The Vintage Book Of Modern Indian Literature

In recent years American readers have been thrilling to the work of such Indian writers as Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth. Now this extravagant and wonderfully discerning anthology unfurls the full diversity of Indian literature from the 1850s to the present, presenting today’s brightest talents in the company of their distinguished forbearers and likely heirs. The thirty-eight authors collected by novelist Amit Chaudhuri write not only in English but also in Hindi, Bengali, and Urdu. They include Rabindranath Tagore, arguably the first international literary celebrity, chronicling the wistful relationship between a village postal inspector and a servant girl, and Bibhuti Bhushan Banerjee, represented by an excerpt from his classic novel about an impoverished Bengali childhood, Pather Panchali. Here, too, are selections from Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, R. K. Narayan’s The English Teacher, and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children alongside a high-spirited nonsense tale, a drily funny account of a pre-Partition Muslim girlhood, and a Bombay policier as gripping as anything by Ed McBain. Never before has so much of the subcontinent’s writing been made available in a single volume.

The Indian subcontinent has produced some of the world's greatest writers, and a body of literature unsurpassed in its sustained imagination, impassioned lyricism and sparkling tragi-comedy. Now Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West have collected together the finest Indian writing of the last fifty years. Published to coincide with the anniversary of India's independence, it is an anthology of extraordinary range and vigour, as exciting and varied as the land that inspired it. Including works by: Mulk Raj Anand Gita Mehta Anjana Appachana Ved Mehta Vikram Chandra Rohinton Mistry Upamanyu Chatterjee R. K. Narayan Amit Chaudhuri Jawaharlal Nehru Nirad C. Chaudhuri Padma Perera Anita Desai Satyajit Ray Kiran Desai Arundhati Roy G. V. Desani Salman Rushdie Amitav Ghosh Nayantara Sahgal Githa Hariharan I. Allan Sealy Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Vikram Seth Firdaus Kanga Bapsi Sidhwa Mukul Kesavan Sara Suleri Saadat Hasan Manto Shashi Tharoor Kamala Markandaya Ardashir Vakil

This Volume Is Devoted To Plays And Prose Writings, The Task Of Bringing Together Samples Of The Best Of Modern Indian Writing Is Now Complete. The Translations Have Been Done By A Competent Team And Are Sure To Appeal To Lovers Of Literature

Taking up the roles that Salman Rushdie himself has assumed as a cultural broker, gatekeeper, and mediator in various spheres of public production, Ana Cristina Mendes situates his work in terms of the contemporary production, circulation, and consumption of postcolonial texts within the workings of the cultural industries. Mendes pays particular attention to Rushdie as a public performer across various creative platforms, not only as a novelist and short story writer, but also as a public intellectual, reviewer, and film critic. Mendes argues that how a postcolonial author becomes personally and professionally enmeshed in the dealings of the cultural industries is of particular relevance at a time when the market is strictly regulated by a few multinational corporations. She contends that marginality should not be construed exclusively as a basis for understanding Rushdie’s work, since a critical grounding in marginality will predictably involve a reproduction of the traditional postcolonial binaries of oppressor/oppressed and colonizer/colonized that the writer subverts. Rather, she seeks to expand existing interpretations of Rushdie’s work, itineraries, and frameworks in order to take into account the actual conditions of postcolonial cultural production and circulation within a marketplace that is global in both orientation and effects.

Contemporary Indian English Literature focuses on the recent history of Indian literature in English since the publication of Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children (1981), a watershed moment for Indian writing in English in the global literary landscape. The chapters in this volume consider a wide range of poets, novelists, short fiction writers and dramatists who have notably contributed to the proliferation of Indian literature in English from the late 20th century to the present. The volume provides an introduction to current developments in Indian English literature and explains general ideas, as well as the specific features and styles of selected writers from this wide spectrum. It addresses students working in this field at university level, and includes thorough reading lists and study questions to encourage students to read, reflect on and write about Indian English literature critically.

Through a comparison with theatrical performance the argument develops that in both theatre and fiction the concepts of performance and performativity transform classical Indian mythic poetics. In the mythic symbiosis of performance and storytelling in Indian tradition, myth becomes a liberating space of consciousness, where rigid categories and boundaries are transcended.