Contents

Preface
Unit – I
NISSIM EZEKIEL: (1924-2004)-
KAMLA DAS: (1934 – 2009)
A.K RAMANUJAN: (1929-1993)
R K NARAYANA: (1906 – 2001)
BHABANI BHATTACHARYA: (1906 – 1988)
NIRAD C CHAUDHURI: (1897 – 1999)
RAO RAJA: (1908 – 2006)-
Mulk Raj Anand:
TORU DUTT (1856 – 1877):-
MANOHAR MALGONKAR (1913 – 2010)
KHUSWANT SINGH (1915 – 2014)
AMRITA PRITAM (1919 – 2005)
SALMAN RUSHDIE (Born in 1947)
V S NAIPAUL (1932 – 2018)
SRI AUROBINDO (1872 – 1950)
MICHAEL MADHUSUDAN DUTT (1824 – 1873)
HENRY LOUIS VIVIAN DEROZIO (1809 – 1831)
SAROJINI NAIDU (1879 – 1949)
ROMESH CHANDER DUTT (1848 – 1909)
RAVINDRA NATH TAGORE (1861- 1941)
GIRISH KARNAD (1938 - 2019)
VIJAY TENDULKAR (1928 – 2008)
BADAL SARKAR (1925 – 2011)
MOHAN RAKESH (1925 – 1972)
BANKIM CHANDRA CHATTERJE (1838 – 1894)
KASHIPRASAD GHOSH (1809 -1873)
MANMOHAN GHOSE (1869 – 1924)
RAJA RAM MOHAN ROY (1772 - 1833)
UNIT – II MODERN WRITERS
BALCHANDRA RAJAN (1920 – 2009)
GEETA MEHTA (Born – 1943)
VED MEHTA (Born – 1934)
BINA AGARWAL-
DOM MOREAS (1938 – 2004)
ALLAN SEALY (Born – 1951)
GAURI VISWANATHAN (Born – 1950)
KIRAN NAGARKAR (Born – 1942)
KAVERY NAMBISAN-
MEENAKSHI MUKHERJEE (1937 – 2009)
CHAMAN NAHAL (1927 – 2013)
ANITA DESAI (Born – 1937)
RAMA MEHTA (1923 – 1978)
JAYANTA MAHAPATRA (Born – 1928)
ARUN JOSHI (1939 – 1993)
KEKI N DARUWALLA (Born – 1937)
NAYANTARA SAHGAL (Born – 1927)
VIKRAM SETH (Born – 1952)
AMITAV GHOSH (Born – 1956)
SHASHI DESHPANDE-
RUSKIN BOND-
G N DEVY-
SUNETRA GUPTA (Born – 1965)
MAHESH DATTANI (Born – 1958)
UPAMANYU CHATTERJEE (Born – 1959)
ARUNDHATI ROY (Born – 1961)
CHATURVEDI BADRINATH (1933 – 2010)
LAXMAN GAIKWAD (Born – 1956)
INDIRA GOSWAMI (1942 – 2011)
MADHU KISHWAR (Born – 1951)
OM PRAKASH VALMIKI (1950 – 2013)
BHARATI MUKHERJEE (1940 – 2017)
MEENA ALEXANDER (1951 – 2018)
ROHINTON MISTRY (Born – 1952)
KIRAN DESAI (Born – 1971)
AGHA SHAHID ALI (1949 – 2001)
 INDIRA SINHA (Born – 1950)
ASIF CURRIMBHOY (1928 -1994)
KAMALA MARKANDAYA (1924 – 2004)
ARUN KOLATKAR (1932 – 2004)
SHOBHA DE (Born – 1948)
SHASHI THAROOR (Born – 1956)
HARINDRA NATH CHATTOPADHYAY (1898 – 1990)
ANEES JANG (Born – 1964)
PRITISH NANDY (Born – 1951)
GIEVE PATEL (Born – 1940)
GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK (Born – 1942)
MANJULA PADMANABHAM (Born – 1953)
SITAKANT MAHAPATRA (Born – 1937)
UNIT – III POST MODERN WRITERS
RUPA BAJWA (Born – 1976)
VIKAS SWARUP (Born – 1963)
CHETAN BHAGAT (Born– 1973)
CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI (Born – 1956)
VIKRAM CHANDRA (Born – 1961)
JHUMPA LAHIRI (Born – 1967)
AMIT CHAUDHARY (Born – 1962)
MAMANG DAI (Born – 1957)
MALATHI RAO (Born – 1930)
JEET THAYIL (Born – 1959)
TEMSULA AO (Born – 1945)
ADIL JUSSAWALLA (Born- 1940)
CYRUS MISTRY (Born – 1956)
JERRY PINTO (Born – 1966)
ESTHER DAVID (Born – 1945)
ARVIND ADIGA (Born – 1974)
ANITA NAIR (Born – 1966)
PANKAJ MISHRA (Born – 1969)
MEENA KANDASAMY (Born – 1984)
MADHULIKA LIDDLE (Born – 1973)
RANA DAS GUPTA (Born – 1971)
RAJ KAMAL JHA (Born – 1966)
MANJU KAPUR (Born – 1948)
GITHA HARIHARAN (Born – 1954)
SUKETU MEHTA-
ASHWIN SANGHI (Born – 1969)
NEELAM SAXENA CHANDRA (Born – 1969)
KRISHNA UDAYASANKAR-
NEEL MUKHERJEE (Born – 1970)
AKHIL SHARMA (Born – 1971)
ANJALI JOSEPH (Born – 1978)
ANURADHA ROY-
KIRAN DOSHI-
EASTERINE KIRE (Born – 1959)
ANAND TELTUMBDE-
RANJIT HOSKOTE (Born – 1969)
 Indian English Literature By
Krishna Sharma

Preface
There are few books in Indian English literature which satisfy
the requirement of students of Indian English literature
particularly for those who are preparing for competitive
examination as NET/JRF. This book is designed to satisfy
them and is presented in a systematic manner to
understand the literature of India in English clearly and
easily. The Book covers all the important writers of literature
especially in India.
Before the compilation of this book, author has consulted
various textbook, periodical and journals from which matters
have been drawn in this book and author heartily
acknowledges his indebtedness for the same. Author has
tried his best to provide up-to date and sincere knowledge
although your suggestions for the improvement of the book
will be acknowledged.
My special and sincere regards are due to my parents,
family members and friends who share each and every
achievement made by me and to whom I am very much
indebted.
 Krishna Sharma
(Author)
 Unit – I
In this section we have those writers who are considered
Legends of Indian English literature. Their contribution to
Indian English literature is unforgettable. These writers were
among those people who fought with struggles and made
sure that their country man may live pleasant life
English is a foreign language but since the British came
to India the language has had an impact on several fields—
in education, literary effort and as a medium of
communication. Indian who writes in the English language
and whose native language could be one of the several
regional and indigenous languages of India. English
literature in India is linked with the works of writers of the
Indian diaspora born in India but living abroad. In the
beginning, however political writing in the novel or essay
format was dominant as can be seen in Raja Ram Mohan
Roy’s works. An outstanding Indo-Anglican was Aurobindo
Ghose whose magnificent work is Savitri, an epic. In prose
his most popular work is ‘The Life Divine’ outlining his
metaphysics in a rich language.
Ravindra Nath Tagore was other prominent figure of this
age. He was the first person from Asia to win the Noble
Prize. He is considered among greatest writers of all ages.
Some of Tagore’s works were originally written in English
and others in Bangla. He attracted the Intellectuals of
literature all around the world toward Indian literature and
religion. Another writer of this era was Sarojini Naidu,the
Nightingale of India, who rendered familiar things with an
essence of color and romance. The Golden Threshold, The
Bird of Time and The Broken Wings are her important works.
In the genre of novel, three early writers made a mark.
Mulk Raj Anand’s Coolie, Untouchable, The Big Heart and
other novels are about the under privileged in India. R K
Narayana has become famous for creating the imaginary
town ‘Malgudi’ as the locale for his novels. He has a
humorous manner and an eye for the comic in the world
around him. His works include Swami and Friends, The Dark
Room, The Guide, Waiting for Mahatama and The Man Eater
of Malgudi. Raja Rao is also a prominent writer of this age.
He has written several good works. He is a good short story
writer also. Among his famous works are ‘Kanthapura’, The
Serpent and the Rope’ and ‘The Cat and the Shakespeare’.
Khushwant Singh (Train to Pakistan), Bhabani Bhattacharya (
So Many Hungers, He Who Rides Tiger, Music for Mohini) are
other Indian novelists famous for their writing in English.
In the recent past, we have had fresh talent. Salman
Rushdie is one of them. He has written lot of good works.
His work Midnight’s Children had become a rage around the
world, winning the Booker Prize. He got ‘Fatwa’ for his work
‘Satanic Verses’ from fanatics of muslim community but
Rushdie keep continue writing.
The mid-20th century Indian literature in English had
witnessed the emergence of poets such as Nissim Ezekiel
(The Unfurnished Man), AK Ramanujan (The Striders,
Relations, Second Sight and Selected Poems) etc.
If we talk about female figure of this age then the name of
Kamla Das, Toru Dutt, Amrita Pritam are considered with
respect. Toru Dutt is an immortal figure. Her style was
Keatsian. ‘Our Casuarina Tree’ is her famous poems. She left
a unforgettable memories with her works. Her name is taken
with respect in the field of literature. Another figure of this
age is confessional poet Kamla Das. She is well known for
her confessional poetry. My Grandmother’s House, Alphabet
of Lust and My Story are her best works. Her open and
honest treatment of female sexuality, free from any sense of
guilt, infused her writing with power and she got hope after
freedom, but also marked her as an iconoclast in her
generation. Amrita Pritam is another big figure of this age.
She is considered first prominent poet of Punjabi language
of this century. She has written several works and many of
her works have been translated into English and other
languages. The Pinjar is among her best works.
Thus we can say that this when it was tough for women to
cross the house wall, these women wrote in English and
touch the crucial topics in their writings. These women
writers paved way for other women to fight for their rights.
Works of these women writers are also considered path
breaking creations in the field of literature.
These writers make use of Indian phrases alongside English
words and have tried to reproduced a blend of the Indian
and the Western cultures. While Indian poets, novelists,
essayists, dramatists have been making momentous and
considerable contributions to world literature since the pre
independence era, the last few years have witnessed a
thriving of Indian English writing in the global market. The
works of Indian writers in English are often to be found on
the best seller list. They are also incurring and earning an
immense amount of critical fame.
❖

NISSIM EZEKIEL: (1924-2004)-

Nissim Ezekiel was an Indian Jewish poet play wright and

critic .He was Born in Bombay Maharashtra . His father was
a professor and his mother was principal of her own school
.He belongs to Mumbai’s Marathi speaking Jewish
community known as the Bene Israel.
He is acclaimed as the father of post- independence Indian
English verse. He is a trend-setter, who started modernity in
Indian English poetry. A group of contemporary
IndianEnglish poets follow the simple, conversational style
of Ezekiel. Not only in the style but also in the selection of
themes one finds the influence of Ezekiel in the
contemporary Indian English poets. He showed a much
greater tilt towards literature.
As a Man of letters Nissim Ezekiel is a ‘Protean Figure’. His
achievements as a poet and playwright are considerable.
His versatile genius can be found in his poetry, plays,
criticism, Journalism and translation. He is a widely travelled
man and delivered lecture in U.S.A, Australia and England as
well as given poetry reading in those countries. He worked
as a professor and Head of the Department of English at the
Mumbai University.
Nissim Ezekiel is also known as the Psychologist and poet of
the mind. He shows a marked tendency to probe the human
mind, and his poems reveal not only the conscious but also
the sub–conscious thoughts and conflicts of human beings,
and more particularly, his own thoughts and conflicts.
Indeed, his primary concern is with man and man’s mind.
The poem entitled ‘Case, Study’ is one of his several
attempts at an exploration of his own mind. Here he
portrays his own personality and his mind, though he
appears here in disguise, making it seems that he is
portraying somebody else. Self-exploration is also very
much in evidence in the poem entitled ‘London’. Here the
protagonist is searching and probing and the innermost
recesses of his self. His personal quest goes on relentlessly.
‘Island’ is another of Ezekiel’s poem where we find the same
search for the self-leading to a resigned acceptance of his
environment. Indeed, Ezekiel may be described as an
endless explorer of the labyrinths of the mind. Satyanarain
Singh observes that Ezekiel has been called “a pilgrim with
a sense of commitment” whose poetry is “a metaphoric
journey to the heart of Existence.” Nissim Ezekiel’s poems
are also the embodiments of some views about
metaphysics, ethics and principles of life and so a study of
these poems can enable one to arrive at what Ezekiel thinks
on metaphysical, ethical and such other questions. So far as
Ezekiel’s views of man’s relationship with the Supreme
Being and man’s place in the Universe are concerned, he
seems to believe that a man can know about the Supreme
Being only what the Supreme Being reveals to him, and
what that the reality is unfathomable.
Ezekiel was an editor of several Journals encouraging writing
poetry, plays and criticism. He also asked many writers for
translation, affecting the theory and practice for the young
poets. He was influenced by writers like Rilke and W.B.
Yeats. He treated poetry, as ‘the record of the mind’s
growth’. His poetic works indicates his growth as a poet-
critic and shows his personal importance.
When he was an M.A student, he topped the University of
Bombay in M.A English literature and won the R.K. Lagu
Prize for it. He was the secretary of the Indian P.E.N from
1963 to 1966 and from 1968 to 1972. He also edited two
P.E.N Conference Volumes. He conducted course in art
appreciation for J.J. school of Art and some other institutions
during 1969 -72. In 1973, he conducted a series of ten
programmed in art appreciation for Bombay Television. In
November 1974 he went for a tour of the United States on
an invitation from the U. S. Government.
He won SahityaAcademi Award in 1983 for his poetry
collection “Latter Day Psalms “. Ezekiel enriched and
established Indian English literature moving it beyond
purely spiritual and orientalist themes. His poem the “Night
of the Scorpion” is used as study material in India and
Colombian schools. His poems are used in NCERT and ICSE
English textbook. He is often considered the father of
Morden Indian English poetry by many critics He was
honoured with the Padamshri Award in 1988.
Works: Time to Change – 1952, Sixty Poem – 1953, The
Discovery of India – 1956 , The Third – 1959, The Unfinished
Man – 1960, The Exact Name – 1960, Snakeskin and Others
Poem – 1974 (It is a translation of the Marathi poet Indira
Sant), Hymns In Darkness – 1976, Latter – Day Psalms –
1982, Collected Poems – 1989, The Three Plays – 1969
(Play), Do Not Call It Suicide- 1993 (Play), Naipaul’s Indian
and Mine – 1992 (An Essay)
Poems: The couple, A Time To Change, For Elkana, Soap ,
In the Country Cot, Night of the Scorpion , Good Bye Party
for Miss Pushpa T.S., Background , Casually , Poet Lover and
Bird Watcher , Enterprise, Island , The Professor, Marriage,
The Paradise Flycatcher , Entertainment

NIGHT OF THE SCORPION

I remember the night my mother

was stung by a scorpion. Ten hours
of steady rain had driven him
to crawl beneath a sack of rice.

Parting with his poison - flash

of diabolic tail in the dark room -
he risked the rain again.

The peasants came like swarms of flies

and buzzed the name of God a hundred times
to paralyse the Evil One.

With candles and with lanterns

throwing giant scorpion shadows
on the mud-baked walls
they searched for him: he was not found.
They clicked their tongues.
With every movement that the scorpion made
his poison moved in Mother's blood, they said.

May he sit still, they said

May the sins of your previous birth
 be burned away tonight, they said.
May your suffering decrease
the misfortunes of your next birth, they said.
May the sum of all evil
balanced in this unreal world

against the sum of good

become diminished by your pain.
May the poison purify your flesh

of desire, and your spirit of ambition,

they said, and they sat around
on the floor with my mother in the centre,
the peace of understanding on each face.
More candles, more lanterns, more neighbours,
more insects, and the endless rain.
My mother twisted through and through,
groaning on a mat.
My father, sceptic, rationalist,
trying every curse and blessing,
powder, mixture, herb and hybrid.
He even poured a little paraffin
upon the bitten toe and put a match to it.
I watched the flame feeding on my mother.
I watched the holy man perform his rites to tame
the poison with an incantation.
After twenty hours
it lost its sting.

My mother only said

Thank God the scorpion picked on me
And spared my children.

KAMLA DAS: (1934 – 2009)

Kamla Das was an Indian English Poet and leading
Malayalam author from Kerala. She is popularly known by
her Pen name Madhavi Kutty.She was born in Thrissur
Kerala. She spent her childhood in Kolkata. She grew up in a
family of artists, where she felt ignored and unloved. Her
mother and uncle were writers.
As a teenager she married an older relative, and the
emotional and sexual problems arising that unsatisfying
relationship and her young motherhood provided material
for her first memoir My Story. Her style and content both
departed from 19th century romanticised ideas of love, a
choice especially striking for an Indian Hindu women. Das
broke with conventions in her personal life. Her open and
open treatment of female sexuality, free from any sense of
guilt, infused her writing with power and she got hope after
freedom, but also marked her as an iconoclast .
She once said “Poetry does not sell in this country
(India) “. She was a confessional poet and her poems have
been considered at par with those of Anne Sexton and
Robert Lowell. In 2009 ‘The Times’ called her “ the mother
of modern English Indian Poetry “. She converted to Islam in
last years of her life and named herself as Surayya Begum.
She was an iconoclast who has asserted her identity on the
firmament of Indian English poetry by her honest and candid
poetical lines that breaks to the hypocritical veneer of man –
woman relationship in Indian traditional society. Her poetry
is a serious break from the former female Indian poets like
that of Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu, but a celebration of the
universal experience of self, love-despair, anguish, failure
and disgust against the traditional mode of gender
manifestation apprehended through a feminine Indian
awareness. Kamala Das may be called the Indian Monroe,
just as MarilynMonroe is known as goddess of sex in
Hollywood. It is because Kamala Das’s writings titillates and
has its leanings on seduction unambiguously look at how
she arouses the reading public with an air of exotica as
found in her poem ‘Introduction,’
Her poetic works illustrates and explores on the struggle for
power and autonomy by the women poets. Her poems have
a self-affirming way of life for the female protagonist as an
intelligent, self-aware, confident and integrated personality
with the aptitude and ability to live life on her own terms.
The central idea and action her poetry revolves round an
encounter between a seemingly irresponsible female
protagonist and the sea in her poem the old play house and
other poems. Never before, had any woman in India dared
to describe so distinctly about the physicability or longing of
a woman as Kamala Das .Her revelation has made the whole
Indian society dazed and awesome. It is because of her
forceful expression of the problems of women by citing her
own sty that she came to be expected as the most daring
and controversial poet.
Works: Alphabet of Lust – 1976 (novel), My Story – 1976
(autobiography), A Doll For the Child Prostitute – 1977
(stories), Padamavati the Harlote and other stories – 199
Poems: The Descendants -1967, The Old p Play House And
Other Poems -1973, The Strange Time -1977, Collected
Poems -1984, Anamalai Poems-1985, Only The Soul Knows
How To Singh -1997, My Mother At Sixty -Six 1999, Ya Allah
-2001, Tonight, This Savage Rite -1979 (with PritishNandy),
Summer in Calcutta -1965, The Sirens – 1964

A.K RAMANUJAN: (1929-1993)

Attipate Krishnaswami Ramanujan was an Indian poet and

scholar. He was born in Mysore in 1929 .His father was an
astronomers and professor of Mathematics at Mysore
University. His brother A.K.Srinivasan was also a writer.
Ramanujan`s critical work in Indian folklore and translation
of Indian classical literature are highly regarded around the
world and fought in collage in India and U.S. His essays such
as “Is there an Indian Way of Thinking?”take theoretical
approches from linguistics in better understanding cultures,
religious influence and way of thinking, via a context
sensitional approch. He is considered to be one of the
cornerstones of Indio –American poetry, with his poems
being on exploration and testamnet of immigrant life along
with the remisincience and preservation of his Indian
Culture.
His poetry has brought many laurels to him. The volumes of
his poetry ‘The Striders’, ‘Relations’ and ‘Selected Poems’
have been praised by the literary critics for the succinct
expression and originality. Ramanujan has done a yeoman
service by translating the Tamil and Kannada classical
poetry into English. Those who read contemporary English
poetry are familiar with the nuances and death of
Ramanjan’s poetry. His stress on the web of family life and
the integration of the individual with it remains the
prominent characteristic of his poetry. The collection of
poems in Relation reflects his poetic insight tinged by
eastern and western cultures. He says that with the passage
of time, the individual is prone to see the law of Karma in all
changes around him. Ramanujan’s use of irony is most
evident in the poem ‘Entries for a Catalogue of Fears’. Even
at the advanced age of sixty instead of having total faith in
God, one may “talk now and then of God” and one may find
the effect of Karma “in the fall of a tubercular sparrow, and
in the news paper deaths in Burma”. He says in the same
poem that double vision is confusing with no clarity of
things in the external world, but “with one small
adjustment/of glasses/all the misunderstanding vanishes”.
The mystification of events due to lack of scientific approach
and empirical analysis, produce a host of problems which
are hurdles in the way of progress maintains Ramanujan.
 The poetry of Ramanujan is like a mirror in which one
can see the face of Indian tradition, along with a host of
other things. His poetry recognizes the vitality inherent in
Indian culture and tradition, and also the changes which
have taken place in the structure of Indian society.
Ramanujan’s subtle irony colours his glimpses into the
traditional ideas and rituals, which are followed by people
belonging to different strata of Indian society. His poetry has
presented the diverse aspects of tradition in a new garb,
which is also indicative of the need to distinguish between
the relevant and irrelevant aspects of it in the context of
changes in the contemporary world. Ramanujan’s poem
‘Self-Portrait’ shows his excellent grasp over the use of
images, to depict the experiences and emotions in his
poetry. He has brought out his innermost feelings and the
assessment of his own personality and its different facts in
it.

He was awarded the “PadamShri” in 1976. In 1983 he was

awarded the Mac Arthur Prize Felloship. He was awarded the
Sahitya Akademi Award pasthamously in 1999 for his
collection of poems “The Selected Poems “

Works: The Interior Landscape – 1967, Speaking of Siva –

1973, The Literature of India – 1974, Hymns for Drowning –
1981, Poems of Love and Wars – 1985, Is There Any Way of
Thinking? – 1990, A Flower Tree and Other Tales from India –
1997, The Striders – 1966, Relations – 1971, Selected Poems
– 1976, Second Sight, The Collected Poems – 1997, Three
Hundred Ramayana: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on
Translation

R K NARAYANA: (1906 – 2001)

Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayan was a famous Indian

writer. He was born in Madras, British India in a Brahman
family. After completing his schooling in Madras, he got his
Bachelor Degree from Maharaja College of Mysore.
He is considered as one of the leading figure of early
Indian literature in English. He is the one who made India
accessible to the people a window to peep into Indian
culture and sensibilities. His writing style is often compared
to that of the great American author William Faulkner.
Although Narayan’s contribution to the Indian literature is
beyond description and the way he grabbed foreign
audience’s attention for Indian literature is commendable
too but he will always be remembered for the invention of
“Malgudi “a semi-urban fictional town in Mysore. This
fictional town of Malgudi was first introduced in “Swami and
Friends “. His work “The Guide “won the Shitya Akademi
Award and adapted for film. His short stories have been
compared with those of Guyde Maupassant because of his
ability to compress a narrative. Narayan also worked for a
Madras based paper called “The Justice “as a reporter. This
paper was dedicated to the rights of non Brahmins .
Narayan’s mentor and friend Graham Greene helped
him to get publishers in starting years of his literary career.
His trilogy of ‘Swami and Friends’ ‘The Bachelor of Arts’ and
“The English Teacher “ is very famous. He is also called the
“South Indian E M Forster “. American writer John Updike
noticed Narayan’s work and compared Narayan to Charles
Dickens. Updike called him a writer of a vanishing breed –
the writer as a citizen ; one who identifies completely with
his subjects and with a belief in the significance of the
humanity.
In his career, Narayan received several awards and
honours including Sahitya Akedmi Award in 1958 for The
Guide. He received the ‘ Padma Vibhushan ‘ and ‘ Padma
Bhushan ‘. India’s third and second highest civilian awards.
He was also nominated for Noble Prize in literature several
times. He was nominated to the ‘ Rajya Sabha ‘ the upper
house of the Indian Parliament. He died in 2001 in Chennai,
Tamilnadu.
Works:
Novels: Swami and Friends – 1935, The Bachelor of
Arts – 1937, The Dark Room – 1938, The English Teacher –
1945, Mr.Sampath -1948, The Financial Expert -1952,
Waiting for Mahatama -1955, The Guide – 1958, The Man
Eater of Malgudi-1961, The Vendor of Sweets – 1967, The
Painter of Signs – 1977, A Tiger for Malgudi – 1983, Talkative
Man – 1986, The World of Nagraj – 1990, Grandmother’s Tale
– 1992
Non- Fiction: Next Sunday – 1960, My Dateless Diary –
1960, My Days – 1974, Reluctant Guru – 1974, The Emerald
Route – 1980, A Writer’s Nightmare – 1988, A Story Teller’s
World – 1989, The writerly Life – 2001
Mythology: Gods, Demons and Others – 1964, The
Ramayana – 1973, The Mahabharata – 1978
Short Story Collections: Malgudi Days – 1942, An
Astrologer’s Days – 1947, A lawleg Road and Other Stories –
1956, A Horse and Two Goats – 1970, Under the Banyan
Tree and Other Stories – 1985

BHABANI BHATTACHARYA: (1906 – 1988)

Bhabani Bhattacharya was an Indian writer. He was born in

Bhagalpur, part of Bengal Presidency in British India. He got
his bachelor degree from Patna University and PhD from the
University of London. While studying in London, he was
taught by the political philosopher and author Harold Laski
who would be, along with Tagore and Gandhi, a lasting
influence on his writing.
In London, Bhattacharya became closely associated
with Marxist groups and an active member of the League
Against Imperialism. He translated Tagore’s The Golden
Boat. His work ‘So Many Hungers’ deals with exploitation
and greed set against the background of the Independence
movement and the Bengal famine of the early 1940s. His
work ‘He Who Rides a Tiger’ is based on an ancient saying,
He who rides a tiger can not dismount.” But Bhattacharya
through the character of Kalo makes it possible to dismount
the tiger if the necessity aries.
His other novel ‘Music for Mohini’ is essentially a novel of
women. It embodies the writer's vision of the role a woman
is likely to play in post independence India. The plot is
concerned with the development of people's consciousness
to absorb the real meaning of freedom from foreign rule and
increasing awareness of responsibilities. The novel seeks to
modulate traditional and modern values. The conflict
between them is finally resolved by proposing a healthy
blend of the two which alone can ensure India's existence in
the courtesy of nations in the fast changing world. It is set in
Calcutta and a Bengali village of Behauli. The plot has all
the essential material of an absorbing family drama, but it is
far from perfect as an artistic whole. Its design is casual.
Many events and characters appear to be superfluous and
remain un-integrated into the plot. The relationships
between different characters remain unexplored. Certain
characters could have been better developed. It does not
have sufficient action which could elaborate the significance
of the title. The novel is highly symbolic and symbolism
operates at the levels of characters settings, themes and
actions.
Bhattacharya's novel ‘A Goddess named Gold’ is rated as
the one of the best novels on Indian village life. It has a
major plot and a sub-plot and both are complementary to
each other. The main plot relates a young girl Meera's
attempt at freeing her poor villagers from the iron clutches
of the village money lender and the sub-plot is related to
talisman episode. They both have been integrated so as to
convey the impression of a narrative. The novel deals with
the theme of economic liberation of the poor from
exploitation. Its action is set around India's independence.
Gold is the central symbol in the novel. It symbolizes
material prosperity, spiritual and mental richness. Like his
many other novels, the plot moves forward as a result of
conflict between the exploiter and the exploited. It is a
unified whole. It remains by the classical unities of place
and action in a qualified sense, and the time duration covers
a few months. The events are arranged in a logical
sequence. The novel is a fine example of the writer's
developed skills in handling technical devices.
He is described as belonging to the social realism
school of Indo – Anglican literature. Bhattacharya adopted a
pedagogical approach to making novels out of ideas more
real through situational examples. He won the Sahitya
Akademi Award in 1967 for his work “Shadow from Ladakh.”
Works: Some Memorable Yesterday – 1941, So Many
Hungers – 1947, Indian Cavalcade – 1948, He Who Rides a
Tiger – 1955, Towards Universal Man – 1961, Music for
Mohini – 1964, Shadow from Ladakh – 1966, A Goddess
Named Gold – 1967, Steel Hawk and Other Stories – 1968,
Gandhi the Writer – 1969, A Dream in Hawaii – 1978, Socio-
Political Currents in Bengal: A Nineteenth Century
Perspective – 1980

NIRAD C CHAUDHURI: (1897 – 1999)

Nirad C Chaudhuri was an Indian writer. He was born at

Kishurganj in Bengal (now Bangladesh). He completed his
study at Kishurganj and Kolkata. Chaudhuri wrote several
works in English and Bengali. His works provide evaluation
of the histories and culture of India, especially the context of
British colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries. He is best
known for “The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian”. He
was awarded the Sahitya Akedmi Award for his, the
biography on Max Muller “Scholar Extraordinary”.
He also worked as secretary to Sarat Chandra Bose, a
political leader in the movement in India. As a result he was
able to interact with political leaders of India such Gandhi ji,
Nehru ji and Subhas Chandra Bose. He is accused of being
in secret connivance with the British and leaked information
about the where about of Sarat Chandra Bose.
Chaudhuri immigrated permanently to Britain in 1970,
initially to research European Indologist Friedrich Max
Muller's documents in the University of Oxford. It was the
final step of his life's west-bound journey and was made
possible by a rich Cambridge sociologist, Professor Edward
Albert Shils, who gave him a handsome loan at the time.
About the help he received from different people, Chaudhuri
wrote, "This outside help came to me unsolicited, given
freely to me by some of my countrymen but mostly by
individual Englishmen, all of whom saw something in me
which was worth supporting." After Nirad Chaudhuri settled
in Britain, he taught at the American universities of Texas
and Chicago as a visiting professor. For somebody who
could not be a professor in India because of inadequate
qualification, it would have been a dream come true.
He also became the subject of a documentary film
‘Adventures of a Brown Man in Search of Civilization’
directed by James Ivory of Merchant-Ivory Productions. The
film's title was taken from a chapter in Chaudhuri's A
Passage to England. Chaudhuri's conceit was that he was in
England to show Englishmen "how their fathers dressed,
how their fathers ate and drank and how their fathers wrote
English." Nirad Chaudhuri's first book from Britain was a
biography of a famous Indology scholar, Max Mueller. Titled
Scholar Extraordinary, The Life of Professor the Right
Honourable Friedrich Max Muller, the book won the Sahitya
Akademi Award in 1975 as the year's best work in Indian
English. Chaudhuri's second, and last, biography was Clive
of India: A Political and Psychological Essay. There would
have been one more biography by Chaudhuri had he
accepted an offer by Jacqueline Onassis, the widow of
former American President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Chaudhuri declined to write a biography of her second
husband, the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis.
Refusing such a high-society offer was an act of intellectual
arrogance by Chaudhuri. He also publicly refuted a remark
of British politician Norman Beresford Tebbit. The latter had
suggested that love of cricket was the acid test of English
patriotism. Chaudhuri, however, wrote back that the love of
Kenneth Grahame's novel The Wind in the Willows, Stilton
cheese and the opera were the three real tests for authentic
Englishhood.
Academic achievement of Nirad Chaudhuri was that even
without a postgraduate degree, he received two post-
doctoral degrees from the universities of Oxford and of
Stirling. At the Oxford ceremony for conferring a honorary
Doctor of Letters degree, the Public Orator said, "The
eminent Bengali whom I now present is thoroughly versed
both in English and European poetry and has interpreted
Indian society and customs to us with great intellectual
ability, illuminating several aspects of our society." In 1992,
Queen Elizabeth II made Chaudhuri an Honorary
Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British
Empire.
Works: The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian – 1959, A
Passage to India – 1959, The Continent of Circe – 1965,
Intellectual in India – 1967, To Live or Not to Live – 1971,
Scholar Extraordinary – 1974, Culture in the Vanity Bag –
1976, Clive of India – 1975, Hinduism: A Religion to Live by
– 1979, Thy Hand, Great Anarch! – 1987, Three Horsemen of
the New Apocalypse – 1997, The East is East and West is
West – (Essay), Why I mourn for England – ( Essay )

RAO RAJA: (1908 – 2006)-

Raja Rao was an Indian writer. He was born in the village of

Hassana in Mysore. He belonged to an orthodox Indian
Brahmin family. His father was a Profesor in Hyderabad.
Having received his early education in Hyderabad, he went
to Aligarh University for higher education. There he came in
contact with Professor Dickinson who inspired him to study
French language. He received PhD at the University of
Sorbarnne under the professor Cazamian.He lived several
years in France. There he married an American actress
Katherine. In 1940, he returned to India and went Banaras in
search of a Guru. There he met a great Vedantic scholar
Swami Almanan, who became his Guru, guide and adviser.
He wrote several novels and short stories. His works
are deeply rooted in Metaphysic. “The Serpent and the
Rope”, a semi-autobiographical novel recounting a search
for spiritual truth in Europe and India, established him as
one of the finest Indian prose stylists and won him the
Sahitya Akademi Award in 1964. His works are seen as a
varied and significant contribution to Indian English
literature as well as world literature as a whole.
The first novel of Raja Rao ‘Kanthpura’ deals with the Quit
India phase of Indian freedom movement. But into its basic
theme Raja Rao has woven other themes also like the
theme of conflict between moral and social commitments of
man towards nature, society and himself. Moreover, it is
intensely Indian in being a PurlilJa, narrated in an age old
manner of granny's way of telling a story. Moorthy,a
character of novel is doubtful about the Gandhiness of
Gandhi. Independence for him is not just an exchange of
papers and powers. Moorthy has humanistic visions for India
and he finally identifies himself with the socialism as the
only possible alternative as a matter of par excellent human
gesture. This novel presents a 'conflict' between "the
contemporary Indian reality and the inherited concept of
tradition". This 'inherited concept', rightly speaking, is the
Western historicism, with its attendant ideas of material
progress and the ultimate perfectibility of human nature
through social advancement and through human effort. The
'Indian reality,' on the other hand, lies in its pulpitate
primitive animism. According to animism the very fabric and
destiny of humanity are closely linked with nature and its
evolutionary metamorphosing quality. Its metaphysical
tenets and purpose permanently remain a mystery. Indians
maintain that life has to be lived in these mysteries and the
human intellect is not sufficient to unwind them. Only divine
grace and the divine intervention can solve the crisis of
existence through faith and not through human reason.
Unlike R. K. Narayan and Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao had a
extensive exposure to the Western culture and he got
intimately acquainted himself with the historical humanistic
development from Renaissance to the present. So in Raja
Rao the East-West conflict and alienation get depth and
vitality in metaphysical and spiritual terms. Walsh,
distinguishing the three novelists, writes: "If Anand is the
novelist as reformer, and Narayan the novelist as moral
analyst, Raja Rao is the novelist as metaphysical poet”.
He was influenced by Andre Malraux, Shakespeare, Romain
Roland and Mazzini. He is one of the greatest writers of
India. He has great respect for women, once he said,
“Woman is the earth, air, ether, sound; woman is the
microcosm of the mind”. He was awarded by ‘Padma
Bhushan’, India’s third highest civilian award in 1969 and
‘Padma Vibhushan’ India’s second highest civilian Award in
2007. His name was also considered for the Noble Prize.
Works:
Fiction: Novels Kanthapura – 1938, The Serpent and
the Rope – 1960, The Cat and Shakespeare: A Tale of India –
1965, Comrade Kirillov – 1976, The Chess master and His
Moves – 1988
Short Story Collection: The Cow of the Barricades – 1947,
The Policeman and the Rose – 1978, On the Ganga Ghat –
1978
Non – Fiction: Changing India: An Anthology – 1939,
Tomorrow – 1943-44, Whither India – 1948, The Meaning of
India – 1996, The Great Indian Way : A Life of Mahatma
Gandhi – 1998

Mulk Raj Anand:

He was an Indian English writer. He was

born in Peshawar, British India. He studied at Khalsa College
Amritsar and Cambridge University. Anand is well known for
his depiction of the poorer castes in traditional Indian
society. He is admired for his novels and short stories, which
have acquired the status of being classical works of modern
Indian English literature, noted for their perceptive insight
into the lives of the oppressed and their analysis of
impoverishment, exploitation and misfortune. His first main
novel ‘Untouchable’ was a chilling expose of the day to day
life of a member of India’s untouchable caste. It is the story
of a single day in the life of Bakha, a toilet cleaner, who
accidentally bumps into a member of a higher caste. This
simple book was widely acclaimed and Anand won the
reputation of being India’s Charles Dickens. The Introduction
of this book was written by his friend, E M Forster, whom he
met while working on T S Eliot’s magazine ‘Criterion’.
Forster writes “Avoiding rhetoric and circumlocution, it has
gone straight to the heart of its subject and purified it.
Anand was associated with the Progressive Writers’
movement of India and was one of the moving spirits behind
the drafting of its first manifesto. Equally noteworthy was
his passion for the arts whose best expression was the
issues of ‘Marg’ which he founded and edited for a quarter
century. Even, after he withdrew from its editorship, it
continued to be the leading art journal of India.
Family tragedy flushed Anand’s career as a writer. One of his
aunts committed suicide after being excommunicated by
her family for sharing a meal with a Muslim woman. This
violent, explicit and personal consequence of Indian’s
uncompromising caste system led Anand to write his first
prose essay. His first main novel ‘Untouchable’ followed
shortly after and is considered a seminal work for its
inclusion of Punjabi and Hindustani idioms transliterated into
English. A character study of a member of India’s
untouchable caste, Untouchable earned Anand the moniker
“India’s Charles Dickens.”
He worked for BBC as a scriptwriter during world war-II.
There he became a friend of George Orwell. Orwell penned a
favourable of Anand’s novel ‘The Sword and the Sickle’.
After returning from England, he founded a literary
magazine ‘Mang’ and taught in several Universities. He was
greatly influenced by Premchand and Tagore. He won the
Sahitya Akedmi Award in 1971. He was a recipient of the
civilian honour of the ‘Padma Bhushan’.
Anand received the International Peace Prize from the World
Peace Council and the Leverhulme Fellowship, among other
awards and accolades. Mulk Raj Anand is remembered for
his seventy-five-years-long literary career that mirrors the
trajectory of India’s search for a just, equitable, and
progressive society.
Works: Untouchable – 1935, Coolie – 1936, Two Leaves and
a Bud – 1937, The Village – 1939, Across the Black Waters –
1939, The Sword and the Sickle – 1942, The Big Heart –
1945, The Last Child – 1934, The Private Life of an Indian
Prince – 1953, The Road – 1961, The Golden Breath – 1933,
Introduction to Indian Art – 1956, Kama Kala – 1958,
Homage to Khajuraho, Seven Summer – 1951, Morning Face
– 1968, Conversations in Bloomsbury – 1981

TORU DUTT (1856 – 1877):-

Toru Dutt was an Indian poetess. She was born in Calcutta.

She came from a family where education, art and linguistics
were encouraged. Her father was a linguist himself who
published some poems in his life time.
Toru Dutt was well versed in Bengali, French and English.
She composed the poem ‘Our Casuarina Tree’ which
became a symbol of her childhood memories. She
personified the Casuarina Tree with the essence of her dead
siblings thus hoping to preserve their memories through her
poem. Her book ‘ A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields’ was a
compilation of translated French poems that she had been
working on with her sister, along with personal observations
and anecdotes. She was highly influenced by French
Romanticism, French language and literature. ‘Our
Casuarina Tree is a splendid Keatsian poem.
She is called the Keats of the Indo-English literature as
she died at a very young age of consumption like him
and for both of them the end came slow and sad. Her
contribution to literature is never ending. Critics describe
her as the fragile blossom that withered so fast. The well-
known poet and novelist Andre Theuriet showered much
praise on ‘A Sheaf Gleaned in French Field’. Her last
poem Amon Pere is praised worldwide and is considered
faultless. She was proud of her Indian tradition. She was
proud of India s cultural heritage, folklores, myths and
legends, and its rich classical literature. Though English
by education, she was an Indian through and through. E.J.
Thompson wrote about her, Toru Dutt remains one of the
most astonishing woman that ever lived fiery and
unconquerable of soul. These poems are sufficient to
place Toru Dutt in the small class of women who have
written English verse that can stand.
Though Toru Dutt loved English and French and had
embraced Christianity with other members of her family,
sub-consciously she felt drawn towards her country and
its rich heritage. Her European education did not have
the adverse effect of alienating her from her roots on the
other hand she returned to it with fresh insights. While
 Gosse sees her ‘A Sheaf Gleaned In French Fields’ as
imperfect though interesting is his prediction that her
English poems will be ultimately found to constitute
Toru’s chief legacy of posterity has come true. The
ballads The Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hidustan
form the last and most matured of her countings. The
ballads are essentially Indian in genre and outlook and
are the poetical attempts to reveal her return to her land.
In them are enshrined what she had learnt of her country
from books and from her people. She did not anglicise
her ideas but kept close to the ethical values of the
original tales while her understanding of modern life and
dedication to craft has helped her to make these ideas of
yore relevant to poterity.
Works: Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan –
1882, A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields – 1876, Bianca:
The Young Spanish Maiden, Our Casuarina Tree – 1881

MANOHAR MALGONKAR (1913 – 2010)

He was an Indian civil servant and writer. He was born in

Belgaum. He earned his graduation from the University of
Mumbai. He joined the Army and rose to the rank of
Lieutenant Colonel but retired from service at the age of 39.
His novels have the background of Indian
independence Movement and its results, which are both
social and historical with adventure as a spirit. ‘A Band in
the Ganges’ is an example for this. It describes the results
of partition. R K Narayan called Manohar as his favourite
Indian novelist in English. Malgonkar is notable for his
military thrillers, historical novels and adventure fiction. His
major works include The Men Who Killed Gandhi, A Bend in
the Ganges, Spy in Amber, Comb at of Shadows, The
Garland Keepers, The Sea Hawk, Shalimar, The Princes,
Cactus Country, Distant Drum, Bandicoot Run and The
Devil’s Wind.
Being an Indian novelist, Malgonkar's world view is coloured
by a sense of fate behind the lives of human beings. His
novels show the defects of the nuclear and the joint-family.
They give a truthful account In Malgonkar’s Combat of
Shadow, there is a portrayal of the life of British aristocracy.
Malgonkar is the only Indian writer who has first-hand
experience in the army. So his accent of the life of soldiers
during war and peace in the Pre-Independence and Post-
Independence period is authentic. A detailed description of
the life of soldiers is found in the ‘Distant Drum’. His soldiers
are known for their courage, bravery, honesty, integrity,
discipline, dignity, loyalty and patriotism under any
circumstances. There is a lot of autobiographical element in
his novels as he feels at home in their presentation.
‘Combat of Shadows’ exhibits the life of British aristocracy
which does not care for the morals and sex-taboos of the
poor, exploiting their ethical existence shows the dominance
put forth by some rich people disturbing human
relationships.
Malgonkar also draws the attention of the common people
towards such many characters of his depicting certain bad
qualities effecting society with differing attitude structures.
He finds India under the pressures of modern education and
industrialization changing its virtues and reminds us to
overcome the evil factors. As a contemporary of writers
such as Mulk Raj Anand, Khushwant Singh and Kamala
Markandya, it is a fact that Manohar Malgonkar’s
contribution to the genre we refer to today as Indian Writing
in English remains largely unacknowledged. Malgonkar
evolves his own technique, in his belief that it is the
responsibility of the novelist to make his novels as readable
as possible. Malgonkar weaves a plot in such a way that no
reader feels bored while reading him. The novels of
Malgonkar have social and political parameters. At the same
time his works are informative and authentic. t of parent-
child relationship.
Works: The Sea Hawk: Life and Battle of Kanhoji Angrey –
1959, Distant Drum – 1960, A Combat of Shadow – 1962,
The Princes – 1963, A Bend in the Ganges – 1964, Spy in
Amber – 1971, The Devil’s Wind – 1972, Shalimar – 1978,
Bandicoot Run – 1982
Short Stories: A Teller of Tales, The Garland Keepers,
Cactus Country, A Toast in Warm Wine, In Uniform, Bombay
Beware, Rumble Tumble, Four Graves, Inside Goa, Two Red
Rooster

KHUSWANT SINGH (1915 – 2014)

Khushwant singh was an Indian author, lawyer, journalist

and diplomat. He was born in Hadali (now in Pakistan). He
was educated at the government college Lahore, at Kings
College and Cambridge University. He practiced law before
joining the Indian Ministry of External Affairs in 1947. He
began a distinguished career as a journalist with All India
Radio in 1951.
Khushwant Singh’s name is bound to go down in Indian
literary history as one of the finest Historian and novelist, a
forthright political commentator, and an outstanding
observer and social critic. He authored classics such as
‘Train to Pakistan’ , I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale’ and
‘Delhi’. His non-fiction includes the classic two volume ‘A
History of Sikhs’, a number of translations and works on
Sikh religion and culture, Delhi, Nature, Current Affairs and
Urdu poetry. His autobiography ‘Truth, Love and a Little
Malice’ was published in 2002.
Khushwant Singh explores social, political realities of
contemporary Indian life. His main concern is the man and
the reality. He has established himself as a prominent writer
of social realism with the publication of his first novel ‘Train
to Pakistan’. The term social realism means the depiction in
literature of social reality in its true colours. The emergence
of social realistic novel in Indian fiction in English is due to
the rise of Nationalistic Movement. The novelists roused the
feelings of nationalism in common man through works.
Most of Khushwant Singh’s critics have talked about his
realistic portrayal of sex and violence, they have not fully
perceived the expensive scope of his vision of humanism.
Khushwant Singh is a writer of social novels but not only sex
and violence. He does not keep the surface reality. Unlike
the other social writers Khushwant Singh selects his
material from the surprising variety of life and his vision is
truly comprehensive.
His contribution lies in the portrayal of political life in
India. Sex, violence are not the only realities Singh’s social
novels transcend this ideological boundary and present the
real picture of society, encompassing the broader humanity.
He enlivens the contemporary Indian life through his
characters. He portrays man objectively in relation to
society without making him a mouthpiece of any
presupposed ideology.
Khushwant Singh’s fictional world indicates the richness and
depth of his demur of reality. He deals with various aspects
of social reality. He is the oldest living monument of Delhi.
He himself is history. He is the witness of pre-partition
national movement, post-partition, Independence and the
modern complex world. He is much interested in human
relation. His East-West education and rural-urban life help
his fictional world to record contemporary socio-political
tensions. He presents a panoramic view of Indian life.
Khushwant Singh portrays the real picture of the
contemporary society and the social, political and religious
behaviour of the people. As we find in ‘Train to Pakintan’ the
original pictures of the village Mano Majra before and after
partition, the love story of Nooran and Jugga, the greedy
people, death and violence. He depicts the peaceful co-
existence of Hindu, Muslim, Sikh in a multi-religion society. It
has only three brick buildings, one of which is the home of
Hindu money lender Lala Ram Lal. The other two are the
Sikh Temple and the Mosque. Their common sharing of the
‘large peepul tree’ is unmistakably the rich common
heritage shared by different communities in India. Here life
is regulated by the trains which rattle across the near by
river bridge. Lala Ram Lal is murdered by Mali and his gang.
Suspicion falls on Juggat Singh, the village gangster, who is
carrying on a secret affair with Muslim girl Nooran, A
western educated communist is also involved. A train comes
full of dead Sikhs. Some days later the same thing happens
again, and the village becomes a battlefield of conflicting
loyalties, and neither magistrate nor police can stop the
rising tide of violence.
‘I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale’ is appreciated for
significant portrayals of the Sikh life and traditions in the
days of pre-Independence India. Buta Singh and Wazir
Chand both the magistrates cherish pro-British ideology.
Their son Sher Singh and Madan are anti British in their
attitude. The womenfolk of Buta Singh’s family and of wazir
chand’s family are not bothered about the political life of the
country. They are mainly concerned with the security of
family life and comfortable living. Sabhrai, wife of Buta
Singh happens to be a very religious lady who believes in
the sanctity of Granth Sahib and the supremacy of Guru
Govind Singh. Champak represents the secret affair of the
contemporary high society lady. The illicit relationship
between Shunno and Peer Sahib is depicted as a counter
part to the affairs between Madan and Champak. Khushwant
Singh tells us that sexual and sensual urges are very
common in all classes of society. Mundoo represents the
poor condition of child labour in pre-Independence India.
Buta Singh’s relationship with Taylor speaks about the
behaviour of British rulers with Indian officials.
The novel ‘Delhi’ is full of Muslim customs and rituals. The
novel is not a elegy sung over lost empires. It is a
celebration of the unique power of a culture and civilization,
the power to generate some of the finer values of life; the
power to ensure the survival of these values in the face of a
nation; collective derogations, and above all, the power to
ensure that when all is lost, an awareness of loss remains. It
is superb in its vulgarity and myriad evils of perversity. It is
also superb in symbolism of the Indian society, its
contradiction, balances, caste and religious communalism,
racial and ethnic strife, the spirit of unity in diversity. The
trio-Musaddi Lal Kaysatha, Nihal Singh and Jaita Rangreta in
their monologues make a rational observation of social and
political situation and plight of the people in general.
Musaddi Lal in his helplessness compares himself with a
hijda; as is the case of Bhagmati, a symbol of Delhi, for their
inherent qualities to adapt themselves to any
circumstances. The writer depicts every kind of sexual
encounter efficiently.
‘The Company of Women’ is also based on man-woman
relationship. The novel begins with its hero Mohan Kumar, a
successful Delhi’s businessman breaking off with his wife
and his everlasting ‘lusty’ effort to set up more flexible
arrangement for appeasement of his physical needs. The
novel also provides middle class aspirations, the concept of
arranged marriages in India which are often related to
business bargains and the desire for scandalous gossip of
the urban elite. The novel chronologically presents the
women with whom the hero beds, including his wife. Here
Singh seems to have been extending the idea that love and
sex know no caste, class and community bar.
Thus we can say that Khshwant Singh was a great
personality of Indian literature. He got lot of laurels in his life
span. He was a member of Parliament from 1980 to 1986.
He was awarded the ‘Padma Bhushan’ in 1974 but returned
in 1984 in protest against the storming of the Golden
Temple in Amritsar by the Indian Army. In 2007, he was
awarded the ‘Padma Vibhushan’. He received the Punjab
Ratna also.
Works: The Mark of Vishnu and Other Stories – 1950, The
History of Sikhs – 1953, Train to Pakistan – 1956 ( novel ),
The Voice of God and Other Stories – 1957, I Shall Not Hear
the Nightingale – 1959 ( novel ), The Sikh Today – 1959, The
Fall of the Kingdom of Punjab – 1963, Ghadar 1915:India’s
First Armed Revolution – 1966, A Bride for Sahib and Other
Stories – 1967, Black Jasmine – 1971, Delhi : A Novel –
1990, Not a Nice Man to Know – 1993, Women and Men in
my Life – 1995, The Company of Women – 1999 ( novel ),
Truth, Love and a Little Malice – 2002 ( autobiography ), The
Sunset club – 2010, Gods and Godmen of India – 2012,
Agnostic Khushwant : There is no God – 2012, Sex, Scotch
and Scholarship – 1992, The Portrait of a Lady, The Strain,
Success Mantra, A Love Affair in London

TRAIN TO PAKISTAN: SUMMARY

Train to Pakistan is a harrowing tale of a country

divided by religious and political differences. The narrative
takes place during the historic Partition of India in the
summer of 1947, which is considered one of the bloodiest
times in the country’s history. This division of India into two
separate states caused a nationwide resettlement, thus
dividing the previously single country into a Hindu India and
a Muslim Pakistan, with devastating results.
With the division of the country on the basis of belief
systems, Singh’s narrative marks how entire families are
made to abandon their lives and uproot themselves to
realign their lives based on religious allegiance to ensure
safety and survival. The resettlement, however, was
anything but safe and secure for those caught up in the
ensuing violence. Trying to quickly avoid the oncoming
troubles, people fled on foot, cart and train. Yet as these
refugees attempted to flee the violence, they often became
caught up in sanctioning violence themselves or were the
victims of violence as Hindus and Muslims fought all over
the country.
Many refugees attempted to flee to the far outskirts of the
skirmish, where they imagined they might outrun the
violence. Ironically, the farther people got from the cities,
the more casual the killing became. It is estimated that
nearly ten million people were assigned for relocation, and
of that number, more than a million were killed in the
resulting violence. Amidst the unspeakable horror, the trains
continued to run. Moreover, the trains became a way of
killing large numbers of people in one place. These “ghost
trains” or “funeral trains,” as they are nicknamed, are what
the narrative’s title references.
For many remote villages, such as Mano Majra, supply trains
were what kept them functioning. The trains’ arrivals and
departures were also a part of the daily life cycle of these
villages. In time, however, the trains began pulling into
stations silently, overburdened with human cargo and off-
schedule. People’s initial complacency soon gave way to
fear and then, at times, violence, as the tensions reached
the outer areas due in fact to the trains.
The novel’s narrative addresses the people of Mano Majra, a
tiny village that relies on trains for its daily needs. Like other
villages, the people living in the village are unconcerned
with the troubling news about violence and resettlement.
The village itself is made up of Hindu, Sikh, Muslim and
quasi-Christians, and has existed for hundreds of years in
this state of cooperation. Given the diverse population, the
village runs on mutual cooperation as opposed to tension
and religious/political division. The villagers need one
another for survival, and because of this mutual need, are
kept secure in their false sense of security.
Life for the villagers of Mano Majra begins to change
suddenly when the first ghost train arrives. The villagers are
shocked at the number of dead and the silent train moving
along the tracks. People stop working to watch from
rooftops as the train goes by. When the second ghost train
arrives in the village, the villagers’ lives are altered even
further when they are ordered to help bury the dead
passengers before the monsoon season begins. Though the
order to help bury the passengers is a shocking twist for the
villagers, things become achingly real and surreal for them
when the Muslims in the village are ordered to evacuate the
village immediately. With overtures that harken to the death
trains of the holocaust during World War II, the Muslims are
stripped of their possessions and only allowed to take what
they can car
The rest of the villagers, including the Sikhs and Hindus, are
then told that there will be an attack on the next train to
Pakistan, and that they will assist in the attack. The soldiers
will begin the attack with gunfire, and the villagers will then
finish with clubs and spears. Adding to the horror of their
situation, the villagers realize that the next train to Pakistan
will actually be carrying the Muslims from their village,
meaning their former friends and neighbors. Train to
Pakistan is made all the more personal by the fact that
Jugga, a Sikh thief, knows that his intended wife, who is
Muslim, is one of the passengers on the train. This crisis in
faith and belief causes the narrative to explore what the
heart is capable of in the face of love, loss and fear. The
ethnic cleansing has not begun with the first or second train
to arrive in Mano Majra, and Jugga, though a thief and
complicit in the killing, must now decide if this baseless
violence should be perpetuated based on the fact that it is
the only thing the villagers now know, or if he should
transcend the current mode of thinking and speak out
against the violence.
Train to Pakistan shows how themes of love, religion and
allegiance cause mankind to do unthinkable things, things
that include both heartbreaking actions and life-affirming
ones. Singh does not paint any of the villagers above
reproach. They are all thrown into a system where the value
of human life is based on caste systems, religious beliefs
and politics. The villagers are but one part in a hopeless,
seemingly endless cycle of bloodshed and history. The
relationship between Jugga and his intended, between Sikh
and Muslim, shows that, despite the death, carnage and
madness, people can choose to be different, to walk a
different path, even if that path might be one of self-
sacrifice.

AMRITA PRITAM (1919 – 2005)

Amrita Pritam was an Indian writer and poet. She was born
in Gujranwala Punjab in a Sikh family. She is considered the
first prominent woman Punjabi poet, novelist and essayist
and the leading 20th century poet of the Punjabi language.
She is equally loved in India and Pakistan.
She is most remembered for her poignant poem ‘Ajj
Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu’, an elegy to the 18th century
Punjabi poet, an expression of her anguish over massacres
during the partition of India. As a novelist her noted work
was ‘Pinjar ( The Skelton ) in which she created her
memorable character, Puro, an epitome of violence against
women, loss of humanity and ultimate surrender to
existential fate. The novel was made into an award winning
film ‘Pinjar’ in 2003. In 1956, She became the first woman to
win the Sahitya Akedmi Award foor her poem ‘Sunehade’
(messages,later she received the ‘Bharatiya Jnanpith in
1982 for ‘Kagaz Te Canvas’ ( The Paper and the Canvas ).
She was honoured with ‘Padma Shri’ in 1969 and ‘Padma
Vibhushan’ in 2004.
Works: Raseedi Ticket –1976, Pinjar–1950, Revenge Stamp
– 1977(an autobiography), Kagaj Te Canvas, Kore Kagaz –
1982, Shadow of Words – 2001, Nag Mani – 1996

SALMAN RUSHDIE (Born in 1947)

Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is an Indian-British novelist and
essayist. He was born in Mumbai in a Kashmiri Muslim
family. He was educated at Cathedraland John Cannon
School in Bombay, Rugby School in Warwickshire and King’s
college, University of Cambridge.
Salman Rushdie is a very reputed writer of
contemporary literature in English. Much of his fiction is set
on the Indian sub-continent. He combines magical realism
with historical fiction. His work is concerned with many
connections, disruptions and migrations between Eastern
and Western civilizations. His second novel ‘Midnight’s
Children’ won the Booker Prize in 1981. His fourth novel ‘The
Satanic Verses’ was the subject of a major controversy,
provoking protests from Muslims in several countries. Death
threats were made against him, including a ‘Fatwa’. Rushdie
was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He
was appointed Commandeur de I ‘Ordre des Arts et des
Letters’ of France in 1999. Queen Elizabeth II knighted him
for his service to literature. In 2008, ‘The Times’ ranked him
thirteenth on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since
1945 .
He wrote a non-fiction book about ‘Nicaragua’ in 1987
called ‘The Jaguar Smile’. This book has a political focus and
is based on his first hand experiences and research at the
scene of ‘Sandinista’ political experiments. His books often
focus on the role of religion in society and conflicts between
faiths and between the religious and those of no faith. He is
a critic of cultural relativism. He favours calling things by
their true names and constantly argues about what is wrong
and what is right.
Althouth Rushdie’s many texts centres on the interpretation
and role of religion in society, He himself is an atheist. This
upset many Muslims who previously regarded Rushdie as a
strong figure in the Muslim community. Combined with the
unpopularity and assassination attempts that followed the
publication of The Satanic Verses, Rushdie issued a
statement in 1990 claiming that he had renewed his Muslim
faith. He denounced the blasphemous ideas that he wrote in
‘The Satanic Verses’ and said that he was committed to
better understanding the religion and how it fit into the
larger world narrative. He also issued a request for the
publisher to never again produce new copies of ‘The Satanic
Verses’. In 1995, he admitted the tactic was only a survival
mechanism and that he still does not follow any religious
beliefs. He considers the statement the biggest mistake of
his life. In 2008 he publicly regretted his embrace of Islam in
the wake of the criticism of The Satanic Verses."It was
deranged thinking," he said. "I was more off-balance than I
ever have been, but you can't imagine the pressure I was
under. I simply thought I was making a statement of
fellowship. As soon as I said it, I felt as if I had ripped my
own tongue out."
Rushdie has also maintained a fiery tongue and pen. He's
been a fierce defender of freedom of expression and was a
frequent critic of the US led war in Iraq.
Works:
Novels: Grimus–1975, Midnight’s Children – 1981,
Shame – 1983, The Satanic Verses – 1988, The Moor’s Last
Singh – 1995, The Ground Beneath Her Feet – 1999, Fury –
2001, Shalimar the Clown – 2005, The Enchantress of
Florence – 2008, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty Eight
Nights – 2015
Non- Fiction: The Jaguar Smile : A Nacaraguan Journey –
1987, In Good Faith – 1990, Imaginary Homelands : Essays
and Criticism 1981-1991 – 1992, Mohandas Gandhi – 1998,
Imagine There is No Heaven – 1999, Steps Across This Line –
2002, The East is Blue – 2004, A Fine Pickle – 2009, In the
South – 2012, Joseph Anton : A memoir – 2012

V S NAIPAUL (1932 – 2018)

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was a Trinidian-British writer
of Indian descent. He was born in Chaguanas, Trinidad and
Tobago. His grandparents had migrated from India to work
as indentured laborers on the sugar plantations in the
1880s.
He published several books of fiction and non-fiction.
He is known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad, his
bleaker later novels of the wider world, and his vigilant
chronicles of life and travels. He wrote in prose that was
widely admired, but his views sometimes aroused
controversy. His prominent support for Hindutva has also
been controversial. He has been quoted describing the
destruction of the Babri Masque as a creative passion and
the invasion of Babar in the 16th century as a ‘mortal
wound’. He views Vijaynagar which fell in 1565, as the last
bastion of native Hindu civilization.
Naipaul’s first novel ‘The Mystic Masseur’ is a farce about a
religious crank who attends to Trinidad's spiritual problems.
‘The Suffrage of Elvira’ won the John Llewellyn Rhys
Memorial Prize for its comic portrayal of vote rigging in
Trinidad. Although it won no literary awards, his third novel,
‘A House for Mr. Biswas’ about a Trinidadian Hindu whose
greatest desire is to own his own home, became the novel
which would win Naipaul his greatest literary acclaim. The
novel, which has elements of high comedy and tragic
pathos, has become closely associated with Naipaul's own
personal search for meaning and community despite the
alienating effects of colonialism.
Naipaul reviewed hundreds of books for The New Statesman
and other publications, where he became known as an
harsh critic of most of his literary contemporaries. It was
also during this period that Naipaul wrote his first two works
of nonfiction. The Middle Passage and An Area of Darkness
are both based on his travel to and observations of
postcolonial conditions in the Caribbean, Africa, and India.
His fiction writing continued to win critical acclaim for its
forceful prose style: Naipaul received the Hawthornden Prize
for Mr. Stone and the Knight's Companion, the story of a
Caribbean man living in England, and the Booker Prize for
‘In a Free State’ a mixed-genre work that contains short
fiction pieces dealing with the themes of alienation and exile
as well as factual eyewitness accounts of postcolonial
oppression and discrimination.
From the 1970s until the present Naipaul has continued to
use travel as an inspiration for his nonfiction, producing
works on, among other things, the character of Indian
people in India: A Wounded Civilization ; the dangers of
charismatic political leadership in The Return of Eva Perón;
Islamic fanaticism in the Middle East in Among the Believers
; the legacy of slavery in the United States in A Turn in the
South ; and Islam in Southeast Asia in Beyond Belief: Islamic
Excursions among the Converted Peoples. In all these works
he positions himself as a stateless wanderer who uses a
keen sense of observation to come to sometimes
devastating conclusions about the possibility for Third World
individuals and societies to rebuild themselves from the
ruins of colonial administration. His fiction, notably in
Guerillas , A Bend in the River , and A Way in the World ,
combines autobiographical themes of his own search for
identity and community with his more overarching themes
of historical anarchy and chaos caused by colonialism.
He won the ‘Booker Prize’ in 1971 for his novel ‘In a
Free State’. He was awarded the ‘Trinity Cross’, Trinidad and
Tobago,s highest national honour in 1989. He received a
Knighthood in Britain in 1990 and in 2001, the Nobel Prize in
literature. Indian poet Nissim Ezekiel wrote the essay
‘Naipaul’s India and Mine’as a reply to Naipaul’s ‘An Area of
Darkness’.
Works:
 Fiction: The Mystic Masseur – 1957, The Suffrage of
Elvira – 1958, Miguel Street – 1959, A House for Mr.
Biswas – 1961, Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion –
1963, The Mimic Men – 1967, A Flag on the Island – 1967,
In a Free State – 1971, Guerrillas – 1975, A Bend in the
River – 1979, The Enigma of Arrival – 1987, A Way in the
World – 1994, Half a Life – 2001, Magic Seeds – 2004
Non-Fiction: The Middle Passage : Impression of Five
Societies – 1962, An Area of Darkness – 1964, The Loss of El
Dorado – 1969, The Overcrowded Barracoon – 1972, India :
a Wounded Civilization – 1977, A Congo Diary – 1980,
Among the Believers : An Islamic Journey – 1981, Finding the
Centre – 1984, A Turn in the South – 1989, India : A Million
Mutinies Now – 1990, Beyond Belief : Islamic Excursions
among the Converted Peoples – 1998, Between Father and
Sons : Family Letters – 1999, The Writer and the World :
Essays – 2002, A Writer’s People : Ways of Looking and
Feeling – 2007, The Masque of Africa : Glimpses of African
Belief – 2010

SRI AUROBINDO (1872 – 1950)

Aurobindo Ghose was an Indian philosopher, Guru, poet and

nationalist. He was born in Calcutta. He was taken to
England for education. He studied at St. Paul’s school
Londonand at Kings College Cambridge. Returning to India
in 1873, he worked for the next thirteen years in the
Princely State of Baroda in the service of the Maharaja and
as a professor in Baroda College.
In 1906, soon after the partition of Bengal, he quit his
post in Baroda and went to Calcutta where he soon became
one of the leaders of the National Movement. He was the
first political leader in India to openly put forward, in his
newspaper “Bande Matram” the idea of complete
independence for the country. Prosecuted for twice for
sedition and once for conspiracy, he was released each time
for lack of evidence. In 1910, he withdrew from politics and
went to Pondicherry in order to devote himself entirely to his
inner spiritual life and work. During his forty years in
Podichhery he invented a new method of spiritual practice
which he called ‘Integral Yoga’. It’s aim is a spiritual
realization that not only liberates man’s consciousness but
also transform his nature.
His main literary works are ‘The Life Divine’ which
deals with theoretical aspects of Integral Yoga: Synthesis of
Yoga, which deals with practical guidance to ‘Integral Yoga’
and “Savitri : A Legend and a Symbol” an epic poem. His
works also include Philosophy, poetry, translations and
commentaries on the Vedas, Upanishads and the Bhagavad
Gita. He was nominated for the Nobel in literature in 1943
and for the Nobel Peace Prize in s1950.
Works: Savitri : A Legend and a Symbol – 1940, The Life
Divine – 1944, Synthesis of Yoga – 1948, The Mother 1928,
Essays on the Gita – 1922, The Human Cycle – 1950, The
Secret of Veda, Hidden Forces of Life, The Hour of God,
Future of Poetry – 1953, The Ideal of Human Unity – 1918

MICHAEL MADHUSUDAN DUTT (1824 – 1873)

Michael Madhusudan Dutt was an Indian poet and

dramatist. He was born in Keshabpur, undivided Bengal now
Bangladesh). He studied at Hindu college where he began to
write poetry in English and Bengali.
He was a pioneer of Bengali drama. His famous work
“Meghnad Bodh Kavya” is a tragic epic. It consists of nine
cantos and is exceptional in Bengali literature both in terms
of style and content. He also wrote poems about the sorrow
and afflictions of love as spoken by women. He is called the
‘The Father of Bengali sonnet’. Although his first love
remained poetry, Dutt showed prodigious skill as a
playwright. He was the first to write Bengali plays in the
English style, segregation the play into acts and scenes. He
was influenced by the works of William Wordsworth and John
Milton. He experimented ceaselessly with diction and verse
forms and it was he who introduced ‘Amitraksar’ (a form of
blank verse with run on lines and caesuras), the Bengali
sonnet-both Petrarhan and Shakespearean-any many
original lyric stanzas.
Dutt was also inspired by both the life and work of the
English Romantic poet Lord Byron. The life of Dutt closely
parallels the life of Lord Byron in many respects. Like Byron,
Dutt was a spirited bohemian and like Byron, Dutt was a
Romantic, though being born on the other side of the world,
and as a recipient subject of the British imperialist
enterprise. These two mighty poets at once remind us of the
sayings of Georges Danton, the French revolutionist:
"L'audace, encore l'audace, toujours l'audace!" If Lord Byron
won over the British literary establishment with Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage, a comparative analogy may be made
for Dutt's heroic epic Meghnadh Badh Kabya, although the
journey was far from smooth. However, the Indian poet
distinguished himself as a serious composer of an entirely
new genre of heroic poetry, that was Homeric and
Dantesque in technique and style, and yet so fundamentally
Indian in theme. To cite the poet himself: "I awoke one
morning and found myself famous." Nevertheless, it took a
few years for this epic to win recognition all over the
country.
He was a gifted linguist and polyglot. Besides Indian
languages like Bengali, Sanskrit and Tamil, he was well
versed in classical languages like Greek and Latin. He also
had a fluent understanding of modern European languages
like Italian and French and could read and write the last two
with perfect grace and ease.
Works: King Porus, The Captive Lady – 1849, Sermista –
1859, Padmavati – 1859, Meghnad Bodh Kavya – 1861,
Ratnavali, Nil Darpan
HENRY LOUIS VIVIAN DEROZIO (1809 – 1831)

Henry Derozio was an Indian poet, rationalist thinker and

teacher. He was born in Kolkata. He studied in Kolkata. At
the age of 17, he was appointed teacher in English literature
and History at Hindu College. His intense zeal for teaching
and his interactions with students created a sensation at
Hindu College. His students came to be known as Derozians.
His ideas had a profound influence on the social
movement that came to be known as the Bengal
Renaissance in early 19th century Bengal. He was an atheist.
His teachings produced great anxiety in the traditional
Hindu society. He was accused of promoting heresy among
his students most of whom came from orthodox Hindu
families. He was also actively involved in promoting the
welfare of Eurasian community and had began editing a
daily English news paper ‘The East Indian’. He encouraged
some of his young Hindu disciples to take to journalism and
disseminate their radical ideas through this important
medium.
Derozio was generally considered an Anglo-Indian,
being of mixed Portuguese descent but he was fired by a
patriotic spirit for his native Bengal and considered himself
Indian. He was perhaps the first nationalist poet of modern
India.
Henry Louis Vivian Derozio as mentioned earlier may be
regarded as one of the earliest Indian English poets, whose
commitment to India was commendable. Being of Eurasian
parentage at a time when his own community would have
denied his mixed origins, he chose to give something to
India that he describes as his native land - In his sonnet To
India - My Native Land he talks about the glorious past of
India before colonisation, how India was revered and
"worshipped as a deity", but he also laments the fact that -
"that glory" and that "reverence" is now no more. He takes
it upon himself to restore India's "fallen" state and all he
desires from his chosen land what he calls his native land is
- "one kind wish from thee!" - the wish to be seen, to be
accepted, and recognised as an Indian poet and not a
Eurasian. He laments the fact that India is under foreign rule
and feels the need for India to awaken; in another poem -
The Hap of India.
Works: The Fakir of Janghira, A Walk By Moonlight, Going
Into Darkness, The Harp of India, To My Native Land, Song
of the Hindustanee Minstree

India- My Native Land

My country! in thy day of glory past
A beauteous halo circled round thy brow,
And worshipped as a deity thou wast.
Where is that glory, where that reverence now ?
Thy eagle pinion is chained down at last,
And grovelling in the lowly dust art thou;
Thy minstrel hath no wreath to weave for thee
Save the sad story of thy misery!
Well–let me dive into the depths of time,
And bring from out the ages that have rolled
A few small fragments of those wrecks sublime,
Which human eyes may never more behold;
And let the guerdon of my labour be
My fallen country! one kind wish from thee!

SAROJINI NAIDU (1879 – 1949)

Sarojini Naidu was in Indian independence activist and

poet. She was born in Hyderabad in a Bengali Hindu family.
She was educated in Chennai, London and Cambridge.
 Naidu is known as ‘The Nightingale of India’. She was
the first Indian woman president of the Indian National
Congress. She was the first woman Governor of an Indian
state after Independence. She was proficient in multiple
languages including English, Bengali, Urdu, Telugu and
Persian. She was noted poet. Her collection of poems earned
her literary acclaim. In 1905, she published her first book, a
collection of poems under the title of ‘Golden Threshold’. A
contemporary poet Bappaditya Bandopadhyay quoted
‘Sarojini Naidu inspired the Indian renaissance movement
and had a mission to improve the life of Indian women’. Her
poetry includes children’s poems, nature poems, patriotic
poems and poems of love and death. She also wrote poetry
in praise of Muslim figure like Imam Hussain
Some of other literary works include The Bird of Time:
Songs of Life, Death and the Spring, The Broken Wing:
Songs of Love, Death and the Spring, Muhammad Jinnah: An
Ambassador of Unity, The Sceptred Flute: Songs of India,
Allahabad: Kitabistan, The Indian Weavers, Feast of Youth,
The Magic Tree and The Wizard Mask.Sarojini Naidu was
imprisoned multiple times for her long involvement in the
nationalist cause as she always marched in Mahatma
Gandhi's footsteps.Sarojini Naidu suffered a heart attack
and died on March 2, 1949 at Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh.
Naidu reflects her poetic sensibility while painting the
character of woman as a bride, as a girl and as a queen of
palace in Hyderabad. She is a singer of woman’s pains. Her
different poems display the different moods and notes of
her sensibility as a woman. Her poetry may be classified
thematically into three main groups: poems of personal
experience, poems of Indian life and nature poems. Love is
the major area with which the poet is concerned with a
majority of the poems based on personal experience.
She was an active participant in the struggle for India’s
freedom and as one of the leaders of women’s liberation.
She has depicted her feminine sensibility in her occasional
pieces like “Suttee” or “The Purdah Nashin”. She has
attached the unjust social customs with romantic notes that
idealize her real self as a woman. As a romantic lover of
nature, her nature poems reflect an aesthetic quest for
passion for beauty. She loves spring as the basic faith in the
joy of life. It is spring which “hastens the seeds of all beauty
to birth”, that blossoms in “the roots of delight in the heart
of the earth” (The Joy of The Spring Time,). Notably enough,
spring is carrier of joy and loneliness, but realizes the sense
of loss to a widow in “Vasant Panchami”
Works: The Golden Threshold –1905, The Bird of Time :
Songs of life, Death and the Spring – 1912, The Broken
Wings–1917, Muhammad Jinnah : An Ambassador of Unity –
1919, The Sceptred Flute: Songs of India – 1943, The
Feather of theDawn – 1961, The Indian Weavers – 1971,
Palanquin Bearers

Palanquin Bearers

Lightly, O lightly we bear her along,

She sways like a flower in the wind of our song;
She skims like a bird on the foam of a stream,
She floats like a laugh from the lips of a dream.
Gaily, O gaily we glide and we sing,
We bear her along like a pearl on a string.
Softly, O softly we bear her along
She hangs like a star in the dew of our song;
She springs like a beam on the brow of the tide,
She falls like a tear from the eyes of a bride.
Lightly, O lightly we glide and we sing,
We bear her along like a pearl on a string.

ROMESH CHANDER DUTT (1848 – 1909)

Romesh Chander Dutt was an Indian historian, writer and

translator. He was born in Kolkata. His father was a Dupty
collector in Bengal. Romesh got his early education in
various Bengali district schools. He also studied at
University College London.
He was well enlightened with Western Education. During his
tour in Europe, mainly in England and Italy, he got in touch
with European Urbanity and saw there life in bustees and
villages. The French Revolution, the German Unification and
the growth of a national state in Italy profoundly influenced
his mind. All these modernised his outlook and enriched his
vision which is reflected in his book, "Three Years in Europe".
His experiences taught him to appreciate the permanent
values of Western culture; he saw his own country in a new
light and his patriotism acquired a new fervour.
At the age of twenty six Roraesh Chunder was moved by the
Pabna Revolt of 1873 and wrote a book, even at the risk of
his career, called "The Peasantry of Bengal" , In this book he
reflected his ideas about the future development of the
conditions of the peasants. This book may be considered as
a background of his thought regarding the economic history
of India. Besides, the famine question as mentioned above
was a serious one to him.
He worked in the Indian Civil Service in the different part of
India. He was appointed as ‘Deewan’ of ‘Baroda State’ after
retirement from service. In 1899, he made the president of
the Indian National Congress. He was also a member of the
Bengal legislative council. He was also a major economic
historian of India of the nineteenth century. His thesis on
deindustrialization of India remains forceful argument in
Indian historiography. He is best known for his translation of
‘Ramayana’ and ‘Mahabharata’.
Works: Three Years in Europe – 1871, The Peasantry of
Bengal – 1874, The Literature of Bengal – 1895,
Mahabharata – 1898, Ramayana – 1899, The Civilization of
India – 1900, The Slave Girl of Agra : An Indian Historical
Romance – 1909, The Lake of Palms : A Story of Indian
Domestic Life – 1902, Indian Famines, Their Causes and
Prevention – 1901, Shivaji : The Morning of Marathi Life –
1944

RAVINDRA NATH TAGORE (1861- 1941)

Rabindra Nath Tagore was an Indian poet, short story writer,

song composer, playwright, essayist and painter. He was
born at Jorasanki in Calcutta. He was sent to several schools
of Calcutta but he had not interested in schools. He was
sent to England in 1878. He studied at the University of
London under Professor Henry Marley. He returned to India
in 1881. He learnt Bangla, Sanskrit, English, Science and
Music at home. He was much influenced by Kalidas, Dante
and Shakespeare. He was highly influenced in introducing
Indian Culture to the west and vice versa, and he is
generally regarded as the outstanding creative artist of
early 20th century India. In 1913, he became the first non
European to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. In 1901,
he founded an experimental school in rural west Bengal at
‘Shantiniketan’ where he sought to blend the best in the
Indian and western traditions. He settled permanently at the
school which became Visva Bharti University in 1921. He
reshaped Bengali literature and music as well as Indian Art
with contextual modernism. His novels, stories, dance-
drama and essays spoke to topics political and personal.
‘Gitanjali’, ‘Gora’, ‘The Home and the World’ are his best
known works and his verse short stories and novels were
acclaimed for their lyricism, colloquialism, naturalism and
unnatural contemplation. His compositions were chosen by
two nations as national anthems India’s ‘Jana Gana Mana’
and Bangladesh’s ‘Amar Sonar Bangla’. The Sri Lankan
National anthem was inspired by his work. He got the Nobel
Prize for his work ‘Gitanjali’ a collection of short poems.
Mahatama Gandhi called him ‘Gurudev’. George V, the
British king gave him the title of knighthood which he gave
up in 1919 in protest against the ‘Jallianwala Bagh’
massacre.
Political views of Ravindra Nath Tagore were somehow at
odds with that of Mahatma Gandhi, though the two shared a
good relation and a moderate friendship. However, Tagore
denounce the Swadeshi Movement in his essay ‘The Cult of
the Charka’ in 1925. He continued to support Indian
nationalist movement in his own non-sentimental and
visionary way. He wrote songs and poems motivating the
Indian Independence movement.
Work:
Novels: Gura, The Broken Notes, The Home and the
World
Plays: The Geneus of Valmiki, The Sacrifice, The Post
office
Short Stories: The Home Coming, The Kabuliwallah, My
Reminiscences in his autobiography
Other Works: Natir Puja, The Fugitive, Red Oleanders,
The Mother’s Prayer, The Gardener, The Child, Golden Boat,
Sandhya Sangeet, Prabhat Sangeet, The Ferry, The
Crescent Moon

GIRISH KARNAD (1938 - 2019)

Girish Raghunath Karnad is an Indian writer, playwright,

actor and movie director in Kannada language. He was born
in Matheran, Maharashtra in a Konkans speaking family. He
got his Bachelor Degree from Karnataka University. He
earned his Master of Arts from Lincoln and Magdalen college
in Oxford.
Karnad is most famous as a playwright. His plays,
written in Kannada, have been translated into English and
all major Indian languages. For four decades Karnad has
been composing plays, often using history and mythology to
tackle contemporary issues. He is also active in the world of
Indian cinema working as an actor, director and screen
writer, earning numerous awards along the way. He was
awarded the ‘Padma Shri’ and ‘Padma Bhushan’ by the
government of India. He is also the recipient of Jnanpith
Award for Kannada, the highest literary honour conferred in
India.
His first chief work was ‘Yayati’. It is based on the story
of king Yayati, one of the ancestors of the ‘Pandavas’, who
was cursed into premature old age by his preceptor,
Shukracharya, who was incensed at Yatati’s infidelity. Yayati
in turn asks his sons to sacrifice their youth for him and one
of them agrees. It ridicules the ironies of life through
characters in Mahabharata. It became an instant success
immediately translated and staged in several oher Indian
languages. His next work was ‘Tughlaq’, about a rashly
idealist 14th century Sultan of Delhi, Mohammad bin Tughlaq
and allegory on the Nehruvian era which started with
ambitious idealism and ended up in disillusionment.
Karnad’s work ‘Hayavadana’ was based on a theme drawn
from ‘The Transposed Heads’ a novella by Thomas Mann,
which is originally found in the 11th century Sanskrit text
‘Kathasaritsagar’. Herein he employed the folk theatre form
of Yakshagana.
Karnad’s plays are appreciated for an absorbing story,
an intricate play, a logical dialogue, an impressive
spectacle, a beginning, middle and a neatly tied up
conclusion. He is faithful to the sources in presenting
characters and episodes .There might have been
anachronisms and deviations here and there. He takes care
to conform to the spirits of the subject matter and at the
same time the treatment of it is in keeping with his own
ideas.
Karnad was influenced more by Henrick Ibsen, an
outstanding figure of his age in dramatic art and whose
works became the model for many dramatists since the late
nineteenth century. Karnad acquired much of the efficiency
of Henrick Ibsen; hence he allows symbolism to infiltrate his
plays. By using symbols and myths, he manipulates an
growth of different meanings. Karnad‟s plays reveal a
healthy tension between tradition and contemporaneity. He
goes back to local and old practices, which were part of his
childhood environment. Karnad‟s return to the roots is a
reaction to the usual social irrelevance of modern Indian
Drama. His style is simple and the dialogues are suited well
for the Indian sensibilities and ethos. Karnad‟s works in the
theatre reveal two outstanding qualities: a continuous
experimentation with dramatic form and a deep
involvement with the human condition in its contemporary
as well as universal manifestation. His plays explore the
human psyche and its social environment sometimes taking
for their theme traditional themes.
Works: Yayati – 1961, Tughlaq – 1964, Hayavadana – 1972,
Maa Nishaadha – One act play, Nagamandala – 1988,
Taledanda – 1990, A Heap of Broken Images – 2006,
Wedding Album – 2009, Boiled Beans on Toast – 2014

VIJAY TENDULKAR (1928 – 2008)

Vijay Tendulkar was an Indian playwright, essayist, journalist

and writer. He was born in Kolhapur Maharashtra in a
Brahmin family. He grew up watching western plays and felt
inspired to write plays himself. In early age, he participated
in the 1942 Indian Freedom Movement, leaving his studies.
The latter alienated him from his family and friends, then
writing became his outlet.
Tendulkar is best known for his plays ‘Shantata! Court
Chalu Aahe’,‘Ghashiram Kotwal’ and ‘Sakharam Binder’. His
plays derived inspiration from real life incidents or social
upheavels, which provides clear light on harsh realities. In
his play ‘Sakharam Binder’, he dealt with the topic of
domination of the male gender over he female. The main
character, Sakharam is a man devoid of ethics and morality
and professes not to believe in outdated social codes and
conventional marriage. He use the society for his own
pleasure. He regularly gives shelter to abandoned wives and
uses them for his sexual gratification whilw ramaining
oblivious to the emotional and moral implications of his
exploits. His another important work is ‘Ghasiram Kotwal’
which dealt with political violence. The play is a political
satire created as a musical drama set in 18th century Pune.
For over five decades Tendulkar had been a highly influential
dramatist and theatre personality in Maharashtra.
His explorations of anger and violence also showed up in his
screenplays of films like Nishant, Aakrosh and Ardha Satya,
In all, he has written eleven films in Hindi and eight in
Marathi, including 'Samana' (Confrontation, 1975),
'Simhasan' (Throne, 1979), and Umbartha (The Threshold)
(1981), a revolutionary feature film on women's activism in
India, starring Smita Patil and Girish Karnad, and directed by
Jabbar Patel. During his career spanning over five decades,
he wrote over 27 full-length plays and 25 one-act plays,
several of which have proven to be 14 modern Indian
theatre classics, his plays have been translated and
performed in many Indian Languages, across India.
Tendulkar never scared to express his thoughts in public. He
talks on the death sentence, he talks on Godhara riots, he
talks on Narmada dam and his statements always make
underground eruption in society. He became one of the most
virulent and radical political voices in India, providing his
acrid insight and viewpoint on every social event and
political upheaval.
In theatre, while his contemporaries were exploring the
limits of social realism, he broke them convincingly, by
jumping straight into the of political radicalism, and
ruthlessly exposed political 15 hegemony of the powerful,
and the prevalent hypocrisies in Indian social mindsets.
Though his subjects are intellectual, his plays have a sharp
and cutting edge. His writing is always thrilling, contains
shock elements, and very powerful.
Works: Silence ! The Court Is in Session – 1979, Ghasiram
Kotwal – 1984, The Churning – 1985, The Threshold – 1985,
Modern India Drama : An Anthology – 2001, The Cyclist and
His Fifth Woman – 2006

BADAL SARKAR (1925 – 2011)

Badal Sarkar was an Indian dramatist and theatre director.

He was born in Calcutta. His father was a history professor.
He got his early education at Scottish Church College. He
earned his Master of Arts degree in comparative literature
from the Jadavpur University in Calcutta.
He is best known for his anti-establishment plays
during the Naxalite movement in the 1970s and taking
theatre out of the proscenium and into public arena, when
he founded his own theatre company ‘Shatabdi’ in 1976. He
did experiments with theatrical environments such as stage,
costumes and presentation and established a new
generation of theatre called “Third Theatre”. In Third
Theatre approach, he created a direct communication with
audience and emphasised on expressionist acting along
with realism. He was awarded the ‘Padma Shri’ in 1972,
Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1968 by government of
India.
Works: The Third Theatre – 1978, The Changing language
of Theatre – 1982, Evam Indrajit : Three Act Play – 1975,
Three Plays : Procession, Bhoma, Stale News – 1983,
Beyond the Land of Hattomala and Scandal in Fairyland –
2003, Two Plays : Indian History Mode Easy, Life of Bagala –
2009

MOHAN RAKESH (1925 – 1972)

Mohan Rakesh was an Indian dramatist who wrote in Hindi.
He was born in Amritsar Punjab. He got his M A in English
and Hindi from Punjab University Lahore. He was one of the
pioneers of the ‘Nai Kahani’ (New Story) literary movement
of the Hindi literature in the 1950s. He wrote the first
modern Hindi play ‘Ashadh Ka Ek Din’ (One Day in Aashad).
He also wrote several novels, short stories, travelogue,
criticism, memoir and drama.
His noted novls are ‘Andhere Band Kamare’ (Closed
Dark Rooms) and ‘Na Aane Wala Kal’ (The Tomorrow that
never comes). His play ‘One Day in Aashad’ played a major
role in reviving Hindi theatre in the 1960s. His work ‘Lehron
Ke Rajhans’ (The Swans of Waves) is about an ancient
Budhist tale on the renunciation of the Budha and its
aftereffects on his close family. His works have been
translated into several languages.

BANKIM CHANDRA CHATTERJE (1838 – 1894)

Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, also known as Bankim Chandra

Chattopadhyay, was a great poet, writer, and journalist. He
was born on June 27, 1838, in West Bengal’s Kantalpara
village, he did his schooling from Midnapur. He graduated
from Mohsin College at Hoogly. He is most famous for
penning down Vande Mataram, which is later adapted to as
India’s national song.
Bankim Chandra Chatterjee was a voracious reader and was
especially interested in Sanskrit literature. He got admission
in the Presidency College in Calcutta in 1856. After
completing his education, he joined government service and
retired in 1891. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee was adept at
both verse and fiction. He shot into the limelight with
Durgeshnandini, his first Bengali romance, published in
1865. He then went on to write other famous novels like
Kapalkundala in 1866, Mrinalini in 1869,Vishbriksha in 1873,
Chandrasekhar in 1877, Rajani in 1877, Rajsimha in 1881
and Devi Chaudhurani in 1884. He brought out a monthly
magazine called Bangadarshan in 1872.His most famous
novel is Anand Math, published in 1882, featuring the
famous song Vande Mataram. Anandamath tells a story
about an army of Brahmin ascetics fighting Indian Muslims
in the pay of the East India Company. The book called for
unity among the Hindus and Muslims. His famous song
Vande Mataram was set to music by none other than
Rabindranath Tagore.

In 1884 Bankim wrote a long method named ‘The Theory of

Religion’, where he introduced the concept of ‘anushilan’,
which means systems of culture, this was to challenge the
western notion of culture. Anushilan is based on the concept
of ‘bhakti’ which further is divided into knowledge and duty.
Bankim was inspired by the ‘Vaishnava’ tradition of devotion
or bhakti. As Bankim himself defined it in Dharamatatva,
‘Bhakti is a condition in which all the faculties of man are
turned towards God.’ He explained that in order to gain
knowledge for natural sciences like mathematics, physics
etc., the West is consulted as these have developed there
and the latter is known for being superior in those aspects.
However, if one wishes to gain knowledge of oneself, then
the person has to depend on the Hindu shastras, that
comprises of truth and the highest achievements, thus in
this case we can see that India is superior. He further
explains that a synthesis can be achieved between the
teachings of the West and the India, but it must retain its
spiritual superiority. In such cases there is always a danger
that the whole process gets snatched by the learned and
educated men and thus in the whole nationalcultural
regeneration system, it is the intelligentsia that leads, while
the rest has to follow.
Bankim Chandra got married when he was only eleven. After
his first wife died, he remarried. This great novelist and poet
of Bengal had entire India in tears when he passed away on
April 8, 1894.
Works:
Fiction: Durgeshnandini – 1865, Kapalkundala – 1866,
Mrinalini – 1869, The Poison Tree – 1873, Indira 1873,
Krishnakanta’s Will – 1878, Anandamath – 1882, Devi
Chaudhurani – 1884, The Life of Muchiram Gur –
Religious Commentaries: Life of Krishna – 1886, Principle
of Religion – 1888, Principle of Divinity (posthumously),
Srimadvagavat Gita, Lalita O Manas – 1858 ( poetry
collection )
Essays: Lok Rahasya – 1874, Bijnan Rahasya – 1875,
Bichitra Prabandha – 1876, Samya – 1879

KASHIPRASAD GHOSH (1809 -1873)

Kashiprasad Ghosh was a Bengali poet and the editor. He

graduated from the Hindu College, Calcutta. He worked as a
editor for the Hindu Intelligencer, an English language
journal that was published in Calcutta and voiced the
opinion of the bhadralok community. His wife was a
maternal aunt of Bhaktivinoda Thakur, a leading spiritual
reformer and philosopher of Gaudiya Vaisnavism.
He was one of the first Indians to publish a regular volume
of English verse. Ghosh started writing very early while he
was at college. His review of Mill‘s History of British India
was printed in the Government Gazette. He wrote ‘The
Vision- a Tale’, On Bengali Writers, On Bengali Works and
Writers and ‘The Shair’ and Other Poems. One of the poems
in this book was commended by D. L. Richardson in these
words: ―Let some of those narrow minded persons who are
in the habit of looking down on the natives of India with
arrogant and vulgar contempt read this little poem and ask
themselves –could they write better verses not in a foreign
tongue but their own.
MANMOHAN GHOSE (1869 – 1924)

Manmohan Ghose was an Indian poet and one of the first

from India to write poetry in English. He was a brother of Sri
Aurobindo.
He was born in a Bengali Hindu family. His father was a
doctor and his family members were among the early
adopters of English education. Therefore, they had acquired
affluence and the prestige of holding government jobs. Their
religion and culture had also been affected by
westernization, and they had flirted briefly with the Brahmo
Samaj. Manmohan's father, Krishna Dhun Ghose, served as
Assistant Surgeon of Rangpur in Bengal. Formerly a member
of the Brahmo Samaj religious reform movement, he had
become enamoured with the then-new idea of evolution
while pursuing medical studies in Britain. Manmohan's
mother, Swarnalata Devi, was the daughter of Shri
Rajnarayan Bose, a leading figure in the Brahmo Samaj.
Manmohan was the second of siblings. The eldest was his
brother, Benoybhusan Ghose, then Manmohan himself, then
his brother Sri Aurobindo followed by his only sister Sarojini,
and last of all was another brother, Barindrakumar.
He was educated at Manchester Grammar School St Paul's
school in London and won an open scholarship to Christ
Church, Oxford
His work was published in Primavera: Poems by Four
Authors (1890), with Laurence Binyon, Arthur S. Cripps, and
Stephen Phillips. Ghose later met Oscar Wilde at the Fitzroy
Street Settlement, who reviewed Primavera in Pall Mall
Gazette, with particular favour towards Ghose. During this
time in London Ghose met many other members of the
"Rhymers' Club" set such as Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson,
who were both very fond of him.
In 1893, after his father's death, Ghose returned to India
and took a series of teaching posts at Patna, Bankipur, and
Calcutta. In 1897, he was appointed Assistant Professor of
Dacca College. After the death of his wife Malati Banerjee in
1918, his health deteriorated and he aged prematurely. For
30 years Ghose had cherished the dream of returning to
England and even booked a passage along with his
daughter in March 1924, but after a short illness on 4
January 1924 he died in Calcutta.

RAJA RAM MOHAN ROY (1772 - 1833)

Raja Ram Mohan Roy was an Indian leader and social

reformer. He was born to Ramakanta Roy and Tarini Devi in
Radhanagar village of Hoogly district, Bengal Presidency. His
father was a wealthy Brahmin and orthodox individual, and
strictly followed religious duties. At the age of 14 Ram
Mohan expressed his desire to become a monk, but his
mother opposed the idea and he dropped it.
Though his father Ramakanto was very orthodox but
wanted his son to get higher education. He got Bengali and
Sanskrit education from the village school. After that he
was sent to Patna to study Persian and Arabic in a
Madrasa. Persian and Arabic were in high demand at that
time as it was still the court language of the Mughal
Emperors. He studied the Quran and other Islamic
scriptures. Post completion of his studies in Patna, he went
to Benares (Kashi) to learn Sanskrit. He mastered the
language in no time and began studying scriptures,
including the Vedas and Upanishads. He learnt English
language in early age. He read the works of philosophers
like Euclid and Aristotle which helped shape his spiritual
and religious conscience.
After getting education, Rammohan entered the services of
the East India Company as a clerk. He worked in the
Collectorate of Rangpur, under Mr. John Digby. He was
eventually promoted to be a Dewan, a post that referred to
a native officer entrusted with the role of collecting
revenues.
During the late 18th century (what was known as the Dark
Age), the society in Bengal was burdened with a host of
evil customs and regulations. Elaborate rituals and strict
moral codes were enforced which were largely modified,
and badly interpreted ancient traditions. Practices like child
marriage (Gouridaan), polygamy and Sati were prevalent
that affected women in the society. The most brutal among
these customs was the Sati Pratha. The custom involved
self-immolation of widows at their husband’s funeral pyre.
While the custom in its original form gave choice to the
women to do so, it gradually evolved to be a mandatory
custom especially for Brahmin and higher caste families.
Young girls were married to much older men, in return for
dowry, so that these men could have the supposed karmic
benefits from their wives’ sacrifice as Sati. More often than
not the women did not volunteer for such brutality and had
to be forced or even drugged to comply.
Raja Ram Mohan Roy was hated by this cruel practice and
he raised his voice against it. He spoke freely and took his
views to the higher ups in the East India Company. His
passionate reasoning and calm perseverance filtered
through the ranks and ultimately reached the Governor
General Lord William Bentinck. Lord Bentinck sympathised
with Roy’s sentiments and intentions and amid much
outcry from the orthodox religious community, the Bengal
Sati Regulation or Regulation XVII, A. D. 1829 of the Bengal
Code was passed. The act prohibited the practice of Sati
Daha in Bengal Province, and any individual caught
practicing it would face prosecution. Raja Ram Mohan
Roy’s name is thus engraved forever as a true benefactor
of women not just for helping abolish the custom of Sati,
but also raising his voice against child marriage and
polygamy, while demanding equal inheritance rights for
women. He was also a great opponent of the rigid caste
divisions of his time.
He advocated the introduction of an English Education
System in the country teaching scientific subjects like
Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and even Botany. He
paved the way to revolutionizing education system in India
by establishing Hindu College in 1817 along with David
Hare which later went on to become one of the best
educational institutions in the country producing some of
the best minds in India. His efforts to combine true to the
roots theological doctrines along with modern rational
lessons saw him establish the Anglo-Vedic School in 1822
followed by the Vedanta College in 1826.
Ram Mohan Roy opposed the unnecessary ceremonialism
and the idolatry advocate by priests. He had studied
religious scriptures of different religions and advocated the
fact that Hindu Scriptures like Upanishads support the
concept of monotheism. This began his quest for a
religious revolution to introduce the doctrines of ancient
Vedic scriptures true to their essence. He founded the
Atmiya Sabha in 1928, and the first meeting of this new-
found religion as held on August 20 that year. The Atmiya
Sabha reorganised itself into the Brahma Sabha, a
precursor organisation of the Brahmo Samaj. The primary
facets of this new movement were monotheism,
independence from the scriptures and renouncing the
caste system. Brahmo religious practices were stripped
bare of the Hindu ceremonialism and were set up following
the Christian or Islamic prayer practices. With time, the
Brahma Samaj became a strong progressive force to drive
social reforms in Bengal, especially women education.
Ram Mohan Roy was a supporter of free speech and
expression. He fought for the rights of vernacular press. He
also brought out a newspaper in Persian called 'Miratul-
Akhbar' (the Mirror of News) and a Bengali weekly called
'Sambad Kaumudi' (the Moon of Intelligence). In those
days, items of news and articles had to be approved by the
Government before being published. Ram Mohan protested
against this control by arguing that newspapers should be
free and that the truth should not be suppressed simply
because the government did not like it.
The title 'Raja' was bestowed upon him by the Mughal
emperor Akbar II, in 1831. Roy visited England as an
ambassador of the Mughal King to ensure that Bentick's
regulation banning the practice of Sati was not overturned.
He died of meningitis in 1833 while residing in Bristol,
England.
 UNIT – II
MODERN WRITERS
This section of writers deals with those writers whose works
have been mostly published from 1950s to 2000. This is not
clear classification but mostly writers who have written
during this period have been discussed here. Writers of this
age directed Indian English literature and made Indian
literature known all around the world. Amitav Ghosh,
ShashiDesh Pandy, Vikram Seth, Anita Desai etc are among
those popular writers who gave pleasant moments to Indian
writing and Indian. This generation of writers has played a
crucial role for the development of Indian English literature.
Several writers of this era emerged as gem on international
level and showed that Indian can write good literatue in
English also.
Emergence of Indian writers internationally inspired lot of
Indian to write and read. Now there is vast society of
readers in India who actually want to read and observe the
writers. This era also inspired many people to write and as a
result we can find several writers who have choosen English
language to express their feelings.
Indian English literature is an honest enterprise to
demonstrate the ever rare gems of Indian writing in English.
It has turned out to be a new form of Indian culture and
voice in which India converses regularly. While Indian
literary figures – poets, novelists, essayists, dramatists –
have been making momentous and considerable
contributions to the world literature.The past few years have
witnessed a prospering and thriving of Indian English writing
in the global market. Not only are the works of Indian
authors writing in English surging on the best-seller list, they
are also incurring and earning an immense amount of
critical acclamation.
Commencing from Anita Desai, Vikram Seth, Allan Sealy,
Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, the plumes of these fine
Indian writers is long and much proceed. They have written
lot of good works which always inspires and direct to do
good in this era of hard living. Anita Desai is prominent
woman figure of this age. She is ideal for innumeral Indians.
She affected the mind set of our society which never allows
women to take same rights as men especially in all those
matters which are considered for men by this intricated
society.
Many Indian women novelists of this age have explored
female subjectivity in order to establish an identity that
is not imposed by a patriarchal society. Thus ,the theme
of growing up from childhood to womanhood , that is a
recurrent strategy . The dominant women writers in this
period are Kamala Markandaya,Anitha Desai and
Shashidesh Pandey. After 1960s Indian English
fiction is considerably changed in its themes and
technique. The fiction shifted its focus from the public
life to the private sphere. The mass destruction was
caused by nuclear weapons in the World War Second and
it brought unrest and anxiety all over the world. This
situation gave rise to psychological disorders and loss of
moral values and it profoundly disturbed man’s
mentalpeace and harmony. The world literature
responded to the new era and started to deal with
different gloomy focus on society.
Anitha Desai, also a feminist expressed the struggle of
women in modern soceity . Her major themes were loss
of identity. Sara Joseph who is a feminist influence by
women’s writing she expressed her view as: “If there is
gender
discrimination in the soceity there will be language
which denotes that discrimination.” Indian writing in
English is now developed , gaining ground rapidly .
Feminist used it as a weapon to express their views
against patriarchal system. A major development in the
modern fiction is the growth of feminist centered
approach. As Patricia Meyer Specks remarks: “There
seems to be something that we call women’s point of
view on outlook sufficiently distinct to be recognizable
through countries”.
Many Indian novelist of this age have explored female
subjectivity in order to establish an identity which is
imposed as a patriarchal society. The there is from
childhood to womanhood developed society representing
women in
general. Shashi desh pande’s novel represent the
contemporary modern woman’s struggle to define and
attain an autonomous
selfhood.Her female protagonist at great pains to free
themselves from stratifying traditional constraints. The
Independence has made women conscious of need to
define themselves, their place in soceity and their
surrounding. The new generation novelist’s are very
popular in Indian English Literature. The novel after
1980s and 1990s began the period so called “new
fiction”. In this period a new novelists emerged . This
period is also called “third generation of Indo English
novels.
Women novelist seems to say rights of women must
be presented. It means that the Indian English women
writers say that women should be treated as a human
being not as anal in family. So like Shashidesh Pande and
Rama Mehta contributed this field, Anitie Myle observed:
“The novelists some established and some others
beginning of create powerful narratives, have provided a
fresh re-orientation to Indian Fiction in English.
Today Indian English Literature has won for
international acclaim and distinction and the writers of
this age played a crucial role. Fiction is the most
powerful form of literary expression and it has acquired a
prestigious position in Indian English Literature.

BALCHANDRA RAJAN (1920 – 2009)

He was an Indian Diplomat and a scholar of Poetry and

Poetics .Rajan was Professor Emeritus of English of the
University of western Ontario and fallow of trinity Collage,
Cambridge from 1994 -1948 but left England to return to his
Native India where He served in the Indian Foreign Service
until 1961 During the period he served on the Indian
Delegation to the United Nation, working extensively with
UNESCO and UNICEF and chairing on international anti –
malaria effort. Rajantought at the University of Delhi before
emigrating to Canada to take up a position at the university
of western Ontario.
Rajan ’s work covered a wide range of English poetry , but
returned to Milton and particularly to Milton’s Paradise Lost ,
His 1947 work “Paradise Lost “ and “The Seventeenth
century Reader” is a response to Milton’s apparent interest
in “Arianism” , considered private and public meaning in
Milton’s poetry . The work was influential for William
Empson particularly Empson’s exitique of strictly theological
reading of “Paradise lost” , Milton’s God . Later essay
explore what Rajan calls “Generic Multeity” in Paradise Lost.
Rajan also wrote two novels. The Dark Dancer is a sobering
of the conflicts of the partition; ‘Too Long in the West’; on
the other hand, is a more light-hearted satire about a girl’s
return to her home village after an emancipating education
in New York. In The Dark Dancer, he chooses a period in the
Indian history which provides the background of the
crumbling of an Empire and the birth of a nation, a painful
process in which the individuals get crushed and paralyzed.
At the same time in the context of both social trends and of
those waste land The Dark Dancer experiences particularly
partition, which have been peculiar to India. The basis of
Rajan’s philosophical mysticism is to be found in the effects
of social phenomena. He divided mind of the ‘England
returned’ India, the alienated personality’s attempt to
recover traditional values. The individual’s involvement in
his country’s political destiny, and the wounding of moral
sensibility resulted from partition violence. In fact, Rajan’s
writing is at times most powerful in the chapters describing
the communal holocaust.
Rajanconsiderd “Poetry can not report the event, it must be
the event”. Rajan also wrote two novels “The Dark Dancer”
is a sobering study of the confilicts of the partition. “Too
long in the west “Is a more light hearted satire (periphrases
influenced by Tagore’s Farewell, my friends) about a girls
return to her home village after on emancipating ed-ucation
in New York.
WORKS: Paradise Lost and the Seventeenth Century
Reader – 1947, W.B. Yeats : A Critical Introduction – 1965 ,
The Lofty Rhyme : A Study of Milton’s Major Poetry- 1970,
The Overwhelming Question : A Study of the Poetry of
T.S.Eliot-1976, The Form Of the Unfinished : English Poetics
from Spencer to Pound – 1985 , Under Western Eyes : India
From Milton to Macaulay – 1999
Milton and the Climate of Reading: Essays – 2006

GEETA MEHTA (Born – 1943)

Geeta Mehta is an Indian writer. She was born in Delhi in a

well known Odia family. She is the daughter of Biju Patnaik,
former chief minister of Odisha. Her younger brother
Naveen Patnaik has been the chief minister of Odisha since
2000.
 She completed her education in India and at the
University of Cambridge,U.K. She has produced or directed
14 television documentaries for UK , Europeans and US
networks. She was a television correspondent for the US
television network NBC during the years 1970-71. Her film
compilation of the Bangladesh revolution, ‘Deadline
Bangladesh’ was shown in cinema theatres both in India and
abroad.
Although she belongs to a high profile family yet she
has emerged as a writer in her own right. Her books have
been translated into twenty one language, and been on the
bestseller lists in Europe, the US, and India. The subject of
her fiction and non-fiction is exclusively focused on India, its
culture and history and the western perception of it.
Mehta’s first novel ‘Raj’, is a colourful historical story that
follows the progression of a young woman born into Indian
nobility under the British Raj. Through young Jaya Singh’s
story, Mehta’s readers are shown a portion of the passage of
British India’s early struggle for independence as it affected
a slim segment of high-culture society. Through her story,
Mehta not only weaves together elegant language and
colourful pictures of Indian culture, but also paints a picture
of Indian colonial life from an Indian perspective.
When Mehta wrote ‘Snakes and Ladders’, a collection of
essays about India since independence, she did not expect
it to be widely read, particularly by people outside India. But
it has instead become her most widely read work,
particularly among those unfamiliar with India. She
explained in an interview that when she wrote ‘Snakes and
Ladders’, her intention was “to make modern India
accessible to Westerners and to a whole generation of
Indians who have no idea what happened 25 years before
they were born.” After she wrote the book, she slimmed it
down by taking out many of the essays that assumed too
much prior knowledge of the subject, thereby giving many
readers a glance of how she, as one woman, sees India. She
defines her India through insightful, intelligent and often
witty eyes with a smattering of personalized anecdotes that
define it not so much as a set of essays, but a collection of
lives. Her lively stories illustrate her analysis of what
modern India is as seen through her eyes, while she
explores India with her reader. While she uses her
personality to define a set of ideas, places, smells and
traditions that make up modern India, she never fashions
herself an expert or authority, but recognizes her power as
one storyteller without trying to draw the reader to her side.
Works: Karma Cola – 1979, Raj – 1989, A River Sutra –
1993, Snakes and Ladders: Glimpses of Modern India –
1997, Eternal Ganesha: From Birth to Rebirth – 2006

VED MEHTA (Born – 1934)

Ved Prakash Mehta was born in Lahore, British India in a

Punjabi Hindu family. He lost his sight at the age of four to
cerebrospinal meningitis. Because of the limited prospects
for blind people in general, his parents sent him to the
Dadar school for the blind in Bombay.
He earned his B.A. and M.A. from Harvard University.
He has lived in the western world since 1949; he became an
American citizen in 1975. His first book “Face to Face” an
autobiography, placed his early life in the context of Indian
politics and history and Anglo-Indian relations, was
published in 1957. He has written more than 24 books,
including several that deals with the subject of blindness, as
well as hundreds of articles and short stories for British,
Indian and American publications.
He was elected a Fellow of Royal Society of Literature in
2009. In 2014,during annual Jaipur Literary Festival, Mehta
said that living in India would never have been possible for
him as he could not live in an ‘anarchy’ but admitted that he
keenly followed Indian political developments.
Works: Face to Face ( autobiography ) – 1957, Walking the
Indian Streets ( travel journal ) – 1960, Fly and the Fly-Bottle
: Encounters with British Intellectuals – 1962, The New
Theologian – 1966, Delinquent Chacha ( novel ) – 1966,
Portrait of India – 1970, John is Easy to Please : Encounters
with the written and the spoken word – 1971, Daddyji –
1972, Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles – 1977, The New
India – 1978, A Family Affair : India Under Three Prime
Ministers – 1982, All For Love – 2002

BINA AGARWAL-

She is an Indian economist. She earned her B.A. and M.A.

from the University of Cambridge and her doctorate in
Economics from the Delhi School of Economics, University of
Delhi. She has written on land, livelihoods and property
rights; environment and development; the political economy
of gender; poverty and inequality; legal change ; agriculture
and technological transformation. Among her award winning
book ‘A Field of One’s Own : Gender’ and ‘Land rights in
South Asia’ which has had a significant impact on
government, NGOs and international agencies in promoting
women’s rights in lands and property. This work has also
inspired research in Latin America and globally.
In 2017,She received the Balzan Prize for Gender
Studies in recognition of her work in studying women’s
contribution to agriculture in India. She has written a well
known poem ‘Sita Speak’.
Works: Monsoon Poems – 1976, Cold Hearths and Barren
Slopes : the Woodfuel crisis in the Third World – 1986, A
Field of One’s Own : Gender and Land rights in South Asia –
1994, Gender and Green Governance – 2010

DOM MOREAS (1938 – 2004)

Dom Moreas was born in Bombay. His father was a well
known journalist and editor. He began writing poems at the
age of twelve. He entered Oxford University where he met
the influential poets W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, who
encouraged his work. Moraes' first published poem
appeared in Spender's literary magazine ‘Encounter’ and his
first book of poetry ‘A Beginning’ was published in 1957.
This book received the Hawthornden Prize, making Moraes
the youngest and first non-English writer to win the award.
Subsequent books of poetry included Poems (1960), John
Nobody (1965), and Beldam Etcetera (1966). Moraes also
worked in prose, writing two autobiographies, Gone Away
(1960), and My Son's Father (1968).
He turned to journalism in order to make a living and wrote
articles about London and British culture for The Times of
India and Illustrated Weekly of India during 1960s. He also
worked as a war correspondent, covering conflicts in
Algeria, Israel, and Vietnam. While in Israel, he reported on
the trial of Adolf Eichmann and translated work by the
Hebrew poet T. Carmi (pseudonym of Carmi Charny).
In addition to his journalism, Moraes worked as a
scriptwriter for several television programs and films and
continued to publish non-fiction work, such as a biography
of Indira Gandhi, Mrs. Gandhi (1980), and a third
autobiography, Never at Home (1992). In the late 1970s, he
returned to live in India and began to focus again on poetry.
In 1987, he published a collection of poems written from
1957 to 1987, and in 2001 published Cinnamon Shade: New
and Selected Poems, which earned the Sahitya Akedemi
Award, India's highest literary prize. During this period he
also collaborated with his companion, Sarayu Srivatsa, who
considered Moraes her mentor.
In 1961-62, he was one of the very few public Indian
figures to criticize the Indian Army take over of Goa, land of
his forefathers-Daman and Diu from Portuguese India. He
tore up his Indian passport on TV in protest. He was later
allowed back in the country. When the Gujrat riots erupted
in 2002 with their heavy toll of muslim dead, Moreas left for
Ahmedabad the minute the news come through, saying that
since he was a Catholic, Muslim would not see him as an
enemy. Even though he was physically in considerable pain
by them, he was one of the first on the scene.
He published nearly 30 books. He is seen as a
foundational figure in Indian English literature. His poems
are a meaningful and substantial contribution to Indian and
world literature. He ended his writing career, writing books
in collaboration with Sarayu Srivatsa.
Works: Green is the Grass – 1951 ( a book of cricket essays
), A Beginning – 1957 ( book of poems and won Hawthorden
Prize ), Gone Away : In Indian Journey – 1960 ( memoir ),
John Nobody – 1965 , My Son’s Father – 1968 (
autobiography ), Serendip – 1990 ( won Sahitya Akademi
Award ), Heiress to Destiny – ( biography of Indira Gandhi )

ALLAN SEALY (Born – 1951)

Allan Sealy was born in 1951 in Prayagraj Uttar Pradesh. He

completed his schooling in Lucknow. He also attended Delhi
University , then studied and worked in the United States,
Australia, Canada, and Newzealand. Now he spends much of
his time in Dehradun.
His first novel ‘The Trotter-Nama: A Chronicle’ is a tale
of seven generations of an Anglo-Indian family. ‘The Everest
Hotel: A Calendar’ gained him an international following
after being short listed for the Booker Prize in 1998.
According to Alex Tickell of the University of York, Allan
Sealy has introduced a memorable cast of characters in ‘The
Everest Hotel’ and his talents are equally evident in the
luminous descriptive passages in the text and in his feel for
the lighter brushwork of natural detail, and shades of colour
and texture. He has won several awards as Commonwealth
Writer’s Prize, Sahitya Akademi Award, Crossword Book
Award etc. The government of India honoured him with
‘Padma Shri’ in 2012.
His first book, The Trotter-Nama is a magical account of
seven generations of an Anglo-Indian family spanning two
centuries and two cultures. The novel was praised as the
year’s best Indian novel in English when The London
Magazine praised it as an extravaganza and the Chicago
Tribune called it richly imaginative. Another work ‘Hero: A
Fable’ has a mock heroic tone with a scornful humour. It is a
genial satire criticizing the socio-cultural circumstance of
India using a cinematic narrative with “Entrance”,
“Intermission” and “Exit”. The travelogue called ‘From Yukon
to Yucatan: A Western Journey’ is a journey down the spine
of North America in a search for the western element within
and without. The ‘Brainfever Bird’ is a tale of love, loss and
biological weapons, appreciated as a wonderful literary
thriller. The latest novel ‘Red’ is a cleverly told tale of man’s
surface peace and inner turbulence and the universal story
of love and betrayal. What sets apart The Everest Hotel from
all these novels is its sub-themes. The main plot revolves
around the life at the Everest Hotel at the foothills of
Himalayas, where enters Ritu, a young nun on the
assignment of nursing the old, invalid owner Immanuel Jed.
The uneasy triangular love between Ritu, Jed and Brij who is
a political activist is the central theme with two important
environmental issues -the logging of the trees and the
construction of a dam. It is for this attempt to deal with the
environmental issues and help people realize the basic
priorities that the novel is analyzed ecocritically in this
thesis.
Woks: The Trotter Nama : A Chronicle – 1990, Hero : A Fable
– 1991, From Yukon to Yukatan : a Western Journey – 1994,
The Everest Hotel : A Calendar – 1998, The Brainfever Bird –
2003, Red : An Alphabet – 2006, The Small Wild Goose
Pagoda – 2014, Zelaldinus : A Masque – 2017
GAURI VISWANATHAN (Born – 1950)

Gauri Viswanathan is an Indian-American educator and

scholar. She was born in Kolkata. She received her M.A from
the University of Delhi and PhD from Columbia University in
1985. She is a professor of English and comparative
literature at Columbia University.
She is the author of ‘Masks of Conquest: Literary Study
and British Rule in India’ and ‘Outside the Fold : Conversion,
modernity and Belief’. She has written widely on education,
religion and culture; nineteenth century British and colonial
cultural studies; and history of modern disciplines.
Works: Masks of Conquest – 1989, Outside the Fold – 1998

KIRAN NAGARKAR (Born – 1942)

Kiran Nagarkar is an Indian playwright, novelist, film and

drama critic and screen writer both in English and Marathi.
He is one of the most significant writers of postcolonial
India. He was born in Bombay in 1942. He studied at the
Ferguson College Bombay and then worked as an Assistant
Professor at same college.
His first novel ‘Saat Sakkam Trechalis’ later published in
English as ‘Seven Sixes Are Forty Three’ is considered one of
the landmark works of Marathi literature. His novel ‘Ravan
and Eddie’ began in Marathi but completed in English. His
third novel ‘Cuckold’ on mystic Meerabai’s husband Bhoj
Raj, was published in 1997 and won the 2001 Sahitya
Akademi Award. It has been translated into several
languages and has become one of the most beloved
contemporary Indian novels, both in India and in Europe.
Nagarkar wrote the play ‘Bad time Story’ based partly on
the Mahabharata. Its performance was banned for 17 years
by fundamentalist parties, including the Shiv Sena.
He was awarded the ‘Order of Merit of the Federal
Republic of Germany’ described as the highest tribute
Germany can pay to individuals.
His work ‘Cuckold’ is set in the early sixteenth century of
Rajasthan in India. The novel deals with the Rajput dynasty
of Mewar and war among the Sultantes of Delhi, Gujarat,
and Malwa. Simultaneously the novel concerns about
triangle love story of Meerabai, Maharja Kumar and Lord
Krishna. Nagarkar brings the sweep and breadth of the epic
form with its panoply of war, intrigue, and action. ‘Cuckold’
is basically historical novel but writer composes with
novelistic form. The novel is based on braveness of Rajput
dynasty and the frequent conduct warfare of Rajasthan in
sixteenth century. It represents the fine holding of a rich
sensibility and presents an engaging story on many levels.
Maharaja Kumar is the protagonist in the novel. He is one of
the most memorable characters in twentieth century
literature. It deals with the invasion of Babur battle of
Khanua and the battles against Gujrat forces. Nagarkar
makes it a real philosophical meditation on the human
condition. The novel still historically fascinates but is not a
complete historical. Meerabai is a legendary figure with a
continuing hold on the popular imagination. Her husband
Maharaja Kumar is a shadow figure both in history and
folklore.
Works: Seven Sixes Are Forty Three – 1974 (This work was
translated into English by Shubha Slee), Ravan and Eddie –
1994, Cuckold – 1997, God’s Little Soldier – 2006, The
Extras – 2012, Rest in Peace – 2015, Jasoda : A Novel –
2017, Bedtime Story – 1978 ( play ), The Broken Circle – (
play ), The Elephant on the Mouse – ( play )

KAVERY NAMBISAN-

Kavery Namnison is an Indian writer. She was born in a

village in South Kodagu, Karnataka in a politician’s family.
Her father, CM Poonacha was at one time a Union Railway
Minister.
 Nambisan has authored several novels for adults, each
with widely different themes. Her first book, published under
the name of Kavery Bhatt, ‘The Truth About Bharat’ is a
story of a rebellious young medical student who runs away
from medical college and begins a cross country road trip on
his motorcycle. Her second novel ‘The Scent of Pepper’ was
set in her birthplace and is a portrait of the life and culture
of its people, through the eyes of a family from colonial rule
to independence.
Her sixth novel ‘The Story that Must Not Be Told’ was
shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian literature in
2012. Her recent novel ‘A Town Like Ours’ is an account of
the lives of several people narrated by a sex worker living in
a small town and engages with themes of identity and
industrialization.
Nambisan’s novel ‘The Scent of Pepper’ is a detailed
fictional journey into the world of Kodavas. It gives a great
picture of the Kodavas who are a fierce, proud, martial race
and owners of vast coffee estates. It tells the story of the
Kaleyanda clan who own vast expanses of coffee plantations
in Coorg. Nambisan belongs to Coorg (Kodagu), a hilly
district of Karnataka also known as Scotland of India, and
the speaker of native language. For the first time, the small
ethnic minority, the Coorgis, enter Indian English fiction in
her second novel, The Scent of Pepper. The characters in the
novel are very real as the author has picked up real life
stories from Coorg which she heard from her grandmother
and used them in the plot of her novel. The distinctive
culture and religious practices of the people of Coorg are
faithfully presented by the novelist by tracing the fortunes
of Nanji, who enters the Kaleyanda clan as a young bride.
Baliyanna, an England-educated veterinary doctor and a
wealthy land owner belongs to Kaleyanda family. He marries
the child widow Nanji who has married at the age of thirteen
and became a widow at fourteen. The thin-faced girl of
seventeen year old in a white sari has captured Baliyanna’s
interest and his heart.
Works: Once Upon a Forest – 1986, Kitty Kite – 1987, The
Truth About Bharat – 1991, The Scent of Pepper – 1996,
Mango Coloured Fish – 1998, On Wings of Butterflies – 2002,
The Hills of Angheri – 2005, The Story that Must Not Be Told
– 2010, A Town Like Ours – 2014

MEENAKSHI MUKHERJEE (1937 – 2009)

Meenakshi Mukherjee was an Indian writer and winner of

Sahitya Akademi Award. She was born in Kolkata. She
studied English and American literature and Indian writing in
English at the University of Poona and the University of
Pennsylvania. Her book ‘An Indian for All Seasons’ is a
biography of historian RC Dutt. She received the Sahitya
Akademi Award in 2003 for her book ‘The Perishable
Empire’.
Her literary research ‘The TwiceBorn Fiction’ gave a great
boost to the English studies in India. There was an
awakening amongst scholars; they realized the importance
of India’s own literature. They felt that Indians were under
no moral obligation to study the British literature alone. We,
she felt, need not question the validity of Indian English
literature, for it truly represents the diverse cultures, ethnic
affiliations and aspirations of the people
It may be said about Meenakshi Mukherjee that she not only
projected Indian sensibility in her criticism but also
emphasized the need to highlight native tradition in
literature. For her, an Indian text, based on our traditions
and philosophy, is as good as any other text. The great
advantage an Indian English text enjoys in our classroom
over any British or American text is that the student has
direct access to the culture surrounding the text, even
outside the classroom
As a critic, Mukherjee may be classed in the category of
liberal humanists. She stated her point of view without any
radicalism or aggression. This was perhaps her strength as a
critic. Her modesty as a person and as a critic will keep alive
her intellectual presence in literary circles.
Works: The Perishable Empire – 2000, Realism and Reality –
1985, The Twice born Fiction : Themes and Techniques of
the Indian novel in English – 1971, An Indian for All Seasons,
Elusive Terrain : Culture and literary Memory – 2008, Re-
Reading Jane Austen – 1995

CHAMAN NAHAL (1927 – 2013)

Chaman Nahal was an Indian writer of English literature. He

was born in Sialkot in pre-independence India, a province in
the present day Pakistan. He received his M.A. from
University of Delhi and PhD from University of Nottingham.
He was considered as one of the best exponents of
Indian writing in English. His writings are known to talk
about India without any touch of exoticism. ‘Azadi’, his novel
on the partition of India, is considered to be the best of the
Indian-English novels written about the traumatic partition
which accompanied Indian Independence in 1947. He is also
known for his depiction of Mahatma Gandhi as a complex
character with human failing. His work ‘Silent Life’ has
autobiographical touch and has been translated into 12
languages. He won Sahitya Akademi Award in 1977 for
‘Azadi’.
Chaman Nahal emerges as a major figure among the Inidian
English novelist of the 1970s. He maintains that he belongs
to the second generation of Indian English novelist. He says
“though my own novels were published in the 70s and later
I consider myself as part of the second group of writers, by
age and thematic involvements”. Nahal's fiction would
reveal that he belongs to the humanistic tradition initiated
by Mulk Raj Anand in the 30s and carried on by Bhabani
Bhattacharya and Kamala Markandaya in the 50s and the
60s. Nahal's themes includes tradition verses
westernization, wife- husband relationship, internationalism,
east west encounter, satire on anglicized Indians, the three
phases of India's epic struggle for freedom and vivisection
of India and the muslim Pakistan and the agony caused to
the millions of people on either side of dividing border.
His novel ‘My True Faces’ offers a brilliant expose of Hindu
homes dominated by religious dogma and tradition. This
novel deals with marital discord between Kamal Kanth and
Malti Meena leading to their separations and traces the
anguish of Kamal's tormenting self caught in conflict with
his wife on the one hand and with his sense of drama on the
other. The suffering of the self is originated in the clash of
wills representing different backgrounds of tradition and
westernization and in the desertion of Kamal by his wife.
The flow of his thoughts of pain, anxiety, anger, depression
and philosophical enquiry is truthfully An stored this
contributes to the psychological realism in the novel.
Chaman Nahal's Silver Lining describes the story of a
handicapped chilled and their parents, unhappy moments,
until a guest who is similarly handicapped brings a ray of
hope into their child's life.
Works: My True Faces – 1973, Into Another Dawn – 1977,
The English Queens – 1979, Sunrise in Fiji – 1988, Azadi –
1975, The Crown and the Loincloth – 1981, The Salt of Life –
1990, The Trump of the Tricolour – 1993, The Gandhi
Quartet – 1993, The Weird Dance and Other Stories – 1965,
Tons – 1977, The Light on the Lake – 1984, The Take Over –
1984, The Bhagavad Gita – 1987, D H Lawrence : An
Eastern View – 1971
‘Azadi’:
It is a straightforward account of a rich Hindu grain
merchant and his family. The novel begins in mid 1947 with
the people of Sialkot hearing the announcement regarding
partition, but they refuse to believe that they now have to
move. Nahal shows how Kanshi Ram, the Hindu. Barkat Ali,
the Muslim and Teja Singh, the Sikh share the same Punjabi
culture and language. The novel ends with a sadly depleted
family trying to begin life in Delhi. Nahal shows the cruelty
as well as the humanity of both sides. The novel also shows
the maturing of Arun, Kanshi Ram’s only son, but account of
his love, first for Nur, the Muslim girl left behind in Pakistan
and then for Chandni, a low caste girl who is abducted on
the way to India, is not as gripping as the rest of the novel.

ANITA DESAI (Born – 1937)

Anita Desai is an Indian novelist. She was born in Mussoorie

to a German mother and Bengali father. She grew up
speaking German at home and Bengali, Urdu, Hindi and
English outside the house. Anita’s daughter Kiran Desai is
also a writer and she has won Booker Prize.
As a writer she has been shortlisted for the Booker
Prize three times’. She considers ‘Clear Light of the Day’ her
most autobiographical work as it is set during her coming of
age and also in the same neighbourhood in which she grew
up. Booker Prize finalist novel ‘Fasting Feasting’ increased
her popularity. Her novel ‘The Zigzag Way’ is set in 20th
century Mexico. She now lives in America.
In her novels, children’s books and short stories, Desai
focuses on personal struggles and problems of
contemporary life that her Indian characters must hold up.
She maintains that her primary goal is to discover “the truth
that is nine-tenths of the iceberg that lies submerged
beneath the one-tenth visible portion we call Reality”. She
portrays the cultural and social changes that India has
undergone as she focuses on the incredible power of family
and society and the relationships between family members,
paying close attention to the trials of women suppressed by
Indian society.
Desai is praised for her broad understanding on intellectual
issues and for her ability to portray her country so vividly
with the way the eastern and western cultures have blended
there. She has received numerous awards, including the
1978 National Academy of Letters Award for Fire on the
Mountain, the first of her novels to be brought to the United
States. The story is of a remote, isolated woman and her
equally withdrawn great-grand daughter as they are forced
together in hills surrounded by violence and fire. In 1983
she was awarded the Guardian Prize for Children’s Fiction for
The Village by the Sea, an adventurous fairy tale about a
young boy living in a small fishing village in India. She was
awarded the Literary Lion Award in 1993, and has also been
named Helen Cam Visiting fellow, Ashby fellow, and
honorary fellow of the University of Cambridge.
Works: The Zigzag Way – 2004, The Artist of
Disappearance – 2011, Fasting Feasting – 1999, Journey to
Ithaca – 1995, Diamond Dust and Other Stories – 2000,
Baumgartner’s Bombay – 1988, In Custody – 1984, The
Village by the Sea – 1982, Clear Light of the Day – 1980,
Games at Twilight – 1978, Fire on the Mountain – 1977, Cat
on a Houseboat – 1976, Where Shall We Go this Summer? –
1975, The Peacock Garden – 1974, Bye Bye Black Bird –
1971, Voice in the City – 1965, Cry, The Peacock – 1963
In Custody:
This is a novel about a small-town man, Deven, who
gets the opportunity to go interview his hero, the great poet
Nur, the greatest living Urdu poet. Having always loved Urdu
poetry and missed the chance to be an Urdu language
professor, he is charmed into going to Delhi the big city.
Even though he hesitates at the idea of possibly being
exploited by his sharp and selfish friend Murad, the dream
of meeting Nur draws him on. So he sets off on a number of
adventures on Sundays, the one free day that he should
have spent with his wife and son.
What Deven finds at his hero's house is misery and
confusion. Having sunk into a old age, surrounded by
fawning sycophants, married to a younger calculating wife
who wants to use his glory to win herself fame, Nur is not
what he once was. Or perhaps he always was this. Deven, a
shrinking and weak man, is somehow drawn to this old poet,
wishing to help and protect him even as he cannot defend
himself. Perhaps it is the tie of Urdu poetry that he
remembers from his treasured times as a child with his
father.

In order to save the name and works of Nur for posterity, he

decides to record his voice on tape for his small-town
university. In the process Deven is exploited monetarily and
emotionally, where Nur's family and hangers on demand
money to keep themselves happy, Murad refuses to pay him
for submissions to his self-proclaimed literary magazine. His
wife Sarla is indignant at his time away, his fellow
professors think he is having an affair in Delhi or push him
to get a taping of Nur's voice. The saddest part is the result
of the sessions. Drunk and encouraged by his admirers who
follow him along to the sessions, Nur offers nothing new or
novel.

RAMA MEHTA (1923 – 1978)

Rama Mehta was an Indian writer and sociologist. She is

remembered above all for her novel ‘Inside the Haveli’. This
novel depicts the conflict between tradition and modern life
faced by women belonging the middle and upper classes,
reflecting the experience of the author herself. This novel
won the Sahitya Akademi Award for English language works
in 1979.
Mehta’s critical essay ‘The Western Educated Hindu
Woman’ describes the contrast between women in their
twenties at the time of independence who were well
educated and spoke English and their mothers who spoke
no English and remained devout Hindus bent on maintaining
traditions. Her ‘The Hindu Divorced Woman’ brings out the
disadvantages of a woman’s acceptance of divorce which
she may well live to regret.
Works: Ramu, A Story of India – 1966, The Life of Keshaw –
1969, The Western Educated Hindu Woman – 1970, The
Hindu Divorced Woman – 1975, Inside the Haveli – 1977

Inside the Haveli : It is an excellent novel about a young

college girl of Bombay, Geeta who marries the son of an ex
prime minister of the former princely state of Mewar and
comes to her husband’s traditional Haveli in Udaipur. The
moment she steps out of the train however, she gets the
biggest shock of her life for not only is her face
instantaneously covered by her woman relatives and maid
servant who take complete charge of her, but she also
immediately finds herself engulfed in a pattern of life which
is totally alien to her modern upbringing in Bombay.
As soon as she reaches home, she is further shocked
by the realization that the men and women live in different
parts of the huge Haveli, without any contact with each
other. The youthful Geeta finds herself unable to reconcile
with the idea of spending the rest of life in “Pardah”. But at
the same time she sees no escape from this outdated way
of life, for her husband is too deeply rooted in his traditions
and too deeply attached to his parents to take up a job in
some other city. Moreover, she gradually comes to know
that in spite of their exacting demands of conformity with
the family tradition, her parents in law are essentially
warmhearted and generous.
Slowly and painfully, Geeta finds herself adjusting with
the life in the Haveli. But in the process she succeeds in
initiating some reform for the women of these ancient
Havelis by starting literacy classes for them and by sending
the female children to school. Her women relatives oppose
her plans, but her father-in-law supports Geeta’s attempt to
make the women less dependent on the Havelis.

JAYANTA MAHAPATRA (Born – 1928)

Jayanta Mahapatra is an Indian poet. He was born in a

Christian family in Orisha. He completed his master degree
in Physic from Patna University Bihar. He is the first Indian
poet to win Sahitya Akademi Award for English poetry. He is
the author of such popular poems as ‘Indian Summer’ and
‘Hunger’ which are regarded as classics in modern Indian
English literature. He was awarded Padma Shri in 2009. He
has also translated from Odia into English simultaneously
while he was composing his original poems of seniors as
well as young writers of Odisha, of Bengal and Andhra
Pradesh.
Mahapatra has written several books of poems in Oriya
and English. He is also a recipient of the Jacob Glatstein
memorial award conferred by Poetry magazine, Chicago. He
was also awarded the Allen Tate Poetry Prize for 2009 from
The Sewanee Review, Sewanee, USA. He received SAARC
literary Award in 2009.

The poetry of Mahapatra describes what he sees around

him. They are temples, beaches and the crowded streets of
Orissa. His poetic world does not reproduce the incidents
that influenced him. His creative mind changes the incidents
into poetry. He supplies the aesthetic pleasure as well as the
social behaviour of people and the issues which affect them.
While dealing with socio-cultural and political issues, he
does not sacrifice the artistic quality. Yet, he is more
concerned with the survival of man rather than creating a
utopian world for the people. His characters are cobbler,
hungry street children, slum dwellers, prostitutes and a
woman in pain. Like the English Romantics, Mahapatra
anchors his poetry in the sights sounds, and experiences of
ordinary life and ordinary man. He portrays the people of
Orissa and their Hindu religion with all its rituals and beliefs
of the ancestors at the same time. He embraced the genre
of poetry because of his exploratory nature and beautiful
rhyme structure.
He expresses his intimacy with his hometown and its
landscape. Though Orissa is endowed with rich natural
resources, it becomes necessary for him to examine the
poverty scenario and living condition of the people of
Orissa. The poet can see the poor families going from door
to door, begging for food. Orissa seems to have a large
number of destitute who lack either money or material to
survive. The poet feels sorry for the sad state of affairs in
his state and he indirectly indicts the government’s
negligent attitude in resuming the good standards of living
condition of the people.
Works:
Poetry: Close the Sky Ten by Ten – 1971, Svayamvara and
other poems – 1971, A Father’s House – 1976, A Rain of
Rites – 1976, Waiting – 1979, The False Start – 1980,
Relationship – 1980
Prose: The Green Gardner – 1997 ( short stories ), Door of
Paper : Essays and Memoirs – 2006

Relationship

This little book of poetry by Jayanta Mahapatra, which won

the 1981 Sahitya Akademi award, is a long poem
segmented into 12 parts. The overlaying theme of the poem
is loneliness, and an effort to find meanings in relationships.
The poems are a curious entangling of crude and finely
chiselled images, but both the kinds of images are sharp
and powerful. The main imagery is that of Konarka – with
the sun, stones, the Mahanadi and myths forming the key
metaphors. The images are unexpected, to say the least.
ARUN JOSHI (1939 – 1993)

Arun Joshi was an Indian writer. He was born in Varanasi,

Uttar Pradesh. He went to abroad for higher education. He is
known for his novels ‘The Strange Case of Billy Biswas’ and
‘The Apprentice’. He won the Sahitya Akademi Award for his
novel ‘The Last Labyrinth’ in 1982. His works bear
contemporary characters who are urban, English speaking
and disturbed for some reason.
‘The Strange Case of Billy Biswas’ is the story of a
young rich American educated Indian who ends up in the
wilderness of central India living as a semi-naked ‘tribal’
seeking a meaning to things above and beyond all that
everyday civilization can provide. A key to Joshi’s whole
intent can be found in the words he puts into the mouth of
his narrator as he grows old he realizes that the most futile
cry of man is his impossible wish to be understood.
In ‘The Last Labyrinth’ the hero, if that always is not
too strong a term for the men Joshi puts at the center, is a
man crying always “I want! I want!” and not knowing what it
is he desires, in some ways a parallel figure to Saul Bellow’s
Henderson, the Rain king. His search takes him, however to
infinitely old Benaras, a city seen as altogether intangible,
at once holy and to an end lost in miasma of non-
understanding. But the way there is gripping.
Works: The Foreigner – 1968, The Strange Case of Billy
Biswas – 1971, The Apprentice – 1974, The Last Labyrinth –
1981, The City and the River – 1990, The Survivor and other
stories – 1975, The Only American from Our Village, The
Home Coming

KEKI N DARUWALLA (Born – 1937)

Keki N Daruwalla is an Indian poet and short story writer in

English language. He was born in Lahore but his family
moved to Junagarh and then to Rampur India. His father was
a famous professor.
His first book of poems ‘Under Orion’ was published in
1970 to be followed by eight more volumes of poetry. He
has also published three volumes of short fiction, a novella
and two collections of poetry for children. He received the
Sahitya Akademi Award in 1984 for his poetry collection
‘The Keeper of the Dead’ and Commonwealth Poetry Prize
for Asia in 1987. He was awarded Padmashri in 2014. He
served an illustrious career in Indian Police Service, rising to
become a special Assistant to the Prime Minister on
International Affairs. He subsequently was in the Cabinet
Secretariat until his retirement.
Daruwalla is known for his bitter, satiric tone and as
one who writes from his experience of violence, he shows a
preoccupation with some of the darker sides of existence
particularly with death and destruction. Daruwalla is one
who believe, like many other poets writing in recent years,
that poetry should derive its inner strength from a social
awareness and sense of commitment.
Works: Under Orion – 1970, Apparition in April – 1971,
Sword and Abyss – 1979 ( short stories ), Winter Poems –
1980, The Keeper of the Dead – 1982, Crossing the River –
1985, Landscapes – 1987, A Summer of Tigers – 1995, The
Minister for Permanent Unrest – 1996, Night River – 2000,
The Map Maker – 2002, The Scarecrow and the Ghost –
2004, A House in Ranikhet – 2003, Collected Poems – 2006,
For Pepper and Christ – 2010, Swerving to Solitude: Letters
to Mama – 2018

NAYANTARA SAHGAL (Born – 1927)

Nayantara Sahagal is an Indian writer. She, a member of the

Nehru-Gandhi family, was born to Jawaharlal Nehru’s sister,
Vijay Lakshmi Pandit. She was educated in the United States
at Wellesley College.
 Sahagal first wrote ‘Prison and Chocolate Cake’, an
autobiographical memoir about her youth amid the Nehru
family. She then turned to fiction, often setting her stories of
personnel conflict amid Indian political crisis. The contrast
between the idealism at the beginning of India’s
independence and the moral decline of post Nehru India
that is particularly evident in ‘A Situation in New Delhi’
recurs in such Sahagal novels as ‘Rich Like Us’ which
confronts civil disorder, corruption and oppression while
detailing the internal conflicts in a businessman’s family.
Sahgal also examines the question ofHinduism in her
novels. Inheriting liberal outlook towards life from the
western education, she does not accept everything at face
value, especially religion. Although she has fine
understanding of the essential and basic Hinduism of The
Vedanta, Upanishads and The Gita, she feels skeptical
doubts about the later fanatic and fundamentalist Hindu
ideology. In her novels, Sahgal portrays the characters who
are deeply influenced by Hinduism. She reveals: "I have
been much pre-occupied with the effects of Hinduism on
character in my novels". In other words, Sahgal is
fundamentally a believer ofthe humanitarianism and instead
of supporting any sectarian or communal ideology, she
believes in the essential unity of the world community.
She was awarded the 1986 Sahitya Akademi Award for
her novel ‘Rich Like Us’. But she returned her Award in 2015
to protest what she called “increasing intolerance and
supporting right to dissent in the country”.
Works: Prison and Chocolate Cake – 1954, From Fear Set
Free- 1963, A Time to Be Happy – 1963, This Time of
Morning – 1965, Storm in Chandigarh- 1969, The Freedom
Movement in India – 1970, The Day in Shadow – 1971, A
Voice for Freedom – 1977, Indira Gandhi’s Emergence and
Style – 1978, Indira Gandhi : Her Road to Power – 1982,
Plans for Departure – 1985, Rich Like Us – 1985, Mistaken
Identity – 1988, Lesser Breeds – 2003, Relationship – 1994 (
collection of letters )

VIKRAM SETH (Born – 1952)

Vikram Seth is an Indian poet and novelist. He was born in

Calcutta. His father was an executive of Bata Shoes and his
mother, Leila Seth became the first female Chief Justice of
Delhi High Court.
His first novel ‘The Golden Gate: A Novel in Verse’
describes the experiences of a group of friends living in
California. His acclaimed epic of Indian life ‘A Suitable Boy’
won the Commonwealth Writers Prize. It is a story of a
young girl, Lata and her search for a husband. ‘An Equal
Music’ is the story of a violinist haunted by the memory of a
former lover. He also wrote a travel book ‘From Heaven
Lake’ an account of a journey through Tibet, China and
Nepal. His children’s book ‘Beastly Tales from Here and
There’ consists of ten stories about animals total in verse. ‘A
Suitable Boy’ is the longest novel ever written in English. His
collections of poetry such as ‘Mappings’ and ‘Beastly Tales’
are notable contributions to the Indian English language
poetry canon. He won Sahitya Akademi Award for ‘The
Golden Gate’ in 1988.
His novel "The Golden Gate" is a novel in verse about the
lives of a number of young professionals in San Francisco.
The novel is written entirely in Onegin stanzas after the
style Aleksandr Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. Seth had
encountered Charles Johnston's 1977 translation of it in a
Stanford second-hand bookstore and it changed the
direction of his career, shifting his focus from academic to
literary work. The likelihood of commercial success seemed
highly doubtful and the scepticism of friends as to the
novel's viability is facetiously quoted within the novel; but
the verse novel received wide acclaim (Gore Vidal dubbed it
"The Great California Novel") and achieved healthy sales.
The novel contains a strong element of affectionate satire,
as with his subsequent novel, A Suitable Boy.
Works: The Golden Gate – 1986, A Suitable Boy – 1993, An
Equal Music- 1999, A Suitable Girl – 2018
Poetry: Mappings – 1980, The Humble Administrator’s
Garden – 1985, All You Who Sleep Tonight – 1990, Beastly
Tales – 1991, Three Chinese Poets – 1992, The Frog and the
Nightingale – 1994, Summer Requiem – 2012, Arian and the
Dolphin – 1994 (children’s work), From Heaven Lake :
Travels Through Sinking and Tibet – 1983, Two Lives – 2005,
The Reversed Earth - 2011

AMITAV GHOSH (Born – 1956)

Amitav Ghosh is an Indian writer who has won both Jnanpith

Award and Sahitya Akademi Award for his works. He was
born in 1956 in a Bengali Hindu family. He grew up in India,
Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi, Oxford and
Alexandria. He got first job in Indian Express newspaper in
New Delhi. He has been a fellow of the centre for studies in
social science, Calcutta. Ghosh joined the faculty at Queens
College City University of New York, as Distinguished
Professor in comparative literature. He has also been a
visiting professor at the English Department of Harvard
University since 2005. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal
Society of Literature. He was awarded the ‘Padma Shri’ in
2007.
Most of his works deals with historical settings,
especially in the Indian Ocean periphery. His work ‘The
Shadow Lines’ that won him the Sahitya Akademi Award
throws light on the phenomenon of communal violence and
the way its roots have spread deeply and widely in the
collective psyche of the Indian sub-continent. His most
recent non-fiction book ‘The Great Derangement : Climate
Change and the Unthinkable’ addresses why modern
literature has failed to address issues of climate change and
how radical transformation due to nature has become
unthinkable.
He is finest Indian writer in English who has given
Jnanpith Award in 2018. His works ‘The Calcutta
Chromosome’ won the Arthur C Clarke Award in 1997 and
‘Sea of Poppies’ was shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker
Prize. He withdrew his novel ‘The Glass Palace’ from
consideration for the Commonwealth Writers Prize where it
was awarded the best novel in the Eurasian section, citing
his objection to the term “Commonwealth” and the
unfairness of the English language requirement specified in
the rules.
Works:
Novels: The Circle of Reason – 1986, The Shadow Lines –
1988, The Calcutta Chromosome – 1995, The Glass Palace –
2000, The Hungry Tide – 2004, Sea of Poppies – 2008, River
of Smoke – 201, Flood of Fire – 2015, Gun Island – 2019
Non-Fictional Works: In an Antique Land – 1992, Dancing
in Cambodia and at Large in Burma(essays)- 1998,
Countdown – 1999, The Imam and the Indian (essays)-
2006, The Great Derangement : Climate Change and the
Unthinkable – 2016
The Shadow Lines:
This novel explores the political and economic growth of
India through the lives of two families-one Bengali and one
English. Opening in 1960s Calcutta, the unnamed 8 years
old narrator examines the complex interrelationships of the
novel, Tridib, the narrator’s cousin and other members of
the two families. Ghosh explores the history and the growth
of the city of Calcutta and India from World War-II, through
Bloody partition years, the Dhaka and Calcutta riots in 1963
and 1964.
The novel begins in Calcutta and moves to Delhi where
the narrator goes to school and ends in London. At the
beginning of the novel the 8 years old narrator introduce the
two branch of his family, represented by his grandmother,
Tha’mma and her sister Mayadevi. Tha’mma, a retired
school teacher is strict, practical and no-nonsense, having
lived through the gruesome nightmare of the partition of her
native Bengal region from India. Her chief ambition is to
reunite the entire family, particularly to return her uncle,
Jethamoshai from Dhaka. The narrator admires Mayadebi’s
son Tridib, because of his deep knowledge of history and his
perspective on events and people.
The Dattachaudhari family and the Prince family in
London are joined together by the friendship of their
patriarchs. The narrator is in love with Ila, his cousin who
lives in London but he never tells her of his forbidden
feelings. She later marries Nick Prince. Tridib is in love with
May Prince and she is in love with him. However, they are
torn apart when Tridib rescues May from a mob during the
Dhaka riots and both Tridib and Jethamoshai are killed by
the mob.

SHASHI DESHPANDE-

Shashi Deshpande is an Indian writer. She was born in 1938

in Karnataka. Her father was a famous Kannada dramatist
and writer. She got education in Mumbai and Bangalore. She
studied journalism at the Vidya Bhavan and worked for a
couple of months as journalist for the magazine ‘Onlooker’.
She has written four children books, several short
stories and novels. She won the Sahitya Akademi Award for
the novel ‘That Long Silence’ in 1990 and the ‘Padma Shri’
in 2009. Deshpande creates figures that take her readers
through the social strata of urban society, But her interest
comes to centre more and more on women of the middle
and upper middle classes; well educated women who fight
for their own space, for their place in the family and in their
society. This setting is the backdrop to her stories, action
remains private, even with rape which is, after all private
only to a certain degree. In ‘The Dark Holds No Terrors’ she
introduce this painful topic that had already been there, as
marital rape in one of her early stories ‘The Intrusion’.
The themes and topics, the cultural contexts of her
novels seems to reflect Shashi’s own family and its cultural
setting. She is one of the eminent novelists of contemporary
Indian literature in English.
Works: The Dark Holds No Terrors – 1980, If I Die Today –
1982, Come Up and Be Dead – 1983, Roots and Shadows-
1983, That Long Silence – 1989, The Intrusion and other
stories – 1993, A Matter of Time – 1996, The Binding Vine –
2002, Small Remedies – 2000, Moving On – 2004, In the
Country of Deceit – 2008, Shadow Play - 2013
Children’s Works: A Summer Adventure, The Hidden
Treasure, The Only Witness , The Narayanpur Incident

RUSKIN BOND-

Ruskin Bond is an Indian writer of British descent. He is

considered to be an icon among Indian writers and
children’s authors. He was born as the son of a British
couple when India was under colonial rule, he spent his
early childhood in Jamnagar and Shimla.
His childhood was marooned by his parent’s separation
and his father’s death. He sought solace in reading and
writing and wrote one of his first stories at the age of 16. He
then moved to U.K in search of better prospects but
returned to India after some years. He wrote short stories
and poems for newspapers and magazines. He has written
over 500 short stories, essays and novels. His popular novel
‘The Blue Umbrella’ was made into a Hindu film of the same
name which was awarded the National Film Award for best
children film in 2007. In 1992, he received the Sahitya
Akademi Award for English writing, for his short stories
collection ‘Our Tree Still Grow In Dehra’. He was awarded
the ‘Padma Shri’ in 1999 for contribution to children’s
literature. He now lives with his adopted family near
Mussoorie, Uttrakhand.
Works:
Children’s Fiction: The Cherry Tree , Ranji’s Wonderful
Bat
Non-Fiction: A Golf Story : Celebrating 125 Years of the
Bangalore Club
Other Works: The Room on the Roof – 1956, The Blue
Umbrella – 1974, Angry River – 1972, The Eyes Have It –
1953, A Flights of Pigeons – 1978, Time Stops at Shamli –
2018, The Hidden Pool – 1966, Our Tree Still Grow in Dehra –
1991, Delhi is Not Far – 1994, Roads to Mussoorie – 2005,
Rain in the Mountains – 2018, Looking for the Rainbow –
2017, The Perfect Murder – 2017

G N DEVY-

Ganesh Narayandas Devy is an Indian writer, thinker and

activist. He writes in English, Marathi and Gujati. He was
born in Pune, Maharashtra. He got his education at Shivaji
University Kolhapur and University of Leeds UK. He worked
as a Professor at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of
Baroda.
He is best known for the ‘People’s Linguistic Survey of
India’ and the Adivasi Academy created by him. His first
book in English ‘After Amnesia’ was hailed upon its
publication as a classic in literary theory.
He launched the “Dakshinayan” ( South word )
movement of artists, writers and intellectuals. He returned
his Sahitya Akademi Award in 2015 as a mark of protest and
in solidarity with other writers sensing a threat to Indian
democracy, secularism and freedom of expression. The
“Dakshinayan” movement follows the ideas of Mahatama
Gandhi and Bhimrao Ambedkar.
Works: Critical Thought – 1987, After Amnesia – 1992, Of
Many Heroes – 1997, In Another Tongue – 2000, A Nomad
Called Thief – 2006, The Being of Bhasha – 2014, The
Question of Silence – 2019, Countering Violence – 2019

SUNETRA GUPTA (Born – 1965)

Sunetra Gupta is an Indian writer. She was born in Calcutta

in 1965 and spent her childhood in Ethiopia and Zambia.
She returned to Calcutta as a teenager and began writing.
She translated the poetry of Ravindra Nath Tagore. She
studied biology at the University of Princeton and got PhD
from the University of London. She is Professor of
Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford. She
has given the Sahitya Akademi Award for her work.
Sunetra Gupta’s protagonists belong to Bengali families,
they possess the stereotypical upbringing, but they are
highly educated and their education gives them the ability
to make decisions without surrendering their self-respect.
They display their survival instinct in the worst situations
without getting frustrated or emotionally stranded.
In Memories of Rain, the entire plot is concentrated within
the span of a single day. One day, Monideepa, an Indian
woman who had come to England after having married the
English Anthony, decides to leave her unfaithful husband
and return to India with her daughter. The relationship
between Moni and Anthony presents the usual
paraphernalia of cross-cultural differences and racism, with
the onus of "primitivity" reversed and applied implicitly to
"cold" England rather than the traditionally rich Bengal of
Rabindra Sangeet.
Works: Memories of Rain – 1992, The Glassblower’s Breath
– 1993, Moonlight in Marzipan – 1995, A Sin of Colour –
1999, So Good In Black – 2009

MAHESH DATTANI (Born – 1958)

Mahesh Dattani is an Indian playwright and writer. He was
born in Bangalore to a Gujrati parents. He studied at St.
Joseph’s College Bangalore. He is the first playwright in
English who got Sahitya Akademi Award. Once he was
reading Edward Albee’s play ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’
and got inspiration to write. He was also influenced by
Gujrati playwright Madhu Rye’s ‘Kumari Agashi’ and
developed interest in playwriting.
In 1984, he founded his playgroup ‘Playpen’ and in
1986 he wrote his first play ‘Where There’s A Will’. Since
then he has written many plays such as Tara, Night
Queen,Final Solution and Dance Like a Man. All the play of
Mahesh Dattani deals with social issues. Apart from theatre
he is also active in the field of film making.
Works: Where There’s a Will – 1988, Dance Like a Man-
1989, Tara – 1990, Bravely Fought the Queen – 1991, Final
Solutions – 1993, On a Muggy Night in Mumbai – 1998,
Seven Circle Round The Fire – 1998, The Murder That Never
Was – 2000, 30 Days in September – 2001, Brief Candle –
2009, Where Did I Leave My Purdah – 2012, The Big Fat City
– 2012

UPAMANYU CHATTERJEE (Born – 1959)

Upamanyu Chatterjee is an Indian writer and scholar. He

was born in Patna, Bihar. He studied at Delhi University. He
joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1983. He has
written a handful of short stories including ‘The
Assassination of Indira Gandhi’. His best selling novel
‘English August’ (made into a major film) was published in
1988 and has been reprinted several times. The novel
follows Agastya Sen, a young westernized Indian civil
servant whose imagination is dominated by women,
literature and soft drugs. His second novel ‘The Last Burden’
recreates life on Indian family at the end of the twentieth
century. It is a fascinating portrayal of the Indian middle
class. ‘Memmaries of the Welfare State’ was published as a
sequel to ‘English August’. He was awarded the Sahitya
Akademi Award for the ‘Mammaries of the Welfare State’ in
2004.
Works: English August: An Indian Story – 1988, The Last
Burden – 1993, The Mammaries of the Welfare State – 2000,
Weight Loss – 2006, Way to Go – 2011, Fairy Tales at Fifty –
2014

ARUNDHATI ROY (Born – 1961)

Arundhati Roy is an Indian writer and activist. She was born

in Shillong, Meghalaya to a Keralatic Christian mother and a
Bengali Hindu father. She spent her childhood in Kerala
which she mentions in her autobiographical book ‘The God
of Small Things’. The novel is filled with Roy’s childhood
memories.
She studied Architecture at the Delhi School of
Architecture and worked as a production designer. She has
written two screenplays. ‘The God of Small Things’, her first
novel won the Booker Prize for fiction in 1997 and has sold
over six million copies worldwide. The novel was published
in 16 language and 19 countries but caused controversy in
India for the description of a love affair between a Syrian
Christian and a Hindu untouchable. Set in Ayemenem in
Kerala, a rural province in southern India. It is a story of two
twins, Estha and Rahel, their reunion after 23 years apart
and their shared memories of the events surrounding, the
accidental death of their cousin, Sophie Mol in 1969.
She has written several non-fiction books including
‘The Cost of Living’, a highly critical attack on the Indian
government for its handling of the controversial Narmada
Valley Dam project and for its nuclear testing programme,
‘Power Politics’, a book of essays and ‘The Algebra of Infinite
Justice’ a collection of journalism.
 She was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2006
for her collection of essays on contemporary issues ‘The
Algebra of Infinite Justice’ but she declined to accept it in
protest against the Indian government toeing the US line by
violently and ruthlessly pursuing policies of brutalisation of
industrial workers, increasing militarization and economic
neo-liberalisation.
Works:
Fiction: The God of Small Things – 1997, The Ministry of
Utmost Happiness – 2017
Non-Fiction: The End of Imagination – 1998, The Cost of
Living – 1999, The Greater Common God – 1999, The
Algebra of Infinite Justice – 2002, Power Politics – 2002, War
Talk – 2003, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire- 2004,
Public Power in the Age of Empire – 2004, The Check book
and the Cruise Missile – 2004, The Shape of the Beast –
2008, Listening to Grasshoppers : Field Notes on Democracy
– 2010, Broken Republic – 2011, Walking with Comrades –
2011, Kashmir : The Case for Freedom – 2011, The Hanging
of Afzal Guru and the Strange Case of the Attack on the
Indian Parliament – 2013, Capitalism : A Ghost Story – 2014,
Things that Can and Can not Be Said – 2016, The Doctor
and the Saint – 2017

CHATURVEDI BADRINATH (1933 – 2010)

Chaturvedi Badrinath was an Indian author and philosopher.

He was born in Mainpuri, Uttar Pradesh. He served in Indian
Administrative Service for several years. His book ‘The
Mahabharata : An Inquiry in the Human Condition’ won the
Sahitya Akademi Award in 2009. This book is a scholarly
treatise on the subject of Indian philosophy and is also
written by one of its foremost and most well known
proponents.
Badrinath shows that the concern of the Mahabharata are
the concerns of everyday life of Dharma, Artha, Kama and
Moksha. This book dispels several false claims about what is
today known as Hinduism to show us how individual liberty
and knowledge, freedom, equality and the celebration of
love, friendship and relationship are integral to the
philosophy of the Mahabharata, because they are integral to
human life.
Works: Swami Vivekanand : The Living Vedanta – 2006,
The Women of Mahabharata : The Question of Truth – 2008,
The Mahabharata : An Inquiry in the Human Condition –
2007, Finding Jesus in Dharma : Christianity in India – 2000,
Dharma, India and the World Order : Twenty One Essays –
1993

LAXMAN GAIKWAD (Born – 1956)

Laxman Gaikwad is an Indian writer who writes in Marathi

language. He was born in Latur, Maharashtra. He gained
international recognition with his work ‘The Branded’, a
translation of his autobiographical novel ‘Ucalya’ considered
a masterpiece. His novel for the first time brings to the
world of literature the trials and tribulations of his tribe
‘Uchalaya’ literally the pilferers, a term coined by the British
who classified the tribe as a criminal tribe. This book brings
in the problems faced by the Dalits in India.
Gaikwad won the Sahitya Akademi Award for his novel
‘The Branded’. Gaikwas also has participated in the Labour
Movement and worked for the welfare of the farmers, slum
dwellers and the other weaker-sections of the society.
Works:
➢ The Branded – 1999

INDIRA GOSWAMI (1942 – 2011)

Indira Goswami was an Indian writer, poet, scholar and

editor. She was born in Guwahati, Assam. She got his
master degree from Guwahati University. She wrote mostly
in Assames.
She was a famous writer of contemporary Indian
literature. Many of her works have been translated into
English from her native language. She won the Sahitya
Akademi Award and Jnanpith Award for her works. She was
also well known for her attempts to structure social change,
both through her writings and through her role as mediator
between the armed militant group United Liberation Front of
Assam and the government of India.
In her work ‘Pages Stained With Blood’, she writes
about the plight of Sikhs in the 1984 anti Sikh riots following
the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister of
India. In ‘The Moth Eaten Howdah of a Tuskar’ she writes
about the plight of Assamese Brahmin widows in Satra,
religious institution of Assam. She also wrote the
controversial novel ‘The Man from Chinnamasta’, a critique
of the thousand years old tradition of animal sacrifice in the
famous Hindu Shakti temple to Kamakhya, a mother
Goddess in Assam.
Works: The Chenab’s Current – 1972, The Blue Necked
Braja – 1976, The Rusted Sword – 1980, The Moth Eaten
Howdah of a Tusker – 1988, Pages Stained with Blood –
2001, The Man from Chinnamasta – 2005, Ramayana from
Ganga to Brahmaputra ( non-fiction work ) – 1996

MADHU KISHWAR (Born – 1951)

Madhu Kishwar is an Indian academic and writer. She was

born in Delhi. She studied from Delhi University. She is
senior fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing
Societies, Delhi and Director of the Indic Studies Project
based at CSDS which aims to promote the study of religion
and cultures in the Indic civilization. She is also the founder
of a journal “Manushi”.
 She believes in creative application of the essentials of
his philosophy to meet the challenges of our times, not dead
and deadening ideologies. In 2013, she wrote a series of
articles titled ‘Modinama’ in her magazine Manushi where
she critical of media for what she termed ‘false propaganda
about Narendra Modi’s role during the Gujrat Violence 2002.
She conducted studies on ‘Khap’ and found that only 2% to
3% honour killings are related to gotra killings, rest are done
by families.
Works: In Search of Answer : Indian Women’s Voice – 1984,
Gandhi and Women – 1986, Women Bhakta Poets – 1989,
The Dilemma and Other Stories – 1997, Off the Beaten
Tracks : Rethinking Gender Justice for Indian Women – 2002,
Deepening Democracy : Challenges of Governance and
Globalization in India – 2006, Zealous Reformers, Deadly
Laws : Battling Stereotypes – 2008, Modi, Muslims and
Media – 2014

OM PRAKASH VALMIKI (1950 – 2013)

Om Prakash Valmiki was an Indian Dalit writer. He was born

in Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh. He is well known writer in
Hindi language but few of his works have been translated
into several language. His autobiography is considered a
milestone in Dalit literature. Beside ‘Joothan’, he wrote three
collection of poetry in Hindi language.

BHARATI MUKHERJEE (1940 – 2017)

Bharati Mukherjee was Indian-born American novelist and

short story writer. She was born in Kolkata. She earned her
BA from the University of Kolkata and MA from the
University of Baroda. In 1980 she settled in the United
States and got US citizenship in 1989. She considered
herself as American not Indian origins.
She wrote her first two novels when she was in Canada ‘The
Tiger’s Daughter’ and ‘Wife’. The Tiger’s Daughter tells a
tale of a young Bengali girl named Tara,born in Calcutta,
studied and married in USA. She returns to India after seven
years of her migration and finds the city in political turmoil.
She is caught between the two worlds and feels equally an
expatriate in both of them. Bharati‟s second novel ‘Wife’
again narrates the story of a Bengali Brahmin girl, Dimple
Dasgupta-Basu, who migrates to America with her husband.
She is also caught between the two worlds and its culture.
She is unable to break away from the original culture and
feels trapped in it. She turns neurotic and kills her own
husband.
Bharati’s work features not only cultural clashes but
undercurrents of violence. Her first novel ‘The Tiger’s
Daughter’ tells of a sheltered Indian woman shocked by her
immersion in American culture and on her return to India by
a changed Calcutta. She won National Book Critics Circle
Award in 1988.
Works:
Novels; The Tiger’s Daughter – 1971, Wife – 1975, Jasmine
– 1989, The Holder of the World – 1993, Leave It to Me –
1997, Desirable Daughters – 2002, The Tree Bride – 2004,
Miss New India – 2011
Short Stories: Darkness – 1985, The Middleman and other
stories- 1988, The Management of Grief , Days and Nights
in Calcutta ( memoir ) – 1977 with her husband Clark Blaise,
The Sorrow and the Terror : The Haunting Legacy of the Air
India Tragedy – 1987, Political Culture and leadership in
India – 1991, Regionalism in Indian Perspective - 1992

MEENA ALEXANDER (1951 – 2018)

Meena Alexander was an Indian poet, scholar and writer.

She was born in Allahabad and raised in Kerala and Sudan.
She earned her BA from Khartoum University and PhD from
Nottingham University.
She was the author of numerous collections of poetry
including ‘Atmospheric Embroidery’ and ‘Birthplace with
Buried Stones’. Her poetry has been translated into several
languages. She explores migration, trauma and
reconciliation in her works. Alexander’s works have been
influenced and mentored by the Indian poets Jayanta
Mahapatra and Kamla Das as well as the American poets
Adrienne Rich and Gulway Kinnell. Her works frequently
confront the difficult issues of exile and identity, while still
maintaining a generous spirit.
She was the recipient of the 2009 Distinguished
Achievement Award in literature from the South Asian
Literary Association for contributions to American literature.
In 2014, she was named a National Fellow at the Indian
Institute of Advanced Study.
Fiction: Stone Roots, House of a Thousand Doors – 1988,
The Storm – 1989, Night Scene: The Garden – 1992, River
and Bridge – 1996, Illiterate Heart – 2002, Raw Silk – 2004,
Quickly Changing River – 2008, Birthplace with Buried
Stones – 2013, Atmospheric Embroidery – 2018, Nampally
Road – 2013 (novel), Manhattan Music – 1997 (novel), Fault
Lines – 1993 (memoirs)
Non-Fiction: The Shock of Arrival : Reactions on
Postcolonial Experience – 1996, The Poetic Self : Towards a
Phenomenology of Romanticism – 1979, Women in
Romanticism : Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth and
Mary Shelly – 1989, Poetics of Dislocation – 2009

ROHINTON MISTRY (Born – 1952)

Rohinton Mistry is an Indian-born Canadian writer. He was

born in Mumbai in a Parsi family. His brother Cyrus Mistry as
also a playwright and author. Mistry studied at St. Xavier’s
college, Mumbai and University of Toronto.
 He migrated to Canada with his wife. There, he worked
as a clerk for few years. He wrote his first short story ‘One
Sunday’ in 1983 and won the Canadian Hart House Literary
Contest. He is the author of several novels: ‘Such a Long
Journey’, the story of a Bombay bank clerk who unwittingly
becomes involved in a fraud, committed by the government,
which won Commonwealth Writers Prize, ‘A Fine Balance’
set during the state of emergency in India in the 1970s and
‘Family Matters’, which tells the story of an elderly Parsi
widower living in Bombay with his step children. ‘Such a
Long Journey’ and ‘A Fine Balance’ were both shortlisted for
the Booker Prize for fiction and ‘Family Matters’ was
shortlisted for the 2002 Man Booker Prize for fiction. In
2012, he won the Neustadt International Prize for literature.
Works: Novels- Such A Long Journey – 1991, A Fine
Balance – 1995, Family Matters – 2002
Short Stories: Tales from Firozsha Baag – 1987, Searching
for Stevenson – 1994, The Scream - 2006

KIRAN DESAI (Born – 1971)

Kiran Desai is an Indian author. She was born in Delhi. She is

the daughter of novelist Anita Desai. She studied at
Bennington College, Hollins University and Columbia
University.
She wrote her finest novel ‘Hullabaloo in the Guava
Orchard’, about a young man in provincial India who
abandons an easy post office job and begins living in guava
orchard, where he makes oracular pronouncements to
locals. Unaware that he knows of their lives from having
read their mail, they hail him as a prophet. This work drew
wide critical praise and received a 1998 Betty Trask Prize
from the British society of authors. Her novel ‘The
Inheritance of Loss’ won the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the
National Book Critics Circle fiction Award. ‘The Economic
Times’, India’s leading business publication listed her as one
of 20 most influential global Indian women.
The Inheritance of Loss depicts a group of “lost” people and
the state of their lives, and how they lost themselves in the
course of pursuing their cultural identity in the process of
globalization. This complex background is of great
significance to the multitudinous diasporic writers who are
still struggling hard to recognize their cultural identity. A
sensitive response to the diasporic challenges characterize
Kiran Desai’s fictional world. Moreover, she is an intelligent
and scholar novelist embracing the cross currents of her
multi-cultural surroundings. She is dedicated to the art of
fiction, the voices and visions of the new generation of
world citizens experiencing a set of values in an age of
globalisation and pursuing their ambitious aspirations in the
midst of contemporary challenges of life.
Works: Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard – 1998, The
Inheritance of Loss – 2006, Win QSB – 2003 (with Yih Long
Chang), Emblems of Transformation – 2015

AGHA SHAHID ALI (1949 – 2001)

Agha Shahid Ali was an Indian-American poet. He was born

in New Delhi and grew up in Kashmir. He attended the
University of Kashmir, the University of Delhi and upon
arriving in the United States in 1975, Pennsylvania State
University and the University of Arizona.
He is well known for his dexterous allusions to
European, Urdu, Arabic, and Persian literary traditions. Ali’s
poetry collections revolve around both thematic and cultural
poles. He expressed his love and concern for his people in
‘In Memory of Begum Akhtar’ and ‘Country without a Post
Office’ which was written with the Kashmir conflict as
backdrop. Ali was the close friend of Amitav Ghosh. ‘Ghat of
the Only World’ written by Amitav Ghosh is a tribute of
friend to Agha Shahid Ali.
Works: The Country without a Post Office – 1997, Call Me
Ishmael Tonight – 2003, Rooms are Never Finished – 2001,
The Half-Inch Himalayas – 1987, A Nostalgist’s map of
America – 1991, A Walk Through the Yellow Paged – 1987,
The Veiled Suite : The Collected Poems – 2009

INDIRA SINHA (Born – 1950)

Indira Sinha is a British writer of Indian descent. He was

born in Colaba, Mumbai. He is the son of an Indian naval
officer and an English lady writer. He got his early education
at Mayo College, Ajmer and then at Pembroke College
Cambridge England.
His novel ‘Animal’s People’ was shortlisted for the 2007
Man Booker Prize and winner of the 2008 Commonwealth
Writer’s Prize for Europe and South Asia. ‘Animal’s People’,
set in the fictional Indian city of Khaufpur, was a reworking
of the Bhopal disaster based on Sinha’s long association
working with the Bhopal survivors. His novel ‘The Death of
Mr. Love’ is based on the case of K.M. Nanavati Vs State of
Maharashtra. He also worked as a copywriter in England. He
was voted by his peers one of the top ten British copywriters
of all time. While working in advertising, he translated
Vatsyayana’s ‘Kama Sutra’ into English, the first new
translation published in the west since Sir Richard Burton’s.
He also wrote monograph on the origins of ‘Tantrism’.
Works: Animal’s People – 2007, The Death of Mr. Love –
2002, The Cyber gypsies – 1999, Tantra : The Search for
Ecstasy – 1993, The Love Teaching of Kama Sutra – 1980

ASIF CURRIMBHOY (1928 -1994)

Asif Currimbhoy was an Indian playwright who wrote in

English. He was born in Mumbai in a muslim family. His
father was an industrialist and his mother was a social
worker. He got his early education at St. Xavier’s College. He
pursued his higher education in the United States at the
University of Wiscosin, where he developed a love for
Shakespearean drama which continued to have a profound
influence on his work. His first play ‘Goa’ deals with racial
discrimination as a paradigm of post colonialism. His plays
also enjoyed success in the United States.
Works: Goa – 1964, The Doldrummers – 1960, The Dumb
Dancer – 1961, The Hungry Ones – 1965

KAMALA MARKANDAYA (1924 – 2004)

Kamala Purnaiya Taylor Markandaya was an Indian novelist

and journalist. She was born in Mysore India. She got her
education from Madras University. After India declared its
independence, Markandaya moved to Britain, though she
still labelled herself as Indian expatriate long after words.
She is best known for writing about culture clash
between Indian urban and rural societies. Her first published
work, ‘Nectar in a Sieve’ was bestseller and cited as an
American Library Association Notable Book in 1955. Her
next book ‘Some Inner Fury’ is set in 1942 during the Indian
struggle for independence. It portrays the troubled
relationship between an educated Indian woman whose
brother is an anti-British terrorist and a British civil servant
who loves her. Markandaya provides the setting for a
conflict of values in ‘A Silence of Desire’ in which religious
middle-class woman seeks medical treatment without her
husband’s knowledge, from a Hindu faith healer rather from
a doctor. In Markandaya’s fiction western values typically
are viewed as modern and materialistic and Indian values as
traditional and spiritual.
Works: Nectar in a Sieve – 1954, Some Inner Fury – 1955,
Silence of Desire- 1960, Possession – 1963, A Handful of
Rice – 1966, The Coffer Dams – 1969, The Nowhere Man –
1972, Two Virgins – 1973, The Golden Honeycomb – 1977,
Pleasure City - 1982
ARUN KOLATKAR (1932 – 2004)

Arun Balkrishna Kolatkar was an Indian poet who wrote in

English and Marathi. He was born in Kolhapur, Maharashtra.
His father was an officer in education department. He got
his early education in Kolhapur.
Arun wrote several poems. His poems found humour in
many everyday matters. His first collection of English poetry
“Jejuri” won the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1977. ‘Jejuri’
is a long poem written in thirty one sections and this is
perhaps Kolatkar’s best work. The poem has been
considered as ‘the poet’s irreverent Odyssey’ to the temple
of Khandoba at Jejuri, a small town in Western Maharashtra.
Written in a style which is ironic and humorous the poem
has a colloquial flavour which goes well with the level at
which life is portrayed. The poem is actually about the
spiritual journey of the city bred men to the temple at Jejuri
and each of the thirty one sections is a poem in itself and
together they make for a pattern of pilgrimage, namely the
arrival, the round of visit and the return. ‘The Bus’ is the first
poem in the series and describes the arrival of the pilgrim at
Jejuri on a rainy down. His Marathi verse collection ‘Bhijki
Vahi’ won Sahitya Akademi Award in 2005.
Works: Jejuri – 1976, Kala Ghoda – 2004, Sharpa Sutra –
2004, The Boatride and other poems, Bhikaji Vahi – 2003

SHOBHA DE (Born – 1948)

Shobha De is an Indian novelist and columnist. She was

born in Ahmednagar Maharashtra. She grew up in Girgaon
and Mumbai. She started her career as a model. After
making her name as a model, she started a career in
journalism. She founded and edited three magazines
‘Stardust’, ‘Society’ and ‘Celebrity’. ‘Stardust’ magazine was
started by Nari Hira in 1971 and became popular under the
editorship of Shobha De.
De is best known for her depiction of socialites and sex in
her works of fiction, for which she has come to be known as
the ‘Jackie Collins’ of India. In 1989 she published her first
novel named ‘Socialite Evening’. The novel explores the
dynamics of elites of Indian society. It high lights the decay
of the social values, morality and culture. It has
autobiographical touch. This novel was heavily criticized for
its controversial content, though it sold out and gained
commercial success. Her works have been translated into
many languages. The reform and rise of women’s fiction is
accredited to Shobha De for her daring to voice her
thoughts in her writing. Her style of writing is deemed a
breath of fresh in the Indian literature. Another interesting
fact about her writing is her invention of ‘Hinglish’ an
uncanny blend of Hindi and English. Readers found this
language a refreshing change in the Indian literature
produced in Hinglish.
Works: Socialite Evening – 1989, Starry Nights – 1989,
Sultry Days – 1994, Shooting from the Hip – 1994, Small
Betrayals – 1995, Second Thoughts – 1996, Speed Post –
1999, Sandhya’s Secret – 2009, Shethji – 2012, Shobha :
Never a Dull De – 2013

SHASHI THAROOR (Born – 1956)

Shashi Tharoor is an Indian politician and writer. He was

born in London to a Malayali family. His father worked in
various positions in London, Bombay, Kolkata and Delhi,
including 25 year career for ‘The Statesman’. He graduated
with a bachelor degree in history from St. Stephen’s College,
University of Delhi. He earned his Master degree and PhD in
America.
He is well known writer of contemporary fiction and non-
fiction. His works are centred on India and its history,
culture, film, politics, society, foreign policy and more
related themes. Tharoor is also the author of several books,
including ‘Reasons of State’ a scholarly study of Indian
foreign policy, ‘The Great Indian Novel’ a modern ironic
adaptation of the 2000 year old Indian epic ‘Mahabharata’
which is narrated from a 20th century view point. He has
published a collection of short stories.
Works: Fiction- The Great Indian Novel – 1989, The Five
Dollar Smile and Other Stories – 1990, Show Business –
1992, Riot – 2001
Non-Fiction: Reasons of State – 1985, India : From
Midnight to the Millennium – 1997, Nehru : The Invention of
India – 2003, Bookless in Baghdad, Pax India : India and the
World of the 21st Century – 2012, India Shastra : Reflections
on the Nation in Our Time – 2015, An Era of Darkness –
2016, Why I Am A Hindu – 2018, The Paradoxical Prime
Minister – 2018

HARINDRA NATH CHATTOPADHYAY (1898 –

1990)

Harindranath Chattopadhya was an Indian poet, dramatist,

actor and musician. He was born in Hyderabad in a Bengali
Hindu Brahmin family. He was the younger brother of
Sarojini Naidu.His first collection of poems ‘The Feast of
Youth’ was published in 1918. The following year he married
Kamala Devi, the future pioneer of craft and textile
preservation, and moved to London to work as research
scholar. He got admission in Fitzwilliam College and began
research on the poet William Blake. While studying in
England, his poems were published in the ‘Indian Magazine’.
Chattopadhyay also wrote a play ‘Tukaram’ based on
the poet saint of Maharashtra, which was performed to
critical acclaim and establish his name back in India. He was
also elected as Member of Parliament from Vijaywada Lok
Sabha Constituency in Madras State. He also worked as an
actor and singer. The Government of India awarded him the
civilian honour of the ‘Padma Bhushan’ in 1973.
Works: Plays- Siddhartha, Man of Peace – 1956, Abu
Hassan –
Poems: The Feast of Youth – 1918, The Magic Tree – 1922,
Ancient Wings – 1923, Blood of Stones – 1944, Spring in
Winter – 1955, Virgin and Vineyards – 1967, The Lady’s
Giant hat –

ANEES JANG (Born – 1964)

Anees Jung is an Indian author, journalist and columnist. She

was born in Rourkela. Her father was a famous scholar and
poet and served as adviser to the last Nizam of Hyderabad
State. Firstly she completed her education at Osmania
University in Hyderabad and went to the United States for
higher education. She studied at University of Michigan,
where she did her Masters in Sociology and American
Studies.
Her well known work ‘Unveiling India’ is a chronicle of
the lives of women in India, noted especially for the
depiction of Muslim women behind the ‘Purdah’. It is a travel
diary focusing on interviews with women. She has written
several subsequent books on the same, talking to women
about their everyday lives, including ‘Night of the New Moon
encounters with the Muslim women in India’.
Her work ‘Beyond the Courtyard’ is based on interviews
with the daughters of the women she had talked to first in
Unveiling India, and many of the horrifying tales continue.
Jung is noted for her lively and vivid descriptions. Her work
‘Last Spring: Stories of Stolen Childhood’ focuses on children
from deprived backgrounds and includes the story of Ideas,
a child who is kidnapped and forced to work in the carpet
industry in Mirzapur. Other children are maltreated by
alcoholic fathers or married off early or sexually abused,
though some find refuge in schools set up by well meaning
NGOs. A section of this book is part of the English
curriculum in many Indian schools.
Works: When a Place Becomes a Person – 1977,
Flashpoints : Poems in Prose – 1981, Unveiling India – 1987,
The Song of India – 1990, Night of the New Moon :
Encounters with Muslim women in India – 1993, Seven
Sisters : Among the Women of South Asia – 1994, Breaking
the Silence : Voice of Women from Around the World – 1997,
Olives from Jericho : Peace in Winter Gardens – 1999,
Beyond the Courtyard – 2003 ( sequel to Unveiling India ),
Lest Spring : Stories of Stolen Childhood – 2005

PRITISH NANDY (Born – 1951)

Pritish Nandy is an Indian poet, painter, journalist, politician,

animal activist and film producer. He was born in Bhagalpur
Bihar. He was educated at La Martiniere College and at
Presidency College in Kolkata. He has written poetry books
in English and translated poems by other writers from
Bengali and Urdu into English.
His poem ‘Calcutta If You Must Exile Me’ is considered a
pioneering classic in Modern Indian Literature. In 1981
Nandy was nominated as a Poet Laureate by the World
Academy of Arts and Culture at the fifth World Congress of
Poets in San Francisco. The government of India conferred
on him the Padma Shri in 1977 for his contribution to Indian
literature.
Works: Of Gods and Olives – 1967, On Either Side of
Arrogance – 1968, I Hand You in Turn My Nebbuk Wreath –
1968, Masks to be Interpreted in Terms of Messages – 1971,
Madness is the Second Stroke – 1972, Riding the Midnight
River – 1974, Rites for a Plebeian Statue – 1970 ( verse play
), Some Friends – 1979 ( short stories ) , Bangladesh : Voice
of a New Nation – 1972
GIEVE PATEL (Born – 1940)

Gieve Patel is an Indian poet, playwright, painter as well as

a practicing physician based in Mumbai. He was born in
Mumbai. He got his education at St. Xavier’s High School
and Grand Medical College Mumbai.
Patel belongs to a group of writers named 'Green
Movement' which is involved in an effort to protect the
environment. His poems speak of deep concerns for nature
and expose man's cruelty to it. Patel's works include poems
(1966), How Do You Withstand. Body (1976) and Mirrored
Mirroring (1991). He has also written three plays titled
Princes, Savaska, and Mr Behram. Patel belongs to an avant-
garde grouping of artists based in Bombay and Baroda.
Patel has also exhibited for Contemporary Indian Art, Grey
Art Gallery, New York City, 1985, Indian Art from the Herwitz
collection Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, 1985 and
Coups de Coeur Geneva, 1987.
He has been conducting a poetry workshop in Rishi Valley
School for more than a decade. He edited a collection of
poetry which was published in 2006. His poetry is included
in Anthology of Contemporary Indian Poetry. One of his
Poems "Licence" from the collection How do you Withstand
is included in the anthology Confronting Love edited by
Arundhati Subramanyam and Jerry Pinto. He has been
translating poems from the 17th century Gujrati poet Akho
into English.
Works: Poems – 1966, How Do You Withstand, Body - 1976,
Mirrored, Mirroring – 1991, On Killing a Tree

GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK (Born – 1942)

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian scholar, literary

theorist, and feminist critic. She is a Professor at the
Columbia University and a founding member of the
establishment's Institute for Comparative Literature and
Society. She was born in Calcutta. She graduated from
Presidency College Calcutta, University of Calcutta.
Spivak joined the graduate program in English at Cornell
University. In 1962, unable to secure financial aid from the
department of English, she transferred to Comparative
Literature, a new program at Cornell, under the guidance of
its first Director, Paul de Man, with insufficient preparation in
French and German. Her dissertation, advised by Paul de
Man, was on W.B. Yeats and titled Myself Must I Remake:
The Life and Poetry of W.B. Yeats. In 1959, upon graduation,
she secured employment as an English tutor for forty hours
a week.
She is among the most influential postcolonial
intellectuals.She is best known for her essay ‘Can the
Subaltern Speak?’ and for her translation of and introduction
to Jacques Derrida's De la grammatologie. She also
translated the works of Mahasweta Devi as Imaginary Maps
and Breast Stories into English and with separate critical
appreciation on the texts and Devi's life and writing style in
general.
In 1967,Spivak translated ‘De la grammatologie’ a book
by Jacques Derrida. This translation became popular across
the world as an introduction to the philosophy of
deconstruction launched by the author, Jacques Derrida;
whom Spivak met in 1971.
Spivak has received several honorary doctorates from
different Universities all around the world in the category of
Arts and Philosophy. She has served on the advisory board
of numerous academic journals, including differences, Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and Diaspora: A
Journal of Transnational Studies.
Spivak has also translated the fiction of the Bengali
author, Mahasweta Devi; the poetry of the 18-century
Bengali poet Ram Prashad Sen; and most recently A Season
in the Congo by Aimé Césaire, poet, essayist and statesman
from Martinique. In 1997 she received a prize for translation
into English from the Sahitya Akadami—the National
Academy of Literature in India.[17]
Her essay, Can the Subaltern Speak? (1983), established
Spivak among the ranks of feminists who consider history,
geography, and class when thinking about women. In all her
work, Spivak's main attempt has been to try to find ways of
accessing the subjectivity of those who are being
investigated. She is praised as a critic who has feminized
and globalized the philosophy of deconstruction, considering
the position of the subaltern, a word used by Antonio
Gramsci as describing ungeneralizable fringe groups of
society who lack access to citizenship.
In the early 80s, she was also hailed as a co-founder of
postcolonial theory, which she refused to accept fully, as
has been demonstrated in her book Critique of Postcolonial
Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (1999),
which suggests that so-called postcolonial theory should be
considered from the point of view of who uses it in what
interest. Since 1986, Spivak has been engaged in teaching
and training adults and children among the landless
illiterates on the border of West Bengal and Bihar/Jharkhand.
In 2013, she received the Padma Bhushan, the third highest
civilian award given by the Republic of India.
In "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Spivak discusses the lack of
an account of the Sati practice, leading her to reflect on
whether the subaltern can even speak. Spivak writes about
the process, the focus on the Eurocentric Subject as they
refuse the problem of representation; and by invoking the
Subject of Europe, these intellectuals constitute the
subaltern Other of Europe as anonymous and mute.
She has often referred to herself as a "practical Marxist-
feminist-deconstructionist." Her ethico-political concern has
been for the space occupied by the subaltern, especially
subaltern women, both in discursive practices and in
institutions of Western cultures. Edward Said wrote of
Spivak's work, "She pioneered the study in literary theory of
non-Western women and produced one of the earliest and
most coherent accounts of that role available to us.”
Spivak coined the term "strategic essentialism," which
refers to a sort of temporary solidarity for the purpose of
social action. "Strategic essentialism" allows for disparate
groups to accept temporarily an "essentialist" position that
enables them able to act cohesively. However, while others
have built upon this idea of "strategic essentialism," Spivak
has been unhappy with the ways the concept has been
taken up and used. In interviews, she has disavowed the
term, although she has not completely deserted the concept
itself.
Spivak's writing has received some criticism, including the
suggestion that her work puts style ahead of substance.
Judith Butler has noted that Spivak's supposedly complex
language has, in fact, resonated with and profoundly
changed the thinking of "tens of thousands of activists and
scholars." On the other hand, Terry Eagleton has lamented
that "If colonial societies endure what Spivak calls 'a series
of interruptions, a repeated tearing of time that cannot be
sutured', much the same is true of her own overstuffed,
excessively elliptical prose. She herself, unsurprisingly,
reads the book's broken-backed structure in just this way, as
an iconoclastic departure from 'accepted scholarly or critical
practice'. But the ellipses, the heavy-handed jargon, the
cavalier assumption that you know what she means, or that
if you don't she doesn't much care, are as much the
overcodings of an academic group as a smack in the face
for conventional scholarship."
Works: Myself Must I Remake: The Life and Poetry of W.B.
Yeats – 1974, Of Grammatology (translation, with a critical
introduction, of Derrida's text) – 1976, In Other Worlds:
Essays in Cultural Politics – 1987, Can the subaltern speak?
– 1988, The Post-Colonial Critic – Interviews, Strategies,
Dialogues – 1990, Outside in the Teaching Machine – 1993,
The Spivak Reader – 1995, A Critique of Postcolonial
Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present – 1999,
Death of a Discipline – 2003, Other Asias – 2008, An
Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization – 2012,
Imaginary Maps (translation with critical introduction of
three stories by Mahasweta Devi) – 1994, Breast Stories
(translation with critical introduction of three stories by
Mahasweta Devi) – 1997, Old Women (translation with
critical introduction of two stories by Mahasweta Devi) –
1999, Song for Kali: A Cycle (translation with introduction of
story by Ramproshad Sen) – 2000, Chotti Munda and His
Arrow (translation with critical introduction of the novel by
Mahasweta Devi) – 2002, Red Thread -

MANJULA PADMANABHAM (Born – 1953)

Manjula Padmanabhan is a playwright, journalist and

children's book author. She was born in Delhi to a diplomat
family. She went to boarding school in her teenage years.
After college, her determination to make her own way in life
led to works in publishing and media-related fields. She won
the Greek Onassis Award for her play ‘Harvest’. An award-
winning film Deham was made by Govind Nihalani based on
the play.
She has written several works as ‘Lights Out!, ‘Hidden
Fires’ ‘The Artist's Model’ and ‘Sextet’. She has also
authored a collection of short stories, called Kleptomania.
Her most recent book is ‘Escape’.
Apart from writing newspaper columns she created comic
strips. She created Suki, an Indian comic character, which
was serialized as a strip in the Sunday Observer. Before
1997 (the year her play Harvest was staged) she was better
known as cartoonist and had a daily cartoon strip in The
Pioneer newspaper.
Works: Light Out- 1984, Harvest, Three Virgins and Other
Stories-2013, Island of Lost Girls- 2015, Escape- 200 8

SITAKANT MAHAPATRA (Born – 1937)

Sitakant Mahapatra is an Indian poet and literary critic in

Odia as well as English. He was born in in village Mahanga
Cuttak Odisha. He grew up reciting a chapter of Odia
version of Bhagwad Gita in a traditional household. He
completed his schooling from Korua government high school
and joined Ravenshaw College, Cuttack, where he did his
B.A. in History Honours this was followed by master's degree
in Political Science from Allahabad University. During that
time, he was the editor of the university journal. At this time
he started writing both in English and Odia, though later he
decided to write poetry solely in his native. His scholastic
works, however, are in English. He also spent a year at
Harvard University as a participant in the Ford Foundation
fellowship program.
He taught for two years at Post-Graduate Department of
Utkal University.He joined the IAS in 1961 as the first Odia
to top the statewide examination and went on to hold
several key post, including Secretary, Ministry of Culture,
Government of India, and President, UNESCO's World
Decade for Cultural Development. He is the recipient of
many awards including the Orissa Sahitya Academy Award
1971 and 1984; Sahitya Akademi Award 1974; culminating
in India's highest literary honour the Jnanpith Award in 1993.
He has published several poetry collection, essay
collections, travelogue and numerous translations. His
poetry collection has been published in several Indian
languages. His notable works are ‘Sabdar Akash’ (The Sky of
Words), Samudra and Anek Sharat.
His first collection of poetry in Odia was ‘Dipti O Dyuti’. His
anthology ‘Ashtapadi’ came out in 1967 and won him the
Odisha Sahitya Academy award, while his third and most
celebrated anthology, Sara Akash got him the Sahitya
Akademi Award, given by Sahitya Akademi. Since then he
has published over 350 poems in Odia and about 30
publications in English on literary criticism and culture.
In 1974, lyricist and writer Prafulla Kar described the works
of Mahapatra as part of the "new poetry" in Odisha
expressing a "contemporary consciousness" of Odia culture
amidst an increasingly "urbanized and technological
environment." According to Kar, Mahapatra addresses
philosophical problems of human existence with an
"awakening of a new kind of spiritual identification with the
past" in search of "new values" with which to make sense of
a "chaotic existence." The government of India honoured
him with Padma Bhushan and Padma Vibhushan. He has
also been given SAARC Literary Award.
Works: Quiet violence - 1970 , The Wooden Sword – 1973,
Old man in Summer and other poems – 1975, Staying is
nowhere: an anthology of Kondh and Paraja poetry – 1976,
Barefoot into reality – 1978, The Jester and other poems –
1979, Primitive Poetry as Love and Prayer – 1983, The
Awakened Wind: the Oral Poetry of the Indian Tribes - 1983 ,
An Anthology of Modern Oriya poetry – 1984, Modernization
and Ritual: Identity and Change in Santal society – 1986,
The Ruined Temple and other poems - 1996 , The Sky of
words and other poems – 1996, Memories Of Time :
Selected Poems - 2011
 UNIT – III POST
MODERN WRITERS
This section of post moderm writers deals with those writers
whose works have been published mostly after 2000. This
section deals with such writers as Chetan Bhagat, Arvind
Adiga, Jhumpa Lahiri, Amit Chaudhary etc. These are the
leading writers from India who are earning fame in India and
even in abroad. Chetan Bhagat is leading figure of this age.
His works have been published all around the world and
translated into several languages. He is well known writer of
India who broke the myths that Indian can not write world
classics in English literature. This generation of writers have
been working well in thf field of literature and they
fascinated the world society towards India and Indian
literature.
It was said that Indian write literature for Western people as,
Klaus Steinvorth argues that Indian literature in English is
written primarily for Western readers. He demonstrates this
thesis on the basis of such evidence as the detailed
explanation of Indian cultural and sociohistorical
heteroglossia in many of the texts, why would an Indian
writer need to include such obvious and, hence,
unnecessary explanations of Indian customs to Indian
readers? Steinvorth also calls attention to all those book
jackets that bear photographs of ‘Sariclad women’ writers
and wonders what these exoticized representations do to
the market sales of the books in the West. In the current
period, Steinvorth‘s 1975 critique of Indian literature in
English reminds us that visual textual signifiers-----
reproductions of Mughalstyle paintings of princesses,
handmaidens, and elephants on book covers, for instance---
are in the service of global commodity production and
circulation. In the case of Indian literature in English, such
visual textual signifilers may serve only to reproduce, for
readers, the kinds of Orientalizing gestures that Edward Said
criticized in Orientalism. In some senses, since its inception
in British colonialism in the mid-nineteenth century, the
literature has always run the risk of appropriation. However,
with the insertion of modernity, the difference that the 20th
and 21st century brings is, a kind of solidification of a project
of writing that has begun to give national boundaries
irrelevant. Such is the determining function of multinational
publishing corporations that national boundaries almost
cease to matter. it is becoming more difficult to make
critical distinctions between indigenous Indian writers and
writers of the Indian diaspora.
Although this point may be argued, surely it is
symptomatic that Viney Kirpal‘s 1990 collection of critical
essays, The New Indian Novel in English; A Study of the
1980s, makes no distinction between indigenous and
diasporic writers. Indeed, its express aim is to show that in
the New Indian literatue, the world itself is regarded as one
big hom. When a critical distinction is made, it falls between
the Old Masters (Narayan and Anand ) and subsequent
generations.
Now Indian writers have been writing not only for
western readers but for Indian community. This generation
of writers has emerged as leading figure in Indian literature
and these authors have made a huge society of readers in
India who want to read this generation of writers. Jhumpa
Lahiri, Rupa Bajwa, Mamang Dai, Temsula Ao etc are among
those writers who have affected Indian society with their
writings. They have made a magnificent field of writing and
are inspirational for Indian as well as foreigner ladies.
Through the hardwork of these writers, new generation
especially in India emerged as readers. Youths have become
aware about literature by Indian.
Jhumpa Lahiri is also rememebered for her myth beaking
idea of using Hinglish instead of English. Hinglish is the
combination of Hindia and English as a languages. Lahiri has
used this type of language in her works. She is leading
figure among the women writers of this generation. Manju
Kapur, Githa Hariharan and Meena Kandasamy also are
among those people who are serving Indian literature. Novel
is leading genre of this generation but others as poetry,
short story etc are also being written by Indian writers of
this age.Modern Indian Poetry in English demonstrates a
global awareness, with many poets indebted to North and
South American and early Indian regional verse.
One significant gain in the entry of Indian literature in
English in the public and global realms has been the
possibility of a space opened up to women‘s writing in India.
Such feminist publishers as Kali for Women have brought
out significant anthologies of stories by Indian women, both
originally in English and translated into English from the
regional languages; for example ‘In Other Words’,New
Writing by Indian Women and The Slate of Life: An
Anthology of Stories by Indian Women. In addition, Kali for
Women has brought out collections of critical essays on
issues to do with feminism, colonialism, and nationalism.
India has grown in prominence on a world stage. The
1990s and 2000s witnessed a dramatic boom in Indian
writers working in English, while the study of India’s many
literary traditions has grown in strength in universities
outside of India. The emerging concept of world literature
has much to gain from debates that have long held sway
within the study of the subcontinent.
 The study of Indian literature has helped us think about
the tension between the ‘world’ and the ‘nation’ as the
proper adjective to describe literature. Are these
competitive, mutually exclusive, intersecting, or
complementary? As early as the mid-1960s, Indian literary
scholars were thinking about world literature as a category
that did not usurp, but in fact relied upon, the concept of
the nation.
Indian literature of this age has wrestled with the question
of comparative language that haunts the concept of world
literature. Western theorists have sometimes assumed that
since the ‘nation’ is the provenance of the specialist and the
‘world’ the provenance of the generalist, we are somehow
able to know a nation intimately, in a way that we can never
know the world.
Indian literary studies have further grappled with world
literature’s animating tension between different ethical and
political approaches to internationalism. Some of these
approaches take us into the heart of imperialism and its
legacies, while others look outward to new forms of
solidarity or sympathy across social borders. Indian literary
study has drawn close attention to the material
asymmetries of global circulation, where some kinds of
literature pass more easily around the world than do others.
Literature in English, for instance, gains far more global
publicity than literature in Tamil or Hindi, revealing the
uneven topographies of world literature. Indian literary
studies offer promising angles for world literature. They
bring an acute sensitivity to the material conditions under
which literature gains visibility in different parts of the
world; an acknowledgement of the usefulness of translation
for legitimate scholarship, as used in literary histories of
India; an awareness of competing ideas of ‘worlding’ in
different literary traditions, as shown by emerging work on
Hindi and Tamil; an attentiveness to histories of inequality
and oppression; and an increasing confidence that working
within international or intercultural systems does not
necessarily skinne local connections. Most crucially, the
precedent of Indian literature suggests that we do not need
to agree on one single model of what ‘world literature’ is or
should be: the multiplicity of worlds may be what makes the
concept maddening, but also what makes it rich and useful.
There are several concepts and principles which are being
used by the writers of this age. They use latest techniques
as according the world stage. Now we can say that Indian
writing in English is not for western people. Novelist of this
age have written lot of good novels which became best
seller as soon as published. This show the quality and
interest of Indians in English literature. There is no
hesitation in saying that India has become a place where
literature in English occupies a prominent place and there is
vast population who like and love to English literature.

RUPA BAJWA (Born – 1976)

Rupa Bajwa is an Indian writer who lives and works in

Amritsar, Punjab. Her first novel ‘The Sari Shop’ explores her
hometown and the class dynamics of India. The novel has
won the writer flattering reviews, with reviewers calling her
India’s new literary find.
The Sari Shop was long listed for the Orange Prize for
Fiction in 2004. The novel won the Commonwealth Award in
2005 and India’s prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award for
English in 2006. Though she is from a Sikh family, she wrote
a controversial piece called ‘Dark Things Happen in
Gurdwaras Too’ in the ‘Tribune’ an Indian newspaper. This
piece brought her flak from the Sikh clergy.
Rupa Bajwa’s second novel ‘Tell Me A Story’ was
released in April 2012. It was met with extreme reactions. It
received critical appreciation from same quarters, at the
same time creating controversy among the literary circles in
New Delhi, since a part of this novel lampooned there very
people.
Works: The Sari Shop – 2004, Tell Me a Story – 2012

VIKAS SWARUP (Born – 1963)

Vikas Swarup is an Indian writer and diplomat. He was born

in Allahabad Uttar Pradesh in a family of lawyers. He
attended Allahabad University and studied History,
Psychology and Philosophy. After graduating with distinction,
he joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1986, motivated by
an interest in international relations and a desire to explore
different cultures.
He is best known as the author of the novel ‘Q&A’
adapted in film as ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ the winner of best
film for the year 2009 at the Academy Awards, Golden
Globe Awards and BAFTA Awards. His debut novel ‘Q&A’ tells
the story of how a penniless waiter in Mumbai becomes the
biggest quiz show winner in history. Critically acclaimed in
India and abroad, this international best seller has been
translated into 43 different languages. It was short listed for
the best first book by the Commonwealth Writers Prize and
won South Africa’s Exclusive Books Boeke Prize in 2006, as
well as the Prix Grand Punlic at the 2007 Paris Book Fair.
Works: Q&A – 2005, Six Suspects – 2008, The Accidental
Apprentice – 2013

CHETAN BHAGAT (Born– 1973)

Chetan Bhagat is an Indian writer, columnist and
screenwriter. He was born on 22 April 1973 in New Delhi. His
father was an Army officer and his mother was a
government employee in the agricultural department. His
younger brother Ketan is also a novelist.
 He completed his schooling from Army Public, Dhaula
Kuan, in New Delhi. He earned his engineering degree from
IIT Delhi and MBA from IIM Ahmedabad. He worked few
years as a investment banker, then focused full time on his
writing career. All book by Bhagat remained best sellers
since their release and five have inspired Bollywood films
(which are the hit films ‘Kai Po Che’, ‘2 States’, ‘3 Idiots’,
‘Half Girlfriend’ and ‘Hello’). In 2008, The New York Times
cited Bhagat as ‘the biggest selling English language
novelist in India’s history’. Time magazine named him as
one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Bhagat believes that India tends to have an academic and
social revolution to prevent young people simply pouring
what they learn without thinking. He wants to convey this
message across to the Indian youth even if they don’t get
stratospheric marks, they are still entitled to a happy life;
and it’s not the end of the world if they fail. He generally
talks about yungsters’ worries, their anxieties and all those
things which preoccupy them, by means of his writings. His
writing subjects include parental academic pressure along
with pre-marital sex, drinking and other topics taboo in
socially conservative India.
Works: Fiction- Five Point Some One – 2004, One Night @
the Call Center – 2005, The Three Mistakes of My Life –
2008, 2 States – 2009, Revolution 2020 – 2011, Half
Girlfriend – 2014, One Indian Girl – 2016, The Girl in Room
105 – 2018
Non-Fiction: What Young India Wants – 2012, Making India
Awesome – 2015, India Positive – 2019

CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI (Born – 1956)

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an Indian-American author,

poet and activist. She was born in Kolkata, India. She
received her BA from the University of Calcutta and went to
the United States to attend Wright State University where
she got master’s degree. She received a PhD in English from
the University of California.
Her short story collection ‘Arranged Marriage’ won an
American Book Award. Two of her novels ( The Mistress of
Spices and Sister of My Heart ) and a short story ‘The Word
Love’ were adapted into films. Her works are largely set in
India and the United States and often focus on the
experience of South Asian Immigrants. She writes for
children as well as adults and has published novels in
multiple genres. Her fiction has been translated into 29
languages.
Divakaruni’s novel‘The Palace of Illusions’ is a re-telling of
the Indian epic ‘The Mahabharata’ from Draupadi’s
perspective.
Works: Arranged Marriage: Stories – 1995, The Mistress of
Spices – 1997, Sister of My Heart – 1999, The Unknown
Errors of Our Lives – 2001, The Vine of Desire – 2002, Queen
of Dreams – 2004, The Lives of Strangers – 2007, The
Palace of Illusions – 2008, One Amazing Thing – 2010,
Oleander Girl – 2013, Before We Visit the Goddess – 2016,
The Conch Bearer – 2003, The Mirror of Fire and Dreaming –
2005, Black Candle – 1991 poetry, Leaving Yuba City – 1997
poetry , Tiger Mask Ritual

VIKRAM CHANDRA (Born – 1961)

Vikram Chandra is an Indian-American writer. He was born in

New Delhi. He earned his BA from Pomona College,
Claremont California. He received his MA from John Hopkins
University in 1987.
His first novel ‘Red Earth and Pouring Rain’ won
Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best First Book in 1996.
This novel was inspired by the autobiography of James
Skinner-the Irish Raja of Hansi in Haryana, a legendry
nineteenth century Anglo-Indian soldier. This novel is named
after a poem from the ‘Kuruntokai’ an autobiography of
classical Tamil love poem. ‘Love and Longing in Bombay’ a
collection of short stories won the Commonwealth Writers
Prize for Best Book ( Eurasia region ) and was short listed for
the Guardian Fiction Prize.
In 2000, Chandra served as co-writer with Suketu
Mehta for ‘Mission Kashmir’ a Bollywood movie.
Works: Red Earth and Pouring Rain – 1995, Love and
Longing in Bombay : Stories – 1997, Sacred Games – 2006,
Geek Sublime : Writing Fiction, Coding Software – 2013

JHUMPA LAHIRI (Born – 1967)

Jhumpa Lahiri is English-born American novelist and short

story writer whose works illuminate the immigrant
experience, in particular that of East Indians. She was born
to Bengali parents from Kolkata. Her parents moved to
London and then to the United States, when she was young.
Her parents nevertheless remained committed to their East
Indian culture and determined to rear their children with
experience of and pride in their cultural heritage. She
received her PhD from Boston University in the 1990s .
Her book ‘Interpreter of Maladies’ won Pulitzer Prize for
fiction in 2000 and PEN Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction.
Her next novel ‘The Namesake’ examines themes of
personal identity and the conflicts produced by immigration
by following the internal dynamics of a Bengali family in the
United States. Her novel ‘The Lowlands’ was nominated for
both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award and
received the 2015 DSC Prize for South Asian literature.
Works: The Name Sake – 2003, The Lowland – 2013,
Interpreter of Maladies – 1999, The Magic Barrel: Stories –
2003
AMIT CHAUDHARY (Born – 1962)

Amit Chaudhary is an Indian novelist, poet, essayist, literary

critic and singer. He was born in Kolkata and grew up in
Mumbai. His father was the first CEO of Britannia Industries
Limited and his mother was a famous singer.
His first book ‘A Strange and Sublime Address’ won the
Betty Trask Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize ( Eurasia
region, Best First Book ) and was short listed for the
guardian Fiction Prize. His work ‘Freedom Song’ deals with
the political tension between Hindus and Muslims during the
winter of 1992-93 in Kolkata. ‘A New World’ is the story of
Jayojit Chatterjee, a divorced writer living in America and
the visit he makes with his son Vikram to his elderly parents
home in Kolkata. His most recent novel ‘The Immortals’ was
shortlisted for the 2010 Commonwealth Writers Prize ( South
Asia and Europe Region, Best Book ) and the 2011 DSC Prize
for South Asian literature. He won Sahitya Akademi Award
for ‘A New World’ in 2002.
Works: A Strange and Sublime Address – 1991, Afternoon
Raag – 1993, Freedom Song – 1998, A New World – 2000,
The Immortals – 2009, Odysseus Abroad – 2015, Friend of
My Youth – 2017, Real Time : Stories – 2002, St. Cyril Road
and other poems – 2005, D.H. Lawrence and ‘difference’ :
Postcoloniality and the poetry of the Present – 2003, Small
Orange Flags – 2003, Clearing A Space – 2008, Calcutta :
Two Years in the City – 2013

MAMANG DAI (Born – 1957)

Mamang Dai is an Indian poet, novelist and journalist. She

was born at East Siang District in Arunachal Pradesh. Her
family belongs to the Adi tribe. She completed her schooling
at Shillong, Meghalaya. She got BA in English literature from
Guhawati University Assam.
 She is the first woman from her state to be selected for
IAS. She was selected for the IAS in 1979, but she left the
post to pursue her career in journalism. She received
Sahitya Akademi Award in 2017 for her novel ‘The Black
Hill’. She was awarded the ‘Padma Shri’ in 2011. The
government of Arunachal Pradesh conferred her Annual
Verrier Elwin Prize in 2013 for her book ‘Arunachal Pradesh :
The Hidden Land’.
Works: River Poems – 2004, The Balm of Time – 2008,
Stupid Cupid – 2008 (novel), The Legend of Pensam – 2006
(novel), The Sky Queen – 2003 (stories), Once Upon a Moon
Time – 2003 (stories), The Black Hill – 2014 (novel)
Non-Fiction: Arunachal Pradesh : The Hidden Land – 2003,
Mountain Harvest : The Food of Arunachal Pradesh – 2004

MALATHI RAO (Born – 1930)

Malathi Rao is an Indian writer. She was born in Bangalore,

Karnataka. She studied in Bangalore and Mysore
Universities. In her young age, she was inspired by the work
of Jane Auston, the Bronte Sisters and Louisa May Alcott.
She epitomized the new generation of her time, as a highly
educated woman. She spent a major part of her teaching
career in Delhi. She taught English literature at Delhi
University .
She has written novels, short stories and several
newspaper articles. ‘The Bridge’, ‘And in Benares Flows the
Ganga’ and ‘Come for a Coffee please’ are among her well
known works. She got fame with her novel ‘Disorderly
Women’. She won Sahitya Akademi Award for this work.
‘Disorderly Women’ is a story of four Brahmin women in pre-
independence India who struggle to break the barriers belt
around them by society.
Works: The Bridge – 1990 ( novel ), Disorderly Women -
2005 ( novel ), Inquisition – 2013 ( novel )
JEET THAYIL (Born – 1959)

Jeet Thayil is an Indian poet, novelist and musicians. He

was born in Kerala. He was educated in Hong Kong, New
York and Bombay. Thayil’s poetry collection ‘These Errors
are Correct’ was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award for
English. He was short listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2012
for his debut novel ‘Nacropolis’. He became the first Indian
author to win the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature in
2013. His novel ‘Nacropolis’ is set in Bombay in the 1970s
and 80s and sets out to tell the city’s secret history, when
opium gave way to new cheap heroin. He is the editor of the
‘Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets’, 60 Indian
Poets and a collection of essays ‘Divided Time : India and
the end of Diaspora’.
Works: These Errors Are Correct – 2008, English – 2004,
Apocalypso – 1997, Gemini – 1992, Nacropolis – 2012, The
Book of Chocolate Saints – 2017

TEMSULA AO (Born – 1945)

Temsula Ao is a poet, short story writer and ethnographer.

She was born in Jorhat Assam. She earned her BA from Fazl
Ali College Nagaland and MA from Gauhati University,
Assam.
She received the Sahitya Akademi Award for her short
story collection ‘Laburnum for My Head’ in 2013. She
received the ‘Padma Shri’ award in 2007. She is also the
recipient of the Governor’s Gold Medal 2009 from the
government of Meghalaya. She is considered as one of the
major writers in English to emerge from Northeast India.
When she was in the University of Minnesota, she came in
contact with the native Americans. She learned about their
culture, heritage and especially their oral tradition. This
exposure inspired her to record the oral tradition of her own
community Ao Naga. After returning from the University of
Minnesota, she worked on the oral tradition for about twelve
years. She collected ‘The myths, folktales, folklores, rituals,
law, customs, belief system’. This ethnographic work was
published in 1999. This book is the most authentic
document about the Ao Naga community.
Works: Laburnum for My Head – 2009, These Hills Called
Home : Stories from a War Zone, Ao Naga Oral Tradition –
2000, Henry James’ Quest for an Ideal Heroine – 1989 (
critical work )

ADIL JUSSAWALLA (Born- 1940)

Adil Jussawala is an Indian poet, editor and translator. He

was born in Mumbai in a Parsi family. He spent his youth
years in England where he studied, wrote plays, read
English at Oxford and taught English at a language school.
After returning to Mumbai, he taught English at St. Xavier’s
College.
He won the 2014 Sahitya Akademi Award for his poetry
collection ‘Trying to Say Goodbye’. He is an influential
presence in Indian poetry in English. He has written several
book of poetry as ‘Land’s End’, ‘Missing Person’. He writes a
complex poetry ironic, fragmented, non-linear, formally
strenuous that evokes and indicts a dehumanised, spiritually
sterile landscape ravaged by contradiction, suspended in a
perpetual state of catastrophe.
Works: Trying to Say Goodbye – 2011, The Right Kind of
Dog – 2013, Maps for a Mortal Moon: Essays and
Entertainments – 2014, I Dreamt a Horse Fell From the Sky –
2015(collection of poetry and prose)

CYRUS MISTRY (Born – 1956)

Cyrus Mistry is an Indian author and playwright. He was

born in Mumbai. He is the brother of author Rohinton Mistry.
He stated writing in early age. He has also worked as a
journalist and short story writer. He has also written short
film scripts and several documentaries. One of his short
stories ‘Percy’ was made into the Gujrati feature film in
1989. It won the National Award for Best Gujrati Film in 1989
as well as Critics Award at the Mannheim Film festival. He
won Sahitya Akademi Award in 2015 for ‘Chronicle of a
Corpse Bearer’ and DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for
same. ‘Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer’ tells the story of the
Khandhias within the Parsi community who carry the bodies
of the dead to the ‘Tower of Silence’ where they are eaten
by vultures. His play ‘Doongaji House’ is regarded as a
seminal work in contemporary Indian theatre in English.
Works: Doonganji House – 1977 ( play ), The Radiance of
Ashes – 2005, Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer – 2013

JERRY PINTO (Born – 1966)

Jerry Pinto is an Indian novelist, poet and translator. He was

born in 1966. He is a Roman Catholic of Goan origin and
grew up in Mumbai. He received a liberal arts degree from
University of Mumbai and law degree from Government Law
College Mumbai.
His first novel ‘Em and the Big Hoom’ won the Sahitya
Akademi Award in 2016 and Windham Campbell Prize in
same year. His work ‘Helen : The Life and Times of an H-
Bomb’ won the Best Book on Cinema Award. He co-authored
‘Leela : A Portrait’ with Leela Naidu, a semi-biographical
book of anecdotes and photos from Leela Naidu’s life. Leela
Naidu was continuously listed as one of top five most
beautiful women in the world in the 1950s and 60s by
magazines like Vogue.
Works: Surviving Women-2000, Bombay Meri Jaan – 2003,
Asylum and Other Poems – 2003, Helem : The Life and Time
of an H-bomb – 2006, Reflected in Water – 2006, Bollywood
Posters – 2008, Leela : A Portrait – 2009 ( with Leela Naidu ),
Em and the Big Hoom – 2012, When Crows Are White –
2013, Monster Garden – 2016

ESTHER DAVID (Born – 1945)

Esther David is an Indian Jewish author, artist and sculpture.

She was born in Ahmedabad, Gujrat. She completed her
Bachelor Degree from Maharaja Siyajirao University of
Baroda. In University, she met Sankho Chaudhary, a
sculpture who taught her sculpture and Art history.
She writes in English and her novels are based on the
Jewish experience in India. She weaves her stories around
the Bene Israel Jewish community of India. She won the
Sahitya Akademi Award for her work ‘The Book of Rachel’.
Works: The Book of Rachel – 2006, The Walled City – 1997,
Shalom India Housing Society – 2007, By the Sabarmati –
1999, My Father’s Zoo – 2007, The Man With Enormous
Wings – 2010, Ahmedabad : City with a Past – 2016,
Bombay Brides – 2018, The Globetrotters – 2018

ARVIND ADIGA (Born – 1974)

Arvind Adiga is an Indo-Australian writer and journalist. He

was born in Chennai. He grew up in Mangalore and studied
there for few years. His family moved to Australia where he
studied in Sydney. He later studied English literature at
Columbia University, New York.
He has worked as a journalist since 2000, first as a
financial correspondent in New York, then returning to India
to work as a correspondent for TIME magazine. His debut
novel ‘The White Tiger’ won the 2008 Man Booker Prize for
fiction. It takes the form of a series of unsent letters to the
Chinese premier from Balram Halwai, a murderer who left
his village to work as a chauffeur in Delhi. His second novel
is ‘Between the Assassinations’ which charts the lives of the
residents of an Indian town over a seven year period
between the assassination of Indira Gandhi and her son
Rajiv.
He is the fourth Indian born author to win the Booker
Prize after Salman Rushdie, Arudhati Roy and Kiran Desai.
VS Naipaul, another winner was ethnically Indian but was
born on the Caribbean island of Trinidad.
Works: The White Tiger – 2008, Between the
Assassinations – 2008, Last Man in Tower – 2011, Selection
Day – 2016, The Sultan’s Battery – 2008, Smack – 2008,
Last Christmas in Bandra – 2008, The Elephant – 2009

ANITA NAIR (Born – 1966)

Anita Nair is an Indian writer. She was born in Shoranur,

Kerala. She got early education in Madras before returning
to Kerala where she got a BA in English language and
literature.
Anita has written several books. Her novels ‘The Betterr
Man’ and ‘Ladies Coupe’ have been translated into 21
languages. In 2002 ‘Ladies Coupe’ was elected as one of the
five best in India. This novel is about women’s conditions in
a male dominated society, told with great insight, solidarity
and humour. This work was translated into more than
twenty five languages around the world. She has also
written ‘The Puffin Book of Myths and Legends’ , a children
book on myths and legends. Her sixth novel ‘Idris : Keeper
of the Light’ is a historical and geographical novel about a
Somalian trader who visited Malabar in s1659 A.D.
Works: Satyr of the Subway & other stories – 1997, The
Better Man – 1999, Ladies Coupe – 200, Malabar Mind –
2002 ( poetry ), Where the Rain is Born – 2003, Puffin Book
of World Myths and Legends – 2004, Mistress – 2005,
Adventures of Nonu, the Skating Squirrel – 2006, Living Next
Door To Alise – 2007, Good Night and God Bless – 2008,
Lessons in Forgetting – 2010, Cat Like Wound – 2012, The
Lilac House : A Novel – 2014, Idris – Historical Novel – 2014,
Alphabet Soup for Lovers – 2015, Chain of Custody – 2016

PANKAJ MISHRA (Born – 1969)

Pankaj Mishra is an Indian essayist and novelist. He was

born in Jhansi, Uttar Pradesh. He graduated from Allahabad
University and earned his Master of Arts in English literature
from Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.
His first book was ‘Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels
in Small Town in India’, a travelogue which describe the
social and cultural changes in India in the new context of
globalization. His novel ‘The Romantics’ an ironic tale of
people longing for fulfilment in cultures other than their
own, won the Los Angles Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for
first fiction. His book ‘An End of Suffering : The Buddha in
the World’, mixes memoir, history and philosophy while
attempting to explore the Buddha’s relevance to
contemporary times. ‘Temptations of the West : How to be
Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond’ describes Mishra’s
travels through Kashmir, Bollywood, Afghanistan, Tibet,
Nepal and other parts of south and central Asia.
Works: Butter Chicken In Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town
India – 1995, The Romantics – 2000, An End to Suffering :
The Buddha In the World – 2004, Temptations of the West :
How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond –
2006, From the Ruins of Empire : The Intellectuals who
Remade Asia – 2012, A Great Clamour : Encounters with
China and Its Neighbours – 2013, Age of Anger : A History of
the Present – 2017

MEENA KANDASAMY (Born – 1984)

Meena Kandasamy is an Indian poet, fiction writer and

translator. She is well known for her works centred on
feminism and the anti-caste ‘Caste Annihilation Movement
of the contemporary Indian milieu. She has published two
collections of poetry namely ‘Touch’ and ‘Ms Millitancy’. Two
of her poems have won accolades in all India poetry
competition. She edited ‘The Dalit’ a bi-monthly alternative
English magazine of the Dalit Media Network. Apart from her
literary works she is vocal about various contemporary
political issues relating to caste, corruption violence and
women’s rights in more ways than one. She also writes
columns for platforms like Outlook India and The Hindu
occasionally.
Works: Ms Millitancy – 2010, Touch – 2006, The Gypsy
Goddess – 2014, When I Hit You : A Portrait of the Writer as
a Young Wife – 2018

MADHULIKA LIDDLE (Born – 1973)

Madhulika Liddle is an Indian writer. She was born in

Halflong Assam. Her father was an officer in the Indian
Police Service so she spent her childhood place to place.
She completed her schooling in Delhi.
She is best known for her book featuring the 17th
century Mughal detective Muzaffar Jang. She is also a
prolific writer of short fiction, travel writing and writing
related to classic cinema. She calls herself ‘primarily a short
story writer’. She has written several short stories in
different genres including black humour, crime and
detection and social awareness. She won Commonwealth
Broadcasting Association Award for ‘A Morning Swim’. Her
novel ‘The Englishman Cameo’ introduces Muzaffar Jang, a
twenty five-year old Mughal nobleman living in Delhi of
1656 A.D. Muzaffar ends up investigating a murder of which
his friend, a jeweller’s assistant, is accused. The book
became a bestseller in India and was published in French.
Works: The Englishman’s Cameo – 2009, The Eighth Guest
and Muzaffar Jang Mysteries – 2011, Engraved in Stone –
2012, Crimson City – 2015, Silent Fear – 2001, A Morning
Swim – 2003, Poppies in the Snow, My Lawfully Wedded
Husband – 2012, Love and Papaya Man –

RANA DAS GUPTA (Born – 1971)

Rana Das Gupta is a British-Indian novelist and essayist. He

was born in Canterbury, England. He grew up in Cambridge
and studied at Balliol College Oxford. He was awarded the
prestigious Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for the novel
‘Solo’. This novel was an epic tale of the 20th and 21st
centuries told from the perspective of a 100 year old
Bulgarian man. This novel was translated into twenty
languages. His first novel ‘Tokyo Cancelled’ was an
examination of the forces and experiences of globalization.
It is about thirteen passengers stuck overnight in an airport
who tell thirteen stories from different cities in the world.
The tales add up to a broad explanation of 21st century
forms of life which includes billionaires, film stars, migrant
labourers, illegal immigrants and sailors. In 2014 ‘le Monde’,
a French newspaper named him one of 70 people who are
making the world of tomorrow. In 2010, ‘The Daily
Telegraph’ called one of Britain’s best novelist under 40.
Works: Tokyo Cancelled – 2005, Solo – 2009
Non-Fiction: Capital : A Portrait of Twenty First Century
Delhi – 2014, Notes on a Suicide – 2017, Maximum Cities –
2006

RAJ KAMAL JHA (Born – 1966)

Raj Kamal Jha is an Indian novelist and editor. He was born

in Bhagalpur , Bihar. He grew up in Kolkata, where he went
to school at St. Joseph’s College. He got his bachelor degree
from IIT Kharagpur. He earned his Master degree from the
University of Southern California .
He worked with ‘The Stateman’, ‘India Today’ and ‘The
Indian Express’ as an editor. His novel ‘She will Build Him A
City’ was short listed for the DSC Prize for the South Asian
literature in 2016. His first novel ‘The Blue Bedspread’ won
the 2000 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best First book (
Eurasia region ). Jha’s novels have been translated into
more than a dozen European languages. His short stories
have appeared in French and German anthologies as well.
He is called the ‘novelist of the newsroom’. John Fowles
described ‘The Blue Bedspread’ as the ‘coming of age of the
Indian Novel’. His fiction is grounded in contemporary
themes around changes. According to Amit Chaudhuri, Jha’s
writing is more the tradition of cinema than literature.
His work ‘Fireproof’ is set against the backdrop of the
2002 Gujrat violence, the first attack on muslims ofter 9/11.
The novel is a tale of a father and his deformed son on a
journey across a city where the ghost’s of those killed have
decided to seek justice.
Works: The Blue Bedspread – 2001, If You are Afraid of
Heights – 2003, Fireproof – 2006, She Will Build Him A City –
2015, The City and the Sea – 2019

MANJU KAPUR (Born – 1948)

Manju Kapur is an Indian writer and professor in Delhi

University. She was born in Amritsar, Punjab. She graduated
from the Miranda House University College for women and
took an M.A. at Dalhousie University in Halifax. She earned
her M.Phil from Delhi University.
Her first novel ‘Difficult Daughter’ won her the
Commonwealth Prize for first novels (Eurasia region ) in
1999 and went on to become a bestseller in India, United
State and England. Her other three novels ‘A Married
Woman’, ‘Home’ and ‘Custody’ were highly acclaimed and
very successful among readers and critics.
Works: Difficult Daughters – 1998, A Married Woman –
2003, Home – 2006, The Immigrant – 2008, Custody –
2011, Shaping the World : Women Writers on Themselves –
2014, Brothers – 2016

GITHA HARIHARAN (Born – 1954)

Githa Hariharan is an Indian author and editor. She was born

in Coimbatore and grew up in Mumbai and Manila. She
graduated from University of Mumbai and earned MA from
Fairfield University U.S. She has written several novels, short
fiction and essays over the last three decades. Her work The
Thousand Faces of Night’ written children’s stories, edited a
collection of translated short fiction, ‘A Southern Harvest’
and the essay collection ‘From India to Palestine : Essays in
Solidarity’ and co-edited ‘Battling for India : A Citizen’s
Reader’. Githa has, over the years, been a cultural
commentator through her essays, lectures and activism.
She now lives in New Delhi.
Works: The Winning Team – 2004, In Times of Siege – 2003,
When Dreams Travel – 1999, The Ghost of Vasu Master –
1998, The Art of Dying – 1993, The Thousand Faces of Night
– 1996, Fugitive Histories – 2009

SUKETU MEHTA-

Suketu Mehta is an Indian-American writer. He was born in

Kolkata to a Gujrati parents and raised in Mumbai. His family
moved to the New York area in 1977. He has attended New
York University and the University of Lowa writers workshop.
His book ‘Maximum City’, autobiographical account of his
experiences in the city of Mumbai, was published in 2004.
This book explores the underbelly of the sprawling city. It
was a 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist. He also co-wrote the
screenplay to the Bollywood film ‘Mission Kashmir’ with
novelist Vikram Chandra.
Works: In the Violent Favelas of Brazl – 2013, Maximum
City – 2004
ASHWIN SANGHI (Born – 1969)

Ashwin Sanghi is an Indian writer in the fiction-thriller genre.

He was born in Mumbai. He completed his schooling in
Mumbai. He got his Bachelor Degree from St. Xavier’s
College and MBA from the Yale School of Management,
United States. He has written three best selling novels ; ‘The
Razabal Line’, ‘Chanakya’s Chant’ and ‘The Krishna Key’. His
works are based on historical, theological and mythological
themes. He is one of India’s best conspiracy fiction writers
and is an author of the new era of retelling Indian history or
mythology in a contemporary context. Magazine ‘Forbes
India’ has included him in their 100 list. He has also been
hailed as the Indian Dan Brown because of his works.
Works: The Rozabal Line – 2008, Chanakya’s Chant – 2010,
The Krishna Key – 2012, Keepers of the Kalachakra – 2018

NEELAM SAXENA CHANDRA (Born – 1969)

Neelam Saxena Chandra is an Indian poet and author. She

was born in Nagpur Maharashtra. She got her education in
Nagpur. She is an IES officer and served as joint secretary of
UPSC. She has written several children’s stories and poetry.
She also writes fiction in English and Hindi. She has got
several awards including the ‘Ravindra Nath Tagore
International Award in 2014.

KRISHNA UDAYASANKAR-

Krishna Udayasanker is a Singapore based Indian author.

She was born in Bangalore in a Tamil family. She went to
Singapore for higher education. She earned PhD in Strategic
Management from the Nanyang Business School Singapore.
She currently works in same college and lives there. She is
well known for her modern retelling of ‘Mahabharata’
through the novels ‘Govinda’, ‘Kaurava’ and ‘Kurukshetra’.
The three books collectively comprise ‘The Arya Varta
Chronicles’. Her debut novel ‘Govinda’ was a best seller.
Works: Govinda – 2012, Objects of Affection – 2013 (
poetry anthology ), Kaurava – 2013, Kurukshetra – 2014, 3 (
novel ) – 2015, Immortal – 2016, Body Boundaries : The
Etiqutte Anthology of Women’s Writing – 2013 ( non-fiction)

NEEL MUKHERJEE (Born – 1970)

Neel Mukherjee is an India-British writeer who write in

English. He was born in Kolkata. He did his schooling from
Don Bose School Kolkata. He attended Jadhavpur University
and studied English. He got his M.A. degree in creative
writing from the University of East Anglia and PhD at
Pembroke College, Cambridge.
He is the author of several critically acclaimed novels.
His first novel, Past Continuous won the Vodafone-Crossword
Book Award in 2008 and several more awards when
republished in the U.K. in 2010. His second novel, The Lives
of Others was shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize and
won the Encore Award .
He reviews fiction for a variety of publication in the U.K.
and U.S., including The Times and Time Asia. Describing the
unexpected ease with which he wrote The Lives of Others,
he described the process.
Writers rarely have access to that part of their heads where
books originate. One can talk forcefully of influences,
plotting, putting a book together, structuring, editing,
everything, really, but origins are a gloomy issue, the
domain of the unconscious, mostly, so not readily available
for truthful discussion I don't know whether my book started
life as the story of a joint family in Calcutta at a critical time
in history or as a reckoning with an ultra-left movement for
social justice and equality around which the domestic story
was built that way of talking about a book as which
narrative came first is always already too late because the
origins lie far earlier it was as if the book had already been
there, waiting patiently to be let in; I only had to open the
door.
Works: Past Continuous or A Life Apart – 2008

AKHIL SHARMA (Born – 1971)

Akhil Sharma is an Indian-American author and professor of

creative writing. He was born in Delhi. His family moved to
America when he was only eight years old. He grew up in
Edison, New Jersey and graduated from J.P. Stevens High
School. He also studied in Princeton University. He also
studied under a succession of famous writers as Russell
Banks, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Paul Auster and
Tony Kushner. He then tried to become a screenwriter but
disappointed with his fortune and left to attend Harvard Law
School.
His first published novel ‘An Obedient Father’ won the
2001 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. His second work
‘Family Life’ won the 2015 Folio Prize and 2016 International
Dublin Literary Award. Sharma's teenage brother was in a
pool accident, that left him in a thirty-year coma, an
incident that forms the basis of Sharma's semi-
autobiographical novel ‘Family Life’.David Sedaris wrote
about this work "every page is alive and surprising, proof of
Sharma’s huge, unique talent." Sharma wrote about the 13
years it took to write ‘Family Life’ in an essay on The New
Yorker's website.
Sharma has published stories in The New Yorker, The
Atlantic Monthly, The Quarterly, Fiction, the Best American
Short Stories anthology, and the O. Henry Award Winners
anthology. His short story "Cosmopolitan" was anthologized
in The Best American Short Stories 1998 and was also made
into a 2003 film of the same name, which has appeared on
the PBS series Independent Lens.
He shares office space with the writers John Wray, Isaac
Fitzgerald, and Alice Sola Kim. He and Wray had previously
been part of an informal writing group that includes Gary
Shteyngart, Suketu Mehta, and Ray Isle. In 2017, Norton
published Sharma's collection of short stories ‘A Life of
Adventure and Delight.
Works: An Obedient Father – 2000, Family Life – 2014,
Mother and Son – 2007 (short story), We did not Like Him –
2013, A Life of Adventure and Delight - 2016
ANJALI JOSEPH (Born – 1978)

Anjali Joseph is a Indian-British author, journalist, and

teacher. She was born in Mumbai. Her father is a scientist
from Malayali descent. Her family moved to England when
she was only seven year old. She studied English at Trinity
College, Cambridge.
Her first novel ‘Saraswati Park’ was a critical success and
earned her several awards, including the Betty Trask Prize
and the Desmond Elliott Prize’ Saraswati Park told the story
of Mohan Karekar, a pensive letter-writer, whose
monotonous life undergoes several changes after his gay
19-year-old nephew moves in with him. The book was a
critical success; Sameer Rahim of The Telegraph wrote in his
review that Joseph's writing was "well crafted and the
images, when they succeed, feel spot-on".
Her second novel ‘Another Country’ was released in
2012. In 2010, she was listed by The Telegraph as one of the
20 best writers under the age of 40. Her latest novel is ‘The
Living’ the tender, lyrical and often funny novel, shines a
light on everyday life, illuminating its humour, beauty and
truth.
 She worked as a journalist with The Times of India in
Mumbai. Joseph's second book ‘Another Country’ tells the
story of Leela Ghosh, a middle-class Bengali girl dealing with
friendship, love and betrayal as she travels through Paris,
London and Mumbai. Reviewing the book for The Guardian,
Joanna Kavenna wrote that the book was "readable and
entertaining" and particularly praised the depiction of Indian
urban middle-class youth. The novel was longlisted for the
2012 Man Asian Literary Prize.
Works: Saraswati Park, Another Country - 2012

ANURADHA ROY-

Anuradha Roy is an Indian novelist, journalist and editor. She

was born in Calcutta. She grew up mainly in Hyderabad. She
was educated at Nasr School and briefly at South Point High
School in Calcutta. She studied English Literature at
Presidency College, then affiliated with the University of
Calcutta and at the University of Cambridge. She is the co-
founder with her husband, of Permanent Black, a publishing
house started in 2000, where she works as a designer.
Anuradha Roy's first novel ‘An Atlas of Impossible Longing’
has been translated into fifteen languages. It was named by
World Literature Today as one of the "60 Essential English
Language Works of Modern Indian Literature". Her second
novel ‘The Folded Earth’ won the Economist Crossword Prize
and is widely translated. ‘Sleeping on Jupiter’ her third
novel, won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and was
nominated for the Man Booker Prize. Her essays and reviews
have appeared in newspapers in India, the US and Britain.
Works: An Atlas of Impossible Longing – 2008, The Folded
Earth – 2011, Sleeping on Jupiter – 2015, All The Lives We
Never Lived – 2018
KIRAN DOSHI-

Kiran Doshi is an Indian writer, diplomat and educationist.

He was born in Gujrat. He studied history, politics and law in
Mumbai. He joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1962 for a
35 year long career which not frequently saw him tackling
relations with Pakistan, always an important, exciting but
ultimately frustrating task. He lives in Delhi.
He is the author of ‘Birds of Passage’ a greatly engrossed
and hilarious novel set in the world of India-Pakistan-USA
diplimacy and Diplomatic Tales, short stories written in
comic verse. He won The Hindu Prize for his third major
work of fiction ‘Jinnah Often Came to Our House’, a book set
against the political turmoil of the suncontinent from the
early part of the 20th cuntury, ending with the partition and
independence. A member of jury, K Satchidanandan pointed
to the manner in which ‘Jinnah Often Came to Our House’
with its ‘unbiased wisdom, correct all kinds of prejudices
bout political leaders and religious communities.’
Doshi said his life in cities such as Chennai was full of
events that triggered his ideas. He said 35 years of
diplimacy and ten years of education after that shaped his
edeas. Two great inspirations for his works were his life in
Pakistan, where he was posted and the ‘dowry’ he received
when he married his wife, the writer said.

EASTERINE KIRE (Born – 1959)

Easterine Kire is an Indian poet and author. She was born to

an Angami Naga family in Nagaland, India. She did her
schooling in Kohima. She did her undergraduate study in
Shillong followed by a course in journalism in Delhi. She did
PhD in English literature from Savitribai Phule Pune
University.
The majority of her writings are based in the lived
realities of the people in Nagaland in north-east India. She
said in an interview, "I felt we needed to create written
Naga Literature. We have so much oral narratives but with
oral dying out, it's all going to be lost." Apart from writing,
she also performs Jazz poetry with her band Jazzpoesi.
Kire published her first book of poetry in 1982 titled
‘Kelhoukevira’. This was also first book of Naga poetry
published in English. Her novel ‘A Naga Village
Remembered’ was the first novel by a Naga writer in
English. Her second novel was ‘A Terrible Matriarchy’
followed by ‘Mari’ and ‘Bitter Wormwood’. Her latest book
‘Don't Run, My Love’ was published in 2017. She has also
written children's books, articles and essays. Kire Has also
translated 200 oral poems from her native language.
‘A Naga Village Remembered’ is about a battle between
the British forces and one Naga hamlet. ‘A Terrible
Matriarchy’ highlights the internal and social strife that grips
Nagaland as a state in India. ‘Mari’ is a novel based on the
Japanese invasion of India in 1944 via Nagaland. It is a true
story of a young mother who lost her fiancé in the war and
made the decision to move ahead and live her life. This is
an example of how Kire through her works has tried to bring
to the fore the everyday lives of the people in Nagaland.
‘Bitter Wormwood’ yet again brought out the human cost
which was involved behind all the news that made the
political headlines from the North-East.Apart from bringing a
focus on the vibrant Naga culture, Kire's work has also
brought out the realities which have changed the lives of
Naga women.
She was awarded the Governor's Medal for excellence in
Naga literature in 2011. She was also given the Free Voice
Award by Catalan PEN Barcelona. ‘Bitter Wormwood’ was
shortlisted for The Hindu Prize in 2013.‘A Terrible Matriarchy’
was selected to be translated into UN languages. She was
awarded The Hindu Literary Prize for her work ‘When the
River Sleeps’ in 2016.

ANAND TELTUMBDE-

Anand Teltumbde is an Indian professor, scholar, author, and

civil rights activist. He was born in Rajur, a small town in the
western state of Maharashtra, in a Dalit family. He has a
younger brother. He got a mechanical engineering degree
from Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, an MBA
from Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad and a
Doctor of Literature (D Litt) from Karnataka State Open
University. He also did PhD in cybernetic modelling.
He has written extensively about the caste system in
India and advocated for the rights of Dalits. He is a
professor at Goa Institute of Management. He works for
Economic and Political Weekly, in which he writes a column
entitled ‘Margin Speak’. He has also contributed to
magazines that include Outlook, Tehelka, and Seminar.
He has some controversy in his career. In August 2018,
the police raided Teltumdbe's home and accused him of
having a connection to the 2018 violence in Bhima
Koregaon as well as involvement in a Maoist plot to
assassinate Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Teltumbde
denied the allegations and sought to quash the complaint
against him, but his petition was denied by the Bombay
High Court. Although he was granted interim protection
from arrest by the court, he was arrested by police in Pune
on February 3. He was released later that day after a court
ruled his arrest was illegal. After his release, Teltumbde
accused the government of harassment and attempting to
criminalize dissent.
 The Washington Post reported that Teltumbe was
arrested as part of "a government crackdown on lawyers
and activists" who are critics of Modi. Almost 600 scholars
and academics issued a joint statement in support of
Teltumbde, condemning the government's actions as a
"witch-hunt" and demanding an immediate halt to the
actions against Teltumbe. In addition, over 150
organizations and intellectuals—including Noam Chomsky
and Cornel West—signed a letter to United Nations secretary
general Antonio Guterres, describing the charges as
"fabricated" and calling for the UN to intervene.
Works: Radical in Ambedkar – 2018, Republic of Caste:
Thinking of Equality in the Era of neoliberalism and Hindutva
- 2018 , Dalits: Past, Present and Future – 2016, The
Persistence of Caste - 2010

RANJIT HOSKOTE (Born – 1969)

Ranjit Hoskote is a Indian poet, art critic, cultural theorist

and independent curator. He was born in Mumbai and
educated at the Bombay Scottish School, Elphinstone
College, where he read for a BA in Politics, and the
University of Bombay, where he took an MA in English
Literature and Aesthetics.
He belongs to the younger generation of Indian poets
who began to publish their work during the early 1990s. He
is the author of several collections of poetry as ‘Zones of
Assault’, ‘The Cartographer's Apprentice’ and ‘The
Sleepwalker's Archive’. Hoskote has been seen as extending
the Anglophone Indian poetry tradition established by Dom
Moraes, Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan and others through
‘major new works of poetry’ .
His work has been published in numerous Indian and
international journals, including Poetry Review (London),
Wasafiri, Poetry Wales, The Iowa Review, Green Integer
Review, Lyric Poetry Review, West Coast Line, Kavya Bharati,
The Four Quarters Magazine and Indian Literature. His
poems have also appeared in German translation in Die
Zeit, Akzente, the Neue Zuercher Zeitung, Wespennest and
Art & Thought/ Fikrun-wa-Fann. He is the author of four
collections of poetry, has translated the Marathi poet Vasant
Abaji Dahake, co-translated the German novelist and
essayist Ilija Trojanow, and edited an anthology of
contemporary Indian verse. His poems have appeared in
many major anthologies.
Hoskote has also translated the 14th-century Kashmiri
mystic-poet Lal Ded, variously known as Lalleshwari, Lalla
and Lal Arifa, under the title I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded.
This publication marks the conclusion of a 20-year-long
project of research and translation for the author.
The critic Bruce King writes of Hoskote's early work in his
influential Modern Indian Poetry in English "Hoskote has an
historical sense, is influenced by the surreal, experiments
with metrics and has a complex sense of the political... An
art critic, he makes much use of landscapes, the sky and
allusions to paintings. His main theme is life as intricate,
complicated, revolutionary movements in time. We live in a
world of flux which requires violence for liberation, but
history shows that violence itself turns into oppression and
death." Agha Shahid Ali wrote about Hoskote’s book ‘Zones
of Assault’, "Hoskote wants to discover language, as one
would a new chemical in a laboratory experiment. This
sense of linguistic play, usually missing from subcontinental
poetry in English, is abundant in Hoskote’s work. "
Commenting on Hoskote's poetry on Poetry International
Web, the poet and editor Arundhathi Subramaniam
observes: "His writing has revealed a consistent and
exceptional brilliance in its treatment of image. Hoskote’s
metaphors are finely wrought, luminous and sensuous,
combining an artisanal virtuosity with passion, turning each
poem into a many-angled, multifaceted experience."
Although he was closely associated with the modernist poet
Nissim Ezekiel, who was his mentor, Hoskote does not share
Ezekiel's poetics. Instead, his aesthetic choices align him
more closely with Dom Moraes and Adil Jussawalla.
Hoskote has been placed by research scholars in a historic
lineage of five major art critics active in India over a sixty-
year period: "William George Archer, Richard Bartholomew,
Jagdish Swaminathan, Geeta Kapur, and Ranjit Hoskote...
played an important role in shaping contemporary art
discourse in India, and in registering multiple cultural issues,
artistic domains, and moments of history." Hoskote was
principal art critic for The Times of India from 1988 to 1999.
He was an art critic and cultural commentator, as well as a
senior editor, with The Hindu, from 2000 to 2007,
contributing to its periodical of thought and culture, Folio as
well as to its editorial and its prestigious Sunday Magazine.
In his role as an art critic, Hoskote has authored a critical
biography as well as a major retrospective study of the
painter Jehangir Sabavala, and also monographs on the
artists Atul Dodiya, Tyeb Mehta, Sudhir Patwardhan, Baiju
Parthan, Bharti Kher and Iranna GR. He has written major
essays on other leading Indian artists. He has also written a
monographic essay on the Berlin-based artists Dolores
Zinny and Juan Maidagan.
Hoskote has addressed the cultural and political dynamics of
postcolonial societies that are going through a process of
globalisation , emphasising the possibilities of a 'non-
western contemporaneity', "intercultural communication"
and "transformative listening". He has also returned often to
the theme of the "nomad position" and to the polarity
between "crisis and critique". In many of his writings and
lectures, Hoskote examines the relationship between the
aesthetic and the political, describing this as a tension
between the politics of the expressive and the expressivity
of the political. He has explored, the connections between
popular visual art, mass mobilisations and the emergence of
fluid and fluctuating identities within the evolving
metropolitan cultures of the postcolonial world, and in what
he has called the nascent "third field" of artistic production
by subaltern producers in contemporary India, which is
"neither metropolitan nor rural, neither (post)modernist nor
traditional, neither derived from academic training nor
inherited without change from tribal custom" and
assimilates into itself resources from the global archive of
cultural manifestations.
In a series of essays, papers and articles published from
the late 1990s onward, Hoskote has reflected on the theme
of the asymmetry between a 'West' that enjoys economic,
military and epistemological supremacy and an 'East' that is
the subject of sanction, invasion and misrepresentation. In
some of these writings, he dwells on the historic fate of the
"House of Islam" as viewed from the West and from India, in
an epoch "dominated by the NATO cosmology" while in
others, he retrieves historic occasions of successful cultural
confluence, when disparate belief systems and ethnicities
have come together into a fruitful and sophisticated
hybridity.
He is also a vocal and articulate defender of cultural
freedoms against the monopolistic claims of the State,
religious pressure groups and censors, whether official or
self-appointed. He has been actively involved in organising
protest campaigns in defence of victims of cultural
intolerance.
Works: Zones of assault - 1991, The Cartographer’s
Apprentice – 2000, The Sleepwalker’s Archive - 2001,
Vanishing Acts: New and Selected Poems – 2006,
Jonahwhale - 2018
Non fiction: Ganesh Pyne: A Pilgrim in the Dominion of
Shadows - 2005, Baiju Parthan: A User's Manual – 2006, The
Dancer on the Horse: Reflections on the Art of Iranna GR –
2007, The Crafting of Reality: Sudhir Patwardhan, Drawings -
2008, Despair and Modernity: Reflections from Modern
Indian Painting. (co-authored with Harsha V. Dehejia and
Prem Shankar Jha – 2000, Confluences: Forgotten Histories
From East And West (co-authored with Ilija Trojanow) - 2012