POLITICAL SCIENCE PROJECT

MARXISM

Project submitted to:

Mr. Alok Kumar Gupta Project submitted by:
Faculty of Law Gautam Khazanchi
NLU,Jodhpur Sec A
B.B.A., L.L.B (Hons.)
Roll no. 406
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Brief study of Indian literature

r.k. narayan – a study

salman rushdie – a study

vikram seth – a study

Ruskin bond – a study

evaluation
INTRODUCTION
Indian writing in English is a relatively recent phenomena, as far as literature
goes. Though one can trace such writers in India to a century back, Indian
writing in English has come into force only in the last couple of decades or
so. Some of these writers have achieved worldwide fame, some national, and
others perhaps have to be content with a more constricted circle

The very definition of the adjective “Indian” here is hazy. Many of these
writers neither live in India, nor are Indian citizens. . The first book written
by an Indian in English was by Sake Dean Mahomet, titled Travels of Dean
Mahomet; Mahomet's travel narrative was published in 1793 in England. In
its early stages it was influenced by the Western art form of the novel.

Early Indian writers used English unadulterated by Indian words to convey

an experience which was essentially Indian. Raja Rao's Kanthapura is Indian
in terms of its storytelling qualities. Rabindranath Tagore wrote in Bengali
and English and was responsible for the translations of his own work into
English. Nirad C. Chaudhuri, a writer of non-fiction, is best known for his
The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian where he relates his life
experiences and influences. He was a self-confessed Anglophile. P. Lal, a
poet, translator, publisher and essayist, is the epitome of the literateur, and
besides translating the entire Mahabharata into English, has written many
essays in defense of Indian literature in English.
BRIEF STUDY OF INDIAN
LITERATURE
Indian Writing in English: India is the third largest English book
producing country after the US and the UK, and the largest number of books
are published in English. Creative writing in English has been an integral
part of the Indian literary tradition for many years. Many believe that is a
challenge for Indian novelists to write about their experiences in a language,
which is essentially “foreign”. However, Indian English has been used
widely by several writers who have been able to successfully use the
language to create rich and invigorating literature. India is rich with tastes,
sounds, and sights that are any writer's dream and stylistic influence from
local languages is a particular feature of Indian literature in English. Many
perceive English as having released the local languages from rigid classical
traditions that could be an obstacle while writing. It is Indian writers in
English who have truly showcased India to the world not only in terms of
understanding the country better, but also by establishing that the language
no longer represents the western concepts of literary creativity as its ranges
have expanded.

The Future of English in India

The language has already been well established in the country and has
acquired its own independent identity. With the number of foreign investors
flocking to India and the growth of outsourcing, English has come to play a
key role in professional relationships between foreign and Indian companies.
Familiarity with the differences between American and British English has
definitely grown as much business communication is carried out according
to the language style with which a client is comfortable.

Though many may perceive the accent, terminology, and conversational

style as “funny”, in reality it is just a different English that cannot simply be
equated with either American or British English. Indians are familiar with
both types of English, but Indian English has acquired its own character in a
country which is a melting pot of various cultures, people, and traditions.
R. K. Narayan
R. K. Narayan (October 10, 1906 - May 13, 2001), born Rasipuram
Krishnaswami Ayyar Naranayanaswami was one of the well known and
most widely read Indian novelists writing in English.

R.K. Narayan was essentially a storyteller, whose sensitive, well-drawn

portrayals of twentieth-century Indian life were set mostly in the fictional
South Indian town of Malgudi. Most of Narayan's work, starting with his
first novel Swami and Friends (1935), captures many Indian traits while
having a unique identity of its own. He was sometimes compared to the
United States writer William Faulkner, whose novels were also grounded in
a compassionate humanism and celebrated the humour and energy of
ordinary life.

On the face of it, his novels seem to be insulated from history, circumscribed
by a limited geography, lacking in ambition and replete with small everyday
detail. But his brilliance, as those who have learnt to love and admire his
work over the years know, cannot be gauged by the usual yardsticks used to
measure literary prowess. In many ways, Narayan was one of a kind. He
may not have charted new trails in fiction writing but he possessed a
wonderful ability to convey a feel of the people and the social context he
wrote about. As a storyteller, he was a natural, picking at the bedrock of
everyday existence to uncover the barest truths and tease out the bald facts
of life

But the greatest point about Narayan's writing is its use of language. His
talent goes beyond mere aptitude with words or a maverick Malgudi.
Narayan stands for the immense flexibility, adaptability and élan of English;
he uses the language of Bible, Shakespeare and American Constitution to an
amazing effect while dealing in subjects vastly removed. His creatures squat
on the floor for meals, wear dhoti with a coat, read the Ramayana, regard
mothers as sacred, rebel against fathers, marry for love over money, and
aspire for eternal life. The author writes all this without a single footnote,
without any discernible twang of the foreign, with a sense of disarming
familiarity.
Narayan represents the synthesis that is English, a language evolving
through the synergy of civilizations, known and unknown; a language in
continual quest.

Narayan's novels are characterised by Chekhovian simplicity and gentle

humour. He told stories of simple folks trying to live their simple lives in a
changing world. Characters in his novels were very ordinary down-to-
earth Indians trying to blend tradition with modernisation, often resulting
in tragi-comic situations. His writings style was simple, unpretentious and
witty-conveyed, with a unique flavour as if he were writing in the native
tongue. Many of Narayan's works are rooted in everyday life, though he is
not shy of invoking Hindu tales or traditional Indian folklore to emphasize
a point. His easy-going outlook on life has sometimes been criticized,
though in general he is viewed as an accomplished, sensitive and
reasonably prolific writer. Most of his work revolves around India and its
colourful life. He is very much an Indian in his writing.

Narayan lived till ninety-five, writing for more than fifty years, and
publishing till he was eighty seven. He wrote fifteen novels, five volumes of
short stories, a number of travelogues and collections of non-fiction, an
English translation of Indian epics, and the memoir My Days.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Indian essayist and author of fiction, most of which is set on the Indian
subcontinent. He lives in London and New York City. Rushdie grew up in a
middle class Muslim family in Bombay (now Mumbai). When he was 17 his
family moved to Pakistan. He attended the Cathedral and John Connon
School in Mumbai, Rugby School in Warwickshire, then King's College,
Cambridge in England. Following an advertising career with Ayer Barker, he
became a full-time writer. In 2004, Rushdie married his fourth wife, Indian
model and actress Padma Lakshmi. He is best known for the violent
criticism his book The Satanic Verses (1988) provoked in the Muslim
community. After death threats and a fatwa by Ruhollah Khomeini, calling
for his assassination, he spent years underground, appearing in public only
sporadically. Between 2004 and 2006 he served as president of the PEN
American Center

His writing career began with Grimus, a fantastic tale, part-science fiction,
which was generally ignored by the book-buying public and literary critics.
His next novel, Midnight's Children, however, catapulted him to literary
fame and is often considered his best work to date. It also significantly
shaped the course that Indian writing in English was to follow over the next
decade. This work was later awarded the 'Booker of Bookers' prize in 1993
— after being selected as the best novel to be awarded the Booker Prize in
its first 25 years. After the success of Midnight's Children, Rushdie wrote a
short novel, Shame, where he depicts the political turmoil in Pakistan by
basing his characters on Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and General Muhammad Zia-ul-
Haq. Both these works are characterised by, apart from the style of magic
realism, the immigrant outlook of which Rushdie is so very conscious.

Rushdie is also highly influenced by modern literature. Midnight's Children

borrows themes from Günter Grass's novel The Tin Drum, which Rushdie
claims inspired him to begin writing. The Satanic Verses is also influenced
by Mikhail Bulgakov's classic Russian novel The Master and Margarita.

India and Pakistan were the themes, respectively, of Midnight's Children and
Shame. In his later works, Rushdie turned towards the Western world with
The Moor's Last Sigh, exploring commercial and cultural links between
India and the Iberian peninsula, and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, which
presents an alternate history of modern rock music. Midnight's Children
receives accolades for being Rushdie's best, most flowing and inspiring
work, and many of Rushdie's post-1989 works have been critically
acclaimed and commercially successful.

His narrative style, blending myth and fantasy with real life, has been
described as magic realism. Magic Realism (or Magical Realism) is an
illustrative or literary technique in which the laws of cause and effect
seem not quite to apply in otherwise real world situations. The term magic
realism was first used by the German art critic Frank Roh to describe the
unusual realism of primarily American painters such as Ivan Albright,
Paul Cadmus, George Tooker and other artists during the 1920s, under
whom traditional realism became subtly infused with overtones of the
surreal and fantastical. The term grew popular in the 20th century with
the rise of such authors as Mikhail Bulgakov, Ernst Jünger, and many
Latin American writers.It is difficult to distinguish magic realism from
conventional fictional realism. After all, the very plots, characters, and
narrator of conventional fiction are not truly realistic. However, stories of
magic realism tend to treat reality as completely fluid and have characters
who accept this as normal. An encyclopedia reshapes the world to fit its
descriptions or a stream of blood travels to tell a woman of the death of
her husband, and the characters simply accept these unprecedented
happenings as more events in their lives.

Rushdie has also long mentored - though quietly - younger Indian (and
ethnic-Indian) writers, and can be said to have influenced an entire
generation of 'Indo-Anglian' writers; it would not be an exaggeration to say
that he has had a hand in shaping (and re-shaping) post-colonial literature in
general.
VIKRAM SETH
Arun Vikram Seth born June 20, 1952 is an Indian poet, novelist, travel
writer, librettist, children's writer, biographer and memoirist. An unusually
forthcoming writer whose published material is replete with un- or thinly-
disguised details as to the personal lives of himself and his intimates related
in a highly engaging narrative voice, Seth has said that he is somewhat
perplexed that his readers often in consequence presume to an unwelcome
degree of personal familiarity with him.

Seth is now best known for his novels, though he has characterised himself
as a poet first and novelist second. His first book of poetry, Mappings, was
originally privately published; it attracted little attention and indeed Philip
Larkin, to whom he sent it for comment, referred to it rather scornfully
among his intimates, though he offered Seth encouragement. Whether or not
Seth's poetry is expressly influenced by Larkin, it contains similar elements:
a highly colloquial vocabulary and syntax with enjambement and rhyme;
closely structured form but without rigidity.

The first of his novels, The Golden Gate (1986), is indeed a novel in verse
about the lives of a number of young professionals in San Francisco. The
novel is written entirely in rhyming tetrameter sonnets after the style
established by Aleksandr Pushkin in Eugene Onegin, which he encountered
in English translation in a Stanford second-hand bookstore and which
changed the direction of his career, shifting his focus from academic to
literary work. The likelihood of commercial success seemed highly doubtful
-- and the scepticism of friends as to the novel's viability is facetiously
quoted within the novel; but the verse novel received wide acclaim (Gore
Vidal dubbed it "The Great California Novel") and achieved healthy sales.
The novel contains a strong element of affectionate satire, something
occasionally missed by Seth's more earnest critics, as with his subsequent
novel, A Suitable Boy.

He has continued to produce volumes of poetry at intervals alongside his

publications in a range of other forms, including translations from Chinese
poets. Despite his formidable erudition in a wide range of disciplines, both
his prose and poetry are strongly characterised by their accessibility and he
has said that he labours considerably to ensure this.
In most of Seth's writing (apart from An Equal Music, narrated in the first
person by its central character), there is a strong, and always engaging
and attractive, narrative persona -- sometimes, as in From Heaven Lake,
obviously Seth himself; at other times, in his novels and poems,
intermittently so.

His work is characterized by the innovative recuperation of traditional and

unfashionable forms like novel in verse. His books reveal a sophisticated
yet unselfconcious return to realist narrative and formal poetic structres.
Seth's considerable range is demonstrated by the meticulous historical
accuracy of A Suitable Boy, with the finely nuanced cultivated-Indian
English of the narrative voice and the entirely in-character voices of the
principals of the story; the correspondingly accurate depiction of northern
California yuppies of the 1980s in The Golden Gate; and his portrait of
the world of western classical musicians in An Equal Music.
RUSKIN BOND
Ruskin Bond is an Indian author of British descent who was born in Kasauli,
Himachal Pradesh, in 1934, and grew up in Jamnagar (Gujarat), Mussoorie,
Dehradun, and Shimla. He lives in Landour, a picturesque Himalayan hill
station contiguous with Mussoorie in the northern Indian state of
Uttaranchal.

Ruskin Bond is an icon among both Anglo-Indian writers and children's

authors. As a writer, he is as productive as ever in his early seventies, and
gets many of his ideas by reminiscing while gazing out of the windows of
his apartment over towards the Lower Western Himalaya, the Pauri Hills and
the Doon Valley from his perch atop Mullingar Hill in Landour Cantonment.
He can always reach into the deep well of his rich life experience, especially
his childhood and early adulthood, for yet another story line or another
evocative character.
Over the course of a writing career spanning forty years, he has written over
a hundred short stories, essays, novels, and more than thirty books for
children.

Though he is quite well-known as a writer of popular books for children, he

prefers the seclusion of the sleepy foothills of the Himalayas. His books and
poems have a mellow and haunting aura. For Bond, life is not about
dramatic and momentous incidents, but of tranquility lost and regained, of
love and romance and nature, where time is the catalyst of change.

In his writings, one comes across passionate descriptions about the pine
and deodar trees in the hilly environs of Northern India, and stories
weaved close to a tantalized depiction of nature. Bond's love for the
mountains and walking about in mountain towns is a very important part
of his amiable personality.
He is very much our Indian Wordsworth, as he finds endless material for
stories in the trees and wild flowers, birds and animals, rocks and rivers,
and simple Hill-folk who are an integral part of the Himalayas.

Media-shy and reclusive by nature, Bond prefers the quiet life of the hills
to the hustle-bustle and pollution of the towns and cities. He feels that the
majority of those who live in the cities miss out on the mystique and
freedom that nature lends.

Ruskin Bond recieved the Sahitya Akademi Award for English writing in
India for 1992 and has also been honoured with the Padmashri. His books
have found mass appeal as both children and adults find echoes of their
thoughts and feelings in Bond's writings, replete with simplicity, warmth,
humour, delight, chills and thrills - all centred round his deep love for
nature and people.
Evaluation
Rushdie with his famous work Midnight's Children (Booker Prize 1981,
Booker of Bookers 1992) ushered in a new trend of writing. He used a
hybrid language – English generously peppered with Indian terms – to
convey a theme that could be seen as representing the vast canvas of
India. He is usually categorised under the magic realism mode of writing
most famously associated with Gabriel García Márquez.

Rushdie's statement in his book – "the ironic proposition that India's best
writing since independence may have been done in the language of the
departed imperialists is simply too much for some folks to bear" – created
a lot of resentment among many writers, including writers in English.

Vikram Seth, author of A Suitable Boy (1994) is a writer who uses a purer
English and more realistic themes. Being a self-confessed fan of Jane
Austen, his attention is on the story, its details and its twists and turns. His
writings have a worldly touch to them and his erudite poetic and language
skills make him more than just an Indian writer of english.

R.K. Narayan is a writer who contributed over many decades and who
continued to write till his death recently. Narayan created the fictitious
town of Malgudi where he set his novels. Some criticise Narayan for the
parochial, detached and closed world that he created in the face of the
changing conditions in India at the times in which the stories are set.
Others, such as Graham Greene, however, feel that through Malgudi they
could vividly understand the Indian experience. Narayan's evocation of
small town life and its experiences through the eyes of the endearing child
protagonist Swaminathan in Swami and Friends is a good sample of his
writing style. His writing is essentially Indian.