I Surveying the Field

The first decade of the present millennium has been an exciting time for Indian English fiction. While the established authors went from strength to strength, fresh voices opened up a host of new possibilities in the articulation of the Indian consciousness, both home-based and diasporic. The range of themes extended from re-mapping mythology and history to reassessing the globalised India of today, and technical experiments transited from re-inventing the epics to forays into science fiction and the graphic novel. In its grounding in socio-cultural concerns specific to India and in its confident negotiation of language, form and content, twenty-first century Indian English fiction follows the dynamic trajectory of innovation and insight established in the 1980s by seminal novels such as Midnight's Children, albeit along radically different lines.

The present volume contends that the current body of Indian English fiction strikes out on so many new paths so confidently that it can no longer be dismissed as derivative or dispossessed, or mere postcolonial ‘writing back’ or compensatory ‘national allegory.’ The essays in this book debate all these theoretical categories afresh in the light of the new corpus of writing that has consolidated the claim of Indian English fiction to be a major component of contemporary Anglophone literature.

A brief review of criticism on Indian English fiction (IEF) from 2000 to 2010 – a comprehensive survey is impossible given the number of titles appearing each year in India alone – will underscore the special contribution of this book. Three kinds of publications readily come to mind. First there are the broad overviews including diasporic writing. Second, there are monographs and anthologies on single authors and individual texts. Third, one has monographs and anthologies on specific themes pertaining to groups of novels. As regards readership, the target audience is usually the interested reader and students of literature, and occasionally specialist researchers and academics.

The overviews follow a number of rubrics. Our contributors Bill Ashcroft and Paul Sharrad have located IEF within the postcolonial discourse in innumerable publications; A Companion to Indian Fiction in English (2004) edited by Pier Paolo Piccioco ranges from R.K. Narayan to Arundhati Roy; IEF features prominently in South Asian Writing in English (2006) edited by another contributor in this collection, Fakrul Alam.