Indian Imagination and the "National Question"

Involvement, concern and emotion are the components of some of the most remarkable novels written during that historical period, in the aftermath of Independence, a crucial moment that demanded of all Indians a radically new approach to life.

However, Indian society was already undergoing a process of considerable change even before this period and, from a cultural point of view, since the second half of the nineteenth century, intellectuals, poets and writers had been influenced by the British cultural environment which had pervaded their languages and traditions, introducing “new” literary forms such as the novel.
The first novel written in English dates back to 1864, to Bankim Chatterjee’s Rajmohan’s Wife, but not until the third or fourth decade of the twentieth century was there a serious and systematic attempt to place such writing in its proper historical context and to consider it as literature. The so-called “twice-born fiction” is the expression of a contamination that has melded languages and literary styles, taking cultural advantages from both worlds, British and Indian.