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Elective English–II

Notes The Indo-Anglican pen was employed in the battle of wits and in the collision of arguments
and perspectives with a simple urgency commensurate with the new-won power of an expressive
resource. The process has continued, with the result that it overlaps the next successive phases.
From Vivekananda to Aurobindo, from Raja Ram Mohan Roy to Tagore, from Tilak, Gokhale,
and Gandhi to Nehru, Radhakrishnan and Rajaji, the Indian writers of English Prose have
been primarily concerned with the exploration of thought on a level of stylistic empiricism
rather than with the pursuit of vision on the level of creative imagination. Nevertheless, the
polemical effectiveness and the empirical vitalism of their writing have tempered and refined
the linguistic idiom itself. In a sense, their writings represent a substantial framework of
preparation for the aesthetic and creative transformation of our interest in the English language.

The next distinctive, chronological phase in the growth of the Indo-Anglican literature reveals
our writers aiming at a consciously enhanced and heightened discourse, and their literary
production reflects the whole process of absorption, assimilation, synthesis and creative tempering
of the language.
At the same time, Indian writing in English enters the mainstream of modern Indian vernacular
literatures, adumbrating, within the specific structures of its own distinctive myth, discourse
and logos the same cyclicality of influences, movements, dimensions and extensions. First,
Romanticism appears in a variety of local habitations and their co-ordinate mutations. From
Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu and Derozio to Armando Menezes, Bhushan and Harindranath
Chattopadhyaya, one finds the activization of the romantic impulse with its mixed vintage of
idealism, mysticism, regionalism and nationalism.
With the fading away of the romantic impulse, the Indo-Anglican sensibility seems to have
turned increasingly towards Realism and its ancillary modifications of Regionalism and Naturalism.
Further, it is considered that there has been Indian literary activity in English for the past 200
years. It began with the insistence of the reformist Raja Ram Mohan Roy and other like-
minded Indians that for India to take its rightful place among nations, a knowledge of education
in English was considered essential. English literary activity took on a new aspect with the
independence movement whose leaders and followers found in English the one language that
united them.
Among the first poets were Henry Derozio, Kashiprasad Ghose and Michael Madhusudan
Datta, all of whom wrote narrative verse. In the following generation, there was Toru Dutt,
the most important among the women poets in this genre. Carrying on this tradition was
Sarojini Naidu, judged by many as the greatest of women poets; among her poetic collections
may be mentioned The Golden Threshold (1905), The Bird of Time (1912) and The Broken
Wing (1917). Best known of the Indian poets in English was the Bengali Rabindranath Tagore,
who, wrote his poems first in Bengali, and then translated some of them into English. A very
different figure from Tagore is Sri Aurobindo.
The independence movement gave a strong impetus to expository prose. Important contributions
to this genre were Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who edited an English journal Maharatta, Lala Lajpat
Rai, Kasturi Ranga Iyengar and T. Prakasam. Mahatma Gandhi, too, wrote widely in English
and edited Young India and The Harijan. He also wrote the autobiography My Experiments
with Truth (originally published in Gujarati, 1927-29), now an Indian classic. In this he was
followed by Jawarhalal Nehru, whose Discovery of India is justly popular. Prose fiction in
English began in 1902 with the novel The Lake of Palms, by Romesh Chunder Dutt. The next
important novelist is Mulk Raj Anand, who spoke against class and cast distinction in a series
of novels, The Coolie (1936), Untouchable (1935), Two Leaves and a Bud (1937) and The Big
Heart (1945). Less fierce, though a better craftsman, is R.K.Narayan, who has published nine
novels (as well as many short stories), among them The Guide (1958), The Man-Eater of

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