INTRODUCTION

Literature is a term used to describe written and sometimes spoken material.

Literature most commonly refers to creative imagination including poetry, drama,

fiction and nonfiction.

Literature is a group of works of art made up of words. Most are written but

some are passed on by word of mouth. Literature usually means work of poetry and

prose that are especially well written. There are many different kinds of literature

such as Poetry, plays or novels. They can also be put into groups through the

language historical Period, origin, genre and subject. The word literature comes from

the Latin word “learning, writing, grammar”

Most of the earliest works were Epic poem. Epic poems are long stories about

are two famous Greek Poems by Homer. There were passed down through speaking

and written down around the 8th century BC. Literature can also mean imaginative for

creative writing which is looked at for its artistic value.

English literature began in old English with the epic poem Beowolf, which

dates from sometime between the 8th to the 11th centuries. It is not written in

language people can understand today, but there are several good translations into

modern English. It is the most famous work in old English, despite being set in

Scandinavia. The poem is written with no rhymes but with alliteration. The next

important landmark is the works of the poet Geoffrey chaucer especially 'The

Canterbury Tales'-Chaucer introduced into English poetry rhyme royal that is a

seven line stanza rhymed ababbcc.

The seed of Indian writing in English was sown during the period of the

British rule in India. Now the seed has blossomed into an evergreen tree, fragrant
flowers and ripe fruits. The fruits are being tasted not only by the native people, but

they are also being chewed and digested by the foreigners. It happened only after the

constant caring, pruning and feeding.

Gardeners like Tagore, Sri aurobindo, R.k. Narayan, Raja Rao – to name a

few, looked after the tender plant night and day. In modern time, it is guarded by a

number of writers who are getting awards and accolades all over the world.

Indian English literature is the body of work by writers in India who write in

the English language and who native or co-native language could be one of the

numerous languages of India. Its early history began with the works of Michael

Madhusudan Dutt followed by R.K. Narayanan, Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao who

contributed to Indian fiction in the 1930s. It is also associated with the works of

members of the Indian diaspora who are of Indian descent. It is frequently referred to

as Indo-Anglian Literature.

Indian English Literature has a relatively recent history, being only one and a

half centuries old. The first book written by an Indian in English was Travels of Dean

Mahomed, a travel narrative by Sake Dean Mahomed published in England in 1798.

In its early stages, Indian English Literature was influenced by the western

novel. Early Indian writers used English unadulterated by Indian words to convey an

experience, which was essentially Indian.

Indian English Literature is an honest enterprise to demonstrate the ever rare

gems of Indian writing in English. From being a singular and exceptional, rather

gradual native flare-up of geniuses, Indian writing has turned out to be a new form of

Indian culture and voice in which India converses regularly.

Indian writers, poets, novelists, essayists and dramatists have been making

momentous and considerable contributions to world literature since Pre-Independence

era, the past few years have witnessed a gigantic prospering and thriving of Indian

English writing in the global market.

Indian English literature has attained an independent status in the realm of

world literature. Wide ranges of themes are dealt within Indian writing in English.

While this literature continues to reflect Indian culture, tradition, social values and

even Indian history through the depiction of life in India and Indians living elsewhere,

recent Indian English fiction has been trying to give expression to the Indian

experience of the modern predicaments. There are critics and commentators in

England and America who appreciate Indian English novels.

Prof. M.K. Naik remarks “A one of the most notable gifts of English education

to India is prose fiction for though India was probably a fountain head of story-telling,

the novel as we know today was an importation from the west”.

India’s substantial contribution to world literature is largely due to the

profusely creative literary works generated by Indian novelists in English. Their

works contemplated and deliberated on multifarious range of issues like nationalism,

freedom struggle, social realism, individual consciousness and the like. This literary

movement being fortified by the overwhelming output by novelist and distinguished

itself as a remarkable force in world fiction. This has been achieved by novelists who

sought to prove their inner creative by mastering the intricacies of the language and

Indian- sub continent. Raja Rao famously argued in 1938, in the preface to his novel

Kanthapura, for using English, but English adapted to Indian conditions.

English is not an alien language to us. It is the language of our intellectual

make up like Sanskrit or Persian was before but not of our emotional make-up. We

are all instinctively bilingual, many of us in our own language and in English. We

cannot write like the English. We should not. We can only write as Indians. Our
method of expression will someday prove to be as distinctive and colorful as the Irish

or the American.

Indian English Literature is two hundred years old. Sri Aurobindo stands like a

huge oak spreading its branches over these two centuries. The contribution of Sri

Autobindo as a perfect writer and craftsman is undoubtedly great. He is the first poet

in Indian English writing who has given the re-interpretation of myths. Sri Aurobindo

envisages spiritual humanism.

Rabinadranath Tagore is a celebrated name in the sphere of English literature.

His creative genius is so much accounting and his literary output is so much rich and

varied that the phrase ‘Myriad-minded’, which Mathew Arnold had used for him

shakespear can apply him also. He won Nobel prize for literature in 1913, for his

immortal poetic work Gitanjali.

K.S.Venkataramani is an Indo-Anglian writer of the Pre-Independent era

brilliantly focuses on the stupendous impact of Mahatma Gandhi in general. He is a

novelist and short-story writer. He interweaves the centrality of the novel keeping in

view the Gandhian ideology of a self-sufficient, morally and economically integrated

village community as the theme of his works.

Bhabani Bhattacharya is one of the novelists of the older generation of Indo-

Anglain writers. He is endowed with a transparently positive vision of life, explored

and expressed artistically in his novels. His first five novels are set against Indian

social sense in the perspectives of setting both in India and America’s Hawaii island

and deals with the theme of spiritual quest.

The triumvirs Milk Raj Anand, Raja Rao and R.K. Narayan were the novelists

who stabilized and fortified the Indian English English Fiction with their ample works
and unique literary style. Each used its own version of an English freed from the

foggy taste of Britain.

The majority of mulk Raj Anand’s novels bring to the limelight of the

inequalities of society and trials and tribulations of the less fortunate. Untouchable,

coolie, The village and The private life of an Indian prince addresses the evils existing

in the society in the Marxist terms. He was instrumental in bringing about an

awareness of the inequality that existed in India. He also advocated solutions for the

issues.

R.K. Narayan is another celebrity author who enjoys a unique position in the

crowded literary scene of Indian fiction. He is undoubtedly the master of portraying

the socio-comic aspects of the ordinary Indian’s family and idiosyncrasies of human

which form the crux of his novels. The greatest merit of his language and style lives

in its simplicity. The vividness in character portrayal is balanced by ironic humor,

which is his characteristic style.

Raja Rao’s reputation as a is amply justified by his substantial contribution in

upholding these themes in his novels. Women in Raja Rao’s novels suffer from

domestic injustice and tyrannical tradition, but the writer suggests no way his novels

to spread the Gandhian message and as propaganda against social evils.

The contributions by women writers cannot go unnoticed. In fact the works by

women writers constitute a major segment of the contemporary Indian writing in

English. Today women are seen establishing their identity in almost all walks of life

and they have heralded a new consciousness in the realm of literature too. Feminism

themes have also been used by authors like Nayantara Sahgal and Rama Mehta.

A novel is a narrative work of prose fiction that tells a story about specific

human experiences over a considerable length.

 Prose style and length, as well as fictional or semi-fictional subject matter are

the most clearly defining characteristics of a novel. Unlike works of epic poetry, it

tells its story using prose rather than verse, unlike short stories, it tells a lengthy

narrative rather than a brief selection.

A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, normally written in prose

form and which is typically published as a book. The present English word for a long

work of prose fiction derivers from the Italian novella for “new”, “news”, or “short

story of something new”, itself from the Latin novella, a singular noun use of the

neuter plural of Novellus, diminutive of Novus, meaning “new”.

Walter Scott made a distinction between the novel, in which “events are of

accommodated to the ordinary train of human events and the modern state of society”

and the romance, which he defined as “a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the

interest of which turns upon marvelous and uncommon incidents”.

The novel constitutes “a continuous and comprehensive history of about two

thousand years”, with its origins in classical Greece and Rome, in medieval and early

modern romance and in the tradition of the Italian renaissance novella. Since the 18 th

century, the term “novella”, or “novelle” in German, has been used in English and

other European languages to describe a long short story or a short novel.

“Mursaki shikibu’s Tale of Genji” an early 11th century Japanese text, has

sometimes been described as the world’s first novel, but there is considerable debate

over this – there were certainly long fictional works much earlier. Spread of printed

books in china led to the appearance of classical Chinese novels by the Ming dynasty.

Fictionality is most commonly cited as distinguishing novels from

historiography. However this can be a problematic criterion. Throughout the early

moder period authors of historical narratives would often include inventions rooted
and traditional beliefs in order to embellish a passage of text or add credibility to an

opinion.

The novel is today the longest genre of narrative prose fiction, followed by the

novella. The requirement of length has been traditionally connected with the notion

that a novel should encompass the “totality of life”

Anita Desai is a critically lauded 20th century writer, and her novels on the

experiences and inner lives of Indian men and women are known for their

compassion, eloquence and lucid prose. Having come of age when India achieved

independence in 1947, Desai weaved politics and gender issues into her works.

Anita Desai was born on June 24, 1937. She is an Indian novelist and the

Emerita John E.Burchard professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of

Technology. As a writer she has been shortlisted for the Booker prize three times. She

received a Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel fire on the mountain from

the Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of letters. She won the British

Guardian prize for “The Village by the Sea”.

Desai was born in 1937 in Mussoorie, India to a German immigrant mother,

Toni Nime and a Bengali businessman, D.N.Mazumdar. Her Bengali father first met

her German mother while he was an engineering student in pre-war Berlin, and they

got married during a period when it was still unusual for an Indian man to marry a

Europeon Woman. Shortly after therir marriage, they moved to new Delhi, when

Desai was raised up with her two elder sisters and brothers.

She was a student at Queen Mary’s Higher Secondary school in Delhi and

received her B.A in English literature in 1957 from the Miranda House of the

University of Delhi. The following year she married Ashvin Desai, the director of a
computer software company and author of the book between Eternities: Ideas on life

and The cosmos.

They have four children, including Booker prize-winning novelist Kiran

Desai. Her children were taken to Thul for weekends, where Desai set her novel, The

village by the sea. For that work she won the 1983 guardian children’s fiction prize, a

once-in-a-lifetime book award judged by a panel of British Children’s writers.

Desai published her first novel, cry the peacock in 1963. She considers clear

light of day her most autobiographical work as it is set during her coming of age and

also in the same neighborhood in which she grew up.

In 1984, she published In custody- about an urdu poet in his declining days-

which was shortlisted for the Booker prize. In 1993, she became a creative writing

teacher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The 1999 Booker prize finalist novel Fasting, Feasting increased her

peculiarity. Her novel The Zigzag way, set in 20th century Mexico, appeared in 2004

and her latest collection of short stories, The Artist of Disappearance was published in

2011.

Desai has taught at mount Holyoke college, Baruch college and Smith college.

She is a fellow of the Royal society of literature, the American Academy of Arts and

letters and of Girton College, Cambridge.

In 1993, her novel In custody was adapted by Merchant Ivory productions into

an English film by the same name, directed by Ismail Merchant, with a screenplay by

Sharukh Husain. It won the 1994 President of India Gold medal for best picture and

stars Shashi kapoor, Shabana azmi and Om puri.

 Anita Desai writes with candour the feeling are stark and need no explanation.

Her characters are often cocooned, living in their own selves, comfortable in their

skin and at times restless like any other characters would be.

Her novels are bleak but sometimes that is the truth about human nature. There

is also the unknown kindness that makes itself visible in her works – from the

relationship of the poet and his fan in “In Custody” to the delicate balance between a

great- grandmother and her great – grandmother and her great granddaughter in “Fire

on the mountains”, which gets maintained over the course of the book.

Desai’s characters are human. They are awkward, shy, boisterous and often

just want to live their lives cocooned without any interference from the world. They

provide the necessary calm and quiet which is needed.

“In custody” the subtlety of a poet’s last days and lost grandeur is depicted

with such pathos, that even we could not help but cry in some parts. The relationship

between the poet and his long time admirer is so delicate and so factual, that one

begins to wonder and introspect about all relationships in that manner.

“Fire on the mountain” begins with an intrusion. The characters think they are

different from each other, till their similarities come to tha surface along with the hurt,

pain, kindness, only ending in Tragedy. The book has less dialogue and more beauty

in the way the characters behave and silently ponder over the events unfolding around

them.

Anita Desai’s books probably are set in different times and worlds, and yet

they ring so true for present times. The pathos of “In Custody” to the grimness of life

in “Fasting, Feasting”, her novels are not for the Weak-hearted. Every book of hers is

a gem to be cherished and kept and to go back to and admire as the years pass by.

Anita Desai is truly one of India’s prolific and erudite writers.

 Anita Nair is a prolific writer best known for her novels Mistress, Ladies

coupe, Idris: keeper of Light and Better man. She has also written a poetry collection

and non- fiction books to her credit. Recently she stepped into crime genre with her

Inspector Gowda series.

Chitra Banarjee Divakumari is best known for Mistress of spices, and

Oleander Girl. The palace of Illusions, a retelling of Mahabharatha through

Draupadi’s pov is an excellent one on Indian mythology. Divakaruni’s works are

largely set in India and the united states, and often focus on the experiences of south

Asian immigrants. Her novels fall into multiple geures, including literary fiction,

historical fiction, myth and fantasy.

Jhumpa Lahiri is an American writer with Indian origins. Her stories capture

the nostalgia faced by immigrants and have a distinct Indianness to them. ‘The

Namesake’, her debut novel is well acclaimed and her latest one, ‘The Lowland’ got

into the Man Booker Longlist, 2013.

Kiran Desai is the daughter of Anita Desai. Her first novel, Hullabaloo in the

Guava orchard, won the Betty Trask award. Her second book, The Inheritance of

Loss, won the 2006 Man Booker P:rize, as well as the 2006 National Book critics

circle Fiction Award.

Kamala Surayya is a prominent writer and poet who has written both in

Malayalam and English. She was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in literature in 1984.

Her writings are personal and she did not shy away from topics such as female sexual

awakening.