Engaging with the ‘Everyday’

My initial reaction to Indian English fiction by women when I first encountered this corpus of work had been guarded – even the much-lauded Shashi Deshpande and Anita Desai had left me somewhat disenchanted. It was only later that I realised that what was happening innocuously in this body of writing had gone unnoticed by me because I had been looking for grand narrative designs and resonant themes and styles that this fiction had never set out to achieve. That is when I discovered ‘the fascination of the everyday’.

The Indian English woman's novel in the first decade of the twenty-first century shows a thematic variety that makes it difficult to see groups and patterns. Its examples come from all over the country from regions that have had different histories of English education, are culturally different and have completely different perceptions of what it means to live in modern India. Except that it still continues to be largely a middle-class phenomenon, today this novel is written from multiple locations and perspectives, making it a fertile new area for the study of modern India. What Aijaz Ahmad had insisted on in speaking of a notion of ‘Indian literatures’ is evident even in the novels written in this single language, English, because India's many regions and cultures come into play here.