About the Book
The author would like to share with readers his collection of fifteen essays on Indian fictional writing and poetry in English, as it reflects his lifelong commitment to Indian literary culture.
This sequence of chronologically arranged essays written over a period of half a century reflects his outside observer’s growing familiarity with Indian English writing. It permits insight into its thematic, formal and stylistic shifts and changes as much as into its growth in scope and quality. Besides, it also throws light on the course of a critical literary debate that has focused — and continues to do so — on the pros and cons of Indians writing their novels and poems in English as well as it does on the controversial issue of their ‘Indianness’.
These essays are complemented by reproductions of photographs, most of them taken by the author, and by a select bibliography of his publications in this field; one of the subcontinent’s liveliest and most fascinating traditions.
Contents
Early Critics of Indo-English Novelists / Meenakshi Mukherjee and M.K. Naik
Human Labour and Alienation / Mulk Raj Anand’s Novels
The New Poets Manifesto / P. Lal and Contemporary Indian English Poetry
History and the Individual / Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day
Indian Women Writing in English / A Brief Look at Short Stories of the 1970s and Early 1980s
Marginalizing the Centre — Centring the Periphery / The Critical Debate on ‘Indian’ Literature in English
‘In the Days When the Love Laws Were Made’ / Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things
Global Fantasy — Glocal Imagination / The New Literatures in English and their Fantastic ImagiNations
Crossing National Borders / The Indian English Novel since the 1990s
Nature and Landscape / An Evolutionary Psychological Analysis of Raja Rao’s Writing
‘The Train Has Moved On’ / R.K. Narayan’s The Guide and Literary History
Glocality and its (Dis)contents / The Future of English Language Literatures Studies
The Persistence and Creation of Internal Borders / India in Aotearoa New Zealand
Translating Cultures / Pictorial and Literary Representations of India in William Hodges’s Paintings and Travel Book
Retrieving Human Rights / Indra Sinha’s Novel Animal’s People and Critical Cosmopolitanism
About the Author / Editor
Dieter Riemenschneider taught German at Panjab University, Chandigarh and Delhi University (1963–66) and New English Literatures at Frankfurt University (1971–99). His Ph.D. on The Modern Indian Novel in English (Darmstadt 1974) was followed by more than 100 publications on Indian English writing over the next forty years, including essays contributed to international journals and books. At the invitation of Goethe-Institute/Max Mueller Bhavan he lectured at the universities of Delhi, Hyderabad, Madras and Bombay (1981–82), as Visiting Professor at I.I.T. Madras (1983), as DFG Research Fellow in Delhi, Hyderabad, Madras and Bombay (1993–94) and as Visiting Fellow of Delhi University in Delhi and Chandigarh (2010).
After more than two dozen visits to India since 1971, attending conferences and keeping up a lively network of authors, academic critics and friends, he now lives with his wife, the New Zealand-born poet Jan Kemp, in Kronberg im Taunus, Germany.
