Indian English Fiction Research Articles

Speaking American: Popular Indian Fiction in English

A number of new popular writers have emerged in the last decade in India, of whom Chetan Bhagat is probably the best known, but there are many others who sell in unprecedented numbers. Appealing to that vast segment of readers for whom English may be a second language (unlike the literary successes of the last decades, who wrote for a global and local audience), this group of writers has their gaze and concerns focused on India. Yet, the new genres (such as chick lit and techie lit) reveal a striking reliance on an American (US) idiom. While the chick lit novels have a distinctly Indian flavor, they, and the other new genres, promote the valorization of entrepreneurship, easy urban relationships, and consumerism. My essay examines the language of Americanness used in these popular fictions.

Smelly Encounters: An Olfactory Reading of Indian English Fiction by Women

George Orwell once described smell as the real secret of gender relations in the West: 'The female sex smells.' Gender connotation is writ large in almost every sociological/anthropological study of smell. Literature is also full of such references where women's sense of smell has been considered stronger than that of men's. Gaze being the masculine sense greater weightage has been given to it while smell has been deprecated as the feminine sense. Since smell has a deep cultural significance the literature of the Indian diaspora by women is replete with what may be termed 'olfactory analysis.' The smell of nostalgia, of memory and the past; the aroma of native food and all the native fragrances keep haunting; bringing much comfort to the aching heart. While Jhumpa Lahiri's characters are particularly nostalgic about the native food finding refuge in the gustatory, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni dedicated the space of one novel to spices where her protagonist is the 'Mistress of Spices' herself; Radhika Jha's Smell reminds one of Patrick Suskind's Perfume. Replete with 'olfactory encounters', to borrow Janice Carlisle's expression, the novel is a buildungsroman of Leela Patel, the protagonist whose very being is apparently governed by her nose. I propose to read the olfactory representations in the novels of these women writers with a view to exploring the social, cultural and moral connotations of the olfactory/gustatory. Indians love its smell but the Australian girl had no such associations and completely disliked it. Smells have strong associative values; even a not-so-pleasant smell may be pleasing for some if it is associated with a pleasant memory. A friend of mine has an interesting story to tell about how smell helped her evade her mother's scolding as a naughty child. As a child she would keep a book open by her side when her brother and she would play cards in their study time. On smelling a baked-sweet smell both she and her brother would hide the cards and hold the open books in their hands pretending to be absorbed in reading it. Before the poor woman could barge in to see her children playing truant, it was the smell of her hair oil that would herald her entry.

Breaking the Stereotype: Women in Indian Fiction in English

The present paper seeks to study the selective fictional works of the Indian writers in English with a purpose to map the gradual erosion of the stereotypes built around women characters in the literary scene keeping with the growing awareness of the issues concerning women and their cause. The objective is also to trace the seeds of feminist ideology even in those writers who marked the scene of Indian writing in its very initial stages starting from the pre independence times growing to full bloom in the much radical works of the current writers. My study focuses on the selective fiction of R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Kamala Markandya , Anita Desai, Shashi Deshpande, Nayantara Sehgal and Bharati Mukherjee as a sufficient ground for the above argument. The choice of works for the analysis follows a particular line of thought without the intention of sounding reductive by nature keeping in mind the marathon contribution of the literary figures under study

Reading new India: post-millennial Indian fiction in English

Introduction: From Postcolonial India to New India 1.1 'Indianness' since Independence 1.2 Literary 'Indianness' 1.3 New India, a New Canon 2. Urban Scapes 2.1 Mumbai 2.2 Bangalore 3. Chick Lit - Crick Lit 3.1 Chick Lit 3.2 Crick Lit 4. Young India 4.1 Call Centres and Corporate Lives 4.2 MSMs 5. Crime Writing 5.1 Female Detectives 5.2 Difference and Death 6. Fantasy and Epic Myth 6.1 New [Fantastical] India 6.2 Bharat Fantasy 7. Graphic Novels 7.1 The Harappa Files (2011) 7.2 Kashmir Pending (2007) Conclusion: New/Old Stories in Old/New Ways Further Reading Index

No longer good girls: sexual transgressions in Indian women's writings

Indian women's writing in English has long depicted Indian women as victims of society, whose rights are routinely exploited and whose welfare and happiness are commonly sacrificed for the good of their families and communities. The literature has often depicted the women as complicit, accepting and upholding the definition of a good woman as one who is faithful, virtuous, self-effacing and obedient. This definition is also one the women instil in their daughters, thus reinforcing this code of ethics. This article observes that there is a tide running contrary to this and that there is a new breed of women in twenty-first century Indian literary fiction in English: women who are single and married, working and non-working, middle and upper-middle class and wives and mothers, who are no longer prepared to be ‘good girls’. These women knowingly, thoughtfully and successfully defy societal conventions to have pre and extramarital affairs, divorces and even custody battles for children, without shame, guilt, dire consequences or even societal condemnation. This article argues that these writings represent a quietly radical departure from the conventional depictions of the roles, expectations and morals of middle-class urban twenty-first century Indian women.

Identity crisis- Indian English fiction of post 1980s

Rapid developments in the fields of trade, market, commerce and telecommunication technologies, together with cultural confrontations at the global level are creating a paradigmatic shift in people's understanding of selfhood and identity. This paper makes a serious attempt to trace and map out the making of contemporary post-national identities within the sub continental cultural production of India and in its English fiction. One of the structural ventures of this study is that these newer identities, which are basically fragmented, ruptured, hyphenated in nature, require new descriptions and new elaborations within the field of creative literature and literary criticism. In order to pursue its research on these lines, the present work contrasts the notion of subject hood and identity with the earlier phases of Indian cultural imagination as represented in some of the pioneering works of Indian English fiction that have now attained a canonical status. By analyzing some of the predominant concerns that work as leitmotif in most of the Indian English novels, the paper brings together and reinterprets some problematic concepts such as history, culture, religion, nation and nationalism and creates a theoretical axis upon which it charts insightful and engaging aspects of selfhood and identity. Key words: Selfhood, identity, insight, crisis, hidden dimensions, quest, escape.

Postcolonial Ecofeminism in Indian Novels in English

This paper seeks to outline postcolonial ecofeminism in India in terms of both activism and fiction that explicitly foreground women. I also argue that women's relationship to environment is ambivalent, thus disputing dualism of nature/culture and yet straddling grey area between these two binaries. This is particularly highlighted by women writing Indian fiction in English. An explication of nature/culture dualism will be given to contextualize this study and to explain how dualism affects upon notions of a gendered (ecological) citizenship. This paper seeks to outline lineage of postcolonial ecofeminism in India in terms of both activism and fiction that explicitly foreground women. I argue for a case to be built for women writers, and why they are important for field of literature and environment in an age of accelerated and globalized technological development. While outlining ecofeminism as a field and forms it has taken in India in both activism and writing, I also argue that womens relationship to environment is ambivalent, thus disputing dualism of nature/culture and yet straddling grey area between these two binaries. This is particularly highlighted by women writing Indian fiction in English. A brief explication of nature/culture dualism will be given to contextualize this study and to explain how dualism affects upon notions of a gendered (ecological) citizenship. Postcolonial ecofeminism is a concept which has been in circulation for some time but is still at a nascent stage. The related fields of postcolonial ecocriticism and ecofeminism have been dominated by a typically Euro-American point of view till date, and both fields do not address issue of postcolonial ecofeminism adequately, where both fields need to recognize the double-bind of being female and being colonized (1). A postcolonial ecofeminist perspective would involve coming together of postcolonial ecocriticism and ecofeminism into one analytical focus, where it would be necessary to recognize that exploitation of nature and oppression of women are intimately bound up with notions of class, caste, race, colonialism and neo-colonialism. Postcolonial ecocriticism focuses on intersection of postcolonial and environmental issues. Many critics, particularly from strain of deep ecology, have asserted that postcolonialism is inherently anthropocentric and

The Ideology of Beauty and Devaluation of the Womankind: A Reading of Contemporary Indian English Fiction

The present study endeavours to read, taking examples from Indian English Novels how the societal beauty standards create an impediment in the psychological wellbeing of women and literally devalue them.

Ideological Moorings in Indian Literature: A Study of Kanthapura

Raja Rao's contribution to Indian fiction in English language is manifolds. The philosophical sensibility of Raja Rao distinguishes him from his contemporaries like Mulk Raj Anand and R.K. Narayan, who project man primarily in relation to social reality. His novels are saturated with various philosophical ideologies. His first novel Kanthapura (1938) is based on Gandhian ideology. This paper presents an analysis of Kanthapura which mainly portrays the Freedom Movement launched by Mahatma Gandhi in the 1920s to liberate India from the imperialistic hegemony of the British, through the hero of the novel Moorthy. In Kanthapura, Raja Rao has come out with complete mastery of the various aspects of the novel as a form of art. Never again since the publication of this masterpiece of Indian English fiction on the theme of Indian struggle for freedom has been able to recapture the perfect harmony of plot, character, dialogue and narrative on the one hand and fantasy and realism on the other. The novelist assiduously explores the Gandhian ideals of loving one's enemies, non-violence and abolition of untouchability.

Recent Trends in Indian English Fiction

Recent Indian English novels employ a variety of experimental narrative techniques to present a wide range of subject matter. The last decade has witnessed the rise of popular fiction depicting contemporary Indian society, written perhaps with an Indian readership in view, but acclaimed by an increasingly international audience.

TWO TALES OF A CITY

Since the early 1980s, novels by Indians in English have become the site of a transnational publishing ‘boom’ made possible by the opening of Anglo-American literary markets to non-white writing. This essay begins by illuminating the disconnect between the postcolonial versus transnational framings of Indian English fiction. It shows how this literature has gone from being grounded in the politics of particular places to being framed as a de-territorialized literary flourishing, thereby denuding it of its political relevance in an era of transnational literary production. In an effort to ‘re-territorialize’ the history of and the issues at the heart of Indian writing in English, the essay argues that the social and political contours of English in India have come to be about much more than ‘writing back to empire’ or offering a ‘window to the world’ for Indians looking ‘out’ or westerners looking ‘in’. Instead, through a reading of two canonical Indian English texts about the death of Urdu in Delhi, the essay points to the limitations of the postcolonial framework itself. Indian English literature has outgrown the line of critique and politics that casts English as the language of colonization and structures the analysis of Indian English as an oppositional stance and peripheral discourse. This essay dwells instead on the place of English in the multilingual Indian consciousness and the work it does as mediator in India's linguistic landscape. What is remarkable is not that Indians write in the language of the colonizer, but that they write in an English that has been infused with the social and political consequences of its own indigenization.

Human Rights and Literature: A Complementary Study in Indian Fiction in English

Human Rights and Literature: A Complementary Study in Indian Fiction in English

Alternatives to the Novel Form: Oral Storytelling and Internet Patterns in Vikram Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain

Contemporary Indian fiction in English revives the novel genre through alternative writing techniques inspired from the Indian oral storytelling tradition. In Vikram Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain digressive storytelling that reflects oral patterns merges with structural strategies derived from the logic of the Internet, hypertext and computer games. The author's creation of an online storytelling community that gives him email feedback on his writing mimics the tradition of oral storytelling in a way that responds to both Bakhtinian expectations of the novel form and the demands of hypertextual interactivity. The implied audience is drawn into the process of storytelling, so that the novel's polyphony emerges from the work of a whole community rather than of an individual author/narrator. Red Earth and Pouring Rain is a modern version of the Arabian Nights, with a frame-narrative filled in by well-told tales meant to earn the protagonist's survival. Throughout the novel the classical concerns of the novel genre, which focuses on individual development and makes statements about society at specific historical moments, based on objective factual observation, are challenged by the presence of elements of myth-based traditional storytelling, digressions and ponderings on the meanings of events, in a discourse in which what matters is the endless storytelling process that must keep growing “like a lotus vine”.

Writing the Nation's Destiny: Indian fiction in English before 1910

This paper examines the representation of proto-national identity in Indian – English fiction before the formative nationalist novels of the 1920s and 1930s. Questioning theoretical connections between Indian – English fiction and the secularism of the Nehruvian national project, my essay argues that primordialist nationalism and culturally transacted concepts of communal/racial identity were key elements in the political imagining of early Indian fiction in English.

Of that time, of that place: Poetics of the “banal” and modernist Indian-English fiction

Of that time, of that place: Poetics of the “banal” and modernist Indian-English fiction

Speech acts in Indian English fiction

Speech acts in Indian English fiction

Studies in Indian Fiction in English

Studies in Indian Fiction in English

Studies in Contemporary Indian Fiction in English

Studies in Contemporary Indian Fiction in English

Cross‐sex conversation in Indian English fiction

ABSTRACT: This paper is concerned with the aspects and dynamics of gender differentiation in conversational style of Indian English texts, and how discoursal strategies and patterns are employed for effective cross‐sex communication. This study examines, among other strategies, the initiation, maintenance and shift of topic, and the organizational devices used by each gender to regulate verbal contact and conversation. It is suggested that the linguistic skills particular to male and female speakers of Hindi are transferred to this non‐native variety of English by creative authors. This Indianizing of the text suggests that Indian writers of English have developed a specialized Indianized language for male and female speakers in cross‐sex conversations. This can be appreciated only by considering the native social and attitudinal contexts. This paper has serious theoretical implications for the understanding of language use across cultures, the acculturation of the English language in a non‐native setting, variation in the speech of males and females within the varieties of English, and the general study of male/female verbal strategies in conversation.

Indian Fiction in English. An Annotated Bibliography. By Dorothy M. Spencer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960. South Asia Regional Studies, University of Pennsylvania. 98.

Indian Fiction in English. An Annotated Bibliography. By Dorothy M. Spencer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960. South Asia Regional Studies, University of Pennsylvania. 98.