Narayan carried the Indo-English novel towards an achievement that goes beyond mere aspiration. He is the child of the Gandhian Age. His artistic exploitation of the rich resources of India’s past in relation to the complex present is strikingly evident in Kanthapura. It is the story of how the Congress for India’s freedom came to a small south Indian village Kanthapura. Therefore, the first remarkable feature of post-Independence Indian English fiction is the consolidation of their reputations by the leading trio Anand, Narayan, and Raja Rao.
The story of the India novel in English is really the story of an altering India. Indian English novels have come quite a long way from the sheer use of English language to the authentic means for expressing one’s ideas, thoughts, concepts and imagination. There was a time when education was not in growth and speaking English was needless. It has attained maturity, but it is not that it rapidly emerged from nowhere. It has had its phases of development.
So the quality of writing has also improved. Recent years have witnessed a good number of Indian English fiction writers who have stunned the literary
“Contemporary Indian literature which is only one and a half centuries old is marked by amazing variations in both the literatures and the regions through which it was produced”. In India contemporary literature was origin at 19th century. The 20th century literatures are more modern than 19th century. The three terms in modern context are highly condensed for historical experiences. Anything fashionable today is considered as modern.
Indian English literature is at its peak and becomes independent and outstanding. It is well established on international horizon. It attracted many critics. In the early days, many of Indian writers tried their hands in poetry and fiction. The practice of poetry and fiction bear good fruits.
The novel provides the basis for discussion. Many of the Indian women novelists focus on women’s issues. Most of the women writers wrote about the sufferings of women faced by them in the male dominated society. Some of the women writers who wrote about identicalanalysis of women were Kamala Markandaya, Anita Desai, ManjuKapur, Anitha Nair, etc. These Indian women novelists get awareness because of their high educational and intellectual standards.
The novel came out in 1947 soon after the independence of the country. The action of the novel covers the war years with Indian people’s gruesome sufferings and frustrations, tension and apparent contradiction of the then Indian society. Therefore, the novel is really a modern Indian classic depicting the inhuman atrocities committed on them by their own fellow beings and countrymen during an almost man-made crisis in the form of famine which claimed the life of many innocent Indians. Bhattacharya’s next novel, Music For Mohini, deal with the problems of India soon after the independence. The story of the novel ranges from 1948 to the present day India.
Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand and R. K. Narayan who are the contemporary short syory writers of Isvaran. Thus, the Indian short story writers gave more contribution to development of English literature. Nilanjana Sudheshna Lahiri, the youngest of diasporic artist who was considered as one of the best writer among the twentieth century writers under the age of forty by The New Yorker. She
Raja Rao’s The Serpent and the Rope (1960) is one of the greatest of Indian English novels. As an enactment of East West confrontation and as a philosophical, spiritual novel it stands unchallenged in the annals of Indian English fiction. While the momentum gained by fiction during the Gandhian age was thus sustained even after Independence by these major novels, the new writers that now appeared on the scene brought not a little individual talent to the established tradition. With the exception of a solitary masterpiece like All About H. Hatterr, the achievement of the post Independence novelists cannot on the whole be said to match that of Anand and his two major contemporaries. Bhabani Bhattacharya, whose first novel was published within
The post-modern novelists like, Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, Nayantara sahgal, Vikram Seth, Geetha Goswami, Salman Rushdie Shobha Dee, Kiran Desai, Anita Nair, Manju Kapur, Geetha Hariharan and Kaveri Nambisan are the second generation novelists who brought Indian fiction in English into the global scenario and have been developing the genre. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight Children as a picaresque novel documents the wanderings of a split self in quest of wholeness and identity. It also becomes the symbol of man’s fundamental human condition. Amitav Gosh was born in 1956 in Calcutta. His father was working in Indian army.