This Volume Of Critical Essays On Indian Literature Cobers A Wide Range Of Genres Like Novel, Short Story And Poetry And Of Languages Like Hindi, English, Urdu, Bengali, Oriya, Kannada And Malayalam Besides English. Informed By A Deeo And Firsthand Awareness Of Indian Literary Trends And Texts As Well As Of Contemporary Literary Theory, These Essays Revaluate Concepts And Movements Like Modernism, Dalit Literature, Nativism And Feminism And Offer Close Readings Of The Texts Of A Number Of Indian Writers Including Premchand, Mirza Ghalib, Mahasweta Devi, Ramakanta Rath, Kamala Das, Chandrasekhara Kambar And Ayyappa Paniker. The Author'S Radical Democratic Attitude To Literature Is Evidenced By His Jusicious Is Evidenced By His Judicious Acceptance Of The Diversity Of Indian Literature And His Sympathetic Understanding Of Avant-Gardist And Subalyern Trends. His Perceptions Are Fresh, Position Well-Argued. Writen In A Lucid Jargon-Free Style, These Insightfuleassays, Including The Brief Editorial Reflections He Wrote For The Journal Indian Literature, Make An Indispensable And Fascinating Reading

The essays in this book look at the interaction between English and other Indian languages and focus on the pressure of languages on writers and on each other. Divided into two parts, the first part of the book deals with the pressure that English language has exerted, and continues to exert, in India and our ideas of connectedness as a nation in the ways in which we deal with this pressure. The essays emphasise on the emergence of the hybrid language in the Tamil cultural world because of the presence of English (and Hindi); on the politics of ‘anthologisation’; and how Karnad’s Tughlaq deals with the idea of the nation, looking at its historical location. The second part of the book focuses on Indian English literature and deals with how it interacts with the idea of representing the Indian nation, sometimes obsessively, seen both in poetry and novels. The book argues that the writer’s location is crucial to the world of imagination, whether in the novel, poetry or drama. The world is inflected by the location of the author, and the struggle between the language dominant in that location and English is part of the creative tension that provides energy and uniqueness to writing.