Midnight's Children Come of Age. Some Indian Novels of the Past Decade

Abstract

The ending of the British Raj and the emergence of an Independent India in 1947 raised some debate as to the future of the English language and the future of Indian literature writtten in English competing, as it would be, with so many other rich indigenous languages. Would the distinguished Indian writers writing in the 1950s and 60s be the last to do so in English? This article discusses the novels of six Indian writers born in the post-colonial decade of the 1950s whose first work appears in the 1980s: Rohinton Mistry, Boman Desai, I. Allan Sealy, Shashi Taroor, Amitav Ghosh and Vikram Seth, all of whom have contributed to the maintenance of the Indian novel in English. There are, however, aspects of Indian life which do seem better reflected in other Indian languages which call for more translation in order to reach a wider, non-Indian readership.