Friday, February 17, 2012

Now you have done it, Anand Giridharadas

Bookle+

BookWorm

Now you have done it, Anand Giridharadas

I hate to do this to you, my good buddy, Anand Giridharadas, get a haircut.
I have been around this topic. INDIA. I made my (writing) career over what is and what is not INDIA. This wet from behind his ears, nincompoop, Anand Giridharadas is not going to make me self enlightened any more than what I am.
Just a look at his list of friends, ( Page 257-261) tells me this boy needs some education before he goes gallivanting in a country of his ancestors, INDIA.
Let me see how many authors wrote how many books on India? Plenty.
E M Forster.

A Passage to India

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For the 1984 film based on this novel, see A Passage to India (film).
A Passage to India
Bookcover a passage to india.jpg
1st edition
Author(s) E.M. Forster
Country England
Language English
Genre(s) Novel
Publisher Edward Arnold, (London)
Publication date 1924
Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN 978-0-14-144116-0
OCLC Number 59352597
A Passage to India (1924) is a novel by E. M. Forster set against the backdrop of the British Raj and the Indian independence movement in the 1920s. It was selected as one of the 100 great works of English literature by the Modern Library and won the 1924 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. Time magazine included the novel in its “TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005″.[1] The novel is based on Forster’s experiences in India.
The story revolves around four characters: Dr. Aziz, his British friend Mr. Cyril Fielding, Mrs. Moore, and Ms. Adela Quested. During a trip to the Marabar Caves (modeled on the Barabar Caves of Bihar),[2] Adela accuses Aziz of attempting to assault her. Aziz’s trial, and its run-up and aftermath, bring out all the racial tensions and prejudices between indigenous Indians and the British colonists who rule India.

Contents

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[edit] Plot summary

A young British schoolmistress, Adela Quested, and her elderly friend, Mrs. Moore, visit the fictional city of Chandrapore, British India. Adela is to marry Mrs. Moore’s son, Ronny Heaslop, the city magistrate.
Meanwhile, Dr. Aziz, a young Indian Muslim physician, is dining with two of his Indian friends and conversing about whether it is possible to be friends with an Englishman. During the meal, a summons arrives from Major Callendar, Aziz’s unpleasant superior at the hospital. Aziz hastens to Callendar’s bungalow as ordered, but is delayed by a flat tyre and difficulty in finding a tonga and the major has already left in a huff.
Disconsolate, Aziz walks down the road toward the railway station. When he sees his favourite mosque, a rather ramshackle but beautiful structure, he enters on impulse. He sees a strange Englishwoman there, and angrily yells at her not to profane this sacred place. The woman, however, turns out to be Mrs Moore. Her respect for native customs (she took off her shoes on entering and she acknowledged that “God is here” in the mosque) disarms Aziz, and the two chat and part friends.
Mrs. Moore returns to the British club down the road and relates her experience at the mosque. Ronny Heaslop, her son, initially thinks she is talking about an Englishman, and becomes indignant when he learns the truth. He thinks she should have indicated by her tone that it was a “Mohammedan” who was in question. Adela, however, is intrigued.
Because the newcomers had expressed a desire to see Indians, Mr. Turton, the city tax collector, invites numerous Indian gentlemen to a party at his house. The party turns out to be an awkward business, thanks to the Indians’ timidity and the Britons’ bigotry, but Adela does meet Cyril Fielding, headmaster of Chandrapore’s little government-run college for Indians. Fielding invites Adela and Mrs. Moore to a tea party with him and a Hindu-Brahmin professor named Narayan Godbole. On Adela’s request, he extends his invitation to Dr. Aziz.
At Fielding’s tea party, everyone has a good time conversing about India, and Fielding and Aziz even become great friends. Aziz buoyantly promises to take Mrs. Moore and Adela to see the Marabar Caves, a distant cave complex that everyone talks about but no one seems to actually visit. Aziz’s Marabar invitation was one of those casual promises that people often make and never intend to keep. Ronny Heaslop arrives and rudely breaks up the party.
Aziz mistakenly believes that the women are really offended that he has not followed through with his promise and arranges the outing at great expense to himself. Fielding and Godbole were supposed to accompany the little expedition, but they miss the train.
Aziz and the women begin to explore the caves. In the first cave, however, Mrs. Moore is overcome with claustrophobia, for the cave is dark and Aziz’s retinue has followed her in. The press of people nearly smothers her. But worse than the claustrophobia is the echo. No matter what sound one makes, the echo is always “Boum.” Disturbed by the echo, Mrs. Moore declines to continue exploring. So Adela and Aziz, accompanied by a single guide, a local man, climb on up the hill to the next cluster of caves.
As Aziz helps Adela up the hill, she innocently asks him whether he has more than one wife. Disconcerted by the bluntness of the remark, he ducks into a cave to compose himself. When he comes out, he finds the guide sitting alone outside the caves. The guide says Adela has gone into one of the caves by herself. Aziz looks for her in vain. Deciding she is lost, he angrily punches the guide, who runs away. Aziz looks around again and discovers Adela’s field-glasses (binoculars) lying broken on the ground. He puts them in his pocket.
Then Aziz looks down the hill and sees Adela speaking to another young Englishwoman, Miss Derek, who has arrived with Fielding in a car. Aziz runs down the hill and greets Fielding effusively, but Miss Derek and Adela have already driven off without a word of explanation. Fielding, Mrs. Moore, and Aziz return to Chandrapore on the train.
Then the blow falls. At the train station, Dr. Aziz is arrested and charged with sexually assaulting Adela in a cave. She reports the alleged incident to the British authorities.
The run-up to Aziz’s trial for attempted sexual assault releases the racial tensions between the British and the Indians. Adela accuses Aziz only of trying to touch her. She says that he followed her into the cave and tried to grab her, and that she fended him off by swinging her field glasses at him. She remembers him grabbing the glasses and the strap breaking, which allowed her to get away. The only actual evidence the British have is the field glasses in the possession of Dr. Aziz. Despite this, the British colonists firmly believe that Aziz is guilty; at the back of all their minds is the conviction that all darker peoples lust after white women. They are stunned when Fielding proclaims his belief in Aziz’s innocence. Fielding is ostracized and condemned as a blood-traitor. But the Indians, who consider the assault allegation a fraud aimed at ruining their community’s reputation, welcome him.
During the weeks before the trial, Mrs. Moore is unexpectedly apathetic and irritable. Her experience in the cave seems to have ruined her faith in humanity. Although she curtly professes her belief in Aziz’s innocence, she does nothing to help him. Ronny, alarmed by his mother’s assertion that Aziz is innocent, decides to arrange for her return by ship to England before she can testify to this effect at the trial. Mrs. Moore dies during the voyage. Her absence from India becomes a major issue at the trial, where Aziz’s legal defenders assert that her testimony alone, had it been available, would have proven the accused’s innocence.
After an initial period of fever and weeping, Adela becomes confused as to Aziz’s guilt. At the trial, she is asked point-blank whether Aziz sexually assaulted her. She asks for a moment to think before replying. She has a vision of the cave in that moment, and it turns out that Adela had, while in the cave, received a shock similar to Mrs. Moore’s. The echo had disconcerted her so much that she temporarily became unhinged. She ran around the cave, fled down the hill, and finally sped off with Miss Derek. At the time, Adela mistakenly interpreted her shock as an assault by Aziz, who personifies the India that has stripped her of her psychological innocence, but he was never there. She admits that she was mistaken. The case is dismissed. (Note that in the 1913 draft of the novel EM Forster originally had Aziz guilty of the assault and found guilty in the court, but later changed this in the 1924 draft to create a more ambiguous ending).
All the Anglo-Indians are shocked and infuriated by what they view as Adela’s betrayal of the white race. Ronny Heaslop breaks off their engagement. Adela stays at Fielding’s house until her passage on a boat to England is arranged. After explaining to Fielding that the echo was the cause of the whole business, she departs India, never to return.
Although he is free and vindicated, Aziz is angry and bitter that his friend, Fielding, would befriend Adela after she nearly ruined his life. The two men’s friendship suffers in consequence, and Fielding soon departs for England. Aziz believes that he is leaving to marry Adela for her money. Bitter at his friend’s perceived betrayal, he vows never again to befriend a white person. Aziz moves to the Hindu-ruled state of Mau and begins a new life.
Two years later, Fielding returns to India and to Aziz. His wife is Stella, Mrs. Moore’s daughter from a second marriage. Aziz, now the Raja‘s chief physician, at first persists in his anger against his old friend. But in time, he comes to respect and love Fielding again. However, he does not give up his dream of a free and united India. In the novel’s last sentences, he explains that he and Fielding cannot be friends, at least not until India is free of the British Raj. Even the earth and the sky seem to say, “Not yet.”

[edit] Character list

Dr. Aziz 
A young Muslim Indian Physician who works at the British hospital in Chandrapore. He relies heavily on intuition over logic, and he is more emotional than his best friend, Fielding. He makes friends easily and seems quite garrulous at times. His chief drawback is an inability to view a situation without emotion, which Forster suggests is a typical Indian difficulty. Despite being the protagonist of the novel Aziz does have some vulgar notion about women’s physicality. Aziz seems to possess a profound love for his late wife but forgets her due to his overshadowing impulsiveness.
Cyril Fielding 
The 45-year-old, unmarried British headmaster of the small government-run college for Indians. Fielding’s logical Western mind cannot comprehend the muddle (or mystery) of India, but he is highly tolerant and respectful toward Indians. He befriends Dr. Aziz, but cultural and racial differences, and personal misunderstandings, separate them.
Adela Quested 
A young British schoolmistress who is visiting India with the vague intention of marrying Ronny Heaslop. Intelligent, brave, honest, but slightly prudish, she is what Fielding calls a “prig.” She arrives with the intention of seeing the real India. But after a frightening trip to the Marabar Caves, she falsely accuses Aziz of sexually assaulting her.
Mrs. Moore 
The elderly, thoughtful mother of Ronny Heaslop. She is visiting Chandrapore to oversee her son’s engagement to Adela Quested. She respects Indians and their customs, and the Indians in the novel appreciate her more than they do any other Briton. After undergoing an experience similar to Adela’s, she becomes apathetic and bitter.
Ronny Heaslop 
The British city magistrate of Chandrapore. Though not a bad man, he shares his Anglo-Indian colleagues’ racist view of Indians. He breaks off his engagement to Adela after she retracts her accusation against Aziz. He considers it a betrayal of their race.
Professor Narayan Godbole 
An elderly, courteous, contemplative Brahmin who views the world with equanimity. He remains totally aloof from the novel’s conflicts.
Mr. Turton 
The British city collector of Chandrapore. He does not hate Indians, for that would be to negate his life’s work. Nevertheless, he is fiercely loyal to his race, reviles less bigoted people like Fielding, and regards natives with thinly veiled contempt.
Mrs. Turton 
Mr. Turton’s wife. Openly racist, snobbish, and rude toward Indians and those Anglo-Indians who are different, she screams at Adela in the courtroom when the latter retracts her accusation against Aziz.
Maj. Callendar 
The British head doctor and Aziz’s superior at the hospital. He is more openly racist than any other male character. Rumors circulate among Indians that Callendar actually tortured an injured Indian by putting pepper instead of antiseptic on his wounds.
Mr. McBryde 
The British superintendent of police in Chandrapore. Like Mr. Turton, he considers dark-skinned races inferior to light-skinned ones. During Aziz’s trial, he publicly asserts that it is a scientific fact that dark men lust after white women. Nevertheless, he is more tolerant of Indians than most Britons, and he is friendly with Fielding.
Miss Derek 
An Englishwoman employed by a Hindu royal family. She frequently borrows their car—and does not trouble to ask their permission or return it in time. She is too boisterous and easygoing for most of her compatriots’ tastes. She has an affair with McBryde.
Nawab Bahadur 
The chief Indian gentleman in Chandrapore, a Muslim. Wealthy (he owns a car) and generous, he is loyal to the British (he lends his car to Ronny Heaslop). But after the trial, he gives up his title of “nawab,” which the British bestowed on him, in favor of plain “Mr. Zulfiqar.”
Hamidullah 
Aziz’s uncle and friend. Educated in law at Cambridge University, he declares at the beginning of the novel that it is easier to be friends with an Englishman in England than in India. Aziz comes to agree with him.
Amritrao 
A prominent Indian lawyer from Calcutta, called in to defend Aziz. He is known for his strong anti-British sentiment. He takes the case for political reasons and becomes disgusted when the case evaporates in court.
Mahmoud Ali 
A Muslim Indian barrister who openly hates the British.
Dr. Panna Lal 
A low-born Hindu doctor and Aziz’s rival at the hospital.
Ralph Moore 
A timid, sensitive and discerning youth, the second son of Mrs. Moore.
Stella Moore 
Mrs. Moore’s daughter and Fielding’s beautiful younger wife.

[edit] Awards

[edit] Adaptations

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ “All Time 100 Novels”. Time. 16 October 2005. Retrieved 2010-04-23.
  2. ^ The Geographical Presence in A Passage to India
  3. ^ Internet Broadway Database listing, A Passage to India, 1962
  4. ^ “Play of the Month” Passage to India (1965)
  5. ^ C. J. Wallia (1996). “IndiaStar book review: Satyajit Ray by Surabhi Banerjee”. Retrieved 2009-05-31.
  6. ^ Shared Experience Take Forster Passage to India Whatsonstage.com
  7. ^ The New York Times. http://theater2.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?_r=1&res=9502E0D6163CF937A35752C1A9629C8B63&fta=y&oref=slogin.[dead link]
8. S. M. Chanda: A Passage to India: a close look in studies in literature (Atlantic Publishers, New Delhi 2003)

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: A Passage to India
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Novels
E. M. Forster von Dora Carrington, 1924-25.jpg

Short stories
Rudyard Kipling.

Rudyard Kipling

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“Kipling” redirects here. For other uses, see Kipling (disambiguation).
Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling by E.O. Hoppé (1912)
Born Joseph Rudyard Kipling
30 December 1865
Bombay, Bombay Presidency, British India
Died 18 January 1936 (aged 70)
Middlesex Hospital, London, England
Occupation Short story writer, novelist, poet, journalist
Nationality British
Genres Short story, novel, children’s literature, poetry, travel literature, science fiction
Notable work(s) The Jungle Book
Just So Stories
Kim
If—
Gunga Din
Notable award(s) Nobel Prize in Literature
1907
Joseph Rudyard Kipling (play /ˈrʌdjəd ˈkɪplɪŋ/ rud-yəd kip-ling; 30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936)[1] was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. Kipling received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature. He was born in Bombay, in the Bombay Presidency of British India, and was taken by his family to England when he was five years old.[2] Kipling is best known for his works of fiction, including The Jungle Book (a collection of stories which includes “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi“), Just So Stories (1902) (1894), Kim (1901) (a tale of adventure), many short stories, including “The Man Who Would Be King” (1888); and his poems, including Mandalay (1890), Gunga Din (1890), The White Man’s Burden (1899) and If— (1910). He is regarded as a major “innovator in the art of the short story”;[3] his children’s books are enduring classics of children’s literature; and his best works are said to exhibit “a versatile and luminous narrative gift”.[4][5]
Kipling was one of the most popular writers in England, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.[3] Henry James said: “Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known.”[3] In 1907 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English-language writer to receive the prize, and to date he remains its youngest recipient.[6] Among other honours, he was sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on several occasions for a knighthood, all of which he declined.[7]
Kipling’s subsequent reputation has changed according to the political and social climate of the age[8][9] and the resulting contrasting views about him continued for much of the 20th century.[10][11] George Orwell called him a “prophet of British imperialism“.[12] Literary critic Douglas Kerr wrote: “He [Kipling] is still an author who can inspire passionate disagreement and his place in literary and cultural history is far from settled. But as the age of the European empires recedes, he is recognised as an incomparable, if controversial, interpreter of how empire was experienced. That, and an increasing recognition of his extraordinary narrative gifts, make him a force to be reckoned with.”[13]

Contents

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[edit] Childhood and early life

Malabar Point, Bombay, 1865
Rudyard Kipling was born on 30 December 1865 in Bombay, in British India to Alice Kipling (née MacDonald) and (John) Lockwood Kipling.[14] Alice (one of four remarkable Victorian sisters)[15] was a vivacious woman[16] about whom a future Viceroy of India would say, “Dullness and Mrs. Kipling cannot exist in the same room.”[3] Lockwood Kipling, a sculptor and pottery designer, was the Principal and Professor of Architectural Sculpture at the newly founded Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art and Industry in Bombay.[16]
John and Alice had met in 1863 and courted at Rudyard Lake in Rudyard, Staffordshire, England. They married, and moved to India in 1865. They had been so moved by the beauty of the Rudyard Lake area that when their first child was born, they included a reference to the lake in naming him. Alice’s sister Georgiana was married to painter Edward Burne-Jones, and her sister Agnes was married to painter Edward Poynter. Kipling’s most famous relative was his first cousin, Stanley Baldwin, who was Conservative Prime Minister of the UK three times in the 1920s and 1930s.[17] Kipling’s birth home still stands on the campus of the J J School of Art in Mumbai and for many years was used as the Dean’s residence. Mumbai historian Foy Nissen points out, however, that although the cottage bears a plaque stating that this is the site where Kipling was born, the original cottage was torn down decades ago and a new one was built in its place. The wooden bungalow has been empty and locked up for years.[18]
Kipling’s India: map of British India
Of Bombay, Kipling was to write:[19]
Mother of Cities to me,
For I was born in her gate,
Between the palms and the sea,
Where the world-end steamers wait.
According to Bernice M. Murphy, “Kipling’s parents considered themselves ‘Anglo-Indians‘ (a term used in the 19th century for people of British origin living in India) and so too would their son, though he spent the bulk of his life elsewhere. Complex issues of identity and national allegiance would become prominent features in his fiction.”[20] Kipling referred to such conflicts; for example: “In the afternoon heats before we took our sleep, she (the Portuguese ayah, or nanny) or Meeta (the Hindu bearer, or male attendant) would tell us stories and Indian nursery songs all unforgotten, and we were sent into the dining-room after we had been dressed, with the caution ‘Speak English now to Papa and Mamma.’ So one spoke ‘English’, haltingly translated out of the vernacular idiom that one thought and dreamed in”.[21]
Kipling’s days of “strong light and darkness” in Bombay ended when he was five years old.[21] As was the custom in British India, he and his three-year-old sister, Alice (“Trix”), were taken to England—in their case to Southsea (Portsmouth), to live with a couple who boarded children of British nationals who were serving in India. The two children lived with the couple, Captain and Mrs. Holloway, at their house, Lorne Lodge, for the next six years. In his autobiography, published some 65 years later, Kipling recalled the stay with horror, and wondered ironically if the combination of cruelty and neglect which he experienced there at the hands of Mrs. Holloway might not have hastened the onset of his literary life: “If you cross-examine a child of seven or eight on his day’s doings (specially when he wants to go to sleep) he will contradict himself very satisfactorily. If each contradiction be set down as a lie and retailed at breakfast, life is not easy. I have known a certain amount of bullying, but this was calculated torture — religious as well as scientific. Yet it made me give attention to the lies I soon found it necessary to tell: and this, I presume, is the foundation of literary effort”.[21]
Trix fared better at Lorne Lodge; Mrs. Holloway apparently hoped that Trix would eventually marry the Holloway son.[22] The two Kipling children, however, did have relatives in England whom they could visit. They spent a month each Christmas with their maternal aunt Georgiana (“Georgy”), and her husband at their house, “The Grange” in Fulham, London, which Kipling was to call “a paradise which I verily believe saved me.”[21] In the spring of 1877, Alice returned from India and removed the children from Lorne Lodge. Kipling remembers, “Often and often afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told any one how I was being treated. Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established. Also, badly-treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of a prison-house before they are clear of it”.[21]
In January 1878 Kipling was admitted to the United Services College, at Westward Ho!, Devon, a school founded a few years earlier to prepare boys for the British Army. The school proved rough going for him at first, but later led to firm friendships, and provided the setting for his schoolboy stories Stalky & Co. (1899).[22] During his time there, Kipling also met and fell in love with Florence Garrard, who was boarding with Trix at Southsea (to which Trix had returned). Florence was to become the model for Maisie in Kipling’s first novel, The Light that Failed (1891).[22]
Kipling’s England: Map of England Showing Kipling’s Homes
Near the end of his stay at the school, it was decided that he lacked the academic ability to get into Oxford University on a scholarship[22] and his parents lacked the wherewithal to finance him,[16] so Lockwood obtained a job for his son in Lahore, Punjab (now in Pakistan), where Lockwood was now Principal of the Mayo College of Art and Curator of the Lahore Museum. Kipling was to be assistant editor of a small local newspaper, the Civil & Military Gazette.
He sailed for India on 20 September 1882 and arrived in Bombay on 18 October. He described this moment years later: “So, at sixteen years and nine months, but looking four or five years older, and adorned with real whiskers which the scandalised Mother abolished within one hour of beholding, I found myself at Bombay where I was born, moving among sights and smells that made me deliver in the vernacular sentences whose meaning I knew not. Other Indian-born boys have told me how the same thing happened to them.”[21] This arrival changed Kipling, as he explains, “There were yet three or four days’ rail to Lahore, where my people lived. After these, my English years fell away, nor ever, I think, came back in full strength”.[21]

[edit] Early travels

The Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, the newspaper which Kipling was to call “mistress and most true love,”[21] appeared six days a week throughout the year except for a one-day break each for Christmas and Easter. Kipling was worked hard by editor Stephen Wheeler, but Kipling’s need to write was unstoppable. In 1886 he published his first collection of verse, Departmental Ditties. That year also brought a change of editors at the newspaper; Kay Robinson, the new editor, allowed more creative freedom and Kipling was asked to contribute short stories to the newspaper.[4]
During the summer of 1883, Kipling visited Shimla (then known as Simla), a well-known hill station and summer capital of British India. By then it was established practice for the Viceroy of India and the government to move to Simla for six months and the town became a “centre of power as well as pleasure.”[4] Kipling’s family became yearly visitors to Simla and Lockwood Kipling was asked to serve in the Christ Church there. Rudyard Kipling returned to Simla for his annual leave each year from 1885 to 1888, and the town figured prominently in many of the stories that he wrote for the Gazette.[4] He describes this time: “My month’s leave at Simla, or whatever Hill Station my people went to, was pure joy—every golden hour counted. It began in heat and discomfort, by rail and road. It ended in the cool evening, with a wood fire in one’s bedroom, and next morn—thirty more of them ahead!—the early cup of tea, the Mother who brought it in, and the long talks of us all together again. One had leisure to work, too, at whatever play-work was in one’s head, and that was usually full.”[21] Back in Lahore, some thirty-nine stories appeared in the Gazette between November 1886 and June 1887. Most of these stories were included in Plain Tales from the Hills, Kipling’s first prose collection, which was published in Calcutta in January 1888, a month after his 22nd birthday. Kipling’s time in Lahore, however, had come to an end. In November 1887 he was transferred to the Gazette’s much larger sister newspaper, The Pioneer, in Allahabad in the United Provinces.
Kipling in his study, 1895
Bundi, Rajputana, where Kipling was inspired to write Kim
Kipling’s writing continued at a frenetic pace; in 1888 he published six collections of short stories: Soldiers Three, The Story of the Gadsbys, In Black and White, Under the Deodars, The Phantom Rickshaw, and Wee Willie Winkie, containing a total of 41 stories, some quite long. In addition, as The Pioneer’s special correspondent in western region of Rajputana, he wrote many sketches that were later collected in Letters of Marque and published in From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, Letters of Travel.[4]
Kipling was discharged from The Pioneer in early 1889, after a dispute. By this time he had been increasingly thinking about the future. He sold the rights to his six volumes of stories for £200 and a small royalty, and the Plain Tales for £50; in addition, from The Pioneer, he received six-months’ salary in lieu of notice.[21] He decided to use this money to make his way to London, the centre of the literary universe in the British Empire. On 9 March 1889, Kipling left India, travelling first to San Francisco via Rangoon, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. He then travelled through the United States, writing articles for The Pioneer that were later published in From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, Letters of Travel. Starting his American travels in San Francisco, Kipling journeyed north to Portland, Oregon; to Seattle, Washington; up into Canada, to Victoria and Vancouver, British Columbia; back into the U.S. to Yellowstone National Park; down to Salt Lake City; then east to Omaha, Nebraska, and on to Chicago, Illinois; then to Beaver, Pennsylvania on the Ohio River to visit the Hill family; from there he went to Chautauqua with Professor Hill, and later to Niagara Falls, Toronto, Washington, D.C., New York and Boston.[23] In the course of this journey he met Mark Twain in Elmira, New York, and was deeply impressed. He then crossed the Atlantic, and reached Liverpool in October 1889. He soon made his début in the London literary world to great acclaim.[3]

[edit] Career as a writer

[edit] London

The building on Villiers Street off the Strand in London where Kipling rented rooms from 1889 to 1891
In London Kipling had several stories accepted by various magazine editors. He also found a place to live for the next two years:
Meantime, I had found me quarters in Villiers Street, Strand, which forty-six years ago was primitive and passionate in its habits and population. My rooms were small, not over-clean or well-kept, but from my desk I could look out of my window through the fanlight of Gatti’s Music-Hall entrance, across the street, almost on to its stage. The Charing Cross trains rumbled through my dreams on one side, the boom of the Strand on the other, while, before my windows, Father Thames under the Shot Tower walked up and down with his traffic.[24]
Kipling photographed by Bourne & Shepherd, ca. 1892
In the next two years he published a novel, The Light that Failed, had a nervous breakdown, and met an American writer and publishing agent, Wolcott Balestier, with whom he collaborated on a novel, The Naulahka (a title which he uncharacteristically misspelt; see below).[16] In 1891, on the advice of his doctors, Kipling embarked on another sea voyage visiting South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and once again India. However, he cut short his plans for spending Christmas with his family in India when he heard of Balestier’s sudden death from typhoid fever, and immediately decided to return to London. Before his return, he had used the telegram to propose to and be accepted by Wolcott’s sister Caroline Starr Balestier (1862–1939), called “Carrie”, whom he had met a year earlier, and with whom he had apparently been having an intermittent romance.[16] Meanwhile, late in 1891, his collection of short stories of the British in India, Life’s Handicap, was published in London.[citation needed]
On 18 January 1892, Carrie Balestier (aged 29) and Rudyard Kipling (aged 26) were married in London, in the “thick of an influenza epidemic, when the undertakers had run out of black horses and the dead had to be content with brown ones.”[21] The wedding was held at All Souls Church, Langham Place. Henry James gave the bride away.{{

[edit] United States

Rudyard Kipling’s America 1892–1896, 1899
The couple settled upon a honeymoon that would take them first to the United States (including a stop at the Balestier family estate near Brattleboro, Vermont) and then on to Japan.[16] However, when they arrived in Yokohama, Japan, they discovered that their bank, The New Oriental Banking Corporation, had failed. Taking this loss in their stride, they returned to the U.S., back to Vermont—Carrie by this time was pregnant with their first child—and rented a small cottage on a farm near Brattleboro for ten dollars a month. According to Kipling, “We furnished it with a simplicity that fore-ran the hire-purchase system. We bought, second or third hand, a huge, hot-air stove which we installed in the cellar. We cut generous holes in our thin floors for its eight-inch [20 cm] tin pipes (why we were not burned in our beds each week of the winter I never can understand) and we were extraordinarily and self-centredly content.”[21]
In this house, which they called Bliss Cottage, their first child, Josephine, was born “in three foot of snow on the night of 29 December 1892. Her Mother’s birthday being the 31st and mine the 30th of the same month, we congratulated her on her sense of the fitness of things …”[21]
Cover of The Jungle Book first edition
Cover of the 1895 first edition of The Second Jungle Book also illustrated by Lockwood Kipling
It was also in this cottage that the first dawnings of the Jungle Books came to Kipling: ” . . workroom in the Bliss Cottage was seven feet by eight, and from December to April the snow lay level with its window-sill. It chanced that I had written a tale about Indian Forestry work which included a boy who had been brought up by wolves. In the stillness, and suspense, of the winter of ’92 some memory of the Masonic Lions of my childhood’s magazine, and a phrase in Haggard’s Nada the Lily, combined with the echo of this tale. After blocking out the main idea in my head, the pen took charge, and I watched it begin to write stories about Mowgli and animals, which later grew into the two Jungle Books “.[21] With Josephine’s arrival, Bliss Cottage was felt to be congested, so eventually the couple bought land—10 acres (40,000 m2) on a rocky hillside overlooking the Connecticut River—from Carrie’s brother Beatty Balestier, and built their own house.
Kipling named the house “Naulakha” in honour of Wolcott and of their collaboration, and this time the name was spelled correctly.[16] From his early years in Lahore (1882–87), Kipling had become enthused by the Mughal architecture,[25] especially the Naulakha pavilion situated in Lahore Fort, which eventually became an inspiration for the title of his novel as well as the house.[26] The house still stands on Kipling Road, three miles (5 km) north of Brattleboro in Dummerston, Vermont: a big, secluded, dark-green house, with shingled roof and sides, which Kipling called his “ship”, and which brought him “sunshine and a mind at ease.”[16] His seclusion in Vermont, combined with his healthy “sane clean life”, made Kipling both inventive and prolific.
Gilt title of the 1890 first American edition of Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads, which contained Mandalay and Gunga Din
In the short span of four years, he produced, in addition to the Jungle Books, a collection of short stories (The Day’s Work), a novel (Captains Courageous), and a profusion of poetry, including the volume The Seven Seas. The collection of Barrack-Room Ballads, first published individually for the most part in 1890, which contains his poems “Mandalay” and “Gunga Din” was issued in March 1892. He especially enjoyed writing the Jungle Books—both masterpieces of imaginative writing—and enjoyed, too, corresponding with the many children who wrote to him about them.[16]
The writing life in Naulakha was occasionally interrupted by visitors, including his father, who visited soon after his retirement in 1893,[16] and British author Arthur Conan Doyle, who brought his golf-clubs, stayed for two days, and gave Kipling an extended golf lesson.[27][28] Kipling seemed to take to golf, occasionally practising with the local Congregational minister, and even playing with red-painted balls when the ground was covered in snow.[14][28] However, wintertime golf was “not altogether a success because there were no limits to a drive; the ball might skid two miles (3 km) down the long slope to Connecticut river.”[14]
From all accounts, Kipling loved the outdoors,[16] not least of whose marvels in Vermont was the turning of the leaves each fall. He described this moment in a letter: “A little maple began it, flaming blood-red of a sudden where he stood against the dark green of a pine-belt. Next morning there was an answering signal from the swamp where the sumacs grow. Three days later, the hill-sides as fast as the eye could range were afire, and the roads paved, with crimson and gold. Then a wet wind blew, and ruined all the uniforms of that gorgeous army; and the oaks, who had held themselves in reserve, buckled on their dull and bronzed cuirasses and stood it out stiffly to the last blown leaf, till nothing remained but pencil-shadings of bare boughs, and one could see into the most private heart of the woods.”[29]
Josephine, 1895
In February 1896 Elsie Kipling, the couple’s second daughter, was born. By this time, according to several biographers, their marital relationship was no longer light-hearted and spontaneous.[30] Although they would always remain loyal to each other, they seemed now to have fallen into set roles.[16] In a letter to a friend who had become engaged around this time, the 30 year old Kipling offered this sombre counsel: marriage principally taught “the tougher virtues—such as humility, restraint, order, and forethought.”[31]
The Kiplings loved life in Vermont and might have lived out their lives there, were it not for two incidents—one of global politics, the other of family discord—that hastily ended their time there. By the early 1890s the United Kingdom and Venezuela were in a border dispute involving British Guiana. The U.S. had made several offers to arbitrate, but in 1895 the new American Secretary of State Richard Olney upped the ante by arguing for the American “right” to arbitrate on grounds of sovereignty on the continent (see the Olney interpretation as an extension of the Monroe Doctrine).[16] This raised hackles in the UK and the situation grew into a major Anglo-American crisis, with talk of war on both sides.
Kipling in the United States (date unknown).
Although the crisis led to greater U.S.-British cooperation, at the time Kipling was bewildered by what he felt was persistent anti-British sentiment in the U.S., especially in the press.[16] He wrote in a letter that it felt like being “aimed at with a decanter across a friendly dinner table.”[31] By January 1896 he had decided[14] to end his family’s “good wholesome life” in the U.S. and seek their fortunes elsewhere.
A family dispute became the final straw. For some time, relations between Carrie and her brother Beatty Balestier had been strained owing to his drinking and insolvency. In May 1896 an inebriated Beatty encountered Kipling on the street and threatened him with physical harm.[16] The incident led to Beatty’s eventual arrest, but in the subsequent hearing, and the resulting publicity, Kipling’s privacy was destroyed, and he was left feeling miserable and exhausted. In July 1896, a week before the hearing was to resume, the Kiplings hurriedly packed their belongings and left the United States.[14]

[edit] Devon

By September 1896 the Kiplings were in Torquay on the coast of Devon, in a hillside home overlooking the sea. Although Kipling did not much care for his new house, whose design, he claimed, left its occupants feeling dispirited and gloomy, he managed to remain productive and socially active.[16] Kipling was now a famous man, and in the previous two or three years, had increasingly been making political pronouncements in his writings. The Kiplings had welcomed their first son, John, in August 1896. Kipling had begun work on two poems, “Recessional” (1897) and “The White Man’s Burden” (1899) which were to create controversy when published. Regarded by some as anthems for enlightened and duty-bound empire-building (that captured the mood of the Victorian age), the poems equally were regarded by others as propaganda for brazenfaced imperialism and its attendant racial attitudes; still others saw irony in the poems and warnings of the perils of empire.[16]
Take up the White Man’s burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
—The White Man’s Burden[32]
There was also foreboding in the poems, a sense that all could yet come to naught.[33]
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet.
Lest we forget – lest we forget!
—Recessional[34]
A prolific writer during his time in Torquay, he also wrote Stalky & Co., a collection of school stories (born of his experience at the United Services College in Westward Ho!) whose juvenile protagonists displayed a know-it-all, cynical outlook on patriotism and authority. According to his family, Kipling enjoyed reading aloud stories from Stalky & Co. to them, and often went into spasms of laughter over his own jokes.[16]

[edit] South Africa

Kipling in South Africa
In early 1898 the Kiplings travelled to South Africa for their winter holiday, thus beginning an annual tradition which (excepting the following year) was to last until 1908. They always stayed in “The Woolsack”, a house on Cecil Rhodes‘ estate at Groote Schuur; it was within walking distance of Rhodes’ mansion.[35] With his new reputation as Poet of the Empire, Kipling was warmly received by some of the most influential politicians of the Cape Colony, including Rhodes, Sir Alfred Milner, and Leander Starr Jameson. Kipling cultivated their friendship and came to admire the men and their politics. The period 1898–1910 was crucial in the history of South Africa and included the Second Boer War (1899–1902), the ensuing peace treaty, and the 1910 formation of the Union of South Africa. Back in England, Kipling wrote poetry in support of the British cause in the Boer War and on his next visit to South Africa in early 1900, he helped start a newspaper, The Friend, for Lord Roberts for the British troops in Bloemfontein, the newly captured capital of the Orange Free State. Although his journalistic stint was to last only two weeks, it was Kipling’s first work on a newspaper staff since he left The Pioneer in Allahabad more than ten years earlier.[16] At The Friend he made lifelong friendships with Perceval Landon, H. A. Gwynne and others.[36] He also wrote articles published more widely expressing his views on the conflict.[37] Kipling penned an inscription for the Honoured Dead Memorial (Siege memorial) in Kimberley.

[edit] Sussex

In 1897, Kipling moved from Torquay to Rottingdean, East Sussex; first to North End House and later to The Elms. [38] In 1902 Kipling bought Batemans, a house built in 1634 and located in rural Burwash, East Sussex, England. The house, along with the surrounding buildings, the mill and 33 acres (130,000 m2) was purchased for £9,300. It had no bathroom, no running water upstairs and no electricity, but Kipling loved it: “Behold us, lawful owners of a grey stone lichened house—A.D. 1634 over the door—beamed, panelled, with old oak staircase, and all untouched and unfaked. It is a good and peaceable place. We have loved it ever since our first sight of it.” (from a November 1902 letter).[39][40]

[edit] Other writing

“He sat in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammeh, on her old platform, opposite the old Ajaibgher, the Wonder House, as the natives called the Lahore Museum”.
—Kim
Kipling began collecting material for another of his children’s classics, Just So Stories for Little Children. That work was published in 1902, the year after Kim was first issued.
On a visit to the United States in 1899, Kipling and Josephine developed pneumonia, from which she eventually died. During the First World War, he wrote a booklet The Fringes of the Fleet[41] containing essays and poems on various nautical subjects of the war. Some of the poems were set to music by English composer Edward Elgar.
Kipling wrote two science fiction short stories, With the Night Mail (1905) and As Easy As A. B. C (1912), both set in the 21st century in Kipling’s Aerial Board of Control universe. These read like modern hard science fiction.[42]
In 1934 he published a short story in Strand Magazine, “Proofs of Holy Writ”, which postulated that William Shakespeare had helped to polish the prose of the King James Bible.[43] In the non-fiction realm he also became involved in the debate over the British response to the rise in German naval power, publishing a series of articles in 1898 which were collected as A Fleet in Being.

[edit] Peak of his career

The first decade of the 20th century saw Kipling at the height of his popularity. In 1906 he wrote the song “Land of our Birth, We Pledge to Thee”. In 1907 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The prize citation said: “In consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration which characterise the creations of this world-famous author.” Nobel prizes had been established in 1901 and Kipling was the first English-language recipient. At the award ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December 1907, the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, Carl David af Wirsén, praised both Kipling and three centuries of English literature:[44]
The Swedish Academy, in awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature this year to Rudyard Kipling, desires to pay a tribute of homage to the literature of England, so rich in manifold glories, and to the greatest genius in the realm of narrative that that country has produced in our times.
“Book-ending” this achievement was the publication of two connected poetry and story collections: Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), and Rewards and Fairies (1910). The latter contained the poem “If—“. In a 1995 BBC opinion poll, it was voted the UK’s favourite poem. This exhortation to self-control and stoicism is arguably Kipling’s most famous poem.
Kipling sympathised with the anti-Home Rule stance of Irish Unionists. He was friends with Edward Carson, the Dublin-born leader of Ulster Unionism, who raised the Ulster Volunteers to oppose “Home Rule” in Ireland. Kipling wrote the poem “Ulster” in 1912 reflecting this. Kipling was a staunch opponent of Bolshevism, a position which he shared with his friend Henry Rider Haggard. The two had bonded upon Kipling’s arrival in London in 1889 largely on the strength of their shared opinions, and they remained lifelong friends.
Many have wondered why he was never made Poet Laureate. Some claim that he was offered the post during the interregnum of 1892–96 and turned it down.
At the beginning of World War I, like many other writers, Kipling wrote pamphlets which enthusiastically supported the UK’s war aims.

[edit] Freemasonry

According to the English magazine Masonic Illustrated, Kipling became a Freemason in about 1885, prior to the usual minimum age of 21.[45] He was initiated into Hope and Perseverance Lodge No. 782 in Lahore. He later wrote to The Times, “I was Secretary for some years of the Lodge . . . , which included Brethren of at least four creeds. I was entered [as an Apprentice] by a member from Brahmo Somaj, a Hindu, passed [to the degree of Fellow Craft] by a Mohammedan, and raised [to the degree of Master Mason] by an Englishman. Our Tyler was an Indian Jew.” Kipling received not only the three degrees of Craft Masonry, but also the side degrees of Mark Master Mason and Royal Ark Mariner.[46]Kipling so loved his masonic experience that he memorialised its ideals in his famous poem, “The Mother Lodge”.[47]

[edit] Son’s death in First World War

Kipling’s son John died in World War I, at the Battle of Loos in September 1915, at age 18. John had wanted to join the military, but his eyesight was too poor. He tried twice to enlist, but was rejected. His father had been life-long friends with Lord Roberts, commander-in-chief of the British Army, and colonel of the Irish Guards, and at Rudyard’s request, John was accepted into the Irish Guards. He was sent to Loos two days into the battle in a reinforcement contingent. He was last seen stumbling through the mud blindly, screaming in agony after an exploding shell ripped his face apart. A body identified as his was not found until 1992, although that identification has been challenged.[48][49]
After his son’s death, Kipling wrote, “If any question why we died/ Tell them, because our fathers lied.” It is speculated that these words may reveal his feelings of guilt at his role in getting John a commission in the Irish Guards.[50] John’s death has been linked to Kipling’s 1916 poem “My Boy Jack“, notably in the play My Boy Jack and its subsequent television adaptation, along with the documentary Rudyard Kipling: A Remembrance Tale. However, the poem was originally published at the head of a story about the Battle of Jutland and appears to refer to a death at sea; the ‘Jack’ referred to is probably a generic ‘Jack Tar‘.[51] Kipling was said to help assuage his grief over the death of his son through reading the novels of Jane Austen aloud to his wife and daughter.[52]
Kipling, aged 60, on the cover of Time magazine, 27 September 1926
Partly in response to John’s death, Kipling joined Sir Fabian Ware‘s Imperial War Graves Commission (now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission), the group responsible for the garden-like British war graves that can be found to this day dotted along the former Western Front and all the other locations around the world where troops of the British Empire lie buried. His most significant contribution to the project was his selection of the biblical phrase “Their Name Liveth For Evermore” (Ecclesiasticus 44.14, KJV) found on the Stones of Remembrance in larger war graves and his suggestion of the phrase “Known unto God” for the gravestones of unidentified servicemen. He chose the inscription “The Glorious Dead” on the Cenotaph, Whitehall, London. He also wrote a two-volume history of the Irish Guards, his son’s regiment, that was published in 1923 and is considered to be one of the finest examples of regimental history.[53] Kipling’s moving short story, “The Gardener”, depicts visits to the war cemeteries, and the poem “The King’s Pilgrimage” (1922) depicts a journey which King George V made, touring the cemeteries and memorials under construction by the Imperial War Graves Commission. With the increasing popularity of the automobile, Kipling became a motoring correspondent for the British press, and wrote enthusiastically of his trips around England and abroad, even though he was usually driven by a chauffeur.
Kipling became friends with a French soldier whose life had been saved in the First World War when his copy of Kim, which he had in his left breast pocket, stopped a bullet. The soldier presented Kipling with the book (with bullet still embedded) and his Croix de Guerre as a token of gratitude. They continued to correspond, and when the soldier, Maurice Hammoneau, had a son, Kipling insisted on returning the book and medal.[54]
In 1922 Kipling, who had made reference to the work of engineers in some of his poems and writings, was asked by a University of Toronto civil engineering professor for his assistance in developing a dignified obligation and ceremony for graduating engineering students. Kipling was enthusiastic in his response and shortly produced both, formally entitled “The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer“. Today, engineering graduates all across Canada are presented with an iron ring at the ceremony as a reminder of their obligation to society.[55] In 1922 Kipling also became Lord Rector of St Andrews University in Scotland, a three-year position.

[edit] Death and legacy

Kipling kept writing until the early 1930s, but at a slower pace and with much less success than before. He died of a perforated duodenal ulcer on 18 January 1936 at the age of 70,[56] two days before the death of George V. (His death had in fact previously been incorrectly announced in a magazine, to which he wrote, “I’ve just read that I am dead. Don’t forget to delete me from your list of subscribers.”)
Rudyard Kipling was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium and his ashes were buried in Poets’ Corner, part of the South Transept of Westminster Abbey, where many distinguished literary people are buried or commemorated.
In 2010 the International Astronomical Union approved that a crater on the planet Mercury would be named after Kipling – one of ten newly discovered impact craters observed by the MESSENGER spacecraft in 2008-9.[57]

[edit] Posthumous reputation

Various writers, most notably Edmund Candler, were strongly influenced by Kipling’s writing. T. S. Eliot, a very different poet, edited A Choice of Kipling’s Verse (1943), although in doing so he commented that “[Kipling] could write great poetry on occasions—even if only by accident.” Kipling’s stories for adults also remain in print and have garnered high praise from writers as different as Poul Anderson, Jorge Luis Borges, George Orwell, and Randall Jarrell who wrote that, “After you have read Kipling’s fifty or seventy-five best stories you realize that few men have written this many stories of this much merit, and that very few have written more and better stories.”[58]
His children’s stories remain popular; and his Jungle Books have been made into several movies. The first was made by producer Alexander Korda, and other films have been produced by the Walt Disney Company. A number of his poems were set to music by Percy Grainger. A series of short films based on some of his stories was broadcast by the BBC in 1964.[59] Kipling’s work is still popular today.
Kipling is often quoted in discussions of contemporary political and social issues. Political singer-songwriter Billy Bragg, who attempts to reclaim English nationalism from the right-wing, has reclaimed Kipling for an inclusive sense of Englishness.[60] Kipling’s enduring relevance has been noted in the United States as it has become involved in Afghanistan and other areas about which he wrote.[61][62][63]

[edit] Links with Scouting

Photograph of General Sir Ian Hamilton, commander of the ill-fated Mediterranean Expeditionary Force in the Battle of Gallipoli in the First World War, at Rudyard Kipling’s funeral in 1936. Hamilton was Kipling’s close friend.
Kipling’s links with the Scouting movements were strong. Baden-Powell, the founder of Scouting, used many themes from The Jungle Book stories and Kim in setting up his junior movement, the Wolf Cubs. These connections still exist today. The movement is named after Mowgli‘s adopted wolf family, and the adult helpers of Wolf Cub Packs adopt names taken from The Jungle Book, especially the adult leader who is called Akela after the leader of the Seeonee wolf pack.[64]

[edit] Kipling’s home at Burwash

After the death of Kipling’s wife in 1939, his house, “Bateman’s” in Burwash, East Sussex was bequeathed to the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty and is now a public museum dedicated to the author. Elsie, his only child who lived to maturity, died childless in 1976, and bequeathed her copyrights to the National Trust. There is a thriving Kipling Society in the United Kingdom and also one in Australia.
Novelist and poet Sir Kingsley Amis wrote a poem, ‘Kipling at Bateman’s', after visiting Kipling’s Burwash home (Amis’ father had lived in Burwash briefly in the 1960s). Amis and a BBC television crew went to make a short film in a series of films about writers and their houses. According to Zachary Leader’s ‘The Life of Kingsley Amis’:
‘Bateman’s made a strong negative impression on the whole crew, and Amis decided that he would dislike spending even twenty-four hours there. The visit is recounted in Rudyard Kipling and his World (1975), a short study of Kipling’s Life and Writings. Amis’s view of Kipling’s career is like his view of Chesterton’s: the writing that mattered was early, in Kipling’s case from the period 1885–1902. After 1902, the year of the move to Bateman’s, not only did the work decline but Kipling found himself increasingly at odds with the world, changes Amis attributes in part to the depressing atmosphere of the house.[65]

[edit] Reputation in India

In modern-day India, whence he drew much of his material, Kipling’s reputation remains controversial, especially amongst modern nationalists and some post-colonial critics. Other contemporary Indian intellectuals such as Ashis Nandy have taken a more nuanced view of his work. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, first Prime Minister of India, always described Kipling’s novel Kim as his favourite book.[66][67]
G V Desani, a canonical Indian writer of fiction, had a condescending opinion of Kipling. He alluded to Kipling in his novel, All About H. Hatterr (1948), thus:
I happen to pick up R. Kipling’s autobiographical “Kim.” Therein, this self-appointed whiteman’s burden-bearing sherpa feller’s stated how, in the Orient, blokes hit the road and think nothing of walking a thousand miles in search of something.
Well-known Indian historian and writer Khushwant Singh wrote in 2001 that he considers Kipling’s If— “the essence of the message of The Gita in English”.[68] The text Singh refers to is the Bhagavad Gita, an ancient Indian scripture.
In November 2007 it was announced that Kipling’s birth home in the campus of the J J School of Art in Mumbai would be turned into a museum celebrating the author and his works.[69]

[edit] Swastika in old editions

A left-facing swastika
Covers of two of Kipling’s books from 1919 (l) and 1930 (r)
Many older editions of Rudyard Kipling’s books have a swastika printed on their covers associated with a picture of an elephant carrying a lotus flower. Since the 1930s this has raised the suspicion of Kipling being a Nazi-sympathiser, though the Nazi party did not adopt the swastika until 1920. Kipling used the swastika as it was an Indian sun symbol conferring good luck and well-being. He used the swastika symbol in both right- and left-facing orientations, and it was in general use at the time.[70][71] Even before the Nazis came to power, Kipling ordered the engraver to remove it from the printing block so that he should not be thought of as supporting them. As an indication of his views of the Nazis, less than one year before his death Kipling gave a speech (titled “An Undefended Island”) to The Royal Society of St George on 6 May 1935 warning of the danger which Nazi Germany posed to Britain.[72]

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Biography and criticism

  • Allen, Charles (2007) Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling, Abacus, 2007. ISBN 978-0-349-11685-3
  • David, C. (2007). Rudyard Kipling: a critical study, New Delhi, Anmol, 2007. ISBN 81-261-3101-2
  • Gilbert, Elliot L. ed., (1965) Kipling and the Critics (New York: New York University Press)
  • Gilmour, David. (2003) The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 0374528969
  • Green, Roger Lancelyn, ed., (1971) Kipling: the Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul).
  • Gross, John, ed. (1972) Rudyard Kipling: the Man, his Work and his World (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson)
  • Kemp, Sandra. (1988) Kipling’s Hidden Narratives Oxford: Blackwell* Lycett, Andrew (1999). Rudyard Kipling. London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0-297-81907-0
  • Lycett, Andrew (ed.) (2010). Kipling Abroad, I. B. Tauris. ISBN 978-1-84885-072-9
  • Ricketts, Harry. (2001) Rudyard Kipling: A Life New York: Da Capo Press ISBN 0786708301
  • Rooney, Caroline, and Kaori Nagai, eds. Kipling and Beyond: Patriotism, Globalisation, and Postcolonialism (Palgrave Macmillan; 2011) 214 pages; scholarly essays on Kipling’s “boy heroes of empire,” Kipling and C.L.R. James, and Kipling and the new American empire, etc.
  • Rutherford, Andrew, ed. (1964) Kipling’s Mind and Art (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd)
  • Shippey, Tom, “Rudyard Kipling,” in: Cahier Calin: Makers of the Middle Ages. Essays in Honor of William Calin, ed. Richard Utz and Elizabeth Emery (Kalamazoo, MI: Studies in Medievalism, 2011), pp. 21–23.
  • Tompkins, J. M. S. (1959) The Art of Rudyard Kipling (London : Methuen) online edition
  • Wilson, Angus The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Works New York: The Viking Press, 1978. ISBN 0-670-67701-9

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ The Times, (London) 18 January 1936, p. 12
  2. ^ Pinney, Thomas (September 2004). H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. ed. ‘Kipling, (Joseph) Rudyard (1865–1936)’ (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ed.). Oxford University Press.
  3. ^ a b c d e Rutherford, Andrew (1987). General Preface to the Editions of Rudyard Kipling, in “Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies”, by Rudyard Kipling. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-282575-5
  4. ^ a b c d e Rutherford, Andrew (1987). Introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of “Plain Tales from the Hills”, by Rudyard Kipling. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-281652-7
  5. ^ James Joyce considered Tolstoy, Kipling and D’Annunzio to be the “three writers of the nineteenth century who had the greatest natural talents”, but that “he did not fulfill that promise”. He also noted that the three writers all “had semi-fanatic ideas about religion, or about patriotism.” Diary of David Fleischman, 21 July 1938, quoted in James Joyce by Richard Ellmann, p. 661, Oxford University Press (1983) ISBN 0-19-281465-6
  6. ^ Alfred Nobel Foundation. “Who is the youngest ever to receive a Nobel Prize, and who is the oldest?”. Nobelprize.com. p. 409. Archived from the original on 25 September 2006. Retrieved 30 September 2006.
  7. ^ Birkenhead, Lord. 1978. Rudyard Kipling, Appendix B, “Honours and Awards”. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London; Random House Inc., New York
  8. ^ Lewis, Lisa. 1995. Introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of “Just So Stories”, by Rudyard Kipling. Oxford University Press. pp.xv-xlii. ISBN 0-19-282276-4
  9. ^ Quigley, Isabel. 1987. Introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of “The Complete Stalky & Co.”, by Rudyard Kipling. Oxford University Press. pp. xiii-xxviii. ISBN 0-19-281660-8
  10. ^ Said, Edward. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus. Page 196. ISBN 0-679-75054-1.
  11. ^ Sandison, Alan. 1987. Introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Kim, by Rudyard Kipling. Oxford University Press. pp. xiii–xxx. ISBN 0-19-281674-8
  12. ^ Orwell, George (30 September 2006). “Essay on Kipling”. Retrieved 30 September 2006.
  13. ^ Douglas Kerr, University of Hong Kong. “Rudyard Kipling.” The Literary Encyclopedia. 30 May 2002. The Literary Dictionary Company. 26 September 2006 [1]
  14. ^ a b c d e Carrington, C.E. (Charles Edmund). 1955. Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work. Macmillan & Co.
  15. ^ Flanders, Judith. 2005. A Circle of Sisters: Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter, and Louisa Baldwin. W.W. Norton and Company, New York. ISBN 0-393-05210-9
  16. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s Gilmour, David. 2002. The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, NY
  17. ^ thepotteries.org (13 January 2002). “did you know ….”. The potteries.org. Retrieved 2 October 2006.
  18. ^ Sir J.J. College of Architecture (30 September 2006). “Campus”. Sir J. J. College of Architecture, Mumbai. Retrieved 2 October 2006.
  19. ^ “To the City of Bombay”, dedication to Seven Seas, by Rudyard Kipling, Macmillan & Co., 1894
  20. ^ Murphy, Bernice M. (21 June 1999). “Rudyard Kipling – A Brief Biography”. School of English, The Queen’s University of Belfast. Retrieved 6 October 2006.
  21. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Kipling, Rudyard (1935). “Something of myself”. public domain. Retrieved 6 September 2008.also: 1935/1990. Something of myself and other autobiographical writings. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-40584-X
  22. ^ a b c d Carpenter, Humphrey and Mari Prichard. 1984. Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature. pp. 296–297
  23. ^ Pinney, Thomas (editor). Letters of Rudyard Kipling, volume 1. Macmillan & Co., London and NY
  24. ^ Kipling, Rudyard (1956) Kipling: a selection of his stories and poems, Volume 2 pp.349 Doubleday, 1956
  25. ^ Robert D. Kaplan (1989) Lahore as Kipling Knew It. The New York Times. Retrieved 9 March 2008
  26. ^ Kipling, Rudyard (1996) Writings on Writing. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-44527-2. see pp. 36, 173
  27. ^ Mallet, Phillip. 2003. Rudyard Kipling: A Literary Life. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. ISBN 0-333-55721-2
  28. ^ a b Ricketts, Harry. 1999. Rudyard Kipling: A life. Carroll and Graf Publishers Inc., New York. ISBN 0-7867-0711-9
  29. ^ Kipling, Rudyard. 1920. Letters of Travel (1892–1920). Macmillan & Co.
  30. ^ Nicholson, Adam. 2001. Carrie Kipling 1862–1939 : The Hated Wife. Faber & Faber, London. ISBN 0-571-20835-5
  31. ^ a b Pinney, Thomas (editor). Letters of Rudyard Kipling, volume 2. Macmillan & Co.
  32. ^ Kipling, Rudyard. 1899. The White Man’s Burden. Published simultaneously in The Times, London, and McClure’s Magazine (U.S.) 12 February 1899
  33. ^ Snodgrass, Chris. 2002. A Companion to Victorian Poetry. Blackwell, Oxford
  34. ^ Kipling, Rudyard. 1897. Recessional. Published in The Times, London, July 1897
  35. ^ “Something of Myself”,pub. 1935, South Africa Chapter
  36. ^ Carrington, C. E., (1955) The life of Rudyard Kipling, Doubleday & Co., Garden City, NY, p. 236
  37. ^ Kipling, Rudyard (18 March 1900). “Kipling at Cape Town: Severe Arraignment of Treacherous Afrikanders and Demand for Condign Punishment By and By” (PDF). The New York Times: p. 21.
  38. ^ http://www.kipling.org.uk/rg_sussex2.htm
  39. ^ Carrington, C. E., (1955) The life of Rudyard Kipling, p. 286
  40. ^ mt (17 November 2005). “Link to National Trust Site for Bateman House”. Nationaltrust.org.uk. Retrieved 23 June 2010.
  41. ^ The Fringes of the Fleet, Macmillan & Co., 1916
  42. ^ Bennett, Arnold (1917). Books and Persons Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908–1911. London: Chatto & Windus.
  43. ^ Short Stories from the Strand, The Folio Society, 1992
  44. ^ “Nobel Prize in Literature 1907 – presentation Speech”. Nobelprize.org.
  45. ^ Mackey, Albert G. (1946). Encyclopedia of Freemasonry, Vol. 1. Chicago: The Masonic History Co.
  46. ^ Our brother Rudyard Kipling. Masonic lecture [2]
  47. ^ Mackey, above.
  48. ^ The Great War and its aftermath: The son who haunted Kipling; It was only his father’s intervention that allowed John Kipling to serve on the Western Front – and the poet never got over his death. Now a TV drama is to retell the story. By Jonathan Brown, The Independent, 29 August 2006
  49. ^ By John Quinlan writing to National Inventory on War Memorials viewed at: [3]
  50. ^ Webb, George. Foreword to: Kipling, Rudyard. The Irish Guards in the Great War. 2 vols. (Spellmount, 1997), p. 9
  51. ^ Southam, Brian (6 March 2010). “Notes on “My Boy Jack”". Retrieved 23 July 2011.
  52. ^ ‘The Many Lovers of Miss Jane Austen’, broadcast BBC2 9pm 23rd December 2011
  53. ^ Kipling, Rudyard. The Irish Guards in the Great War. 2 vols. (London, 1923)
  54. ^ Original correspondence between Kipling and Maurice Hammoneau and his son Jean Hammoneau concerning the affair at the Library of Congress under the title: How “Kim” saved the life of a French soldier : a remarkable series of autograph letters of Rudyard Kipling, with the soldier’s Croix de Guerre, 1918–1933. (LOC Ref#2007566938) [4]. The library also possesses the actual French 389-page paperback edition of Kim that saved Hammoneau’s life, (LOC Ref 2007581430) [5]
  55. ^ “The Iron Ring”. Ironring.ca. Retrieved 10 September 2008.
  56. ^ Rudyard Kipling’s Waltzing Ghost: The Literary Heritage of Brown’s Hotel, paragraph 11, Sandra Jackson-Opoku, Literary Traveler
  57. ^ – Article from the Red Orbit News network 16 March 2010. Retrieved 18 March 2010
  58. ^ Jarrell, Randall. “On Preparing to Read Kipling.” No Other Book: Selected Essays. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.
  59. ^ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0298668/
  60. ^ Rhyme and Reason, BBC Radio 4, 25 January 2011
  61. ^ WORLD VIEW: Is Afghanistan turning into another Vietnam?, Johnathan Power, The Citizen, 31 December 2010
  62. ^ Is America waxing or waning?, Andrew Sullivan, The Atlantic, 12 December 2010
  63. ^ Rudyard Kipling, Official Poet of the 911 War
  64. ^ “ScoutBase UK: The Library – Scouting history – Me Too! – The history of Cubbing in the United Kingdom 1916–present”. Scoutbase.org.uk. Retrieved 10 September 2008.
  65. ^ ‘The Life of Kingsley Amis’, Zachary Leader, Vintage, 2007 pp.704–705
  66. ^ Globalization and educational rights: an intercivilizational analysis, Joel H. Spring, pg.137
  67. ^ Post independence voices in South Asian writings, Malashri Lal, Alamgīr Hashmī, Victor J. Ramraj, 2001. «Not surprisingly, a brief biographical aside practically identifies Nehru with Kim»
  68. ^ Khushwant Singh, Review of The Book of Prayer by Renuka Narayanan, 2001
  69. ^ “Kipling’s India home to become museum”. BBC News. 27 November 2007. Retrieved 9 August 2008.
  70. ^ Schliemann, H, Troy and its remains, London: Murray, 1875, pp. 102, 119–20
  71. ^ Sarah Boxer. “One of the world’s great symbols strives for a comeback“. The New York Times, 29 July 2000
  72. ^ Rudyard Kipling, War Stories and Poems (Oxford Paperbacks, 1999), pp. xxiv–xxv

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MACAULAY’S MINUTE ON INDIAN EDUCATION

This text is part of the History of English Studies Page (Rita Raley).
2ND OF FEBRUARY, 1835
As it seems to be the opinion of some of the gentlemen who compose the Committee of Public Instruction, that the course which they have hitherto pursued was strictly prescribed by the British Parliament in 1813, and as, if that opinion be correct, a legislative act will be necessary to warrant a change, I have thought it right to refrain from taking any part in the preparation of the adverse statements which are now before us, and to reserve what I had to say on the subject till it should come before me as a member of the Council of India.
It does not appear to me that the Act of Parliament can, by any art of construction, be made to bear the meaning which has been assigned to it. It contains nothing about the particular languages or sciences which are to be studied. A sum is set apart “for the revival and promotion of literature and the encouragement of the learned natives of India, and for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories.” It is argued, or rather taken for granted, that by literature, the Parliament can have meant only Arabic and Sanscrit literature, that they never would have given the honorable appellation of “a learned native” to a native who was familiar with the poetry of Milton, the Metaphysics of Locke, and the Physics of Newton; but that they meant to designate by that name only such persons as might have studied in the sacred books of the Hindoos all the uses of cusa-grass, and all the mysteries of absorption into the Deity. This does not appear to be a very satisfactory interpretation. To take a parallel case; suppose that the Pacha of Egypt, a country once superior in knowledge to the nations of Europe but now sunk far below them, were to appropriate a sum or the purpose of “reviving and promoting literature, and encouraging learned natives of Egypt,” would anybody infer that he meant the youth of his pachalic to give years to the study of hieroglyphics, to search into all the doctrines disguised under the fable of Osiris, and to ascertain with all possible accuracy the ritual with which cats and onions were anciently adored? Would he be justly charged with inconsistency, if, instead of employing his young subjects in deciphering obelisks, he were to order them to be instructed in the English and French languages, and in all the sciences to which those languages are the chief keys?
The words on which the supporters of the old system rely do not bear them out, and other words follow which seem to be quite decisive on the other side. This lac of rupees is set apart, not only for “reviving literature in India,” the phrase on which their whole interpretation is founded, but also for “the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories,”–words which are alone sufficient to authorise all the changes for which I contend.
If the Council agree in my construction, no legislative Act will be necessary. If they differ from me, I will prepare a short Act rescinding that clause of the Charter of 1813, from which the difficulty arises.
The argument which I have been considering, affects only the form of proceeding. But the admirers of the Oriental system of education have used another argument, which, if we admit it to be valid, is decisive against all change. They conceive that the public faith is pledged to the present system, and that to alter the appropriation of any of the funds which have hitherto been spent in encouragmg the study of Arabic and Sanscrit, would be down-right spoliation. It is not easy to understand by what process of reasoning they can have arrived at this conclusion. The grants which are made from the public purse for the encouragement of literature differed in no respect from the grants which are made from the same purse for other objects of real or supposed utility. We found a sanatarium on a spot which we suppose to be healthy. Do we thereby pledge ourselves to keep a sanatarium there, if the result should not answer our expectation? We commence the erection of a pier. Is it a violation of the public faith to stop the works, if we afterwards see reason to believe that the building will be useless? The rights of property are undoubtedly sacred. But nothing endangers those rights so much as the practice, now unhappily too common, of attributing them to things to which they do not belong. Those who would impart to abuses the sanctity of property are in truth imparting to the institution of property the unpopularity and the fragility of abuses. If the Government has given to any person a formal assurance; nay, if the Government has exdted in any person’s mind a reasonable expectation that he shall receive a certain income as a teacher or a learner of Sanscrit or Arabic, I would respect that person’s pecuniary interests–I would rather err on the side of liberality to individuals than suffer the public faith to be called in question. But to talk of a Government pledging itself to teach certain languages and certain sciences, though those languages may become useless, though those sciences may be exploded, seems to me quite unmeaning. There is not a single word in any public instructions, from which it can be inferred that the Indian Government ever intended to give any pledge on this subject, or ever considered the destination of these funds as unalterably fixed. But had it been otherwise, I should have denied the competence of our predecessors to bind us by any pledge on such a subject. Suppose that a Government had in the last century enacted in the most sole,nn manner that all its subjects should, to the end of time, be inoculated for the smallpox: would that Government be bound to persist in the practice after Jenner’s discovery? These promises, of which nobody claims the performance, and from which nobody can grant a release; these vested rights, which vest in nobody; this property without proprietors; this robbery, which makes nobody poorer, may be comprehended by persons of higher faculties than mine.— I consider this plea merely as a set form of words, regularly used both in England and in India, in defence of every abuse for which no other plea can be set up.
I hold this lac of rupees to be quite at the disposal of the Governor General in Council, for the purpose of promoting learning in India, in any way which may be thought most advisable. I hold his Lordship to be quite as free to direct that it shall no longer be employed in encouraging Arabic and Sanscrit, as he is to direct that the reward for killing tigers in Mysore shall be diminished, that no more public money shall be expended on the chanting at the cathedral.
We now come to the gist of the matter. We have a fund to be employed as Government shall direct for the intellectual improvement of the people of this country. The simple question is, what is the most useful way of employing it?
All parties seem to be agreed on one point, that the dialects commonly spoken among the natives of this part of India, contain neither literary nor scientific information, and are, moreover, so poor and rude that, until they are enriched from some other quarter, it will not be easy to translate any valuable work into them. It seems to be admitted on all sides, that the intellectual improvement of those classes of the people who have the means of pursuing higher studies can at present be effected only by means of some language not vernacular amongst them.
What then shall that language be? One-half of the Committee maintain that it should be the English. The other half strongly recommend the Arabic and Sanscrit. The whole question seems to me to be, which language is the best worth knowing?
I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic.–But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed both here and at home with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is, indeed, fully admitted by those members of the Committee who support the Oriental plan of education.
It will hardly be disputed, I suppose, that the department of literature in which the Eastern writers stand highest is poetry. And I certainly never met with any Orientalist who ventured to maintain that the Arabic and Sanscrit poetry could be compared to that of the great European nations. But when we pass from works of imagination to works in which facts are recorded, and general principles investigated, the superiority of the Europeans becomes absolutely immeasurable. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say, that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England. In every branch of physical or moral philosophy, the relative position of the two nations is nearly the same.
How, then, stands the case? We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother-tongue. We must teach them some foreign language. The claims of our own language it is hardly necessary to recapitulate. It stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the west. It abounds with works of imagination not inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to us; with models of every species of eloquence; with historical compositions, which, considered merely as nar- ratives, have seldom been surpassed, and which, considered as vehicles of ethical and political instruction, have never been equalled; with just and lively representations of human life and human nature; with the most profound speculations on metaphysics, morals, government, jurisprudence, and trade; with full and correct information respecting every experimental science which tends to preserve the health, to increase the comfort, or to expand the intellect of man. Whoever knows that language has ready access to all the vast intellectual wealth, which all the wisest nations of the earth have created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations. It may safely be said, that the literature now extant in that language is of far greater value than all the literature which three hundred years ago was extant in all the languages of the world together. Nor is this all. In India, English is the language spoken by the ruling class. It is spoken by the higher class of natives at the seats of Government. It is likely to become the language of commerce throughout the seas of the East. It is the language of two great European communities which are rising, the one in the south of Africa, the other in Australasia; communities which are every year becoming more important, and more closely connected with our Indian empire. Whether we look at the intrinsic value of our literature, or at the particular situation of this country, we shall see the strongest reason to think that, of all foreign tongues, the English tongue is that which would be the most useful to our native subjects.
The question now before us is simply whether, when it is in our power to teach this language, we shall teach languages in which, by universal confession, there are no books on any subject which deserve to be compared to our own; whether, when we can teach European science, we shall teach systems which, by universal confession, whenever they differ from those of Europe, differ for the worse; and whether, when we can patronise sound Philosophy and true History, we shall countenance, at the public expense, medi- cal doctrines, which would disgrace an English farrier,–Astronomy, which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school,–History, abounding with kings thirty feet high, and reigns thirty thousand years long,–and Geography, made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter.
We are not without experience to guide us. History furnishes several analogous cases, and they all teach the same lesson. There are in modern times, to go no further, two memorable instances of a great impulse given to the mind of a whole society,–of prejudices overthrown,–of knowledge diffused,–taste purified,–of arts and sciences planted in countries which had recently been ignorant and barbarous.
The first instance to which I refer, is the great revival of letters among the Western nations at the close of the fifteenth and the begi:ning of the sixteenth century. At that time almost every thing that was worth reading was contained in the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Had our ancestors acted as the Committee of Public Instruction has hitherto acted; had they neglected the language of Cicero and Tacitus; had they confined their attention to the old dialects of our own island; had they print- ed nothing and taught nothing at the universities but Chronicles in Anglo-Saxon, and Romances in Norman-French, would England have been what she now is? What the Greek and Latin were to the contemporaries of More and Ascham, our tongue is to the people of India. The literature of England is now more valuable than that of classical antiquity. I doubt whether the Sanscrit literature be as valuable as that of our Saxon and Norman progenitors. In some departments,–in History, for example, I am certain that it is much less so.
Another instance may be said to be still before our eyes. Within the last hundred and twenty years, a nation which has previously been in a state as barbarous as that in which our ancestors were before the crusades, has gradually emerged from the ignorance in which it was sunk, and has taken its place among civilized communities.–I speak of Russia. There is now in that country a large educated class, abounding with persons fit to serve the state in the highest ftmctions, and in no wise inferior to the most accomplished men who adorn the best circles of Paris and London. There is reason to hope that this vast empire, which in the time of our grandfathers was probably behind the Punjab, may, in the time of our grandchildren, be pressing close on France and Britain in the career of improvement. And how was this change effected? Not by flattering national prejudices: not by feeding the mind of the young Muscovite with the old women’s stories which his rude fathers had believed: not by filling his head with lying legends about St. Nicholas: not by encouraging him to study the great question, whether the world was or was not created on the 13th of September: not by calling him “a learned native,” when he has mastered all these points of knowledge: but by teaching him those foreign languages in which the greatest mass of information had been laid up, and thus putting all that information within his reach. The languages of Western Europe civilized Russia. I cannot doubt that they will do for the Hindoo what they have done for the Tartar.
And what are the arguments against that course which seems to be alike recommended by theory and by experience? It is said that we ought to secure the cooperation of the native public, and that we can do this only by teaching Sanscrit and Arabic.
I can by no means admit that when a nation of high intellectual attainments undertakes to Superintend the education of a nation comparatively ignorant, the learners are absolutely to prescribe the course which is to be taken by the teachers. It is not necessary, however, to say any thing on this subject. For it is proved by unanswerable evidence that we are not at present securing the Cooperation of the natives. It would be bad enough to consult their intellectual taste at the expense of their intellectual health. But we are consulting neither,–we are withholding from them the learning for which they are craving, we are forcing on them the mock-learning which they nauseate.
This is proved by the fact that we are forced to pay our Arabic and Sanscrit students, while those who learn Engiish are wiling to pay us. All the declamations in the worid about the love and reverence of the natives for their sacred dialects will never, in the mind of any impartial person, outweigh the undisputed fact, that we cannot find, in all our vast empire, a single student who will let us teach him those dialects unless we will pay him.
I have now before me the accounts of the Madrassa for one month,-in the month of December, 1833. The Arabic students appear to have been seventy-seven in number. All receive stipends from the public. The whole amount paid to them is above 500 rupees a month. On the other side of the account stands the following item: Deduct amount realized from the out-students of English for the months of May, June and July last, 103 rupees.
I have been told that it is merely from want of local experience that I am surprised at these phenomena, and that it is not the fashion for students in India to study at their own charges. This only confirms me in my opinion. Nothing is more certain than that it never can in any part of the world be necessary to pay men for doing what they think pleasant and profitable. India is no exception to this rule. The people of India do not require to be paid for eating rice when they are hungry, or for wearing woollen cloth in the cold season. To come nearer to the case before us, the children who learn their letters and a little elementary Arithmetic from the village school-master are not paid by him. He is paid for teaching them. Why then is it necessary to pay people to learn Sanscrit and Arabic? Evidently because it is universally felt that the Sanscrit and Arabic are languages, the knowledge of which does not compensate for the trouble of acquiring them. On all such subjects the state of the market is the decisive test.
Other evidence is not wanting, if other evidence were required. A petition was presented last year to the Committee by several ex-students of the Sanscrit College. The petitioners stated that they had studied in the college ten or twelve years; that they had made themselves acquainted with Hindoo literature and science; that they had received certificates of proficiency: and what is the fruit of all this! “Notwithstanding such testimonials,” they say, “we have but little prospect of bettering our condition without the kind assistance of your Honorable Committee, the indifference with which we are generally looked upon by our countrymen leaving no hope of encouragement and assistance from them.” They therefore beg that they may be recommended to the Governor General for places under the Government, not places of high dignity or emolument, but such as may just enable them to exist. “We want means,” they say, “for a decent living, and for our progressive improvement, which, however, we cannot obtain without the assistance of Government, by whom we have been educated and maintained from childhood.” They conclude by representing, very pathetically, that they are sure that it was never the intention of Government, after behaving so liberally to them during their education, to abandon them to destitution and neglect.
I have been used to see petitions to Government for compensation. All these petitions, even the most unreasonable of them, proceeded on the supposition that some loss had been sustained- that some wrong had been inflicted. These are surely the first petitioners who ever demanded compensation for having been educated gratis, for having been supported by the public during twelve years, and then sent forth into the world well furnished with literature and science. They represent their education as an injury which gives them a claim on the Government for redress, as an injury for which the stipends paid to them during the infliction were a very inadequate compensation. And I doubt not that they are in the right. They have wasted the best years of life in learning what procures for them neither bread nor respect. Surely we might, with advantage, have saved the cost of making these persons useless and miserable; surely, men may be brought up to be burdens to the public and objects of contempt to their neighbours at a somewhat smaller charge to the state. But such is our policy. We do not even stand neuter in the contest between truth and falsehood. We are not content to leave the natives to the influence of their own hereditary prejudices. To the natural difficulties which obstruct the progress of sound science in the East, we add fresh difficulties of our own making. Bounties and premiums, such as ought not to be given even for the propagation of truth, we lavish on false taste and false philosophy.
By acting thus we create the very evil which we fear. We are making that opposition which we do not find. What we spend on the Arabic and Sanscrit colleges is not merely a dead loss to the cause of truth; it is bounty-money paid to raise up champions of error. It goes to form a nest, not merely of helpless place-hunters, but of bigots prompted alike by passion and by interest to raise a cry against every usetul scheme of education. If there should be any opposition among the natives to the change which I recommend, that opposition will be the effect of our own system. It will be headed by persons supported by our stipends and trained in our colleges. The longer we persevere in our present course, the more formidable will that opposition be. It will be every year reinforced by recruits whom we are paying. From the native society left to itself, we have no difficulties to apprehend; all the murmuring will come from that oriental interest which we have, by artificial means, called into being, and nursed into strength.
There is yet another fact, which is alone sufficient to prove that the feeling of the native public, when left to itself, is not such as the supporters of the old system represent it to be. The Committee have thought fit to lay out above a lac of rupees in printing Arabic and Sanscrit books. Those books find no purchasers. It is very rarely that a single copy is disposed of. Twenty-three thousand volumes, most of them folios and quartos, fill the libraries, or rather the lumber-rooms, of this body. The Committee contrive to get rid of some portion of their vast stock of oriental literature by giving books away. But they cannot give so fast as they print. About twenty thousand rupees a year are spent in adding fresh masses of waste paper to a hoard which, I should think, is already sufficiently ample. During the last three years, about sixty thousand rupees have been expended in this manner. The sale of Arabic and Sanscrit books, during those three years, has not yielded quite one thousand rupees. In the mean time the School- book Society is selling seven or eight thousand English volumes every year, and not only pays the expenses of printing, but realises a profit of 20 per cent. on its outlay.
The fact that the Hindoo law is to be learned chiefly from Sans- crit books, and the Mahomedan law from Arabic books, has been much insisted on, but seems not to bear at all on the question. We are commanded by Parliament to ascertam and digest the laws of India. The assistance of a law Commission has been given to us for that purpose. As soon as the code is promulgated, the Shasster and the Hedaya will be useless to a Moonsiff or Sudder Ameen. I hope and trust that before the boys who are now entering at the Madrassa and the Sanscrit college have completed their studies, this great work will be finished. It would be manifestly absurd to educate the rising generation with a view to a state of things which we mean to alter before they reach manhood.
But there is yet another argument which seems even more untenable. It is said that the Sanscrit and Arabic are the languages in which the sacred books of a hundred millions of people are written, and that they are, on that account, entitled to peculiar encouragement. Assuredly it is the duty of the British Government in India to be not only tolerant, but neutral on all religious questions. But to encourage the study of a literature admitted to be of small intrinsic value, only because that literature incuIcates the most serious errors on the most important subjects, is a course hardly reconcileable with reason, with morality, or even with that very neutrality which ought, as we all agree, to be sacredly pre- served. It is confessed that a language is barren of useful know- ledge. We are to teach it because it is fruittul of monstrous superstitions. We are to teach false History, false Astronomy, false Medicine, because we find them in company with a false religion. We abstain, and I trust shall always abstain, from giving any public encouragement to those who are engaged in the work of converting natives to Christianity. And while we act thus, can we reasonably and decently bribe men out of the revenues of the state to waste their youth in learning how they are to purify themselves after touching an ass, or what text of the Vedas they are to repeat to expiate the crime of killing a goat?
It is taken for granted by the advocates of Oriental learning, that no native of this country can possibly attain more than a mere smattering of English. They do not attempt to prove this; but they perpetually insinuate it. They designate the education which their opponents recommend as a mere spelling book education. They assume it as undenlable, that the question is between a profound knowledge of Hindoo and Arabian literature and science on the one side, and a superficial knowledge of the rudiments of English on the other. This is not merely an assumption, but an assumption contrary to all reason and experience. We know that foreigners of all nations do learn our language sufficiently to have access to all the most abstruse knowledge which it contains, sufficiently to relish even the more delicate graces of our most idiomatic writers. There are in this very town natives who are quite competent to discuss political or scientific questions with fluency and precision in the English language. I have heard the gentlemen with a liberality and an intelligence which would do credit to any member of the Committee of Public Instruction. Indeed it is unusual to find, even in the literary circles of the continent, any foreigner who can express himself in English with so much facility and correctness as we find in many Hindoos. Nobody, I suppose, will contend that English is so difficult to a Hindoo as Greek to an Englishman. Yet an intelligent English youth, in a much smaller number of years than our unfortunate pupils pass at the Sanscrit college, becomes able to read, to enjoy, and even to imitate, not unhappily, the compositions of the best Greek Authors. Less than half the time which enables an English youth to read Herodotus and Sophocles, ought to enable a Hindoo to read Hume and Milton.
To sum up what I have said, I think it clear that we are not fettered by the Act of Parliament of 1813; that we are not fettered by any pledge expressed or implied; that we are free to employ our fiinds as we choose; that we ought to employ them in teaching what is best worth knowing; that English is better worth knowing than Sanscrit or Arabic; that the natives are desirous to be taught English, and are not desirous to be taught Sanscrit or Arabic; that neither as the languages of law, nor as the languages of religion, have the Sanscrit and Arabic any peculiar claim to our engagement; that it is possible to make natives of this country thoroughly good English scholars, and that to this end our efforts ought to be directed.
In one point I fully agree with the gentlemen to whose general views I am opposed. I feel with them, that it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.
I would strictly respect all existing interests. I would deal even generously with all individuals who have had fair reason to expect a pecuniary provision. But I would strike at the root of the bad system which has hitherto been fostered by us. I would at once stop the printing of Arabic and Sanscrit books, I would abolish the Madrassa and the Sanscrit college at Calcutta. Benares is the great seat of Brahmanical learning; Delhi, of Arabic learning. If we retain the Sanscrit college at Benares and the Mahometan college at Delhi, we do enough, and much more than enough in my opinion, for the Eastern languages. If the Benares and Delhi colleges should be retained, I would at least recommend that no stipends shall be given to any students who may hereafter repair thither, but that the people shall be left to make their own choice between the rival systems of education without being bribed by us to learn what they have no desire to know. The funds which would thus be placed at our disposal would enable us to give larger encouragement to the Hindoo college at Calcutta, and to establish in the principal cities throughout the Presidencies of Fort William and Agra schools in which the English language might be well and thoroughly taught.
If the decision of his Lordship in Council should be such as I anticipate, I shall enter on the performance of my duties with the greatest zeal and alacrity. If, on the other hand, it be the opinion of the Government that the present system ought to remain unchanged, I beg that I may be permitted to retire from the chair of the Committee. I feel that I could not be of the smallest use there–I feel, also, that I should be lending my countenance to what I firmly believe to be a mere delusion. I believe that the present system tends, not to accelerate the progress of truth, but to delay the natural death of expiring errors. I conceive that we have at present no right to the respectable name of a Board of Public Instruction. We are a Board for wasting public money, for printing books which are of less value than the paper on which they are printed was while it was blank; for giving artificial encouragement to absurd history, absurd metaphysics, absurd physics, absurd theology; for raising up a breed of scholars who find their scholarship an encumbrance and a blemish, who live on the public while they are receiving their education, and whose education is so utterly useless to them that when they have received it they must either starve or live on the public all the rest of their lives. Entertaining these opinions, I am naturally desirous to decline all share in the responsibility of a body, which unless it alters its whole mode of proceeding, I must consider not merely as useless, but as positively noxious.
Return to the History of English Studies page.
Rita Raley / Dept of English / University of California, Santa Barbara
Major (recognized) writers.

Indian literature

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Indian literature
Assamese
Bengali
Bhojpuri
Gujarati
Hindi
Kannada
Kashmiri
Malayalam
Manipuri
Marathi
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Oriya
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Indian literature refers to the literature produced on the Indian subcontinent until 1947 and in the Republic of India thereafter. The Republic of India has 22 officially recognized languages.
The earliest works of Indian literature were oraly transmitted. Sanskrit literature begins with the Rig Veda a collection of sacred hymns dating to the period 1500–1200 BCE. The Sanskrit epics Ramayana and Mahabharata appeared towards the end of the first millennium BCE. Classical Sanskrit literature flourished in the first few centuries of the first millennium CE[citation needed], as did the Tamil[citation needed] Sangam literature[citation needed], and the Pāli Canon[citation needed].
In the medieval period, literature in Kannada and Telugu appeared in the 5th and 11th centuries respectively.[1] Later, literature in Marathi, Bengali, various dialects of Hindi, Persian and Urdu began to appear as well. Early in the 20th century, Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore became India’s first Nobel laureate. In contemporary Indian literature, there are two major literary awards; these are the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship and the Jnanpith Award. Eight Jnanpith awards each have been awarded in Hindi and Kannada, followed by five in Bengali, four in Malayalam, and three in Gujarati, Marathi and Urdu.[2][3]

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[edit] Indian literature in archaic Indian languages

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[edit] Vedic literature

Main article: Vedas
Examples of early works written in Vedic Sanskrit include the holy Hindu texts, such as the core Vedas. Other examples include the Sulba Sutras, which are some of the earliest texts on geometry..

[edit] Epic Sanskrit literature

Main article: Indian epic poetry
Ved Vyasa‘s Mahabharata and Valmiki‘s Ramayana, written in Epic Sanskrit, are regarded as the greatest Sanskrit epics.

[edit] Classical Sanskrit literature

Main article: Sanskrit literature
The famous poet and playwright Kālidāsa wrote two epics: Raghuvamsha (Dynasty of Raghu) and Kumarasambhava (Birth of Kumar Kartikeya); they were written in Classical Sanskrit rather than Epic Sanskrit. Other examples of works written in Classical Sanskrit include the Pāṇini‘s Ashtadhyayi which standardized the grammar and phonetics of Classical Sanskrit. The Laws of Manu is an important text in Hinduism. Kālidāsa is often considered to be the greatest playwright in Sanskrit literature, and one of the greatest poets in Sanskrit literature, whose Recognition of Shakuntala and Meghaduuta are the most famous Sanskrit plays. He occupies the same position in Sanskrit literature that Shakespeare occupies in English literature. Some other famous plays were Mricchakatika by Shudraka, Svapna Vasavadattam by Bhasa, and Ratnavali by Sri Harsha. Later poetic works include Geeta Govinda by Jayadeva. Some other famous works are Chanakya‘s Arthashastra and Vatsyayana‘s Kamasutra.

[edit] Prakrit literature

The most notable Prakrit languages were the Jain Prakrit (Ardhamagadhi), Pali, Maharashtri and Shauraseni.
One of the earliest extant Prakrit works is Hāla‘s anthology of poems in Maharashtri, the Gāhā Sattasaī, dating to the 3rd to 5th century CE. Kālidāsa and Harsha also used Maharashtri in some of their plays and poetry. In Jainism, many Svetambara works were written in Maharashtri.
Many of Aśvaghoṣa‘s plays were written in Shauraseni as were a sizable number of Jain works and Rajasekhara‘s Karpuramanjari. Canto 13 of the Bhaṭṭikāvya[4] is written in what is called “like the vernacular” (bhāṣāsama), that is, it can be read in two languages simultaneously: Prakrit and Sanskrit.[5]

[edit] Pali literature

Main article: Pali Canon
The Pali Canon is mostly of Indian origin. Later Pali literature however was mostly produced outside of the mainland Indian subcontinent, particularly in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia.
Pali literature includes Buddhist philosophical works, poetry and some grammatical works. Major works in Pali are Jataka tales, Dhammapada, Atthakatha, and Mahavamsa. Some of the major Pali grammarians were Kaccayana, Moggallana and Vararuci (who wrote Prakrit Prakash).

[edit] Indian literature in common Indian languages

[edit] Assamese literature

Main article: Assamese literature
The Charyapadas are often cited as the earliest example of Assamese literature. The Charyapadas are Buddhist songs composed in 8th-12th century. These writings bear similarities to Oriya and Bengali languages as well. The phonological and morphological traits of these songs bear very strong resemblance to Assamese some of which are extant.
After the Charyapadas, the period may again be split into (a) Pre-Vaishnavite and (b) Vaishnative sub-periods. The earliest known Assamese writer is Hema Saraswati, who wrote a small poem “Prahlada Charita”. In the time of the King Indranarayana (1350–1365) of Kamatapur the two poets Harihara Vipra and Kaviratna Saraswati composed Asvamedha Parva and Jayadratha Vadha respectively. Another poet named Rudra Kandali translated Drona Parva into Assamese. But the most well-known poet of the Pre-Vaishnavite sub period is Madhav Kandali, who rendered Valmiki’s Ramayana into Assamese verse (Kotha Ramayana, 11th century) under the patronage of Mahamanikya, a Kachari king of Jayantapura.
The most famous modern Assamese writers are Indira Goswami, Nirupama Bargohain, Birendra Kumar Bhattacharya, Homen Borgohain, Bhabendra Nath Saikia, Amulya Barua, Nabakanta Barua, Atul Chandra Hazarika, Nalini Bala Devi, Nirmal Prabha Bordoloi, Mahim Bora, Arupa Kalita Patangia, Bhabananda Deka, Purobi Bormudoi, Mamoni Raisom Goswami, Arun Sharma, Anuradha Sharma Pujari, Atulananda Deva Goswami, Hiren Bhattachaya, Roindra Bora etc.

[edit] Bengali literature

Main article: Bengali literature
The first evidence of Bengali literature is known as Charyapada or Charyageeti, which were Buddhist hymns from the 8th century. Charyapada is in the oldest known written form of Bengali. The famous Bengali linguist Harprashad Shastri discovered the palm leaf Charyapada manuscript in the Nepal Royal Court Library in 1907. The most internationally famous Bengali writer is Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 for his work “Gitanjali”. He wrote the national anthem of India and Bangladesh namely, “Jana Gana Mana” and “Amar Sonar Bangla”, respectively. He was the first Asian who won the Nobel Prize. Rabindranath has written enormous amount of Poems, Songs, Essays, Novels, Plays and Short-stories. His songs remain popular and are still widely sung in Bengal.
Kazi Nazrul Islam, who is one generation younger than Tagore, is also equally popular, valuable, and influential in socio-cultural context of the Bengal, though virtually unknown in foreign countries. And among later generation poets, Jibanananda Das is considered the most important figure.[6] Other famous Indian Bengali writers were Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyay, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Sunil Gangopadhyay and etc. Bengali is the second most commonly spoken language in India (after Hindi). As a result of the Bengal Renaissance in the 19th and 20th centuries, many of India’s most famous, and relatively recent, literature, poetry, and songs are in Bengali.
In the history of Bengali literature there has been only one path-breaking literary movement by a group of poets and artists who called themselves Hungryalists

[edit] Bhojpuri literature

[edit] Hindi literature

Main article: Hindi literature
Hindi literature started as religious and philosophical poetry in medieval periods in dialects like Avadhi and Brij. The most famous figures from this period are Kabir and Tulsidas. In modern times, the Khadi dialect became more prominent and Sanskrit.
Chandrakanta, written by Devaki Nandan Khatri, is considered to be the first work of prose in Hindi. Munshi Premchand was the most famous Hindi novelist. The chhayavadi poets include Suryakant Tripathi ‘Nirala’, Prem Bajpai, Jaishankar Prasad, Sumitranandan Pant, and Mahadevi Varma. Other renowned poets include Ramdhari Singh ‘Dinkar’, Maithili Sharan Gupt, Agyeya, Harivansh Rai Bachchan, and Dharmveer Bharti.

[edit] Gujarati literature

Main article: Gujarati literature
Gandhiji extensively wrote in Gujarati
Gujarati literature’s history may be traced to the 1000 AD.Since then literature has flourished till date. Well known laureates of Gujarati literature are Hemchandracharya, Narsinh Mehta, Mirabai, Akho, Premanand Bhatt, Shamal Bhatt, Dayaram, Dalpatram, Narmad, Govardhanram Tripathi, Gandhiji, K. M. Munshi, Umashankar Joshi, Suresh Joshi, Pannalal Patel and Rajendra Keshavlal Shah .
Gujarat Vidhya Sabha, Gujarat Sahitya Sabha, and Gujarati Sahitya Parishad are Ahmedabad based literary institutions promoting the spread of Gujarati literature. Umashankar Joshi, Pannalal Patel and Rajendra Keshavlal Shah have won the Jnanpith Award, the highest literary award in India.

[edit] Kannada literature

Kannada writer and Jnanpith Award winner for the year 1994, U. R. Ananthamurthy
Main article: Kannada literature
The oldest existing record of Kannada poetry in tripadi metre is the Kappe Arabhatta record of 700 CE. The folk form of literature began earlier than any other literature in Kannada. “Gajashtaka” of Shivamara, “Chudamani” of Thumbalacharya are examples of early literature. Kavirajamarga by King Nripatunga Amoghavarsha I (850 CE) is the earliest existing literary work in Kannada. It is a writing on literary criticism and poetics meant to standardize various written Kannada dialects used in literature in previous centuries. The book makes reference to Kannada works by early writers such as King Durvinita of the 6th century and Ravikirti, the author of the Aihole record of 636 CE. An early extant prose work, the Vaddaradhane by Shivakotiacharya of 900 CE provides an elaborate description of the life of Bhadrabahu of Shravanabelagola. Since the earliest available Kannada work is one on grammar and a guide of sorts to unify existing variants of Kannada grammar and literary styles, it can be safely assumed that literature in Kannada must have started several centuries earlier.[7] Pampa who popularised Champu style which is unique to Kannada wrote the epic “Vikramarjuna Vijaya“. He also wrote “Adipurana“. Other famous poets like Ponna and Ranna wrote “Shantipurana” and “Ghadayudha” respectively. The jain poet Nagavarma_2 wrote “Kavyavalokana”, “Karnatabhashabhushana” and “Vardhamanapurana” . Janna was the author of “Yashodhara Charitha”. Rudhrabhatta and Durgashima wrote “Jagannatha Vijaya” and “Panchatantra” respectively. The works of the medieval period are based on Jain and Hindu principles. The Vachana Sahitya tradition of the 12th century is purely native and unique in world literature.[8] It is the sum of contributions by all sections of society. Vachanas were pithy comments on that period’s social, religious and economic conditions. More importantly, they held a mirror to the seed of social revolution, which caused a radical re-examination of the ideas of caste, creed and religion. Some of the important writers of Vachana literature include Basavanna, Allama Prabhu and Akka Mahadevi. Kumara Vyasa, who wrote the Karnata Bharata Katamanjari, has arguably been the most famous and most influential Kannada writer of the 15th century. The Bhakti movement gave rise to Dasa Sahitya around the 15th century which significantly contributed to the evolution of Carnatic music in its present form. This period witnessed great Haridasas like Purandara Dasa who has been aptly called the Pioneer of Carnatic music, Kanaka Dasa, Vyasathirtha and Vijaya Dasa. Modern Kannada in the 20th century has been influenced by many movements, notably Navodaya, Navya, Navyottara, Dalita and Bandaya. Contemporary Kannada literature has been highly successful in reaching people of all classes in society. Works of Kannada literature have received Eight Jnanpith awards, which is the highest number awarded for the literature in any Indian language. It has also received forty-seven Sahitya Academy awards.

[edit] Kashmiri literature

Main article: Kashmiri literature

[edit] Malayalam literature

Main article: Malayalam literature
Even up to 500 years since the start of the Malayalam calendar which commenced in 825 AD, Malayalam literature remained in preliminary stage. During this time, Malayalam literature consisted mainly of various genres of songs. Ramacharitham written by Cheeramakavi is a collection of poems written at the end of preliminary stage in Malayalam literaure’s evolution, and is the oldest Malayalam book available. Thunchaththu Ramanujan Ezhuthachan (17th century) is considered as the Father of the Malayalam language, because of his influence on the acceptance of the Malayalam alphabet and his extremely popular poetic works like Adhyathmaramayanam. Several noted works were written during the 19th century, but it was in the 20th century the Malayalam literary movement came to prominence. Malayalam literature flourished under various genres and today it is a fully developed part of Indian literature. Main poets in Malayalam literature are Vishnu Raj,Santha Kumari,and Sandhya.S,Sreedharan nambiar.

[edit] Manipuri literature

Main article: Manipuri literature
Manipuri literature is the literature written in the Manipuri Language (Meiteilon), including literature composed in Manipuri Language by writers from Manipur, Assam, Tripura, Myanmar and Bangladesh .The history of Manipuri literature trace back to thousands of years with flourish of its civilization. The survival of Manipuri literature after passing through the massive devastation, the terror event of history, by burning of Meetei Scriptures, which is known as Puya Meithaba, was a miracle. The resilience that Meeteis could acquire in the event of devastation proved her ability to survive in history. Most of the early literary works found in Manipuri Literature were in Poetry and Prose . Some of the books were written with combination of both the Prose and Poetry.

[edit] Marathi literature

Main article: Marathi literature
Marathi literature began with saint-poets like Dnyaneshwar, Tukaram, Ramdas, and Eknath. Modern Marathi literature was marked by a theme of social reform. Well-known figures from this phase include Mahatma Jyotiba Phule, Lokhitwadi, and others. Prominent modern literary figures include Jnanpith Award winners Vishnu Sakharam Khandekar, Vishnu Vaman Shirvadakar (Kavi Kusumagraj) and Govind Vinayak Karandikar . Though the earliest known Marathi inscription found at the foot of the statue at Shravanabelgola in Karnataka is dated c. 983 CE, the Marathi literature actually started with the religious writings by the saint-poets belonging to Mahanubhava and Warkari sects. Mahanubhava saints used prose as their main medium, while Warkari saints preferred poetry as the medium. The early saint-poets were Mukundaraj who wrote Vivekasindhu, Dnyaneshwar (1275–1296) (who wrote Amrutanubhav and Bhawarthadeepika, which is popularly known as Dnyaneshwari, a 9000-couplets long commentary on the Bhagavad Gita) and Namdev. They were followed by the Warkari saint-poet Eknath (1528–1599). Mukteswar translated the great epic Mahabharata into Marathi. Social reformers like saint-poet Tukaram transformed Marathi into an enriched literary language. Ramdas’s (1608–1681) Dasbodh and Manache Shlok are well-known products of this tradition.
In the 18th century, some well-known works like Yatharthadeepika (by Vaman Pandit), Naladamayanti Swayamvara (by Raghunath Pandit), Pandava Pratap, Harivijay, Ramvijay (by Shridhar Pandit) and Mahabharata (by Moropant) were produced. However, the most versatile and voluminous writer among the poets was Moropanta (1729–1794) whose Mahabharata was the first epic poem in Marathi. The historical section of the old Marathi literature was unique as it contained both prose and poetry. The prose section contained the Bakhars that were written after the foundation of the Maratha kingdom by Shivaji. The poetry section contained the Povadas and the Katavas composed by the Shahirs. The period from 1794 to 1818 is regarded as the closing period of the Old Marathi literature and the beginning of the Modern Marathi literature.
[edit] Modern Period (after 1800) The period of the late 19th century in Maharashtra is the period of colonial modernity. Like the corresponding periods in the other Indian languages, this was the period dominated by the English educated intellectuals. It was the age of prose and reason. It was the period of reformist diadicticism and a great intellectual ferment.
The first English Book was translated in Marathi in 1817. The first Marathi newspaper started in 1835. Many books on social reforms were written by Baba Padamji (Yamuna Paryatana, 1857), Mahatma Jyotiba Phule, Lokhitwadi, Justice Mahadev Govind Ranade, Hari Narayan Apte (1864–1919) etc. Lokmanya Tilak’s newspaper Kesari, set up in 1880, provided a platform for sharing literary views. Marathi at this time was efficiently aided by Marathi Drama. Here, there also was a different genre called ‘Sangit Natya’ or Musicals. The first play was V.A. Bhave’s Sita Swayamvar in 1843 Later Kirioskar (1843–85) and G.B. Deval (1854-19l6) brought a romantic aroma and social content. But Krishnaji Prabhakar Khadilkar (1872~1948) with his banned play Kichaka-Vadh (1910) set the trend of political playwriting. Later on this “stage” was ably served by stalwarts like Ram Ganesh Gadkari and Prahlad Keshav Atre.The Drama Flourished in 60s and 70s with few of the best Indian actors available to take on a variety of protagonists. Mohan Agashe, Sriram Lagoo, Kashinath Ghanekar, Prabhakar Panshikar playing many immortal characters penned by greats like Vasant Kanetkar, Kusumagraj, vijay Tendulkar to name a few. This Drama movement was ably supported by Marathi films which did not enjoy a continuous success. Starting with V.Shantaram and before him the pioneer DadaSaheb Phalke, Marathi cinema went on to influence contemporary Hindi cinema. Director Raja Paranjape, Music director Sudhir Phadke, lyricist G.Madgulkar and actor Raja Gosavi came together to give quite a few hits in later period. Marathi Language as spoken by people here was throughout influenced by drama and cinema along with contemporary literature. Modern Marathi poetry began with Mahatma Jyotiba Phule’s compositions. The later poets like Keshavsuta, Balakavi, Govindagraj, and the poets of Ravi Kiran Mandal like Madhav Julian wrote poetry which was influenced by the Romantic and Victorian English poetry. It was largely sentimental and lyrical.Prahlad Keshav Atre, the renowned satirist and a politician wrote a parody of this sort of poetry in his collection Jhenduchi Phule. Sane Guruji (1899–1950) contributed to the children’s literature in Marathi. His major works are Shyamchi Aai (Shyam’s Mother), Astik (Believer), Gode Shevat (The Sweet Ending) etc. He translated and simplified many Western Classics and published them in a book of stories titled Gode Goshti (Sweet Stories). Vishnu Sakharam Khandekar (1889–1976)’s Yayati won him the Jnanpith Award for 1975. He also wrote many other novels, short stories, essays etc. His major works are Don Dhruv (Two Poles), Ulka (Meteorite), Krounchavadh, Jalalela Mohar, Amrutvel.
The major paradigm shift in sensibility began in the forties with the avant-garde modernist poetry of B.S. Mardhekar. In the mid fifties, the ‘little magazine movement’ gained momentum. It published writings which were non-conformist, radical and experimental. Dalit literary movement also gained strength due to the little magazine movement. This radical movement was influenced by the philosophy of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar and challenged the literary establishment which was largely middle class, urban, and upper caste people. The little magazine movement threw up many excellent writers. Bhalchandra Nemade is a well known novelist, critic and poet. Dr.Sharad Rane is a well known bal-sahityakar. The poetry of Arun Kolatkar, Dilip Chitre, Namdeo Dhasal, Vasant Abaji Dahake, Manohar Oak and many other modernist poets is complex, rich and provokative. Bhau Padhye, Vilas Sarang, Shyam Manohar, Suhas Shirvalkar and Visharm Bedekar are well known fiction writers.
The another major paradigm shift in Marathi sensibility began in the nineties with the another avant-garde modernist poetry of poets associated with Abhidhanantar and Shabadavedh. In the post nineties, this ‘new little magazine movement’ gained momentum and poets like Manya Joshi, Hemant Divate, Sachin Ketkar, Mangesh Narayanrao Kale, Saleel Wagh, Mohan Borse, Nitin Kulkarni, Nitin Arun Kulkarni, Varjesh Solanki, Sandeep Deshpande, Vasant Gurjar touched the new areas of post-modern life. The poetry collections broughtout by Abhidhanantar Prakashan and the regular issues of the magazine Abhidhanantar is taking Marathi poetry to the global standards.[1] Another leading wave in contemporary Marathi poetry is the poetry of non-urban poets like Arun Kale, Bhujang Meshram, Pravin Bandekar, Shrikant Deshmukh, Veerdhaval Parab etc. They insist on native values in their poetry.
Marathi is also one of the few Indian languages (and possibly the only one) where there is a stream of science fiction literature. A few well known Marathi science fiction authors are Dr. Jayant Narlikar, Dr Bal Phondke, Subodh Javadekar, and Laxman Londhe.
Many writers like Dnyaneshwar Mulay have added new dimensions and enriched Marathi with their literary talent. His autobiographical book ‘Maati Pankh Aani Aakaash’ was considered to be among the best ten autobiographies of last 100 years in Marathi by a survey conducted by Antarnaad, a respected martahi literary magazine. His other books are ‘Russia Navya Dishanche Amantran’ a book that captures post 1992 Russia. It is popular because it is probably the only work of its kind in Marathi. His recent poetry collection ‘Swatahteel Awakash’ won the state literary award of governmment of Maharashtra. He writes regular columns in Marathi dailies like Lokmat and Loksatta and Sadhana, weekly published from Pune.

[edit] Nepali literature

Main article: Nepali literature

[edit] Oriya literature

Main article: Oriya literature
Oriya has a rich literary heritage dating back to the 13th century. Sarala Dasa who lived in the 14th century is known as the Vyasa of Orissa. He translated the Mahabharata into Oriya. In fact the language was initially standardised through a process of translation of classical Sanskrit texts like the Mahabharata, the Ramayana and the Srimad Bhagabatam. Jagannatha Das translated the Srimad Bhagabatam into Oriya and his translation standardized the written form of the language. Oriya has had a strong tradition of poetry, especially that of devotional poetry. Some other eminent ancient Oriya Poets include Kabi Samrat Upendra Bhanja and Kabi Surya Bala Dev Ratha.
In 19th century, Fakir Mohan Senapati (1843–1918), Gouri Shankar Ray, Gopal Chandra Praharaj, Pandit Nilmani Vidyaratna, Kabibar Radhanath Ray were prominent figure in prose and poetry writinga of Oriya Literature. In 20th century Godabarish Mohapatra, Kalindi Charana Panigrahi, Kanhu Charan Mohanty (1906–1994), Gopinath Mohanty, Sachchidananda Routray, Surendra Mohanty, Manoj Das, Kishori Charan Das, Sitakanta Mohapatra, Ramakanta Rath, Binapani Mohanty, Jagadish Mohanty, Sarojini Sahoo, Rajendra Kishore Panda, Padmaj Pal, Ramchandra Behera, Pratibha Satpathy are few names who made the Oriya Literature and Oriya language worthy.

[edit] Punjabi literature

Main article: Punjabi literature
The history of Punjabi literature starts with advent of Aryan in Punjab. Punjab provided them the perfect environment in which to compose the ancient texts. The Rig-Veda is first example in which references are made to the rivers, flora and fauna of Punjab. The Punjabi literary tradition is generally conceived to commence with Fariduddin Ganjshakar (1173–1266).[2]. Farid’s mostly spiritual and devotional verse were compiled after his death in the Adi Granth.
The Janamsakhis, stories on the life and legend of Guru Nanak (1469–1539), are early examples of Punjabi prose literature. Nanak himself composed Punjabi verse incorporating vocabulary from Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, and other Indic languages as characteristic of the Gurbani tradition. Sufi poetry developed under Shah Hussain (1538–1599), Sultan Bahu (1628–1691), Shah Sharaf (1640–1724), Ali Haider (1690–1785), and Bulleh Shah (1680–1757). In contrast to Persian poets who had preferred the ghazal for poetic expression, Punjabi Sufi poets tended to compose in the Kafi.[3].
Punjabi Sufi poetry also influenced other Punjabi literary traditions particularly the Punjabi Qissa, a genre of romantic tragedy which also derived inspiration from Indic, Persian and Qur’anic sources. The Qissa of Heer Ranjha by Waris Shah (1706–1798) is among the most popular of Punjabi qisse. Other popular stories include Sohni Mahiwal by Fazal Shah, Mirza Sahiba by Hafiz Barkhudar (1658–1707), Sassi Punnun by Hashim Shah (1735?-1843?), and Qissa Puran Bhagat by Qadaryar (1802–1892).
The Victorian novel, Elizabethan drama, free verse and Modernism entered Punjabi literature through the introduction of British education during colonial rule. The setting up of a Christian mission at Ludhiana in 1835 (where a printing press was installed for using Gurmukhi fonts, and which also issued the first Punjabi grammar in 1838), the publication of a Punjabi dictionary by Reverend J. Newton in 1854 and the ripple-down effect of the strengthening and modernizing the education system under the patronage of the Singh Sabha Movement in 1860s, were some of the developments that made it possible for ‘modernism’ to emerge in Punjabi literary culture. It needs to be pointed out here that ‘modernism’ is being used here as an umbrella term to cover a whole range of developments in the Punjabi literary culture, starting with the break from tradition or the past to a commitment to progressive ideology, from the experimental nature of the avant-garde to the newness of the forward-looking.

[edit] Rajasthani literature

Main article: Rajasthani literature

[edit] Sanskrit literature

Main article: Sanskrit literature

[edit] Sindhi literature

Main article: Sindhi literature

[edit] Tamil literature

Main article: Tamil literature
Tamil literature has a rich and long literary tradition spanning more than 2000 years. Tolkaappiyam has been credited as the oldest work in Tamil available today. The history of Tamil literature follows the history of Tamil Nadu, closely following the social and political trends of various periods. The secular nature of the early Sangam poetry gave way to works of religious and didactic nature during the Middle Ages. Tirukkural is a fine example of such work on human behaviour and political morals. A wave of religious revival helped generate a great volume of literary output by Saivite and Vaishnavite authors. Jain and Buddhist authors during the medieval period and Muslim and European[citation needed] authors later also contributed to the growth of Tamil literature.
A revival of Tamil literature took place from the late 19th century when works of religious and philosophical nature were written in a style that made it easier for the common people to enjoy. Nationalist poets began to utilise the power of poetry in influencing the masses. Short stories and novels began to appear. The popularity of Tamil Cinema has also provided opportunities for modern Tamil poets to emerge.

[edit] Telugu literature

Main article: Telugu literature
Telugu, the Indian language with the third largest number of speakers (after Hindi & Bengali), is rich in literary traditions. The earliest written literature dates back to the 7th century. The epic literary tradition started with Nannayya who is acclaimed as Telugu’s Aadikavi meaning the first poet. He belongs to the tenth or 11th century.
Vemana was a prince, also called Pedakomati or Vemaa Reddy, who lived in the 14th century and wrote poems in the language of the common man. He questioned the prevailing values and conventions and religious practices in his poems. His philosophy made him a unique poet of the masses.
Viswanadha Satyanarayana (Veyipadagalu) (1895–1976), a doyen of conventional yet creative literature, was the first to receive the Jnanpith Award for Telugu followed by C. Narayana Reddy.
Srirangam Srinivasarao or Sri Sri (born 1910) was a popular 20th century poet and lyricist. Srisri took the “Telugu literary band wagon that travelled in roads of kings and queens in to that of muddy roads of common man”.
Literary Movements: Old Era: Telugu literature has been enriched by many literary movements like Veera Shaiva movement which gave birth to dwipada kavitvam (couplets). Bhakti movement which gave us immortal compilations by Annamayya, Kshetrayya and Tyagaraja and kancharla Gopanna (Ramadasu). The renaissance movement heralded by Vemana stand for the old Telugu literary movements.
New era: Romantic Movemnet (led by Krishnasashtri, Rayaprolu, Vedula), Progressive Writers Movement, Digambara Kavitvam (Nagnamuni, Cherabanda Raju, Jwalamukhi, Nikhileswar, Bhairavayya and Mahaswapna Revolutionary Writers’ Movement, Streevada Kavitvam and Dalita Kavitvam all flourished in Telugu Literature and in fact, Telugu Literature has been the standard bearer of Indian Literature in these respects.
Fiction and Prose literature:
Kadukuri Veeresalingam, is said to be the father of Modern Telugu fiction. Kodavatiganti Kutumba Rao laid foundation for the realistic modern Telugu Novel and Short Story, Rachakonda and Kalipatnam carried the flag in to excellency.
Annamaya, Gurajada Appa Rao, Kandukuri, Devulapalli, Jashuva, Unnava Laxminarayana (Malapalli), Bucchi Babu, Tripuraneni Gopichand and many more had a profound impact on Telugu literature.

[edit] Urdu literature

Main article: Urdu literature
Among other traditions, Urdu poetry is a fine example of linguistic and cultural synthesis. Arab and Persian vocabulary based on the Hindi language resulted in a vast and extremely beloved class of ghazal literature, usually written by Muslims in contexts ranging from romance and society to philosophy and devotion to Allah. Urdu soon became the court language of the Mughals and in its higher forms was once called the “Kohinoor” of Indian languages. In Urdu literature fiction has also flourished well. Umrao Jaan Ada of Mirza Hadi Ruswa is first significant Urdu novel. Premchand is treated as father of modern Urdu fiction with his novel Godan and short stories like Kafan. The art of short story was further taken ahead by Manto, Bedi, Krishn Chander and a host of highly acclaimed writers.Urdu novel reached further heights in 1960s with novels of Quratul Ain Haider and Abdullah Hussain. Towards the end of 20th century Urdu novel entered into a new phase with trend setter novel MAKAAN of Paigham Afaqui. Urdu ghazal has also recently changed its colour with more and more penetration in and synchronization with modern and contemporary issues of life.

[edit] Indian literature in foreign languages

[edit] Indian Persian literature

Main article: Persian literature
During the early Muslim period, Persian became the lingua franca of the subcontinent, used by most of the educated and the government. Although Persian literature from Persia itself was popular, several Indians became major Persian poets, the most notable being Amir Khusro and in more modern times Allama Iqbal. Much of the older Sanskrit literature was also translated into Persian. For a time, it remained the court language of the Mughals, soon to be replaced by Urdu. Persian still held its status, despite the spread of Urdu, well into the early years of the British rule in India. Most British officials had to learn Persian on coming to India and concluded their conversations in Persian. In 1837, however, the British, in an effort to expand their influence, made a government ruling to discontinue the use of Persian and commence the use of English instead. Thus started the decline of Persian as the subcontinent’s lingua franca, a position to be taken up by the new language of the British Raj, English. Many modern Indian languages still show signs of heavy Persian influence, most notably Urdu and Hindi.

[edit] Indian English literature

In the 20th century, several Indian writers have distinguished themselves not only in traditional Indian languages but also in English. India’s only Nobel laureate in literature was the Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore, who wrote some of his work originally in English, and did some of his own English translations from Bengali. More recent major writers in English who are either Indian or of Indian origin and derive much inspiration from Indian themes are R. K. Narayan, Vikram Seth, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Raja Rao, Amitav Ghosh, Rohinton Mistry, Vikram Chandra, Mukul Kesavan, Raj Kamal Jha, Vikas Swarup, Khushwant Singh, Shashi Tharoor, Nayantara Sehgal, Anita Desai, Kiran Desai, Ashok Banker, Shashi Deshpande, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kamala Markandaya, Gita Mehta, Manil Suri, Ruskin Bond, Preeti Shenoy and Bharati Mukherjee.
In the 1950s, the Writers Workshop collective in Calcutta was founded by the poet and essayist P. Lal to advocate and publish Indian writing in English. The press was the first to publish Pritish Nandy, Sasthi Brata, and others; it continues to this day to provide a forum for English writing in India.In modern times, Indian poetry in English was typified by two very different poets. Dom Moraes, winner of the Hawthornden Prize at the age of 19 for his first book of poems A Beginning went on to occupy a pre-eminent position among Indian poets writing in English. Nissim Ezekiel, who came from India’s tiny Bene Israel Jewish community, created a voice and place for Indian poets writing in English and championed their work.
Their contemporaries in English poetry in India were Jayanta Mahapatra, Gieve Patel, A. K. Ramanujan, Arun Kolatkar, Dilip Chitre, Eunice De Souza, Kersi Katrak, P. Lal and Kamala Das among several others. Younger generation of poets writing in English include Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Makarand Paranjape Arundhathi Subramaniam, Ranjit Hoskote, Sudeep Sen, Jerry Pintoamong others.
A generation of exiles also sprang from the Indian diaspora. Among these are names like Agha Shahid Ali, Sujata Bhatt, Richard Crasta, Yuyutsu Sharma and Vikram Seth.
In recent years, English-language writers of Indian origin are being published in the West at an increasing rate.
Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai and Arvind Adiga have won the prestigious Man Booker Prize, with Salman Rushdie going on to win the Booker of Bookers.

[edit] Literature from North East India

Literature from North East India refers to literature of Languages of North East India, and also the body of work by English-language writers from this region. North-East India is an under-represented region in many ways. The troubled political climate, the beautiful landscape and the confluence of various ethnic groups perhaps have given rise to a body of writing that is completely different from Indian English Literature. North-East India was a colonial construct and continues to be one by virtue of having a historically difficult relationship with the Indian nation state.

[edit] Journalism in India

The first printing press arrived in India in the year 1556, through the efforts of Jesuit missionaries. It was brought from Portugal and installed at the college of St. Paul in Goa. It was used mainly for printing religious literature like tracts, hymn books etc.
The first printed newspaper of India was in English, and was called Hicky’s Bengal Gazette. It was edited and published by James Augustus Hicky, an ex-employee of the East India Company. The first issue of this newspaper came out in 1780 and carried only classified advertisements on its front page. It was a weekly newspaper and generally dealt with the arrival and departure of Europeans, timings of steamers, fashionable news from London, Paris and Vienna, and personal news. It attended to the needs of the small European community of Calcutta. Many other Anglo-Indian newspapers emerged after Hicky’s pattern- such as John Bull, Calcutta Journal, Bengal Harkaru. In the year 1781, Hicky’s Bengal Gazette was forced to close down after Hicky published a scandalous story about Warren Hastings, the then Governor-General and his wife.
Later on, another type of newspaper emerged- Indo-Anglian papers. They were English newspapers run by Indians primarily for English educated elite Indians. The first newspaper of this type was Bengal Gazette, started in 1816 by Gangadhar Bhattacharya, a disciple of Raja Rammohan Roy. Rammohan Roy also began his famous Brahmanical Magazine, English fortnightly.
The early Indo-Anglian papers concentrated on drawing the attention of the British to the cultural and philosophical history of India. They did not openly attack social and political evils.
The first war of Independence was fought from 1857-59 in various parts of the country. Between 1860 and 1899, hundreds of newspapers came up demanding freedom of expression and criticizing the repressive measures taken by the British. Journalism played an important role in making educated Indians aware of their rights. Some newspapers of this period are The Hindu of Madras and Amrit Bazaar Patrika of Calcutta. Another significant factor was that during this period a large number of colleges imparting science and liberal arts education sprang up in the major towns of India.
Digdarshan (World Vision) was the first Indian language newspaper, a Bengali religious weekly started in Sehrampur by Christian missionaries. Based on the pattern of Digdarshan, Raja Rammohan Roy brought out Bengali and Urdu weeklies like Bangadoota and Mirat-ul-Akhbar. The newspaper with the greatest longevity in India is the first Gujarati newspaper- Mumbai Samachar, established in 1822. Some of the early Hindi publications were Oodunt Martand, Banaras Akhbar, Shimla Akhbar and Samayadant Martand, the first Hindi daily. Mangaloora Samachar, published from Mangalore, was the first Kannada journal. Malayala Manorama, the second oldest newspaper in Kerala was started in 1890, and was the first newspaper to be published by a joint stock company formed solely for the purpose of publishing a newspaper. The first Marathi newspaper was Darpan- a bilingual fortnightly in Englisha and Marathi, started by a professor of the Elphinstone College of Bombay. The first all Marathi journal was Mumbai Akhbar. During the early part of the 20th century, Marathi journalism played an important role in the freedom movement. Bal Gangadhar Tilak, a renowned freedom fighter started two powerful journals- Kesari and Maratha.
Despite the numerous columns and articles demanding political and social reforms, journalism during the 19th century had little impact on the Indian masses, due to widespread illiteracy and poverty.
In 1947, the major English newspaper in India were the Times of India (Bombay), Statesman (Calcutta), Hindu (Madras), Hindustan Times (New Delhi), Indian Express (Bombay & Madras) Amrita Bazaar Patrika (Calcutta). Of these, the Times of India, Statesman & Pioneer were under British ownership till 1964, when it came under a group of Indian business.
During the long struggle for India’s Independence, the major English newspaper that served the national cause were the Hindu (1878), Amrita Bazaar Patrika (1868), & Hindustan Times (1924). Among the Indian language newspapers, the prominent ones were, Ananda bazaar Patrika (1922), Sakal (1931), Mumbai Samachar (1822), Malayala Manorama (1890) & Mathrubhumi (1930).
During the 1950s 214 daily newspapers were published in the country. Out of these, 44 were English language dailies while the rest were published in various regional languages. This number rose to 2,856 dailies in 1990 with 209 English dailies.
There are four major publishing groups in India, each of which controls national and regional English-language and vernacular publications. They are the Times of India Group, the Indian Express Group, the Hindustan Times Group, and the Anandabazar Patrika Group. The Times of India is India’s largest English-language daily, with a circulation of 656,000 published in six cities. The Indian Express, with a daily circulation of 519,000, is published in seventeen cities. There also are seven other daily newspapers with circulations of between 134,000 and 477,000, all in English and all competitive with one another. Indian-language newspapers also enjoy large circulations but usually on a statewide or citywide basis. For example, the Malayalam-language daily Malayala Manorama circulates 673,000 copies in Kerala; the Hindi-language Dainik Jagran circulates widely in Uttar Pradesh and New Delhi, with 580,000 copies per day; Punjab Kesari, also published in Hindi and available throughout Punjab and New Delhi, has a daily circulation of 562,000; and the Anandabazar Patrika, published in Calcutta in Bengali, has a daily circulation of 435,000. There are also numerous smaller publications throughout the nation. The combined circulation of India’s newspapers and periodicals is in the order of 60 million, published daily in more than ninety languages.

[edit] Journalism During the Emergency Period

During the summer of 1975, as Indira Gandhi became increasingly threatened by the mounting criticisms of her government, she declared a state of emergency. The declaration of a national emergency lasted for about 19 months. The emergency was declared as a result of mounting political pressure exerted upon the government from opposing political parties which were striving to fight corruption, inflation and economic chaos in the country. Indira Gandhi’s government, rather than taking this as a political challenge, resorted to declaring a national emergency and imprisoning the opposition party leaders, including all dissenting voices from the media.
Immediately she took control of the press, prohibiting their reporting of all domestic and international news. The government expelled several foreign correspondents (mainly American and British) and withdrew accreditation from more than 40 Indian reporters who normally covered the capital.
The fundamental rights of the Indian people were suspended, and strict controls were imposed on freedom of speech and press. According to the Right of Freedom-Article 19(1) of the Indian Constitution, Indians have the right (a) to freedom of speech and expression, (b) to assemble peacefully and without arms, (c) to form associations or unions, (d) to move freely across the length and breadth of the country, (e) to reside or settle in any part of India, (f) to own or dispose of property, and (g) to carry on any lawful trade of occupation.’
It is obvious that, unlike the American Constitution or others In which freedom of the press is mentioned as one of the fundamental rights, the Indian Constitution doesn’t specifically mention freedom of the press. However, the fundamental Rights Clause of the Indian Constitution treats freedom of the press as an integral part of the larger “freedom of expression.”
Indira Gandhi’s government used the “security of the state” and “promotion of disaffection” as its defense for imposing strict control on the press. And with the airwaves already under government ownership, Indira Gandhi successfully controlled the mass communication system in India for over a year and a half.
During censorship, most of the nation’s domestic dailies gave up the battle for press freedom. Their pages were “filled with fawning accounts of national events, flattering pictures of Gandhi and her ambitious son, and not coincidentally, lucrative government advertising.” But two tough, prominent publishers of English language dailies, The Indian Express and The Statesman, fought courageously against Indira Gandhi’s opposition of the Indian press. Despite some bold fights and stubborn stands taken up by these publishers, its was quite clear that Indira Gandhi had as strong a grip on the Indian press as she had on Indian politics, at least during the government-imposed emergency.
Methods of Press Control
Like other dictators in history, Indira Gandhi’s first attempt was to impose “thought control” on the populace. For her, this was to be effectuated not merely by controlling the Indian mass media but also by moulding the media to her own purpose. It has now become a well known fact that during the emergency Indira Gandhi had a firm grip on the Indian mass media. This was especially true since radio and television in India are government owned and operated; for Indira, there was the simple matter of controlling the newspapers in order to achieve a total control of the mass media. She used at least three methods in manipulating the newspapers:
(1) allocation of government advertising;
(2) shotgun merger of the news agencies; and
(3) use of fear-arousal techniques on newspaper publishers, journalists and individual shareholders.
The Indian newspapers depend a great deal on governmental advertising; without such revenues, it would be difficult for many Indian newspapers to stay in business. Unfortunately, this has kept many of them vulnerable to government manipulation. The large scale possibility of such manipulation, however, was not fully demonstrated until Indira Gandhi’s government decided to take advantage of this unique circumstance. In the beginning of censorship, when a few leading newspapers such as The Indian Express and The Statesman refused to abide the governmental censorship, the government withdrew its advertising support from these newspapers. Later on, this type of financial castigation was used on several other rebellious newspapers.
The second and perhaps more profound way of manipulating the news flow resulted from the governmental decision to bring about a shot-gun merger of the four privately-owned Indian news agencies; the main purpose behind this merger was to alter the management and control of the Indian news agencies and thus to control much of the content of the leading newspapers. Since these agencies had been acting as the gatekeepers of information, it was essential for Indira Gandhi and her Information and Broadcasting Minister, Mr. V.C. Shukla, to control the gatekeepers. To effect such a merger, the government carried through various successful tactics. First of all, pressure was put on the members of boards of these agencies. Then the financial squeeze was applied to the agencies themselves by withholding governmental subsidy. Thirdly, the government introduced the threat of cutting-off the teleprinter services, the lifelines of a news agency. For example, the government-owned Post and Telegraph Department was ordered to impose a suspension of services to the United News of India if it resisted the merger. The manipulation of these four news agencies was so effective that hardly a voice was raised to resist the governmental perfidy. Soon after this, Shukla reported to the Indian parliament that these four news agencies accepted the merger “voluntarily.”
A third and an equally effective method applied by Indira Gandhi was to use fear-arousal techniques on the newspaper publishers, editors, reporters and shareholders. Such techniques were imposed by making false charges with regard to tax arrears, possible reductions in newsprint quotas, imprisonment of publishers

[edit] Awards

[edit] See also

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ “Kannada literature”, Encyclopædia Britannica, 2008. Quote: “The earliest literary work is the Kavirajamarga (c. AD 450), a treatise on poetics based on a Sanskrit model.”
  2. ^ “Awardees detail for the Jnanpith Award”. Official website of Bharatiya Jnanpith. Bharatiya Jnanpith. Retrieved 2007-06-29.[dead link]
  3. ^ “Kunwar Narayan to be awarded Jnanpith”. Times of India. Nov 24, 2008. Retrieved 2008-11-25.
  4. ^ Fallon, Oliver. 2009. Bhatti’s Poem: The Death of Rávana (Bhaṭṭikāvya). New York: Clay Sanskrit Library[1]. ISBN 978-0-8147-2778-2 | ISBN 0-8147-2778-6 |
  5. ^ Narang, Satya Pal. 2003. An Analysis of the Prākṛta of Bhāśā-sama of the Bhaṭṭi-kāvya (Canto XII). In: Prof. Mahapatra G.N., Vanijyotih: Felicitation Volume, Utkal University, *Bhuvaneshwar.
  6. ^ http://ccrtindia.gov.in/literaryarts.htm
  7. ^ Jyotsna Kamat. “History of the Kannada Literature-I”. Kamat’s Potpourri, November 4, 2006. Kamat’s Potpourri. Retrieved 2006-11-25.
  8. ^ “Declare Kannada a classical language”. Online webpage of The Hindu (Chennai, India: The Hindu). 2005-05-27. Retrieved 2007-06-29.

[edit] External links

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Excerpt: Anand Giridharadas’ ‘India Calling’

India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking by Anand Giridharadas. (Times Books, 2011) India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking by Anand Giridharadas. (Times Books, 2011)
Excerpted from India Calling by Anand Giridharadas (Times Books, 2011). © Anand Giridharadas. All rights reserved.
Chapter One: Dreams
As my flight swooped down toward Bombay, an elderly Indian man leaned over and asked for help with his landing card. We started talking, and he asked why I was visiting India. Actually, I’m moving to India, I told him. His eyes bulged. They darted to my American passport on the tray table and then back up at me.
“We’re all trying to go that way,” he said after a moment, gesturing toward the plane’s tail and, beyond it, the paradisiacal West. “You,” he added, as if seeking to alert me to a ticketing error, “you’re going this way?”
And so it began.
I was twenty-one and fresh out of college. My parents had left India in the 1970s, when the West seemed paved with possibility and India seemed paved with potholes. And now, a quarter century after my father first arrived as a student in America, I was flying east to make a new beginning in the land they had left.
The first thing I ever learned about India was that my parents had chosen to leave it. They had begun their American lives in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, called Shaker Heights. It was a sprawling neighborhood of brick and Tudor houses, set on vast yards, with the duck-strewn ponds, meandering lanes, and ample sidewalks that had lured millions of Americans into suburbia.
In Shaker Heights the rituals of my parents’ youth quickly confronted new ones. Suburban Cleveland was not a place where one could easily cling to the Old Country or take refuge in multiculturalism. So they dug in, assimilated, gave my sister and me childhoods with all the American fixin’s. Making snowmen with carrot noses. Washing our Toyota Cressida on Sundays, me in diapers working with a watering can. Playing catch with a vinyl baseball mitt. Trying in vain to build a tree house. Catching possums in baited cages. Meandering through summer block parties, where the rules of normal life seemed suspended: the roads were emptied of cars; fire engines rode up and down and could be boarded at will; there were more bubbles and balloons than your cheeks could blow.
Shaker Heights was a warm and generous place. Family was the only community that had mattered in India; in America, my parents discovered the community itself: the people who shared recipes, gave them rides, taught them the idioms they didn’t know, brought them food when they were sick. It was perhaps the grace of this welcome that inoculated them against the defensiveness and nostalgia that so often infect immigrants. They still loved India, but they never looked back. They spoke often of “Indian values,” but these were abstractions meant to suffuse our being rather than commandments to live in this way or that. They accepted and came to savor the American way of life.
And yet we were unmistakably Indian, too. Indianness in those days was like a secret garden to which the society around us lacked access. You needn’t have gone there if you didn’t want to, but it was there, a hidden world of mysteries. We had a past that others didn’t; we had our little secrets of what we ate and wore when we attended a family wedding; we had dinner table stories about places and people from an almost mythical past. We had history, history being the only thing that America’s abundant shores could not offer.
We were raised with a different idea of family: family as the fount of everything, family as more important than friends or schools or teachers could ever be. We were raised with an Indian docility: we didn’t hit or fight; we didn’t play contact sports such as football or hockey but stuck to swimming and tennis. We didn’t – not then and still not today – call our parents by their first names or curse in their presence. We got paid for losing teeth but not for doing chores. (“Should I start charging you for cooking?” my mother would ask.) We wore American clothes around the house and to school, but we were asked to wear Indian clothes for weddings and other important occasions. We ate baingan ka bharta and rajma chawal and mutter paneer on some days and penne with tomato sauce on others. We ate meat only occasionally at home, and usually just chicken, but in restaurants we were free to explore the animal kingdom. My mother observed the Indian festival of karva chauth, in which women fast for their husbands’ prosperity and well-being; in their American rendition of it, however, my father fasted for my mother, too.
And so I grew up with only a faint idea that another country was also somehow mine. My notion of it was never based on India’s history or traditions, its long civilizational parade; it was a first-generation idea of a place in our shared past, nostalgically shared but blessedly past. It came not through anthems and ritual feasts and the taut emotions of an Independence Day, but through the stories we were told at meals and on holidays and the characters within our extended clan. As I conjured up the country, I squeezed these things for all the juice that they possessed, searched for meaning where it may not have been, deduced from personal history the history of a people. I forged a memoryof events I didn’t witness, from times and places I didn’t know.
Reflected from afar, India was late-night phone calls that sparked the fear of a far-off death. It was calling back relatives who could not afford to call us. It was Hindu ceremonies with rice, saffron, and Kit Kat bars arrayed on a silver platter. It was the particular strain of British-public-school-meets-Bombay-boulevard English that my parents spoke, prim and propah. It was the sensible frugality of getting books from the library rather than the bookstore and of cautious restaurant ordering – always one main course less than the number of diners, with the dishes shared communally. It was observing that none of the Indian-Americans around us were professors or poets or lawyers, but rather engineers or doctors or, if particularly rambunctious, economists.
Once every two or three years, we would fly east to India. The country offered a foretaste of itself in New York, in the survivalist pushing and pulling to board an airplane with assigned seats. On the other end of the voyage, coming out of the plane door, the machine-cooled air vanished at our backs, and the hot, dank, subtropical atmosphere drank us in. The lighting went from soft yellow to cheap fluorescent white. I remember the workers waiting in the aerobridge, smaller, meeker, scrawnier than the workers on the other end, laborers with the bodies of ballerinas.
Consumed on these visits east, India was being picked up from the airport by my grandparents in the middle of the night. It was cramming more people into their little Maruti than that car could safely hold. It was cousins who knew how to slide their posteriors forward or backward in the car to make such cramming possible. It was the piping-hot aloo parathas that my grandmother unfailingly cooked for us upon arrival. It was sideways hugs with my female relatives that strove to avoid breast contact. It was the chauvinism of retired uncles who probed my aspirations and asked nothing of my sister’s. It was the ceaseless chatter among the women of making jewelry, making clothes, making dinner. It was the acceptability of reporting toilet success and toilet failure at the breakfast table.

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‘India Calling’: The New ‘Land Of Opportunity’?

The sun sets over a stretch of the skyline in Mumbai, India.
EnlargeGautam Singh/APThe sun sets over a stretch of the skyline in Mumbai, India, where writer Anand Giridharadas worked as a management consultant after he graduated from college. “I grew up with only a faint idea that another country was also somehow mine,” Giridharadas writes of his upbringing in America. “My notion of it was never based on India’s history or traditions, its long civilizational parade; it was a first-generation idea of a place in our shared past, nostalgically shared but blessedly past.”
text size A A A
January 4, 2011
Writer Anand Giridharadas grew up in America, but it was in India — the country that his parents left — where he went to look for hope. “India has become — in a way that it has not been — a land of opportunity for millions and millions and millions of people,” he says.
In his book, India Calling, Giridharadas describes how India’s growing economy is creating growing opportunity — what many might recognize as American-style chances to get ahead. But Giridharadas also explains how he encountered a society riddled with ancient divisions of class and caste.
India Calling
India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking
By Anand Giridharadas
Hardcover, 288 pages
Times Books
List Price: $25
Read An Excerpt
“In India, you’re eternally a master and eternally a servant,” Giridharadas tells NPR’s Steve Inskeep. “Servants in many ways have been seen — and [have] been taught to see themselves — as being not someone who is situationally inferior, but someone who is eternally, intrinsically inferior.”
Giridharadas experienced first-hand the different treatment of the servant and the served one morning when he visited friends for breakfast. A “typical elite Indian breakfast with all of the fussiness and all of the servitude” was presented by the family’s obsequious and much-loved servant.  Later that day, Giridharadas returned to the friend’s house — this time in shorts and a T-shirt — to bring over a mattress. The same man who had served breakfast mistook Giridharadas for a delivery man and began gruffly barking orders at him.
When Giridharadas reminded the servant who he was, he says the man underwent a “total human metamorphosis … he shrunk right in front of me from a master to a servant,” Giridharadas says. ”And you realize that almost every Indian is engaged in both of these transactions at different moments of their days: superior to some, inferior to others. As an Indian poet once said, ‘never thinking to resist the one kick from above, nor to refrain from giving the kick below.’”
Though Giridharadas says the experience helped him understand the “truth about India,” he also cites examples of a new generation of Indians who are transcending boundaries of caste and class. He describes the story of an ambitious young man named Ravindra, who Giridharadas says was “born close to the lowest of the Indian low” — yet managed to get ahead.

Hear Giridharadas Read From ‘India Calling’

“Something happened to him that has happened simultaneously to millions — maybe even tens of millions — of Indians who were also born as ‘servants,’” Giridharadas says. Armed with the idea — from school and TV — that he didn’t have to be a servant, Ravindra educated himself through the many courses and classes that are cropping up in small Indian towns. After completing dozens of courses, Ravindra became a computer teacher, and then secured a job at a travel agency.
“At the travel agency,” Giridharadas says, “the real advantage of it was not the money, but the fact that he got to sit with middle class people many rungs above him in the hierarchy … He watched how they dressed, how they gestured, how they talked, what kind of cars they drive. He memorized everything about them, and mimicked it, and slowly set out to become them.”
Through self-directed education, careful observation and sheer tenacity, Ravindra slowly pulled himself to a higher place society. He now runs an English language academy and a roller skating academy (roller skating is all the rage in India’s small towns, Giridharadas explains.) He’s a lecturer at seven colleges teaching English and, as Giridharadas says, “he’s made himself the guy who you need to go see in that town if you want to get out of that town.”
Anand Giridharadas
Priya ParkerAnand Giridharadas writes the “Currents” column for the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times online. He lives in Cambridge, Mass.
Giridharadas grew up in suburban Cleveland, Ohio, the son of Indian emigres, so he’s well acquainted with the myths and the realities of both India and America.
“The defining narrative that Americans have told themselves about themselves for a long time is: anything can happen here, anything is possible,” Giridharadas says. “That narrative in America today is in decline. I think it’ll come back, but we’re not in a good moment for that narrative.”
Meanwhile, in India, the idea that you shape your own destiny is gaining traction. “Walking around India, watching TV in India, you feel that India is possessed by a narrative of hope right now and America is not,” Giridharadas says.
The question is: when does reality catch up to the illusion?  “I think in both countries we tend to underplay the extent to which it’s the fundamentals, not the narratives that matter,” says Giridharadas. With so much optimism and foreign investment flowing into India, he explains, it’s easy for people to think the country will change overnight. “India still has a lot to work out, and one of the risks of a boom is that it becomes easy to forget that.”

Excerpt: ‘India Calling’

by Anand Giridharadas
India Calling
India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking
By Anand Giridharadas
Hardcover, 288 pages
Times Books
List Price: $25
One of my clearest impressions about India as a child was that my parents’ stories would have been impossible had they stayed. Of course, such a vision was self-serving, for it made a virtue of our displacement. But I looked at my father, a management consultant whose talents would later reveal him to be a masterful writer and wonderfully empathetic teacher, and I knew that in India he could never have dreamed of a career in such things. His father was an engineer whose sons became engineers. They did not question. Likewise, my mother found in America a new liberty to fashion a life undefined by others. She had known little freedom in India to live and spend her time as she pleased. Older relatives would comment on the complexion of her skin. She was scolded about what she ate and what conditions were folklorically believed to flow from her eating habits. In America, where no one judged or supervised her, where my father was too busy eating her cooking to notice whether she was eating it, too, my mother found herself newly enchanted by the taste of food.
They had met in French class, the two of them. My father had never studied the language but needed some bon mots for his job selling Indian trucks and buses in Francophone Africa; my mother, studying French in college, was burnishing her spoken skills. It was he, knowing nothing, who raised his hand constantly, becoming the teacher’s pet, and she, knowing it all, who sat in silence, taking note of an eager engineer. The most she allowed herself was to stop her parents’ chauffeur-driven car every day at the bus stop where he was waiting and offer him a ride. My father showed none of her restraint. He asked her out again and again, accepting rejection each time. He brought his gold medal from business school to class one day and pulled it slyly out of his pocket to show her. She beamed with admiration, but that was all.
My mother had good reason for her coyness. She was Punjabi, from the very north; he was Tamil, from the very south. She told herself from the beginning that it could never work between them. even if she let her mind go there, she knew it wouldn’t happen in the end. They came from different universes, and she didn’t want to lead a good man on.
Her parents were refugees of partition, the traumatic moment in 1947 when the subcontinent was cut in two by the departing British and a chunk of northwestern India became, overnight, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Her parents, my Nanu and Nani, grew up in Lahore, in comfortable and educated families that suddenly lost their possessions and their bearings in the world. In a newly independent India, their families, like so many Punjabi families, began anew, educated themselves, slogged their way back into the affluence and respectability that their families had known on the far side of a freshly drawn frontier. Partition’s wound had become all but invisible for them by the time my mother was born, in 1955.
My mother’s family lived in southern Bombay, the rarefied tip of a rarefied island city, where Nanu worked for Hindustan Lever, the Indian arm of the global Unilever enterprise. They did not feel wealthy, for few did in that age: at times, my grandmother’s budgeted grocery money would dry up early, and she had to borrow from the allowance money she had earlier given her daughter. But their world was cosmopolitan and open. Nanu and Nani traveled the world on company-paid business trips, dining in Trafalgar Square in London, seeing the Lido in Paris, even attending a strip show in Amsterdam. Sitting on white cane chairs on his veranda, Nanu would leaf through one newspaper after another and by noon could dissect the politics of any country with more sophistication than many of its own citizens. He wore impeccably cut blazers, and his talk was peppered with “Well, you know, when I was in London in ’57 . . .” My grandparents lived in some of Bombay’s finest buildings, including a famous seaside property called Bakhtavar. There they entertained my grandfather’s equally worldly colleagues with tumblers of whiskey as the velvet whine of Miles Davis’s trumpet slid along the walls.
My mother grew up strong. She was a charismatic leader among her peers, staging plays, organizing projects, raising money for charity; she was fiercely protective of her younger brother, with whom she shared a passion for jazz and rock and roll. She read books by enid Blyton and Jane Austen and W. Somerset Maugham, and listened to the regular Western music hour on All India Radio as well as to Hindi film songs.
But the Westernization and modernity of their setting could be something of an illusion. Miles Davis notwithstanding, my mother was subject to the same culture of izzat — honor — that her mother had grown up with in Lahore, eased but never lifted with each successive generation of women. Running through the stories my mother would later tell of India was a theme of stifling, needless repression. As a teenager and even into her twenties, she was seldom allowed to go to parties. On one occasion, the adults let her and her cousins go to a discotheque, but on one condition: they had to take their towering, white-sari-clad, widowed grandmother along. (So deprived were they of entertainment that they accepted this deal.) As my mother got older, she was forbidden to go out to meals with male friends. Her mother feared that “society” would talk.
In her twenties, working as a French translator, my mother was the only woman in her office who was not a secretary. Starved gazes would follow her short hair and almond eyes as she navigated the desks. Some men showed interest in her at work, but she gave them no thought, for she quietly assumed that her parents would arrange her marriage and, with it, the rest of her life: in all likelihood to some nice Punjabi boy who would also live in Bombay, whose parents would distantly know her parents, who wouldn’t upset the mango cart. The notion of marrying otherwise or, stranger still, migrating to America would have seemed far-fetched to her at the time. It would take a man no less persuasive than my father to bend her mind.
He lived close by and a world apart. He came from a family of Tamil Brahmins, a caste that deserved its reputation for piety verging on sanctimony and purity verging on the total absence of fun. There was little whiskey and even less Miles Davis in their home. His father was a stern, brilliant engineer in the Central Indian Railways who would rise to become one of its highest officials. Thatha was the archetype of the Indian paterfamilias: staunchly protective of his family, emotionally remote, verbally economical, above the fray of daily life, functioning like a chief justice who framed his family’s values and monitored their compliance. He married a cheerful wife, tender and docile and eternally absorptive of his temper, who raised their four sons and one daughter with a gentleness and permissiveness that were rare in India.
My father, the middle child, spent much of his childhood in boarding schools, with his parents moving constantly for railway projects, and in those schools he forged a steely self-reliance that was also improbably un-Indian. When at home, he entered and left the apartment as he pleased. He played Ping-Pong and badminton and, in later years, bridge with friends whom his parents did not vet. He was trusted to fend for himself or lean on his siblings for help with homework or getting to after-school activities. I knew, from my mother’s stories and those of others, that this style of childhood was not typical, that the norm was guilt-tripping micromanagement. When he would return to India later in life, the deep patience he showed in America would crack when faced with the endless interference in other people’s affairs that was so endemically Indian but so foreign to him.
The story of his childhood shaped my earliest narratives about America, where he would one day choose to make his life. He had fallen for America and thrived there, I believed, because he had known freedom and self-determination as a child. I began to see those traits as peculiarly American, and I began to see my father as an American separated at birth from, and later reunited with, a land to which he naturally, psychologically belonged.
His path to America was through education. education was every generation’s duty to its progeny, in the Indian way; the rest was in the progeny’s hands. This idea was passed on to my sister and me in America. Sports, television, talking on the phone after school — these were the indulgences of Americans, of a land of plenty. For our family, learning was everything; homework came first; books, being sacred, were never to be left on the floor. But it was a lesson that my father had learned the hard way. In an early grade, he fared poorly in virtually every class. He brought home his report card, which had to be signed. His father flew into a rage, tearing the paper to shreds and spewing words that have remained with my father to this day: “I have no money to leave you. All I can give you is an education.” In an instant, my father learned the concept of accountability: no one would tell him how to organize his Thursdays, but if he messed up at year’s end, he would suffer for it.
That incident became a point of no return. My father studied like a monk from that day forward, threading the successive needles of India’s higher-education system. He trained for a year to get into the Indian Institutes of Technology, the country’s ultra-selective engineering school, and he did. He attended a leading business school and topped the class. He struggled, fought, succeeded. But then as he entered his middle twenties, all that drive and energy, the fruits of a bitterly learned lesson, collided with the stagnancy of a country that was not making the fullest use of its people.
It was the 1970s, and he worked in the export division of the Tata conglomerate, based in Bombay. It was a period of social and political turmoil known as the emergency, in which massive civic unrest had prompted Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to suspend the constitution and take matters into her own hands. The society was tense; mass sterilizations were in progress, opposition leaders languished in jail, and protest was being squelched. But it was not politics that drove my father away. It was that he saw no future in a company where, as in most Indian companies of the era, success favored the tenured. Longevity, not talent, ruled. He saw his superiors, twenty years ahead of him in line, and concluded that he didn’t want to spend his life becoming them. The thought was reinforced on those mornings when he trudged through the monsoon to work, as those executives, encased in their company cars, streaked through the water past their drenched trainees.
And yet he began to think about America almost casually, for he was not raised to ponder introspectively. He had heard of people crossing that ocean; some friends were applying to study at Harvard Business School. Why not? A photograph from his farewell party at Tata shows a young man, almost unrecognizable from the seasoned, worldly man who would become my father — beaming, skinny, fresh-faced, innocent, with curly black hair. He is receiving a leather jacket as a parting gift, about to embark on what my young mind would come to see as his actual life: a new beginning in a continent of new beginnings.
My mother had given him no reason to stay. Now he was gone. He wrote her regularly from Boston, and she wrote back. Their friendship deepened. He found a job in Cleveland as graduation approached and returned to India for a summer break before starting his new job in America. Two years had passed, and my parents’ correspondence had worked its effects. When at last he asked my mother to marry him on that trip, in the dark of a cinema, it took days of stunned silence before she found her voice, but in the end that voice said “Yes.” Her parents, who she feared would oppose her marrying outside the tribe, were broader minded than she realized, and they were impressed by my father’s education and temperament. The world was changing, and Harvard graduates, whatever their family histories, were now a marriageable clan of their own. They were wedded ten days later, in my grandparents’ home in Bakhtavar, because it was impossible to rent a venue so hurriedly. My father left immediately thereafter for America, alone, while my mother waited months for a visa. Her first steps outside India would come in leaving it for good.
So started their lonely, thrilling adventure. It was not long before my mother was backing a red Oldsmobile, larger than many Indian dwellings, down an icy driveway in Shaker Heights, not long before my father, with his Indian accent, was counseling the executives of America’s leading companies. They learned together to drive, to shop in malls, to paint a house. The women in the neighborhood would stop to ask my mother the meaning of the red dot on her forehead; one preempted her by suggesting that it was blood from a hole in her head. She learned from an elderly Jewish neighbor the recipe for cheesecake. They found a regular restaurant they favored, Pearl of the Orient. They shoveled snow for the first time in their lives. They began a family.
What distinguished them in my eyes from the Indians in the Old Country was their perpetual growth and self-renewal. They discovered new music that was not their own music, new food not their own food. They took up new styles of dressing. They soaked in the world. They allowed their ideas to be upset by better ideas. They clung to pieties that made sense and jettisoned those that didn’t. They kept reinventing themselves, discarding the invention, starting anew. My father would become an entrepreneur, then a human-resources executive, then a PhD candidate in his fifties, then a professor. My mother, who began as a homemaker, would learn ceramics, become a ceramics teacher, and then a school administrator. They moved us from Ohio to Paris, then back to Ohio, then to the suburbs of Washington, D.C. They refreshed themselves constantly and, what’s more, came to see such refreshment as life’s very goal.
It was extraordinary, and ordinary: this is what America did to people, what it always has done. They raised us with this borrowed heritage of self-invention. It was not our Indian heritage, a heritage they sought by and large to preserve. But this was one sphere of American life where the Old Country’s values were not permitted to intrude. We were taught to respect our elders as Indians did, to sacrifice for family in the Indian way, to abstain from America’s addictive consumption. But we were taught time and again to invent ourselves, to write our own stories. They never pushed us, as other Indian parents did, to become engineers or doctors: to do so would have stripped us of the liberties that they had come to savor for themselves. They selected for us not the math-and-science magnet schools that emigres adored, but liberally minded private schools that taught painting and history and literature, instilling in us the sense of open-road possibility, of the worthiness of multiple alternative existences, that their own childhoods had lacked. In high school, when I was reading The Great Gatsby and becoming enthralled by the novel’s seductive, ominous vision of self-invention, my parents were paying steeply for me to become everything India taught the young not to be.
And so it was strange that now I had come to reinvent myself in, of all places, India. It was not a fate that they or I could have imagined. I wondered at times if they felt abandoned, not just by me but also by the invisible forces of history that make countries rise and fall. And I thought to myself: if they left that frozen land for us, if they built from scratch a new life in the West for us, if they slogged, saved, sacrificed to make our lives lighter than theirs, what did it mean when we returned to the place they left?
excerpted from India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking by Anand Giridharadas. Copyright 2011 by Anand Giridharadas. Reprinted by arrangement with Times Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company LLC.

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Very Hungry (Alright)
Very Hungry (Alright) wrote:
Gujjus relax a bit. This is not modis gujrat. when you evoke holocaust, i think you should see Gujrat (gave rest of india a real bad name) first. How do you reconcile the fact that Subhash Chandra Bose tried to pal with hitler…and the modern day “hindu” terrorist Thackery (who i might add thinks hitler was “awesome”):http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjkkMhfwUsw
your nationlistic sentiments are so high that you fail to see the worst scam to have hit india. The 2g scam is the mother of all scams. This is 2-3 times more than what the british “stole”. So whats happening is the “new” india is more dangerous, arrogant and ignorant of the poor, fearful and debt ridden India. You do not have it in you to think beyond the color of skin, religion and race. Mere quoting the fallacy of a country 400 years old isnt a winning argument and really does no good to change the decrepitude that India is.
Friday, January 07, 2011 1:02:53 PM
Jayant Patel (yantipal)
Jayant Patel (yantipal) wrote:
In response to very hungry: it is so eay to fall in love with rich countries isn’t it? I hope he uses some of this anger for the British – these evil men took a rich 100+ million people with a GDP amounting to 20-25% of the world’s & by the time they left we were down to 1-2%! Millions of people were left to die by the British of starvation when they could have prevented it. Winston Churchill is admired the world over, but like Hitler he despised people of color & couldn’t care less about the millions of Indians dying of hunger. This was the Indian Holocaust that no one talks about. Why? The guy is rich & white! I hope we see people in their true light in the near future.
As for the disgust of caste, any thoughts on racism here in the US mr very hungry? I am sure as a dark skinned person u must have faced racism, any disgust there? or is it ok because it is white man abusing you?
Wednesday, January 05, 2011 9:38:16 PM
Jayant Patel (yantipal)
Jayant Patel (yantipal) wrote:
contd: much older days. When india first got independence, corruption was unheard of. It got worse as time went on, but i can see this lifting. Corruption takes root in poor countries, people feel the pressure to make a life & they see addl money as a need. But as incomes rise, this need will fall & u will see less corruption as India moves on with its success story.
Wednesday, January 05, 2011 9:31:21 PM
Jayant Patel (yantipal)
Jayant Patel (yantipal) wrote:
I would like to comment on 2 things – Caste & Corruption:
Caste: The Gita makes it clear that Caste was just a job classification, it depended on Education & work. Just like saying someone has a PHD, u could say he was a Brahmin. But as time went on Caste became synonymous with birth – this is similar to what is happening in the Catholic church. Having unmarried priest looked like a good idea – they can devote more time to the church, but as we saw good ideas can turn bad.
The way to get out of caste is simple – the water that feeds this evil tree of caste is Arranged Marriages! When parent arrange marriage for this kids they look for suitable candidates within their own caste. If the young men or women reading this make a pledge to look for thier sould mates on their own, they are less likely to fall in love with a man or woman of the same caste & that’s how caste will break down to nothing. We can get rid of caste in one generation! Of course this involves actually doing something instead of shouting great slogans that make us feel good.
Corruption: U guys haven’t seen anything – it was much worse in the older days & much, much better in the contd
Wednesday, January 05, 2011 9:28:59 PM
Dahya Patel (Dahya)
Dahya Patel (Dahya) wrote:
I heard NPR interview of Author of India Calling.
I was unhappy about NPR toeing the missionary line of inserting the word Caste in any interview questions related to India. After independence, Indians have themselves recognized evil of Caste discrimination and on their own they have actively brought reforms with great results. While self reform is a unique cultural quality of Indian people, missionaries have continued the derogative attacks on India on Caste issue.
The author should be commended for bringing such facts in light in a book.
The author is realistically highlighting the submissive mentality of worker, especially in a house hold setting.
I have saw an old photo of British India, where many Indian servants are shown attending to a British man (washing feet, clipping nails, cleaning face etc.). This was typical traditional servant-owner relationship that spilled over into Indians who worked as administrators and it eventually became a norm submissive cultural.
Thank God, Britishers left USA in 1776.
It is hard to see, while in India. However, once one comes to USA, one cannot miss to see just the opposite practice
I thank NPR for spreading the word about a book that gives a realistic cultural aspect of India.
Tuesday, January 04, 2011 6:07:37 PM
Raena Honan (azrae)
Raena Honan (azrae) wrote:
I had a wonderful driver in India..weeks on roads that barely exist and less plumbing. Once we dined together – I was glared at and he uncomfortable so we became friends only on the road. Child labor, beggars missing body parts, old women, animals & children paw through burning garbage near the Taj Mahal, pollution to the max…there is so much that can be done but sadly the divides are still great and obvious.
Tuesday, January 04, 2011 5:34:26 PM
nothing is forever (just_kidding)
nothing is forever (just_kidding) wrote:
Very Hungry (Alright) I donot know what you mean by your detoxification.
anyways as i said earlier you can find such things depdning on where you look.
come to remote part of USA you can still find blacks being called names threatened etc.
as of now the olden days cast system is gone, gov can only make laws and educate people today I can guarantee you that a lower cast person not only can aspire but can become what ever he wants all he needs is to believe that he or she can do it.you have scholarships you have reservations social forums against violence.
if you do not know it I think your brain never tried to learn about India in 25yrs.
Tuesday, January 04, 2011 3:20:17 PM
Very Hungry (Alright)
Very Hungry (Alright) wrote:
I thought this was a story on an authors persepective & his book. The Indian audience as always are too proud to see the reality & make a mockery of their intelligence in every public forum. There is one who says the caste-ism is on the decline. The last time I checked, its very much alive and a work in progress (inspite of outdated laws against it). Elections are fought and won solely on religious and cast lines almost everywhere in India. The issue of caste is so grave that even to this day people of “low” caste are paraded naked and whipped in public for drinking water from the well of a person from “high” caste. These so called nationalistic Indians never tire to climb on people who give unvarnished opinion. Its as if the 700 million who live on 2 meals a day are non existant. Just like cows on Indian streets, caste-ism is there for people to see. My disgust is also with how India has managed to institutionalize corruption. 54% Indians pay bribe! My 25 years in India has been so intense that the last 5 years in US was of little help in my detoxification process.
Tuesday, January 04, 2011 2:36:30 PM
nothing is forever (just_kidding)
nothing is forever (just_kidding) wrote:
Sam Vurti (SAM09) wrote:
J S (sheaffer) wrote:
And finally, the author here is the new generation of American-Indian writers who can’t write a book without mentioning casteism and corruption in India because then it is not a very interesting read for this so called civilized world as it helps them feel good about themselves!
…………………………………………………
I hear this word called “real India” from ABCD’s (American Born Confused Desi”) and american’s when they real India means the India that is stereotyped to be filthy, suppressed minorities, cast system etc forgetting that Indian minorities are most successful minorities in the world, we had a powerful women leaders while USA yet to have one. we have lot of protection reservation fully funded education for lower casts and some cases minorities.
Tuesday, January 04, 2011 1:09:44 PM
Sam Vurti (SAM09)
Sam Vurti (SAM09) wrote:
J S (sheaffer) wrote:
“Yet, India has a huge problem with its cast system. It is a system that exploits the poor and keeps them that way simply because of how they were born. If you happen to be an untouchable, well, forget it, there is no upward mobility.”
First off, casteism in India is on the decline, almost to the extent where the situation is reversed. You are describing the India of 1950’s.
Second, the west, specially America has no right to point fingers at us, when this very country was involved in slave trade for centuries and Martin luther king had to march to the streets few decades ago, just to demand humane treatment of blacks in the united states. Just because you elected a black president doesn’t mean racism in the US is dead.
This does not justify the caste system but I am tired of everybody pointing out casteism, as India’s big roadblock to progress but refuse to see discrimination in their own backyard.
And finally, the author here is the new generation of American-Indian writers who can’t write a book without mentioning casteism and corruption in India because then it is not a very interesting read for this so called civilized world as it helps them feel good about themselves!
Tuesday, January 04, 2011 12:27:34 PM
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India Calling
India Calling
An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking
by Anand Giridharadas
Hardcover, 273 pages | purchase

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  • February 23, 2011, 7:06 PM IST

Who Gets to Write About India?

By Tripti Lahiri

What do William Dalrymple, Patrick French and Anand Giridharadas have in common? Each of them, in turn, has received a smackdown this year for their work on India from self-designated real McCoys who seem to feel a bit proprietary about the place.
Mr. Giridharadas, a columnist for the International Herald Tribune, who is speaking about his new book “India Calling” in New Delhi this evening, was the latest to be put in line with a scathing review in the Indian Express over the weekend.

HarperCollins Publishers India
“The last refuge of full-throated Orientalism is an Indian-American’s big India book,” said the reviewer, Mihir Sharma, adding that the NRI, or non-resident Indian, has only a few predictable and shallow narratives about the country. “The narratives will be of this type: poor Indians are now, for the first time, being allowed to dream. Or: young urban Indians are sleeping around, but they’re conflicted about it…There are precisely twelve such ideas — I shall not enumerate them, for fear of putting half of India’s publishers out of business.”
This certainly does appear to be the moment of the “big India book.” Mr. French’s “India: A Portrait” appeared last month just as “India Calling” debuted in the United States. Siddhartha Deb’s “The Beautiful and the Damned” is due out in June, while Sadanand Dhume, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (and a columnist for WSJ.com), is working on a book on India’s middle class.
Within the larger genre, there are subcategories, such as the foreign correspondent book (think Edward Luce’s “In Spite of the Gods,”  which some say is the best of the recent India books) or the NRI book, which generally has a memoir component (Anita Jain’s “Marrying Anita,” for example), and those identities generate different sorts of books.
But the extent to which the recent criticism about writing on India has centered on the identity of the writers, as much as on the quality of their work, is a little surprising. That was particularly true in the case of the pieces on Mr. Dalrymple and Mr. Giridharadas.
The reviews also raise several questions about the genre—should there even be a big India book now, or is it silly to try and sum up such a vast and diverse country in a single work? And who really should be writing about India? Is the Indian-American capable of writing only superficial narratives, as Mr. Sharma suggests? Are books about India by English people acts of re-conquest and are Indian readers who enjoy those books hopelessly colonized?
In the U.S. and U.K., “India Calling” has received very good reviews and it will be interesting to see what other Indian reviewers make of the book. Given the publishing market, it is pretty clear that a nonfiction book on India usually needs to appeal in the West rather than just locally if it wants to sell more than a few thousand copies, and readers overseas are going to want a book with a broad, if sometimes general, sweep.
“The reason there are big India books is also why there are big China books, these are countries that are either new global leaders or soon expected to be. Everyone wants to know something about it,” wrote Chiki Sarkar, editor-in-chief of Random House India, in an e-mail. “I wonder if there were big America books in the early 20th century?  I don’t know but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were.”
At least one springs to mind, though it was written a little earlier than that. Its writer was in his mid-twenties when he spent nine months in the United States and then went back to Europe to write a major work summing up his impressions of the country and its political workings–the sort of thing a person writing about India could really get lampooned for.
We are sadly ignorant of how American reviewers greeted Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” the first volume of which was published in 1835. But nowadays, he is required reading in introductory politics courses in American liberal arts colleges.
So, just wait a century or so folks, and meanwhile offer this Tocquevillian defense of your work, which appears in the preface to Volume I: “The diversity of the subjects I have had to treat is exceedingly great, and it will not be difficult to oppose an isolated fact to the body of facts which I cite, or an isolated idea to the body of ideas I put forth.”
As for those writers—and we hope they stretch the gamut from Indians from across the length and breadth of this country, to Indians from across the diaspora, to foreigners of various hues and nationalities—who are still working on their India books, please keep going. Everyone who wants to should feel free to write about India, said Mr. Dhume.
“It’s petty and small-minded to sit in judgment on who may or may not write about India,” he said, via e-mail. “Indian intellectuals need to get over the silly notion that the only people entitled to write about the country are those who have paid their dues by following Kapil Dev’s bowling average in real time, or writing unreadable reviews for Biblio, or clocking enough time at the IIC [India International Center] bar to know all the waiters by name, or whatever else it is that makes one Indian enough to write about India.”
Have you read any of the recent books about India? Share your thoughts on them in the Comments section.

Comments (5 of 10)

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      • 11:42 am July 18, 2011
      • nri wrote:
      I was with Mr. Dhume until he said “Kapil Dev’s bowling average in real time”. Kapil active cricketing days were over by the early nineties. Sounds like Mr. Dhume hasn’t kept up with Indian cricket for about 20 years. I wonder what else he is out of date with respect to India.
      • 2:55 am March 3, 2011
      • What Makes One Indian Enough to Write About India?* | The Trajectory wrote:
      [...] Recently there has been some heated discussion on who is ‘morally qualified’ to write about India. Socio-economic changes have made India the apple pie of global literary – fiction and non-fiction – circle. Patrick French’s India: A Portrait and Anand Giridharadas’s India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking have invited the ire of several intellectuals and books reviewers in India. The patronizing narrative in such books is criticized as reflecting the colonizing mindset and selectively focussed on the aspirations of the urban middle class. According to the critics an outsider’s view is not authentic and only those who are ‘Indian enough’ (measured by some abstract standard) are eligible to communicate an objective view. The controversies have led Will Heaven, Deputy Editor of Telegraph Blogs to suggest that “the colonial hangover afflicts not us but them.” [...]
      • 9:39 pm February 27, 2011
      • tukkimom wrote:
      India truly is too vast for a single book to encompass, whether by Indian or non-Indian or Indian origin authors; however, explaining India to the Western audience is best done by those who can understand both sides of the equation. What is puzzling is that the editing of such India books can sometimes leave factual errors. I recently opened Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Temptations of the West’ whose first chapter opened with the line ‘Elections were held in India in September 2000′ (or equivalent) which is inaccurate. On the next page, Allahabad was described as east of Varanasi. At this point, I gave up reading the book.
      • 10:34 am February 26, 2011
      • Navina wrote:
      Well done Tripti, I enjoy all kinds of writing on India ! From India, Indians, non-Indians too. Thanks for a great article. Navina
      • 9:35 pm February 24, 2011
      • Rkapoor wrote:
      I’m with Mr. Dhume. There is no right to write about India — anyone damn well can if they please. I’ve read both Dalrymple and Giridhardas. Both books are well researched, insightful and honest — and for those feeling insecure about India, they are accompanied by a deep affection for India and its people. So i don’t know where this pettiness is coming from. Also if one disagrees with the point of view expressed why not criticize that instead of attacking the origin of the author which is useful to no one, and really only revealing about the reviewer’s insecurity? India has made much progress but perhaps the bravado we exhibit is really quite shallow after all; otherwise why are we indulging in this age-old ad hominem lashing out which suggests an ultra sensitivity to any (even suggested) criticism. I hope readers in India will prove Mr Sharma an irrelevant relic of the past, and that’s what counts!


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Writer Anand Giridharadas hears ‘India Calling’

Thursday, January 27th, 2011

Hour 2
Anand Giridharadas was born in America but just a few decades after his parents left India in search of a better life, he returned to a new and economically booming India to work and explore his cultural heritage.  In his new book,  India Calling,  Giridharadas tells the stories of the people and the dilemmas of India today, through the lens of his family history and his childhood memories of his parent’s homeland.  He introduces us to entrepreneurs, radicals, industrialists, and religious seekers, but, most of all, to Indian families who are reconciling an economic boom with their cultural traditions.
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Sunday Book Review

Homeland Revisited

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
Calcutta, 2009.
By GAIUTRA BAHADUR
Published: January 7, 2011
In the middle of his accomplished book, “India Calling,” Anand Giridharadas tells of meeting a Maoist revolutionary in Hyderabad. The city, nicknamed Cyberabad, serves as a base for both the globalized Indian economy and an armed insurgency at war against the country’s inequalities, rooted and new. India’s Maoist — or Naxalite — movement began as a rural struggle against exploitative landlords in a caste-conscious, socialist nation but has now arrayed itself against the forces of global capitalism reshaping India. When Giridharadas pushes the Naxalite — What does one fight have to do with the other? — the man answers with a striking notion: globalization is reducing people to their specific economic task, stripping them of their humanity, just as caste had done. And software engineers in gated communities have become the new Brahmins. Giridharadas follows the curve of this argument, allowing it to seduce us. Then, he reveals that this rebel, although waging revolution by night, reports by day for a newspaper he himself describes as a shill for the multinational transformation of India. “I have to earn my lunch,” the man explains. “I’m not a whole-timer for revolution.”
INDIA CALLING
An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking
By Anand Giridharadas
273 pp. Times Books/Henry Holt & Company. $25
Multimedia
The scene accentuates Giridharadas’s appeal as a writer. “India Calling” has what Hanif Kureishi once described as “the sex of a syllogism.” Full-figured ideas animate every turn. So, simultaneously, does Giridharadas’s eye for contradiction. The combination both pleases us and makes us wary — distrustful of shapely ideas, including the author’s own.
His main thrust will be familiar to readers of his “Letter From India” series in The International Herald Tribune (for which he now writes the Currents column): ­Western-style malls and skyscrapers have proliferated since his parents emigrated in the 1970s. But the landscape most transformed is the one within. The change, Giridharadas writes, is “in the mind, in how people conceived of their possibilities: Indians now seemed to know that they didn’t have to leave, as my father had, to have their personal ­revolutions.”
Consider electricity, he says. Yes, power cuts once leveled class differences, democratically dooming everyone to the same arbitrary darkness. And true, gated communities now have private power plants that provide a way “to depart India without leaving.” But to Giridharadas this does not prove the existence of an emerging “iCaste.” He cites the example of the village of Umred, whose residents rioted to protest blackouts once stoically endured. “It was a small town in the middle of nowhere, dusty and underwhelming and dead,” he writes. “But it had begun to dream.”
For centuries, he argues, Indians had been born understanding their precise place. They knew who was master and who was servant, fixedly. Giridharadas describes hierarchy’s hold on his homeland with eloquence: “It was the calculus that governed life: Am I his sahib, or is he mine? Who should shout at whom? Whose body must apologize for its presence, and whose must swagger?” In his view, society — and the state-regulated economy set up by the nation’s founders — prevented the emergence of self-made men and (even more so) self-made women.
But globalization has led towns like Umred to demand electricity — necessary for the Internet and satellite television, and “essential,” as one resident tells Giridharadas, “to ambition.” Capitalism allows Indians to imagine and even realize lives outside their fates (kismet) and prescribed roles (karma). Servants might become masters. In other words, it accomplishes what the Naxalites and Nehru failed to achieve.
That is Giridharadas’s seductive theory. And it inspires wariness, just as the Naxalites’ does — yet not because of any dishonesty. In fact, Giridharadas is disarmingly honest. Raised in the United States, he acknowledges upfront his quintessentially American lens: “I had begun to see self-invention as a theme of India’s unfolding drama. It was an idea that resonated with me, naturally, because of my own family’s story.” In 2003, after graduating from college, Giridharadas retraced his parents’ steps and went back to India. He took a consulting job and, a year later, a reporting position in Mumbai. His was an unexpected circle traveled by other ­Indian-Americans, a cohort he calls “India’s stepchildren.” These bankers, artists and techies were not simply looking for themselves. They were pursuing futures in the country their parents had left behind, but one that was now achieving growth rates surpassed only by China.
The book’s subtitle promises “an intimate portrait of a nation’s remaking.” Giridharadas, however, casts himself as narrator rather than subject. There is no identity crisis here. He doesn’t present a personal love story either, although the acknowledgements suggest there is one. Giridharadas provides just enough family history — movingly, for instance, snippets from his grandmother’s diary about her arranged marriage — to illuminate the India that once was.
But he recognizes that as the new India called to him, it also called to its very own. This memoir is about them. Giridharadas introduces us to fascinating characters: The shoeless son of a coolie who transforms himself into a local Dale Carnegie, teaching others how to reinvent themselves. The billionaire Mukesh Ambani — “a nonviolent Don Corleone” — whose brash embrace of Bollywood and a peculiarly subcontinental style of bribery forces Giridharadas to ask: “So was India becoming more Westernized or less?” And a high-powered banker who lives with her parents, lingering “in the badlands” between “liberated and anxious,” her confused love life a testament to how wrenching the freedom to shape one’s future can be.
“India Calling” is a fine book, elegant, self-aware and unafraid of contradictions and complexity. Giridharadas captures fundamental changes in the nature of family and class relationships and the very idea of what it means to be an Indian. Still, his filter — India seen through the eyes of one of its stepchildren — makes me skeptical about his thesis, however alluring. Giridharadas wonders if the Naxalite was projecting the emotions of the old feudal fight into his critique of Google and Microsoft. In the same vein, I wonder if Giridharadas is projecting his own experience — brought up in America’s free market culture, a child of immigrants raised on reinvention — into his argument that capitalism is teaching Indians how to become men of their own making.

Gaiutra Bahadur’s “Coolie Woman,” about Indians who reinvented themselves in the plantation-era West Indies, will be published in 2012.
A version of this review appeared in print on January 9, 2011, on page BR13 of the Sunday Book Review.
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