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The Book of Indian Essays: Two Hundred Years Of English Prose

Arvind krishna mehrotra ( editor ).

462 pages, Hardcover

Published November 12, 2020

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Gems, rare and otherwise, of indian-english prose, finally in one place.

‘The Book of Indian Essays’ traces the evolution of the transplanted language, collects old favourites together

GN Bureau | February 9, 2021

The Book of Indian Essays: Two Hundred Years of English Prose Edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra Black Kite in association with Ashoka University and Hachette India, 446 pages, Rs 699 In the 1990s, the English-language publishing in India was yet to go in the overdrive, and it produced many gems that made a special place in the hearts of many readers. They remain attached to these works affectionately. Possessively too, since many of these works are out of print. Much of these writings do not get talked about today. Some of the authors are no more, so no tweets, no litfest presence, no media interviews. Sheila Dhar, for example, wrote short pieces about family, cooking, music and so on, with a idiosyncratic wit and sensibility. Two compilations were later put together in a volume, ‘Raga’n Josh: Stories from a Musical Life’ (Permanent Black: 2005). New readers, however, may not have heard the name and remain unfortunate in depriving themselves of a rare pleasure. They can do themselves the favour of sampling her heart-warming prose, and many other now-lesser-known gems in ‘ The Book of India Essays: Two Hundred Years of English Prose ’, edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (Black Kite in association with Ashoka University and Hachette India: 2020). Apart from Dhar’s ‘Baua’, there are 44 more prose pieces to dip into. Plus, there is a fine introduction by the editor himself. The collection – the first of its kind, and filling a sore gap – is also the story of evolution of Indian English, the transplantation of a tongue. It begins at the beginning in early nineteenth century, with Derozio. Then comes Tagore, Nehru, Nirad C Chaudhuri, G V Desani and R K Narayan among others – but also Amrita Sher-Gill and F N Souza, as well as Dharma Kumar and Madhur Jaffrey. Some of those better known as public intellectuals or academics or novelists (or all three) – Amitav Ghosh, Mukul Kesavan, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Ramachandra Guha – have given us memorable essays too, which find place in this volume. Essay, of course, is the most open-ended literary form: a fine piece of academic writing is also an essay, and so is a well-crafted political speech. The editor has chosen not to include the political prose, though Tagore’s ‘Nation’ makes the cut. Any selection is by definition subjective, yet some reader may complain about non-representation of Arundhati Roy’s non-fiction. The same goes for the work of M K Gandhi, with literary sensibilities properly fine-tuned. Another restriction is in the subtitle: this is not a book of Indian essays but of Indian-English essays. Indian languages have a robust tradition of essay writing. In Marathi, to take one example, essay is a form as popular as novel or poem, thanks to literary essays by Pu La Deshpande, Kusumagraj, Vinda Karandikar, Manik Godghate (who wrote under the penname ‘Grace’) and others. Their fans can make an argument about these works being on par, if not above, in quality. However, majority of Indian essays in regional languages remain untranslated. The two pointers in no way take away from the achievement that this treasure trove is – and from the reader’s joy and gratitude for it.

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Essay on indian writing in english.

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Essay on Indian Writing in English!

English is a foreign language but since the British came to India the language has had an impact on several fields—in education, literary effort and as a medium of communication.

Indian English Literature refers to that body of work by writers from India, who writes in the English language and whose native or co-native language could be one of the numerous regional and indigenous languages of India. English literature in India is also linked with the works of writers of the Indian diaspora born in India but residing elsewhere.

A pioneer of this literature was Raja Rammohan Roy whose prose works is noteworthy. There were poets who are considered the first of the Indian English poets: Henry Vivian Derozio, Madhusudan Dutt, Aru and Toru Dutt, and Manmohan Ghose. Indian literature in English actually dates back to the 1830s to Kashiprasad Ghosh, who is considered the first Indian poet write in English.

Sochee Chunder Dutt was the first writer of fiction. In the beginning, however, political writing in the novel or essay format was dominant, as can be seen in Raja Rammohan Roy’ works. An outstanding Indo-Anglian writer was Aurobindo Ghose whose poetic magnum opus is Savitri an epic. In prose his most effective work is The Life Divine outlining his metaphysics in a rich language.

Some of Rabindranath Tagore’s works were originally written in English Sadhana Personality and The Religion of Man Yet another Indian writer in English was Sarojini Naidu, the Nightingale of India’, who rendered familiar things with an essence of colour and romance. The Golden Threshold, The Bird of Time and The Broken Wing are her important works. Jawaharlal Nehru’s prose works, The Discovery of India and Glimpses of World History, are famous.

In the genre of novel, three early writers made a mark. Mulik Raj Anand’s Coolie, Untouchable, The Big Heart and other novels are about the underprivileged in India. R.K. Narayan has become famous for creating the imaginary ‘Malgudi’ as the locale for most of his novels. He has a humorous manner and an eye for the comic in the world around him. His works include Swami and his Friends.

The Dark Room, the Guide, Waiting for the Mahatma and The Man Eater of Malgudi Raja Rao is a good short story writer and has written only four novels but they are significant. They include Kanthapura, The Serpent and the Rope, and The Cat and Shakespeare. Besides the legendary and hugely venerated Indian English literary personalities like Rabindranath Tagore or R K Narayan, later novelists like Kamala Markandaya (Nectar in a Sieve, Some Inner Fury A Silence of Desire, Two Virgins), Manohar Malgaonkar (Distant

Drum, Combat of Shadows, The Princes, A Bend in the Ganges and The Devil’s Wind), Anita Desai (Clear Light of Day, The Accompanist, Fire on the Mountain, Games at Twilight) and Nayantara Sehgal, have ceaselessly captured the spirit of an independent India struggling to break away from the British and establish a distinct identity. Khushwant Singh (Train to Pakistan), Bhabani Bhattacharya (So Many Hungers, He Who Rides Tiger, Music for Mohini) are other Indian novelists famous for their writing in English.

In the recent past, we have had a crop of fresh talent. During the 1980s and 1990s, India had emerged as a major literary nation. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children had become a rage around the world, winning the Booker Prize. Other Indian English literature novelists of repute of the contemporary times include V.S. Naipaul, Shobha De (Selective Memory), G.V. Desani, M. Ananthanarayanan, Arun Joshi, O.V. Vijayan, Allan Sealy (The Trotternama), Shashi Tharoor (Show Business, The Great Indian Novel) and Amitav Ghosh (Circle of Reason, Shadow Lines). Vikram Seth wrote a novel in verse. The Suitable Boy, which is equally famous for the stupendous advance he got from his publishers. Upamanyu Chatterjee (English August) has made a name for himself as a foremost modern novelist.

Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things won the 1997 Booker Prize and became an international best-seller overnight. Rohinton Mistry, Firdaus Kanga, Kiran Desai (Strange Happenings in the Guava Orchard), Sudhir Kakar (The Ascetic of Desire), Ardeshir Vakil (Beach Boy) and Jhumpa Lahiri (Interpreter of Maladies) are some other renowned writers of Indian origin. Satish Gujral’s A Brush with Life, R.K. Laxman’s The Tunnel of Time, Prof. Bipin Chandra’s India after Independence, Sunil Khilnani’s The Idea of India, J.N. Dixit’s Fifty Years of India’s Foreign Policy, Yogesh Chadha’s Rediscovering Gandhi and Pavan K.Varma’s The Great Indian Middle Class, are also some notable works of recent times.

The mid-20th century Indian literature in English had witnessed the emergence of poets such as Nissim Ezekiel (The Unfurnished Man), P. Lai, A.K. Ramanujan (The Striders, Relations, Second Sight, Selected Poems), Dom Moraes (A Beginning), Keki N. Daruwalla and Geive Patel.

These authors make use of Indian phrases alongside English words and have tried to reproduce a blend of the Indian and the Western cultures. While Indian poets, novelists, essayists, dramatists have been making momentous and considerable contributions to world literature since the pre-Independence era, the past few years have witnessed a thriving of Indian English writing in the global market. The works of Indian authors writing in English are often to be found on the best-seller list. They are also incurring and earning an immense amount of critical fame.

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How to Write the AP Lit Prose Essay + Example

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What is the ap lit prose essay, how will ap scores affect my college chances.

AP Literature and Composition (AP Lit), not to be confused with AP English Language and Composition (AP Lang), teaches students how to develop the ability to critically read and analyze literary texts. These texts include poetry, prose, and drama. Analysis is an essential component of this course and critical for the educational development of all students when it comes to college preparation. In this course, you can expect to see an added difficulty of texts and concepts, similar to the material one would see in a college literature course.

The AP Lit exam is similar to the AP Lang exam in format, but covers different subject areas. The first section is multiple-choice questions based on five short passages. There are 55 questions to be answered in 1 hour. The passages will include at least two prose fiction passages and two poetry passages and will account for 45% of your total score. All possible answer choices can be found within the text, so you don’t need to come into the exam with prior knowledge of the passages to understand the work.

The second section contains three free-response essays to be finished in under two hours. This section accounts for 55% of the final score and includes three essay questions: the poetry analysis essay, the prose analysis essay, and the thematic analysis essay. Typically, a five-paragraph format will suffice for this type of writing. These essays are scored holistically from one to six points.

Today we will take a look at the AP Lit prose essay and discuss tips and tricks to master this section of the exam. We will also provide an example of a well-written essay for review.

The AP Lit prose essay is the second of the three essays included in the free-response section of the AP Lit exam, lasting around 40 minutes in total. A prose passage of approximately 500 to 700 words and a prompt will be given to guide your analytical essay. Worth about 18% of your total grade, the essay will be graded out of six points depending on the quality of your thesis (0-1 points), evidence and commentary (0-4 points), and sophistication (0-1 points).

While this exam seems extremely overwhelming, considering there are a total of three free-response essays to complete, with proper time management and practiced skills, this essay is manageable and straightforward. In order to enhance the time management aspect of the test to the best of your ability, it is essential to understand the following six key concepts.

1. Have a Clear Understanding of the Prompt and the Passage

Since the prose essay is testing your ability to analyze literature and construct an evidence-based argument, the most important thing you can do is make sure you understand the passage. That being said, you only have about 40 minutes for the whole essay so you can’t spend too much time reading the passage. Allot yourself 5-7 minutes to read the prompt and the passage and then another 3-5 minutes to plan your response.

As you read through the prompt and text, highlight, circle, and markup anything that stands out to you. Specifically, try to find lines in the passage that could bolster your argument since you will need to include in-text citations from the passage in your essay. Even if you don’t know exactly what your argument might be, it’s still helpful to have a variety of quotes to use depending on what direction you take your essay, so take note of whatever strikes you as important. Taking the time to annotate as you read will save you a lot of time later on because you won’t need to reread the passage to find examples when you are in the middle of writing.

Once you have a good grasp on the passage and a solid array of quotes to choose from, you should develop a rough outline of your essay. The prompt will provide 4-5 bullets that remind you of what to include in your essay, so you can use these to structure your outline. Start with a thesis, come up with 2-3 concrete claims to support your thesis, back up each claim with 1-2 pieces of evidence from the text, and write a brief explanation of how the evidence supports the claim.

2. Start with a Brief Introduction that Includes a Clear Thesis Statement

Having a strong thesis can help you stay focused and avoid tangents while writing. By deciding the relevant information you want to hit upon in your essay up front, you can prevent wasting precious time later on. Clear theses are also important for the reader because they direct their focus to your essential arguments.

In other words, it’s important to make the introduction brief and compact so your thesis statement shines through. The introduction should include details from the passage, like the author and title, but don’t waste too much time with extraneous details. Get to the heart of your essay as quick as possible.

3. Use Clear Examples to Support Your Argument

One of the requirements AP Lit readers are looking for is your use of evidence. In order to satisfy this aspect of the rubric, you should make sure each body paragraph has at least 1-2 pieces of evidence, directly from the text, that relate to the claim that paragraph is making. Since the prose essay tests your ability to recognize and analyze literary elements and techniques, it’s often better to include smaller quotes. For example, when writing about the author’s use of imagery or diction you might pick out specific words and quote each word separately rather than quoting a large block of text. Smaller quotes clarify exactly what stood out to you so your reader can better understand what are you saying.

Including smaller quotes also allows you to include more evidence in your essay. Be careful though—having more quotes is not necessarily better! You will showcase your strength as a writer not by the number of quotes you manage to jam into a paragraph, but by the relevance of the quotes to your argument and explanation you provide. If the details don’t connect, they are merely just strings of details.

4. Discussion is Crucial to Connect Your Evidence to Your Argument

As the previous tip explained, citing phrases and words from the passage won’t get you anywhere if you don’t provide an explanation as to how your examples support the claim you are making. After each new piece of evidence is introduced, you should have a sentence or two that explains the significance of this quote to the piece as a whole.

This part of the paragraph is the “So what?” You’ve already stated the point you are trying to get across in the topic sentence and shared the examples from the text, so now show the reader why or how this quote demonstrates an effective use of a literary technique by the author. Sometimes students can get bogged down by the discussion and lose sight of the point they are trying to make. If this happens to you while writing, take a step back and ask yourself “Why did I include this quote? What does it contribute to the piece as a whole?” Write down your answer and you will be good to go.

5. Write a Brief Conclusion

While the critical part of the essay is to provide a substantive, organized, and clear argument throughout the body paragraphs, a conclusion provides a satisfying ending to the essay and the last opportunity to drive home your argument. If you run out of time for a conclusion because of extra time spent in the preceding paragraphs, do not worry, as that is not fatal to your score.

Without repeating your thesis statement word for word, find a way to return to the thesis statement by summing up your main points. This recap reinforces the arguments stated in the previous paragraphs, while all of the preceding paragraphs successfully proved the thesis statement.

6. Don’t Forget About Your Grammar

Though you will undoubtedly be pressed for time, it’s still important your essay is well-written with correct punctuating and spelling. Many students are able to write a strong thesis and include good evidence and commentary, but the final point on the rubric is for sophistication. This criteria is more holistic than the former ones which means you should have elevated thoughts and writing—no grammatical errors. While a lack of grammatical mistakes alone won’t earn you the sophistication point, it will leave the reader with a more favorable impression of you.

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Here are Nine Must-have Tips and Tricks to Get a Good Score on the Prose Essay:

Here is an example essay from 2020 that received a perfect 6:

[1] In this passage from a 1912 novel, the narrator wistfully details his childhood crush on a girl violinist. Through a motif of the allure of musical instruments, and abundant sensory details that summon a vivid image of the event of their meeting, the reader can infer that the narrator was utterly enraptured by his obsession in the moment, and upon later reflection cannot help but feel a combination of amusement and a resummoning of the moment’s passion.

[2] The overwhelming abundance of hyper-specific sensory details reveals to the reader that meeting his crush must have been an intensely powerful experience to create such a vivid memory. The narrator can picture the “half-dim church”, can hear the “clear wail” of the girl’s violin, can see “her eyes almost closing”, can smell a “faint but distinct fragrance.” Clearly, this moment of discovery was very impactful on the boy, because even later he can remember the experience in minute detail. However, these details may also not be entirely faithful to the original experience; they all possess a somewhat mysterious quality that shows how the narrator may be employing hyperbole to accentuate the girl’s allure. The church is “half-dim”, the eyes “almost closing” – all the details are held within an ethereal state of halfway, which also serves to emphasize that this is all told through memory. The first paragraph also introduces the central conciet of music. The narrator was drawn to the “tones she called forth” from her violin and wanted desperately to play her “accompaniment.” This serves the double role of sensory imagery (with the added effect of music being a powerful aural image) and metaphor, as the accompaniment stands in for the narrator’s true desire to be coupled with his newfound crush. The musical juxtaposition between the “heaving tremor of the organ” and the “clear wail” of her violin serves to further accentuate how the narrator percieved the girl as above all other things, as high as an angel. Clearly, the memory of his meeting his crush is a powerful one that left an indelible impact on the narrator.

[3] Upon reflecting on this memory and the period of obsession that followed, the narrator cannot help but feel amused at the lengths to which his younger self would go; this is communicated to the reader with some playful irony and bemused yet earnest tone. The narrator claims to have made his “first and last attempts at poetry” in devotion to his crush, and jokes that he did not know to be “ashamed” at the quality of his poetry. This playful tone pokes fun at his childhood self for being an inexperienced poet, yet also acknowledges the very real passion that the poetry stemmed from. The narrator goes on to mention his “successful” endeavor to conceal his crush from his friends and the girl; this holds an ironic tone because the narrator immediately admits that his attempts to hide it were ill-fated and all parties were very aware of his feelings. The narrator also recalls his younger self jumping to hyperbolic extremes when imagining what he would do if betrayed by his love, calling her a “heartless jade” to ironically play along with the memory. Despite all this irony, the narrator does also truly comprehend the depths of his past self’s infatuation and finds it moving. The narrator begins the second paragraph with a sentence that moves urgently, emphasizing the myriad ways the boy was obsessed. He also remarks, somewhat wistfully, that the experience of having this crush “moved [him] to a degree which now [he] can hardly think of as possible.” Clearly, upon reflection the narrator feels a combination of amusement at the silliness of his former self and wistful respect for the emotion that the crush stirred within him.

[4] In this passage, the narrator has a multifaceted emotional response while remembering an experience that was very impactful on him. The meaning of the work is that when we look back on our memories (especially those of intense passion), added perspective can modify or augment how those experiences make us feel

More essay examples, score sheets, and commentaries can be found at College Board .

While AP Scores help to boost your weighted GPA, or give you the option to get college credit, AP Scores don’t have a strong effect on your admissions chances . However, colleges can still see your self-reported scores, so you might not want to automatically send scores to colleges if they are lower than a 3. That being said, admissions officers care far more about your grade in an AP class than your score on the exam.

12 Classic Essays on English Prose Style

Despite the changes in English prose over the past few centuries, we may still benefit from the stylistic observations of the old masters. Here, chronologically arranged, are 12 key passages from our collection of Classic Essays on English Prose Style .

Classic Essays on English Prose

Samuel johnson on the bugbear style.

There is a mode of style for which I know not that the masters of oratory have yet found a name; a style by which the most evident truths are so obscured, that they can no longer be perceived, and the most familiar propositions so disguised that they cannot be known. . . . This style may be called the terrifick , for its chief intention is, to terrify and amaze; it may be termed the repulsive , for its natural effect is to drive away the reader; or it may be distinguished, in plain English, by the denomination of the bugbear style , for it has more terror than danger. (Samuel Johnson, "On the Bugbear Style," 1758)

Oliver Goldsmith on Simple Eloquence

Eloquence is not in the words but in the subject, and in great concerns the more simply anything is expressed, it is generally the more sublime. True eloquence does not consist, as the rhetoricians assure us, in saying great things in a sublime style, but in a simple style, for there is, properly speaking, no such thing as a sublime style; the sublimity lies only in the things; and when they are not so, the language may be turgid, affected, metaphorical --but not affecting. (Oliver Goldsmith, "Of Eloquence," 1759)

Benjamin Franklin on Imitating the Style of the Spectator

About this time I met with an odd volume of the Spectator . I had never before seen any of them. I bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with it. I thought the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it. With that view, I took some of the papers, and making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by for a few days, and then, without looking at the book, tried to complete the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand. (Benjamin Franklin, "Imitating the Style of the Spectator ," 1789)

William Hazlitt on Familiar Style

It is not easy to write a familiar style. Many people mistake a familiar for a vulgar style, and suppose that to write without affectation is to write at random. On the contrary, there is nothing that requires more precision, and, if I may so say, purity of expression, than the style I am speaking of. It utterly rejects not only all unmeaning pomp, but all low, cant phrases, and loose, unconnected, slipshod allusions . It is not to take the first word that offers, but the best word in common use. (William Hazlitt, "On Familiar Style," 1822)

Thomas Macaulay on the Bombastic Style

[Michael Sadler's style is] everything which it ought not to be. Instead of saying what he has to say with the perspicuity, the precision, and the simplicity in which consists the eloquence proper to scientific writing, he indulges without measure in vague , bombastic declamation , made up of those fine things which boys of fifteen admire, and which everybody, who is not destined to be a boy all his life, weeds vigorously out of his compositions after five-and-twenty. That portion of his two thick volumes which is not made up of statistical tables, consists principally of ejaculations , apostrophes, metaphors, similes--all the worst of their respective kinds. (Thomas Babington Macaulay, "On Sadler's Bombastic Declamations," 1831)

Henry Thoreau on a Vigorous Prose Style

The scholar might frequently emulate the propriety and emphasis of the farmer's call to his team, and confess that if that were written it would surpass his labored sentences . Whose are the truly labored sentences? From the weak and flimsy periods of the politician and literary man, we are glad to turn even to the description of work, the simple record of the month's labor in the farmer's almanac, to restore our tone and spirits. A sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plow instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end. (Henry David Thoreau, "A Vigorous Prose Style," 1849)

Cardinal John Newman on the Inseparability of Style and Substance

Thought and speech are inseparable from each other. Matter and expression are parts of one; style is a thinking out into language. This is what I have been laying down, and this is literature: not things , not the verbal symbols of things; not on the other hand mere words; but thoughts expressed in language. . . . A great author, Gentlemen, is not one who merely has a copia verborum , whether in prose or verse, and can, as it were, turn on at his will any number of splendid phrases and swelling sentences; but he is one who has something to say and knows how to say it. (John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, 1852)

Mark Twain on Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences

Cooper's word-sense was singularly dull. When a person has a poor ear for music he will flat and sharp right along without knowing it. He keeps near the tune, but it is not the tune. When a person has a poor ear for words, the result is a literary flatting and sharping; you perceive what he is intending to say, but you also perceive that he does not say it. This is Cooper. He was not a word-musician. His ear was satisfied with the approximate words. . . . There have been daring people in the world who claimed that Cooper could write English, but they are all dead now. (Mark Twain, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences," 1895)

Agnes Repplier on the Right Words

Musicians know the value of chords; painters know the value of colors; writers are often so blind to the value of words that they are content with a bare expression of their thoughts . . .. For every sentence that may be penned or spoken the right words exist. They lie concealed in the inexhaustible wealth of a vocabulary enriched by centuries of noble thought and delicate manipulation. He who does not find them and fit them into place, who accepts the first term which presents itself rather than search for the expression which accurately and beautifully embodies his meaning, aspires to mediocrity, and is content with failure. (Agnes Repplier, "Words," 1896)

Arthur Quiller-Couch on Extraneous Ornament

[L]et me plead that you have been told of one or two things which Style is not ; which have little or nothing to do with Style, though sometimes vulgarly mistaken for it. Style, for example, is not—can never be—extraneous Ornament. . . . [I]f you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: "Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—wholeheartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings ." (Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, "On Style," 1916)

H.L. Mencken on Woodrow Wilson's Style

Woodrow knew how to conjure up such words. He knew how to make them glow, and weep. He wasted no time upon the heads of his dupes, but aimed directly at their ears, diaphragms and hearts. . . . When Wilson got upon his legs in those days he seems to have gone into a sort of trance, with all the peculiar illusions and delusions that belong to a frenzied pedagogue. He heard words giving three cheers; he saw them race across a blackboard like Socialists pursued by the Polizei ; he felt them rush up and kiss him. (H.L. Mencken, "The Style of Woodrow," 1921)

F.L. Lucas on Stylistic Honesty

As the police put it, anything you say may be used as evidence against you. If handwriting reveals character, writing reveals it still more. . . . Most style is not honest enough. Easy to say, but hard to practice. A writer may take to long words, as young men to beards—to impress. But long words, like long beards, are often the badge of charlatans. Or a writer may cultivate the obscure, to seem profound. But even carefully muddied puddles are soon fathomed. Or he may cultivate eccentricity, to seem original. But really original people do not have to think about being original—they can no more help it than they can help breathing. They do not need to dye their hair green. (F.L. Lucas, "10 Principles of Effective Style," 1955)

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A priceless collection of 200 years of Indians writing prose and poetry in English

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Book Description

About the Book

Indian writing in English: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry Selections covers the syllabus for Discipline Course1, Semester 1 for students of English under the four Year Undergraduate Programme of the University of Delhi, Beginning with the poetry of H.L.V. Derozio, and closing with a short story by Aravind Adiga, the book also includes readings by noted commentators on the development of Indian writing in English. It carries comprehensive introductions to the history of the development of Indian Literature in English spanning over one hundred years, as also extensive headnotes to introduce the individual poetry and prose selection.

This course attempts to include a large cross-section of Indian poets and authors who have made their mark on the literary map. The texts and the authors have been chosen carefully to represent various geographical and cultural variations in terms of caste, class, linguistic background, and domicile. The writers featured in this text are: Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, Robin S. Ngangom, Mulk raj Anand, Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Aravind Adiga, Raja Rao, Meenakshi Mukherjee and Bruce King.

Indian Literature in English has come a long way since its inception. Though it is difficult to trace its genesis, one thing is certain that it was a product of the colonial rule. When English was introduced in India following Lord Macaulay’s Minute way back in 1835, the educated Indians of that time could have hardly imagined that a hundred years down the line their progeny would have a literature of their own in English. Of course, they continued to agonize over the use of a foreign language for creative expression, a few (like Michael Madhusudan Dutt and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay in the nineteenth century) starting their writing career in English and abandoning it in favour of their mother tongue. Yet, many more wrote nothing except in English and, at least one of them (Raja Rao) famously justifying the need for suitable adjustment in the idiom.

Be that as it may, having been a subject-race of the British Empire, the more Indians were exposed to the English language and literature, the more they chose to express their creative imaginations in English. Needless to say, today Indian Literature in English is a well established domain, appreciated the world over for its varieties and qualities.

This textbook for the First Year students of the University of Delhi opens up several dimensions of Indian Literature in English to both students and teachers of English Literature. Beginning with Derozio and closing with Aravind Adiga, the selection covers more than one hundred years of creative output in English. The texts and the authors have been chosen carefully so as to represent the geographic and cultural variations in terms of caste, class, linguistic background, and domicile. The course attempts to include a large cross section of India’s significant poets and writers by choosing from three major literary genres: poetry, the short story and the novel. Unfortunately, no play could be included due to the paucity of space. The volume comes with a detailed introduction and extensive headnotes for each of the individual selections, put together by scholars who have many years experience of teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. We hope that students and teachers will find this volume useful in appreciating the richness and diversity of this course.

Indian Writing in English: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry Selections introduces the reader to a selection of poetry and short stories written in English by Indians over the last 200 years. The creative writers, who embarked on the challenging task of narrating the Indian nation in prose and verse, both before and after Independence, were faced with many challenges. The key words were ‘exile’, ‘alienation’, ‘authenticity’ and ‘Indianness’, while the hidden agenda was nationhood and citizenship and the search for an essentially Indian mode of perception and thought, in whatever language it was expressed. Satchidanandan (1999) points out that in this writing, paradigms are tried and given up; communities are imagined and dissolved; traditions are constructed and deconstructed; the principle of unity and of difference are alternately tried out; and the West’s presence is acknowledge and negated; radical European concepts and models are alternated with a return to indigenous roots. Our creativity, he adds, has thus been dialogic, and our literary discourse marked by a negotiation of a necessary heterogeneity, by a conception of identity that lives through difference and hybridity.

An added dimension is given to the negotiations by the creative writers, by expatriate writing which introduces the idea of the nation that is not contingent upon domicile or constricted by the demands of geographical territory. Diaspora epistemology locates itself, as Mishra (1996) points out, in the realm of the hybrid, in the domains of the cross- cultural, and in contaminated social and cultural regimes. In a progressively multi-ethnic conception of the nation-state, it is ‘diaspora theory’ that bears testimony to the fact that nation within the minds of writers are as real as those on the map. Vijayasree (1966) identifies expatriation as operating in a space permeated by perpetually shifting ‘alter-nativities’. She also addresses the question of self-definition as an urgent imperative in expatriate consciousness and sees the issue of identity at the heart of creative expressions by expatriate writers. There is a continuous attempt, she believes, to turn one’s liminality into strength, to question notions of belonging, to celebrate unbelonging and above all, to prove oneself. These writers oppose concepts of centrality, and their dominant discourse is one of difference. Rushdie (1991), while talking about Indian writers, both those who live away from India and those who live in India but write in English, mentions that they inhabit separate spaces in life and in literature, both in geographical and literary terms. He says that these writers create, ‘not actual cities and villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind. This kind of writing also questions the premise that ‘a people must have a land [or a specific language] in order to be a people. He then suggests that the writer who is ‘out-of-country’ and even ‘out-of-language’ may experience alienation in an intensified form. What some critics see as a fallout of the expatriate condition, can also be understood as a central predicament of the Indian English writer who, while writing about the state of the nation, is actually endeavouring to write him/herself into being.

We will begin with an introduction to Indian English poetry and narrate a brief history of the critical paradigms that have been used to critique it. We will then go on to discuss the life and writings of the four poets included in this anthology, to provide their writing a context and a framework.

Indian English Poetry

An important site of the criticism of Indian English poetry is its perceived ‘inauthenticity’ by critics who question whether this poetry can claim to be called Indian at all, since it does not conform to their notion of what constitutes Indianness. An early response to Indian English poetry had come from Buddhadev Bose who called it ‘a blind alley, lined with curio shops, leading nowhere’ (quoted in Lall, 1983), and Mukherjee (1971) wrote that Indian English poetry can lay claim to an independence from English poetry only when it is firmly rooted in the social and cultural ethos of India. In his introduction to an anthology of Indian English poetry, Sarang (1989, 1994), attempts to understand why it has been difficult to accept this literary genre as legitimate and ‘authentic’. He locates the problems of Indian poetry in English in its allegedly derivative nature; its restricted focus on a particular social stratum; and its lack of a homogeneous geographically compact literary culture. For Sarang, Indian English poetry needs the dynamic play of forces and counter- forces, groups and movements, the fuel of rebellion and a return to tradition. He suggests that Indianness is exploited by these writers for its exotic appeal to the non-Indian reader and denies that this commonly invoked criterion of merit can be a true measure of aesthetic value. Finally, for Sarang, it is only by being himself that the poet can contribute to a definition of Indianness, for Indianness can only be defined, after all, in terms of who Indians are.

While its detractors are legion, Indian English poetry also has its share of champions who interrogate the idea of a monolithic notion of Indianness as a legitimate stick with which to beat the poets. Narasimhaiah (1968, 1999) argues that it is the operative sensibility that makes a writer an Indian and not the language s/he uses. An early advocate of Indian English poetry, Narasimhaiah uses inwardness with the English language and the expression of a distinct identifiable sensibility as the yardsticks to judge such writing. In a spirited defence of its belonging within the larger family of Indian literature, Gokak (1970, 1998) calls Indian English poetry Indian first and everything else afterwards. His defence is based on his belief that it has voiced the aspirations, the joys and sorrows of the Indian people and been sensitive to the changes it the national climate and striven increasingly to express the soul of India. On the question of identity, Char (1988) suggests that Indian English poetry can lay claim to being part of Indian literature by virtue of its rootedness in the Indian cultural milieu. He locates the ironic keenness of the writing of Indian English poets in the simultaneous exercise of their individual talents trained in and tempered by the study of English poets, along with their awareness of indigenous traditions.

The second issue at the forefront of the study of Indian English poetry is language. Since English originally came to India as a colonial legacy, the language itself has become an arena for critical debate and contest. Iyengar (1962, 1984), who inaugurated the language debate in the criticism of Indian English writing, praises it as a novel experiment in creative mutation, in so far as it is Indian in thought and feeling and emotion, yet courting the graces and submitting to the discipline of English for expression. He credits this literature with the unique distinction of deriving from and promoting an all-India consciousness—a total vision of Mother India—to the outside world and also before the diverse linguistic groups of the country. Iyengar also comments on the challenges faced by the writers as they walk on the razor’s edge in an attempt to render in English the rhythms, idiosyncrasies, images, idioms and proverbs of the Indian language. This concern had already been raised by Raja Rao three decades earlier in his preface to Kanthapura (1938) and continued to be at the centre of Parthasarathy’s discussion about this genre, in the following decade. Iyengar also points out that since spatially in India, English is a ‘nowhere language’, it has to work even harder to adapt to the Indian climate. Another predicament of this writing is its constant endeavour to simultaneously assert itself as Indian and measure itself against the best Western standards. For Parthasarathy (1976: 3) an important characteristic of Indian verse in English in the mid-twentieth century has been its ‘emergence from the mainstream of English literature and its appearance as part of Indian literature’. He sees Indian English literature as ‘rooted in and stemming from an Indian environment and reflecting its mores, often ironically’. For him, these writers face two kinds of problems—the quality of experience to be expressed in English and the quality of the idiom to be used. For Parthasarathy, the question of ‘national identity bedevils Indian English poetry’ and the search for an ‘individual voice’ is an enduring concern. Locating Indian English poetry in the context of an Indian search for self-definition, Nandy (1983, 1991) views this poetry as impelled by a quest for roots and an interrogation of older forms of poetry. He sees this enterprise as marked by the efforts of some poets to consciously reject the rain/peacock/lotus image nexus and the attitudes of renunciation, resignation and detachment, in favour of a more individual and modern idiom, trying to make English a living language that Indians could create in.

As we have seen, on one side of the debate are Iyengar and others, and on the other, an equally strong set of arguments against the use of English by India English poets. The issue of the medium of expression engages the attention of Vatsyayan (in Poddar, 1969), and he bemoans the fact that a whole generation of writers ‘is living in translation, rather than the original’. Parthasarathy who gives us both sides of the picture, also feels that English in India rarely approaches the liveliness and idiosyncrasy one finds in African and West Indian writing. According to Parthasarathy, Indian poets have not extended the resources of English, or Indianized it, and hence have been unable to find an adequate and personal language. Adding to the chorus of detractors, Singh (1992) alleges that ‘the spirit that we seek to exorcise has infiltrated the very mantra through which we seek to exorcise it’ and in Perry’s (1994) opinion, Indian English poets stretch their linguistic resources far beyond their milieu of everyday life. Perry hypothesizes that most of the poets have undergone supplemental saturation experiences with English through extensive stays in Britain and America. At the same time, he also feels that Indian English verse smells of the lamp, is academic and exaggeratedly intra-literary and imitative. He believes that the academic reverence that the poets have for T.S. Eliot’s poetics results in their valorizing tradition, myth and legend, while minimizing individual creativity and personal consciousness. Perry asserts that it is incumbent upon Indian English poetry to develop its capacities for cultural criticism by going beyond preserving cultural values, building national consciousness and offering visionary alternatives. This is particularly important, Perry feels, given the rapid changes in Indian society that are threatening both its diversity and unity. On a lighter note, as a practitioner, Daruwalla (1998) has attempted to bring this debate to a close by objecting to what he calls the ‘lactatory school of literary criticism’ which claims that you can ‘only write in a language you imbibed with your mother’s milk’!

The introduction to Bruce King’s Modern Indian Poetry in English (1987, 2005), included in this anthology, intervenes in this debate and suggests a context within which this gene can be read. He historicizes the development of this genre from the 1950s onwards and provides a framework for its analysis. While King’s book spans only three decades of writing by Indian poets in English and is selective in its inclusion of the poets, chosen for detailed analysis, it is nevertheless a very useful starting point for the study of poetry being written by Indians, both resident in India and those who have settled in different parts of the world. King would perhaps agree with Parthasarathy who says, ‘In the context of Indian verse as whole, the contribution of poets writing in English is only marginal, and is likely to remain so. But it can, today, be unreservedly said that it is a significant contribution in that it is a legitimate expression of universal, human experience’ (Parthasarathy, 1976: 11).

The foremost among the poets included in this anthology is Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809-31). Derozio is one of the earliest Indian poets to use English as the medium of creative expression. Born in Calcutta into the Eurasian community, he attended Drummond’s Academy and after leaving school in 1823, worked with his father in the office of J. Scott and Company for two years. He then went to Bhagalpur to work for his uncle Johnson (married to his mother’s sister) who was an indigo planter. It is here that the muse of poetry is believed to have blessed him, as he attributes this sojourn to being the inspiration for his The Fakeer of Jungheera: A Metrical Tale (1828). In his own words, ‘it struck me as a place where achievements in love and war might well take place and the double character I had heard of the Fakeer together with some acquaintance with the scenery induced me to form a tale upon both these circumstances’ (quoted in Mehrotra 2003: 47). A more controversial sub-theme of the poem is sati. At the centre of the debate among both the British and the Indians at the time, issues relating to the rights of women especially sati, was a site for the conflict between tradition and Western progressive ideas that were finding their way into the classroom and the pulpit, as well as other public arenas such as the newspaper.

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Journey of Indian English Drama

Indian English Drama: An Essay

Table of Contents

Introduction

Drama is a composite art form. It is mimetic like all other performing arts in literature. It imitates life, particularly reflecting the three unities of time, place and action.

“It is designed for representation on the stage by actors who act the parts of the characters of its story, and among whom the narrative and the dialogue are distributed.”

India has a long and fertile history in Drama, starting from Sanskrit plays of Vedic Age. Dramatists of Indian Writing in English have scaled the length and breadth of the experimentation in dramaturgy of India during and after independence. To fathom the depths of Indian Drama in English certain characteristic features are to be kept in mind. Basically, the Indian Writings in English during Modern Age articulate the budding and the already present writers as well as the influence of Existentialism, Globalisation, Surrealism, Dadaism, Magic Realism and the Post Colonial issues. India had been under the colonial shackles for a time period of three hundred years and as a matter of fact the colonial language and culture had cast its direct shadow on the Indian literary venues.

Classical Indian Drama: It’s Origin

Drama in India has had a rich glorious tradition. It begins its journey with the Sanskrit plays. Indian tradition preserved in the Natyasastra . The oldest of the texts of the theory of the drama, claims for the drama divine origin and a close connection with the sacred Vedas themselves. Origin of English drama can be traced to the ancient rules and seasonal festivities of the Vedic Aryans. The most renowned and talented dramatists of the ancient era are Ashwaghosh, Bhasa, Shudraka, Kalidas, Harsha, Bhavabhuti, Visha-khadatta, Bhattanarayana, Murari and Rajeshkhora, who enriched Indian theatre with their words like Madhya Mavyaayoda , Urubhangam , Karnabharan , Mrichkatikam , Abhigyana Shakuntalam , Malankagnimitram , Uttar Ramacharitam , Mudrarakshasa , Bhagavadajjukam , Mattavilasa etc.

Pre-Independence Indian English Drama

The Indian English Drama began in the 18th century when British Empire came and strengthened its political power in India. It is started with the publication of Krishna Mohan Banerjee’s The Persecuted in 1813. It is a social play in which the author tries to present the conflict between the East and the West. The real journey of Indian English Drama begins with Michael MadhuSudan Dutt’s Is This Called Civilization which appeared on the literary horizon in 1871. Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo, the two great sage – poets of India, are the first Indian dramatists in English worth considering. R.N. Tagore wrote primarily in Bengali but almost all his Bengali plays are available to us in English renderings. His prominent plays are Chitra , The Post Office , Sacrifice , Red Oleanders , Chandalika , Muktadhara , Natir Puja and The Mother’ Prayer etc.. These plays are firmly rooted in the Indian ethos and ethics in their themes, characters and treatment. Sri Aurobindo’s complete plays are Perseus the Deliverer , Vasavadutta , Radoguna , The Viziers of Bassora and Eric and each of these plays is written in five acts.

Notes on Origin of Drama in English Literature

Harindranath Chattopadhyaya added a new dimensions to Indian English drama . He sympathizes with the underdogs same like Mulk Raj Anand. His collection of social plays include The Windows , The Parrots , The Santry Lantern , The Coffin and The Evening Lamps .

Post Independence or Post Modern Indian English Drama

D. M. Borgaonkar’s Image-Breakers (1938) is a problem play that aims to break the conventions of caste system, horoscope, dowry, etc. S. Fyzee’s Rahamin’s D aughter of Ind (1940) portrays the conflict between love and social barriers, featuring a low-caste girl loving an Englishman. Balwant Gargi’s The Vulture , Mung-Wa, The Fugitive and The Matriarch “ dealt with themes which are engaging the attention of people everywhere.”

Another dramatic voice on the Indian literary scene that demands attention is that of T.P. Kailasam. He wrote both in English and Kannada. Though Kailasam is regarded as the father of modern Kannada drama, his genius finds its full expression in his English plays such as The Burden (1933), Fulfilment (1933), The Purpose (1944), Karna (1964) and Keechaka (1949).

Bharati Sarabhai is the modern woman playwright during the colonial era of Indian English drama. She has written two plays The Well of the People (1943) and Two Women with some considerable measure of success.

J.M. Lobo Prabhu is the last great name in pre-Independence Indian English drama. He has written over a dozen plays but only Mother of New India : A Play of India Village in three Acts (1944) and Death Abdicates (1945) appear before Independence.

The use of blank verse is flawless and the last play compels us to remind of T.S.Eliot’ s Murder In The Cathedral . Other verse plays of the period include P.A.Krishnaswami’s The Flute of Krishna (1950) M.Krishnamurti’s The Cloth Of Gold (1951). S.D.Rawoot’s Immortal Song . Karm and The Killers (1959) Satya Dev Jaggi’s The Point Of Light (1967) Pritish Nandy’s Rites for a Plebian Salute (1969). P.S. Vasudev’s The Sunflower (1972) etc.

Nissim Ezekiel’s Three Plays (1969) including Nalini : A Comedy , Marriage Poem : A Tragi Comedy and The Sleep Walkers : An Indo-American farce are considered to be a welcome addition to the dramaturgy of Indian English drama.

Girish Karnad in the capacity of writer, director and actor substantially contributed to enrich the tradition of Indian English theatre. His well known plays are Yayati (1961), Tughlaq (1962), Hayvadana (1970), Nagmandala (1972). He borrowed his plots from history, mythology and old legends.

Vijay Tendulkar symbolizes the new awareness and attempts of Indian dramatists of the century to depict the agonies, suffocations and cries of man, focusing on the middle class society. In the plays Silence! The Court Is In Session (1968) and Ghasiram Kotwal (1972), the theme of oppression dominates. Sakharam Binder (1972) is a study in human violence amounted to powerful dramatic statement.

Gurucharan Das (1943- ) is known for his popular play, Larins Sahib ( 1970). Set in Punjab, it is about the political career of a British Resident in Punjab. Vera Sharma wrote a number of one act plays, including Life is Like That (1997) and Reminiscence (1997) which deal with the plight of women.

Badal Sircar too is a prestigious name in the realm of contemporary theatre. He represents New Theatrical Movement in India. His earlier plays are Evan Inderjit (1962) That Other History (1964) and There Is No End (1971). All these plays are based on political, social, psychological and existential problems.

Post Independence era witnessed the birth of several one act plays. R. Raja Rao’s The Wisest Fool on Earth and Other Plays (1996) is on the theme of homosexuality. T.S. Gill’s Asoka (1983), V.D. Trivedi’s Gandhi: A Play (1983) and Prema Sastri’s Gandhi, Man of the Millions (1987), Gieve Patel’s Princess , Savaksha and Mr. Behram , Dina Mehta,s The Myth Maker (1959) and Brides Are Not for Burning , Uma Parameswaram (1938- )’s Sons Must Die and Other Plays (1998) are some to quote.

The Post Modern era ushered in new changes in the Indian English drama. Mahesh Dattani (1958- ) a playwright of World stature, has added a new feather to the Indian English drama. His plays deal with serious and sensitive issues like communalism, homosexuality, female infanticide, domestic abuse, child sexual abuse, condition of eunuchs in Indian society. His plays include Where There’s a Will , Tara , Bravely Fought the Queen , Final Solutions , Dance like A Man and Thirty Days in September .

Post-Independent Indian Drama in English falls short of the level reached by poetry and fiction in India. There are four reasons for this:

i) drama is essentially a composite art involving the playwright, the actors and the audience in a shared experience on the stage-has its own problem of which the other literary forms are free.

ii) As Srinivas Iyenger attributes “the failure to the fact that English is not a natural medium of conversation in India.”

iii) Lack of living theatre in our country.

iv) The Indian English playwrights do not give much importance to the rich and varied Indian dramatic traditions involving the native myth and Indian historical heritage.

In short, Indo-Anglican literature continues to grow and flourish and this despite all the misguided and prejudiced and politically motivated campaign against English as a foreign language , a language which comes in the way of its growth. More Indians are writing in English than ever before, and the Indo-Anglican writer is enjoying a much wider market. Indo-Anglican drama has, indeed, a bright future.

3 thoughts on “Journey of Indian English Drama”

Hi sir… Thank you so much. It is really helpful. All the best to chase your dream sir.

I’m working on a project for an event in my college and this helped me greatly to understand this topic better … thank you very much sir

Sincerely welcome

A priceless collection of 200 years of Indians writing prose and poetry in English

By Vishnu Makhijani New Delhi, Jan 15 (IANS) Its an anthology that took 10 years to compile but thats not surprising given that it takes in 200 years of Indians writing prose and poetry in English and what emerges is a priceless collection of something that has never been attempted before. “We started talking about the book, or one like it, about eight or ten years ago. But it was only an idea and it never got anywhere, mainly because I did not know where to begin or where to find the essays, especially of the 19th century,” its editor, poet-translator-anthologist Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, told IANS in an interview of “The Book of Indian Essays” (Black Kite)”. “At first I thought of restricting the book to essays written since independence, then pushed it back to cover the 20th century, then decided to take in the whole period of writing in English in India, from around the 1820s to the present. “We have never had a selection of essays for the general reader before and I thought that if we were going to do one we may as well include the 19th century, particularly since I knew at least two essays that I wanted to include the ones by (poet and assistant headmaster of Hindu College Calcutta Henry Louis Vivian) Derozio and (author-historian-poet), Shoshee Chunder Dutt. “They would otherwise have remained buried in books that only a handful of specialists would ever read. Which is sad, for the essays, when they were written, were aimed at the magazine or newspaper reader of the time and not for the specialist of the future,” Mehrotra explained. Given his vast research, does he see the writing in English evolving over the 200 years that the book covers? “Unlike science, literature does not evolve. Unlike economies, it does not stagnate or grow. Something written let’s say in the 1870s, Shoshee Chunder’s ‘Street Music of Calcutta’ for example, might have been written yesterday in Delhi, if anyone in Delhi had the brains to listen to street cries and write an essay on the subject. The essay (or poem) is immersed in the moment, but it is a moment that’s been illuminated and which the passage of time cannot darken. “Literature does not evolve but neither does it fade. Parts of it can of course be neglected and sink into obscurity. ‘The Book of Indian Essays’ is an attempt at rescuing a few pieces of prose before they disappeared altogether, though their sentences, had you stumbled upon them, would have lost none of their newness and surprise, as Derozio’s and Shoshee Chunder’s have not,” Mehrotra contended He also noted that while Indians have been writing prose for 200 years, and yet when we think of literary prose we think only of the novel. “The ‘essay’ brings only the school essay to mind. Those of us who read and write English in India might find it hard to name an essay even by someone like R.K. Narayan as easily as we would one of his novels, say ‘Swami and Friends’ or ‘The Guide’. Our inability to recall essays is largely due to the strange paradox that while the form itself remains invisible, it is everywhere present. “The paradox becomes even more strange when we realise that some of our finest writers of English prose did not write novels at all, they wrote essays. The anthology is an attempt at making what has always been present also permanently visible,” Mehrotra explained. To this end, the 45 essayists in the anthology include some of the best-known Indian writers of English, including Jawaharlal Nehru, Aubrey Menen, G.V. Desani, Dom Moraes, Sheila Dhar, Madhur Jaffrey, Amitav Ghosh, Anita Desai, Chitrita Banerji, Mukul Kesavan and Pankaj Mishra, to mention just a few. Working as an alternative history, the anthology is impressive in its range, taking in the reflective essay, the luminous memoir, the essay disguised as a story, the memorable prefatory article, the newspaper column that transcends its humdrum origins, the gossip piece that oozes literariness, the forgotten flower in the long-dead magazine, the satirical putdown – all of them find a place. This is Mehrotra’s 21st work. How does he find the time and energy for this? “Time is something we are always short of but in this I was fortunate. I retired from my job the day it started. Since I started at a young age, at 21, I retired early. You could say that I have been retired all my well-paid working life. The job I had was teaching English at the University of Allahabad. It was as undemanding on my time as it was on my mind. The only way to keep the mind from rotting away and falling off and immersing it in Sangam was to write or translate or edit books,” Mehrotra concluded. Power to those of his ilk! (Vishnu Makhijani can be reached at [email protected])

An anthology compiles 200 years of ‘Indian’ prose and poetry in English

The book of indian essays (black kite) is an anthology that took 10 years to compile but that’s not surprising given that it takes in 200 years of indians writing, prose and poetry, in english.

Vishnu Makhijani

The Book of Indian Essays (Black Kite) is an anthology that took 10 years to compile but that’s not surprising given that it takes in 200 years of Indians writing, prose and poetry, in English—a collection that has never been attempted before.

"We started talking about the book, or one like it, about eight or ten years ago. But it was only an idea and it never got anywhere, mainly because I did not know where to begin or where to find the essays, especially of the 19th century," its editor, poet-translatoranthologist Arvind Krishna Mehrotra recalls.

"At first I thought of restricting the book to essays written since Independence, then pushed it back to cover the 20th century, then decided to take in the whole period of writing in English in India, from around the 1820s to the present.

"We have never had a selection of essays for the general reader before and I thought that if we were going to do one, we may as well include the 19th century, particularly since I knew at least two essays that I wanted to include, one by (poet and assistant headmaster of Hindu College Calcutta Henry Louis Vivian) Derozio and another by (authorhistorian-poet), Shoshee Chunder Dutt.

"They would otherwise have remained buried in books that only a handful of specialists would ever read. Which is sad, for the essays, when they were written, were aimed at the magazine or newspaper reader of the time and not for the specialist of the future," Mehrotra explains.

"Unlike science, literature does not evolve. Unlike economies, it does not stagnate or grow. Something written let's say in the 1870s, Shoshee Chunder's Street Music of Calcutta might have been written yesterday in Delhi, if anyone in Delhi had the brains to listen to street cries and write an essay on the subject. The essay (or poem) is immersed in the moment, but it is a moment that's been illuminated and which the passage of time cannot darken.

"Literature does not evolve but neither does it fade. Parts of it can of course be neglected and sink into obscurity. The Book of Indian Essays is an attempt at rescuing a few pieces of prose before they disappeared altogether, though their sentences, had you stumbled upon them, would have lost none of their newness and surprise, as Derozio's and Shoshee Chunder's have not," Mehrotra contends.

When we think of literary prose we think only of the novel."The 'essay' brings only the school essay to mind. Those of us who read and write English in India might find it hard to name an essay even by someone like R.K. Narayan as easily as we would one of his novels, say Swami and Friends or The Guide. Our inability to recall essays is largely due to the strange paradox that while the form itself remains invisible, it is everywhere present.

"The paradox becomes even more strange when we realise that some of our finest writers of English prose did not write novels at all, they wrote essays. The anthology is an attempt at making what has always been present also permanently visible," Mehrotra explained. To this end, the 45 essayists in the anthology include some of the best-known Indian writers of English, including Jawaharlal Nehru, Aubrey Menen, G.V. Desani, Dom Moraes, Sheila Dhar, Madhur Jaffrey, Amitav Ghosh, Anita Desai, Chitrita Banerji, Mukul Kesavan and Pankaj Mishra, to mention just a few.

Working as an alternative history, the anthology is impressive in its range, taking in the reflective essay, the luminous memoir, the essay disguised as a story, the memorable prefatory article, the newspaper column that transcends its humdrum origins, the gossip piece that oozes literariness, the forgotten flower in the long-dead magazine, the satirical putdown - all of them find a place. This is Mehrotra's 21st work. How does he find the time and energy for this?

"Time is something we are always short of but in this I was fortunate. I retired from my job the day it started. You could say that I have been retired all my well-paid working life. The job I had was teaching English at the University of Allahabad. It was as undemanding on my time as it was on my mind. The only way to keep the mind from rotting away and falling off and immersing it in Sangam was to write or translate or edit books," Mehrotra quips.

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‘The Book of Indian Essays’ review: Inside the club compound

A look at the organising principles and the writers chosen by arvind krishna mehrotra for an anthology of indian essays in english that covers over 200 years.

February 13, 2021 04:22 pm | Updated February 14, 2021 01:09 pm IST

The sub-heading of this book is ‘Two Hundred Years of English Prose’, and as you begin to flip the pages you understand that this means non-fiction pieces in English written by Indians. For a moment after that you find yourself noting the preponderance of Bengali names in the contents pages. Of the 45 pieces of prose collected here, 14 are by Bengalis, 15 if you count Ram Guha as an honorary Bong. From a Calcuttan’s p.o.v this is a paltry 30% strike rate. To be fair, this over-representation isn’t the fault of the Bengalis/Kolkataiyas: what were they to do if other desis slouched for a hundred years before picking up the auxiliary Bengali language called English?

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Arvind Mehrotra has included a couple of gems here from the 19th and early 20th centuries, such as Shoshee Chunder Dutt’s witty compilation of Calcutta street-vendors’ calls and Rabindranath Tagore’s succinct challenge to the very idea of a nation. For an example of genuine Bengali cosmopolitanism you can’t do better than Buddhadeb Bose’s lovely recounting of visiting Henry Miller in California in the mid-50s. In contrast there is Ashok Mitra’s superb rendering of a deeply local Calcutta life in ‘An Ordinary Man’. Besides these pieces there are many other lovely bits of writing to be found in the book, by both Bengalis and the non-blessed. However, the more you read more the questions start to bubble up about the organising principle of the anthology and the selection Mehrotra has made.

Many exceptions

“...it was decided to restrict this anthology as far as possible to ‘Indian’ writers. Literary geography, unfortunately, had to be mapped on to the political one, but only loosely,” writes Mehrotra in his introduction, explaining why he has left out people such as Ved Mehta, Salman Rushdie and Vikram Chandra while having “allowed in” Santha Rama Rau and Victor Anant.

This doesn’t hold water: if a certain weight of residence in India was a serious criterion for inclusion then not only Rau and Anant but also Aubrey Menen, Amrita Sher-Gil, Nirad Chaudhuri, G.V. Desani, F.N. Souza, Madhur Jaffrey, Anita Desai, Dom Moraes (at the time of writing), Chitrita Banerji, Amitav Ghosh and Sara Rai, i.e. nearly one third of the writers, are exceptions to the ‘rule’.

As with other aspects of the selection, this codification begins to feel more arbitrary than ‘loose’ in a way that doesn’t enhance the quality of the collection.

Mehrotra also explains the exclusion of political essays and of someone like Arundhati Roy thus: “Political writing is urgent but it is soon replaced by something as urgent the next day... we need it more than ever before; but so do we, as urgently, the essays in this anthology.” This claim to urgency leads to a bit of head-scratching because it’s not as if very many of the essays throw other kinds of sharp light on our current reality. Mehrotra claims various serendipitous connections between different essays but the one ‘link’ that emerges is his fondness for novelistic family memoirs, of which there are several. These pieces read like slight variations on the same theme; of the eight, all are to do with the middle or upper class, seven are filled with cousin sadnesses, six are to do with urban north India, only one is not set in middle of the 20th century. Such a bloc do these pieces form that one wonders if it might not have been an idea to do a collection solely devoted to these sort of dissections of the peculiarities of Indian kinship.

Way with words

Arbitrariness also seeps in from yet a different angle. The first two-thirds of the anthology has a certain tenor, a certain way in which the English is used. With the brilliant exception of G.V. Desani’s ‘The Benares that Was’ — where Desani cracks open the language as only he can — and also Dharma Kumar’s light way with her words, there is a similarity to the smooth rounded prose so respectful of British cadences, a far cry from the photographs of Walker Evans and the paintings of Cezanne that Mehrotra cites in his introduction, more the written equivalent of Rubens and Ravi Varma. Perhaps the anthology should have ended with the piece by Chitrita Banerji who was born in 1947.

Mehrotra is one of the most generous intellects in the Indian world of letters. Therefore, it is mystifying to see the parsimony and timidity of his choices as we come to our own times.

It’s as though Mehrotra’s great erudition has been denied a proper visa into the zone of contemporary Indian writing in English. With the exception of Allan Sealy on the Anglo-Indians, Mukul Kesavan’s delicious evisceration of the Indian male and Sara Rai’s extremely moving memoir ‘On Not Writing’, the array of usual suspects and some truly bizarre choices is disappointing. It’s not only the NRIs, Mehta and Rushdie et al who have been banished outside the club compound. How do you have an anthology of Indian essays in English that includes not even one writer from Paromita Vohra, Kai Friese, Ambarish Satwik, Rahul Bhattacharya, Samanth Subramanian, Snigdha Poonam, Raghu Karnad or Aman Sethi?

The Book of Indian Essays ; Edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Black Kite/Hachette India,₹699.

The reviewer is a filmmaker and columnist.

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The success of this anthology of 200 years of English essays from India is that it is for everyone

Editor arvind krishna mehrotra demonstrates his belief in the accessibility of prose..

“The essay, like a penknife, can be put to many uses; like a newspaper aeroplane, it can fly and crash and fly again; as a literary genre, it is unfussy. An essay gathers no dust.”

Unless you’re a literary buff who seeks out good non-fiction writing, especially essays, written by Indians, the chances of your having read something outside of your school and college syllabi (which somehow includes mostly British and American essay writers) are low. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, poet, writer, and critic puts it rather bluntly: “We’ve certainly not paid as much attention to the essay as we should have. Actually, there’s a lack of historicity in the way we think and talk and write about Indian literature.”

Range and style

And so, when you pick up The Book of Indian Essays: Two Hundred Years of English Prose , edited by Mehrotra, you find within the purview of the anthology the sparkle of academic intellect alongside humour, personal opinions and reflections that engage both the critical eye as well as a non-academic audience. To reflect on Mehrotra’s introduction, the curation is symptomatic of a dual progression, where the stress is not only on stylish prose, but also on a delectable range of subjects.

While the inclusion of a few more contemporary essayists could certainly have upped the ante, it is perhaps Mehrotra’s sense of history that makes him partial towards work that provides a setting for an anthology that celebrates two hundred years of Indian English prose. Throughout, the book moves at different levels, capturing not only stylish writing but also making sure that the reader is engaged with a wide variety of subjects that range from the sport of Jellicut to an exploration of Anglo Indians, from musings on An Ordinary Man to ruminations On God .

Read in this day and age, most of the writers appear to be groping for a balance between the emotional and intellectual. In that sense and more, the creative personal essay enjoys a certain lack of boundary and allows the writer an ease of reflection, on matters perceived as less academic and more personal. Imagine then, the startled joy of a reader at finding the odd piece of writing far more resonant of the writer’s personality than of crafted prose or imagined fiction. Therein lies the reason for the popularity of this genre perhaps.

Speaking of the curious and the eclectic, Shoshee Chunder Dutt’s essay, Street Music of Calcutta, is perhaps one of the quirkiest essays you’ll read about a city. In fact, the piece makes you realise that words are not only capable of creating resonating sounds, but that they also articulate within themselves the most unexpected variants:

“Poorana Loha Bikree! Poorana Chatta Bikree! Poorana Nakhra kani Bikree!

Your old iron, your old chatta or parasol, all your tattered rags, are marketable articles: there is no destruction for them, but a statutory change.”

The public and the private

Or there is Gautam Bhatia’s interesting essay on Art as Politics, where he scrutinises Indian politicians’ penchant for building statues after themselves. Anecdotes reveal the process that goes into the commissioning of such statues while also recounting the number of politically motivated structures build over the years: “Much before Mayawati’s memorial building encountered rough weather, a Delhi architect, a Dalit himself, had proposed a thirty-storey statue of his leader to be built as a focus of a memorial in central Lucknow. The monument was to be 340 feet high, and if built would have dwarfed not just the tallest building in Lucknow but the Statue of Liberty as well.”

Every once in a while, the essays offer glimpses into the personal lives of the writers whom the reader has so far known only through their prose. Take, for instance, Hasan Shahid Suhrawardy as a student describing his youthful glee at meeting Tagore in Oxford , or the inimitable academic whom Amit Chaudhuri found discussing the rather insistent habit of Indians (and Indian auto rickshaw drivers) refusing to part with change, while standing on the pavements of Khan Market in Delhi with fellow poet CP Surendran in his essay Money Matters , or for that matter Arun Kolatkar discussing the furniture in his ancestral house in his unassuming manner in House with Nine Rooms.

Other than these personal pieces, there are some literary ones too, like Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s critique of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger , or Nissim Ezekiel’s incisive essay on Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness , Pankaj Mishra’s ever elegant description of his literary getaway in Mashobra, or Buddhadev Bose recounting his unusual friendship with author Henry Miller in Big Sur.

Mehrotra belongs to the rare breed of writers who still believe that the best of literature must be approachable – in fact you see it in his own writing too. I remembered Pankaj Mishra’s words as I closed on the last chapter: “...on days when I’m far away from Mashobra, in very different landscapes, I only have to see a patch of mellow light on a lawn, only have to feel a fresh bracing quality in the air...” Sparkling prose does that to you I suppose, it makes the journey to the larger world lighter.

The Book of Indian Essays: Two Hundred Years Of English Prose

Indian Women Writers in English

The first major women writer is Kamala Markandaya who is an immigrant writer, her ten novels present remarkable range of characters from poor peasant women in Nectar in Sieve, through the urban poor of A Handful of Rice to the higher class in The Golden honey comb. The conflict between tradition and modernity, East and West runs through all of her novels. She also throws light on how the development is amounting to a kind of neo-colonialism and racial prejudice, of which she has first-hand experience, against, Indian emigrants in Britain. The next major woman writer is Nayantara Sahagal. Her novels reveal a close acquaintance with the political elite, major political and national events which form the background to each her eight novels.

Her novels present the life of the richest sections of Indian society, their hypocrisy and shallow values. At the same time she is concerned with the Indian heritage and its value for the educated Indian. A Time to Happy articulates the problem of identity faced by the English-educated elite and exploration of the fate of women within domestic sphere. Her later novels Rich Like us, Plans for Departure, and Mistaken Identity depict the slow erosion of values among both civil servants and people at large.

Another important woman novelist is Anita Desai, if Shahagal depicts political circumstance, Kamala Markandaya Social circumstance, Anita Desai concentrates on the psychology of her women characters. She believes writing is a process of discovering truth, the truth is nineteenth of the iceberg that lies submerged beneath the one tenth visible oration we call reality. She says her novels are no reflection of Indian Society, politics or characters. Anita Desai depicts a confidently the plight of educated upper-middle class women. Desai's westernised, educated women protagonists seem to have the luxury of freedom of choice but deeper analysis reveals them to be frustrated and emotionally dependent.

Her characters range from daughter, young wife, middle aged wife, mother, to grandmother. All these women tend too be fragile introverts. Most of her novels reveal the breakdown of relationships material or familial. In later novels In Custody and Baumgartner's Bombay, Anita Desai has switched over to male centered plots. Anita Desai's novels are experimentations in the latest narrative techniques. Her novels are marvelous presentation of the fever and fretfulness of the stream of consciousness of her principal characters. Anita Desai has found it necessary to explore the inner as well as the out climate and to disperse the narration in the flow of several sensibilities. The Cry the Peacock consists almost entirely of Maya's interior monologue. It is a brilliant impressionistic novel. For the stream of consciousness technique Anita Desai indebted to the pioneering attempts of Proust, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is another woman writer whether she is an Indian writer or not is an interesting problem. But in an interview she herself has said that she should not be considered as Indian writer, but one of the European writers who have written about India. She has written many short stories and about twelve novels. The important theme of her work is reactions of the westernised protagonist and their conventional Indian families to the subject of arranged marriage and romantic love.

The major women writers who have started writing after 1980s are Shashi Depshapande, Gita Hiraharan, Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai. When their counterpart novelists after 1980s assert that they have a right to rewrite national history, these women writers also claim that they have their own say about what constitutes the nation. Shashi Deshapande is a leading writer dealing with situation of women in urban, middle class in her The Dark Holds No Terror, Roots and Shadow, That Long Silence and Small Remedies. The Binding Vine depicts fears, hopes and uncertainties of an urban middle class consciousness. Here she has recorded the unrecorded and translation acts as a metaphor to signify the gaps.

She employs a kind of stream of consciousness technique. Her characters and situation are presented in a realistic mode. Gita Hariharan is another important woman writer who does show interest in experimentation, her A Thousand Faces of Nights and The Ghosts of Vasu Master are concerned with rewriting folktales and children stories. She insists the necessity of reconstruction from the dismantled parts of various ideas, beliefs and models because those are our inheritance. Traditions, beliefs and folklore should not be considered as mean, irrelevant, outdated and closed. But indeed they are tested truths, relevant, useful, vibrant and open source for writing about present needs.

Arundathi Roy is another important woman writer, who employs post modern and post colonial devices like magic realism, allegory and goes back to history, myths and traditions. She focuses on the identity crisis and records the unrecorded. In her Man Booker Prize winning novel The God of small Things, places her heroine, in the context of traditional Hindu narratives. Her divorcee heroine struggles hard against the fate laid out by convention. This novel provides a powerful imaginative statement of the way people can find themselves trapped outside' their own history. She also records the dislocations between the 'Small God' of individual lives and the 'Big God' of the nation.

Some of the common themes run through most the novels of these women writers are the discrimination against the daughter, the silence of women, no recognition of their talent, conflict between modernity and tradition, East and West and the lack of communication between the sexes. A number of women novelists have made their debut in the nineties. Their first novels are quite effective in revealing the true state of Indian society when it comes to the treatment of women. All these writers were born after independence and English does not have any colonial associations for them. Their work is marked by an impressive feel for the language and authentic presentation of contemporary India, with all its regional variations. Generally they write about the urban middle class the stratum of society they belong and know best.

Traditionally, the work of Indian Women Writers has been undervalued due to patriarchal assumptions about the superior worth of male experience. The factors contributing to this prejudice is the fact that most of these women writers have observed no domestic space. The Indian women's perceptions of their aspirations and expectations are within the framework of Indian social and moral commitments. Indian Women Writers in English are victims of a second prejudice vis-a-vis their regional counterpart's.

Proficiency in English is available only to writers of the intelligent, affluent and educated classes. Writer's works are often therefore, belong to high social strata and cut off from the reality of Indian life. As, Chaman Nahal writes about feminism in India: "Both the awareness of woman's position in society as one of disadvantage or in generality compared with that of man and also a desire to remove those is advantages."

The majority of novels written by Indian women writers depict the psychological sufferings of the frustrated homemakers. This subject matter is often considered superficial compared to the depiction of the replaced and oppressed lives of women. Indian writing in English is now gaining ground rapidly. In the realm of fiction, it has heralded a new era and has earned many laurels both at home and abroad. Indian women writers have started questioning the prominent old patriarchal domination.

They are no longer puppets in the hands of man. They have shown their worth in the field of literature both qualitatively and quantitatively and are showing it even today without any hurdle. Today, the works of Kamla Markandaya, Nayantara Sahgal, Anita Desai, Geetha Hariharan, Shashi Deshpande, Kiran Desai and Manju Kapur and many more have left an indelible imprint on the readers of Indian fiction in English. A major development in modern Indian fiction is the growth of a feminist or women centred approach, that seeks to project and interpret experience, from the point of a feminine consciousness and sensibility.

Many Indian women novelists have explored female subjectivity in order to establish an identity. The theme is from childhood to womanhood-developed society respecting women in general. Santha Rama Rau's' Remember for the House, (1956), Ruth Prawar Jhabvala"s first novel 'To whom she will', 1955 and her later novel 'Heat and Dust' (1975), Kamla Markandya's 'Two Virgins' (1994), Rama Mehta's 'Inside the Haveli' (1977), and Gaeta Hariharan 'The Thousand Faces of Night' (1992). Are some of the leading women writers writing in Indian English literature? The image of women in fiction has undergone a change during the last four decades.

Women writers have moved away From traditional portrayals of enduring self-sacrificing women, towards conflicts, female characters searching for identity; no longer characterized and defined simply in terms of their victim status. A major preoccupation in recent Indian women's writing has been a delineation of inner life and subtle interpersonal relationships.

In a culture where individualism and protest have often remained alien ideas and marital bliss and the woman's role at home is a central focus. It is interesting to note the emergence of not just an essential Indian sensibility but an expression of cultural displacement. Women's presentation is more assertive, more liberated in their view and more articulate in their expression than the woman of the past is.

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HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF INDIAN WRITING IN ENGLISH

English language (literature) contains some of the finest utterances of life and conduct. In it we have The Authorized Version of the Bible, the perfection of the English language. It is the language with which Shakespeare held the "mirror upto nature" to show "virtue her image and vice its own countenance"; the language with which Milton tried to assert eternal providence, "And justify the ways of God to men", the language through which Darwin expounded his "theory of evolution", "struggle for existence" and "survival of the fittest". Through it, Mill preached the gospel of liberty and Bentham, the theory of the 'greatest good of the greatest number'. Arnold used it for the spared of 'sweetness and light' and Newman for putting forward his theory of 'knowledge its own end', Shaw for speaking of 'socialism' and Wells showing for the 'Shape of Things to Come'. With it Burke carried on his campaign of 'no taxation without representation' and Morley warned the bureaucracy that: 'bulling is no governing'. Thus English language has given expression to great social ideas and great political ideas. In the same language has been written literature by indian authors and the recognition of their writings has evolved a term "Indo-Anglian Literature"-but recently the Indianans in such writings has come finally" to be known as "Indian Writing in English." There is unanimity among literary historians and scholars that Indian creative writing in English had begun even before Macaulay " s Minute on Indian Education (1835) was accepted and edorsed by Lord William Bentick, the Governor-General of Indian at that time 1. Yet there is considerable disagreement, often verging on confusion, as to the term one should employ in describing and identifying this area of writing. As one reviews the development of this literature. one becomes keenly aware of the necessity to agree on a comprehensive descriptive term for it, thus assisting in giving credibility to this literature.

Realist perspective views survival and security of state as supreme national interest in international system characterized by anarchy. Each nation state attempts to maximize its power to promote its national interest at the expense of others. The international system is defined in terms of great powers like bipolar, unipolar and multipolar world and that great power tends to exercise hegemony. Any foreign policy and decision of political leaders must be assessed in terms its outcome. This perspective became dominant framework for explaining foreign policy behavior after Second World War.

Languages belonging to four language families such as Indo - Aryan, Astro - Asiatic (Munda), Dravidian and Tibeto - Burman are spoken in our country. Among them Dravidian, the second largest spoken language family of the Indian subcontinent is mainly spoken in South Indian states - Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamilnadu and Telangana. The word ‘Dravidian’ from Sanskrit adjectival term dravida- was first used by Robert Caldwell. There are about 26 Dravidian languages (The Dravidian Languages Bhadriraju Krishnamurti, 2003) as mentioned by various scholars. Among these only four literary languages namely Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam are well civilized and are recognized by our Indian constitution. The Dravidian languages are classified into three subgroups while Telugu is considered as South Central Dravidian language

Women's life in India and the world over are bounded by what can be termed as five 'Ps' Patriarchy; Productive resources access inadequacy, Poverty, Promotion advancement insufficiency and Powerlessness". It is estimated that women do two-thirds of the world's work. In replace they obtain only 10 percent of all the returns and own a mere one percent of the whole world's income of production. It is a fact that the actual social grade and the genuine rank of political participation of women cannot be analyzed in isolation. On the converse it is interlinked with the socio-economic conditions, political environment and inequalities inherent in the customary social structure, its norms and values, customs and rituals. All these factors jointly centerline the actual social position of women. The pillars of democracy like liberty, equality, fraternity, justice etc. are well-built sufficient to maintain and protect the people from the challenges posed by man-made inequalities. Thus the study of the character and level of political participation and its resultant empowerment can be evaluated only on the basis of the availability of democratic values. Empowerment is not quality as achieving supremacy to govern others, but rather power to act with others to effect change. Political participation is a major element of empowerment. The present paper highlights the situation of women from the ancient

accommodation industry and have become one of the most competitive businesses in the world in recent years (Harrison & Enz, 2005). For example, lodging in the India was a $108 billion industry, with over 536,500 hotels and 4.1 million guestrooms in 2006 (The Hotel & Lodging Association, 2006).

Muhammad Abdul Halim Abdullah was one of the most distinguished Arabic fiction writers in the middle of the twentieth century. After the Second World War he brought vitality in Arabic fiction writing. In his novel writing we can observe many genres: romantic novels, social realistic novels, and historical novel. As far as the social issues are concerned, we can illustrate from his best known novels like „Al-Jannah al-„Adra‟, „Laqita‟ etc. They are basically social realistic fictions where the writer has depicted the true picture of his society and expressed his inner feelings and emotions. In this article, I would like to sketch a conflicting picture between the poor and the rich; and also between the upper class and the lower class where the powerful authorities of the society discriminate the poor class people and the elite classes of people despise the lower class to be part with them.

Human rights are for human and to save humanity. Today the terrorism is a bolt over the humanity. Whole world is suffering from the same virus whish is terrorism. Terrorism is not an issue for only India or Asia but it covered whole world by its bed wings. The bed wings of terrorism ruining the humanity. The Human rights is feels like shame on this day. If Human rights are there to protect the human than the Humanity is in big danger. All Developed and Developing countries have a mark of blood on its history dealing with terrorism. Many innocent get murdered by terrorism. The result of terrorism is many countries wasting their money

History is a great teacher for the coming generations as it consists of deeds and mistakes made by erstwhile kings, warriors, social and religious leaders and thinkers and important personalities who could change the course of life and destiny of persons, communities, states, countries and the world at large. The worst thing that happened while writing of the history of any community, religious sect and nation is that it has always been subjective and biased as the historians and the persons who prevailed upon historians have given their own versions and interpretations, mostly what suited to their personal and community interests. History of India and Pakistan before 1947 was one and the same but in school and college curriculums of history teaching of both the countries after partitions one surprisingly detects are the vast differences in the narration of the same event and

The paper delineates the role effectiveness of culture, values and traditions in the present day business scenario particularly in the Indian context. Whatever might be the change in any field, the prime element is “human beings”, who should not be brushed aside as normal or simple factors. The discussion clearly brings out the fact that the whole transformation on HRM practices portrays a travel from idealism to realism and from the „employees” ascending the status of “co-owners” to match the galloping changes in the sphere of people management practices per forced by the objective of harnessing the best talent, a scarce component commanding an unparalleled demand. To harness and attain this kind of workforce, it is essential for all organisations to have a bastion in terms of the culture, values and attitudes amongst their employees. This paper attempts to accentuate on these vital aspects and their impact on the organisational culture as a whole.

The present paper deals with the factors which led to the rise, growth and evolution of Punjabi Journalism during freedom struggle. Here the Punjabi Journalism means from the printed material in different forms such as newspapers, journals, magazines, pamphlets, bills etc. in Gurmukhi. This period was considered a crucial one because of the social, religious and political events. It tries to draw the outcome of the Punjabi Journalism in all round awakening of socio-religious and political milieu of the nation leading it to the gate of liberation, which in the absence of the Punjabi Journalism would not have been achieved. However, in this chapter a detailed background of its growth and development has been traced out.

Sudhaveni Naresh

Emigration is not a new phenomenon in India but globalization has reinforced it. India has been a source of emigrants for many countries for a long period. Over 25 million Indian diaspora is spread across the world. Historically, during the British rule indenture labour from India was sent to other colonies. To regulate indentured emigration and to provide a mechanism for emigration, the British India government enacted Emigration Act, 1922. After independence, a majority of unskilled and semi-skilled labour emigrated to Gulf and South-East Asia, whereas white-collar workers preferred North America, Europe and Australia. They are contributing to both the economies in origin and destination. Due to increasing quantum of emigration, the Ministry of Labour enacted Emigration Act, 1983, which deals with the emigration of Indian workers for overseas employment on contractual basis, seeks to safeguard emigrants’ interest and ensures their welfare. The paper explains the reason behind enacting Emigration Act, 1983, and the changes in the form of an Emigration (Amendment) Rules, 2009. This paper examines the current status, effectiveness of the Act and rules. Keywords: Emigration Act, 1983, Emigrants, Remittance, Economic Growth

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Indian Writing in English (An Anthology of Prose and Poetry Selections)
Ap Prose Essay Example Lit Examples 2019 Thesis 2020
Prose: Definition and Helpful Examples of Prose in Literature • 7ESL
Prose Essay 1
The text presents characteristics of contemporary Indian English poetry in a general way with a
The success of this anthology of 200 years of English essays from India is that it is for everyone

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The Book of Indian Essays: Two Hundred Years Of English Prose
Indians have been writing prose and poetry in English for the past two centuries. Anthologies of the country's poets and poems have appeared regularly, but it is difficult to come across a wide-ranging historical anthology of the Indian essay in English.
PDF Background to the Indian Prose
Write about major Indian English prose writers. 5.1 Introduction Friends, this chapter will introduce you to the history of Indian English prose. It will provide you with information of the growth of ... His English works are mostly journalistic essays which appeared in his own weekly papers. The essays were on Vedanta, to
Indian English literature
The first book written by an Indian in English was The Travels of Dean Mahomet, a travel narrative by Sake Dean Mahomed, published in England in 1794. IEL, in its early stages had influence from The Western novel . Early Indian writers used English unadulterated by Indian words to convey an experience which was essentially Indian.
Gems, rare and otherwise, of Indian-English prose, finally in one place
The Book of Indian Essays: Two Hundred Years of English Prose. Edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. Black Kite in association with Ashoka University and Hachette India, 446 pages, Rs 699. In the 1990s, the English-language publishing in India was yet to go in the overdrive, and it produced many gems that made a special place in the hearts of many ...
Indian Writing In English English Literature Essay
The term "Anglo-Indian literature" is used to denote the writing of Englishmen in English about India and Indian life. Their works are significant as they serve to interpret India to the west. However, their presentation of Indian life is often romantic rather than realistic.
Essay on Indian Writing in English
Indian literature in English actually dates back to the 1830s to Kashiprasad Ghosh, who is considered the first Indian poet write in English. Sochee Chunder Dutt was the first writer of fiction. In the beginning, however, political writing in the novel or essay format was dominant, as can be seen in Raja Rammohan Roy' works.
An Introduction to Indian Writing in English
Indian writing in English has commended unstinted admiration in both home and abroad, is now in its full swing. It has carved out a new track, a new vision - a vision that is replete with an un answering faith and hope, myths and traditions, customs and rites etc.
How to Write the AP Lit Prose Essay
A prose passage of approximately 500 to 700 words and a prompt will be given to guide your analytical essay. Worth about 18% of your total grade, the essay will be graded out of six points depending on the quality of your thesis (0-1 points), evidence and commentary (0-4 points), and sophistication (0-1 points).
12 Classic Essays on English Prose Style
F.L. Lucas on Stylistic Honesty. As the police put it, anything you say may be used as evidence against you. If handwriting reveals character, writing reveals it still more. . . . Most style is not honest enough. Easy to say, but hard to practice. A writer may take to long words, as young men to beards—to impress.
Essay on Prose
Skim this samples catalog, select an essay about Prose that suit your needs, and use it as a model to follow while writing your own paper. Expectedly, thanks to having proper Prose essay examples in front of you, you will be able to fulfill your task much quicker and at a higher level. Yet, assistance WePapers.com is prone to lend to Prose ...
A priceless collection of 200 years of Indians writing prose and poetry
To this end, the 45 essayists in the anthology include some of the best-known Indian writers of English, including Jawaharlal Nehru, Aubrey Menen, G.V. Desani, Dom Moraes, Sheila Dhar, Madhur Jaffrey, Amitav Ghosh, Anita Desai, Chitrita Banerji, Mukul Kesavan and Pankaj Mishra, to mention just a few.
Indian Writing in English (An Anthology of Prose and Poetry Selections
We will begin with an introduction to Indian English poetry and narrate a brief history of the critical paradigms that have been used to critique it. We will then go on to discuss the life and writings of the four poets included in this anthology, to provide their writing a context and a framework. Indian English Poetry
Journey of Indian English Drama
Basically, the Indian Writings in English during Modern Age articulate the budding and the already present writers as well as the influence of Existentialism, Globalisation, Surrealism, Dadaism, Magic Realism and the Post Colonial issues.
A priceless collection of 200 years of Indians writing prose and poetry
To this end, the 45 essayists in the anthology include some of the best-known Indian writers of English, including Jawaharlal Nehru, Aubrey Menen, G.V. Desani, Dom Moraes, Sheila Dhar, Madhur Jaffrey, Amitav Ghosh, Anita Desai, Chitrita Banerji, Mukul Kesavan and Pankaj Mishra, to mention just a few.
Prose
Prose is a form of written or spoken language that follows the natural flow of speech, uses a language's ordinary grammatical structures, or follows the conventions of formal academic writing. It differs from most traditional poetry, where the form consists of verse (writing in lines) based on rhythmic metre or rhyme.
An anthology compiles 200 years of 'Indian' prose and poetry in English
To this end, the 45 essayists in the anthology include some of the best-known Indian writers of English, including Jawaharlal Nehru, Aubrey Menen, G.V. Desani, Dom Moraes, Sheila Dhar, Madhur Jaffrey, Amitav Ghosh, Anita Desai, Chitrita Banerji, Mukul Kesavan and Pankaj Mishra, to mention just a few.
'The Book of Indian Essays' review: Inside the club compound
The sub-heading of this book is 'Two Hundred Years of English Prose', and as you begin to flip the pages you understand that this means non-fiction pieces in English written by Indians. For a...
Ram Mohan Roy || Writing in Indian English Literature
Rammohan had written extensively and his writing have been edited by Kalidas Nag and Debajyoti Burman under the title - "English works of Raja Ram Mohan Roy" amount is English words there as many as 25 original passage on various subjects. The earliest of his writings on religion were in the form of translations - An Abridgement of the Vedant ...
The success of this anthology of 200 years of English essays from India
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, editor of the anthology. "The essay, like a penknife, can be put to many uses; like a newspaper aeroplane, it can fly and crash and fly again; as a literary genre, it is ...
Indian Women Writers in English
19th Century Women Posts of Victorian era. undefined. Ismat Chugtai: Writer in Indian English literature. Bharti Mukherjee: writing in English literature. The first major women writer is Kamala Markandaya who is an immigrant writer, her ten novels present remarkable range of characters from poor peasant women in Nectar in Sieve, through the ...
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF INDIAN WRITING IN ENGLISH
The separate categories that have been suggested by critics and literary historians helped to distinguish original Indian writing in English from other Indian literature in English that for some time has been erroneously accepted under this title.Inspite of this specific categorizations, there are critics who hesitate to accept either of the ...
Essays in English, Essay writing in English Topics, Format
Essay on Digital India in English. Essay of Digital India in English. Objectives of Digital India Article. What is Digital India? It was launched on 1 July 2015.In 2015, the Government of India launched a massive campaign named "Digital India". This was done to make the government services accessible in various parts of the country.