Indian Writing in English, Vol. I

Indian English writing is a vast arena today. With new trends emerging, new talents making their mark, new creative and critical branches sprouting in various directions, as well as with the thematic varieties, technical experiments, and linguistic innovations, —it is now ‘God’s plenty.’ The extraordinary richness and variety of Indian writing today, indeed, pose a challenging task for any critic or anthologist in the area, since it has become next to impossible to give any comprehensive view or idea of this fast-growing literature in its totality within the compass of a single volume. Still it remains the critic’s responsibility as well as pleasure to ‘find’ the new authors and texts side by side with the older and already canonized ones. As Robert Kroetsch, the Canadian author, says, ‘we want the critic to find us out’—our Indian authors today also should legitimately expect the perceptive-responsive critic to ‘find’ them out. It is especially needed in the present case since the Indian writers in English are still engaged in the process of writing from outside the mainstream, and, therefore, are in serious need of the right critical attention and understanding. It is precisely this situation that has been kept in view in compiling the present anthology of a bunch of critical essays on a cross-section of Indian fiction, poetry and drama in English. Quite a number of the texts discussed in this volume have been written in recent years, whereas a few earlier texts—M.R. Anand’s, for example—have also been included in order to help the reader to view the spectrum in a total perspective. The critical range of this volume includes Mulk Raj Anand, Khushwant Singh, Ruth Jhabvala, Anita Desai, Manju Kapur, Amitav Ghosh in fiction, A.K. Ramanujan Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das in poetry, Girish Karnad’s Tuglaq and Hayavadana in drama. The articles included in the present volume will allow us a glimpse into some of the representative authors, texts, and trends. Students, teachers, scholars, as well as the common reader will find the book useful and interesting.