A writer is designated on the basis of the socio-geographical community and culture to which he belongs and whose tradition, life and language he utilizes in his writings. The Indian English novelists of the 1980s are totally assimilated with the western culture and they establish an independent cultural and literary identity exposed to the experience of life in India and abroad- their writings are of an auto- biographical historical nature, primarily revelations of events and episodes, the experience of the place and its ambience.
The 1980s witnessed efficient emergence of new Indian fiction in English heralding a new era of change in its tone and tenor, with an impressive array of young novelists from the corridors of St. Stephen’s college, New Delhi – Amitabh Ghosh, Allan Sealy, Shashi Tharoor and Vikram Seth. Both quantitatively and qualitatively, by the virtue of his education, Vikram Seth qualifies as a member of the post- independence generation of economically privileged upper middle class Indians – his schooling at Dehradun Public School, his graduation at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, his doctoral studies at Stanford University. He is a famous polymath who has lived in three continents- Asia, Europe and Australia and written in a variety of genres- poetry, fiction, non-fiction, travelogue and libretto. He has studied several languages including Welsh, German, French, Mandarin, English, Urdu, Hindi and the Devanagari language.
In 1986, Vikram Seth wrote The Golden Gate, his first novel, a satirical romance describing the stories of young professionals in San Fransisco throughout their quests and questions to find and deal with love in their lives as well as each other’s lives. In 1993, Seth was propelled into the publi...
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...verse culture with the basic concept of love. His writings reveal the complex heterogeneity and multi locational contexts with trans-national mobility.
Works Cited
Seth, Vikram. The Golden Gate. New York: Random House Inc. 1986.
…. A Suitable Boy. New Delhi: Viking, Penguin India Ltd, 1993.
…. An Equal Music. New Delhi: Viking, Penguin India Ltd, 1999
…. Two Lives. New Delhi: Viking, Penguin India Ltd, 2005.
Gupta, Roopali. Vikram Seth’s Art: An Appraisal. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2005.
Kapur, Akash. ‘The Seth Variations’. Atlantic Unbound Online Edition. June 23, 1999.
Mee, John. ‘After Midnight: The novel in the 1980s and 1990s’. An Illustrated History of Indian
Literature in English. Ed. A.K. Mehrotra. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003.
Punekar, Rohini Mokakshi. Vikram Seth: An Introduction. New Delhi: Foundation Books, 2008.
Alexie, Sherman. The Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. New York: Hachette Book Group, 2007. Print.
In attempting to define the history and modern identity of postcolonial nations, Partha Chatterjee calls to attention the many paradoxes inherent in the cultural fabric of India. It is a country, he notes, with a modern culture based on native tradition that has been influenced by its colonial period. This modern culture contains conflicts and contradictions that create the ambiguity in India’s national identity. U. R. Anantha Murthy’s understands Indian culture as a mosaic pattern of tradition and modernity. He writes of a heterodox reality where the intellectual self is in conflict with the emotional, the rational individual experiences the sad nostalgia of the exile from his traditional roots and in fluctuating between belief and non-belief he works out his dilemmas. This paper attempts a reading of the transgression of “Love Laws” in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things as not only the representation of this heterodox modernity in the personal domain as a reflection of the larger national conflict but also a postcolonial writer’s dilemmas in search for an identity and their troubles in expressing it.
Malkani, Gautam. Londonstani. Rotten English: a literary anthology. By Dohra Ahmad New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007.
Charlemagne was once quoted having said “To have a second language is to have a second soul” (Kushner 29). In achieving full comprehension of another language, one also gains insight into the culture of foreign individuals. It is common knowledge that in the modern world, English is the dominant tongue. Yet, bilingualism, even multilingualism, is a sure sign of possessing the scarce knowledge of cultural diversity. As American society becomes more accepting of various cultures in its politics and education, foreign voices also appear more in American literature. The diversity of origins of the latest young writers is vast: In The New Yorker’s 2010 “Top 20 Under 40” list of new American writers, over one-third were not born in this country. Their homes cross the globe, from Latvia to Peru (“Top 20 Under 40”). The rise in popularity of stories of these bicultural writers can be attributed to the changing of attitudes in America. Our history and present is laden with the accounts of immigrants. Their perspectives are fresh and bursting with talent. Jhumpa Lahiri, a female Bengali author, gained prominence after she was listed in the 1999 edition of the “Top 20 Under 40”. That same year, her collection of short stories “Interpreter of Maladies” was published, and went on to sell millions of copies worldwide. Lahiri in particular is well known for, in the words of Aviya Kushner, “translating the immigrant experience for us, often lyrically…as the English-born child of immigrants, she can move smoothly between both worlds, marveling and assuring us that, yes, it will be all right” (Kushner 27). In many of her short stories, Lahiri focuses on that transition from a foreign culture-in her case, Indian-to American culture. More than oft...
When discussing the controversial authors of Indian literature, one name should come to mind before any other. Salman Rushdie, who is best known for writing the book “Midnights Children.” The first two chapters of “Midnights Children” are known as “The Perforated Sheet”. In “The Perforated Sheet” Rushdie utilizes magic realism as a literary device to link significant events and their effects on the lives of Saleem’s family to a changing India. In fact, it is in the beginning of the story that the reader is first exposed to Rushdie’s use of magic realism when being introduced to Saleem. “On the stroke of midnight/clocks joined palms” and “the instant of India’s arrival at independence. I tumbled forth into the world”(1711). Rushdie’s description of the clocks “joining palms” and explanation of India’s newfound independence is meant to make the reader understand the significance of Saleem’s birth. The supernatural action of the clocks joining palms is meant to instill wonder, while independence accentuates the significance of the beginning of a new era. Rushdie also utilizes magic realism as an unnatural narrative several times within the story to show the cultural significance of events that take place in the story in an abnormal way.
As in representations of the other British colonies, India was used by colonial novelists as a tool of displacement of the individual and re-affirmation of the metropolitan whole. There are three methods by which this effect is achieved. The first method displays an unqualified reliance on a culture too remote to be approached except physically: a hero or protagonist in a pre-mutiny novel is at liberty to escape to India at a moment of crisis, rearrange his life to his advantage and return to a happy ending and the establishment of a newly defined metropolitan life. Dobbin of Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1848) and Peter Jenkins of Gaskell's Cranford (1853) exemplify this well. Even the child Bitherstone of Dickens' Dombey and Son (1848) regards India as his salvation.
The doctoral research that I hope to pursue at -------------- intends to analyse these questions more systemically (more thoroughly?). My research archive would cover Anglophone literary production from Sri Lanka between 1983 and 2009 - the time period of the ethn...
If there is one author which is responsible for bringing realism in Indian fiction back in the early twentieth century, he is Premchand. Before him, almost every Indian fiction encompassed stories about Gods and mythological tales. Premchand’s stories were a true reflection of the society where the abused like the peasants, the farmers, the prostitutes and the widows were crushed all their lives by the hollow norms and rules of the society where the riches and politically powerful ruled. His stories depicted their exploitation and I, as a reader could feel that – such is the ability of his writing skills. He also wrote these stories and novels aiming to bring about social reform in the society.
Shusterman, David. "A Passage to India: Synthesis Broken, or No One is India." The Quest for Certitude in E.M. Forster's Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP,
There are people bustling, merchants selling, Anglo-Indians watching, and birds flying overhead. How many perspectives are there in this one snippet of life? They are uncountable, and that is the reality. Modernist writers strive to emulate this type of reality into their own work as well. In such novels, there is a tendency to lack a chronological or even logical narrative and there are also frequent breaks in narratives where the perspectives jump from one to another without warning. Because there are many points of view and not all of them are explained, therefore, modernist novels often tend to have narrative perspectives that suddenly shift or cause confusion. This is because modernism has always been an experimental form of literature that lacks a traditional narrative or a set, rigid structure. Therefore, E. M. Forster, author of A Passage to India, uses such techniques to portray the true nature of reality. The conflict between Adela, a young British girl, and Aziz, an Indian doctor, at the Marabar Caves is one that implements multiple modernist ideals and is placed in British-India. In this novel, Forster shows the relations and tension between the British and the Indians through a series of events that were all caused by the confusing effects of modernism. E.M. Forster implements such literary techniques to express the importance or insignificance of a situation and to emphasize an impression of realism and enigma in Chandrapore, India, in which Forster’s novel, A Passage to India, takes place.
Recent years have witnessed a large number of Indian English fiction writers who have stunned the literary world with their works. The topics dealt with are contemporary and populist and the English is functional, communicative and unpretentious. Novels have always served as a guide, a beacon in a conflicting, chaotic world and continue to do so. A careful study of Indian English fiction writers show that there are two kinds of writers who contribute to the genre of novels: The first group of writers include those who are global Indians, the diasporic writers, who are Indians by birth but have lived abroad, so they see Indian problems and reality objectively. The second group of writers are those born and brought up in India, exposed to the attitudes, morale and values of the society. Hence their works focus on the various social problems of India like the plight of women, unemployment, poverty, class discrimination, social dogmas, rigid religious norms, inter caste marriages, breakdown of relationships etc.
The measured dialogue between Reader and Editor serves as the framework through which Gandhi seeks to discredit accepted terms of civilization and denounce the English. These principle characters amply assist in the development o...
Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children employs strategies which engage in an exploration of History, Nationalism and Hybridity. This essay will examine three passages from the novel which demonstrate these issues. Furthermore, it will explore why each passage is a good demonstration of these issues, how these issues apply to India in the novel, and how the novel critiques these concepts.
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, published in 1980, was perhaps the seminal text in conceiving opinions as to interplay of post-modern and post-colonial theory. The title of the novel refers to the birth of Saleem Sinai, the novel’s principal narrator, who is born at midnight August 15th 1947, the precise date of Indian independence. From this remarkable coincidence we are immediately drawn to the conclusion that the novel’s concerns are of the new India, and how someone born into this new state of the ‘Midnight’s child’, if you will, interacts with this post-colonial state. To characterise the novel as one merely concerned with post-colonial India, and its various machinations, is however a reductive practice. While the novel does at various times deal with what it is to be Indian, both pre and post 1947, it is a much more layered and interesting piece of work. Midnight’s Children’s popularity is such that it was to be voted 25th in a poll conducted by the Guardian, listing the 100 best books of the last century, and was also to receive the Booker Prize in 1981 and the coveted ‘Booker of Bookers’ in 1993. http://www.bookerprize.co.uk/
Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956. He is one of the leading Indian writers in English who interweaves nature with experience and history. His works show an interaction between nature and human. He has published many fictions such as The Circle of Reason (1986), The Shadow Lines (1988), In An...