Chapter One: Introduction

The First Chapter incorporates the thematic preliminaries delineating the

significance of the exploration of self and the comparative culture study. It includes an
overview of Novel as a literary type and takes an elaborate stock of the origin and
development of Indian Novel in English. This Chapter also takes into consideration an
outline of Short Story as a genre along with the illumination of the origin of this genre and
the Indian Short Story in English. An attempt has also been made at analyzing the
introduction of English in India and the future of Indian Fiction in English.

I.i. Thematic Preliminaries:

The 21st century India is essentially a nation under an unprecedented impact of
globalization which has changed the national culture altogether. Though the process of
Globalization is said to have been originated in the second half of the 20th century, the
process got under way almost three thousand years ago. The inevitable process of
globalization consists in the fact that different cultures and economic systems around the
world are becoming connected and similar to each other because of the influence of large
multinational companies and of the improved communication systems. It is also said that
this international phenomenon has been responsible for the spreading influence of
companies beyond their national borders and increased interconnectivity between the
economies and most importantly the cultures of countries. Under the influence of these
developments, nations and people are getting integrated politically, economically and
culturally into a larger community.

Swami Vivekananda foresaw the adverse results of globalization influencing the

national culture, as he asserted that India would not die due only to its spirituality,
tolerance and ideality, which form the ethos of this nation. However, he warned the
Indians against the dangers of lust and luxury giving rise to fraud, force and competition
bringing about the destruction of man or the self. Mahatma Gandhi too dedicated his
lifetime for creating awareness among the people of India about the significance of the
essence of India consisting in truth, nonviolence and tolerance. His life had been a series
of attempts at exploration and enrichment of self in the context of his ideals, his family
and the nation at large. Exploration of self has been a preoccupation with Indians. The self
has been considered to be a complex entity moulded by the world around. It is a cauldron
of emotions, feelings, desires, memories, aspirations, inhibitions and a host of other things.

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The post-colonial Indian condition has made an individual to come to terms with the
global forces. This has certainly shaken the very roots of existence. The self is made more
and more complicated and mysterious.

Culture study involves the analysis of the fictional works of Aravind Adiga and
Kiran Desai in terms of the elements of culture consisting in social organizations, customs
and traditions, values and norms, language, religion, race, caste, gender, forms of
government, economic system and symbols. Culture study subsumes culture as constantly
interacting and changing sets of practices and processes. As far as the present research is
concerned, the select fictional works of Aravind Adiga and Kiran Desai have been
analyzed considering the depiction of culture in these works and a comparison of them.

Literature, being a reflection of the self and the society, has its own way of
interpreting individuals besieged by their surroundings. Indian writing in English has
shown its concerns for the depiction of the self in the post-colonial period. Especially, the
Indian fiction in English has been a rich inventory of India during and after the British Raj.
The early Indian novelists in English like Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao and R. K. Narayan
showed a tendency of portraying the socio-political conditions, whereas the writers like
Khushwant Singh, Chaman Nahal and Salman Rushdie, writing after the national freedom,
are said to have been under the impact of the horrors of the partition. The second half of
the 20th century saw a change in the depiction of the Indian fiction in English with the rise
of the writers like- Manohar Malgonkar, G V Desani, Nayantara Sahgal, Anita Desai, I
Allan Sealy, Arun Joshi, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Shashi
Tharoor, Rohinton Mistry, Boman Desai, Kiran Nagarkar, Shashi Deshpande, Bharati
Mukherjee, Gita Hariharan, Arundhati Roy, Manju Kapur, and Jhumpa Lahiri who
brought the Indian fiction in English abreast of the subtleties of human life.

Carrying forward the same line of fictional depiction or precisely speaking,

bringing in more consideration for the individuals are the contemporary Indian writers like
Aravind Adiga and Kiran Desai. The proposed research has been undertaken on the select
fictional works of Aravind Adiga and Kiran Desai, who have been awarded the Man
Booker Prize for their novels in 2008 and 2006 respectively. The two writers have
concretized the dilemma of the Indian individuals in their literary works. These writers
have written about India under the bludgeoning forces of globalization, giving rise to a set
of awe-inspiring cultural changes.
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Their works bring out the tales of the individuals in conflict with their self and
surroundings. These fictional works make a worthy attempt at illuminating the self, which
is a complex of social, political, financial, psychological, religious and cultural forces.

I.ii. Scope and Limitations of the Research:

The present research accommodates the select fictional works of the two Indian
writers in English, namely Aravind Adiga and Kiran Desai. The study material has been
collected from the primary and the secondary sources concerned. The limitation of the
research is that it has focused critically the three fictional works by Aravind Adiga- The
White Tiger (2008), Between the Assassinations (2008) and Last Man in Tower (2011)
and the two fictional works by Kiran Desai- Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998)
and The Inheritance of Loss (2006) excluding the other latest writings of these two
writers. This research is constituted by a comparative study of the exploration of self in the
changing cultural context of India in the select fictional works of Aravind Adiga and
Kiran Desai.
Most importantly, the methodology adopted for the present research work is
culture study with a comparative approach. This research considers only those criteria
from this theory which are suitable for the literary studies.

I.iii. Significance of the Research:

The present research work has been aimed at analyzing how the exploration of self
is actualized against the cultural background of India in the fictional works selected. It is
in the fitness of things to make an attempt at assessing the novelists’ thematic concerns as
well as their critical explorations in the Indian cultural context. The present study has been
done according to the principles of culture study also. In addition, this research will be
helpful for understanding the shades of contemporary varieties of fiction.

I.iv. Aims and Objectives of the Research:

The aims and objectives of the present doctoral research are:
1. To take an overview of the history of Indian fiction in English from its inception to
the contemporary situation
2. To assess the process of cultural changes in the context of India and their reflection
in the select fictional works

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 3. To critically study the exploration of self in the cultural context of India in the
select fictional works of Aravind Adiga
4. To critically study the exploration of self in the cultural context of India in the
select fictional works of Kiran Desai
5. To compare the exploration of the self in the Indian cultural context in the select
fictional works of Aravind Adiga and Kiran Desai
6. To employ the elements of culture for the comparative study to the select fiction of
Aravind Adiga and Kiran Desai

I.v. Hypotheses:
1. The process of globalization in India has taken into grips the social, political,
financial and most importantly the cultural life of the individuals in such a manner as to
bring them in conflict with the fundamental questions of orientation, roots and existence.
2. Novel, as a more democratized, flexible and reader-friendly literary type than
poetry or drama, provides sufficient scope for the analysis of human life and the forces
shaping, directing and undermining it.
3. The Indian Novel in English during the last four decades has undergone a sea
change from the depiction of the broader aspects of life to the portrayal of the subtleties of
human existence shaped by the changing cultural context.
4. The novels and stories of Aravind Adiga have been the creations which have
delineated the inner workings of the individuals under the inevitable forces of culture.
5. The novels of Kiran Desai have brought out the complexities constituting the
selves under the overwhelming conditions caused by the wide-ranging transformation in
the cultural scenario.

I.vi. Review of Literature:

Shreeja Sharma has published a Ph.D. thesis converted into the book titled Kiran
Desai: Critical Study in Diaspora, New Age Diaspora and Multiculturalism in 2016. It
analyses the fictional works of Kiran Desai from the Diasporic point of view only and the
author has taken only one writer for research. Pundlik J. Wankhade completed Ph.D.
research on Socio-Cultural Variations in the Works of Kiran Desai, Aravind Adiga,
Jhumpa Lahiri and Manju Kapur: A Comparative Study in 2015. Though this study is
aimed at comparison, it lacks the analysis from the culture study’s perspective.

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 Rashmi J. Soni carried out Ph.D. research on Unfolding Cultural Dilemma: A
Comparative Study of Manju Kapur’s and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction in 2013. It deals with
the study of the fictional works of women writers Manju Kapur and Jhumpa Lahiri. The
author has dealt with the select works of these writers and brought out the cultural
dilemma in them.

Authorspress has published Dr Archana Bhattacharjee’s book titled Reflection of

Social Ethos in the Select Novels of Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai and Aravind
Adiga (2015). It’s a thesis that analyses the works of the Booker Prize Winning Indian
writers from the social point of view by selecting only one novel of each writer.

The Atlantic Publishers has brought out a book edited by Vijay K. Sharma & Dr
Neeru Tandon titled Kiran Desai and Her Fictional World (2011). The book is a
collection of articles with insights into the various aspects of the works of Kiran Desai.
Kamal Kumar Raul has published a book entitled The Cultural Landscape of Jhumpa
Lahiri and Kiran Desai (2015) through the Atlantic Publishers and Distributers. The book
is about the cultural ethos reflected in the works of Jhumpa Lahiri and Kiran Desai.

S. Monika has published a book titled Contemporary Social Issues in Aravind

Adiga’s The White Tiger and Last Man in Tower (2015). The book analyses the two
novels of Aravind Adiga from the social point of view only. It doesn’t include the analysis
of the collection of short stories by Adiga. K.K.Singh’s Studies in Modern Indian English
Novels appreciates the novels of five Indian writers including Aravind Adiga. The book is
an analysis of the themes and stylistic devices used in the works of these writers.

The Fiction of Kiran Desai (2015) is a collection of articles edited by Tapan K.

Ghosh. The book mainly focuses The Inheritance of Loss, by Desai and sporadically deals
with Hullabaloo in Guava Orchard. The Fiction of Aravind Adiga: A Critical Study is the
title of the Ph.D. thesis completed by Chaudhari L.S. in the year 2012.

I.vii. Research Methodology:

The methodology adopted for the present research is descriptive, interpretative,
analytical and critical with the help of various print and electronic, primary and secondary
sources of the selected authors and their select literary works. The data are critically
analyzed, compared and evaluated with the objective of studying the exploration of the
self in the cultural context of India in the select literary works.

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 The novels of Aravind Adiga and Kiran Desai have been studied according the
basic tenets of culture study with a comparative approach. The MLA method has been
used to cite the references of the Primary and Secondary Sources.

I.viii. Chapter Scheme:

Chapter One: Introduction

The First Chapter presents, along with the thematic
preliminaries, an outline of Indian Fiction in English along
with its origin, development, the contemporary situation, its
prospective and the changing cultural scenario in India
under the impact of globalization.
Chapter Two: Exploration of Self in the Select Fiction of Aravind
Adiga
This chapter critically brings about a study of the
exploration of self in Aravind Adiga’s select fictional works:
The White Tiger, Between the Assassinations & Last Man in
Tower.
Chapter Three: Exploration of Self in the Select Fiction of Kiran Desai
This Chapter examines the exploration of self in Kiran
Desai’s select fictional works: Hullabaloo in the Guava
Orchard & The Inheritance of Loss.
Chapter Four: A Comparative Culture Study of the Select Fiction of
Aravind Adiga and Kiran Desai
This chapter has been aimed at analyzing the select fiction
of Aravind Adiga and Kiran Desai according to the tenets of
culture study consisting in the components of culture with a
comparative approach.
Chapter Five: Conclusion
The Last Chapter is aimed at summing up the arguments of
the preceding chapters and ultimately arriving at certain
conclusions.

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I.ix. Origin of Novel as a Genre:
Novel as a literary type or genre came into existence as a matter of evolution rather
than revolution. Establishment of novel as a genre has not been an overnight development.
The word novel has been derived from novella, an Italian word, which itself has been
taken from novellus, which means ‘new’ (Thompson 931).
R.J. Reese in his book titled English Literature: An Introduction to Foreign
Readers quotes a definition of novel from The Shorter Oxford Dictionary, as it is,
“…a fictitious prose narrative of a considerable length in which
characters and actions representative of the real life of past or
present are portrayed in a plot of more or less complexity.”

(Reese 106)

Emphasizing the organic unity of novel, Henry James, the noted novelist has made
a revealing comment in his essay The Art of Fiction:

A novel is living thing, all one and continuous, like any other
organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that
in each of the parts there is something of the other parts.

(James 392)

Henry Fielding, the celebrated English novelist, calls novel to be a comic epic in
prose, whereas, Jane Austen claims that the greatest powers of mind are displayed in a
novel. According to Abraham H. Lass:

… novel is the individual vision of an artist, his direct impression

of reality. To share his discoveries we must look at the view he sees
from his personal porthole.

(Lass xi)

For George Meredith a novel presents a summary of the life within and without,
and on the other hand, William Henry Hudson funnily defines novel as a work which can
be written by anyone who has sufficient paper, ink, time and patience. An American
novelist Marion Crawford calls novel to be a theatre in pocket, since all the elements
included in a play are potentially found in a novel. In terms of the flexibility of novel as
literary type, J.A. Cuddon fittingly states:

7
 The subject matter of the novel eludes classification, for it is the
hold-all and Gladstone bag of literature. No other literary form
has proved so pliable and adaptable to a seemingly endless variety
of topics and themes.

(Cuddon 561)

Novel consists of nine different elements: Plot, People, Point of view, Setting,
Form, Subject &Theme, Diction, Philosophy and Tone. Plot of a novel is a series of events
and incidents arranged in the cause and effect manner, which is called the principle of
causality. Plot of a novel may be simple or complex. People are the characters in a novel.
The characters may by human, non-human or/and superhuman. Sometimes the setting may
also assume the proportions of a character, the Yorkshire Moors in Emily Bronte’s
Wuthering Heights is an example of a ‘spatial character’.

Once the plot and the characters are selected by the novelist, he has to adopt a
suitable point of view for unfolding the plot, containing characters, their actions and
events. There are two broad points of view: I Person and III Person. The I person point of
view consists in the use of the pronominal references like I, we, me, mine, and other such
references. The III person point of view can be omnipresent, which means the narrator
knows everything about the characters, their actions and the events, or limited, which is
also called the stream of consciousness narration. It consists in the narration of a novel
through the consciousness of one selected character. The oriental philosophy of time
which believes in its circular motion gave rise to this type of narrative strategy in the 20th
century by the writers like Henry James, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner
and others. The Indian novelists like Mulk Raj Anand too adopted this narrative style for
their novels.

Another important element of the novel is its setting. The setting in a novel has
three types: Spatial, Temporal and Social. The spatial setting is the place selected by the
writer to locate his plot. The spatial setting has been considered by the novelists with
varying degrees of priority. There are novelists who change the spatial setting with every
new novel, however, there are those who have used the same locale for all their fictional
creations. Thomas Hardy used Wessex as the spatial setting for his novels and
R.K.Narayan used Malgudi as the locale for all his fictional works.

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The temporal setting considers three time zones- past, present or future. A novel with the
past time becomes historical, the other with the present time becomes contemporary and
still other with the future time becomes futuristic. The social setting in a novel is an
amalgamation of different societal elements. Every society in the world has differences in
terms of class, caste, gender, race, language, and culture. The novelist has to select
characters from these social factions according to the need of the plot and the theme.

Novel is a flexible genre that allows and assumes a variety of forms. The
development of novel witnessed the emergence of different forms of fictional expression
in the course of time. The plot in a novel may be unfolded in different manners as follows:

1. Epistolary: A novel which gets unfolded through letters written by the

characters. Samuel Richardson wrote epistolary novels like Clarissa (1748).

2. Picaresque: A novel that takes a picaro or a vagabond for its protagonist and his
escapades are portrayed with reasonable amount of fun and wisdom. Cervantes’s Don
Quixote (1605) has been an ideal precedence in this variety.

3. Allegory: A novel with two levels of plot. The first level has a set of characters,
actions and events, which correspond with the other set of the second level. John Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) is an allegorical novel.

4. Gothic: A novel that has awe-inspiring characters, actions, events and setting.
The vogue for writing the Gothic novels was initiated by Horace Walpole’s The Castle of
Otranto (1764).

5. Fable: A novel which has people consisting in humans as well as animals. The
animals are made to think, speak and act like human beings. George Orwell’s Animal
Farm (1944) is a fable with animals representing political philosophies and their
practitioners.

6. Autobiography: A novel which illuminates some of the persons, events and

actions from the personal life of the writer. Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1850)
presents the childhood misery of the writer.

7. Verse: A novel that unearths the plot by virtue of verse passages. Vikram Seth’s
maiden novel The Golden Gate (1986) is made of 590 sonnets.

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 Arnold Kettle rightly points out that form of the novel comes next to its essence,
which means its insight into life:

‘Form’ is important only in so far as it enhances significance; and

it will enhance significance just in so far as it bears a real relation
to, that is to say symbolizes or clarifies, the aspect of life that is
being conveyed. But form is not in itself significant; the central
core of any novel is what it has to say about life.

(Kettle 15)

Another fictional pair of elements is subject and theme. The subject of the novel is
concrete, whereas the theme is abstract. The major theme of Daniel Defoe’s debut novel
Robinson Crusoe (1719) is human struggle for existence and it is made concrete in the
subject of Robinson Crusoe, a sailor who is shown to create a world of his own on an
unmanned island. While dealing with the importance of subject in a novel, Percy Lubbock
asserts,

What was the novelist’s intention, in a phrase? … It may be

simplest anecdote or the most elaborate concatenation of events, it
may be a solitary figure or the widest network of relationships.

(Lubbock 42-43)

The diction of the novel is determined by the way it is made to talk with the
readers. It is decided in keeping with the point of view the novelist adopts to unfold the
tale. E.M. Forster observes:

The speciality of the novel is that the writer can talk about his
characters as well as through them, or can arrange for us to listen
when they talk to themselves. He has access to self-communings,
and from that level he can descend even deeper and peer into the
subconscious.

(Forster 85)

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 A novelist imbues his work with a philosophy of his own. The philosophy
expressed in the novel may be social, political, religious, cultural, psychological,
existential, aesthetic or racial. The novelist intermingles different shades of these
philosophies in the work, as human life is multifarious. The beginning of the English
novel saw a huge impact on the religious philosophy, however, as the novel developed it
came to accommodate the other areas of human concern. We see the climax of its
philosophical celebration in the modern novelists like William James, James Joyce,
William Faulkner and other writers.

The tone of a writer is decided by his attitude towards life and the world he has
incorporated in the novel. A positive attitude makes the novel humorous, whereas a
negative attitude makes it pathetic. The novelist, who wants to poke fun at different social
follies, makes the novel satirical.

As far as English novel is concerned, before the final rise of this literary type, there
had been certain precursors which must be taken into consideration, as follows:

I.ix.i. Boccaccio’s Decameron:

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) was a 14th century Italian writer, who wrote a
collection of stories under the title Decameron. It is an earliest attempt at writing works in
a narrative form. It has one hundred stories related by a group ten Italians got together
under the threat of Plague. Themes concerning day-to-day human life have been included
in this book.

I.ix.ii. Chaucer’s Narratives:

Geoffrey Chaucer (1345-1400) is considered to be the father of English undefiled.
Although he was a poet, he brought into his poetic expressions the first attempts at
narration in the history of English literature. His book The Canterbury Tales (1476) is a
collection of stories in verse, which presents diversified aspects of human life.

I.ix.iii Picaresque Fiction:

Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), a Spanish writer, came out with his fictional
work titled Don Quixote, which consisted in two parts, the first was published in 1605,
whereas the second in 1615. This novel has been internationally famous and has been
translated into more than sixty world languages.

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The Spanish term picaro means somebody who is a vagabond, rogue or rascal. It also
means a person who wanders from one place to another place with changing settings. Don
Quixote is the story of an old man Quixote, the Don, who undertakes different unforced
adventures along with his squire Sancho Panza, a ceaseless source of humour.

I.ix.iv. English Picaro:

It was Thomas Nash (1567-1601) who first wrote an English version of a
picaresque novel. He wrote The Unfortunate Traveller or The Life of Jack Wilton (1594),
which narrates the story of the voyage undertaken by Jack Wilton, the picaro, through
Germany and Italy.

I.ix.v. John Bunyan:

John Bunyan (1628-1688) was an English writer and preacher. He wrote Pilgrim’s
Progress (1678) which narrates the story of a protagonist called Christian. It is the
narration of different hurdles faced by Christian in the form of a dream. However, this
book was read as a religious allegory only.

I.ix.vi. Aphra Behn:

Aphra Behn (1640-1689) was the first lady writer to earn her a livelihood by virtue
of writing. Her novel Oroonoko (1688) is one of the earliest attempts at writing a fictional
work in English, however, she is not given the status of the first novelist in the history of
English novels. The novel depicts the story of a slave from Surinam.

I.ix.vii. Rise of Periodicals and Readers:

Richard Steele (1672-1729) and Joseph Addison (1672-1719) were the two writers
who published periodicals like The Tatler (1709) and The Spectator (1711), which
cultivated the habit of reading and this created a favourable environment for the reception
of novel, which required spare time and patient reading on the part of the readers.

I.x. Rise of the English Novel:

Daniel Defoe (1660-1631) who was essentially a journalist wrote Robinson Crusoe
in 1719, which is considered to be the first ever full-fledged novel in English. Defoe based
the plot of this novel on a real-life story of a sailor named Alexander Selkirk, getting lost
at sea and going to an unmanned island and staying there for some days bravely.
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Robinson Crusoe is the hero of this novel who accidentally went to an unknown and
unmanned island and lived there for 28 years. He had a pistol to protect himself and a
copy of the Bible to seek inspiration.

With the publication of Daniel Defoe’s novels there came into being a trend of
writing and reading novels. The 18th century witnessed novelists like Samuel Richardson,
Tobias Smollett, Lawrence Stern, Oliver Goldsmith, Horace Walpole and others. The 19th
century novel saw further development of this new genre, which was successfully handled
by the novelists like Jane Austin, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Oscar
Wilde, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Ann Bronte, R.L. Stevenson,
and Thomas Hardy. Regarding the development of the English novel focusing different
social issues during the 18th and 19th centuries, Grahame Smith records:
Another way of tracing the development of the English novel might
be in terms of its relationship to society, and changes in novelistic
form might be validly related to objective social change and to
changes in the conceptions men and women have of their social
world.
(Smith 40)

The 20th century English novel assumed different new dimensions and technical
finesse by virtue of the novelists like H.G. Wells, D.H. Lawrence, Henry James, Joseph
Conrad, P.G. Wodehouse, E.M. Forster, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell,
Graham Greene and a host of others. The 21 st century England has several novelists like
Douglas Adams, Stephen Baxter, A.C. Clarke, Frederick Forsyth, Peter Hamilton, J.K.
Rowling, Julian Barnes, Kate Atkinson, and David Mitchell who are worth mentioning.

I.xi. Outline of the Indian Novel in English

I.xi.i. A Retrospection:

I.xi.i.i. The Historical Background:

The Indian English Literature had its roots in the 19th century India that was under
the British Raj. Going down memory lane, we see that the East India Company was
commissioned by Queen Elizabeth I in the year 1600, with the sole mercenary intentions.
The Company’s first ships hit the coast of Surat in the year 1608.

13
It was Sir Thomas Roe, as the envoy of King James I, who presented himself before the
court of Mughal Emperor Jahangir and sought the permission to set up business centre in
Surat in 1615. The battle of Plassey fought in 1757 and the one fought at Buxar in 1764
were won by the British. The valiant Tipu Sultan too gave in to the British forces in 1799.
The Charter Act of 1833 allowed the British persons to go to India for the propagation of
English and Christian faith. India, with all its diversity in regional, religious, political and
socio-cultural terms, was gradually transmogrified into a British colony.

During the early 19th century, there had been a conflict between the Orientalists
and the Anglicists over the issue of the type of education in India. The Orientalists, most
of them being English scholars like Sir William Jones, staunchly favoured the education in
Sanskrit and Arabic languages. The Anglicists argued in favour of the introduction of the
western knowledge and philosophy in India by virtue of English as a language. Raja
Rammohan Roy intervened on behalf of the Anglicists and supported the demand of
introducing English for the proliferation of the western knowledge in India. In his letter
dated 11th December 1833 to Lord Amherst, he said, that the Sanskrit system of education
would keep India in darkness. However, a more liberal and enlightened system of
instruction would certainly modernize the nation (Rao & Singh 27). The 19th century
turned out to be the beginning of the Indian renaissance.

In order to attribute the language of the British colonizer the status of standard
means of administrative facility, the Minutes of Macaulay was published in the year 1835.
Thomas Babington Macaulay is known to Indians for the report on the state of education
in India under the Raj. Macaulay, who strongly advocated the cause of the British
Imperialism and prominence of English, went on to ridicule the two dominant languages
of India viz. Sanskrit and Arabic, in the following manner,
“I have never found one among them who could deny that a single
shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native
literature of India and Arabia.”
(Macaulay’s Minutes)

Macaulay’s argument was that Sanskrit and Arabic languages were inferior to that
of the British tongue which abounded in the vast intellectual wealth. He referred to two
the-then European communities which were rising in South Africa and Australia due only
to their use of English.
14
He staunchly believed that English would ameliorate the people of India just as Greek and
Latin had done to the British people in the wake of the English Renaissance. Moreover,
Macaulay cited the example of Russia, which had its resurrection by virtue of its proximity
with the west European languages. In the capacity of the rulers of India, Macaulay
asserted, it was the duty of the British to exert this linguistic activism in their colony of the
Indian subcontinent. He held the British investment in Oriental education and book
publication to be mere wastage. And finally, he came out with his declaration that Britain
must generate a class of Indians who became its mediators and who had English tests,
opinions, morals and intellect, but who were Indian in blood and colour. Of course, these
remarks were blatantly racial and prophetically political, nevertheless, they consciously or
unconsciously moulded the future of Indian people and their culture. Macaulay’s Minutes
not only introduced a foreign language in to a nation with multilingual identity, but also
problematized the linguistic situation in the nation with its consequences felt in the present
and the times to come. The most significant result of the introduction of English in India
was the fertility it allowed to the Indian educated class of reaching knowledge and later on
creating in this western language possibilities for expressing the very local plethora of
thoughts, aspirations and insights.

The British rule over India got strengthened with the defeat of the India’s uprising
against the foreign rule in the year 1857 (Iyengar 9-10). On the one hand, India after the
great military fiasco came under the exploitative regime of the British, on the other hand,
the intrinsic socio-cultural problems were too ingrained in the Indian character to be easily
resolved. The Indian arc was trembling on the turbulent waters being burdened with
different bickering religions, races, castes, creeds, and to make the matters worse the
nation came under the rule of an imperial superpower. However, the phenomenon of the
introduction of English in India has been a productive topic giving rise to so many
interpretations, biases, prejudices, theories, counter-theories and to top them all a corpus
of literary creation worth considering nationally and internationally.

To be sure, the early names for Indian English Literature were different. The first
of these to be begotten was Anglo-Indian literature. However, as it sounded racial, it was
not accepted to be the name of the new literature of India in a foreign tongue. Besides, the
Anglo-Indians were not a sizeable community during the pre-independent India.

15
Another of the nomenclatures was Indo-Anglian, which happened to be used in the last
quarter of the 19th century. However, this name too couldn’t go down the throats of
Indians.
There were two acceptable names for the literary output of the Indian writers in
English- Indian Writing in English and Indian English Literature. It was KR Srinivasa
Iyengar who used the term Indian Writing in English, which happens to be the title of a
comprehensive book he first published in 1962. Nevertheless, Prof M.K.Naik uses the
term Indian English Literature as the title of the historical book that deals with the
retrospect and prospect of Indian literature in English first published in the year 1982.

I.xi.i.ii. The Precursors:

Dean Mahomed (1759-1851) is supposed to have been the first Indian to make an
attempt at writing a book in English. His book entitled The Travels of Dean Mahomet,
published in 1794, is the first ever English book written by an Indian author (Mehrotra 2).
Mahomed was born in Patna. His family had been in the service of the Mughal Empire.
However, Mahomed joined the Bengal Army of the East India Company in 1769. He
served the foreign army in the capacity of a subaltern officer for 15 years. The book
written by Mahomed consists of his experiences as an employee of the Company’s Army.
It is made of letters written to an imaginary friend of the writer. Afterwards, Dean
Mahomed went to England and settled in Cork.

There were made paltry attempts at writing novels in English. Kylash Chunder
Dutt wrote A Journal of 48 Hours of the Year 1945 published in The Calcutta Literary
Gazette in 1835. Panchkouree Khan published The Revelations of an Orderly in the year
1849. No significant contribution came until the year 1864, when Bankimchandra
Chattopadhyaya’s (the British version being Chatterjee) Rajmohan’s Wife was published
in a periodical named The Indian Field serially. It was published in the book form in 1935
after having been rewritten by Brajendra Nath Banerji. This novel is considered as the first
ever Indian novel in English. Makarand Paranjape is of the opinion that it is the first ever
English novel in the whole of the Asian continent (makarand.com).

This novel can be seen as an allegory, which consists in a set of characters, their
actions and setting corresponding to another set of characters, their actions and setting.
The protagonist of the novel is Matangini who symbolizes the emerging India under the

16
rule of the British government. The male characters Madhav and Mathur stand for the
quarreling elites of India and Rajmohan represents the masses. Matangini is depicted as
mother India. However, the novel ends on a tragic note, wherein Matangini is molested
and she is not able to win her the real companion viz. Madhav. This narrative can be called
precedence to the succeeding narratives dealing with the theme of nation building.
Bankimchandra’s dilemma, as it was that of a sizeable number of intelligentsia of India,
was his acceptance of the British rule as a gateway of modernization, on the one hand and
the disdain for the exploitation of the nation with rich resources and culture, on the other.
The tragic end of the novel illuminates this irony of the Indian situation which was getting
abreast of the western modernity but at the price of its independence and self-esteem.

The 19th century Indian novels in English were written in keeping with the Indian
literary traditions of Mahakavya and Purana (Mund 13). This century witnessed a lot of
developments of seminal importance in the social, political and cultural terms. The last
Emperor of the Mughal dynasty Bahadur Shah Jafar led the assorted military attack
against the British forces. But the result was quite dismal, since the Indian forces lacked
integrity and the British turned out to be more powerful than they were assumed to be. The
Indian historians term it to be the first battle of the national freedom or the Year 1857
Revolt against the foreign ruler. On the other hand, the colonial historians call it to be a
mere mutiny. A matter of coincidence was that it was in the same year of this event with
political upheaval that three universities were established each one in the-then Bombay,
Madras and Calcutta. In the year 1885 the Indian National Congress was set up and it was
during the next two decades that Mohandas K. Gandhi was undergoing a kind of initiation
in the struggle for truth, justice and human rights in South Africa. M K Gandhi was going
to discharge a key role in India’s struggle for independence in the next century. Mahatma
Gandhi, with all his social, political and religious philosophies, was also going to mould
the Indian novel in English in the first half of the 20th century. As far as the rise of the
Indian Novel in English is concerned Agrawal and Dutta have passed on the following
comment:
In Indian literature … the ‘novel’ as literary genre was new to
India. Poetry, epics, drama, short stories and fables have their old
literary history. Novel was actually the last to arrive on the Indian
English literary scene.
(Agrawal-Dutta 77)

17
I.xi.i.iii. The Trinity:
The most significant event in the history of Indian English fiction in the nineteen
thirties was the appearance on the scene of its major trio: Mulk Raj Anand, R.K.Narayan
and Raja Rao (Naik 162). It is an unavoidable fact that Anand, Narayan and Rao
established the base of the Indian fiction in English on which the superstructure was going
to be erected by the succeeding writers of this very fertile genre in the Indian context. No
other genre in Indian writing in English has flourished and received international acclaim
than fiction in general and novel in particular.
Of the Indo-Anglian novelists, only Mulk Raj Anand and
R.K.Narayan have shown anything like stamina and stern
consistency of purpose.
(Iyengar 331)
Mulk Raj Anand (1905-2004) came from a lower-middle class family of Peshawar
in the Colonial India. After completing education in India, he joined University College in
London and thereafter Cambridge University for completing Ph.D. in Philosophy. He had
been in contact with the Bloomsbury Group as well. Anand had witnessed the
repercussions of the caste system in the Indian society, which he was going to depict in his
ensuing novels. Along with the social consciousness of the first water, Anand was under a
huge impact of the Gandhian philosophy too. The early attempts at Indianizing English
were made by Anand, which was to seek its culmination in the chutnyfication of English
in the fiction of Salman Rushdie and others in the second half of the 20 th century.

And above all, his innate compassion for the poor and the
oppressed, wherever they may be, guides him even today in the
shaping of his fictional world and the moulding of his Indian
English.

(Narasimhaiah 93)

Anand’s Untouchable (1935) was his maiden attempt at writing an English novel,
which made him try one publisher after another in vain; at long last it was published by
Wishart, London with a Preface by E.M.Forster. This was a trendsetting novel in terms of
its subject matter and the narrative technique. The novel depicts the story of an
untouchable boy namely, Bakha and one day of his life with dramatic developments.

18
Being aware of the history and contemporary scenario of social discriminations based on
caste system in India, Anand exposes the pitiable condition of a member from the
scavenger community and spiteful treatment afforded to him by the upper caste people.
The novel, to a great extent, was courageous, as it broached a very controversial issue of
the inhuman social practice of untouchability, of which the western world hardly had any
awareness. Untouchable interrogates this issue and poses the problem before the society
(Vallath 65). This novel was primarily motivated by the story of a sweeper boy written by
Mahatma Gandhi for a periodical. Anand was fortunate enough to enjoy the company of
the father of the nation during the process of writing of this novel.

Anand continued with his social preoccupation in the narratives with the
succeeding novels- Coolie (1936) and Tow Leaves and a Bud (1937). The first of these
two novels presents the sad adventurous story of Munoo, a coolie migrating to Bombay
and carrying out himself in different jobs from a coolie to a rickshaw puller to Simla. The
crux of the novel is Munoo’s realization of the perennial rift between the Haves and Have-
nots. Two Leaves and a Bud has a spatial setting of the tea plantation in Assam. It presents
a racial conflict ending in the death of Gangu, the protagonist at the hands of a British
officer. Yet another novel by Anand namely The Big Heart (1945) delineates the tale of a
young and generous Ananta, a coppersmith by occupation. The hero of the novel is a
believer in social equality and justice. He is shown to courageously stand against the
barbarous caste system in the Indian society. In the wake of modernization Anand makes
his protagonists favour machines, despite Gandhian bias for a simple and modest work
culture.

Afterwards Mulk Raj Anand brought out a series of autobiographical novels in

Seven Summers (1951), Morning Face (1968), Confession of a Lover (1976) and The
Bubble (1984). Anand is known for his contribution to the Indian Short Story in English
and establishing an art quarterly named Marg. Mulk Raj Anand gave a significant
contribution to the development of Indian English fiction by virtue creating a corpus of
revealing works and motivating several budding writers too. He received the Sahitya
Akademi Award for Morning Face in the year 1971.

The second of the trio was R.K.Narayan (1906-2001). He was born in a Tamil
Brahmin family, but went on to spend a long length of time in Karnataka. He had mastered
three languages- Tamil by birth, Kannada by stay and English for expression.

19
Narayan is not only known for his sense of humour, but also for the spatial setting namely
Malgudi, which happens to be an imaginary place in the colonial South India. For
transforming the place into a veritable character he is often paralleled with Bennett, Hardy
and Bronte, the past masters of breathing life into their locales. Narayan, unlike Mulk Raj
Anand, was really a man of letters, without any political affiliations to impact on his
writing (KRS Iyengar 358).

Having tried his hand at journalism, R.K.Narayan began his career as a novelist in
1935 with the publication of Swami and Friends. This novel deals with Swaminathan, the
child protagonist and his friends: Somu, Sankar, Mani and the Pea, and their friendship.
Nevertheless, the scenario gets complicated with the introduction of Rajam, who was son
of the new Police Superintendent of Malgudi. But, after a few skirmishes, Rajam was
initiated into the group of five friends as the sixth member. The novel takes a sudden turn
as Swaminathan participated in a crowd protesting against the recent arrests of the national
leaders by the British and got his relations with Rajam disturbed by supporting violence.
The rift was soon filled as Swaminathan modestly revived his friendship with Rajam and
consequently forming a cricket team called MCC. Yet another conflict is built by the
writer which consists in the participation of Swaminathan in the match against YMU.
Despite his attempts at evading the school and the school assignments, Swaminathan was
not able to participate in the practices and the final match against YMU. As a result,
Rajam was infuriated and once again the two friends got estranged. In the end of the novel
we see Rajam leaving Malgudi, as his father was transferred to another place and
Swaminathan trying to reach the station to see Rajam off and gift him a book. Though
Swaminathan gave the book to Rajam in just the nick of the time, he couldn’t get to know
if their friendship was resurrected. The novel ends on an ambiguous note.

After the first successful work, Narayan published two novels at a stretch:
Bachelor of Arts (1936) and The Dark Room (1938). The first of the two works presents
Chandran as the hero. He is one of the mouthpieces of Narayan, who project the writer’s
antipathy towards the English education converting the Indians into English speaking
robots. An aborted love affair with a girl made Chandran run away from home and
become a Sadhu for a while. However, he got back to Malgudi and settled down with an
arranged marriage with Susila. The humour in the novel consists in the contradiction
between the young Indian aspirants and the reality of their modicum capacities.

20
The Dark Room, on the other hand, has a lady protagonist namely Savitri with Ramani, her
husband working in an Insurance Company and three children. The dark room is the place
where Savitri used to stay whenever her husband abused her. To make the matters worse,
Ramani developed extra-marital affairs with his colleague, making Savitri leave the house.
When she couldn’t commit suicide, she sought shelter in a temple. However, Savitri, a
typical Indian wife, was not able to leave without her children and home, which made her
return home and spend life under the weight of her gloomy past. Another novel that
Narayan wrote was The English Teacher (1945), which can be called the most
autobiographical work of the author. Krishna the hero of the novel is a replica of the
writer, reflecting the dilemma of the average English teachers in India imparting a foreign
tongue and literature to the apathetic students.

The other novels written by Narayan: Mr Sampath: A Printer of Malgudi (1949),

The Financial Expert (1952), Waiting for the Mahatma (1955), The Guide (1958), The
Vendor of Sweets (1967), The Painter of Signs (1977) do exhibit the forte of this writer.
Especially, Waiting for the Mahatma and The Guide have been quite memorable. The first
of these two was inspired by the father of the nation and the national struggle for
independence. Gandhian philosophy had been the common denominator of the great
Indian fiction threesome. Narayan, as a young man, found himself on the horns of
quandary. On the one hand, he witnessed the struggle for India’s freedom and on the other,
there had been a whole new set of changes that showed the softer side of the otherwise
cruel British Raj. This novel too depicts the Indians motivated by the movement
undertaken by the Mahatma, but the disappointment is that the vision comprising truth,
self-reliance, modesty and non-violence getting sadly disintegrated, which saw its
culmination in the assassination of Gandhiji.

The Guide is another memorable novel by Narayan, not because it was made into a
box-office hit film, but because of its innate fictional qualities. It deals with the story of a
guide named Raju, who is shown to undergo different ups and downs in his life: a short-
lived career, a romantic love interlude, an aborted love affair, a metamorphosis into a
recluse and the eventual forced sacrifice. R.K.Narayan was a prolific writer who has
created a world of his own where his people, their actions and the setting of Malgudi are
inseparably intermingled. R.K.Narayan was felicitated with the Sahitya Akademi Award
in 1960 for The Guide.

21
 Raja Rao (1908-2006) was the third of the Indian trio of English fiction. He was
born in Mysore in a Brahmin family. Like the other two of his fellow writers, Rao too was
to spend a length of time in Europe and America, of course, he was to spend the longest
time of the three abroad. His grooming was a combination of the Indian and Western
influences. He was as much initiated into Indian spiritualism, as he was interested in the
Western thought and mysticism. As far as his creative output is concerned, Rao was the
most frugal of the three, since he wrote only five novels and some stories.

Kanthapura (1938), the first novel by Rao, was an allegory of the glorious freedom
struggle of India. A speciality of the novel is the foreword by the author, in which he says
that Indians are not required to write like the English people, what is more we should not
write like them. This frank confession of the Indian writers’ manifesto of adapting English
to Indian creative needs has been a backbone of the Indian writing in English.

One has to describe in a language that is not one’s own, the spirit
that is one’s own. One has to convey the various shades and
omissions of a certain thought-movement that looks maltreated in
an alien language.

(Rao v)

This novel depicts Gandhi as a myth in the tradition of The Ramayana and The
Mahabharata. Moorthy the chief character of the novel is depicted as a leader of the
small-scale agitation launched by the men and women of the imaginary village,
Kanthapura. The attempt at showing the villagers resistance to the foreign rulers exploiting
the workers ends in a fiasco, but the principles of Gandhi rise head and shoulders above
the dramatic developments in the novel. After a long gap of 22 years Rao came out with
his second novel titled The Serpent and the Rope (1960) with an Indo-European setting.
Ramaswamy, the protagonist of the novel, is a young and intelligent person who, after a
failed marriage with a French lady, is shown being embroiled into multiple feminine
relations. The title of the novel is about the illusion that misleads the minds confused by
the East-West encounter. The Cat and Shakespeare (1965) is a further development of the
philosophical fiction by Raja Rao. The novel concretizes the theory of complete surrender
and total faith in one’s deliverer, just as the kitten is held by the cat between the jaws or
the people created by Shakespeare.

22
Comrade Kirillov (1976) is a novel that deals with Kirillov’s opinions about the politics of
1930s and 1940s. Rao depicts the plot of this novel in London. Irene, the wife of the
Comrade, realized that her husband found it difficult to do away with his strong loyalty to
the Gandhian philosophy in particular and India in general.

The Chessmaster and His Moves (1988) was the last of Rao’s creations as a
novelist. The novel has a huge impact of The Serpent and the Rope. It projects the
predicament of a Paris-based Indian mathematician namely Sivarama Sastri. Raja Rao was
felicitated with the Sahitya Akademi Award for this novel in 1964.

I.xi.i.iv. After the Trinity:

After the trinity setting up the foundation of Indian English fiction, we see the
meteoric rise of a novelist, G.V.Desani, who by dint of his one and the only novel All
About H. Hatterr (1948) took the Indian and the foreign readership by storm. Govindas
Desani (1909-2000) was a writer of Indian origin who was born in Kenya and who lived
for a long stretch of time in England. He came to India after 1945 to get initiated into the
Indian spiritual practices. He was greatly influenced by the Buddhist philosophy too.
Desani spent the last phase of his life and career in the United States. The theme of All
About H. Hatterr is informed by the vicissitudes in the life of the author, reflected in its
eponymous protagonist, who was a son of the European trader and a Malayalam woman.
The other salient feature of the novel is its teasingly innovative use of English. Critics
have been tempted into comparing the structure of the novel with James Joyce’s creations.
The spatio-temporal setting of the novel is the colonial India. The plot of the novel is made
of seven episodes, each episode bringing about a disillusionment of Hatterr. We see in the
novel a scuffle between the Indian religious system and the British social set-up. Hatterr’s
disappointments with every experiment he tried made him realize the true meaning of life,
that life is a phantasmagoria of aspirations and bafflements. Desani’s experiments with the
thematic treatment and language have been a ceaseless source of inspiration for the
succeeding novelists like Salman Rushdie and I. Allan Sealy. The foreword to Kanthapura
by Raja Rao had sown the seed of Indianization of English and its climax was to be seen
in the fiction of Rushdie and all, nevertheless the credit of passing on the baton goes to
G.V.Desani. Men of letters with repute like T.S.Eliot, E.M.Forster and C.P.Snow were all
praise for the linguistic endeavours by Desani (Naik-Narayan, 184). The strength of this
novel is the overwhelmingly comic vision of the inevitable tragedy of life in this world.

23
 Manohar Malgonkar (1913-2010) was a writer of the themes belonging to India
under the British rule and the developments of the first half of the 20th century world. His
first novel with repute was Distant Drum (1960), which celebrates the venturous
dimensions of the military life. Malgonkar, who had the first hand experience of the war,
as he participated in the II World War for England, not only deals with the adventures of
the warriors but also goes beyond it and analyses the warp and the weft of human nature.
This novel has a unique temporal setting with great amount of dynamics of its own. The
Princes (1963) was the novel that took the name of Malgonkar to the horizon of Indian
writing. Abhayraj, the hero of the novel, is depicted as the Prince of Begwad, an imaginary
princely state. He is portrayed as a participant and a spectator of the merger of the princely
states after the independence of India. Right after the partition of India the then Home
Minister, Sardar Patel undertook a mammoth task of dissolving the 500 odd princely states
and integrating them into the Indian Union, either by negotiation or coercion. This novel is
a fictionalization of India’s political history. Its plot is a combination of the developments
before, during and after the process of democratizing and unifying an imaginary princely
state of India under the rule of Heroji Bedar. A Bend in the Ganges (1964) is another novel
by Malgonkar which furthered his acclaim. The novel presents the slice of Indian history
between the 1930’s Civil Disobedience movement and the national partition causing
unprecedented violence. It’s a fact that Manohar Malgonkar’s writings have not been
sufficiently recognized. Nonetheless, some of his major works have been translated into
both Indian and non-Indian languages.

Khushwant Singh (1915-2014) is one of the journalist-cum-writers in the history of

Indian English Literature. He was a man of great versatility and gusto. Having been born
in the state of Punjab, now in Pakistan, and brought up in Delhi, Khushwant Singh had his
Graduation in Delhi and he went to King’s College, London for higher studies. He enjoyed
a stint of an IFS officer and later on worked for the UNESCO. In his sixties he was
appointed Member of the Upper House of the Indian Parliament. He firmly believed in the
secular foundations of India and his tenure as a journalist and columnist was famous as
well as controversial. His Train to Pakistan (1956) depicts the partition of India, a national
wound which hasn’t been fully healed even in the present times too. The novel doesn’t
rely upon this violent event alone, but focuses the trauma of this heart-rending incident in
the minds of those who underwent the brutalities and alienation. Mano Majra is the
imaginary village on the Indo-Pak border where the plot unfolds.

24
I shall not Hear the Nightingale (1959) deals with the contradictory father, Buta Singh and
his son, Sher Singh of Punjab during the British reign. It presents the conflicting facts: age
versus youth, loyalty versus rebelliousness and stagnation versus change.

The last work by Khushwant Singh, Delhi: A Novel (1990) deals with the history
of Delhi, the capital of India and a place witnessing two millennia of history. It is an
autobiographical novel, which portrays an ageing protagonist with a background of self-
indulgence and discursions, who per chance meets Bhagmati, a eunuch. The entry of a
hermaphrodite in the life of the hero brings about the complication, which is further
intensified by the backward and forward visits in time by the narrator.

K.A.Abbas (1914-1987), who was a multifarious genius, wrote novels in English

too. His Tomorrow is Ours (1943), Defeat for Death (1944) and Inquilab (1949) are the
tales of India’s freedom struggle, the role of Mahatma Gandhi, the Second World War,
and the fascism among other preoccupations.

Bhabani Bhattacharya’s (1906-88) first novel So Many Hungers (1947) brings out
the fictional representation of the Bengal famine of 1941-42 and the Quit India movement.
Bhattacharya is yet another writer who was under a sustained impact of Gandhi. This
novel not only concretizes the change in the political situation of the nation but also
throws light on the socio-economic transition of the period under Gandhi and Nehru. He
Who Rides a Tiger (1952) is the other novel by Bhattacharya which focuses poverty,
ensuing hunger and fraudulence against the 1940s famine of Bengal. He received the
Sahitya Akademi Award for his novel Shadow from Ladakh in 1967.

Chaman Nahal (1927-2013) was specialized in delineating the history of India. The
most celebrated of his novels is Azadi (1975) which takes stock of the partition of India.
Nahal has brought about a Raj trilogy consisting in The Crown and the Loincloth (1981),
The Salt of Life (1990) and The Triumph of the Tricolour (1993). He was decorated with
the Sahitya Akademi Award for Azadi in 1977.

Arun Joshi (1939-93) is a name worth consideration for his thought-provoking

novels. His most renowned novel is The Strange Case of Billy Biswas (1971). This novel
brings about a moving story of a US returned person with a primordial nature. This is a
philosophical novel that exposes the seamy side of the so-called modern civilization with
all its debauchery and hypocrisy.

25
It makes the readers have an interface with an individual besieged by the demoralizing
forces of the world. The novel holds a mirror to those who run after material pleasure,
which is a mirage. It also questions the very significance of different social systems like
religion, family and marriage. Arun Joshi is a writer dedicated to the exploration of human
psyche, which becomes a theme in his novel titled The Apprentice (1974). This novel puts
forward the contrast between the old generation with a patriotic bent of mind and the post-
independence generation with a fickle mind that gets carried away by the whirlwind of
self-interest and opportunism. Arun Joshi was felicitated with the Sahitya Akademi Award
for his work The Last Labyrinth in 1982.

I.xi.i.v. The Women Novelists:

Abreast of the men novelists, the history of Indian Fiction in English is

interspersed with some of the best women writers as well. They too have contributed to
the development of the Indian Novel in English and have certainly made the fictional
canvas more comprehensive and all inclusive.

Nayantara Sahgal (1927) is a novelist who deals with the themes of political ups
and downs and the people belonging to the upper crust of the society. She comes from the
Nehru dynasty. A Time to be Happy (1958) has Sanad for its protagonist. It depicts the
crisis in the life of the members from the rich class with English education. Another of her
novels Rich Like Us (1985) has a background of the 1975 political upheaval called the
Emergency. It was for this novel that Nayantara Sahgal received the Sahitya Akademi
Award in 1986. Storm in Chandigarh (1969), yet another novel by Sahgal, deals with the
issue of Haryana, a state created by the division of Punjab on the linguistic basis.

Kamala Markandaya (1924-2000), like Sahgal, is a writer who mainly painted the
elites, but she also attempted to go beyond them to portray the life of the poor. Her
objective was to give a set of variegated characters through her literary creations. Nectar
in Sieve (1954) and A Handful of Rice (1966) depict the life of the rural and urban poor
respectively. The first of these two shows the burden of the feudal system and
industrialization. The Golden Honeycomb (1977) is considered to be an ambitious work of
Markandaya. It advances Rabi, the chief character, seeking an independent identity after
coming in contact with different women in his life. Kamala Markandaya’s forte has been
the comprehensive depiction of female characters.

26
 Indian culture is based on the philosophy of Universal
Brotherhood. This philosophy colours the creative imagination of
Kamala Markandaya.

(Narasimhaiah 208)

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1927) is one of those European writers often included in
different versions of the History of Indian Writing in English, since she has written about
India. Her novel The Householder (1960) deals with the western interpretation of the
conventional Indian family set-up. It also considers the arranged marriage practice and
romantic love in the Indian situation. Jhabvala received the Booker Prize for her novel
Heat and Dust (1975), which depicts the relations between India and Britain, and
especially India with all its heat and dust.

Anita Desai (1937) began her career at a younger age and came out with Cry, the
Peacock (1963) which depicts the theme of family relations and illusions therein. Maya,
the father-fixated character in the novel is shown to undergo a pathetic volley of episodes
after her marriage. The other novel by Desai namely Bye Bye Blackbird (1969) presents
the theme of cultural alienation in terms of three major characters. Fire on the Mountain
(1977) was another novel by Desai which deals with the complicated relationship between
an old woman, Nanda Kaul and her granddaughter, Raka, whereas Clear Light of Day
(1980) portrays the sorrowful tale of two married sisters. In Custody (1984) yet another
novel by Anita Desai, depicts an Urdu man of letters during his cheerless times. This novel
got shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Nevertheless, she had received the Sahitya Akademi
Award for Fire on the Mountain in 1978.

Bharati Mukherjee (1940), the expatriate writer of India, began her career with The
Tiger’s Daughter (1972) which portrays Tara, the lady protagonist, getting married to an
American only to work her alienation. Wife (1976) was another creative venture by
Mukherjee which culminates in a violent manner consisting in the murder of the husband
by his wife Dimple. Her third novel Jasmine (1989) shows the dilemma in the life of the
eponymous protagonist, an immigrant to America. It deals with the conflict between
Indian belief in fate and the American life of individuality.

27
 Shashi Deshpande’s (1938) The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980) depicts the drama
of human relations like child-parent and man-woman duels. That Long Silence (1989)
paints Jaya as the protagonist facing a crisis after 17 years of marital life. Like other
novels by Deshpande, this novel too explores the psyche of the female characters, where
the silence is also made audible. Shashi Deshpande was felicitated with the Sahitya
Akademi Award for this novel in 1990.

The other fictional work by Deshpande, A Matter of Time (1996) is quite different
from her earlier works in that it depicts a male character moulded by the other characters
and their actions. Small Remedies (2000) deals with the incident of bomb explosions after
the Babari Masjid demolition in 1992.

Manju Kapur (1948) published her first novel under the title Difficult Daughters
(1998). The novel presents the story of a rebelling mother, Virmati and her daughter, Ida
against the background spanning the colonial India to an independent India. Her second
novel, A Married Woman (2003) depicts the story of a low-profile married woman and the
storm brought into her life due to her discursive decision. On the other hand, her third
novel Home (2006) is a tale of three generations. The Immigrants (2008) and Custody
(2011), the other novels by Manju Kapur, present the stories of the problems cropped up in
marriage and divorce.

Shobhaa De’s (1948) Socialite Evenings (1989) deals with the love story fixed in
the 1990s. One of her famous works is Starry Nights (1991), which unfolds another love
story based on the love affairs of Bollywood stars. Strange Obsession (1992) is the other
novel by De, that depicts the rise of a glamorous model and the complications incurred in
the world of lust and lucre. Sultry Days (1994) is a novel by De where she brings out the
story of a teenager falling in love with a catchy youngster with vagabond inclinations.

Githa Hariharan’s (1952) first novel was The Thousand Faces of Night (1992) that
depicts a journey of three women against the Indian social background. It shows the
traditional conflict between the male-dominated family system and women in the Indian
situation. She received the Commonwealth Best First Book Prize for this novel in 1993.

28
The other novel by Hariharan is The Ghosts of Vasu Master (1993) which is considered to
be an innovative narration of a teacher with curative powers. The novel involves a retired
teacher coming in the proximity of a taciturn student, and ensuing teaching and learning
processes on their parts.

Gita Mehta (1943), is mainly known for her stories, however, she has written a
novel titled Raj (1989). It is the story of the queen of a princely state during the British
rule. It shows the tragic deaths of four of her close blood relatives: father, brother, husband
and son during the violent conflicts before Indian independence. Nevertheless, she is
shown to witness the merger of her state and the rise of democracy in the nation.

Jai Nimbkar’s (1932) first novel Temporary Answers (1974) deals with the
emptiness of family and love in human life with its portrayal of a widow. A Joint Venture
(1988) depicts the story of a married couple made of a middle class woman and an inside-
out businessman and their mutual disillusionment. Come Rain (1993), the third novel of
the writer, has an innovative perspective consisting in the interpretation of Indian customs
and practices by an American protagonist.

Rama Mehta (1923-1978) is essentially known for her novel Inside the Haveli
(1977). It portrays the conflict between the traditions and modernity in terms of the
women characters. This is an autobiographical work by the writer, who won the Sahitya
Akademi Award for this novel in 1979.

Nergis Dalal’s (1920) first venture in the fictional world, Minari (1967) depicts the
story of two lady characters who don’t subscribe themselves to the conventional male-
dominated system. The Sisters (1973) by Dalal, as the title goes, portrays the tale of two
sisters with contrary mind-sets. The Inner Door (1975) has a plot involving the Oedipus-
complex-style treatment of a mother and her son. Her fourth novel The Girls from the
Overseas (1979) has a feminist theme, whereas the recent novel Skin Deep (2005) is
considered to be an extension of the earlier novel The Sisters.

Arundhati Roy’s (1961) God of Small Things (1997) is located in the Kerala
landscape. It depicts the socio-political theme in a different manner altogether. The tender
love story of Amu, an upper caste widow and Velutha, a lower caste person is the essence
of the novel.

29
The end of the novel became much of a discussion for the conventional critics, since it
portrays the intercourse of the two in a picturesquely tactile fashion. Arundhati Roy was
decorated with the Booker Prize for this creation in the year 1997.

I.xi.i.vi. Salman Rushdie and his Clan:

Salman Rushdie (1947) has been one of the most controversial yet celebrated
writers of Indian English Literature. Rushdie and the other like-minded writers have really
set the Indian Novel in English on the high pedestal; in terms of the Postmodern Indian
novelists, B.K. Das has shared his insight as follows:

… that Indian English fiction has brought revolution in the whole

range of Indian English literature in the choice of subjects and
language of expression. Its portrayal of characters is appropriate
to the situation. Thus, Indian English fiction re-creates
contemporary society with insight and justness. Therein lies the
merit of Indian English Fiction.

(Das 93)

Rushdie started his career as writer with Grimus (1957), which was indifferently
received. However, his Midnight’s Children (1981) won him the Booker prize. It presents
Saleem Sinai as the protagonist, who is shown to have been born with the birth of India,
hence a midnight’s child. Sinai stands for the divided self, as the nation got divided at the
time of its birth. The political implication is the strife between the colonial India and the
India after independence. The surname Sinai refers to the moon, which is known for its
waxing and waning. The plot of the novel brings the protagonist as an individual to have
an encounter with the hostile forces of the world. The other feature of the novel is its
innovative diction and as the author has called it “chutnyfication of English”. His next
creation The Satanic Verses (1989) attained the biggest amount of controversy and
criticism. It caused Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran to issue a fatwa against Salman Rushdie,
making the writer go underground in England. This work deals with the cultural
predicament of the immigrants to England, on the one hand and a very sensitive debate on
religion, faith and skepticism, on the other.

30
 While in exile, Rushdie wrote The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995). This novel brings
about the completion of the trilogy that got underway with the publication of Midnight’s
Children and continued in The Satanic Verses. Here is an autobiographical work that
combines the story of an individual and a nation with a violent birth. Rushdie’s Ground
Beneath Her Feet (1999) is a different novel in the sense it deals with a love story. It has a
parallel to an ancient legend involving Orpheus and Eurydice. This novel earned Rushdie
the Commonwealth Book Prize in the year 2000.

Salman Rushdie is mainly known for his masterly use of ‘magic realism’, which
consists in an intermingling of imaginary or fantastic elements with the realistic fiction.
No one can deny the significance of Salman Rushdie in shaping the Indian fiction after
1980s. His fictional and non-fictional writings have given birth to what can be called the
Rushdie Clan, which moulds a number of succeeding writers. Rushdie was honoured with
the Booker Prize in 1981 for Midnight’s Children and a matter of great pride for all was
his winning the Booker of Bookers for this book after 25 years.

I. Allan Sealy (1951) is mostly known for his celebrated work The Trotter-Nama:
A Chronicle (1988). As far as its theme is concerned, it runs parallel with Midnight’s
Children. The difference consists in finding out a unity between the national struggle for
independence and the subsequent process of nation building. The Everest Hotel: A
Calendar (1998) is a portrayal of an old man, the sick owner of the hotel, in the company
of a young nurse. It was for his extraordinary creation, The Trotter-Nama: A Chronicle,
that Sealy was decorated with the Sahitya Akademi Award in the year 1991.

Amitav Ghosh’s (1956) The Circle of Reason (1986) has Nachiketa alias, Alu,
which is a Hindi word for potato, as the protagonist. The name Nachiketa reminds us of
the famous Katha Upanishad. Having been accused of being a terrorist, Alu is shown to
run away from Bengal to different areas in the Middle East. Ghosh’s Antique Land (1992)
has a locale in the Middle East. It celebrates the peaceful coexistence of cultures witnessed
in the olden times and how this cultural balance was disturbed by the colonial interruption.
Two other novels by Ghosh are worth noticing The Calcutta Chromosome (1996) and The
Glass Palace (2000). The plot of The Calcutta Chromosome is located in Calcutta and the
temporal setting of the novel is amusingly indecisive. It is considered to have been
modeled on the life of Ronald Ross, the famous scientist.

31
The Glass Palace is a novel by Ghosh with a complex spatial setting encompassing three
nations- Burma, Malaya and India and a time span of hundred years. The Shadow Lines
has been a masterpiece by Ghosh, which won him the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award
in 1989. This novel is yet another successful experiment with the temporal setting and the
narrative technique by an Indian author.

Shashi Tharoor (1956) modeled his ambitious work The Great Indian Novel (1989)
on the world famous classical epic of India The Mahabharata. The plot, the people and
their actions are adapted to the spatio-temporal setting of Indian freedom struggle and the
three decades after the independence. It is a mythification of important personae from this
length of time of India. Another Tharoor novel is Show Business (1994) that deals with the
theme of Bollywood. It portrays Ashok as the chief character, which stands for Amitabh
Bachchan and the accident he met with while shooting for a movie. Ashok too met with an
accident and he is shown to remember everything in his life up to the mishap, while
meandering between life and death in the hospital. Shashi Tharoor was honoured with the
Commonwealth Book Prize for The Great Indian Novel in 1990.

Upamanyu Chatterjee’s (1959) English August: An Indian Story (1988) depicts, in

a satirical manner, the bureaucratic story involving Agastya Sen, an IAS officer on
probation in a remote place in India. The officer gets involved in the time-killing act of
fabricating lies and spreading them for fun. Another novel of Chatterjee that portrays the
bureaucratic acrobatics is The Mammaries of the Welfare State (2000). Chatterjee’s being
an IAS officer has played a key role in moulding his oeuvre. However, his second novel
The Last Burden (1993) demystifies the so-called integrity of the Indian joint family
system. Chatterjee received the Sahitya Akademi Award for The Mammaries of the
Welfare State in 2004.

I.xi.i.vii. The Parsi Novelists:

Rohinton Mistry (1952), a Parsi Indian novelist, published his first novel Such A
Long Journey (1991), that portrays the story of Gustad, a Parsi bank employee and the
turmoil in his family and professional life. His second novel, A Fine Balance (1995)
depicts the socio-political situation between India’s independence and the Emergency of
1975. Rohinton Mistry was felicitated with the two Commonwealth Book Prizes, one for
Such A Long Journey in 1992 and the other for A Fine Balance in 1996.

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 Farrukh Dhondy (1944) has been another writer from the Parsi community to have
created different novels with the Parsi consciousness. Bombay Duck (1990) is a novel that
paints two cultures- Indian and Western. It is considered to be a courageous work by
Dhondy. On the other hand, The Siege of Babylon, which was published in 1989, has the
tale of three black youngsters under the siege.

Boman Desai (1950) published his first novel The Memory of Elephants (1988)
that has a plot with east-west cultural theme in general and the process of memory in
particular. The novel has caught the attention of critics all over the world for an out-of-the-
ordinary theme and treatment.

Another Parsi writer Ardashir Vakil (1962) wrote his first novel in 1993 titled
Beach Boy. It is a tale of a Parsi boy called Cyrus. The spatial setting is Bombay and it is
considered to be an autobiographical work reflecting the social, cultural and religious
crisscross of India in general and Bombay in particular.

Vakil’s second novel, One Day (2003), presents the story of Ben, the protagonist,
and one day in his life. The novel is a combination of interior monologues and stream of
consciousness technique. The main themes of this novel are the marital relations and
friendship, with their constructive and destructive powers. The place shown in this work is
London.

I.xi.i.viii. The other Voices to Reckon with:

Vikram Seth (1952) hit the international scenario with his ambitious literary work
A Suitable Boy (1993). Having witnessed a spate of novels with magic realism, there came
into being a revival of social novels by means of this work. It presents the story of a drive
undertaken by Rupa for a suitable bridegroom for her daughter namely Lata. Its mammoth
narrative incorporates a complex but revealing relations among different families. This
novel won Vikram Seth the Commonwealth Book Prize in 1994. The other novels by Seth
are The Golden Gate (1986) and An Equal Music (1999) that depict the stories in the
foreign locales. Seth was embellished with the Sahitya Akademi Award for his The
Golden Gate in 1988.

Kiran Nagarkar (1942) is a bilingual writer. His first novel, Seven Sixes are Forty
Three (1974), was translated from his Marathi work and it deals with the life of Kushank,
the chief character, with a stream of consciousness narrative.

33
Ravan and Eddie (1994) was the second novel by Nagarkar. He wrote Cuckold (1997)
which depicts a historical tale of King Bhojraj of Mewar and his wife Meera, and the
background of a battle. This ambitious work by Nagarkar won him the Sahitya Akademi
Award for the year 2000.

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) published a novella titled A Strange and Sublime

Address (1991) has a small-scale fiction and stories which deal with different issues in a
very moderate but impressive way. Afternoon Raag (1993) depicts the tale of a young
student of English Literature at Oxford University. It presents a touching nostalgia of the
student.

Freedom Song (1998) is the third novel of Chaudhuri in this series which portrays
the story of two families in Calcutta. Another novel by Chaudhuri is A New World (2000)
which deals with the story of a father and son duo returning to India from America. He
received the Sahitya Akademi Award for this work in 2002.

Rukun Advani (1955) has written a promising debut making novel titled Beethoven
among the Cows (1994) which is a tale of India, and the rise and fall of its democracy.
Mukul Kesavan (1957) caught the international acclaim with his novel Looking Through
Glass (1994). This novel has a funny incident of a young man accidentally getting
transported into his past, which happens to be the 1940s of the colonized India.

Vikram Chandra (1961) came with a bang with his debut novel Red Earth and
Pouring Rain (1995), which is an extraordinary narrative involving humans, non-humans
and superhumans. He received the prestigious Commonwealth Book Prize for this novel in
1996.

I.xii. The Contemporary Scenario (21st Century):

Chetan Bhagat (1974) is a 21st century Indian English novelist, who has catapulted
to success on account of a series of his fictional works. His first novel Five Point Someone
(2004) deals with the campus story involving three friends, a love affair and the
unfavourable elements on the campus. The novel was made into a hit Bollywood movie.
One Night @ the Call Center (2005) has a plot with six employees working for a call
centre in North India.

34
The Three Mistakes of my Life (2008) presents a protagonist making three blunders- a
hurried financial investment, a love-affair and a delayed attempt at rescuing a friend. 2
States (2009) and Half Girlfriend (2014) are the novels by Bhagat which depict the theme
of love and complications therein. One Indian Girl (2016) is the latest novel by Bhagat
which portrays the story of a marriageable girl with three marital proposals and the
ensuing dilemma.

Anita Nair (1966) is another young and promising Indian novelist who has written
The Better Man (2000) which portrays the story of Mukundan against the Kerala
background and The Ladies Coupe (2001) that depicts Akhila, a single Brahmin woman
who is accompanied by five women passengers during her journey to Kanyakumari. The
novels of Anita Nair basically present the feminine themes like marriage, sex, man-woman
relationship and other related issues in a frank manner.

In the year 2002 Rohinton Mistry’s third novel was published under the title
Family Matters that fictionalizes the microcosmic portrayal of the Parsi community in
India. The family of Nariman Vakeel is the focus of attention. The time setting of the
novel is the modern India.

Shalimar the Clown (2005) is another novel by Salman Rushdie which portrays the
allegory on Kashmir, the controversial state of India. The plot contains the theme of love
and betrayal, which gives rise to a set of conflicts and issues, which run parallel to the
historical constituents of the nation called India.

Sacred Games (2006) is the recent novel by Vikram Chandra. It depicts the
conflict between the police, the gangsters and the financial aspects causing the
complications. This novel is a thriller which is realized by the conflict between the robust
and dutiful police officer and the hardcore gangster of the underworld.

Kiran Nagarkar published The Extras (2012) and Rest in Peace (2016) which
complete the trilogy that got under way with his Ravan and Eddie. The Extras paints the
life of Mumbai via the taxis, the bars and the Hindi film industry. Rest in Peace is the
climax of the Ravan and Eddie story that takes the readers through different amusing
episodes.

35
 Farrukh Dhondy wrote a novel titled The Bikini Murders (2008), which is based on
the life of the infamous criminal Charles Sobhraj. The other novel by Dhondy is Prophet
of Love (2013) which depicts a character resembling Bhagwan Rajneesh alias Osho.
Dhondy excels in a cinematic representation of his fictional persons.

Jhumpa Lahiri (1967), who hit the literary scene with her revealing stories, wrote
her first novel titled The Namesake in 2003. The novel delineates the conflict between the
Indian and American cultures in terms of a Bengali couple settling in America. Her second
novel The Lowland (2013) has a plot with eight interlinked sections presenting the story of
Indians in America.

Cyrus Mistry’s (1956) first novel, The Radiance of Ashes (2005) depicting the
story of Jingo, the protagonist, is set against Mumbai’s chaotic background. His second
novel Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer (2013) is a revealing narration of the suffering and
predicament of a small section of the Parsi community that disposes the dead. The first
half of the novel is a love story consisting in a Parsi youth falling in love with the daughter
of a corpse bearer, who is treated untouchable by the community. However, the second
half of the novel is quite moving, as it depicts the plight of the young man who by turn of
fate becomes a corpse bearer himself. This work won Mistry the Sahitya Akademi Award
for the year 2015.

Jerry Pinto (1966) published Em and the Big Hoom in 2012. The novel deals with
the tale of a boy being brought up by a mentally affected mother, who is called Em and a
father, who is called the Big Hoom. This literary work won Pinto the Sahitya Akademi
Award for the year 2016.

Trio: A Novel Biography of the Schumanns and Brahms (2015), another of Boman
Desai’s novel, has a theme of human relations set against a rich background of music. It
deals with the intricate relationship between Brahms and Schumann.

An Era of Darkness (2016) is the latest novel by Shashi Tharoor. It depicts the tale
of India’s colonization by the British and the horrid consequences consisting in the
exploitation, partition, crippled democracy and sham modernity. It throws light on the
decline of the spirit of globalization and the sudden rise of nationalism and parochial
tendencies, especially the victory of the BJP government and its politico-cultural
consequences.

36
 Arundhati Roy, after a gap of almost 20 years, published her second novel titled
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017). Anjum, the eunuch, is the protagonist of this
novel, which incorporates the major ill-fated developments in the 21 st century India. The
plot of the novel is not linear, especially the temporal setting is made strangely circuitous.

I.xiii. The Prospection:

The prospect of Indian Novel in English is quite bright and sparkling. Several
writers of the previous century are quite actively writing in the present century also. There
will be further contributions from the writers like Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Upamanyu
Chatterjee, Shashi Tharoor, Amit Chaudhuri, Rohinton Mistry, Farrukh Dhondy, Rukun
Advani, Boman Desai, Chetan Bhagat, Cyrus Mistry, Aravind Adiga and the women
writers like Anita Nair, Kiran Desai, Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri, and others.

I.xiv. The Origin of Short Story as a Genre:

Short Story as a literary type is as old as language itself. It means our ancestors
started to exchange the tales of their daily adventures and developments by word of
mouth. In the course of a long length of time the oral form of the stories got transformed
into the written form, in the wake of the evolution of the writing system. J.A.K. Thomson
has appositely observed that,

… the notion that the short story is something quite new or modern
is a piece of self-deception on the part of those whose reading does
not go beyond the present century.

(Thomson 61)

According to M.H. Abrams a short story is a brief work in prose fiction. He further
says that most of its component elements, the types and the various narrative techniques of
the novel are applicable to the short story as well (193). Nevertheless, a short story is
different from its larger counterpart called novel, in that the former has a plot with one or
two events, only few characters and one significant idea to put forward. Considering the
scope of the story, a writer has to organize all the constituents in such a manner that the
end is easily and effectively achieved. The reputed Indian writer Shiv K. Kumar throws
light on the brevity of short story as follows:

37
 … a good short story is that it excludes all extraneous material:
long-winded descriptions, over-elaborate analyses of characters,
and leisurely conversations which may delay a rapid unfolding of
the central theme.

(Kumar 07)

According to Merriam-Webster dictionary a short story is “an invented prose

narrative shorter than a novel usually dealing with a few characters and aiming at unity of
effect and often concentrating on the creation of mood rather than a plot.” The Oxford
Advanced Learner’s Dictionary defines short story as “a piece of fiction that is shorter
than a novel, especially one that deals with a single event or theme (1090)”. Manjeri
Isvaran, an Indian story writer, defines short story as,

… a fable, or a parable, real or fantasy, a true presentation or a

parody, sentimental or satirical, serious in intent or a light-hearted
diversion…but to be memorable, it must catch the eternal in the
casual, invest a moment with the immensity of time.

(Isvaran x)
Short Story, which is considered to be a minor type of literature, is known for its
flexibility. Kamal Mehta claims:

Certainly, the short story always has been more flexible and open
to experiment than novel. The writer is subject to both a stricter
technical discipline and a wider freedom than the novelist. The
writer is concerned with the present moment only.

(Mehta 16)

A short story has some basic elements like Plot, People, Setting, Point of view and
Theme. The plot of a story allows only one or two incidents. Grenville Kleiser underlines
the importance of plot in a story

The first duty of the short story writer is to find a plot. He is,
before everything else, a raconteur.

(Kleiser 05)

38
 As far as characters are concerned, there can be one or at most two major
characters in a well-knit story. The setting in its miniature form is used in the story, just
indicating the time, place and society of the plot. The plot of the story is narrated either by
the writer as the third person narrator or the first person narrator by virtue of a character
participating in the story. The theme of the story is abstract which is made concrete by all
the elements of the story. Guy de Maupassant, the world famous story writer, was of the
opinion that a writer of the story should not rest content with simply telling the story,
amusing the readers or transporting them, but he must compel the readers into grasping the
deeper and implied meaning of the people, action and events in the story.

The trend of creating short stories must have got underway with the rise of
languages, well before the languages had acquired their own written form. However,
before it came in vogue in English language, short story had its evolution, which can be
seen on a global level as follows:

I.xiv.i. Egypt:

The first example of storytelling is found in the Ancient Babylonian civilization, it

was titled The Epic of Gilgamesh, which conveys the tale of a king who was half divine
and half human.

I.xiv.ii. Greece:

Aesop’s Fables happen to be a collection of Greek stories written during the 6th
century BC and they were handed down by word of mouth from one generation to another.
The stories were written by Aesop, a slave and a narrator. The stories focus on
maintenance of moral values.

I.xiv.iii. India:

The Jatak Katha is a group of tales written during the 4th century of the Ancient
Period. These stories have been handed from generation to generation by the oral tradition.
The stories are written in Pali language and they relate the incidents in the previous life of
Lord Buddha. The major theme of the stories is moral behaviour.

The Panchatantra is a collection of Sanskrit fables written by Vishnu Sharma

during the 2nd century of the Ancient Period. These are didactic tales involving human as
well as non-human characters.

39
They were aimed at inculcating moral values and governing rules among the rising
generations of the rulers. The stories have a combination of prose and verse.
Kathasaritsagar or Ocean of Stories was another collection of Indian stories, written by
Somdev, a Kashmiri writer, who tells the tales of kings, queens and princes. Hitopdesh
was another collection of stories in Sanskrit which rendered its contribution from India to
the development of short story. It must have been written between the 9th and 10th century
AD.

It is considered that the Indian Short Story has been moulded by different
precedents and, Mohan Ramanan and P. Sailaja have asserted that,

In matters of strategies for story-telling, or weaving a narrative, or

creating a frisson or generating suspense, Indians have a fine
native provenance to go by and need not seek Western models.
Without doubt the Indian short story is built on strong indigenous
foundations.

(Ramanan-Sailaja 03)

I.xiv.iv. The Arabian Nights:

The collection of folk stories, The Arabian Nights dates back to the Islamic Golden
Age, which may be attributed to a period between the 8th century and 13th century AD.
The stories were written in the Arabic language and later on got translated into different
languages including English.

I.xiv.v. The Decameron by Boccaccio:

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) was a 14th century Italian writer, who wrote a
collection of stories under the title Decameron. It is an earliest attempt at writing works in
the narrative form. It has one hundred stories related by a group ten Italians under the
threat of Plague. Themes concerning day-to-day human life have been included in this
book.

I.xiv.vi. Chaucer’s Narratives:

Geoffrey Chaucer (1345-1400) is considered to be the father of undefiled English.
Although he was a poet, he brought into his poetic expressions the first attempts at
narration in the history of English literature.

40
His book The Canterbury Tales (1476) is a collection of stories in verse. The occasion for
these stories was the pilgrimage undertaken to the Cathedral of Thomas Becket at
Canterbury. The tales are shown to be exchanged by the pilgrims while going to
Canterbury. Members of different divisions of the British society are depicted to
participate in this marathon story-telling, which is full of worldly wisdom, humour,
bawdiness and moralizing.

I.xiv.vii. Edgar Allan Poe & American Writers:

The American writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) brought the vogue for writing
stories into American English literature. To Poe a good story is the one that concentrates
on a unique or single effect and one in which the totality of effect is the main objective
(Cuddon 817). The trend of writing stories by American writers became quite pervasive,
which is obviously seen in the list of the writers: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville,
Mark Twain, O. Henry, Robert Frost, Earnest Hemingway, Stephen Crane, Jack London
and Sherwood Anderson.

I.xiv.viii. The Russian Scene:

There has been a significant contribution from the Russian writers to the
development of the short story globally. The writers like Nicolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov,
Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky have been translated into dozens of languages and
have become a source of inspiration for budding writers across the world. Anton Chekhov
and Leo Tolstoy have been a great source of inspiration for the promising story-tellers
belonging to different languages.

I.xiv.ix. The French and German Writers:

Some of the French and German writers too have given rise to a fabulous set of
stories, which have been well received by the readers directly or indirectly, through
translations. The French writer Guy de Maupassant and the German writer Franz Kafka
have set their own standards in the art of story-telling.

I.xiv.x. The British Story Writers:

During the 19th century so many English writers began publishing short stories.
The chief among them were Lewis Caroll, Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, Thomas
Hardy, Oscar Wilde, R.L. Stevenson, W.W. Jacobs, Rudyard Kipling and W. Somerset
Maugham. The practice of writing short stories got continued in the 20 th century too.
41
There were several writers of this period who have written immortal tales, to name the
notable among them: Henry James, H.G. Wells, Ian Fleming, Katherine Mansfield, E.M.
Forster, Saki, Stephen Leacock and others.

I.xv. An Outline of the Indian Short Story in English:

I.xv.i. A Retrospection:
The Indian short story in English has been essentially a by-product of its rich and
variegated fictional industry. Nevertheless, there have been witnessed considerable
contributions to the growth and development of the Indian short story in English. The
origin of the Indian short story in English is attributed to Kamala Sathianandan of the 19th
century. She wrote Stories from Indian Christian Life in 1898.

However, the full-fledged short stories in English by Indians started to evolve in

the first half of the 20th century. Mulk Raj Anand, R.K.Narayan and Raja Rao, the trinity
of Indian English novel, played a key role in establishing the shorter version of fiction-
short story. As far as the valuable contribution of the trinity to the Indian English short
story is concerned B.K. Das concludes in the following manner:

… the real beginning of this genre was made in the 1930s in the
hands of Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan, and Raja Rao. It is a
coincidence of literary history that the great-trio, Anand, Narayan
and Rao are the pioneers of novel and short story in Indian
English Literature in the fourth decade of the twentieth century.
(Das 95)

Mulk Raj Anand has been a prolific writer who has published six collections of
short stories: The Lost Child and Other Stories (1934), The Barber’s Trade Union and
Other Stories (1944), The Tractor and the Corn Goddess and Other Stories (1947),
Reflections on the Golden Bed and Other Stories (1953), The Power of Darkness and
Other Stories (1959) and Lajwanti and Other Stories (1966). Mulk Raj Anand was
inspired by his mother who had a keen eye for everyday happenings. The stories of Anand
reflect his extraordinary imagination. A majority of his stories take India for their locale.
His stories breathe his command over the narrative technique which concretizes a wide
range of subjects.

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 R.K.Narayan is known for his half a dozen anthologies of short stories: Malgudi
Days (1943), Cyclone and Other Stories (1944), The Astrologer’s Day and Other Stories
(1947), Lawley Road (1956), A Horse and Two Goats (1970) and Old and New (1981).
Irony and humour are the strengths of Narayan’s stories.

Narayan is often seen giving a twist-in-the-tail finish to his stories. The characters
are neatly drawn with the intention of scrutinizing their mindsets. All in all, R.K.Narayan
is famous for his well-knit tales. The most important feature of his stories is the spatial
setting – Malgudi.

Raja Rao was quite economical in the production of short stories. He published
only two collections of stories: The Cow of the Barricades and Other Stories (1947) and
The Policeman and the Rose (1978). Rao’s chief leitmotif was Gandhi and Gandhian
thought. He dealt with other issues like the national freedom struggle, religion, Indian
mindset, customs and practices. Excluding few stories, Raja Rao has more or less placed
his narratives in the countryside of south India.

Khushwant Singh’s first collection of short stories was titled The Mark of Vishnu
and Other Stories (1950). The stories in this collection carry an impact of the writer’s
tenure as a legal practitioner in Lahore. It was followed by the other anthologies of stories:
The Voice of God and Other Stories (1957), A Bride for the Sahib and Other Stories
(1967), Black Jasmine (1971) and Paradise and Other Stories (2004). The stories of
Khushwant Singh carry the life of the north of India with all the typical of his ingredients
like free expression, irony and vulgarity.

On the other hand, Manohar Malgonkar has published four anthologies of short
stories: A Toast in Warm Wine (1974), Bombay Beware (1975), Rumble Tumble (1977)
and Four Graves and Other Stories (1990), which deal with the life of the army men, their
bravery and his favourite hobby- hunting.

K.A.Abbas, the novelist and film-writer has richly contributed to this genre by
publishing the collections: Blood and Stones and Other Stories (1947), Rice and Other
Stories (1947), Cages of Freedom and Other Stories (1952), One Thousand Nights on a
Bed of Stones and Other Stories (1957) and The Black Sun (1963), which mainly deal with
the themes of Indian freedom struggle, social issues and human nature.

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 Shiv K. Kumar (1921), the celebrated poet, novelist and critic, has published two
collections of short stories under the titles Beyond Love and Other Stories (1980) and To
Nun with Love and Other Stories (2002), which attempt at finding out an interpretation of
the otherwise difficult-to-understand human life and deriving characters from different
communities of India.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala too has contributed to the Indian short story in English by
virtue of publishing the anthologies: Like Birds, Like Fishes (1963), An Experience of
India (1966), A Stronger Climate (1968) and How I became a Holy Mother (1976).

Ruskin Bond (1934), a writer who has exclusively devoted himself to this genre,
has been quite prolific in his literary output. His collections of stories: Neighbour’s Wife
and Other Stories (1966), My First Love and Other Stories (1968), The Man-Eater of
Manjeri (1972), The Girl from Copenhagen (1977), Friends in Small Places (2000) and
When Darkness Falls and Other Stories (2001) mainly deal with the themes of
contemporary life, children, tame animals and all that goes into the making of India.

Manoj Das (1934) is another writer with a consistent inclination towards short
story with high imaginative quality in his collections: Song for Sunday and Other Stories
(1967), Short Stories (1969), The Crocodile’s Lady (1975) and The Submerged Valley and
Other Stories (1986). His chief area of interest in his stories has been the life of the rural
people.

Rohinton Mistry’s stories are included in the anthology, Tales from Ferozsha Baag
(1992) that deals with the life of the Parsi community living in an old apartment in the-
then Bombay. The eleven interlinked stories in the book have a uniform locale.

Anita Desai’s anthology of short stories titled Games at Twilight and Other Stories
(1978) and Shashi Deshpande’s four collections of short stories The Legacy and Other
Stories (1978), It was the Nightingale (1986), It was Dark (1986) and The Miracle (1986)
chiefly present the tales of women, the injustice done to them, marital relations and issues
therein. On the other hand, Kamala Das (1934-2009) who has written profusely in her
mother tongue, Malayalam, has published two collections of short stories in English as
well. Her A Doll for the Child Prostitute (1977) and Padmavati, the Harlot (1992) contain
the stories which essentially deal with the women protagonists with high individual
concerns in the chaos of the male dominated system.

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 Githa Hariharan’s The Art of Dying and Other Stories (1993) is a collection of
stories that portray women characters with substance. The story included in the title is an
expression of the feminine capacity of accepting the inevitable reality called death.

Anita Nair’s Satyr of the Subway (1997) has brought about a wide range of
feminine issues right from women’s identity to sex. Her treatment of these issues has been
more eloquent than that of the other story tellers.

Vikram Chandra has published Love and Longing in Bombay (1997), which
contains stories narrated by an old man and the speciality of them is that they have
different genre dimensions. Chandra has experimented with the art of telling tales.
Chandra was honoured with the Commonwealth Book Award for Love and Longing in
Bombay in 1998.

The Parsi women writers Nergis Dalal (1920) and Meher Pastonji (1946) too have
written short stories under the titles The Nude (1977) and Mixed Marriage and Other
Stories (1999) respectively. Their primary thematic concerns are women and the Parsi
community. Both Nergis Dalal and Meher Pastonji have attempted successfully at delving
deeper into the psyche of their characters.

Jhumpa Lahiri published Interpreter of Maladies in 1999. The book comprises

nine stories that present the life, aspirations and disillusionments of the characters from
India and the Americanized Indians. Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and
Hemingway Foundation Award in the year 2000.

I.xvi. Summary:

This Chapter has presented the thematic preliminaries throwing light on the aspects
of exploration of self and those of the comparative culture study. It has included an
elaboration of the origin of Novel and Short Story as literary types in English in general
and the Indian Fiction in English with its past, present and future in particular. It has
focused the introduction of English in India and the development of Indian Writing in
English taking into consideration the major writers and their contributions.

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8. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Commonwealth-Book-Prize
9. https://www.makarand.com

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