Indian English Literature Research Articles

Ecological Imperialism and Indigenous Resistance: A Postcolonial Ecocritical Analysis of Selected Indian English Novels

This paper examines the representation of environmental degradation and critique of postcolonial development paradigms in two contemporary Indian English novels: Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide (2004) and Indra Sinha's Animal's People (2007). Employing a postcolonial ecocritical framework, the study analyzes how these works articulate the environmental consequences of development in India, challenge Western models of progress, and highlight indigenous environmental perspectives. The research reveals that both novels effectively portray multi-faceted environmental issues, from biodiversity loss in the Sundarbans to long-term impacts of industrial pollution in urban areas. They offer pointed critiques of anthropocentric development models while presenting indigenous knowledge as a valuable alternative for sustainable human-nature relationships. The study contributes to postcolonial ecocriticism by demonstrating how Indian English literature engages with and critiques the environmental costs of postcolonial development. It underscores the potential of literature to provide nuanced, culturally-specific insights into complex environmental issues, challenging dominant narratives and proposing alternative visions of progress.

Digital Migration Infrastructure in return-writing: visualizing the migration landscape of India.

Digitization has carved out the migration patterns of immigrants over the recent years of increased technological interventions in human mobility. Migration infrastructures, which typically refer to the physical, commercial, humanitarian, and governmental modes of operation, are multidimensional in nature. Digital infrastructures are equally important to the physical ones as digital technologies facilitate these migration processes through agents like hardware, software, and mediating actors. Amongst the multiple forms of migration, the concept of return-writing and nostalgia-struck-returnees encompass individuals whose life trajectories run parallel to the homeland. The narrative of return to the homeland emerges aβs a dominant motif in literature due to the rising trends of globalization, the writers' reflection on their own migrant experiences, and publishing trends meeting the demand of the global book market. The objective is to assess the role of digital migration infrastructures in return migrations to India through a close reading of the selected texts and review of postcolonial literary theories by using conditional operation in Python. The study here explores the varied nuances of return migration with a primary focus on the external conditions of travel in migration literature. The paper aims to analyze the genre of return-writing in Indian English literature, through three novels over a period of two decades, i.e., from 2000-2023. The selected texts, beginning with Amit Chaudhuri's A New World (2000), Gun Island (2019) by Amitav Ghosh, and Devika Rege's novel Quarterlife (2023), offer a panoramic view of return migration. These novels are extensive in the time period of technological interventions and in depiction of return migration. The Python code examines the extent of existence of a set of digital migration infrastructure keywords by analyzing the content of the novels and creates bar plots and charts to offer a visual representation of the classification results. The resulting trend traces the increased intervention of Digital Migration Infrastructure in the recent migration literature.

Marginalisation and Portrayal of Women Characters in Indian Diasporic Writings: A Study of Jhumpa Lahiri and Bharati Mukherjee

Most authors of post-colonial diasporic origin tend to write in a formulaic fashion. Inviting readers from all over the world, they use methods as varied as stream of consciousness, immigration, magic realism, alienation, and the capacity to adjust to a new area and culture. The literary world has taken notice of Indian literature in English because of the depth and relevance of its subject matter. The contemporary trend in Indian writing in English is unparalleled, despite the fact that outstanding literary works written in English were discovered a century ago. Numerous authors have gained widespread recognition on both a national and international scale. Some of the most well-known Indian authors of the modern era did not even grow up in India. Modern Indian English literature found a strong ally in India's female authors. They have shed light on many of the ongoing problems that women have had to deal with for centuries. Women who have stepped out to demonstrate their efficacy in numerous fields have been met with resistance from patriarchal culture. An identity crisis does not arise from one specific event or cause. A person's identity crisis may have been brought on by a number of different things.

Crossing Borders Between Languages: The Great Transition of Hindi Literary Translation with Special Reference to Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand

The surging number of Hindi speakers in recent decades raises an intriguing question: does the expanding influence of Hindi across India lead to the commensurate pan-Indianization or globalization of its literature? Despite its widespread use within the country, Hindi literature often remains overshadowed by Indian English literature (IEL), particularly on the global stage. It appears to be somewhat confined within regional boundaries. However, a transformative event occurred in 2022 when Geetanjali Shree, a Delhi-based Hindi novelist, clinched the prestigious International Booker Prize for her work, Tomb of Sand, originally titled Ret Samadhi in Hindi. The prize was equally shared between Geetanjali Shree, the writer, and Daisy Rockwell, the translator. With this award, Tomb of Sand has emerged as a symbol of Hindi literary translation, heralding a significant transition in the Hindi literary translation scene. This paper aims to explore the challenges and prospects of Hindi literary translation in the era of the great transition, focusing specifically on the translation methods and strategies employed in Tomb of Sand. Through this analysis, I intend to contribute to the ongoing scholarly discourse concerning the promotion and appreciation of Hindi literature in international literary circles.

Reclaiming Voice and Agency through Resistance in Meena Kandasamy's Poetry

One of the leading voices of Indian English Literature, Meena Kandasamy is a candid activist, fierce poet, critically acclaimed novelist, and noteworthy translator of the current era. As a writer, she excels in the stark portrayal and deconstruction of caste and gender-based violence in contemporary Indian society. Her poetry reflects aggressive resistance towards oppressive hierarchy promoted by the champions of casteism and cultural supremacy. With her unique and raw style, she covers the shocking atrocities engineered against underprivileged beings in her poetic collections like Touch and Ms Militancy. She deftly examines sexual politics and unapologetically questions the norms of a male-dominated society. With blatant rawness, she dissects the power dynamics of patriarchy and challenges certain taboos & stereotypes about femininity. This paper examines how her poetry seeks to reclaim the voice and agency of the silenced and underprivileged women, destined to live on the fringes. It explores the fierce spirit of resistance in her discourse of subversion. It also traces how she reinterprets and dismantles the instruments of colonization and constructed dominance of the female body by the power institutions of patriarchy.

The labyrinth of marginality: a critique of theorising literary representation of marginality in indian english literature

In his work After Amnesia, G.N. Devy rightly points out a gap, a void created by our collective “cultural amnesia” in literary theory and criticism. Foregrounding this insight, the research on “Marginal Literature” has crucial ontological and epistemological questions ahead of itself. The question: “What is Marginal Literature?” becomes more pertinent and complex when assessed in the context of the plurality of Indian society and culture. The exercise of creating a structured and organised theoretical point of view that is comprehensive enough to address and acknowledge the diverse and multifaceted marginal experience as expressed by contemporary writers is a challenge for all scholars working to define, hypothesise, analyse the phenomenon of marginality in the form of a question, a vista, an enigma or a mere tributary in the canon of Indian Literature written and translated in English. As a doctoral candidate working in this area, in this paper, I intend to discuss the various theorists, thinkers, and perspectives that have informed and the lacunas that have restrained the discussion of marginality in my thesis.

Mythology Meets Modernity: Urban Settings and Mythological Characters in Indian English Literature

This paper explores the intricate relationship between ancient Indian mythology and contemporary urban settings in Indian English literature. It examines how authors such as Ashwin Sanghi, Amish Tripathi, Samit Basu, and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni reimagine mythological characters within modern contexts. This trend not only revitalizes traditional narratives but also addresses pressing societal issues, acting as a cultural bridge between India’s mythological past and its urban present.

Kamala Das: A Dweller with Existential Alienation

The present paper makes an attempt to examine whether Kamala Das is a dweller with existential alienation or not. This discourse, , first of all, tries to figure out what ‘alienation’ is, what its types are, and what its cause and effect bring chaos in one’s life. Moreover, how thinkers, categorizing it into various groups, have dealt with it, is also its inevitable part. Secondly, it tries to find out how it (alienation) affects the world literature—chiefly, the Pan-Indian literature—that witnesses its hallmarks on its aura. Thirdly, it endeavours to define ‘existential alienation’ to find and point out its essential characteristics in Indian English literature. To attain its pinnacle, this paper, finally, aims to investigate such traces of existential alienation in Kamala Das’ oeuvres (be it prose or poetry) that have both a butterfly and tornado effect on her social, psychological, and philosophical life. In doing so, all the possible research methods and approaches—discourse analysis, textual analysis, archival methods, academic, creative, and critical writing, descriptive, explorative, and mixed-method research approaches—are used with hungry eyes for a coveted aftermath.

A Recuperation of the Oppressed and Subjugated Women in Arundhati Roy’s the God of Small Things

Postmodern Indian literature in English is a powerful expression of Indian women writers who have made significant contributions to the world of English fiction. The volume, diversity and maturity of the Indian novel have grown considerably. Famous writers like Kamala Markandaya, Nayantara Sahgal, Kamala Das, Arundhati Roy, Anita Desai, Shashi Deshpande and many others have given their creative outlet the enrichment of literature in recent decades by sensitively exposing various issues on the gender bias of women and society. In their creative writings, female characters either rebel against the subjugation of women and the oppressive role of family, society, religion and culture, including long-standing patriarchy, or they reinvent the feminine ethos. The God of Small Things Arundhati Roy's debut novel is a saga about the eternal suffering of women in a patriarchal society, who were oppressed and even deprived of their socio-political, economic identity and basic human rights. Roy excels at how women are victims of violence, exploitation, marginalization, suffering and exile. The novel deals with the suffering, struggle and transformation of three generations of women: Mammachi, Ammu and Rahel. This idea is the basis of this research, which tries to find out how painfully three generations of Women in the novel suffer.

Malgudi a Fictional World: A Critical Study on R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi Days

Rasipuram Krishna Swami Iyer Narayanaswami, a leading writer of early Indian English literature famous for his works set in the fictional South Indian town of Malgudi. Malgudi is the fictional place of R.K. Narayan, like Wordsworth’s Lake District and Arnold Bennett’s Five Cities. It is the eternal source of pleasure and sadness for the characters of the novel. This article consists of four parts; such as introduction, setting, people and structure. It has its limitations, but it is hoped that it will help those who lead the same path. It analyzes and interprets the life of this city. This distinguishes the author’s approach to Indian life from that of some Western writers. It also shows a live image of configuration Malgudi. Additionally; it focuses on the people and structure of Malgudi.

Exploring the Multifaceted Concept of Death in Indian and Western English Literature

Death, being an inescapable aspect of the human condition, has been a perennial subject of exploration and contemplation in literature. Both Indian and Western English literature offer rich and diverse perspectives on the nature of mortality, drawing from cultural, religious, and philosophical traditions. This research paper undertakes a comprehensive analysis of the portrayal of death in select texts from these literary traditions, examining the various ways in which death is conceptualized, interpreted, and imbued with meaning. Through a comparative lens, this paper seeks to elucidate the similarities, differences, and underlying themes that emerge in the depiction of death in Indian and Western English literature.

Recent Trends in English Literature and Language in India

Literature is the mirror of society. Literature reflects the social, cultural, economic and historical life of human beings. Literature no longer remains limited to particular geographical, national or cultural circumstances. The recent trends in literature may be dangerous for the society or bring a new era in the field of writing in the future. The writers of pre- independence dealt mostly with subjects of nationalism and patriotism in their writings. Most of our writers are bi-lingual, some equally proficient in English and the mother tongue, and some more in one than in the other. In Literature there is an undeniable interrelationship between life, literature, thought and language. The early novels were the patriotic depictions of Indian, but with the advent of Indian Independence India grew out of her own streak of imperialism during the emergency and thus the Indian idiom began to change. The global concerns and shifting paradigms informing different art forms have transformed the nature and the understanding of literature. Now Indian English literature no longer remains limited to the writings necessarily of the “sons of the soil”. It has broadened the scope of fictional concerns of these writers from purely Indian to the global and transnational. Today Indian English as well as Indian writing in English has got its own identity these writers concentrate on different forms of life concerning various cultures.

Emotional Bonds in Agha Shahid Ali’s Postcard from Kashmir

Diaspora literature, recognized as an independent academic discipline within universal literary canon, encompasses works produced by authors who have migrated from their home countries. Referred to interchangeably as ‘expatriate’ or ‘migratory’ writing, it has garnered increasing scholarly interest globally, particularly due to escalating socio-political and economic tensions worldwide.Indian Diaspora literature has evolved into a significant component of Indian English literature, reflecting the extensive reach of the Indian Diaspora, which spans the globe and ranks as the third largest after the British and Chinese Diasporas. Its influence extends across various fields, notably in creative writing, where authors of Indian origin have articulated their diasporic experiences. This literary realm boasts a plethora of distinguished male and female writers who have migrated abroad for various reasons.

Unravelling Societal Constructs and Feminine Agency: A Critical Analysis of Manju Kapur’s Difficult Daughters

Manju Kapur's Difficult Daughters stands as a pivotal work in the realm of Indian English literature, delving into the intricate complexities of familial dynamics, societal norms, and individual agency against the backdrop of pre-partition Punjab. This research article aims to explore Kapur's narrative through a critical lens, dissecting themes of tradition, rebellion, and the quest for identity within the context of a patriarchal society. By examining the characters' struggles and triumphs, this study seeks to unravel the multifaceted layers of gender roles and societal expectations depicted in the novel. Through a combination of literary analysis and sociocultural critique, this research endeavors to shed light on the enduring relevance of "Difficult Daughters" in contemporary discourse on gender, tradition, and autonomy.

Modernism in Indian English Literature

Indian English literature can be specified as a literature originally written in English by authors who are Indians by birth, origin, and nationality. Diaspora is a term used to describe a group of people living in exile. Literature of the Indian Diaspora constitutes a major study of the literature and other cultural texts of the Indian Diaspora. It is a globally accepted fact that Diasporic writers set a propensity since Independence. Writing in the Diaspora occupies a distinctive place among nations and cultures. Indo-English literature emerged as an interesting outgrowth of an eventful encounter in the late eighteenth century between lively and enterprising Britain and anarchic India. In this present paper, I would like to raise two important questions: the first will concern the cultural alienation of Indian writers writing in English, usually referred to as westward impulsion, East-West encounter, or cross-cultural conflict. Alienation is a concept transplanted to Indian soil that gained currency in postwar Europe and whose roots lie deep in the Old Testament. The cultural alienation of Indian writers writing in English can be tackled from the beginning. Indian writing has absorbed at least three major currents: The Central European Aryan, the Muslim, and the British, which have had a strong and creative influence on the primary driving force. The second part deals with the identity of Indian writers writing in English as authors of English literature, which is constantly questioned. The present work tries to examine such writings, which appear as a meander of nothingness that repeats the same kind of ideas in every piece of writing, in almost all works of all writers: you can call it a negative conception, the exculpation lies in the resulting proposals; for this purpose, I would like to select some writers and their works that are noteworthy.

Women Identity: The Study of Characterization of Women in the select works of Manohar Malgonkar

The portrayal of women in Indian English novels is a complicated and changing component of literature that has changed with time. It is critical to remember that Indian English literature is immensely diverse and that women are not portrayed uniformly throughout. The portrayal of women in Indian English literature does share certain common themes. The portrayal of women frequently reflects India’s immense cultural diversity. The depiction of female characters varies depending on the cultures, groups and customs present. Traditional roles for women in the novels of Manohar Malgonkar include wives; mothers and daughters frequently take on the role of carers and are required to respect traditional family and social norms. Women characters were neglected and men played an important role in his novels. The present study will concentrate on comprehensive portrayal of man-woman relationship in his selected novels. It also depicts the characterization of women in his selected novels.

Delineation of adivasi world of sustainability in Indian english literature: Looking from objective lenses of reality and ariel romanticity

Delineation of adivasi world of sustainability in Indian english literature: Looking from objective lenses of reality and ariel romanticity

Representation of Mental Health in 20th-Century British and Indian English Novels: A Comparative Analysis

This paper examines the nuanced representations of mental health in 20th-century British and Indian English literature, highlighting the intricacies and cultural contexts that shape these portrayals. For this purpose, this paper picks up the following texts for a comparative appraisal— Mrs. Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf, Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) by George Orwell, The English Teacher (1945) by R.K. Narayan, and Cry, the Peacock (1963) by Anita Desai. These novels offer profound insights into the characters' mental state, reflecting the societal attitudes toward mental health in that period. By comparing these texts, the paper sheds light on how mental health is a universal and culturally specific issue, shaped by historical and social factors.

Indian English Fiction: Seeding to Efflorescence

Indian English literature began as an interesting by-product of an eventful encounter in the late eighteenth century between a vigorous and enterprising Britain and a stagnant and chaotic India. As a result of this encounter as F.W. Bain puts it ‘India a withered trunk… suddenly shot out with foreign foliage’. The first problem that confronts the historian of Indian English literature is to define its nature. The question has been made rather complicated owing to two factors: first this body of writing has, from time to time, been designated variously as ‘Indo-Anglian literature’, ‘Indian Writing in English’ and ‘Indo-English literature’. Secondly the failure to make clear-cut distinctions has also often led to confusion between categories such as ‘Anglo-Indian literature’, literature in the Indian languages translated into English and original composition in English by Indians. Thus, in his A Sketch of Anglo-Indian Literature (1908), E.F. Oaten considers the poetry of Henry Derizio as a part of ‘Anglo-Indian literature’ the same critic in his essay on Anglo-Indian literature in the Cambridge of English Literature includes Toru Dutt, Sarojini Naidu, Rabindranath Tagore and Arvindo Ghose among ‘Anglo-Indian writers along with F.W. Bain and F.A. Steel.

Exploring the Dynamic Tapestry of Mother-Daughter Relationships in Indian English Literature

This paper will expound on the discourse of the ambivalent relationship between the duo mother and daughter. The role of motherhood as imposed on women and how it influences their relationship with their children, especially daughters. The expectations of society for a woman to be a good mother can harm the relationship between mother and daughter. How a daughter constructs her identity in terms of her relationship with her mother. It often involves a mixture of love, closeness, conflict, and tension. This paper will discuss the mother-daughter relationship portrayed in the works of Indian women writers.