Indian and Pakistani Literature

Abstract

‘Indian literature’ resembles ‘European literature’ rather than ‘British’ or ‘Polish’ literature. There is as yet no self-consciously national Indian literature. But of course there is a specifically Indian culture; it stands apart from and above political disunities. It is right to say that ‘physically as well as culturally, [India] is a microcosm of the world as a whole’. There was a quite advanced civilization in the Indus valley by 2500 BC, related to the Sumerians; it may have been Dravidian. But Indian culture — although Hinduism owes much to earlier civilizations — really begins, if only because of what we possess, with the entry into the subcontinent of Aryan-speaking peoples (they called themselves — whatever they really were — Aryan, meaning, like ‘Sanskrit’, ‘noble’, ‘perfect’) from central Asia. Their dialects coalesced with Dravidian dialects to produce Sanskrit — the language of the original Vedic scriptures but now also an official living language of secular culture (as ‘Modern Sanskrit’, which is highly synthetic).