The Making of Indian English Literature brings together seventeen well-researched essays of Subhendu Mund with a long introduction by the author historicising the development of the Indian writing in English while exploring its identity among the many appellations tagged to it. The volume demonstrates, contrary to popular perceptions, that before the official introduction of English education in India, Indians had already tried their hands in nearly all forms of literature: poetry, fiction, drama, essay, bio­graphy, autobiography, book review, literary criticism and travel writing. Besides translation activities, Indians had also started editing and publish­ing periodicals in English before 1835. Through archival research the author brings to discussion a number of unknown and less discussed texts which contributed to the development of the genre. The work includes exclusive essays on such early poets and writers as Kylas Chunder Dutt, Shoshee Chunder Dutt, Toru Dutt, Mirza Moorad Alee Beg, Krupabai Satthianadhan, Swami Vivekananda, H. Dutt, and Sita Chatterjee; and historiographical studies on the various aspects of the genre. The author also examines the strategies used by the early writers to indianise the western language and the form of the novel. The present volume also demonstrates how from the very beginning Indian writing in English had a subtle nationalist agenda and created a space for protest literature. The Making of Indian English Literature will prove an invaluable addition to the studies in Indian writing in English as a source of reference and motivation for further research. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Indian literature is not a corpus of texts or literary concepts from India, argues Preetha Mani, but a provocation that seeks to resolve the relationship between language and literature, written in as well as against English. Examining canonical Hindi and Tamil short stories from the crucial decades surrounding decolonization, Mani contends that Indian literature must be understood as indeterminate, propositional, and reflective of changing dynamics between local, regional, national, and global readerships. In The Idea of Indian Literature, she explores the paradox that a single canon can be written in multiple languages, each with their own evolving relationships to one another and to English. Hindi, representing national aspirations, and Tamil, epitomizing the secessionist propensities of the region, are conventionally viewed as poles of the multilingual continuum within Indian literature. Mani shows, however, that during the twentieth century, these literatures were coconstitutive of one another and of the idea of Indian literature itself. The writers discussed here—from short-story forefathers Premchand and Pudumaippittan to women trailblazers Mannu Bhandari and R. Chudamani—imagined a pan-Indian literature based on literary, rather than linguistic, norms, even as their aims were profoundly shaped by discussions of belonging unique to regional identity. Tracing representations of gender and the uses of genre in the shifting thematic and aesthetic practices of short vernacular prose writing, the book offers a view of the Indian literary landscape as itself a field for comparative literature.

The first history of Indian literature in English to cover the 200 years from Raja Rammohan Ray to Arundhati Roy, including in its scope canonical poets and novelists, social reformers (Behramji Malabari), anthropologists (Verrier Elwin), nature writers (Sálim Ali), and writers of the Indian disapora (Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Ved Mehta).

The essays in this book look at the interaction between English and other Indian languages and focus on the pressure of languages on writers and on each other. Divided into two parts, the first part of the book deals with the pressure that English language has exerted, and continues to exert, in India and our ideas of connectedness as a nation in the ways in which we deal with this pressure. The essays emphasise on the emergence of the hybrid language in the Tamil cultural world because of the presence of English (and Hindi); on the politics of ‘anthologisation’; and how Karnad’s Tughlaq deals with the idea of the nation, looking at its historical location. The second part of the book focuses on Indian English literature and deals with how it interacts with the idea of representing the Indian nation, sometimes obsessively, seen both in poetry and novels. The book argues that the writer’s location is crucial to the world of imagination, whether in the novel, poetry or drama. The world is inflected by the location of the author, and the struggle between the language dominant in that location and English is part of the creative tension that provides energy and uniqueness to writing.

Chaudhuri's extravagant and discerning collection unfurls the full diversity of Indian writing from the 1850s to the present in English, and in elegant new translations from Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu. Among the 38 authors represented are contemporary superstars such as Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, and Pankaj Mishra.