The Indian Novel in English: Its Critical Discourse 1934-2023

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Abstract

The ever increasing number of novels written in English by Indian writers bears witness of the fecundity of a literary genre that has not only attracted a growing number of readers but has also appealed widely to critics from India and abroad. Among countless responses to individual writers or single works about 350 publications – essays, essay collections or monographs – on the novel as such have been published between 1934 and 2023. Apart from attention paid here to historical,thematic and linguistic concerns, the poetics of a genre created by authors writing not in their first language has played a significant role, pioneering, by the way, the present discourse on transnational and transcultural literatures in English created outside countries with English as their national language. The following presentation in two parts first explores the critical discourse of the Indian novel in English that developed over seventy years between 1934 and 2004. Presented in my book of 20051 it draws on around 280 publications that round off its first chapter, “The Indian Novel in English: The Reception of a Literary Genre”. The second part, “Supplement” , comments but briefly on the direction the discourse has taken over the last twenty years. It is followed by an enumeration of seventy publications that would of course need a more detailed investigation into the various parameters evident in their titles: a task for the present generation of critics.