INDIAN LITERATURE: DIALECTICS OF CONTINUITY

AND CHANGE
1900 AD -- 2000 AD

The term Indian literature can be very problematic because of variety of

languages in which it is written and different regional identities of the writers and
cultural specificities constantly emerging in their writings. However, one is
accustomed to using the term in the singular when one refers to literature in India
and uses plural when referring to the languages. There is no doubt that at any
given moment the common patterns as manifested in the literary texts in different
languages can be accepted on one single level of organization and hence in spite
of the tension between Indian ness and regional specificities, between kshetra
(region) and desa (nation state), these texts create a sense of unity in literature.
But this unity of Indian literature emerges only when one understands it in the
pluralistic context or in the context of cultural diversity. Indian literature
demonstrates unity through acknowledgement of differences.

The Idea of Indian Literature

The idea of Indian literature is not based on language literature equation

because of Indias multilingual situation and writers writing in many languages
and hence identification of Indian literature only by its affiliation to a particular
language is not possible. The literature of India is not identified in terms of
language alone, or geographical territory or political unity but more as
recognition of the relationship existing between the people and literature. This
sense of communality is responsible in the development of a cultural space by
the writers of India which is more stable and abiding than a political concept of a
nation state. The idea of Indian literature gives us a perception which recognizes
the relationship between literatures in different Indian languages, each having its
own peculiar character and temperament and identifies certain features cutting
across the limitation of ethnic, religious and linguistic boundaries. In Indian
literature the vibrant Indian ness emerges only when one understands it in its
pluralistic context hence any study of Indian literature is an inter-lingual study of
literature written in twenty-two Indian languages recognized by the constitution
of India. It reveals the features of commonality as well as wonderful diversities
expressed in different Indian languages. It ensures that all groups can preserve

1
their own diversity yet each individual is linked to the mainstream and that every
stream in its own way is the mainstream.
A certain homogenizing impulse is inherent in positing a category called
Indian literature because the term makes its appearance in literary discourse
around the time India came to be perceived and imagined as a nation. It was
during the colonial period that India came to be projected as a nation, as a
collective super organism with its separate history and destiny. However, India
and Indian literature had existed as ideas and images in creative writing in the
country for centuries but they began to emerge as critical concepts and tools of
comparison probably only in the nineteenth century when the Western scholars,
inspired by the affinity between European and IndoAryan languages, began to
study the literatures in Sanskrit, Pali and Prakrit that they called Indian
Literature. Unlike in West European countries where the nation states and
national literatures were constituted by the same historical movement, Indian
literature had attained its civilisational and historical unity much before India
attained nationhood. It is true that idea of a modern state took root in Indian
society because of Indias contact with western ideas, but very soon, Indian
writers like Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (Bengali, 1838-1894) made use of this
newly acquired notion of nationalism to attack the colonial rule and created a
distinctive civilizational concept of universalism that was accepted by many as a
reply to Western Colonialism. Revivalism and reformism were natural corollaries
of the newly emerging idea of nationalism. Rabindra Nath Tagore (Bengali,
1861-1941), the greatest name in modern Indian literature made federalism an
important part of his concept of national ideology. He said that the unity of India
has been and shall always be a unity in diversity. The foundation for this
tradition had been laid in India at the social and not at the political level, by
medieval saints like Nanak, Kabir, Chaitanya, Tukaram and others. It is this
solutionunity through acknowledgement of differencesthat India has to offer
to the world. As a result, Indias nationalism is mingled with its spiritual tradition
with truth and non-violence preached by Mahatma Gandhi in the beginning of
the twentieth century and non-alignment advocated by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru,
after India became a sovereign state in 1947, which demonstrated Indias concern
for its pluralism. Modern Indian pluralism is a multi lingual, multi-cultural,
secular, nationstate concept.

Back ground

The Renaissance

In almost all the Indian languages, the modern age begins from 1800 AD
or near that time. The impact of western civilization, the rise of political
consciousness, and the change in society could be seen in what was written

2
during that time. The founding of the college of Fort William in Calcutta in 1800
AD, symbolizes the consolidation of British supremacy in India and the cultural
programme for political purposes that the British contemplated at that time.
Contact with the Western World resulted in Indias acceptance of western
thought on the one hand, and rejection of it on the other, and as a result efforts
were made to revive Indias ancient glory and Indian consciousness. A large
number of writers opted for a synthesis between Indianization and
Westernization, in their search for a national ideology. All these attitudes were
combined to bring about the renaissance in 19th century India. But it was a
renaissance in a country which was under foreign domination. So it was not the
kind of renaissance which had spread in 14th15th century Europe, where
scientific reasoning, individual freedom and humanism were the dominant
characteristics. The Indian renaissance took a different shape, in the context of
Indian race, milieu and moment, and as a result, nationalistic, reformist and
revivalist thinking found its way into literature, which slowly turned itself into a
pan-Indian movement spearheaded in different parts of the country by
renaissance leaders like Raja Rammohun Roy (1772-1833), Bankimchandra
Chatterjee, Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Swami Vivekananda, Madhav
Govind Ranade, U.V. Swaminatha Aiyer, Swami Dayanand, Gopal Krishna
Gokhale, K.V. Pantulu, Narmadashankar, Lavshankar Dave, and others. The
leaders of the renaissance, in fact, succeeded in instilling nationalistic fervour in
the people, and induced in them a desire for social reform and a sentimental
yearning for their past glory.
It is true that the idea of a modern state took root in Indian society
because of Indias contact with western ideas, but very soon Indian writers like
Bankimchandra Chatterjee (1838-1894) and others made use of this newly
acquired concept of nationalism to attack colonial rule, and in the process created
their own brand, of nationalism, rooted in the soil. Bankimchandra wrote many
historical novels like Durgesh Nandini (1865) and Anand Math (1882), acquired
a pan-Indian popularity and made nationalism and patriotism a part of Dharma.
This alternative was a distinctive civilisational concept of universalism that was
accepted by many as a reply to western colonialism. Revivalism and reformisms
were natural corollaries of the new emerging idea of nationalism. As a result,
Indias nationalism is mingled with its spiritual tradition, with truth and tolerance
preached by Mahatma Gandhi, and non-alignment advocated by Pundit
Jawaharlal Nehru, showing Indias concern for its pluralism.
Patriotic writings proliferated almost spontaneously in different
languages, as the resistance of a community against foreign rule and the voice of
the poets became more pronounced after 1857. Rangalal in Bengali, Mirza
Ghalib in Urdu and Bharatendu Harishchandra in Hindi expressed themselves as
the patriotic voice of that era. This voice was, on the one hand, against colonial
rule, and on the other, for the glorification of India. Besides, Mirza Ghalib
(1797-1869) wrote ghazals in Urdu, about love, with unusual imagery and

3
metaphors. He accepted life both as a joyous existence and as a dark and painful
experience. Michael Mdhusudan Dutt (1824-1873) wrote the first modern epic in
an Indian language, and naturalized blank verse in Bengali. He was a typical
example of the young Bengalan epithet meant for a batch of young students
who accepted the western education and knowledge but were rebels and
challenged the traditional poetic sensibility and developed a true national
consciousness. Subramania Bharati (1882-1921) was the great Tamil patriot-
poet, who revolutionized the poetic tradition in Tamil. Radhanath Ray (1848-
1908) in Oriya effected a change in taste and approach as well as in literary
sensibility and style. Kerala Verma and Raja Raja Varma were the renaissance
writers in Malayalam. Themes from anthology or history were taken up to write
epics, by Maithilisaran Gupta (1886-1964) in Hindi, Bhai Vir Singh (1872-1957)
in Punjabi and others, with the express purpose of fulfilling the needs of the
patriotic reader.
The birth of the novel is associated with the social reform-oriented
movement of the 19th century. This new genre, borrowed from the west, is
characterized by a spirit of revolt, right from its adoption into the Indian system.
The first Tamil novel, Pratap Mudaliyar Charitram (1879) by Samuel V. Pillai,
the first Telugu novel, Sri Ranga Raja Charitra (1872) by Krishnamma Chetty,
and the first Malayalam novel, Indu Lekha (1889) by Chandu Menon were
written with didactic intentions and to re-examine evil social customs and
practices like untouchability, caste distinctions, denial of remarriage of widows,
etc. In other first novels, like the Bengali novel, Phulmani O Karunar Bibaran
(1852), by an English woman, H. Catherine Mullens, or the Hindi novel,
Pariksha Guru (1882) by Lala Sriniwas Das, one can discover shared patterns of
response and articulation towards social problems. Fakirmohan Senapati (1843-
1918) of Oriya wrote about common people and their problems and was the first
Indian novelists of social realism. The writings of Vishnu Shasri Chiplunkar
(1800-1882) and of Gopal Ganesh Agarkar (1856-1895) and B.G. Tilak (1856-
1920) created a new social awareness in the Maharastrian society.
Historical novels were written by Bankimchndra Chatterjee, Hari Narayan
Apte (Marathi) and others to describe the glorious past of India, and to instill
nationalist fervour in her people. Ushakal (1895) is the most popular of Aptes
historical novels on Shivaji. C.V. Raman Pillai (1858-1922) wrote historical
novels in Malayalam to create a pantheon of heroes to inspire the people with
high ideals. Novels were found to be the most appropriate medium to eulogize
the intellectual and physical richness of the past, and reminded Indians about
their obligations and rights. The Indian writers revived a glorious past to
generate feelings of pride and encourage the spirit of sacrifice for the national
cause. In fact, in the 19th century, the idea of national identity emerged from
literature and most Indian writings turned into the voice of enlightenment. This
paved the way for India to understand the real, factual position by the time it
reached the threshold of the 20th century. It was during that time that Tagore

4
wrote the novel Gora (1910), to challenge colonial rule, colonial criteria and
colonial authority, and to give new meaning to Indian nationalism.

The emergence of Prose

The most important literary event that revolutionized literature was the
emergence of literary prose in all the modern Indian languages, and the advent of
the printing press, under the patronage of an Englishman, William Carey (1761-
1834), at Serampore, Bengal. It is true that Sanskrit and Persian had a vast body
of prose, but the necessity for prose in modern Indian languages, for use in
administration and higher education, led to the emergence of prose in different
Indian languages at the beginning of the modern period. The grammars and
word-books and the primers and readers for many of the modern Indian
languages were compiled by English scholars with the help of Indian Pundits and
Munshis. The birth of newspapers and periodicals in Indian languages between
1800 and 1850 was extremely important for the development of prose. Raja
Rammohun Roy gave an impetus to Bengali prose, and the missionaries of
Serampore started Bengali journalism on its career. Prose existed in Indian
languages but did not have a continuous tradition and was not properly
developed. One must concede that prose had a very limited sphere of application
and was hardly used, with a few exceptions in literary works. In the 19th century
when Indian writers desired to make use of the various western prose forms in
their respective languages they became aware of the potentiality and the
possibilities of prose as an effective instrument of literary and non-literary
communication. Christian missionaries and the officials of the East India
Company under their colonial agenda were also aware of its usefulness. After the
East India company took over the Diwani rights of Bengal, Bihar and North
Western Province (present day Uttar Pradesh) in 1765 Christian missionaries set
up text book societies in different parts of the country to teach languages and
then it became highly fashionable to translate all and sundry works of English
literature with the basic idea that it would strengthen Indian languages. The
Indian scholars attached to Fort William CollegeLalluji Lal, Sadal Misra, Mir
Amman, Ramram Basu, Mrityunjay Vidyalankar, Iswarchandra Vidyasagar and
othersmade significant contributions to the making of a new prose in their
respective languages. It is true that the prose written by foreign scholars was
artificial and the prose styles in modern Indian languages developed through
translations acquired an inevitable tenor and tone of translation language. They
are less supple than what they need to be. This colonial legacy is so firmly rooted
in contemporary Indian literary culture that often we find Indians making a nave
claim that literary prose is a positive and original contribution made by the
British to Indian culture. Indian prose writings, free from any foreign
intervention, first appeared in religious tracts and works on social problems. The
trend started with the publication of Rammohans Persian work Tuhfat-ul-

5
Muwahhdin in 1803 and it was backed by journalism carried through newspapers
and periodicals in different languages. And in the course of time Indian prose
became a strong instrument in the freedom movement when the war of
independence came in 1857, a bilingual newspaper in Persian and Devanagari
scripts entitled Payam-i-Azadi was started in Delhi. Its July 1857 issue carried
Bahadurshah Zafars message to Indians. I appeal to every citizen of India, to
all people of different religions, to wrest freedom from the cursed Feringee, call
an all-India Panchayat of able, wise and God-fearing people like the Haryana
Sarvakhep Panchayat, and let them draw up a constitution and administer the
country. I shall gladly transfer all my rights to that Panchayat. The emergence
of prose as a powerful medium brought a kind of change that coincided with the
process of modernization. Prose, in due course, became a very important vehicle
of literacy expression. Letters of Ghalib, Urdu-i-Mualla Ud-i-Hindi (1858) and
Chinna patra (1912) by Tagore are examples of informal prose writing which
later developed into personal essay. Religious debates fascinated almost all the
19th century intellectuals. Keshabchandra Sen, Swami Dayanand, Swami
Vivekananda, Vishnushastri Chiplunkar, Pandita Ramabai by their religious and
social writings contributed towards the growth of prose in different languages.
Bankimchandra Chatterjee wrote historical essays which were all published in
his journal Bangadarshan. Sir syed Ahmad Khan and Narmad wrote biographical
essays. Most of the writers were associated with one or more than one journals
which were used by them to express their views on various topics which played
distinctive roles in the growth of prose literature. Before the 19th century came to
an end a prose literature of immense merit came into existence in all the
languages. 20th century prose manifested itself in various genres and emerged as
a powerful instrument for human expressions. Lakshminath Bezbarua
(Assamese), Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi (Hindi), Ramachandra Shukla (Hindi),
N.S. Phadke (Marathi), Sanjayan (Malayalam), Puran Singh (Punjabi), Swami
Vedachalam (Tamil), Haraprasad Shastri and Tagore (Bengali) and others are
some of the best prose writers and because of their efforts it began to grow in
size, variety and quality. It helped in the growth of novel and short story.
Premchand, Tagore, K. Sukumaran, D.K. Kelkar, Puthumaipittan, Mokkapati
Narasimha Shastri, Masti and Rajshekar Basu used the form of short story and
contributed to the creation of a mosaic of opulence in prose.

Cultural nationalism

The dawn of the Modern Age in India is marked not so much by the
contact as by the conflict with the western civilization which gave rise to
political consciousness of India and which took a definite shape with the
founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885. But in Indian situation
because of a long tradition of religious humanism as propounded by the saint-
poets in all parts of the country, Indian nationalism grew as religiously

6
personified nationalism with accent on social purification and social reform. This
kind of nationalism generated love for the country, its culture, civilization and its
plurality of religions distinguished from any institutional religion. During the
days of freedom struggle there was a revival of interest in the devotional poetry
of the middle ages; songs of Mira and Kabir became popular. The devotional
poets did not sing of national freedom, but their songs reflected the same sense
of self-effacing dedicationdevotion to a cause at once deeply human, based on
equality and justice. The cultural manifestations of glorifying Indias past
revived the images of old heroes, gods and goddesses. The poets made a fervent
search for a myth which they discovered in the saga of lord Krishna, the
inexhaustible fountain of strength. Bankimchandra Chatterjee described the
geographical entity of the country as mother and Goddess, and in his song
Vandemataram included in his novel Anandamath (1882), he identified the
motherland with Durga, Lakshmi and Saraswati. The idea of a freedom
movement received spiritual elevation at Bankims hands. The Malayalam poet
Vallathol regards worship of the motherland and the mother-tongue as the two
sides of the same coin. Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) related the age-old values
of asceticism and non-violence to the needs of a modern mass movement and
nation building. His saintliness was a message in itself which attracted a large
number of people in the rural areas to see him and to listen to him. In fact the
songs of the Charans in Rajasthan and the Pavadas in Maharashtra were a
response of the village folk poets to the 1857 war of Independence which
indicate very strongly the existence of a separate stream of socio-political
patriotic poetry in Indias own tradition. This was the time when Swami
Vivekananda, following the path already set by Sri Ramakrishna, staged a
triumphal return from Chicago to address the youth of India to come forward and
conquer the whole world with the strength of Indias spirituality. And at the end
of the 19th century, Sri Aurobindo gave articulation to the aspirations of young
India a divining intention of the spirit of liberty, the beating of whose wings was
being heard over Asia. He inclined towards the growing extremist trend which
got a philip because of the British Governments announcement of the partition
of Bengal in 1905. The whole country stood like a solid block to oppose it and
paved the way for radicals to spread the ideals of militant nationalism which
inspired writers like Sharatchandra Chatterjee to write the novel Pather Dabi
(1926) to extol revolutionary nationalism. Before this Tagore in his novel Ghare
Baire (1916) heralded the emergence of political novel and both condemned and
extolled militant nationalism and which was, in fact, a display of ambivalence in
his perception of nationalism. In fact, in the first twenty years of the 20th Century
with the partition of Bengal, the Jalianwala Baga Massacre, the Rowlatt Act, and
such other events the national struggle was intensified focusing more on radical
nationalism. However at the same time Gandhis impact of non-violence
movement also attracted the writers of that age? This phase of anti-colonial and
reform oriented spiritual movements was a major thrust in the making of Indian

7
literature. On the one hand, the tradition of cultural nationalism was upheld to be
used as a handle to fight against colonial rule and on the other, the social
movements encouraged the re-examination of Tradition itself which contained
several retrogressive customs and practices like untouchability, caste
distinctions, denial of remarriage to widows, patriarchy that oppressed and
dominated women. This double battle promoted the ambivalence common to the
literary works of that time because most of the writers had a poor opinion of
mere political thinking. Tagore in a letter to a Gujarati poet wrote, The political
civilization which has sprung up from the soil of Europe and is over-coming the
whole world like some prolific weed, is based upon exclusiveness. Like Tagore,
writers like Vallathol, Kumaran Asan, Keshavsuta, Jaishankar Prasad, K.V.
Puttapa, D.R. Bendre, Veereshalingam, Gulam Ahmed Mehjoor, Nazrul Islam,
Subramania Bharati and many others revived through their writings the age-old
concept of cultural nationalism based on universal brotherhood. However, Tamil
poet Bharatidasan (1891-1962) became an ardent champion of Tamil culture and
extolled nadu(region) more than the desa(nation).

The advent of Mahatma Gandhi

In 1915 Mahatma Gandhi entered the political arena and his idealism
based on Satya and Ahmisa further enlarged the scope of Cultural nationalism.
Gandhi spoke the language of the common man and was for the outcastes. His
weapon was the weapon of truth and non-violence. He was for traditional values
and against industrialization. He very soon turned himself into a medieval saint
and a social reformer. Tagore called him Mahatma, a saint. Gandhi became the
theme of both poetry and fiction of cultural nationalism. He became an apostle of
peace and idealism. Satyendranath Datt, Kazi Nazrul Islam and Akbar
Allahabadi accepted Gandhi as a challenge to western civilization, and as an
assertion of the dignity of Asian Values. Gandhian beroes swamped the fictional
world of that time. Raja Rao, Tarashankar Bandhyopadhyaya, Premchand, V.S.
Khandekar, Saratchandra Chatterjee, Lakshmi Narayana, Mulkraj Anand all
created Gandhian protagonists as rural reformers or social workers with moral
and religious commitments. It was not the writers, but the people, who created
the Gandhi myth, and the writers, in their turn, used it effectively to mark a
period of great awakening. Saratchandra Chatterjee (1976-1938) was one of the
most popular Bengali novelists, whose popularity continues unabated even
today, not only among Bengali readers, but also among people in other parts of
India, by means of the numerous translations of his books, which are available in
various Indian languages. His pet theme was the man-woman relationship, and
he was well known for his portrayal of women, their sufferings and their often
unspoken love. He was both a Gandhian and a Socialist. Premchand (1880-1936)
wrote novels in Hindi. He was a true son of the soil, deeply attached to the land
of India and its people. He was the finest literary exponent of the Indian

8
peasantry in Indian literature. As a true Gandhian, he believed in the idealistic
theory of a change of heart in the exploiters. But in his magnum opus, Godan
(1936), he becomes a realist and records the suffering and struggle of the Indian
rural poor. K.M. Munshi (Gujarati), Hari Narayan Apte (Marathi), Lakshmi
Narayana (Telugu) wrote political novels under the influence of Gandhi.
Literature was crucial in the nationalist-patriotic cultural resistance to British rule
which encouraged a certain multilingual exchange through translation and
pointed out how language-centered regionalism and a nationalism that
transcended linguistic divisions could emerge as complementary notions.

Indian Romanticism

Another collective movement that gave a solid foundation to the idea of

Indian literature was romantic movement ushered in the second decade of the
twentieth century by three great forces which influenced the destiny of modern
Indian literature. These forces were Sri Aurobindos (1872-1950) search for the
divine in man, Tagores quest for the beautiful in nature and man, and Mahatma
Gandhis experiments with Truth and Non-violence. Sri Aurobindo through his
poetry and philosophical treatise, The Life Divine, presents the prospect of the
ultimate revelation of divinity in everything. He wrote mostly in English.
Tagores quest for beauty was a spiritual quest, which attained fruition in the
final realization that service to humanity is the best form of contact with God.
Tagore was aware of a supreme principle pervading nature and the entire
universe. This supreme principle or the unknown mystique is beautiful, because
it shines through the known, and it is only in the unknown that we have perpetual
freedom. Tagore, a many splendoured genius, wrote novels, short stories, essays
and dramas, and never ceased to try out new experiments. His collection of songs
in Bengali, Gitanjali (song-offerings) received the Nobel Prize in 1913. Tagores
influence, after the award, inspired writers of different Indian languages to
popularize the age of romantic poetry. This poetry in Hindi is known as
Chhayavad, the age of romantic mystery. In Kannda, it is Navodaya, the rising
Sun and in Oriya it is known as Sabuj, the age of green and in Malayalam
Kalpanikta (the age of imagination), Jai Shankar Prasad, Nirala, Sumitra Nandan
Pant, Mahadevi Verma, Vallathol, Kumaran Asan, G. Shankar Kurup. Kalindi
Charan Panigrahi, B. M. Srikantayya, Puttappa, Bendre, Vishwanath
Satyanarayana, Umashankar Joshi, and poets of other languages highlight
mysticism and romantic subjectivity in their poetry. The poets of Ravikiran
Mandal, a group of six poets in Marathi search for a hidden reality in nature.
This romantic pan-Indian movement according to many can be claimed with
some justification as the final phase of the Romantic movement that started in
Germany and appeared in different countries in Europe in successive stages and
there are others who think that the romantic writers in the Indian languages, have
through their poetry often attacked the European Romanticisms obscurantist

9
tendencies and high Brahmanism in orientialist constructions of India in the late
18th and early 19th centuries. One can refer to Malayalam, Hindi and Assamese
romantic poetry for the justification of this statement. It is no doubt that Indian
romantic poetry is not an imitation of western romantic poetry, but a spontaneous
expression of a particular state of mind and experience of the Indian poets which
they tend to demonstrate from time immemorial. One may, therefore, like to
concede that romantic sensibility of oneness of the self with nature and its
mystical manifestation and the humanist concept of universal man are age-old
poetic concepts which indicate the continuity of the poetic experience of the
literary mind of India. In every age some new insights covering the sensibility of
the age are added to keep the continuity of the romantic tradition ever vibrant
and dynamic. In fact, the romantic trend of the modern times follows the
tradition of Indian poetry, where romanticism indicates the vedantic oneness
between nature and man, more along the lines of Vedic symbolism and not
paganism. It is not western romantic ideal of return to nature, to the unconscious,
the realm of imagination or feeling but an affirmation of the organic relation of
man and nature, of the microcosm and the macrocosm, of the inner and the outer
world and of the interior and transcendent imagination. In Indian context, the
term romanticism is widely used as an umbrella term along with its local
manifestation. Indian romanticism is a reaction to the prosaic matter of factness
of the earlier mode. It created new diction, language, metrical structure and
symbolism. Its emotionalism lent itself to reformist and patriotic compositions
which, however, contrasted sharply with the public rhetoric of nationalist
literature especially in poetry. Its anti-industrial thrust which supported Gandhis
critique of colonialism influenced Gujarati poet Umashankar Joshi, Tamil poet
Subramania Bharati and Assamese poet Nilamani Phookan. Romanticism in
Indian context is not merely a literary attitude but is a part of a popular
programme for both national autonomy and social uplift and thus has a bigger
perspective than the British romantics and hence Tagore could so easily move
from romantic to God as an experience and then to affirmation of life. Suryakant
Tripathi Nirala from romanticism to social realism and again back to love and
devotion, Krishna Shastri from Bhavakavita to modern anxiety and questioning
and Shankar Kurup from the romantic to the modern. Mohammed Iqbal (1877-
1938), the greatest poet that Urdu has produced, second only to Ghalib, went
through initially a romantic-cum-nationalistic phase in his poetry. His best
collection of Urdu is Banga-i-Dara (1924). His quest for pan-Islamism did not
deter him in his concern for humanity at large. In his poem Iblis Ki majlis-e-
shewa Marx has been introduced as a Kalim without the light, he is the Christ
without the crucifix? Indian romanticism contributed to the definition of a
distinctive modern Indian self and even an alternative national identity in which
a poet introspectively became the site for the assertion and manifestation of
specific Indian literary traditions even while being under the influence of the
western, especially, British romantics. Indian romanticism is fraught with

10
 mysticismnot like English romanticism which wants to break puritanical
shackles, seeking joy in Hellenism. Poetry of this phase became a document of
the experiences of the poets search for the unknown, longing for beauty,
brooding over death and challenging the very scheme of things. It, however, did
not snap its links with the tradition, and drew inspiration and sustenance from
ancient texts, religious and secular. The literature of this period utilized lyrics
and moved from theocentricism to anthropocentrismfrom devotion to God to
devotion to the world, its beauties, man as a reflection to supernatural and mans
pursuit of joy and beauty. The acceleration of the independence movement and
the social and cultural reformation movements influenced it and made it also a
literature that examined social and nationalist issues

Progressive Literature

In the thirties, before India won independence and established itself as a

sovereign democratic republic, emphasis began to shift in Indian literature from
romantic individualism to social relations. The romanticisation of the past and
personification of nature and urge for advaita oneness began to give away to a
more realistic and critical approach to existing social institutions. The traditional
idealistic view of life gradually yielded to a greater concern for the socio-
economic conditions of the people. If earlier, in view of the movements for
social reform by the Ramakrishana Mission, Arya Samaj, Brahmo Samaj and
others, the writer was concerned with the moral degradation of the society, now
one found him disturbed by the poverty of the people and national oppression.
Premchand, whose earlier stories had romanticized freedom, now took hold of
the ordinary peasantexploited in the extremeas the central character of his
writings. On the one side, the impact of Mahatma Gandhi turned writers in
different Indian languages towards the depiction of the life of the common man,
the poor and the illiterate, particularly the villagers and to aim for Gandhian
humanism of class-caste harmony, on the other side, another orientation, caused
by the introduction of Marxist ideology attracted writers to give a new definition
of their role in society on the side of the struggling humanity and write about the
Marxian equalitarianism of a classless society.
The advent of Marxism on the Indian literary scene in the thirties is a
phenomenon which India shared with many other countries. Both Gandhi and
Marx were driven by opposition to imperialism and concern for the dispossessed
section of society. The progressive writers Association was originally established
in 1935 by some expatriate writers in London which included Mulk Raj Anand,
Sajjad Zaheer, Raja Rao, Muhammad Ali and others. In the manifesto they made
it clear that the duty of every Indian writer is to give form to each revolutionary
change as evident in the Indian scene. In 1936 Premchand and 1938 Tagore in
the annual conferences of progressive writers asked the Indian writer to express
progressively the various transformations of Indian society. Soon it became a

11
great pan-Indian movement that brought together Gandhian and Marxist insights
into society. The movement was especially conspicuous in Urdu, Punjabi,
Bengali, Telugu and Malayalam but its impact was felt all over India. It
compelled every writer to re-examine his/her relationship with social reality. In
Hindi Chhayavad was challenged by a progressive school and the movement
came to be known as Pragativad (Progressivism). Nirala and Nagarjun were
undisputedly the most powerful and noted Hindi poets of the progressive group.
In the Badalraga (1920) of Nirala, the peasant is not alone; a revolutionary
gallant is with him. The Bengali poets Samar Sen Vishnu Dey and Subhas
Mukhopadhyaya added a new socio-political outlook to their poetry and revealed
the poets solitary struggle, his unending exploration of the beauty and dignity of
human existence. Rootedness to the soil, compassion for the wretched, and
sincerity of expression are the qualities of the novels of Fakir Mohan Senapati.
One could see a powerful progressive note in the Oriya poetry of Ananta
Pattanayak and Sachiananda Rautray, Rautrays poem Baji Raut is a remarkable
document of the struggle of the people against British colonial rule. Manik
Bandhopadhyaya was the most well-known Marxist Bengali novelist. Malayalam
fiction writers like Vaikhom Muhammed Basheer, S.K. Pottekkatt and Thakazhi
Shivsankara Pillai, made history by writing progressive fiction of high literary
value. They covered fresh ground exploring the life of ordinary men and the
human relations that economic and social inequalities fostered. Shivaram
Karanth, the most versatile fiction writer in Kannada, never forgot his early
Gandhian lessons. He was aware of the gap existing between the ideals and the
reality and wrote about economic exploitation of the untouchable. Yashpal
(1903-76) and Rahul Sankrityayan (1893-1963) were most noted exponents of
Marxism in their Hindi novels. Sri Sri writing in Telugu was Marxist, but
showed interest in modernism at a later stage in his life. Syed Abdul Malik, in
Assamese, wrote with an ideological bias. The critical norms of progressive
literature were established by the pioneer of this phase in Punjabi by Sant Sing
Sekhon. The progressive writers movement attracted the attention of eminent
poets of Urdu, Josh Malihabadi, Makhdum Mohiuddin and Faiz Ahmed Faiz.
Imbued with the Marxist spirit they infused in the age-old symbolism a political
meaning. However, a tension was quite visible among writers in the 30s and 40s
about accepting either the Gandhian or the Marxist model. In Dhatri Devata of
Tarashankar Bandyopadhyaya a comparison is made between Marxian
radicalism on the one hand, and the Gandhian non-cooperation movement with
its techniques of picketing and boycott on the other, to prove that a via media is
to be found and that can only be the natural revolutionary pattern of socialism.
Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru said in his Presidential Address to the Lucknow
Congress in 1936, I am convinced that the only key to the solution of the
worlds problems and of Indias problems lies in socialism and when I use this
word I do so not in a vague humanitarian way but in the scientific, economic
sense.

12
Search for Modernity

A great work of art, in the Indian context, is the expression of both the
traditional and the actual. As a result, the concept of modernism grew in the
Indian context along different lines. The urge was to create something new. Even
the imitations of western modernists came as a challenge to understand their own
realities. Writers during this time presented their manifestos, explaining their
ideas of modernity. A new language was found to articulate their own historical
position. Jibanananda Das (1899-1954) was the most important Bengali poet
after Tagore who had a total sense of poetry. He was an imagist and used
language not just to communicate, but to grasp reality. Bibhuti Bhushan
Bandyopadhyay (1899-1950), the Bengali fiction writer whose novel Pather-
Panchali (The Saga of the Road) was filmed by Satyajit Ray, and which received
international acclaim, presented the unsophisticated and warm hearted village
life that is passing away. In his quest for identification with mans every day
relation with nature, he proved himself to be no less modern. Tara Shankar
Bandyopadhyay (Bengali, 1898-1971) depicted in his novels the pulsating life of
a whole generation staying in a village or a city, where society itself becomes the
hero. In depicting regional life, the social change and human behaviour, he
achieved utmost success. Uma Shankar Joshi (Gujrati) initiated new
experimental poetry and spoke of the shattered self in the modern day world.
Amrita Pritam (Punjabi) created an intensely personal poetry of an unearthly
glory, without losing contact with the earth. B.S. Mardhekar (Marathi, 1909-
1956) reflected in his poetry contemporary reality with the help of images,
indicating the limitations of man and the inevitable despair arising from them.
Gopal Krishna Adiga (1918-92), the famous modern Kannada poet, developed
his own personal idiom, and became mystical. He also displayed the agony of his
time. Practically all the writers reflected the despair of man, arising out of his
sense of helplessness in society and in the larger sphere of history. The imitation
of the west, the degeneration of canons and the disillusionment of the middle
class psyche, are some of the characteristics of Indian modernity. Modernism
became a way of documenting the dehumanization of society in India after
independence with its attendant morbidity, alienation and loss of identity. There
was a shattering of the gestalt as Dilip Chitre would call it. However, the
Tradition of humanism was very much alive and hopes for a better future are not
discarded. Like in European Modernism political conservatives and radicals were
both accommodated by Indian modernism too (Adiga and Muktibodh) since both
had grown cynical and frustrated about the authoritarian tendencies of the
nascent state and economic and moral deprivation and both were on the look-out
for powerful forms of new expressions. This is the most fascinating aspect of
Indian modernism that it accommodates both conservatives and radicals.
Probably, this is the most important characteristic it has in common with
European modernism (Yeats and Louis Mac Neice).

13
 In western terminology, modernism is a breaking away from established
rules, traditions and conventions and implies fresh ways of looking at mans
position and functions in the universe, and inheres, in some cases, remarkable
experiments in form and style. In India modernism as a phenomenon or value, is
not an absolutely unrelated one without reference to the past or the future. The
element of permanence is one of the essential ingredients of all the creative
expressions, which is explained by the word Sanatana which means Nitya
nutana (forever new). It is not a voyage backward through time but a reassertion
of the centre. Thus, modernism has a time significance which has both linear and
circular movements. It absorbs in it traditional values as well as new innovations,
and is indicated by the term continuity. In India, nothing is rejected; new
alternatives are created which become part of the continuity of thought and
creativity. This is the Indian way of thinking which is not logo-centric and
exclusive, but symbolic or inclusive. The west develops through substitution; it
rewrites itself again and again. India develops through accommodation. New
ideas may supplant older ones but the older ones linger on. They are allowed to
coexist with what is new. It is both a critique and an extension of tradition. In
other words, changing from within and creating new perceptions by remodeling
the outside forces are what writers present as their own agenda to understand the
Indian modernity. In this way the pan-Indian elite tradition of Sanskrit (marga),
the regional (desi) and folk (loka) traditions and the alien tradition of English co-
exist in the linguistic sensibility of Indian languages, the nature of their
combination is often an index to the modernity of an artifact in the language. But
one cannot possibly identify one single reference point of modernity and,
therefore, one may conclude that Indian modernity is like a mosaic. However,
one thing is very clear that modernism was a demand of our own history and not
a command from the west. Western models might have been employed at times
as tools of subversion but the agenda for the new aesthetic was set up by our own
literary history.
In spite of this kind of a view being prevalent in the fifties, the majority of
the new writers portrayed a dreadfully artificial world based on some formulas of
western modernism. This was done by the writers who knew it well that a
majority of the old guards starting from Rabindranath Tagore were rooted in the
Indian soil. Modernity for Tagore and Prem Chand and Kumaran Asan and
others was to create a new approach to life. Writers like Tagore put forth some
principles of modernism like universalism; permanence and ananda which make
poetry look inward. Self-expression of the individual, utter nakedness
(transparency), truthfulness, a negation of fashioning in order, tearing off the veil
of illusion, definiteness and self-reliance were the characteristics of modernity
for the old guards. The writers drew largely on life for their themes, and new
horizons opened up before them. When under the influence of the European
modernist movement with a specific historical strain Yeats was writing: Things
fall apart, the centre cannot hold, Rabindranath Tagore then wrote, Thou hast

14
made me endless such is thy pleasure. The Indian reality could not be
interpreted by the western model created by movements like imagism, anti-
novel, anti-play, anti-hero, expressionism, beat poetry, surrealism, avant-garde,
and experimentalism.
There were experimentalists who showed concern with the inner reality,
but the champions of inner reality mostly obsessed with sex produced erotic
literature in different Indian languages. Daiva Chandra Talukdar (Assa+mese),
Suresh Joshi (Gujarati), Buddhadev Bose (Bengali), Manto (Urdu), Ismat
Chughtai (Urdu) and A.N. Krishna Rao (Kannada) are a few writers who wrote
explicitly about sex. One can even include Thakazhi Shiv Shankar Pillai
(Malayalam) in this category, though he went beyond mere sex in creating a
strong sense of realism and deep human interest in the lives of the oppressed and
marginalized. Besides these writers, there were others who regarded modernism
as a measurement-oriented intellectual approach, which fell short of the
holistic experience that related an individuals centre to the physical and
intellectual world and thus regained for him personal faith and identity and a
sense of community.
The Indian mind does not refer to a tradition of the past or a tradition of
the culture of the past. It believes that what exists today is tradition, is culture. In
a culture like the Indian, the past does not pass off. It keeps on providing
paradigms for the present. The present grows from the past and both the past and
the present, change together. But the rhythm broke down because of the
modernistic experimentation in the early fifties drawing its sustenance from the
west. Most of the Indian poets looked outside and accepted Eliot, Mallarme,
Yeats and Baudelaire as their models and in the process rejected Tagore, Bharati,
Kumaran Asan, Sri Aurobindo and Gandhi. The novel Sekhar Ek Jivani (1941)
and the collection of Poems by Ajneya (1911-87) in 1943 bear the impress of
Eliot. The Bengali experimentalists Sudhindranath Datta (1901-60), Premendra
Mitra (1904-88), Jibanananda Das (1899-1954), Bhuddhadev Basu (1908-74)
were all influenced by the western literary sensibility but for them west came as
a challenge to understand their own realities and the forces of history shaping
human destiny. Writers during this time presented their manifestos, explaining
their ideas of modernity. A new language was found to articulate their own
historical position. Jibananada Das was the most important Bengali poet after
Tagore who had a total sense of poetry. He was an imagist and used language not
just to communicate, but to grasp reality. The concept of experimentation
includes a profound ethical concern, the quest for new values and searching
examination after basic sanctions or sources of value as spelt out in the preface
to Tar Saptak, a collection of modernist experimental poems under the editorship
of S.H. Vatsyayan Ajneya. Umashankar Joshi (Gujarati) initiated new
experimental poetry and spoke of the shattered self in the modern day world. As
already explained Amrita Pritam (Punjabi), B.S. Mardhekar (Marathi, 1909-
1956), Gopalakrishna Adiga (1918-92), the Kannada poet, all displayed the

15
agony of their time. Practically all the writers reflected the despair of man and a
sense of helplessness particularly when they looked at themselves as a part of the
society and also in the larger sphere of history. However, the traditions of
humanism were very much alive and hope for a better future was not discarded.
This is the most fascinating aspect of Indian modernism that it accommodates
both, the new western experimentation and the continuity of Indian tradition
which are amply illustrated in the novels of Bhushan Bandyopadhyaya (Bengali,
1899-1950), Tarashankar Bandyopadhyaya (Bengali 1898-1971), and many
others. Bhai Vir Singhs Punjabi novel Sundari reflected Sikh aspirations and
valorized the Sikh way of life. Kalki in Tamil became the master story-teller in
the forties. Visvanatha Satyanarayanas Veyi Padagalu in Telugu was a
courageous defense of the traditional values against the onslaught of modernity.
Ismat Chugtai (Urdu) was conspicuous for her radicalism and total disregard of
the middle-class toboos towards sex. Jhaver Chand Meghany (Gujarati) through
his novels described the living experience of Saurastra. V.S. Khankekar
introduced intellectual content in his novels. Indian novelists tried to discover
the Indian identity through their novels set up mostly in rural background. These
writers following their tradition revealed the dialectics of continuity and change
rooted in it. These writers made an effort to retrieve, rediscover and redefine
elements of culture in a creative way, by a return to pride in roots, while looking
ahead.
However, the poets of the fifties and even the sixties developed an
identity crisis. The specific identity crisis, the conflict between traditional
Indianness and western modernity is discernible in the writings of the major
language areas in India during those days. Because of the crisis, the predicament
of the writers of the fifties and sixties can be analyzed through three divergent
attitudes of life. Either the writer is in dispute with society or else he starts the
search and explores the contemporary reality and in the process goes in for a
world belief, psychoanalysis, existentialist philosophy or social realism. But then
this separates him from the common masses and their reality. But this does not
apply to all the writers
There were many writers of that age who had a profound understanding of
the social reality and their literary experience was always contextualized to the
contemporary history but at the same time they knew how to challenge and
transform the existing system of development and the concept of modernity and
create their own models of development and modernity in pursuance with the
traditional holistic view of man living in harmony with nature and society as well
as exploring new innovations. A poem Twarikh (history) in Punjabi by Amriita
Pritam written on the independence of India is typical example of the historical
consciousness of the writers of that era which accommodates without any
conscious efforts both traditional Indianness and western modernity.

16
Indian Drama: The period of transition

Sanskrit drama after the 10th century lost its tenor. It strove no more
through symbol and gesture to realize the truth behind human experience.
Medieval Indian literature was a glorious representation of mans exploration of
the Divine that turned the era into the era of devotional poetry which was a little
indifferent to secular representation of life on stage. The Islamic taboo against
such forms of entertainment was also responsible for the decline of Indian
theatre, and, therefore, drama remained in a state of oblivion. However, folk
plays continued to entertain the audience which has always remained a vehicle of
expression of protest, dissent and reform and thereby has induced at one level
emotional enjoyment and on another level stimulated rational judgment. One can
make bold to say proper Indian drama, which is essentially an urban growth
originated in these folk dramas.
With the advent of the modern period and the impact of western literature,
drama took a new turn and developed as a form of literature. The Parsi theatre,
around 1850, started staging plays based on Indian mythology, history and
legends. With its moving troupes, they traveled to different parts of the country
and made a tremendous impact on their audience. Agha Hashr (1880-1931) was
an important playwright of the Parsi theatre. But Parsi plays were mostly
commercial and cheap. In fact, modern Indian theatre grew mainly as a reaction
against crudity and superficiality of Parsi theatre and to express the emerging
national consciousness. However Parsi theatre will be remembered in the history
of Indian theatre mainly because of its emphasis on the spectacle and its
influence on the style of acting. Initially playwrights in different Indian
languages delved into Indias folk tradition to create plays to protest against
colonialism, social injustice and westernization. Michael Madhusudan Datta,
(Bengali, 1825-74) in his farces satirized the half-educated young rich imitating
western manners. Bharatendu Harishchandra, (Hindi, 1850-1885), also through
his satires and farces condemns the decadent social institutions and ridicules the
western mode of life which had begun to permeate the life of the people during
those days. His play Andheri Nagari has become a byword for any set up or
situation where justice has no relevance. Dinabandhu Mitra (Bengali, 1829-74)
in his play Neela Darpan had dealt with the exploitation of the country at the
hands of the British colonialists. The depiction of the horrors of planter rule was
promptly translated into English by one of the famous Bengali poets, Madhu
Sudan Dutt under the pseudonym of Rev. Long. In fact playwrights of that era of
the 19th century enlightenment wrote mythological and historical plays and social
satires to make a concentrated effort to express political feelings and urge for
social reforms. Girish Chandra Ghosh (Bengali), Dwijendra Lal Roy (Bengali)
Ranchodbhai Udayram (Gujarati), M. M. Pillai (Tamil), Balvant Pandurang
Kirloskar (Marathi), Hemchandra Barua (Assamese) and others through their
plays demonstrated political subjugation and strived for civil liberty and

17
questioned our social affairs. The first public theatre in Bengal came into
existence in 1872. During this time there was a strange kind of configuration of
imitation of the West as well as resistance to it or adjustment, accommodation,
and assimilation of the gifts of the west. The net result of this complex social
conditioning was a strange kind of romanticism which magnified in drama
love, passion, agony, a kind of rationality and spirit of adventure. Social relations
revolving round individualistic, passionate, romantic love were encouraged. C.V.
Raman Pillai (Malayalam) and Viresalingam (Telugu) wrote social comedies and
mythological plays. Viresalingam like Kirloskar made the mythological plays
relevant to the contemporary time. Gurazadas Kanya Sulkam revolutionized
Telugu drama by introducing the spoken Telugu. T.P. Kailasam also
revolutionazied Kannada stage. Tagore wrote a number of plays and added a new
dimension to the traditional conception of Indian drama by creating an integral
vision of the march of humanity towards an idealistic order larger than human
life. In his dance-drama the most dominating symbol is of yatrinot only yatri
but chirayatri who is on his way to nandanpath so that he may discover the
ultimate truth. There were others like K.P. Kolhatkar and P.G. Gadkari in
Marathi and Gunabhiram Barua in Assamese who gave dignity to theatre. Jai
Shankar Prasad (Hindi) and Adya Rangacharya (Kannada) wrote historical and
social plays to highlight the clash between idealism and the harsh realities by
which they were surrounded. P.S. Mudaliyar gave Tamil stage respectability and
new direction and similarly K.M. Munshi through his social satires gave a new
meaning to the Gujarati stage. It was the time of emergence in Bengali and
Marathi of great actors like Sisir Bhaduri and Bal Gandharva.
Sachindranath Sengupta (Bengali) Lakshminarayan Misra (Hindi) and
T.P. Kailasam (Kannada) broke fresh ground by concentrating on the life of the
middle class and their problems and making them heroes in their plays. It was
Indian Peoples Theatre Association (IPTA) in 1940 which brought about a
change in experience by highlighting the reality of the collective. It did not
register only the need for a social change but, in fact, initiated a line of action,
protest and revolt. It picked up the conventions of the folk drama and gave a
blow to cheap idealism. Bijon Bhattacharya (Bengali), Sajjad Zaheer (Urdu),
Sant Singh Sekhon and Balwant Gargi (Punjabi) and others emphasized on the
depiction of the life of economically exploited and socially oppressed and on the
struggle of the masses. The effect of this new drama movement was far-reaching.
It helped in the establishment of the peoples theatre or group theatre and the
making of modern theatre complete, in the fifth decade of the 20th century.

Making of Modern Theatre

In the field of theatre, particularly in the sixties and seventies, Badal

Sarkar, Mohan Rakesh and Girish Karnad described the condition of nothingness
and absurdity, but with the hope that reason can and will exert a selection-

18
pressure in the right direction. This is the racial unconscious giving shape to
Indian literature even during the days of a near total disintegrationemotional
and otherwise. Then comes the age of contemporary group theatre run by
amateurs who combined the truth of object with the outer reality. As against this,
in the regular auditoriums the other theatre continued with its social awareness,
giving a new perspective to the function of theatre in society. It combines the
truth of object with the inner reality to foster a new dimension of change in
experience. This theatre is seeking the chariot in darkness, because in the
contemporary theatre man has been robbed of his metaphorthe metaphor of the
invincible soul of man. This other theatre is struggling hard to discover this
metaphor and re-establish confidence in man. Now we see in this theatre people
who can give away their life in their struggle for a causefor the emancipation
of the suppressed. These people are Bhoma of Badal Sarkar (Bengali) or Hanus
of Bhisham Sahani (Hindi). Thats why the history of the contemporary other
theatre is the history of extending the social schema.
Aesthetic response is connected with social schema which, if extended by
the writer on the basis of complex social conditioning, can be meaningful. Now
in plays like poster by Shankar Shesh (Hindi) or Spartacus by Utpal Dutt
(Bengali), an effort can be discerned for an epistemological rupture in the
existing structure to allow us to transcend the life attitudes created by the
formula and market-oriented modernism. Transcendence of this attitude,
sometimes with the help of an extensive use of folk elements, allows a complex
seeing of alternative points of view.
The energy of folk theatre comes from the fact that although it seems to
uphold traditional values, it has also the means of questioning these values. Now
the dialectics of continuity and change are creating a dilemma, but even in the
face of this dilemma the writer is affirming his identity with the tradition as well
as with the complex social conditioning to unfold a total view of the Indian
psyche. Sometimes the dilemma takes its toll and the writer ends up with an eye
to expediency and forgets about the enduring totality.
In fact, this is commercialism which has captured the literary market in
the last decades of the last century. In the Dravidian languages, popular serials of
different kinds seem to be a craze. Telugu writers, like Malladi Venkatakrishna
Murti or Yerramsetti Sai trade on the readers nostalgia, with descriptions of men
and women in their pristine simplicity against the primitive background of
mountains, jungles and rivulets or they seek to explore the readers longing for
forgotten history and visionary romance, or they describe black magic, voodoo
and witchcraft. One can say in passing that beside drama in Tamil one can see
the ever-increasing market for pulp pocket novels. In Gujarati, either the novel
is cheap pulp, or it is an academic exercise.

19
Discourse of Experimentation

However, there were experimentalists with a difference, who showed their

urge to experiment and to discover a new idiom to express the complexities of
our predicament, but they differed in the ways they experimented and perceived
the new reality. The hungry poets of Bengal inspired by Allen Ginsberg (the
Beatnik poet), especially Sunil Gangopadhyay and Shakti Chattopadhyay and the
Digambara poets of Telugu like Nagnamuni, Jwalamukhi and Nikhileshwar gave
a new twist to experimentation by displaying anger and frustration with Dadaist
and Surrealist elements in their modes of imagination. Free verse and prose came
to be increasingly used; images replaced older figures of speech, poetic
imagination as well as idiom was freed from conventional habit and clichs.
Annada Shankar Ray said about these changes that there was nothing foreign
about them: We went surrealist without reading about it. Ionescos absurd world
had descended upon us. All the experimentalists like Navakanta Barua, Agyeya,
Kunwar Narain, Sitanshu Yashaschandra, Chandrasekhar Kambar, Ayyappa
Paniker, Rahman Rahi, Vinda Karandikar, Harbhajan Singh, Sri Sri, Akhtar-ul-
Iman, Makhdoom Mhouddin and many others either used the Marxist paradigm
for interpreting reality or depended on their personal vision. There were many
who spoke indirectly through ambivalent images while some used under
statement and irony or spoke directly writing a sort of anti poetry. There are
many who have broadly divided these writings into a high modernist one where
the emphasis is on stylistic innovation per se and the various avant gardist
movements which constitute an attempt to nativise western modernism through
the deployment of indigenous forms of articulations and through the
accommodation of greater segments of Indian reality within these forms.
Even the advanced and progressive ideas that came from the western
world through English education were confined to the educated urban
community and grew independently without becoming a part of the continuity of
the Indian literary process. However, the poetry of social realism became a
dominant trend in contemporary Indian literature in the sixties and the seventies.
After Independence, the poet felt a strong agony because of the pressure of
disintegration of society and broken relationship with our past heritage.

The psychology of Partition

The idea of a homogeneous India with its multi-lingual, multi-religious

population, an India as a geographical space stabilized through centuries, was
considered by the poets and artists as something permanent and hence the
freedom of the country in 1947 which was a flawed and fissured freedom since
its gift was a divided India, came as a rude shock to most of them and they were
completely bewildered. India witnessed the worst bloodbath in the memory of
the sub-continent just before it became Independent, after the partition of the

20
country. Indias nationalism at that juncture was nationalism of mourning. It was
a false dawn for the writer who felt, like Nazrul Islam of Bengal that the Swaraj
did not bring anything for the hungry child. The deepest anguish was expressed
by the poets of the Punjab and Bengal directly affected by partition. For millions
of people the independence of the country brought terrible suffering and
humiliation, fear of loss of human dignity and a morbid sense of isolation of
being uprooted. Amrita Pritam invokes the sufi poet Waris Shah as the symbol of
the undivided Punjab and exhorts him who has always given words to the
suffering of the people. But Amrita Pritam asks him now, who is going to help us
today?: when a daughter of the fabled Punjab wept/ he gave tongue to her silent
grief/ Today a million daughters weep/ but where is Waris Shah/ to give voice to
their woes? The partition does not change the life of the wily politicians and the
businessmen for whom communalism is yet another instrument of exploitation
and profit. Selflessness slowly gave way to selfishness in politics. The trauma of
partition slowly turned into a trauma of utter hopelessness. There is no doubt that
the poet had a coiled beam of hope of nation and society affluent and flourishing
but with the passing of time, the dream remained unfulfilled, and when no
fulfillment came till the sixties, the whole attitude to life took a different turn. In
place of agony, resentment took over. Dreams and values were turned down as
romantic sentimentality. Angry protests were raised against the political and
social powers, institutions, establishment, and rejection of the constraining
conventions became inevitable. The compelling situation drove the young poets
to hostility and revoltto frustration and extremity. The poets bade adieu to the
earlier individualistic trend in poetry which had started with all kinds of
experimentations in the early fifties. Poets now write on the theme of agony and
the theme of struggle with clenched teeth. The poetry moved further nearer the
downtrodden. Poets like Dhumil in Hindi showed a great range of social realism.
O.N.V. Kurup in Malayalam added to his lyricism the sharpness of anger
towards social injustice.
Now poetry is a combination of emotion, irony and the suffering of the
common man caught in social contradictions. In the progressive poetry two
trends were visibleone of the old unchanged trend of progressive poems of
protests and struggle. One can take the name of Sri Sri, Nirala, Vaikom
Muhammed Basheer, and other who in spite of the Bolshevik revolution and
Marxist aesthetics drew sustenance mostly from the soil. This kind of poetry was
the outcome of the nationalist consciousness created by the middle class and
Indian folk writers during the freedom movement. But after the fifties it moved a
step further and became quite radical. Now the creed of militant young poets felt
that bullet can achieve what the ballot had not. Alok Dhanva in Hindi wrote:
This is not poetry but bullet to be shot at. Baqar Mehdi in Urdu gave vent to
the angry and rebellious mood of modern poetry. Telugu Digamber (naked) poets
in their figures and symbols mixed up the pleasant and the ugly. Chullikad in
Malayalam took up the question of social justice and oppression while the

21
 Marathi Dalit literature by poets like Namdev Dhasal and Narayan Surve and
novelist like Laxman Gaikwad and others betrayed in the eighties the anguish of
a community and demanded the shaping of a just and realistic future for the
underprivileged and the outcasts. Gaikwad in his novel The Pilferer is more
concerned with social change than the literariness of the artifact. The Kannada
Bandaya (the rebel) are concerned with forms of violence in a classless society.
Literature moved nearer to the downtrodden and the exploited. In fact, the
Naxalite movement of the seventies brought with it Uttara Adhunikta (post-
modernism) which created in the Indian literary scene a new literary orientation.
This was the time when Raghuvir Sahai in Hindi published another collection of
poems Hanso Hanso, Jaldi Hanso (laugh, laugh, laugh soon) hinting at the
impending political crisis. His poem Ramdas was a unique document of our
feeling of insecurity. When Subhas Mukhopadhyaya in Bengali thought of the
son who had gone to the forest, one was bound to remember almost a whole
generation of youth who were thrown behind bars or went underground in the
seventies during the Naxalite movement. Manjit Tiwana in Punjabi showed her
bewilderment and asked: What times are these/sitting on the threshold of it/we
ask the whereabouts/ of our home.
The second trend came as an integral part of the modern poetic sensibility,
which did not have the fire amply demonstrated in the progressive poems of the
sixties, seventies and in the Dalit poetry of the eighties, but now it is more
ironical, artistic and aesthetical. One could find the beginning of this direction
initially in the poems of Muktibodh in Hindi or Bishnu Dey in Bengali and some
others. Muktibodh says that now, In this city, there is no sun or moon/ In the
mist of conspiracy there are shadows of ghosts/ Under the slippers of Gandhi,
army boots are reverberating/ The selfish baboons are sitting on the turret of the
fort/ the roads are dark/ and, one can only listen to the poisonous whispers.
Bishnu De on the other hand, reveals to us the poets solitary struggle, his
unending exploration of the beauty and dignity of human existence in opposition
to the mounting crisis of uprooted identity. This is the predominant trend of the
contemporary poetry. The contemporary poets in their satire and cynicism reflect
a total view of their socio-cultural existence. What Bishnu De said long back,
Fear no more the dark/ Cover your face with my hands can now evidently be
found in contemporary poetry written by Joy Goswami (Bengali), Rajesh Joshi
(Hindi), Balachandra (Malayalam), Chandra shekhar Patil (Kannada),

The urge for Uttara Adhunikta (Post-Modernism)

It is just a coincidence that in western literature, modernism started falling

apart in the 60s at the time of Vietnam, Woodstock, peace marches, race riots,
demonstrations and violence. By 1968, minimalism, the last of the modernist
styles, collapsed in heaps of rubble on gallery floors. In 1969 on the 3rd
anniversary of Andre Bretons death, a group of followers announced that the

22
historical period of surrealism had ended though it had some eternal values. By
1970 post-modernism became a new catchword. In place of technology, people
now talked about ecology and return to nature. In place of progress and objective
truth, people now talked about cooperation and interpreted truth as magical
reality. The new trend was no more experimental and creation of new forms, but
it veered towards the psychological and the narrational for personal content, life-
like contexts, and subjective facts. Here in India modernism and post-modernism
are not in opposition to each other, but they, supplement each other. One can
easily restate these terms as adhunikta and uttara adhunikta. Uttara Adhunikta is
not a synonym of post-modernism. It is also not used as a counter-concept to
adhunikta or modernism. It does mean, on the analogy of uttara mimamsa and
purva mimamsa of Indian philosophy, the next phase after modernism. Post-
modernism arose out of conceptualist premises that art is informationwhile
protesting its modernist aridity.
In the Indian context, uttara adhunikta (roughly post-modernism) has
arrived as a reaction to media-operated and market guided realitya reaction to
modernism of the sixties which was linked to a particular way and view of life,
common in the western world and increasingly common in the affluent societies
of east Asia and Latin America. It has come to challenge the very idea of Euro-
centricist modernism, internationalismthe tendency to compare every literary
text/ trend with some Euro-American product. Now one realizes that by
borrowing things from the west one cannot bring about change and enter the
realm of modernity. The elements of modernity are to be sought in our own roots
and traditionsin our own realities. Our failure to bring about a true economic
development, technological change and modernization is to be understood
properly.
We come across many instances of writings trying to explore their roots
and find their moorings, and probe whole areas of experience blurred during a
period of extreme modernism of the last several decades. The Hindi poet
Raghuvir Sahai bemoaned such a situation. Can poetry change society/ No,
where there is too much of art/ no change will occur. Thayathu Sankaran in his
book of criticism Adhunikatayude Jirna Mukham in Malayalam brought to our
notice the decaying face of modernism. After a period of extreme modernism,
the writers are now willing to convey the message in more direct terms. The
modernist idea that anything simple should not be accepted is now questioned. It
is established now that simple texts may present complex extra-textual
structures. Even cultural references simply stated in poetry can have different
romantic values. In fact, the contemporary writers now reflect a total view of
their socio-cultural existence. The Gangeo Pattro group of Bengali critics called
it Total Poetry. Uttara adhunikta dramatizes the shift of dominant from
problems of knowing to problems of modes of being from an epistemological
dominant to an ontological one. Now in place of modernist questions like How
can I interpret this world of which I am a part? And what am I in it? Uttara

23
adhunikta raises questions like Which world is this? What is to be done in it?
Which of my selves is to do it? What is a world? What kinds of world are there?
The idea is to look at the self in relation to the world holistically.
When Rabindranath Tagore said, there was a time when every (Indian)
artist had the freedom of being Indian in a natural way, he was articulating a
nostalgic awareness of the past as well as the bitter reality of the present. Now in
the Uttara adhunik era, the effort is to be natural, to be Indian, to be nearer the
common man, to be socially conscious. The third generation of Malayalam
writers like N. Prabhakaran, P. Surendran prefers the term anti modernism to
post-modernism and are content simply to narrate human tales without any
explicit social message or philosophical pretensions. Now Tamil writer like
Vannanilavan sums up this mood by saying, we have stared enough at the skies/
we have relished enough the fruits of freedom/ let us become children.
Zacharia, V.R. Sudeesh (Malayalam), Vijaydan Detha (Rajasthani), Surendra
Prakash (Urdu) and others are now writing stories without any theoretical
prejudices. In other words, it is developing a sense of Indianness, the
manifestation of which Amitabh Gupta (Bengali) of the Gangeo Pattro group
found first in the 19th century Bengali literature and then in the first two decades
of the twentieth century literature.

Use of mythology and living experience

One of the dominant trends visible in the uttara adhunik literature is the
use of mythology to present the modern predicament. Mythic thoughts, in fact,
are attempts to mediate the gaps between continuity and change, thereby
authenticating the idea of total poetry with reference to mans existenceboth
mundane, and spiritual. In Agyeyas (Hindi) poetry we find a shift towards the
realization that the individuals entity is just a humble part of the larger reality.
Ramakanta Rath (Oriya) affirms in his Radha mans relationship to the
transcendent by using, the mythical past. In contemporary Indian poetry along
with a sense of urbanity, an attitude of irony, frequent use of mythological
sequences as structural images, a continuous involvement with the problems of
expediency and eternity are very much visible. Playwrights like Girish Karnad,
Kambar (Kannada), Mani Madhukar (Hindi), G.P. Deshpande, Satish Alekar
(Marathi), Manoj Mitra and Bibhas Chakravarti (Bengali) are using myths, folk
legends and religion-centric tradition to understand our present day existence. In
the Indian post-modernist period, the departure from Euro-centricist modernism
has created a new literary code, the socio-cultural mythical code-which is used in
the organization of poetry by Kunwar Narayan (Hindi), Dilip Chitre (Marathi)
Sankha Ghosh (Bengali), and in novels by Bhyrappa (Kannada), Prapanchan
(Tamil) and others. Myth is now accepted as a meaningful sub-text of the literary
text. Even in novels dealing with city life, the familiar frustrated young urban
male protagonist lives on, on one side, with his racial unconsciousness and talks

24
of idealism and spirituality, and on the other feels trapped between the inner lack
of freedom and progress, and the external imposition of a free and progressive
existence.
In the field of novel and short-story, contemporary writers go for the
material or the living experience of life. Without exception to any big social or
psychological truth, the writer depicts experiences taken from dual contacts with
the milieu and the environment and makes it relevant in the modern context. The
genuineness of individual experience of the modern short-story writer highlights
many problems of the modern society and brings us face to face with the
dilemma of inter-relationship and broken values. In this process, the totality of
inter-relationship and values become clear.
The contemporary short-story writer has made new experiments with
structure. In this, the plot is not built up as an organic whole having a beginning,
middle and an end with dramatic twists like the plot of a drama. In this, a single
point of the life circle is reconstructed in a creative and artistic way. These
stories unravel every aspect of the reality of life. The impact of the aesthetic
value of the story does not rest in the end of the story. The conventional style of
story telling is discarded it obtains the help of symbols, images and other poetic
means to magnify a particular moment in life. Nirmal Varma (Hindi), U.R.
Ananthamurthy (Kannada), Muni Manikyam (Telugu) and many others have
made their presence felt in this area. U.R. Anantha Murthy explores the
relevance of some traditional values in todays changed context. His novel,
Samskara, is a world classic which portrays the spiritual struggle of man in terms
of the urgency of lifes demands.

Regional experience

In novels, besides the living experience, the writers show concern for the
neglected regions of this vast country. The novelists dealing with a region and
having a living experience of the life pattern of that area understand every
feeling, need and the urge of that region. A Writer selects the life of a particular
region where he has stayed but in fact projects the image of the life-pattern of the
Indian people, because India still lives in villages and different regions rather
than in the cities. Tara Shankar Bandyopadhyaya (Bengali), Bhagwati Charan
Verma (Hindi), Phaniswar Renu (Hindi), Akhilan (Tamil) and others wrote
novels to expose the abysses of passion and hopelessness, the strength and
weakness, the beauty and the ugliness of the community staying in a particular
region. Contemporary Indian novels by Jayamohan (Tamil), Debes Ray
(Bengali), Shivprasad Singh (Hindi), dealing with various neglected regions and
the spoken dialect of that area, give a composite picture of total India pulsating
with new experience and struggling for keeping the old values and in the process
sometimes discarding them. In this period of uttara adhunikta, these novels
dramatize the shift of the dominant from problems of knowing to problems of

25
modes of being. It gives a glimpse of actual India which stays in villages where
people of different religions stay together. Their culture is a composite culture. It
is not possible to undo this situation prevailing in Indian villages. Rahi Masoom
Raza (Hindi, Urdu) explains this in a very interesting way in the introduction of
his novel, Adha Gaon (Half Village), why should I allow any-body to ask me
to leave my village Gangoli and go, for example to Rai Bareli? Why shall I go,
sir? I wont go.
These novelists of a region have forcefully demolished the myths created
by the western Indologists that Indianness is just fatalism or Indianness is to be
identified with harmony and order and that the Indian vision cannot perceive its
own reality and that the two-nation theory is to be applied to India.
Those novels are also important where the social life of the city-dwellers
is delineated with all sincerity, but at the same time, without giving any
importance to the pseudo and subjective formula of modernism. Though it is
difficult to paint authentically the life of the city, as here, the life has many
barriers and also the life of the novelist is bound with his own complexities. The
central tension in the vast majority of contemporary Indian novelists is that of
transition from a rural and traditional to an urban and modern situation,
expressed either through a romantic nostalgia for the village left behind or
through fear and hatred for the cruel impersonal city with all its sex, horror,
violence and cruelty. Thakazhi Shivasankar Pillai (Malayalam), Birendra Kumar
Bhattacharya (Assamese), Pannalal Patel (Gujarati), Quratulain Hyder (Urdu),
Mannu Bhandari (Hindi), Nayantara Sehgal (English), Bhyrappa (Kannada),
Vyasaraya Ballal (Kannada) Vishram Bedekar (Marathi), Samaresh Basu
(Bengali), and others with their rural-urban sensitivity have portrayed the Indian
experience in its totality.
In short, there are some specific social phenomena shared by all Indians
like the break-down of the joint family system, breakdown of the rural middle
class, exploitation by politicians and the business community, the communal
problem, problems of rural poverty and urban unemployment, the frustration of
the educated unemployed, general middle-class taboo on sex and endless
religious superstition. All these provide a common bond to the Indian novelists
who combine a deep awareness of social contradictions with the modern sense of
form. They are aware of the complexity of modern life and portray the
psychological insight with an existentialist concern for the solitary individual and
take up the questions of values from a civilisational point of view and re-
examine tradition in ontological terms and in the process revolutionize the very
idea of narration.
These writers are discovering their roots and a sense of belonging and
trying to understand the Indian reality in terms of their past experience or
tradition. Tradition in the Indian context is not a fixed entity within a time span.
Indian literary concepts like marga-desi, (elite and folk) shastrachara-deshachara
(elitist idiom and folk idiom), natyadharmi-lokadharmi (stylization and mimetic)

26
 reveal the dialectics of continuity and change rooted in the Indian tradition. So
contemporary Indian writers like Binapani Mohanty, Pravasini Mahakud (Oriya),
Afsar Ahmed, Anil Ghorai (Bengali), Kumar Pash (Urdu), Surjit Pattar
(Punjabi), Savitri Rajeevan (Malayalam), and K. Rajanarayanan (Tamil) and
many others have their tradition as well as social questions connected with it.
These writers have made an effort to retrieve, rediscover and redefine elements
of culture in a creative way, by a return to pride in roots while looking ahead.

Desivad (Nativism) in literature

In fact, writers and critics like Bhalchandra Nemade, G.N. Devi, Kanji
Patel and Himanshi Shelat and others are in the search for a new metaphor of the
socio-cultural existence of India to enable them to explore as how to develop
their own modernity by absorbing traditional values as well as new innovations.
This has led to a movement known as Desivad (nativism) in literature based on a
concept of kula and sheela. Kula is heredity, inheritance, tradition. Sheela is the
making of a man, his demeanour and personality which, however, are
conditioned by his kula. Sheela in its own time and space goes on discarding
elements of kula which have lost their potency and in the process generates new
modes of thought and action and thereby ensures the continuity of a culture,
which in turn, enriches and invigorates the sheela making modernity sharp and
effective. Desivad is not an obsession with roots but has emerged more as a
reaction to the hegemony of videshi (foreign) ideas which is at the same time not
to be replaced by a counter-hegemony of sanskritic revivalism but to create an
agenda of indigenism displaying cultural self-respect and autonomy of thinking
of the majority of ordinary people of folk who make up the plurality of Indian
civilization. It will be wrong to say that in a tradition that has been as open to
transformation as ours, it is wings rather than roots that signify a living culture.
One who understands the kula and sheela concept of our existence understands it
well that for us both the wings and roots are important. The Indian mind has
always conceived of change within a framework of continuity. Our modernism
as a phenomenon or value is not an absolutely unrelated one without reference to
the past or future. Nativism is a celebration of the pluralism that is at the very
core of Indian culture and literature. It is the avant garde tradition of Indian
writings in different languages which constitutes an attempt to nativise and
analyze it with reference to desi as two poles of the same continuum and thus
accommodate greater segments of Indian reality. It is an interrogation of the
existing canons that are most often a continuation of the orientalist notions of
Indianness governed by wrong premises like the privileging of high textuality,
the marginalization of the non canonical performative and counter hegemonic
texts and trends, simplifications of our over determined literary contexts and
movements and aesthetic reductivism. Most of the nativistic writers understand it
well that a meaningful modernity which is truly Indian does not mean dealing

27
with a culture which is a monolith or literature which is a monologue. Nativism
is post-colonial in its battle against the invasion of alien sensibilities and modes
of feeling and articulation, while it is post-modernist in its emphasis on cultural
difference. A meaningful modernity which is truly Indian, can be developed not
by merging the Western modernism with the Indian realities and creating new
category to go with the emergence of a new writing and critical awareness in
respect of modern Indian literature in different Indian languages. In fact, in place
of any synthesis of the East and the West or Indias civilisational categories and
the values of western modernism, if the East & the West are accepted as
opposites to be interpenetrated to create a structure then that could give us the
right understanding of Indian modernism. The interpenetration of Indias
pluralistic cultural tradition with the new elements of contemporary western
civilization is to be obtained for our modernity to define its place and role in a
fast changing world. Desivad, therefore is not a search for swadeshi (in-
digenous) and rejection of videshi (foreign) but swaraj (protection &
continuation of Indian ways of thinking which is multiple by definition), a search
for the creation of categories of modernism. The choice Desivad offers is,
therefore, not tradition versus western modernism, but the choice of both versus
the forced acceptance of one.

Dalit literature

One of the most significant features of the post modernist era was the
emergence of writings of the outcasts, as a major literary force. The word dalit
means the down-trodden. The literature which is concerned with the socially
under privileged, and which asserts the socio-political stature of the underdogs,
is known by this name.
In fact, Dalit writers like Namdev Dhasal, Daya Pawar, Narayan Surve
(Marathi), Yoseph Macwan (Gujarati), T.B. Siddalingaiah (Kannada), in their
writings raise the question of social justice and oppression, and betray the
anguish of a community and demand the shaping of a just and realistic future for
the under-privileged and the outcasts in society. Most of the dalit poems deal
with the collective memory of pain, suffering and violence the dalits have
suffered over the centuries. The insurrectionary dalit literature of Marathi,
Guajarati and Kannadanow coming up also in Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi
and other languagesthat articulates the pain, indignation and fury of a most
creative and imaginative segment of our people marginalized and oppressed
since the time of the srutis, constitutes another avant-garde attempt at forging an
alternative nationhood of a caste-free society. Dalit literary movement is a
dialogue with the so-called high-caste Hindus. The multi-voicedness that is
central to the dialogic approach manifests itself in the dalit poetry as a dramatic
encounter between the collective voice of a community and the members of the
same community or those who oppress them. The Marathi dalit novelist Laxman

28
Gaikwad is more concerned for a social change than the literariness of the
artifact. Dalits now challenge the tone and content of the existing literary canon
created by the shastra protagonists and decentralize the whole process of a
literary movement. It creates an alternative aesthetics and extends the linguistic
and generic possibilities of literature. Dalit poetry rejects the norms set by
poetics and throws overboard classical values like propriety, balance, restraint
and understatement. The diction of these poets is deliberately subversive as it
challenges the middle class notions of linguistic decency and redraws the map of
literature by discovering and exploring a whole new continent of experience that
has so far been left to darkness, and silence. The recent phase of dalit writings
seems to be more mature, sober, larger in its concerns, more conscious of form,
less angry and complaining. The new generation of writers is also careful to
avoid ghettoization and broaden the scope of their concerns and transcend the
ideology of destructive hatred. There is even a tone of celebration of the dalit
identity in the new generation writers.
The contemporary Avant-gardism movements that are mostly driven by
larger humanitarian concerns and social issues like protection of ecology, search
of water in villages, violence towards women, the case of corrupt politicians and
mafia menace, child labour, caste discrimination have given new meaning to
feminist writings and a realistic understanding of the impact of globalization of
literature. In fact womens writings today is part of the larger enterprise of
empowering women and this in turn join hands with other struggles for social
justice on various fronts such as issues of dalits and tribal's, imperialist economic
and cultural interventions, class and caste exploitation, developmental issues and
environmentalists struggle against ecological pollution. All these have received
due attention in the writings of different Indian languages.

Womens writings

Emancipatory womens writing has emerged strongly in all Indian

languages in the contemporary times, seeking to subvert the man-dominated
social order and forging revisionary myths and counter-metaphors by women
writers like Kamala Das (Malayalam, English), Krishna Sobti (Hindi),
Ashapurna Devi (Bengali), Rajam Krishnan (Tamil), Mahasweta Devi (Bengali)
and others. Veterans like Mahasweta Devi are relentless in their exposure of the
Western mode of development which is linked with the destruction of nature and
oppression of women. Greed based economic development leads to
impoverishment and under development of others, resulting in the degradation of
prakrati (nature) and nari (women) and hence women writers are making efforts
through their writings and activism to safeguard and cherish the environment by
rediscovering the key position of women. Mahasweita Devi, in her story, the
Hunt describes vividly how an illegitimate tribal women, marry Oraon, can fight
to save the depredations of nature and the honour of women, who tend to be

29
marginalized as sex commodities only. She resurrects the real meaning of the
annual hunting festival, by dealing out justice for a crime committed against the
entire tribal society, against illegal deforestation, against nature, against
oppression of woman. What Mary Oraon does, using violence to kill an
oppressor of women, is common in Indian myths, where goddesses kill male
demons to establish female power. The story not only unveils a profound
ecological loss, the loss of the forest as the foundation of life, but also captures
and reconstructs the insights and visions that Indian women provide in their
struggle for survival.
However, the womens movement in India is different from the Western
feminist movement, which seeks enemies and expresses itself through anger and
confrontation, which is based on a notion of totalized oppression of women
across cultures and nationalities, unleashed by the inequality of gender,
patriarchy and to certain extent, capitalism. Here in India writers like Ashapurna
Devi, accept the feminine construct as a valid construct and use the inequality to
expose marriage and widowhood, unfair work practices, sexual servitude, the
problems of bearing and rearing children in poverty, gender discrimination and
other forms of exploitation. Here feminism means total upliftment of the entire
society, and therefore, Ashapurna Devi dreams of an ideal domestic scene, where
women enjoy the same rights as men, in an affirmation of human values. In the
writings of Anees Jung (English) also, one finds women oppressed, as they have
been always, yet they talk of fulfilling relationships, the joys of marriage and
children, the exhilaration of breaking free from the bonds of rituals and
exploitive social practices and they sing with joy, and pray in the name of God.
Faminity, by definition, for these writers like Raji Seth (Hindi), Jaya Mitra
(Bengali), Savitri Rajeevan (Malayalam), Nabaneeta Dev Sen (Bengali), Gagan
Gill (Punjabi), is not a limiting factor, but an expending one - holistic, eclectic,
trans-specific, and encompassing diverse stirrings. Feminity is a struggle for a
certain basic principle of perceiving life, a philosophy of being. It is a principle
and a philosophy that can serve not just women but all human beings.
The story, the Hunt by Mahasweta Devi also raises the question as how to
expose the western mode of development with totalizing tendencies which is
now a part of the global economic system. This system is quite evidently not
sustainable and inequitable and does not allow alternate approaches to life and
usurps local spaces which are spaces of taste, fragrance and sensuousness and
ultimately local culture, value, significance and belief and hits at the very core of
the plurality of Indian existence. It is also affecting the creativity of the writer
because his value is now determined not by his literary value but by his market
value and as a result avant garde writers like Kamal Kumar Majumdar(Bengali)
and others are completely marginalized. However, there is a group of writers
who think that globalization cannot be stopped and that is the key to progress. It
has brought changes in our languages. Use of words of two languages, English
and any one Indian language has entered in our language use in a big way

30
 creating a vital relationship between local, pan-Indian and international identities
which reveals the true nature of Indian literature. Acceptability and open
mindedness have increased. The effect of globalization is creating a new
narrative. Global grid is now acceptable. On the other side, the other group of
writers thinks that the autonomy of literature is in danger. There was a time when
it was said that if the writer wanted he could change the world but today the man
who was in the centre of history is threatened. The information hype is new real
which is now threatening the objective reality. The information technology is
now turning objectivity into imagination and imagination into reality. But there
is no doubt that the global cannot survive without local. The global can reach us
only being local. The global has to locate itself, has to have a locus and as a
result, in comparison with global the local in the post-modernist period is getting
importance and becoming exclusive as a demonstration of Indian nativism. It has
now become part of our self-assertion which has become possible because of the
decolonization of mind asserting its difference from Euro-American universalist
critical discourses and establishing the Indian identity.
Indian Diaspora Literature
After the end of the imperial period Indian professionals and businessmen
voluntarily emigrated to improve their prospects. The second generation, who
were children of the Indian labourers also belong to this group, who with better
adoptability instinct and education made a place in the society of the host
country and by combining and synthesizing both cultures created a new brand of
diasporic culture but as Edward Said says, it was more a schizo-phrenic nature of
the expatriates reality or what Bhabha calls inter-national culture based not on
the exoticism of multi culturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the
inscription and articulation of cultures hibridity but for them it was definitely a
liberated experience. Dev, a Punjabi poet living in Europe gives bent to this
reality.
I was never much involved
In your ecstatic joys;
In your moment of grief, however,
Im one with you.
Like the fate of an uprooted jew,
Punjab, for your frail health
come, lets share a last drink.
This was the second generation Indians who had a very toiling experience
of existence as inferiors to a better culture and also were victims of racism. In
fact their strength in maintaining their culture also has kept them apart from
other ethnic groups in many places creating hard feelings and struggles for
dominance that sometimes exploded to violence.
This group of the second generation which included the children of the
mistreated, discriminated and underprivileged classes of migrants of the colonial
times and the voluntary migrants who were professionals and academics or

31
businessmen who started moving to foreign countries in the 50s and 60s of the
last century in search of fortune and who had close access to the mother land but
had certain anxiety, if not guilt towards the homeland. The writers of this
generation like V.S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie write in English. But they are
not the only writers who wrote in English representing the diasporic Indian
writings. However, the initial assumption was that the diasporic writings meant
writings in English and barring a few top writers the rest of them occupied a kind
of second space of exile and cultural solitude. Among the old diasporic writers
such as Raja Rao, G.V. Desani and Kamala Markandaya grew up in India, began
their writing careers in India and then for one reason or another moved to the
United State or Britain. This early generation of writers articulated the problems
of writing in English, of grappling with the straitjacket of mainstream English to
represent the varied textures of Indian life. Raja Rao in the preface to his novel
Kanthapura which was published in England in 1938 writers:
The telling has not been easy. One has to convey in a language that is not
ones own the spirit that is ones own. One has to convey the various shades and
omissions of a certain thought movement that looks maltreated in an alien
language.
A few lines later he adds:
We in India, think quickly, we talk quickly and when we move, we move
quickly. There must be something in the sun of India that makes us rush and
tumble and run on. The Mahabharata has 214,778 verses and the Ramayana
48,000. The Puranas are endless and innumerable. We have neither punctuation,
nor the treacherous ats and ons to bother uswe tell one interminable tale.
Episode follows episode, and when our thoughts stop our breath stops, and we
move on to another thought. This was and is still the ordinary style of our story-
telling. I have tried to follow it myself in the story. Rao and Desani
experimented with the language, Indianising English if one wants to call it that
but in different ways. While Rao attempts to provide the Cadence of Kannada in
English, Desani transcribes the idiosyncrasies of Indian English to great comic
effect. But the third generation diasporic writers, who settled abroad and
accepted by the West by virtue of their talent, are concerned with truth as they
see it in life around them. They are Vikram Seth, Amitabh Ghosh, Shashi
Tharoor, Amit Chaudhuri, Jhumpa Lahiri and others who use English no more as
a colonial language and never suggest a self-conscious distancing from their
Indian situation and at the same time their use of English do not show any lack of
commitment to Indianness. They have brought name and fame to them as well as
their mother country. They are read by the western readers and not just by
indofiles or by those who are more interested to know about India rather than to
enjoy these writings as literature.
In fact these writers including jhumpa Lahiri are honest and authentic to
their experience and write about the Indians who have settled either in the United
states or England and do not comment on something that they are not well-

32
versed in. the Indians who have settled abroad feel themselves exiled, as they are
in their consciousness unable to cut off completely their umbilical chords that
still bind them in their emotional crisis.
The diasporic literature in English is read both in the West and India but
those diasporic authors of Indian origin who write in different Indian languages
are primarily read in India by the readers of different languages areas. However,
expect a few well established writers like Llokranjan Dasgupta of Germany
writing in Bengali, Usha priyamvada or Susham bedi of US writing in Hindi or
Abhimanyu Anant of Mauritius also writing in Hindi or Dev, Sati Kumar, Ajmer
Rode of Europe, England and Canada writing in Punjabi the rest of the diasporic
writers in different Indian languages are struggling hard to overcome marginality
and become a strong voice in the ethnic literary discourse and also in the
historiography of different Indian languages. it is a different matter that
Alokranjah Das Gupta has a strong presence in the Bengali literature but by
virtue of his poetic excellence and to because it is a voice from Germany or Usha
Priyamvada is referred to in Hindi literature but as a novelist of merit before her
migration to US. Susham Bedis case is all together different. She has by her
literary talent overcome the insider/outsider syndrome (Ashis Gupta) and has
established herself in the Hindi historiography as a writer who is at home in both
cultures. Similarly it can be said of Punjabi writers like Dev, Sati Kumar or
Ajmer Rode who have shown, the propensity to keep the ties with ones native
land and at the same time have romanticized the native land and developed new
bonds within ones adopted homeland. Their texts themselves are journeys
between source and target cultures, between homelands and the current place of
abode or in other words des/pardes or imaginary homelands. But for these
Punjabi writers past is constantly in focus which empowers them to fight their
battles of self-respect in their new lands and also live in mourning of the
moments of trauma and with their pain of adjustment. This experience is more
with those writers who have created a third space for them in the diasporic
Indian Literature. So says Amar Jyoti:
To live in an alien land
to suffer, tolerate discriminations,
the hatred of those eyes
this is the definition of homelessness.
These diasporic writing has developed its own theoretical position
privileging a double vision of mythologising of history or describing perpetual
homelessness or renewal and change creating both a looking forward and a
yearning backward condition. Sometimes they feel homeless in their new home
or nostalgically think of their home land which they have left or create an
imaginery homeland where they live and thus diasporic consciousness in Punjabi
and other Indian language writings particularly moves alternatively between two
sets of discourse, the older discourse of nostalgia problematising their identity of
expatriation, alienation and racial discrimination and a new discourse of

33
absorption and transplantation and validation of their dreams and in the process
resolving the conflict between continuity and disruption which is so beautifully
described by Kamal Kapur:
Plonk in the middle of
thoroughfares cars honking
in traffic jams heat and smoke
the thought of you stirs
some root unseasonably thrusts
its stem out of my
nipples and flowers.
This is the most authentic reflection of the third space, writers of the
Indian diaspra who have as commented by Bhiku Parekh like the banyan tree, the
traditional symbol of the India way of life, spread their roots in several soils,
drawing nourishment from one when the rest dry up. Far from being homeless,
they have several homes, and that is the only way they have increasingly come to
feel at home in the new world. Members of the Indian diaspora share a diasporic
consciousness. It is generated in part by a complex network of historical
connections, spiritual affinities and unifying cultural memories and manifest
itself in varying degrees in the literary productions of Indian communities around
the world. These writers engage in their works the complicated politics of their
(dis) locations; their narratives carry the inscriptions of their complex
perspectivesperspectives that are simultaneously shaped by their ethnicity,
gender, migrancy and post coloniality.
The third generation of Indian diaspora mostly of young people who are
unable to speak any of the Indian languages or otherwise use creole or speak
Indian languages in a broken tongue, are children of migrant Indian parents who
keep to the old ways and their children feel trapped by their differences, not only
at the host society but at home also. However with their resilience of youth most
of them find a balance and some even start appreciating aspects of their heritage
culture. These young Indians speak English, German and French in a perfect
natural way and are now established professionals in different fields: media,
administration, corporate world and are part of establishment in their respective
countries of stay. In the post modernist multi-cultural situation they are not
nostalgic but curious about the sartorial, culinary, literary, cinematic and
religious images of India which are transmitted across space and time through
electronic networks, films and theatre linking and juxtaposing again across space
and time new subjectivities within the diasporic community. Among the
diasporic youth of the third generation two characteristics are very vivid: film
making and Hindu Activism. The best example of film making by the
professionals of third generation, is the comedy Goodness gracious me which
was shown on BBC channel two by young versatile Indian actors and writers
which makes fun of the Indian Cultural stereotypes, highlighting generation

34
difference and presenting what their parents did and new the young generation
hated to do that. For example:
Parents peeled the stamps off letters that the postal service missed to
mark up.
Your more came home with napkins stuffed in her purse of the
restaurant she last ate at.
When you became part of that vicious clan who recycled wedding gifts.
Parents took Indian snacks anywhere it says, No food allowed or ate
the famous hamburger, no meat; water, no ice; 3 cups; and 18 ketchups
please.
It even makes fun of British monarchy and different British
establishments and in the process displays (a) the confidence, brightness and
strength of purpose in young professional Indians (b) resistence against cliche-
ridden cultural conventions and also the natural urge to establish their British
identity in the multicultural set up of Britain. When one can laugh at oneself it
shows maturity and confidence. And therefore one feels a little astonished to
read Yasmin Jiwanies review of the Masala made n US by Srinivas Krishna.
The review which grudgingly bespeaks of the film and says that it presents the
complexity of diaspora culture in a trivial way and repacks it for easy
consumption by white Canadians. Jiwanie says very strongly that it violated
Indian, made a mockery of their sense of being and betrayed them to the wider
society. Yasmin Jiwanies readings are stereotypical as she could not understand
the underneath irony and humour and trauma and memory of the film which in
no way can be termed as black humour. The film is about people who are not at
home. In fact Srinivas Krishna makes it problematic from within the diaspora
by asking questions about what home actually means to specific diasporic
groups. It is said that Masala is the intertext of Gurinder Chadhas Bhaji on the
Beach (Vijay Mishra). There is another film Mississippi Masala by Meera
Nair which provides a perspective from within the diaspora and addresses gender
concerns through providing women a more central role in the shaping of their
future (Pratyusha Basu). The latest craze is the Bombay Dreams a play being
shown in London for the last one year to the capacity crowd.
The role of these films and plays is understandable emphasizing change
but Hindu activism, it can be claimed, believes in an unchanging constant
tradition. By these contrasting images one can successfully project the
complexities of British and American Indian youth and their creative minds.
These two aspects reveal two distinct responses of the youths to the cultural
differences. Here one may ask about the genesis and also aim of the Hindu
movement particularly when it does not go for any internal reform but rather
external representation. Is it only an approach to prove ones separate identity?
Has the vision of Hinduism anything to do with the political situation in India? It
is no doubt an urge of the post modernist period to search for ones own identity
and also to establish it but more than that it is a protest against racism, against

35
the term ethnic which is used for the diaspora to prove that the other represents
the civilized race and they, a different creature, uncivilized and inferior, skin
dark and all that. There is no doubt that globalization has delinked culture from
territory but in the post-modernist period roots, ethnicity, tradition have become
quite important so much so that people are now realizing the threat to local
culture because of the entry of globalization in the life of a nation.
It is true that both frames, films and Hindu activism represent resistance.
First frame resists the popularly stereo-typed first generation Indian: gentle,
submissive, overachieving and full of culture and the second frame resists the
contrapuntal modernity. It is hoped that this third generation will give a new
meaning to diasporic creativity.
There is a post script to this paper. It will not be proper if we ignore a
large number of diasporic Indian writings which have created a deep impact by
changing the quality of peoples lives with the help of spiritual messages of the
eternal India. They are the Gurus like Deepak Chopra, known as wellness Guru
in America, whose bestselling book The seven spiritual laws of success has
created a stir in the minds of millions as how to realize the full potential hidden
in them and understand divine intelligence directly. These Gurus are adored and
on many occasions abused also because of the fear of the West in the
propagation of cult worship. But most of these spiritual messages go beyond
faith and religion and demonstrate an universal urge as how can one mentally
and spiritually change the lives of people and make this world free of violence by
spreading compassion, love and understanding among each other.
However, the most interesting aspect that one notices in Indian literature
today is a fierce trend of polarization due to the onslaught of commercialism.
Now the battle lines have been drawn with so much gusto that for many up and
coming writers of today, commercial magazines, however prestigious they may
be, are taboo. The Tamil little magazine Ka Cha Da Tha Pa Ra says in its
manifesto, we care a dam about those who barter literature for a living. We care
two hoots for those who are keenly in search for the buttered side of the literary
loaf.
It is true that little magazines like Pahal (Hindi), Anustup (Bengali),
Tatparya (Marathi), Vasagan (Tamil), Rujuwatu (Kannada), Nagmani (Punjabi)
are carrying on a continuous interrogation of both literary modes and social
assumption and turning them into vehicles, by means of which the real vitality of
a culture survives, but at the same time to draw a battle line and condemn in the
name of popular literature is not acceptable to many. Padigal, a little Tamil
magazine, says literature should not, in the name of fighting popularism, become
anti-people. However commercialization and the subsequent pressure, both
insidious and open, have compelled even gifted writers like Sunil Gangopadhyay
and Shirshendu Mukherjee (Bengali) to churn out instant novels and then regret
it in private, having written them. It is true that because of the lotus eating habit
of the reader, the formula-based and easily readable novels are written, but at the

36
same time experimentation also continues with a clever mixture of the readers
curiosity, the publishers handout and the crities eulogy. In recent times, stories
like Tirich (Hindi) by Uday Prakash or Sooryana Kudure (The suns Horse) by
U.R. Anantha Murthy (Kannada) became a high point for discussion in the
literary circle. With the help of magic reality, they brutally expose the
psychology of a sick society. In Kannada literature, one of the attempts is to
grasp the significance of the culture of the collective and another to understand
the dangers of the commercializing culture. If Devanoor Mahadeva, who belongs
to the Bandaya movement stands for the latter, T.G. Ragava represents the
former.
The present day crisis in India is the conflict between expediency and
universality, and as a result, a large number of writers are in the process of
identifying a pattern of problem-solving within the traditional system, vigorous
enough to generate and sustain an indigenous process of modernization, which
does not need readymade external solutions, and is in accord with indigenous
needs and attitudes. The new crop of writers are concerned with truth as they see
it in life around them. Even for the Indian English writers English is no more a
colonial language. There are outstanding contemporary English writers like
Anita Desai, Nayantara Sahgal, Vikram Seth, Shashi Despande, Amitabh Ghosh,
Upamanyu Chatterjee, Shashi Tharur, Arundhati Roy and others who would
never suggest a self-conscious distancing from their Indian situation and show
lack of commitment to Indianness. Those writers who are aware of their
inheritance, complexity and uniqueness, express in their work, without any
conscious effort, both tradition and the actual. What is noteworthy is that Indian
literature is written in many languages, but there is a vital, living relationship
among them because of polyglot fluidity, inter-lingual translations, shared
themes, forms, concerns, directions and movements. Al these keep the ideals of
Indian literature dynamically alive even today.
It is generally said that we are living in an impoverished literary age
having no more stalwarts like Tara Shankar Banerjee, Pottekat, Prem Chand or
Gopinath Mohanty. But what is missing in fact, is a society with enough literary
perception to ensure celebrity status to new talents and thus to ensure a
continuity between generations. What is further missing is a literary life,
continuous exchange, a constantly open debate between writers and other
members of the society who speak the language of honest men. In the present
day situation, it has become impossible to recommit to a cause mobilization for
collective action. We can only hope that in this new century, writers will re-
establish their position.

--------

37