Critically analyse the developments in the field of Indian English Fiction during the post-1980 period./How was Rushdie successful in creating a new wave in Indian English literature?

Critically analyse the developments in the field of Indian English Fiction during the post-1980 period./How was Rushdie successful in creating a new wave in Indian English literature?

Indian Writing in English witnessed a renaissance in 1980s. The two cultural and literary events that led to the attempts of departing from the preceding period way of writing are: The first one, Edward Said’s theoretical deliberations in Orientalism was instrumental to the emergence of the postcolonial discourse and the second one is the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children with departure from the predominant realist mode of the Indian English novel practised since the 1930s. Midnight’s Children is perhaps the most outstanding and ‘ground breaking’ novel of this period. It is a multifaceted narrative; it is at once an autobiographical bildungsroman, a picaresque comedy, a surrealist fantasy, a political and existential allegory, a political satire and a stylistic experiment. Described by the author as a ‘sort of modern fairy tale’, the narrative is an exciting blend of the natural and the supernatural, political allegory and ethical implications.

Such an epoch making work heralded the advent of a new generation with remarkable fresh insights and abundant fecundity and appearance of a certain post modern playfulness, the turn to history, an exuberance of language, the reinvention of allegory, the sexual frankness, even the prominent references to Bollywood, all seem to owe something to Rushdie’s novel. As a result of this and a considerable degree of orientation in the Indian world view there is a paradigm shift in Indian English fiction’s theme and narrative strategies employed to objectify the intended vision of life and world. The influence of Rushdie’s work is acknowledged by critics and novelists alike. Shyam Asnani observes that Midnight’s Children led to “the birth of a new kind of Indian English novel moving from the portrayal of the contemporary socio-political themes to the imaginative treatment of individual fantasies in the mythic/archetypal, fabulist and satiric modes” (26).Paranjape has remarked that it has really jolted the very foundation of the Indian English novel. Anita Desai points out “Indian writing in the past was characterized by recurring portrayals of stock-scenes, themes and characters and a turn away from the circular to the linear narrative structure under the influence of Western literature” yet recently in “Midnight’s Children Salman Rushdie wound the straight line of narrative into a circle” while in Shame he “Mythologized still-living people and turned events in living memory into fantastic legends” (26)...................

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