, folk-based narratives, as well as hybrid languages to portray typical Indian situations. Indian English authors, based in India as well as abroad, try to capture the scintillatingly rich, yet endlessly complex entity of India in a language that had been bequeathed to them by their late colonial overlords, yet that they have appropriated as their own.
Most Indian universities have included Indian English texts in their curricula and advanced research - doctoral and post-doctoral, has been going on in this field for quite some time now. Unfortunately, however, Indian English writing has not been accepted as a core option in most Indian universities and still remains an optional one. In the undergraduate level, for students who do not opt for English Major or Honours courses, Indian English authors remain as foreign and as unfamiliar as the British or American authors in their syllabus.
The Indian entrepreneur, Dean Mahomet, who introduced the first curry house restaurant in England also offered the luxury of shampoo baths (therapeutic 'chumpi' massages') to Englishmen. The Hindoostanee Coffee House offered real chillum tobacco beside a host of Indian dishes. Dean Mahomet, Indian entrepreneur-surgeon-traveller was one of the first Indian immigrants to England from Patna, where his father was in employment with the East India Company. His book, Travels of Dean Mahomet, was a travel narrative, published in 1794, and is officially the first book written by an Indian to be published in English. His role in the chutnification of the English language and chumpification of this new branch of literature- now almost two centuries' old, therefore, remains significant. However, the chief force behind the growth and proliferation of Indian writing in English is undoubtedly Thomas Babington Macaulay, who quite unwittingly set the ball rolling for this new branch of literature. Macaulay's 'Minute on Education' was written for Lord William Bentinck, the Governor General of India, and his promulgation of an educational policy that was chiefly to serve English needs soon backfired.
'We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.'
(Macaulay's 'Minute on Education', 1835)
Macaulay or his English peers could not possibly anticipate that the mastery over the English language by the natives shall go on to express not just English tastes, opinions, morals and intellect but also their essentially Indian sensibilities. What evolved, as Meenakshi Mukherjee states in The Anxiety of Indianness, was 'an erasure of difference within the border and accentuating the difference with what lies outside. The Indian writers who chose to represent themselves in the English language gradually carved a niche for themselves, representing to a large extent the English-educated Indian's coming to terms with rapid changes in history as well as identity. Social and religious reform, nationalism and education mingled with responses to English colonialist strategies and the outcome was an extraordinary and eclectic collection of fiction, poetry as well as non-fictional prose. India is a country where words and silences remain juxtaposed as the warp and woof of a notional national fabric that reminds one of a bricolage. Untold stories and undocumented lives, especially of people who inhabit the margins, whose lives are more of non-lives, their nebulous nature posing challenges to articulation, yet that very process of articulation becomes a text to be written, a text to be shared, a text to be read. Indian writing in English is as much evolving as it has evolved. The journey that started with Dean Mahomet's Travels proceeded with Sarojini Naidu's palanquin bearers' songs, navigating past Raja Rao's portly and pristine 'Cow of the Barricades' through a maze of genres, tones and tomes, to avant garde Prakalpana literature (initiated by Vattacharja Chandan), where writing and visuals blend to present a surreal excess!
The history of Indian Writing in English is also the history of how Indians saw, perceived arid connected themselves with the phenomenon called 'India'. Humongous, multi-dimensional and too nebulous to be defined, the country posed a challenge to its own inhabitants, who used their vernaculars as well as their skill in English to express their indigenous experiences of being Indian. Hence, from the early days on, Indian English literature came to be regarded by non-Indian readers as exotic as the Indian curries! And true to expectations, Indian English or 'Indish' writers served varied fare, as spicy as Bengali 'ilish shorshe', 'Goan vindaloo', Punjabi 'aloo parathas' or South Indian 'masala dosa'!
"
Send as free online greeting card
Email a Friend
Manage Wishlist