A Short Literary Background : Indo-Anglian Literature

  The term “Indo-Anglian” is used to denote original literary creation is the English language written by Indians.

Early Poets:

Henry Derozio’s volume of poems published in 1823

Kashiprasad Ghose published his volume of poetry entitled The Shair and the Other Poems in 1830.

Early Novelists:

Bankim Chandra Chatterjee became the first Indian writer of Indian English novel. He wrote Rajmohan’s Wife (1864)

S.K.Ghosh’s One Thousand and One Nights

S.B. Banerjee’s Indian Detective Stories

Toru Dutt’s  Bianca or The Young Sapnish Maiden

Ramesh Chandra Dutt wrote novels in Bengali. Two of them were translated into English; The Slave Girl of Agra

The Lake of Palms

Early Playwrights

1^st Indian play in English:  The Persecuted (1832)

Rabindranath Tagore and Shri Aurobindo Ghosh were the pioneers of Indian English Drama

 

 

The early phase of Indian English Literature (1830-1880) was called The Phase of Imitation 

  

The 2^nd phase was that of Indianisation; began with the works of Toru Dutt. (later 19^th century) She began her poetic career with A Sheaf Gleaned in Friench Fields.

She wrote Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan (1883)

Michael Madhusudan Dutt, a Bengali Poet, wrote Visions of the Past(1848) and The Captive Ladies

Shoshee Chander Dutt’s A Vision of Sumeru and Other Poems imitated English verse and style

Greece Chunder’s Cherry Blossoms, a series of sonnets, was also imitative of English models.

B.M. Malabari’s The Indian Muse (poems) and The Indian Eye on English Life (prose work)

Manmohan Ghosh’s His Love Songs and Elegies (1898)

His Songs of Love and Death  was published posthumously in 1926.

Sarojini Naidu was a famous Indo Anglian Poet of 20^th century. Her The Golden Threshold, The Bird of Time  and The Broken Wing were Indian in spirit, thought, emotion and imagery.

Rabindranath Tagore was the greatest of Indians writing in English. His Gitanjalii is a transcreation of the Bengali original. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for this work.

Aurobindo Ghosh (1890-1950) was another great Indo Anglian poet, prophet and seer who wrote lyrics, narrative poems, a comic epic and many philosophical poems.

 

The third phase (beginning of 20^th century) was that of national consciousness where the writers wrote and interpreted the mind and heart of the India to the west.

 

Indo-Anglian Poetry of the Post-Independence Era

These poets had experimental approach, quest for originality and newness, stress on individuality and they rejected all that was traditional. Some important poets:

Dom Moraes

Nissim Ezekiel

P.Lal

Kamala Das

A.K. Ramanujan

 

 

Post Independent Indian writings were marked with experimentation and individual talent.

Many novels were about the Gandhian struggle for freedom, ideals o f the Indian struggle for freedom: K.S. Venkataramani’s Murugan, The Tiller (1927) and Kandan, The Patriot (1932)

Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1932) and Coolie (1936)

Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938)

Some other notable novelists: 

K. Nagarajan, 

Bhabhani Bhattacharya, 

Manohar Malgaonkar,

 Khushwant Singh, 

Balachandra Rajan, 

Kamala Markandaya 

and 

Anita Desai.

 

 

Writers like Mulk Raj Anand wrote about poverty, hunger and disease; portrayal of widespread social evils and tensions; examination of the survivals of the past; exploration of the hybrid culture of the educated Indian middle class; analysis of the innumerable dislocations and conflicts in a tradition-ridden society under the impact of a half developing, half hearted industrialisation.

Some other themes of novels were inter-racial relations, The Indian national movement and the struggle for freedom, partition of India and the death, destruction and suffering caused by it. Train to Pakistan is about the partition agony.

Depiction of hunger and poverty of Indians—Bhabhani Bhattacharya’s So Many Hungers

Indian rural life--- K.S. Venkataramani’s Murugan, The Tiller

Conflict between modernity and tradition –Untouchable

Conflict between the east and the west

Themes of loneliness, rootlessness, the exploitation of the psyche and the inner man have been dealt with by Anita Desai in her novels like Cry the Peacock and Voices in the City and by Aren Joshi in his The Foreigner