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Unit 12: Indian Weavers by Sarojini Naidu

literatures in the Indian languages continues to be as undefined as the status of English itself Notes
in relation to other Indian languages. But, R.K.Narayan’s novel, The Guide (1958) has been
made into an expensive and popular Hindi film, and this may well be taken as one kind of
public approval of Indian writing in English.

The establishment of Indo-Anglican literature as a valid and distinct form of Indian literary
writing has not, however, solved the epistemological problem of such Indian writing as is
available in translation in English. Oaten’s 1907 list includes Michael Madhusudan Datta’s ‘Is
This Called Civilization?’ as an Anglo-Indian Work without conceding that it is a translation
of the original Bengali play ‘Ekeyi ki boley savyata?’
As recently as 1960, Dorothy M. Spencer’s introductory essay to her annotated bibliography,
Indian Fiction in English makes no serious distinction between Indian novels written in English
and Indian language novels translated into English. VK Gokak, in concluding his powerful
plea in favour of recognising what he calls ‘Indo-English literature’, says.

“I cannot help thinking that one of the befitting ways of honouring the message and significance
of Gitanjali is to create a body of Indo-English writing, which will wear Gitanjali as a jewel
in its crown. I cannot help thinking that the area so persuasively opened by Prof.Gokak needs
to be sharply defined and delimited in order to forestall any boundary disputes” (1972,p.22).

Those who have read and invariably derived benefit from Gokak’s pioneering book, English
in India, will have noticed that he has devoted a separate chapter to Indian Literature in
Trasnlation wherein he has argued that scholarly translations into English from classical Indian
literary works—not only in Sanskrit, but in the older regional languages as well—should
constitute valid post graduate work towards the doctoral degree in the department of English
or of Comparative Literature in Indian Universities.
The historical evaluation of Indian writing in English is also bound to deal with the patterns
of continuity and differentiation which have marked out the various phases and movements
in its complex and often overlapping, growth. Literary history does not flow so smoothly, for
the progression of creative concentrations and transitions reveal the operation of a multiple
causation, of which the individual personality or achievement is but one, if readily discernible
factor.

The Carlylean approach to literary history as primarily a collective literary biography has no
doubt done its necessary service in the cause of identifying and establishing an essential frame
of reference for the appreciation of Indo-Anglican literature as a coherent, self-consistent and
autonomous tradition; but it must now give room for a more comprehensive and qualitative
histriographical and comparativistic strategy. Indian writing in English, produced over the
last hundred odd years, does not reveal a homogeneous continuity, but rather a complex
cyclical continuity.

In its initial stages, one witnesses a self-conscious approximation of the ‘singing strength’ to
the ferment of ideas and the corresponding upheaval of talents during the so-called Indian
Renaissance. The Indian mind was at this time concentrating on a patriotic rediscovery of a
national identity and a national destiny. The first writers like the writers of colonial and
revolutionary America, or the expatriates of Colonial Australia, had used the gift of the English
language of a direct descriptive statement of the physical discovery of a newly accessible
experience. They were engrossed in the immediacies of political argument, social rethinking,
and dissemination of modern enlightenment and revaluation of the Indian Spirit. Their rhetorical
simplicity and forthrightness were more conducive to effective debate rather than to an imaginative
discourse.

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