In this month's The Caravan Amitava Kumar writes about 'Raising the stakes for Indian writing in English', in The Shiver of the Real.
Several interesting points -- including that: "India isn't revealed only by tracking the dilemmas of Indians abroad" (and that: "The vernacular literatures in India are better poised to elude these tendencies").
He also points specifically to:
Several interesting points -- including that: "India isn't revealed only by tracking the dilemmas of Indians abroad" (and that: "The vernacular literatures in India are better poised to elude these tendencies").
He also points specifically to:
A novel that I regard as nearly talismanic in its ability to speak in a voice that is uniquely its own is Upamanyu Chatterjee's English, August. No one could accuse it of translating India for the West. And yet, and yet: On the one hand it represented a successful attempt at conveying small-town Indian realities in an English that was somehow familiar and yet new; on the other hand, however, its own narration cast doubt on any easy transportation of English into small-town India.