R.K.
Narayan is a
writer who contributed over many decades and who continued to write till his
death recently. He was discovered by Graham Greene in the
sense that the latter helped him find a publisher in England. Graham Greene and
Narayan remained close friends till the end. Similar to Thomas
Hardy's 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
Graham 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, was similarly gaining recognition for his writing set in rural
India; but his stories were harsher, and engaged, sometimes brutally, with
divisions of caste, class and religion.
Among the later writers, the most notable is Salman Rushdie, born
in India, now living in the United Kingdom. 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.
Vikram Seth, author of 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's outstanding achievement as a versatile and prolific
poet remains largely and unfairly neglected.
Shashi Tharoor, in his The Great Indian Novel (1989), follows a story-telling (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.
Debates
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 Literaturerespectively 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 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.
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 [1] (2000),Shreekumar
Varma [2] touches upon the unique matriarchal system and
the sammandham system of marriage as he writes about the Namboodiris and the
aristocrats of Kerala.
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.
A generation of exiles also sprang from the Indian diaspora. Among
these are names like Agha Shahid Ali, Sujata Bhatt, Richard Crasta, Yuyutsu Sharma and Vikram Seth.
In modern times, Indian poetry in English was typified by two very
different poets. Dom Moraes,
winner of the Hawthornden Prize at the age of 19 for his first book of poems A Beginning went on to occupy a pre-eminent position among Indian poets
writing in English.Nissim Ezekiel, who came from India's tiny Bene Israel Jewish community, created a voice and place for
Indian poets writing in English and championed their work.
Their contemporaries in English poetry in India were Jayanta Mahapatra, Gieve Patel, A. K. Ramanujan, Arun Kolatkar, Dilip Chitre,Eunice De Souza, Kersy Katrak,
P. Lal, Kamala Das,
and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, among several others. The younger generation of poets writing in
English include Smita Agarwal, Makarand Paranjape, Nandini Sahu, Vattacharja Chandan, Arundhathi Subramaniam,Ranjit Hoskote, Sudeep Sen, Hemant Mohapatra, Jeet Thayil, Mani Rao, Jerry Pinto, Abhay K , Meena Kandasamy among others.
Alternative writing
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 couterparts. Vattacharja Chandan is a central figure who contrived the movement.Prakalpana fiction is a fusion of prose, poetry,
play, essay, and pictures. An example of a Prakalpana work is Chandan's
bilingual Cosmosphere .
Some bilingual writers have also made significant contributions,
such as Paigham Afaqui with his novel Makaan in 1989.
Shripad Krishnarao Vaidya (born on 05th May, 1969) from
Maharashtra, India has created a record by writing a Poetry book with the
longest title. This book has title in 355 words. It was published on 28th
March, 2010. The title of this book is grammatically correct and makes a sense
about the theme of the book.
Girish Raghunath Karnad (born 19 May 1938), is a contemporary writer, playwright,
screenwriter, actor and movie
director in Kannada
language. His rise as a prominent playwright in 1960s, marked the coming
of age of Modern Indian playwriting in Kannada, just as Badal
Sarkar did in Bengali, Vijay
Tendulkar in
Marathi, and Mohan
Rakesh in Hindi.[1] He is a recipient[2] of
the 1998 Jnanpith
Award, the highest literary honour conferred in India.
For four decades Karnad has been
composing plays, often
using history and mythology to tackle contemporary issues. He has translated his major plays
into English, and has received critical acclaim across India.[3] His plays have been translated into several Indian languages and
directed by eminent directors like Ebrahim
Alkazi, B. V.
Karanth, Alyque
Padamsee, Prasanna, Arvind
Gaur, Satyadev
Dubey, Vijaya
Mehta, Shyamanand
Jalanand Amal
Allana.[3] He is also active in the world of Indian
cinema working as
an actor,director, and screenwriter, both in
Hindi and Kannada cinema, earning numerous awards along the way. He was
conferred Padma
Shri and Padma
Bhushan by the
Government of India and also he won 4 Filmfare
Awards where 3
are Filmfare Award for Best
Director - Kannada and 1 Filmfare Best Screenplay Award
Karnad is most famous as a playwright. His
plays, written in Kannada, have
been widely translated into English and all major Indian languages. Karnad's plays are written neither
inEnglish, in which he dreamed of earning international literary fame as a
poet, nor in his mother tongue Konkani. Instead
they are composed in his adopted language Kannada. When
Karnad started writing plays, Kannada literature was highly
influenced by the renaissance in Western literature. Writers would choose a subject
which looked entirely alien to manifestation of native soil. C. Rajagopalachari's version of the Mahabharat published in 1951, left a deep impact on him,[8] and
soon sometime in the mid 1950s, one day he experienced a rush of dialogues
spoken by characters from the Mahabharata in his adopted language Kannada.
"I could actually hear the dialogues being spoken into my ears..."I
was just the scribe, " said Karnad in a later interview. Eventually Yayati was published in 1961, he was 23 years
old. It is based on the story of King Yayati, one of
the ancestors of thePandavas, who was cursed into premature old age by
his father-in-law, Shukracharya, incensed
by Yayati's infidelity. Yayati in turn asks his sons to sacrifice their youth
for him, and one of them agrees. It ridicules the ironies of life through
characters in Mahabharata and became an instant success, immediately translated and staged
in several other Indian languages.[7]
In a situation like that Karnad
found a new approach like drawing historical and mythological sources to tackle contemporary themes, and existentialist crisis of modern man, through his characters locked in
psychological and philosophical conflicts. His next wasTughlaq (1964), his best loved play, about an
idealist 14th-century Sultan
of Delhi, Muhammad bin Tughluq, and allegory on theNehruvian era which started with ambitious idealism and ended up in
disillusionment.[8] This established Karnad, now 26-years old, as one of the most
promising playwrights in the country. It was
staged by the National School of Drama Repertory under the direction ofEbrahim
Alkazi, with the actor Manohar
Singh, playing the visionary king who later becomes disillusioned and
turns bitter, amidst the historic Purana
Qila in Delhi.
It was later staged in London by the National School of Drama for the Festival
of India in 1982.
Hayavadana (1971) was based on a theme drawn from The Transposed Heads, a 1940
novella by Thomas
Mann, which is originally found in Kathasaritsagara, herein
he employed the folk theatre form of Yakshagana.
A German version of the play, was directed byVijaya
Mehta as part of
the repertoire of the Deutsches
National Theatre, Weimar. Naga-Mandala (Play with Cobra, 1988) was based on a
folk tale related to him by A. K. Ramanujam, brought him the Karnataka Sahitya
Academy Award for the Most Creative Work of 1989. It was directed by J. Garland
Wright, as part of the celebrations of the 30th anniversary of Guthrie Theatre,
Minneapolis. The theatre subsequently commissioned him to write the play, Agni Mattu Male (The Fire and the Rain). Though prior
to it came Taledanda (Death by Beheading, 1990) which used the backdrop, the rise of Veerashaivism, a radical
protest and reform movement in 12th century Karnataka to bring out current
issues.[3][9]
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