The Rise of Modern Vernacular Literature

The Rise of Modern Vernacular Literature

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• Throughout its history, the literature of the Indian subcontinent has been characterised by an exuberant diversity of languages, enriched by ever-shifting dialogues among these languages and the regions and cultures they represent.
• The rise of modern vernacular literature in the second half of the 19th century was the product of one such dialogue — between English, a colonial import that replaced Sanskrit and Persian as the medium of education, and India’s more than twenty regional languages, many with literary traditions stretching back a thousand years or more.
  • While some 19th-century Indian writers wrote in English, the majority instead adapted European genres — chiefly the novel and the short story — into the vernacular, regional languages, writing on modern themes and forging new literary styles.
• The second half of the 20th century saw English emerge as a major language for Indian fiction, and from the 1980s onward, Indian and South Asian writers in English became leading figures on the global literary scene. Modern Indian literature, taken as a whole, mirrors the diversity and vibrancy of modern India itself.
• From its very beginnings, Indian fiction has offered — often more discerningly and reliably than documentary sources — imaginative commentary on India’s social and political realities, and on the negotiation of India’s traditional cultures with the West and the modern world.

The British Colonial Period to 1947

Modernity, the Novel, and the Nation

• The rise of modern Indian literature in the 19th century reveals the complexity of India’s encounter with colonialism and its entry into modernity.
  • As early as 1835, the British colonial government introduced English education for upper-class Indians, intending to prepare them for service in colonial administration.
  • With the establishment, in 1857, of universities in the three Presidencies of Madras (Chennai), Bombay (Mumbai), and Calcutta (Kolkata), a significant number of Indians gained access to European thought.
  • The colonisers hoped that an English education would instil Western values in their subjects and wean them away from ideas they considered pernicious in Indian religious and literary texts — British condemnation extended to the aesthetics of Indian literature as well.
• However, the creation of an English-educated upper middle class shaped Indian literary production in ways the colonial government could hardly have anticipated.
  • The new education carried with it 19th-century European ideals of individualism, progress, and nationalism. Stung by British criticism of Indian society and literature, yet exhilarated by European Orientalist scholars’ celebration of ancient Indian culture, Indians began writing in modern literary forms — to represent new realities, reimagine India’s history, and advocate social and political change.
  • Notably, they wrote in the Indian languages rather than in English. Prose fiction — marked by realism, linear narrative, and a focus on the individual — displaced the earlier Indian literary modes of myth and poetry, with their emphasis on ideal images and social types.
  • Unsurprisingly, the novel — a form whose development in Europe was closely tied to the rise of the middle class and the idea of the nation — became the principal genre of Indian literature in the last quarter of the 19th century.
  • Even so, Indian writers reshaped this Western literary form to suit Indian linguistic, literary, and cultural sensibilities from the very beginning, drawing eclectically on the diverse classical and popular traditions they had inherited in Sanskrit, Persian, and the regional languages.
• The “Bengal Renaissance” in Calcutta, the British capital, stood at the vanguard of these new literary and cultural movements.
  • The pioneering writer Bankim Chandra Chatterji wrote Bengali novels on social reform and resistance to colonial rule.
    • Bisha briksha (1873; translated as The Poison Tree, 1884) treated the plight of upper-caste Hindu widows, who were forbidden to remarry.
    • Rajsingha (1881) was a fictional account of the glory of the Rajput chiefs, suggestive of the grandeur of Indian civilisation.
    • Ananda Math (1882; translated as The Abbey of Bliss, 1906), under the guise of a historical novel set in an earlier period, allegorised the violent overthrow of British rule in India.
  • By 1885 — the year the Indian National Congress was founded to pursue economic and political reform — the ideals of nationalism and social justice had become an inspiration not only for political activists but for Indian writers as well.
• Many early Indian novelists engaged with social issues, especially the controversies surrounding the treatment of women in Indian society — the object of the most trenchant European criticism, and a sore point for reformers and traditionalists alike.
  • Early novels focused on how Indian women of the middle and upper classes were oppressed through the denial of personal freedom, education, and economic autonomy, while writers grappled with the social upheaval surrounding women’s entry into the modern nation and public life.
    • Among the many novels on the condition of widows were Chatterji’s Poison Tree; Baba Padmanji’s Yamuna paryatan (Yamuna’s Journey, 1857, in Marathi); and Chokher bali (1901, in Bengali; translated as Binodini, 1968) by Rabindranath Tagore, a great humanist and towering figure in modern Indian writing.
    • In Indulekha (1889), the first novel written in Malayalam, Chandu Menon presented his eponymous heroine as the ideal “modern” woman.
    • In Ghare baire (1915, in Bengali; translated as Home and the World, 1919), Tagore criticised fanatical nationalism while sympathetically portraying the dilemmas of women caught between tradition and modernity.
  • In the 1880s and 1890s, the multifaceted Tagore introduced the short story genre to Bengali and to Indian literature, publishing stories that sensitively depicted the lives of ordinary villagers in East Bengal (e.g., Chuti, 1892; translated as The Homecoming, 1916).

Poetry and Other Genres

• Departing from the archaising cadences of the pioneering poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt (Meghnadbadh, 1861; translated as The Slaying of Meghanada, 2004), Tagore also pioneered a modern poetry for the Bengali language.
  • In 1913, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Gitanjali (Song Offering, 1912; translated as Gitanjali, 1916) — a collection of his own poems, translated into English at the request of the poet W.B. Yeats.
  • Tagore’s musical dramas (e.g., Dak-ghar, 1912; translated as The Post Office, 1914) were performed at Santiniketan, the modern school he founded near Calcutta to nourish Indian culture and arts, and throughout India.
• Like her predecessor Toru Dutt, Sarojini Naidu — a Bengali by birth — wrote poetry in English.
  • While Dutt died at a very young age, Naidu went on to become a celebrated leader of India’s freedom movement, publishing several volumes of poetry on Indian culture and women’s lives (e.g., The Golden Threshold, 1905) alongside speeches and essays in English.
• Modern poetry flourished in all the Indian languages, maturing fully in the middle years of the 20th century.
  • The Tamil writer Subramania Bharati’s passionate poems espousing the cause of freedom from British rule are among the earliest examples of modern writing in Tamil.
  • Hindi poets such as Sachidananda H. Vatsyayan (“Agyeya”), Suryakant Tripathi (“Nirala”), and Mahadevi Varma (a woman writer and recipient of a major award from the Indian Academy of Letters) wrote poetry of a more introspective, personal character.
• In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, women from the rising Indian middle class became authors of both fiction and non-fiction — especially memoirs and works centred on women’s issues and social change.
  • Celebrated examples include reformist Pandita Ramabai’s The High-Caste Hindu Woman (1887, in English), on the condition of Hindu women; Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Bengali writings on the constraints of seclusion (purdah) on Muslim women (e.g., the essay collection Avarodhbasini, 1928–1930; translated as Inside Seclusion, 1981); and Krupabai Satthianadhan’s autobiographical novel Saguna: A Story of Native Christian Life (1894, in English).
  • Tarabai Shinde argued for the superiority of women’s character in her Marathi essay Stripurush tulna (1882; translated as A Comparison of Men and Women, 1991).
  • In Sultana’s Dream (1905, in English), Rokeya Hossain imagined a utopian world in which women ruled benevolently, ushering in progress through scientific achievement.

Indian Writing from World War I to 1947

• Two movements influenced and stimulated Indian writing between the World Wars: the non-violent freedom movement led by Mahatma Gandhi, and the international Marxist-socialist movement advocating social justice for labourers, peasants, and the masses.
  • Two great novels of social realism and critique were published in 1936: Premchand’s Godan (translated as The Gift of a Cow, 1968), an epic of peasant life in North India, and Manik Bandyopadhyay’s Putul nacher itikatha (translated as The Puppet’s Tale, 1968), a novel of rural Bengal.
  • By the 1930s and early 1940s, the short story had become a major genre in Indian literature, with Premchand and his contemporaries celebrated for their classic short fiction on similar themes.
    • Bibhuti Bhushan Banerjee’s Pather panchali (1929, in Bengali; translated as Song of the Road, 1968), a classic evocation of a rural childhood, stands as a novel in the humanistic tradition of Tagore.
• The 1930s also saw the rise of the Indian novel in English.
  • Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938) was revolutionary in both theme (the involvement of Indian villagers in the Gandhian freedom movement) and style — Rao himself declared he had written it not in standard English fiction style, but in an English reshaped to reflect the Kannada speech of women in a South Indian village and the storytelling style of the Sanskrit Puranas (mythological texts) and women’s folktales.
  • Mulk Raj Anand’s English novels Untouchable (1935) and Coolie (1936), dealing with caste injustice and oppressive labour practices, are representative of the progressive stream in Indian writing of this period.
  • R.K. Narayan, who began his long and illustrious career with Swami and His Friends (1935), stands apart from his mid-1930s contemporaries — his novels focus on character and the flow of human life rather than larger social and political issues.
• Autobiography as a genre also gained popularity during this period.
  • Mahatma Gandhi’s An Autobiography: Or, The Story of My Experiments with Truth was quickly translated from Gujarati into English (1929).
  • Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi’s disciple and India’s future prime minister, published his own English autobiography, An Autobiography, in 1936.
  • Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951, in English) is second only to Gandhi’s autobiography in fame.

Modern Indian Literature from Independence to the Twenty-First Century

Major Themes and Trends, 1947–1980s

• The year 1947, in which India gained freedom from British colonial rule, marks a watershed in the development of modern Indian literature — impelling writers to grapple with the ideals and realities of post-colonial nationhood.
  • On one hand, there was the euphoria of freedom; on the other, the Partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, and the violence that followed, traumatised the Indian people.
  • Through the years of the freedom movement, Hindus and Muslims had grown increasingly divided over cultural-national identity, and Partition brought great communal violence — especially along the new territorial borders in divided Punjab and Bengal, and in the disputed region of Kashmir.
  • The agony of Partition became part of the lived experience and memory of the people of India and Pakistan, many of whom were uprooted from their homelands or saw their families divided.
• Indian fiction from 1947 to the present re-examines both the positive and negative aspects of India’s recent past, explores the political and social problems of independent India, and comments on a changing Indian society amid increasing globalisation and South Asian migration to the West.
• In the years following independence, the humanistic and progressive trends represented by earlier writers such as Manik Bandyopadhyay and Mulk Raj Anand continued to flourish in fiction from every region of India, for example:
  • U.R. Ananta Murthy’s Kannada novel Samskara (1965; translated as Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man, 1976), on the decaying Brahman priestly community of a Karnataka village;
  • Shrilal Shukla’s Hindi novel Raag Darbari (1968; translated 1992), on politics in a North Indian provincial town;
  • Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai’s celebrated Malayalam novel Chemmeen (Shrimp, 1956), on the fate of the individual in a Kerala fishing community; and
  • Vyankatesh Madgulkar’s Marathi novel Bangarwadi (1955; translated as The Village Had No Walls, 1967), on the shepherds of Maharashtra.
• Modern Indian drama frequently undertook social and political critique.
  • Marathi playwright Vijay Tendulkar directed mordant satire at Maharashtrian society in plays such as Shantata! Kort Chalu Ahe (1967; translated as Silence! The Court Is in Session, 1978) and Ghashiram Kotwal (1972).
  • Drama also became a medium for avant-garde and experimental work, as in Girish Karnad’s Kannada plays Hayavadana (Horse-head, 1971) — a meditation on reality and personal identity through folktale — and Nagamandala (1989; translated as Play with a Cobra, 1990), which illuminates the power of stories through its evocation of a folk ritual.
• From the 1970s onward, activist and feminist women writers became major voices in Indian fiction.
  • In her Urdu short stories, written between the 1950s and 1970s (e.g., Badan ki khushbu, translated as “Scent of the Body,” 1994), Ismat Chughtai used bold, direct language and vivid detail to depict the ironies and injustices of women’s lives, especially within Muslim circles in India.
  • Mahasweta Devi, winner of the Indian government’s Jnanpith Award, combined social activism among tribal and other marginalised groups in eastern India with an extraordinary writing career — her powerful Bengali short stories and novels (e.g., Stanadayini, translated as Breast-Giver, 1988) expose with devastating clarity the convergence between the exploitation of women and of the lower classes.
  • Recent translated anthologies, such as Women Writing in India (edited by S. Tharu and K. Lalita, 1990–1993), have helped bring Indian women writers to a wider audience.
• The recent movement of Dalit (“oppressed”) writing, in which men and women from marginalised, low-caste communities write poetry and fiction about their own lives, communities, and perspectives, is a significant development in modern Indian literature.
  • Examples include the Marathi poems and essays of Namdeo Dhasal and others, translated in Untouchable! Voices of the Dalit Liberation Movement (edited by Barbara R. Joshi, 1986).
  • Dalit writers have produced poetry and fiction in every Indian language, with autobiography — given its power to document and bear witness to the struggles of the disenfranchised — emerging as a major genre within Dalit writing (e.g., Vasant Moon’s Growing Up Untouchable in India: A Dalit Autobiography, translated from Marathi in 2000).
• Partition is perhaps the single most persistent theme in Indian and Pakistani fiction since 1947, recurring across English and the regional languages alike.
  • Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956, in English) is among the earliest novels to evoke the horrors of Partition violence.
  • Saadat Hasan Manto, who lived first in India and then in Pakistan, bore witness in his eloquent Urdu short stories to the personal trauma of divided identities and the wider societal and national tragedy of Partition — his most famous story, Toba Tek Singh (translated in Kingdom’s End and Other Stories, 1987), depicts the dislocation of populations at Partition as an absurd event, viewed through the eyes of the inmates of a lunatic asylum.
  • Bhisham Sahni’s Hindi novel Tamas (translated as Darkness, 1989), a chronicle of Partition, was later adapted into a television film.
  • In Pakistani writer Bapsi Sidhwa’s gripping English novel Cracking India (published as Ice-Candy Man, 1988), the events of 1947 are seen through the eyes of a little girl.

Tamil

• Tamil, the oldest of the Dravidian language group spoken in southern India, has a literary history dating back to the early centuries before the common era.
  • The earliest surviving Tamil literature is known, from later commentators of the 7th century, as the poetry of the Cankam (or “academy”) of Madurai.
  • This body of poetry is diverse and was organised into anthologies of varying sizes sometime after its composition. It is thematically divided into akam (“interior”) love poems with anonymous characters, and puram (“exterior”) poetry on war, the praise of kings, and related themes.
  • Cankam poetry relies on a complex, highly conventional system of seasons, times, and landscapes to signal mood and situation — conventions laid out, among other places, in the earliest grammar of the language, the Tolkappiyam, composed perhaps in the first centuries of the common era.
• The Cankam age, sometimes characterised as the “heroic” period of incipient state structures, gave way — between the 3rd and 6th centuries AD — to a more settled agrarian society of established kingdoms, in which longer poems and didactic works were composed.
  • The most famous of these were Ilanko Atikal’s “Tale of an Anklet” or Cilappatikaram, a long narrative and lyrical poem telling the story of the widow Kannaki, and the Tirukkural, a collection of gnomic verses on love, politics, and righteousness by Tiruvalluvar.
  • Many works of this period were strongly influenced by Jainism and Buddhism.
• By the 7th century, the Hindu cults of Shaivism and Vaishnavism gained widespread popularity through devotional songs known as the alvar and nayanmar, composed by wandering saint-devotees.
  • Though sometimes built on earlier Cankam poetic conventions, these songs tended to adopt a simpler, more direct style, in keeping with their message of devotion to Shiva or Vishnu.
  • The hymns of the saints were collected and anthologised from the 12th century, during the apogee of the famous Chola kingdom of Tanjavur (c. AD 950–1250). The Chola court produced numerous important literary innovations, heavily influenced by Sanskrit kavya.
    • The later Chola courts produced some of the most famous poems of the medieval period, such as Kampan’s Iramavataram (a Tamil version of the Ramayana) and the courtly epic Kalingattupparani by Cayankontar — one of a large class of new genres known collectively as prapantam.
    • This prapantam literature remained the staple of literary accomplishment as late as the 19th century, serving as an umbrella under which numerous folk and courtly genres met during later medieval times.
  • From the late Chola period, a rich commentarial and scholastic literature also emerged in fields such as grammar, poetics, and theology.
• During the 17th and 18th centuries, under the Nayaka kings of Madurai, Senji, and Tanjavur, northern languages such as Telugu, Marathi, Urdu, and Sanskrit were often heavily patronised by the elite, while the study of Tamil literature itself remained confined almost entirely to Shaiva monasteries (mathas).
• European missionary activity in the 18th and 19th centuries brought important new developments, chief among them the spread of indigenous printing presses from 1835 onward.
  • Modern genres — the novel, autobiography, the essay, and newspaper writing — became widespread through the 19th century.
  • By the early 20th century, several important writers had sparked renewed public interest in Tamil literature and history, which became entangled with the anti-Brahman movement and organised Dravidian nationalism.