Proceedings of the 32nd International Academic Conference, Geneva

MANY INDIAN LITERATURES: AN ILLUSTRATION OF THE ANCIENT YET STEADILY GROWING COSMOPOLITAN

PRIYAM SINGH

Abstract:

India is a land of contradictions because the co-existence of multiplicities has been the norm here. This is not to say that there is consonance in the many differences that persist but that at some level or the other, there is acceptance and nothing can be completely shunned. To put it in a magic realistic understanding of Marquez and apt words by Arundhati Roy for India, “India lives in several centuries at the same time. Somehow we manage to progress and regress simultaneously.” In that spirit, this paper intends to chart through some specific examples of the literary texts from India, the path of to and fro between which India will look like an enchanting exploration but in actuality show narratives steeped in its politics, law and culture. Namely they will include, ‘Cilappatikaram’ by Adigal which is an epic with a female protagonist, ‘Raag Darbari’ by Srilal Shukla which is a satirical rendering of a post independence Indian village, a comparative effort between India’s foremost epic ‘Mahabharata’ and its modern day telling by Dr. Shashi Tharoor called ‘The Great Indian Novel’, ‘A Fine Balance’ by Rohinton Mistry which entails the threatening politics within a democratic nation and finally ‘Ghachar Ghochar’, originally written in Kannada by Vivek Shanbhag and recently translated into English, a masterpiece touching to the realistic core, the effects money and success can have on different people while hearkening to ‘Financial Expert’ written by R.K. Narayan. These examples in their content and context coming from different states of India, written in several genres and languages and various time periods in the last hundred years or so is illustrative of the melting pot that India has been. Why is the level of tolerance in this country debatable but never dismissed? The idea of this paper presentation is to depict India’s cosmopolitan literature and that despite the bans of many books in India, the country does not altogether support the muffling of voices, evident in its culture of writing over the years and also in recent Supreme Court judgments’.

Keywords: Indian literature, cosmopolitan, culture of writing, languages, female protagonist, voices

DOI: 10.20472/IAC.2017.032.037

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