History and movements notes

This paper asks you to keep three labels apart. They look alike; they are not one literature. M. K. Naik’s working definition is the safest exam sentence: Indian English literature is literature written originally in English by authors Indian by birth, ancestry or nationality. The classroom name for that body is Indian Writing in English (IWE), after K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar’s survey. It is a literature of India that chose English as its first language of composition, not a branch of British literature that happens to mention India.

Anglo-Indian writing, in Naik’s history, is the literature of Englishmen and other Westerners in India or about India: Kipling, Forster’s A Passage to India, Paul Scott. The writer’s passport is British (or European); India is the scene or the subject. Do not pour that shelf into IWE. A second trap sits in ordinary speech: “Anglo-Indian” also names the Eurasian community in India. Ruskin Bond belongs to that community by ancestry, lives in India, and writes in English; on this paper he sits with IWE (Unit 3), not with Kipling. Community and the old literary label are two different jobs of the same words.

Indo-Anglian (Gokak’s treasury; Iyengar’s earlier usage) means Indians writing originally in English — the same field as IWE, an older name. The MGSU list prints Indo-Anglican. “Anglican” strictly means the Church of England; the scholarly spelling is Indo-Anglian. In an answer, use the syllabus word, then add one line: it is the older name for Indian Writing in English, not church writing. Some older critics used Indo-English for translations from Indian languages into English. Naik keeps that shelf separate. So Nil Darpan in Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s English (Unit 5) is a translated play, not originally English; Manto’s “The Assignment” (Unit 3) is Urdu in English dress. They are on this paper because the course also reads Indian writing through English. They are not the definition of IWE.

Indian Writing in English does not begin with Independence. It begins when English becomes a language Indians can compose in, not only a language of the factory and the court. The East India Company and Christian missions planted the tongue; print and the college made a readership. Hindu College, Calcutta, opened in 1817. Macaulay’s Minute on Indian Education (1835) and Bentinck’s English-medium policy turned English into the language of higher study. Raja Rammohan Roy had already argued that useful Western knowledge should come through English. Sisir Kumar Das maps this as “Western impact, Indian response”: the same decades modernise Bengali and other Indian languages and grow a thin, serious English literature by Indians.

First voices are earlier than the famous poets. Sake Dean Mahomed’s The Travels of Dean Mahomet (1794) is often named as the first book in English by an Indian. In verse the classroom start is Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809–1831), Eurasian teacher at Hindu College, Poems (1827), Byronic and patriotic. Kashiprasad Ghose follows with The Shair and Other Poems (1830). Michael Madhusudan Dutt writes The Captive Ladie (1849) in English, then turns to Bengali blank-verse epic — a life that shows how the new education could feed both tongues. The first Indian novel in English is Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Rajmohan’s Wife (serialised 1864); Bankim’s great fame then moves into Bengali. Krishna Mohan Banerjee’s The Persecuted (1831) is often listed as the first Indian play in English.

Origin, then, is not one birthday. It is a climate: English education in Bengal, a bilingual intelligentsia, Romantic models from Britain, and Indian matter (myth, the nation, social reform) looking for a form. Toru Dutt later makes that climate into lasting poetry (Unit 2). If a short question asks “origin of IWE,” name the college, the Minute, Derozio, and Rajmohan’s Wife, and add that the writing is original English by Indians, not Kipling’s India.

Naik’s history is the map most Indian universities still walk. Four phases are enough for a 20-mark answer, provided each phase has a job and two names, not a cloud of “growth and development.”

From the beginnings to 1857. Imitation and first experiments: Derozio, Kashiprasad Ghose, Madhusudan’s English verse, early prose and the first play. The models are Byron, Scott, and the English classroom poem. The 1857 uprising closes this chapter in the history books; the literature is still small. 1857 to about 1920 — the literary renaissance. Toru Dutt, Romesh Chunder Dutt, Manmohan Ghose, Sri Aurobindo, Sarojini Naidu, Tagore’s English Gitanjali (1912; Nobel Prize 1913). Bankim has already opened the novel. English is no longer only a school exercise; it carries myth, nation, and lyric fame. Gokak’s treasury is built from this shelf. 1920 to 1947 — the Gandhian whirlwind. Politics enters fiction as a climate, not only as a speech. The “big three” of the Indian English novel appear together in the 1930s: Mulk Raj Anand (Untouchable, 1935), R. K. Narayan (Swami and Friends, 1935), Raja Rao (Kanthapura, 1938). Anand writes social protest; Narayan writes the small South-Indian town (Unit 3 still uses that voice); Raja Rao Indianises English syntax and the sthala-purana. Independence and after, 1947–. Poetry modernises with Ezekiel (lesson 8). The novel widens: Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve (1954) is the set rural novel of Unit 4; Anita Desai, Shashi Deshpande, Rushdie after 1981. Drama in English finds an urban stage in Mahesh Dattani (Unit 4). Non-fiction runs from Nehru to A. P. J. Abdul Kalam (Unit 5).

Two forces run through every phase, as the course outcomes ask you to say. Classical Indian tradition supplies myth, epic episode, bhakti, the village tale — Toru’s “Lakshman,” Raja Rao’s purana, later Kolatkar’s pilgrimage. Western colonisation supplies the language, the printed book, Romantic and then modernist forms, and the wound of rule. IWE is the meeting, not a copy of London and not a translation of the Sanskrit canon. Mukherjee’s phrase for the novel, “twice-born fiction,” names that double birth: an Indian imagination in a language learned at school.

A “prominent authors of varied genres” question wants a map, not a full Unit 2 reading. Poetry is the oldest continuous IWE genre. Early names: Derozio (“The Harp of India,” “To India — My Native Land”); Madhusudan before he leaves English; Toru Dutt, whose posthumous Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan (1882) retells epic episode in English — “Lakshman” is the set lyric of Unit 2; Romesh Chunder Dutt’s English condensations of the epics; Manmohan Ghose; Sri Aurobindo’s long English spiritual verse, especially Savitri. Sarojini Naidu, the “Nightingale of India,” publishes The Golden Threshold (1905), then The Bird of Time and The Broken Wing; Unit 2 sets “The Bangle Sellers” and “Palanquin Bearers.” Tagore’s English Gitanjali is a self-translation from Bengali; it still changed how the world heard Indian lyric in English, and the Nobel year 1913 is a fact this paper expects.

After 1950 the prominent list shifts from song to speech (lesson 8). Nissim Ezekiel is the hinge: urban, ironic, exact. A. K. Ramanujan brings family, Tamil and Kannada worlds, and a scholar’s ear. Kamala Das writes a confessional woman’s body into Indian English. Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri (1976) makes pilgrimage modern; “The Bus” is its opening poem on this paper. Jayanta Mahapatra, Keki N. Daruwalla, Adil Jussawalla, Gieve Patel, Eunice de Souza, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra fill the same generation. Later names the syllabus itself plants: Meena Alexander (“Her Garden”) and Mamang Dai (“The Sorrow of Women”).

Rule for the exam: if the question is “prominent poets,” give one early cluster (Derozio–Toru–Naidu) and one modern cluster (Ezekiel–Kolatkar–the set women), and say what changed — from Victorian-Romantic song to irony, city, and region. Do not write a Unit 2 paraphrase of “Night of the Scorpion” here unless the question names the poem.

Fiction is the genre through which IWE became world-visible. After Bankim’s English start, the form waits for the 1930s trio. Mulk Raj Anand writes caste, labour, and the insult of the colonial city (Untouchable, Coolie). R. K. Narayan invents Malgudi: comic, exact, unhurried. Unit 3’s “Under the Banyan Tree” is that storyteller’s India in short form — the village audience, the professional tale, speech as craft. Raja Rao in Kanthapura makes English carry a grandmother’s oral rhythm and the Gandhi-movement as a village epic. Mukherjee’s Twice Born Fiction reads these novels as technique, not only as “Indian themes”: how an Indian tale behaves inside English.

Women novelists open the house and the field. Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve (Unit 4) is the peasant woman’s chronicle of land, hunger, and the tannery — the nation after 1947 seen from the furrow, not from Delhi. Anita Desai turns inward to mind and family. Shashi Deshpande (Unit 3, “The Intrusion”) writes the middle-class woman’s body and consent. After Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981, Booker Prize) the Indian English novel becomes a global commodity: Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things, 1997). Name Rushdie in a development answer; do not pretend he is on the set-text list.

The short story is IWE’s other public form. Narayan and Ruskin Bond (Unit 3, “The Night Train at Deoli”) keep the small encounter. Bond writes the hills and the passing stranger in a plain English that the exam still counts as Indian writing by nationality and residence. Temsula Ao (Unit 3, “The Letter,” from Laburnum for My Head, 2009 — a recommended book on this paper) brings Nagaland into English fiction: insurgency as household fact, not as north-east “colour.” Keep Manto on the paper as Urdu modernism in translation, beside these original-English stories, not inside the IWE definition.

Indian English drama is thinner than the novel for a long time, because the living stage spoke other languages. After Banerjee’s early play, verse drama in English continues in Sri Aurobindo. The mid-century English stage is often closet or festival theatre (Asif Currimbhoy; Ezekiel’s own plays). Girish Karnad writes a modern Indian theatre of myth and history; several plays exist in English as well as Kannada — name him as a bilingual giant, not as this paper’s set dramatist. The set English playwright is Mahesh Dattani. Dance Like a Man (Unit 4) is urban, middle-class, and cruel about gender: two generations, Bharatanatyam, a man punished for dancing, a woman punished for wanting a life besides the art. Dattani’s other titles (Tara, Final Solutions) show the same English as a city language — family, communal fear, the body — without folk costume.

Unit 5’s play is not originally English. Dinabandhu Mitra’s Nil Darpan (1860) is Bengali protest against indigo planters; Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s 1861 English, The Indigo Planting Mirror, carries it to a colonial reading public. In a “genres of IWE” answer, call this translation and Bengal-Renaissance theatre, then return to Dattani for original English drama.

Prose (essay, autobiography, public argument) is a full IWE genre. Nineteenth-century English prose begins in the reform pamphlets of Rammohan Roy. Vivekananda, Gandhi, and Nehru (The Discovery of India, the Autobiography) make English a language of the nation. Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian is the difficult, brilliant personal book of the same tradition. On this paper the set prose is A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, “Patriotism beyond Politics and Religion,” from Ignited Minds (Penguin, 2002). It is twenty-first-century public English: science, youth, a patriotism that refuses to shrink to party or sect. In Unit 1 you only need the shelf: IWE prose is not “only novels.” It includes the speech of reformers, the memoir, and Kalam’s civic essay.

Early Indian English poetry on this paper means the line from Derozio to Naidu (and Aurobindo), before the 1950s break. Gokak’s Golden Treasury of Indo-Anglian Poetry is the named classroom book. The verse learns English Romantic and Victorian music: stanza, personification, a harp that hangs silent, a mother-nation addressed as a woman. Subject-matter is already Indian: the lost glory of the land, Puranic story, festival, the woman’s decorative and labouring life.

Derozio is the first figure to teach. Son of an English mother and an Indo-Portuguese father (Eurasian), he taught at Hindu College, gathered the “Young Bengal” circle, and died at twenty-two. “The Harp of India” asks why the national instrument is mute; “To India — My Native Land” kisses the fallen country’s chain. The feeling is patriotic; the diction is Byron’s school. Toru Dutt (1856–1877) is the first poet whose English still lives as literature rather than as a historical sample. She wrote in French and English, died at twenty-one, and left Ancient Ballads — Sita, Savitri, Prahlad, and “Lakshman,” where the lakshman-rekha scene becomes a poem about trust, exile, and a woman’s voice against a brother’s vow. Manmohan Ghose, Oxford-trained, writes a late-Victorian English of almost no local names; Aurobindo, his brother, writes the opposite: Indian yoga in English blank verse on a huge scale. Sarojini Naidu turns folk scene into song: bangle-sellers at the bazaar, palanquin-bearers on the road. The danger, which later poets named, is that the song can freeze into “picturesque India” for a London reader. Early poetry is still the root of Unit 2. Without it, Ezekiel has nothing to refuse.

Tagore belongs on the edge of this heading. Gitanjali in English is not original IWE in Naik’s strict sense; it is the poet’s own English of Bengali songs. Examiners still accept 1913 as a date in the story of Indian lyric in English. Keep the strict definition for Derozio, Toru, Naidu; let Tagore be the international moment. If the question says “early Indian English poetry,” start with Derozio and end with Naidu, and give Toru one full paragraph because she is on this paper.

Poetry after 1950 is a revolt against the early song. The new poets wanted the sound of the Indian city, irony, a spoken sentence, and an English that admitted Indian life without bazaar-costume. Bruce King’s Three Indian Poets takes Nissim Ezekiel, A. K. Ramanujan and Dom Moraes as the type-case. Mehrotra’s anthology and P. Lal’s Writers Workshop (Calcutta, from 1958) are the two publishing climates: little books, a new readership, argument about whether Indian English poetry had at last grown a modern voice.

Nissim Ezekiel (1924–2004) is the hinge. A Time to Change (1952) is the date to memorise. Bombay, the flat, the office, the prayer that fails, the neighbour’s speech: “Night of the Scorpion” (Unit 2) is that method in a village room — sceptic husband, believing women, a child’s memory, no harp. Dom Moraes won the Hawthornden Prize for A Beginning (1957) and lived a more cosmopolitan lyric. A. K. Ramanujan (1929–1993) split his life between South Indian languages and Chicago; the poems make family, ritual, and the body exact. Kamala Das (Summer in Calcutta, 1965) broke the polite woman-lyric. Arun Kolatkar wrote in Marathi and English; Jejuri (1976, Commonwealth Poetry Prize) follows a bus to a god’s town with a camera eye — “The Bus” is Unit 2. Jayanta Mahapatra stayed in Orissa’s rain and stone. Eunice de Souza and Gieve Patel kept Bombay’s harsh clarity.

Later decades regionalise and globalise the same modern line. Agha Shahid Ali carries Kashmir and the ghazal into American English. Imtiaz Dharker writes purdah, faith, and the migrant city. Meena Alexander (1951–2018), born in Allahabad, raised partly in Sudan, a poet of the United States and of memory, is on this paper for “Her Garden.” Mamang Dai of Arunachal Pradesh writes land, river, and women’s sorrow as history — “The Sorrow of Women” from An Obscure Place: Five Survival Lyrics. After 1950, then, means: Ezekiel’s modernism as the centre, and a widening map that this syllabus already marks (Kolatkar, Alexander, Dai). In an answer, name the 1952 book, name the refusal of Naidu’s music, and name two set poems as proof.

The Bengal Renaissance is the nineteenth-century awakening in religion, society, education and letters centred on Calcutta. It is not the Italian Renaissance copied onto the Hooghly; it is the Indian response to colonial modernity in one presidency. Hindu College (1817), English print, Christian missions, and an upper-caste urban gentry (the bhadralok) are the engine. Raja Rammohan Roy founds the Brahmo Sabha / Brahmo Samaj (1828), argues against sati (abolished 1829), and defends English education as a tool. Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar fights for widow remarriage and a modern Bengali prose. Derozio’s Young Bengal, in the 1820s–30s, is the radical student wing: reason, English books, a quarrel with custom. Debendranath Tagore and Keshab Chandra Sen carry the Brahmo line later in the century.

Literature is not a side-show. Michael Madhusudan Dutt turns from English verse to a Bengali epic in blank verse (Meghnadbadh Kavya), importing a European heroic form to retell the Ramayana from Ravan’s son’s side. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee creates the Bengali novel, edits Bangadarshan, writes Anandamath and “Vande Mataram,” and also the English Rajmohan’s Wife. Dinabandhu Mitra’s Nil Darpan (1860) puts the indigo peasant on the stage; Dutt’s English translation (Unit 5) is how that Renaissance play enters this English paper. Rabindranath Tagore is the high flowering: poem, novel, play, school, song of the nation. Vivekananda carries a reformed Hindu voice into English lectures abroad. The same decades that give IWE its first poets give Bengali its modern classics. That double gift is the point of the heading on an IWE paper.

Sumit Sarkar, the critic named on the reading list, is a brake on praise. He treats “Renaissance” as a disputed word: the movement was real, but it was largely Hindu, male, Calcutta-centred, and shaped by colonial rule, not a rebirth of the whole people. In an answer, define the movement, list Roy–Vidyasagar–Derozio–Madhusudan–Bankim–Tagore, name Nil Darpan as theatre of protest, and add Sarkar’s caution in one sentence. Do not call the Bengal Renaissance “Indian Writing in English.” It is the climate in which IWE, modern Bengali, and social reform grew together.

Contemporary trends means the field after the mid-century moderns, especially after Rushdie (1981), as it looks from the twenty-first century. The course outcomes want a postcolonial ear: English is no longer only the ruler’s leftover; it is one of India’s languages, bent by Indian syntax, myth, and politics. Raja Rao had claimed that right in the 1930s; contemporary writers take it as normal.

Several trends can be named without a publisher’s catalogue. The global Indian novel: history and the nation as family — Rushdie, Ghosh, Roy. Prize culture (Booker) makes IWE a world brand; that is a fact, and also a distortion, because most Indian literature is still not in English. Diaspora and memory: writers who live between India and elsewhere (Meena Alexander on this paper). Women’s inner room: Deshpande, the politics of the household — Unit 3’s “The Intrusion” is a small proof. Region, especially the Northeast: Temsula Ao, Mamang Dai — English used to speak a history Delhi often skipped. English as city theatre: Dattani. Beside original IWE, a translation industry now carries Indian-language texts into English; keep that parallel to Naik’s definition, as Unit 5 already forces you to do with Nil Darpan.

On this paper, “contemporary” is not a vague word for “recent books.” It is the line that explains why a rural 1954 novel (Markandaya), a 1989 dance-play (Dattani), Nagaland and Arunachal lyrics and stories, a woman’s short story of violation, and Kalam’s civic prose can sit in one course. Indian Writing in English has become many Englishes: village, city, hill, and public argument. If the question is 20 marks, pick four trends, pin each to one set name, and close with Naik’s test: originally English, Indian writer, Indian matter in a language the writer was not born singing.