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.

Dieter Riemenschneider taught German at Panjab University, Chandigarh and Delhi University (1963–66) and New English Literatures at Frankfurt University (1971–99). His Ph.D. on The Modern Indian Novel in English (Darmstadt 1974) was followed by more than 100 publications on Indian English writing over the next forty years, including essays contributed to international journals and books. At the invitation of Goethe-Institute/Max Mueller Bhavan he lectured at the universities of Delhi, Hyderabad, Madras and Bombay (1981–82), as Visiting Professor at I.I.T. Madras (1983), as DFG Research Fellow in Delhi, Hyderabad, Madras and Bombay (1993–94) and as Visiting Fellow of Delhi University in Delhi and Chandigarh (2010).

After more than two dozen visits to India since 1971, attending conferences and keeping up a lively network of authors, academic critics and friends, he now lives with his wife, the New Zealand-born poet Jan Kemp, in Kronberg im Taunus, Germany.