Recent decades have witnessed a prodigious outpouring
of literature in India. Most works have been written in
one of the Indian languages and have not been translated
into a foreign tongue. Many authors, however, choose to
write in English for the Indian elite or for foreign audiences.
For that reason, some critics charge that such literature
lacks authenticity.
Because of the vast quantity of works published (India
is currently the third-largest publisher of Englishlanguage
books in the world), only a few of the most
prominent fiction writers can be mentioned here. Anita
Desai (b. 1937) was one of the first prominent female
writers in contemporary India. Her writing focuses on the
struggle of Indian women to achieve a degree of independence.
In her first novel, Cry, the Peacock, the heroine
finally seeks liberation by murdering her husband, preferring
freedom at any cost to remaining a captive of traditional
society.
The best-known female writer in South Asia today is
Taslima Nasrin (b. 1962) of Bangladesh. She first became
famous when she was sentenced to death for her novel
Shame (1993), in which she criticized official persecution
of the Hindu minority. An outspoken feminist, she is critical
of Islam for obstructing human progress and women’s
equality. She now lives in exile in Europe.
The most controversial writer in India today is Salman
Rushdie (b. 1947). In Midnight’s Children, published in
1980, the author linked his protagonist, born on the
night of independence, to the history of modern India, its
achievements and its frustrations. Like his contemporaries
Günter Grass and Gabriel García Márquez, Rushdie
used the technique of magical realism to jolt his audience
into a recognition of the inhumanity of modern society
and the need to develop a sense of moral concern for the
fate of the Indian people and for the world as a whole.
Rushdie’s later novels have tackled such problems as
religious intolerance, political tyranny, social injustice,
and greed and corruption. His attack on Islamic fundamentalism
in The Satanic Verses (1988) won plaudits from
literary critics but provoked widespread criticism among
Muslims, including a death sentence by Ayatollah Khomeini
in Iran. The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), which focuses
on the alleged excesses of Hindu nationalism, has been
banned in India.
Like Chinese and Japanese artists, Indian artists have
agonized over how best to paint with a modern yet indigenous
mode of expression. During the colonial period,
Indian art went in several directions at once. One school
of painters favored traditional themes; another experimented
with a colorful primitivism founded on folk art.
Many Indian artists painted representational social art
extolling the suffering and silent dignity of India’s impoverished
millions. After 1960, however, most Indian artists
adopted abstract art as their medium. Surrealism in particular,
with its emphasis on spontaneity and the unconscious,
appeared closer to the Hindu tradition of favoring
intuition over reason. Yet Indian artists are still struggling
to find the ideal way to be both modern and Indian.
World History
