TAARE ZAMEEN PAR

“It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And

above all, to feel.”-Salman Rushdie

The ‘dawn’ of Indian English writing arrived with Sake Dean Mahomet

(1759-1851). He was a traveller, surgeon and entrepreneur who introduced

the Indian curry house restaurant in Britain, and was the first Indian to have

written a book in English.

His fame chiefly lies with his work, The Travels of Dean Mahomet: An

Eighteenth Century Journey through India.

Sake Dean Mahomet

Indian English literature refers to the body of work by

writers in India who write in the English language and whose

native or co-native language could be one of the numerous

languages of India. It is also associated with the works of

members of the Indian diaspora, such as V. S. Naipaul, Kiran

Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri, Agha Shahid Ali, Rohinton Mistry

and Salman Rushdie, who are of Indian descent.

Writers like Rabindranath Tagore, Kazi Nazrul Islam, and Bankim Chandra

Chattopadhyay inspired the millions of Indians to strive for freedom. In later ages the

influences of British English built the track for Indian English writing.

Tagore’s translation of Gitanjali which earned him a Nobel Prize for Literature set the

flicker for English writing which in turn burst into flames.

The bibliography of the authors begins...NOW...

Bankim ChandraChattopadhyay

Raja Rao

R. K. Narayan

Mulk Raj Anand

Rabindranath Tagore

Anita Desai

Salman Rushdie

Nirad C. Chaudhuri

Ram Nath Kak

Nayantara Sahgal

Vikram Seth

Amitav Ghosh

Kiran Desai

Amish Tripathi

Amit Chaudhuri

Aravind Adiga

Chetan Bhagat

Durjoy Datta

Bishwanath Ghosh

Jhumpa Lahiri

Kunal Basu

Khuswant Singh

Ravinder Singh

Through this journey of ours we got to know a lot about ourfellow Indian writers in English language. Their never-ending zeal has and is still inspiring a lot of Indians totake up English as their field of creativity and to aspire intheir life! We are all grateful to them and shall always bethankful for what they have done to make English both aspoken and a written language in India. Not only we fellowIndians are enriched by their deeds but also the Englishliterature as a whole which “Mads’t it pregnant” as JohnMilton puts it.

At work!

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