ESSAYS ON INDIAN WRITING IN ENGLISH: Twice-Born or Cosmopolitan Literature?

The author would like to share with readers his collection of fifteen essays on Indian fictional writing and poetry in English, as it reflects his lifelong commitment to Indian literary culture.

This sequence of chronologically arranged essays written over a period of half a century reflects his outside observer?s growing familiarity with Indian English writing. It permits insight into its thematic, formal and stylistic shifts and changes as much as into its growth in scope and quality. Besides, it also throws light on the course of a critical literary debate that has focused ? and continues to do so ? on the pros and cons of Indians writing their novels and poems in English as well as it does on the controversial issue of their ?Indianness?.

These essays are complemented by reproductions of photographs, most of them taken by the author, and by a select bibliography of his publications in this field; one of the subcontinent?s liveliest and most fascinating traditions.

Contents

? Early Critics of Indo-English Novelists / Meenakshi Mukherjee and M.K. Naik
? Human Labour and Alienation / Mulk Raj Anand?s Novels
? The New Poets Manifesto / P. Lal and Contemporary Indian English Poetry
? History and the Individual / Salman Rushdie?s Midnight?s Children and Anita Desai?s Clear Light of Day
? Indian Women Writing in English / A Brief Look at Short Stories of the 1970s and Early 1980s
? Marginalizing the Centre ? Centring the Periphery / The Critical Debate on ?Indian? Literature in English
? ?In the Days When the Love Laws Were Made? / Arundhati Roy?s The God of Small Things
? Global Fantasy ? Glocal Imagination / The New Literatures in English and their Fantastic ImagiNations
? Crossing National Borders / The Indian English Novel since the 1990s
? Nature and Landscape / An Evolutionary Psychological Analysis of Raja Rao?s Writing
? ?The Train Has Moved On? / R.K. Narayan?s The Guide and Literary History
? Glocality and its (Dis)contents / The Future of English Language Literatures Studies
? The Persistence and Creation of Internal Borders / India in Aotearoa New Zealand
? Translating Cultures / Pictorial and Literary Representations of India in William Hodges?s Paintings and Travel Book
? Retrieving Human Rights / Indra Sinha?s Novel Animal?s People and Critical Cosmopolitanism