CHAPTER 87: INDIAN LITERATURE IN ENGLISH.

The article presents information on Indian literature in English. It informs that R.K. Narayan's account of his school days in Mysore is informed with a comic irony which conveys the alienating effects in general of a colonial education as well as the long-standing attachment which, in his particular case, grew out of his early encounter with the language of the colonizers. "English in India" was a paper delivered at a conference on Commonwealth literature at the University of Leeds, but may be regarded also as a significant contribution by a notable novelist to a crucial debate which was going on in India in the years following Independence. This debate was concerned with the legitimacy of English as a medium of literary expression and, a related issue, the status and authenticity of Indian writing in English. As a label applied to literature written in "English by Indians," Indo-Anglian was given general currency by the pioneering critic K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar when his volume of essays appeared in 1943 under the title Indo-Anglian Literature. No longer fashionable, the term served at the time to draw attention to a body of creative work, limited though it was, which had emerged since the last quarter of the nineteenth century.