Contemporary English Writing in India - JPCS

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies 

ISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic) 

Contemporary English Writing in India 

Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández 

When names like V.S. Naipaul, Kiran Desai, Bharati Mukherjee, Rohinton Mistry, 

Jhumpa Lahiri or Salman Rushdie are mentioned, one immediately associates them with authors 

of literary value, to protruding cultural and/or postcolonial stance and to India. In recent years 

postcolonial literary criticism has paid much attention to authors of Indian origin: issues like 

identity, diaspora, nationalism, transnationalism and other key concepts have been the focus of 

much critical attention. However, none of these writers live in India, and some of them were not 

even born there. 

In 1997 Femi Osofisan analyzed African exiled writers as characterized by two main 

features. First, these writers were positioned as disillusioned fugitives; second, their reading 

audience would largely be non-African but mainly European and American. For the Nigerian 

writer “these two factors therefore determine their chosen style—a disjointed, postmodern prose, 

dissonant and delirious, in conformity with the current respectable literary fashion in the west 

(confirmed by their ability to win these glittering prizes); and an ahistorical, unideological 

vocation, in celebration of their escape from, and abandonment of, the African predicament” 

(qtd. in Smith 261). Osofisan, upon pointing out these characteristics, was implicitly speaking of 

those who remain in the place: oblivious to literary fashion in the West and therefore attached to 

their cultural background together with a historical, ideological vocation. Though referring to 

Africa, the Indian case may prove likewise. Nevertheless, none of the two previous 

characteristics are totally valid nowadays due to globalization. It is hard to believe that Indian 

authors are unaware of what happens in the West (how could they or could anyone ignore 

Editorial. Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández. JPCS. Vol. 3, No. 2, 2012. 

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Internet?) and also difficult to simply exclusively associate their writings with their cultural 

background, as if they were living in a plastic bubble. In this sense, this issue of the Journal of 

Post-Colonial Cultures and Societies has attempted to provide a space for discussion and 

analysis that helps to deepen our current understanding of contemporary English writing in India 

through a variety of critical stances. 

Yet, the preparation of this volume has given rise to coexisting opposing forces. The 

whole message and core idea that contemporary English writing in India deserved special 

attention was utterly buried by the avalanche of essays dealing with some of the abovementioned 

authors. This was a sign of the great attention attracted by the literary quality of such 

writers and the scarce interest on the part of the academia to Indian writers living in India. 

However, those few accepted papers (four out of only eight received) engage with connections 

between history, economics, literature, society, religion, and so on. Indeed, these articles devote 

to the analysis of how contemporary Indian writers deal with cultural and social problems or 

Indian public issues through literature. This approximation may offer an illuminating perspective 

complementary to that other more common approach that one usually encounters. 

The reason why literature written in English by Indian authors living in India does not 

receive an equal amount of interest may possibly thus lie in a dominant Westernized critical 

approach. It is quite striking to find out that all the authors contributing to this issue have Indian 

names. Hence my statement pointing out that a Westernized critical approach may have had 

something to do with this situation. It can be a symptom of the biased stance in Western 

academia but also a proof of the difficulty of approaching an utterly different cultural paradigm, 

not to mention historical, sociological, literary or linguistic, from one’s own. Be that as it may, I 


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believe that still it is worth the effort to critically ponder on the weight of English writing in 

India, whether it is prose, poetry or drama. This would allow the (Western or not) academia to 

foster and elicit a trend of analysis centered on English writing in India which consciously 

remains unaware of publishing business machinery and its sparkling awards, and which delves 

into the literary phenomenon as a way to reach a new understanding of Indian issues from 

within. 

I am conscious of the difficulty of the proposal though. Most writers in India are at least 

bilingual and in many cases they speak four or five languages. Makarand Paranjape, in dealing 

with the Indian novelist Kiran Nagarkar, tackles the problem of establishing a tradition in fiction 

writing exclusively in English: 

There is another kind of critique of this notion of a tradition of Indian English 

writing . . . According to this other argument you cannot constitute a tradition of 

Indian writing or Indian fiction, which takes into account the literary productions 

in all the major Indian languages. That is to say that monolingualism is a colonial 

imposition; to carry it forward to this date would be to reify a colonial legacy. The 

cultural complexity that is India will not respond to such an imposition of a 

monolingual literary tradition. The argument here is that because Indian English 

creativity is a kind of bilingual creativity in the first place, you cannot consider 

Indian English literature in isolation. There is no Indian English tradition as such 

but traditions which talk to works written in other Indian languages. (9-10) 

Paranjape believes that “to talk of a tradition of Indian English writing is therefore considered 

unsatisfactory” (10). Yet the body of English writing in India reaches a wider audience in this 


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globalized world than others written in Assamese, Tamil, Telugu or Marathi, to mention a few. 

For the Western literary critic, such writing deals with culturally Indian topics, uses a different 

kind of English, and opens up a radically distinct vision of reality. It is at this point when 

Literature should be written in capital letters for here resides one of the most important values of 

this art. Indian writing in English per se can provide, I believe, to any reader of English 

something genuinely Indian that remains out of reach for a wider audience in literature written in 

other Indian languages. In addition, approaching English writing in India does not necessarily 

entails the negation of the existence of other literatures written in India in any of the many 

languages spoken nowadays or prior to the colonization of India. It is naïve, in my view, on the 

part of the reader and of the academia to believe that taking into consideration English literary 

production in India negates the existence of literature written in other languages, especially in a 

country in which multilingualism is such a common place. A serious approach to literature 

written in English in India can only acknowledge the existence of a continuous inter-influence 

among coexisting languages and literary traditions in India and delve into how this writing 

enlarges and resituates our assumptions about reality and literature. 

Another interesting fact is that the papers accepted exclusively deal with women writers, 

namely Kamala Das, Indira Goswami, Shashi Deshpande and Meena Kandasamy. All of these 

artists are at least bilingual. Das writes in Malayalam and English, Goswami in Assamese and 

English, Deshpande only writes in English but speaks Kannada, Marathi and Sanskrit fluently, 

and Kandasamy writes in English but speaks Tamil. These writers are very heterogeneous in 

their life and literary trajectories. Das and Goswami died recently and their place within 

international literature is already secured. The same can be said of Deshpande, but she is a living 


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author. Kandasamy, on the contrary, is an emerging and promising artist who has broken ground 

in poetry initially, and is now working in prose. If one looks at the map of India having these 

writers in mind, one can see that different parts of the national territory are represented: Das was 

born and lived in the South of India, in Kerala; Goswami in Northeastern India, in Assam; 

Deshpande was born in Karnataka but has lived in Mumbai and Bangalore, all of these territories 

in the West in India; and Kandasamy in the Southeast of India, in Chennai. 

Priya Menon deals with Das’ My Story and considers questions of gender construction in 

upper caste Kerala in the novel and its complex intermingling with writing. Kumar Sankar 

Battacharya explores Goswami’s The Moth-Eaten Howdah of the Tusker and the short story 

“The Offspring” in order to reflect upon the interconnectedness of notions like caste and class in 

India. Maninder Kapoor and Seema Singh approach Deshpande’s That Long Silence as a way 

delve into the question of feminist narratology by pointing out the features associated to 

Deshpande’s writing and to a genuinely feminist writing. Finally, Abin Chakraborty examines 

Kandasamy’s Touch and reveals how her poems counteract readers’ prejudices in relation to 

Dalit culture and people by giving voice to silenced historical past and current events. 

This issue also includes two short stories. Anway Mukhopadhyay’s Letter from the 

Brotherland opens up a new territory, a private—yet universal—urge which leads readers to a reconsideration 

of India. On the other hand, S. Krishnamoorthy Aithal’s Samudramanthana, the 

Churning of the Ocean discloses a fresh and alternative conception of culture in its wider sense. 

Upon looking back at the work done, it is nonetheless unavoidable to think of the great 

health of Indian writing in English, despite Western (conscious or not) unawareness of its 

existence. Many other Indian writers could have been studied here but what remains the key 


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question is that there always are public spaces which allow for its study and analysis, like the one 

offered by the Journal of Post-Colonial Cultures and Societies. 

Biography 

Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández is Associate Professor in English at the University of Córdoba, Spain. 


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Works Cited 

Paranjape, Makarand. “Kiran Nagarkar and the Tradition of the Indian English Novel.” The 

Shifting Worlds of Kiran Nagarkar’s Fiction. Ed. Lukmani, Yasmeen. New Delhi: 

Indialog Publications, 2004. 1-24. Print. 

Smith, Andrew. “Migrancy, Hybridity, and Postcolonial Literary Studies.” The Cambridge 

Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. Ed. Neil Lazarus. Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press, 2004, 241-61. Print. 


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Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández teaches at the University of Córdoba, Spain, but she has spent 

research periods at Stanford University and Wheaton College in the US and Trinity College of 

Dublin in Ireland. She was Founder and Secretary-Treasurer of AEEII (Spanish Association for 

India Studies) for the period 2007-2009. She co-edited the book India in the World, published by 

Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2011. Her research interests are mainly concerned with issues 

of identity and with the role of perception in literature. 


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Contemporary English Writing in India - JPCS

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