No abstract

At the turn of the last century, the Indian poet, novelist, economist, historian, and civil servant Romesh Chunder Dutt published two English-language "condensations" and translations of the authoritative Sanskrit tellings of the ancient epics: the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. This essay argues that, for Dutt, the epics document the past, its social mores and its artefacts, while simultaneously serving as historical artefacts of, as well as living organisms from, that past. The epics are excavated treasures that embody not the dead weight of a now inanimate object but a living, breathing, speaking voice. In transposing the Sanskrit sloka into the English trochaic octametre in his translations, Dutt measures out "India" in verse, transposing the material, metrical, and spoken form of the once-known to the once-again nation. Thus, his translations of the ancient epics simultaneously establish and blur the epochal time of a supposedly historically and geographically stable and singular entity known as "India" and in so doing illustrate the fraught category of "Modern Indian Literature" and the modern Indian nation, which depends on recovering an "authentic" pre-colonial identity to inaugurate its modernity under British colonial rule.

Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949), the English-language Indian poetess and politician, appears before the viewer in the frontispieces to her first two collections of poetry, The Golden Threshold (1905) and The Bird of Time: Songs of Life, Death and the Spring (1912). She presents herself in print, as in her oratory, as both a figure of nineteenth-century verse culture and a cosmopolitan nationalist. The Golden Threshold includes a now well-known introduction by Arthur Symons and a sketch of a young Naidu by J. B. Yeats (father of W. B. Yeats). [See Figure 1.] Arrayed in a voluminous and ruffled white dress, distinctly “Western” in style, with hands clasped together, Naidu's youthful yet grave face stares directly at the viewer. She appears here as a precocious, prepubescent Victorian poetess captured within a private setting. Yet when this volume was published in 1905, the picture, drawn during Naidu's sojourn in England in the mid-1890s when much of the poetry included in the collection was composed, must have been almost a decade old. The only sign of racial difference in the sketch is her lightly shaded skin and dark hair. The blurred sketch echoes Naidu's own ambiguous position at this time: she is neither wholly Indian nor wholly English, and she navigates uneasily between the roles of naïve student of poetry and accomplished poetess.

Originating in the late 1950s and early 1960s during a period of decolonization, the category of Commonwealth literature is inseparable from the history of the Commonwealth of Nations. Encompassing Anglophone literature from the former British colonies, it paradoxically excluded literature from Great Britain within its purview. While an emphasis was initially placed on literature from the former settler colonies, Commonwealth literature scholars soon became attentive towards literary production from the former occupied colonies as well. Often critiqued for its marginalization of the literature studied (as separate from and therefore secondary to British literature proper), its lack of interest in literatures in languages other than English, and its lack of political engagement, Commonwealth literary studies has been largely incorporated into and become inseparable from postcolonial literary studies and theory in the last two decades.

The Indian‐born, American‐based writer, Vikram Chandra has published two novels, Red Earth , Pouring Rain (1995) and Sacred Games (2006), and a collection of short stories, Love and Longing in Bombay (1997). He is known for his interest in narrative structure, and his works often feature embedded narratives, parallel narratives, multiple narrators, and the clever manipulation of the narrative conventions of various genres, including detective fiction, fantasy, and oral traditions. In his latest works, Chandra has also been one of the foremost chroniclers of the impact of “new,” market‐liberalized India on its urban landscapes, especially Bombay.