From Anand to Adiga, it is a fast leaping-forward in the art of storytelling in a foreign language by Indian writers who have a rich cultural heritage and a desperate desire to express themselves to international public. It is a journey from imitation to authentic expression through myriad experiment.
This book introduces a few of them to the college and university students showing their main traits and discussing at least one representative work of each.
The emphasis is on the broad theme of a story and its style of expression. Anand's tragic life-view, Narayan's ironical approach and Rao's philosophical inter-pretation of human experiences have been deftly analyzed before moving on to search for roots in a Diaspora of writings and probing into the complexities of modern human relationships.
Shubha Mukherjee (née Ganguly), an Assistant Professor of English in Guru Nanak Khalsa College, Mumbai, is widely known for her extensive study and intensive scholarship of Indian Fiction in English. Her articles lie scattered in literary journals all over the country. She has a novel, Delicate Desire, also to her credit. Glimpses of Indian Fiction in English is her debut in literary criticism in book form.
'Twice-born Indian fiction in English is now a well-recognized globally-respected area of English literature. Books come streaming in in the market, many of them being award-winning best-sellers, and, their makers held in high respect by the reading public all over the world. But it is the story of a few years, not even a century. When Untouchable of Mulk Raj Anand was published in 1935, it was a big milestone, as if it was the starting point of a new journey, a story written in English language with a theme thoroughly Indian, richly topical and yet having universal symbolism. Anand wrote quite a few novels in quick succession, cach dealing with social and political problems of the time, and the time was of hope and despair, suffering and sacrifice, confusion and uncertainties. Those were the years around 'independence', and this independence was not just a change in the political scenario, a shift from British administration to Indian administration or the replacement of the union jack by our own tri-colour, but the birth of a new civilization with all the pangs and possibilities of a new beginning.
Independence was achieved in 1947 but before that there was a multi-dimensional struggle for no less than a century in a country of myriad diversities, not only diversities in living pattern and culture but also in wishes and ambitions.
All these trickled down to a peculiar social milieu simmering in expectation to be expressed in fictional literature. True, India has so many rich native languages each of which is capable of producing good literature, but at this juncture of time the world was opening up to India with great eagerness and curiosity to know more about this country of nawabs and maharajas living in harmony (!) with millions dying in hunger and malnutrition, a country of the richest ancient wisdom and starkest present-day illiteracy. India must tell her story to the world and for that Indian languages, despite rich literature in them, were not sufficient.
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