The marvelous success of Chetan Bhagat as a novelist is a miracle of an exceptional device. The credit goes to his management skills, growing of thousands of new private engineering colleges necessitating his mastery over simple past tense, his justification of depraved instinctive human acts in garb of new age realism and above all one term from great Hindu philosophy called Prarabdh- Throw a lucky man into the sea, and he will come up with a fish in his mouth. Since the phrase, the bestseller English language author has become the similar to Chetan Bhagat. The legend deserves some critical attention and assessment as the master of sentiments of young generation, a name and place, both in the hearts of their sweet hearts and in society. His …show more content…
The composition not only shows his ultimate sarcasm with the British rule in India, it is also a reflection of the Western civilization. Rabindranath jots down, I had at one time believed that the springs of civilization would issue out of the heart of Europe. But today when I am about to quit the world that faith has gone bankrupt altogether. Rabindranath, who had started his life as a keen believer in the generosity of the European civilization was later disappointed when he came across the catastrophic consequences of the English rule in Indian subcontinent. It is with this disappointment the beginning of Modern Indian English Literature is marked, the earliest phase of which is described by H.M. Williams as Georgian effusions. However, more than a period of time, those effusions took a back seat with the British denial to grant Indian sovereignty. Therefore, the new generation that emerged was cynical by the West’s failure to keep its exciting promises. Three early masters of the Modern Indian Literature in English namely Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao and R.K. Narayan laid the foundation of the Contemporary English novel in India by throwing out the Indian values and adapting English Language to the Indian needs by asserting an Indian identity. It was a creative appropriation of English Language, but a rejection of the world of the existing British English Literature also. While the trio Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao and R.K. Narayan successfully laid the basics of the Indian reality and started to look at the Indian opinion and the Indian picture from a post-colonial point of the view, the later generation went further and calculate in detail the emerging guides of the Indian socio-political reality born within and without the Indian environmental boundaries. Hence, the arrival of Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Amitava Ghosh, Upmanyu
One statement in the beginning of the book was especially poignant to any one who studies Indian culture, It is easy for us to feel a vicarious rage, a misery on behalf of these people, but Indians, dead and alive would only receive such feelings with pity or contempt; it is too easy to feel sympathy for a people who culture was wrecked..
When discussing the controversial authors of Indian literature, one name should come to mind before any other. Salman Rushdie, who is best known for writing the book “Midnights Children.” The first two chapters of “Midnights Children” are known as “The Perforated Sheet”. In “The Perforated Sheet” Rushdie utilizes magic realism as a literary device to link significant events and their effects on the lives of Saleem’s family to a changing India. In fact, it is in the beginning of the story that the reader is first exposed to Rushdie’s use of magic realism when being introduced to Saleem. “On the stroke of midnight/clocks joined palms” and “the instant of India’s arrival at independence. I tumbled forth into the world”(1711). Rushdie’s description of the clocks “joining palms” and explanation of India’s newfound independence is meant to make the reader understand the significance of Saleem’s birth. The supernatural action of the clocks joining palms is meant to instill wonder, while independence accentuates the significance of the beginning of a new era. Rushdie also utilizes magic realism as an unnatural narrative several times within the story to show the cultural significance of events that take place in the story in an abnormal way.
In attempting to define the history and modern identity of postcolonial nations, Partha Chatterjee calls to attention the many paradoxes inherent in the cultural fabric of India. It is a country, he notes, with a modern culture based on native tradition that has been influenced by its colonial period. This modern culture contains conflicts and contradictions that create the ambiguity in India’s national identity. U. R. Anantha Murthy’s understands Indian culture as a mosaic pattern of tradition and modernity. He writes of a heterodox reality where the intellectual self is in conflict with the emotional, the rational individual experiences the sad nostalgia of the exile from his traditional roots and in fluctuating between belief and non-belief he works out his dilemmas. This paper attempts a reading of the transgression of “Love Laws” in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things as not only the representation of this heterodox modernity in the personal domain as a reflection of the larger national conflict but also a postcolonial writer’s dilemmas in search for an identity and their troubles in expressing it.
The author experienced a background history with this country. Indeed, he wanted to be a foreign journalist, so when he was offered a job by the NPR in India, he could not resist. As a correspondent, his job was to cover the main political and economic events about modern India, and he did not get to know the other India: the one with gurus, yoga, meditation, and what seemed to lead to a direct path to happiness. However, this time he came to India with a special purpose: to write about Indian’s happiness, and to find answers about the mystery of this country’s attraction of westerners.
Aravind Adiga’s novel, The White Tiger, discusses the life of entrepreneurial India, Balram. Moving from a weak frightened boy living in what he calls the ‘darkness’, a place of poverty and cruel leaders, he moves up the social hierarchy to the point were he becomes a CEO of a large business corporation. In a letter format to a Chinese minister he conveys his personal thoughts on India’s corruption, the difficulty of social mobility and the change in his own person identity during his life. The readers of this text are forced to form an emotional bond with the protagonist and empathises with him to the extent that a friendship is formed between the two. This bond is achieved through many different literary techniques used by Adiga such as monologue, the plot and the imagery achieved throughout his writing to develop Balram’s character as a likeable person.
Only a boat remains, an eye painted on it. The novelist says that this eye can weep. Hence, even after the cathartic disaster, “maya remained”. Partha Chatterjee, referring to this novel, argues that our colonial modernity embodies this maya, this obstinate infatuation with our pre-modern pasts which embodied both the loathsome and the beautiful. Like the storm suffered by Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, the flood faced by the chandal in Antarjali Jatra is an apocalyptic vision of the advent of modernity, a violent rupture that is necessary yet painful. On the other hand, the map of the “sacredsecular” modernity that Madhu Khanna, Brother William and Mani seek to draw begins from little things - a dewdrop or a flower - and is grounded in an ecology of love that is captured in this remark of Irigaray: “Love is not an explosion or implosion but an
Aravind Adiga in his debut novel The White Tiger, which won the Britain’s esteemed Booker Prize in 2008, highlights the suffering of a subaltern protagonist in the twenty first century known as materialism era. Through his subaltern protagonist Balram Halwai, he highlights the suffering of lower class people. This novel creates two different India in one “an India of Light and an India of Darkness” (Adiga, p. 14). The first one represents the prosperous India where everyone is able to dream a healthy and comfortable life. The life of this “Shining India” reflects through giant shopping malls, flyovers, fast and furious life style, neon lights, modern vehicles and a lot of opportunities which creates hallucination that India is competing with western countries and not far behind from them. But, on the other side, the life nurtures with poverty, scarcity of foods, life taking diseases, inferiority, unemployment, exploitation and humiliation, homelessness and environmental degradation in India of darkness.
Recent years have witnessed a large number of Indian English fiction writers who have stunned the literary world with their works. The topics dealt with are contemporary and populist and the English is functional, communicative and unpretentious. Novels have always served as a guide, a beacon in a conflicting, chaotic world and continue to do so. A careful study of Indian English fiction writers show that there are two kinds of writers who contribute to the genre of novels: The first group of writers include those who are global Indians, the diasporic writers, who are Indians by birth but have lived abroad, so they see Indian problems and reality objectively. The second group of writers are those born and brought up in India, exposed to the attitudes, morale and values of the society. Hence their works focus on the various social problems of India like the plight of women, unemployment, poverty, class discrimination, social dogmas, rigid religious norms, inter caste marriages, breakdown of relationships etc.
Indian English writers have always been responsive to the changes in material reality and theoretical perspectives that have influenced and governed its study from the very beginning. At the earlier stage the fictional works of Mulk Raj Anand, R.K.Narayan and Raja Rao were mainly concerned with the down-trodden of the society, the middle class life and the expression of traditional cultural ethos of India. The writings of Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Anita Desai, Kavita Dasvani, M.G. Vassanjee, V.S.Naipaul and Hari Kunjru, to name a few, provide an insight of the problems faced by the dislocated people in their adopted homes in a way that questions the traditional understanding of the concepts like home, nation, native and alien. Contemporary writers hailing from the previously colonized nations, particularly India, explore the forms of life that existed during the British rule and expose the subtle strategies employed to make the colonized
The measured dialogue between Reader and Editor serves as the framework through which Gandhi seeks to discredit accepted terms of civilization and denounce the English. These principle characters amply assist in the development o...
Much work has been done on Indian literature in English based on analyses through the tools of Western critical methods. The ‘Indian classical tradition’ is very rich and consists of perception and insight which serve as a best alternative to the western critical theories; but due to the colonial hangover we fail to appreciate and recognize our age old classical tradition of critical theories.
If the world of Ramakant, Umakant, Manik, and Papa symbolizes evil aspects inherent in human nature, the world of Rama and Rajaninath symbolizes its tender aspects. Although Rama’s relationship with Rajaninath is extra-marital one, one should not ignore the fact that it is the only human and genuine one. Tendulkar succeeds here in projrcting the tragedy of Rama and Rajaninath in naturalistic terms. Similarly, by placing of these two worlds of gentleness and aggression against each other, he introduces a new trend of avant-garde movement – the “Theatre of Cruelty” in Marathi. Manchi Sarat Babu precisely
India constitutes a large number of diaspora all over the world. Migration of people in various countries is no longer a surprising issue. Immigrants endeavour to settle in adopted land. Though they adapt foreign way of life and culture yet the pull of past intervenes in their life. They become nostalgic and feel alienated. If out of these immigrants some choose writing as their profession, they consciously or unconsciously give vent to their diasporic experiences in their writings. They attempt to focus on pains, dilemma, discrimination and conflicts they have to face there. Through their imaginary characters they catharsise themselves.
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, published in 1980, was perhaps the seminal text in conceiving opinions as to interplay of post-modern and post-colonial theory. The title of the novel refers to the birth of Saleem Sinai, the novel’s principal narrator, who is born at midnight August 15th 1947, the precise date of Indian independence. From this remarkable coincidence we are immediately drawn to the conclusion that the novel’s concerns are of the new India, and how someone born into this new state of the ‘Midnight’s child’, if you will, interacts with this post-colonial state. To characterise the novel as one merely concerned with post-colonial India, and its various machinations, is however a reductive practice. While the novel does at various times deal with what it is to be Indian, both pre and post 1947, it is a much more layered and interesting piece of work. Midnight’s Children’s popularity is such that it was to be voted 25th in a poll conducted by the Guardian, listing the 100 best books of the last century, and was also to receive the Booker Prize in 1981 and the coveted ‘Booker of Bookers’ in 1993. http://www.bookerprize.co.uk/
Writing by women has given a new dimension to the Indian literature. In the 20th century, women’s writing has been considered a powerful medium of modernism and feminist statements. The last two decades have witnessed phenomenal success in feminist writings of Indian English literature. Women writers comprise a sizeable segment of Indo-English writers. They present the age-old problems of Indian womanhood. As Indo-English literature has absorbed the new trends from the western literature, its theoretical foundation ranges between Greco-Roman theories of literature and Marxist, existentialist, psycho-analytic and other avant-garde movements in the world literature. The English language