Indian English Fiction: Seeding to Efflorescence

Indian English literature began as an interesting by-product of an eventful encounter in the late eighteenth century between a vigorous and enterprising Britain and a stagnant and chaotic India. As a result of this encounter as F.W. Bain puts it ‘India a withered trunk… suddenly shot out with foreign foliage'. The first problem that confronts the historian of Indian English literature is to define its nature. The question has been made rather complicated owing to two factors: first this body of writing has, from time to time, been designated variously as ‘Indo-Anglian literature', ‘Indian Writing in English' and ‘Indo-English literature'. Secondly the failure to make clear-cut distinctions has also often led to confusion between categories such as ‘Anglo-Indian literature', literature in the Indian languages translated into English and original composition in English by Indians. Thus, in his A Sketch of Anglo-Indian Literature (1908), E.F. Oaten considers the poetry of Henry Derizio as a part of ‘Anglo-Indian literature' the same critic in his essay on Anglo-Indian literature in the Cambridge of English Literature includes Toru Dutt, Sarojini Naidu, Rabindranath Tagore and Arvindo Ghose among ‘Anglo-Indian writers along with F.W. Bain and F.A. Steel.