Anglophone and Postcolonial Literatures

Indian English fiction

Indian English fiction means novels and stories written in English by Indian authors, and it became a major field of world literature after independence in 1947. Its early landmarks include the work of R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao. Narayan's invented South Indian town of Malgudi first appears in Swami and Friends (1935), so the setting is a standard reference point for the genre. Partition, the division of British India in 1947, is the most frequent historical theme. Partition fiction deals with the violence, displacement and memory that the division produced, and Shauna Singh Baldwin's What the Body Remembers and Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines are standard examples. A novel set in the disturbed years before 1947 is not automatically a post-1947 violence narrative. Khushwant Singh's I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale focuses on the inner tensions of a prosperous Sikh family in the pre-Partition period, so the test is the time frame and the focus. Many Indian English novels are not about Partition at all. Anita Desai's Cry, the Peacock is a psychological study of a woman's marriage, and Kamala Markandaya's Nectar in a Sieve concerns rural poverty and famine. Questions on authorship test author-title pairs. Bhabani Bhattacharya wrote So Many Hungers! (1947), He Who Rides a Tiger (1954) and A Goddess Named Gold, whereas Manohar Malgonkar wrote A Bend in the Ganges and Distant Drum. Anita Desai's short story collections Games at Twilight (1978) and Diamond Dust (2000) are hers, but Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998) is by her daughter Kiran Desai, and All About H. Hatterr (1948) is by G. V. Desani. Early English-language narratives by Indians include Shoshee Chunder Dutt's The Republic of Orissa, published in 1845, which imagines a rebellion provoked by a British slavery measure. Salman Rushdie's Grimus (1975) is his first novel, and Midnight's Children (1981) followed it. The term 'chutneyfication', for English absorbing Indian vocabulary, idiom and syntax into a blended form, is associated with Rushdie's introduction to the anthology Mirrorwork (1997).

Ngugi wa Thiong'o and language choice

Ngugi wa Thiong'o is a Kenyan writer who first wrote in English and then began writing in Gikuyu in 1977, after many years of Afro-European literary work in English. His choice is grounded in the argument of Decolonising the Mind (1986), where he holds that language carries culture and that writing in a colonial language alienates colonised people from their own experience. His positions can be tested as a set. He calls for literature in African languages, comparing the task to what Spenser, Milton and Shakespeare did for English and what Pushkin and Tolstoy did for Russian. He criticises the coercive imposition of the colonizer's language, and he rejects using that language as a route to social mobility or as mimicry of the colonizer. In the same book he analyses colonialism in three layers: military conquest, political dictatorship, and control through culture. For him the most important of these was domination of the colonised person's mental universe, meaning how people see themselves and their relation to the world. Useful expression: the 'cultural bomb' is his metaphor for the destructive effect of imposed language and culture. Example: a critic who argues that African writers should abandon English for their mother tongue is following Ngugi, while one who defends English because it brings career advancement is opposing his argument.

Bombay-set novels

Bombay, now Mumbai, is the setting of several major Indian English novels, but a novel is 'predominantly set' in Bombay only when the city is its main location. Kiran Nagarkar's Ravan and Eddie is set largely in the chawls and streets of Bombay. Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance is set during the Emergency of 1975 to 1977 in an city that is never named but is widely identified as Bombay. Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children has a substantial Bombay section, particularly in the narrator's youth, though it also covers Kashmir, Delhi and Pakistan, so it is a multi-city novel. Contrast is important here. Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger is set mainly in Delhi and Bangalore, not Bombay, which is a common trap in setting questions. Example: a novel whose narrator grows up in a crowded Bombay neighbourhood and whose plot stays in the city belongs to this group, whereas a novel whose plot moves between Delhi and a southern tech hub does not.

Indian-origin loanwords in English

Loanwords are words borrowed from one language into another, and English contains many words from the languages of the Indian subcontinent, including Hindi, Sanskrit, Tamil and Bengali. Among the most familiar are shampoo (from Hindi chāmpo), chintz (from Hindi chhīṭ), calico (named after the port of Calicut), and juggernaut (from the Sanskrit name Jagannātha). Other examples are bungalow and dungaree from Hindi, cheroot from Tamil, and kedgeree from Hindi khichri. Mulligatawny, the soup, comes from Tamil milagu-tanni, meaning pepper water. Care is needed with words that look exotic but come from elsewhere. Candy is from Arabic or Persian, and panic, echo and galaxy are from Greek, while philistine is from Hebrew. Test strategy: check the etymology of each word in a cluster, and do not assume that a word is Indian because it sounds foreign to an English reader.

Transnational circulation of world literature

Transnational circulation describes how literary works move across national and linguistic borders, often through translation and multiple publication. Paulo Coelho's recent novels, which appeared in several languages at once or immediately after the Portuguese edition, are a standard example of this. The phenomenon supports the idea of the globality of the book market, in which publishers plan worldwide release from the beginning. Rebecca Walkowitz's notion of 'born translated' literature describes novels conceived for a global audience and translated almost at once, so simultaneous publication is evidence for her argument. A common trap is to treat the nation as the only frame for reading literature. Transnational publication works against that frame, so it cannot be cited as evidence that the nation is the sole unit of literary analysis. Example: a novel released in twelve languages within a month shows the market's global reach, not the closed boundaries of a single national literature.

Colourism and racial identity narratives

Colourism is prejudice or privilege based on skin shade, usually favouring lighter skin, and it can operate within a racial group as well as between groups. Racial identity narratives in literature often expose how race is constructed through acts of looking and classification rather than by fixed biology. Wole Soyinka's poem 'Telephone Conversation' is a standard text for this. A Black speaker responds to a landlady's demand that he state his skin colour by offering a spectrum of shades instead of a single colour, which shows that black is not one colour. He then splits his body into parts of different shades, which fragments the racialised body and exposes the absurdity of her categories. The closing request that she should 'see for yourself' places the judgement of race in the perception of the observer, not in the body observed. A common mistake is to read the speaker as conceding to the landlady's definitions. He does not accept her classification, and he mocks it. Expression: 'racialised' means treated as a racial category by social practice, not simply a racial fact.

Political uprisings in fiction

Political uprising fiction takes revolution, insurgency or civil war as its main historical frame, and this frame is the feature to look for in such questions. Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities is set during the French Revolution. Mahasweta Devi's Mother of 1084 depicts the aftermath of the Naxalite movement in Calcutta. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun is set during the Biafran War in Nigeria. Shobha Shakti's Gorilla is also grouped with this body of works in the question. Do not confuse this group with other categories. A picaresque novel follows the episodic journey of a roguish protagonist through many social settings, and feminist or animal-centred fiction is defined by other features. Example: a novel in which a family's life is organised around a civil war is a political uprising novel, even if it is also a family saga.