Indian English Literature (Vol. 9)

It is a matter of pleasure and pride to note that Indian English Literature has been making conspicuous progress in recent years. While some celebrated Indian novelists like Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai and Aravind Adiga have won the Booker Prize, a host of others have won accolades and wide readership in India and abroad. The present anthology aims at presenting an in-depth study of twenty established as well as upcoming writers including: Jayanta Mahapatra, Eunice de Souza, Arun Kolatkar, G.S. Sarat Chandra, Romen Basu, Raja Rao, Chaman Nahal, Ruskin Bond, Arun Joshi, Amitav Ghosh, Meera Syal, Habib Tanvir, Badal Sircar, Chandrasekhar Kambar, Girish Karnad and H.S. Shivaprakash.
The topics covered in this anthology include a critique of modernist Indian English poetry; thematic concerns in Jayanta Mahapatra’s poetry; feminine sensibility in the poetry of Eunice de Souza; East-west encounter in Romen Basu’s fiction; alienation and quest for identity in Ruskin Bond’s The Room on the Roof; eclecticism, diasporic displacement, nostalgia and exile in Amitav Ghosh’s fiction; and other themes like human suffering, poverty, violence, loneliness, faith, skepticism, and pangs of Partition that form the subject matter of Indian English literature in general.
The five articles dealing with drama, included in this anthology take up theatrical assumptions; a rejection of Western theatrical modes; experimentation; satirical and utopian elements in two of Circar’s fantastical plays; and the plight of marginalised and oppressed women.
Since most of the authors included in the present volume for discussion are prescribed in the English syllabi in various Indian universities and studied for M.Phil and Ph.D. degrees, it is hoped that teachers, students and research scholars will find this volume extremely useful.