Indian literature
Sometime in the first half of the 2ND millennium BC Aryan peoples from the northwest entered the Indian subcontinent and displaced the Indus Valley civilization of what is now Pakistan (see Indus Valley civilization). The language of the Aryans was Sanskrit, which eventually became the classic literary language of Hinduism, the leading religion of India.
Since about 1400 BC India has had a continuous literature in Sanskrit, which still remains a sacred and learned language for Hindus. The impact of the early literature cannot be overestimated because it had such a powerful impact on later works.
From about the 1st century AD there developed a literature in Tamil, which has also persisted in literary use until the present. Much later, from the 12Th century on, literature's in several other languages appeared—in Hindi, Bengali, Assamese, Punjabi, and Urdu, among others. And from the 11Th century an extensive Islamic literature, primarily in Persian and Urdu, developed as a result of the 8Th-century Islamic conquest of a portion of India (see Islamic literature).
The modern period of Indian literature began in the 18Th century with the colonization of India by the British. There was not a complete break with the past, however. The influence of the early Sanskrit classics could still be seen in the modern novels, poetry, and drama that were being reshaped by Western political ideas and literary styles.
The Sanskrit Classics
The main body of classical Sanskrit literature consists of the Vedas, sacred Hindu writings from about 1400 to 1200 BC; the commentaries on the Vedas in the Brahman's, the Aranyakas, and the Upanishads (1000 to 500 BC); the epic and wisdom literature (400 BC to AD 1000); and poetry in a style called kavya (AD 200 to 1200).
The oldest document in the literature of the Indian subcontinent is the Rigveda, or Veda of the Stanzas, of about 1400 BC. The fundamental text of Brahmanical Hinduism, it is largely a compilation of hymns dedicated to the gods of the ancient Vedic religion (see Hinduism). The second Veda, the Yajurveda (1200 BC), contains sacred formulas recited by priests during sacrifices. The third, the Samaveda (about 1100 BC), also called the Veda of the Chants, is essentially an anthology of Rigveda literature. The fourth, the Atharvaveda (1200 BC), contains hymns, incantations, and magic charms.
While all of the Vedas were written in verse, the Brahmanas (Disquisitions About the Ritual), which were composed in about 1000 to 700 BC, were written in a dry, expository prose. So were the Aranyakas (Books Studied in the Forest), written from 800 to 600 BC. Far more interesting and readable were the Upanishads (Collections of Esoteric Equations), dated from 1000 to 500 BC.
The name Upanishad implies a pupil sitting at the feet of a revered teacher, and the 108 known Upanishads—written in both prose and verse—record the wisdom of a succession of Hindu sages and teachers. These texts form the basis of much later Hindu philosophy. They represent the last stage of Vedic tradition, and the teaching based on them is known as the Vedanta, or conclusion of the Veda. The special concern of the Upanishads is with the nature of reality, and, in spite of the polytheism of the Hindu religion, there is some development toward the concept of a single supreme being.
The chief works in the Sanskrit epic and wisdom tradition are the Mahabharata (Great Epic of the Bharata Dynasty), 400 BC to AD 200; the Ramayana (Romance of Rama), about 300 BC; the Harivamsa (Genealogy of Hari), AD 400; and the Puranas (Ancient Lore), AD 400 to 1000.
The Mahabharata, which contains about 100,000 couplets, is the longest poem ever written. It reached its present form in about AD 400 and consists of a mass of legendary and wisdom material worked around a central heroic narrative concerning the struggle for power between two related families. Within this enormous work is the famous Bhagavadgita (The Lord's Song), the single most significant religious text of Hinduism. This poem, written in the 1st or 2ND century AD, consists of 700 verses divided into 18 chapters. Composed as a dialogue between the warrior prince Arjuna and his friend Krishna, an incarnation of the black god Vishnu, the poem goes beyond a basic war story to consider the nature of God and how He can be known. The Mahabharata has long remained a popular work in the literature of South Asia and Southeast Asia, and many of the incidents that this monumental work relates have been carved in stone, notably at Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom in Cambodia (see Angkor Wat).
The Ramayana is less an epic than a romance, recounting the story of Prince Rama and his wife, Sita. In its present form it consists of 24,000 couplets divided into seven parts. The story presents Rama as the ideal king and Sita as the ideal wife. The poem still enjoys immense popularity throughout India, and in the north its events are enacted in an annual pageant. In other parts of India and the Far East the story has formed a basis for plays and dance.
The Harivamsa is a supplement to the Mahabharata. It deals with the ancestry and the exploits of the god Krishna, together with other Hindu lore.
The Puranas, of which 18 principal ones survive, are encyclopedic works, often of considerable length, that deal with the mythology of Hinduism, the sagas of heroes, and the legends of saints. The most significant of them, the Bhagavata-Purana, celebrates the god Vishnu in his many manifestations, particularly his incarnation as Krishna. This book has had an enormous impact on Indian religion, art, and literature, and some Indian scholars consider it the greatest poem ever written. There are also 18 Upapuranas (lesser Puranas) that treat much the same material used in the major ones.
The kavyas were Sanskrit court epics, mostly in verse of a highly artificial style characterized by elaborate meter and figures of speech. Their subject matter was derived mainly from the earlier epics. The earliest surviving kavya literature was written in the 1st century by a Buddhist, Asvaghosa. The greatest of the kavya poets was Kalidasa, who is believed to have lived in the late 4th and early 5Th centuries (see Kalidasa). The influence of kavya poetry dominated literary taste for a thousand years.
Sanskrit narrative literature is so abundant and rich that for a time it was believed that all folktales originated in India. Many Indian stories have found their way into other literatures—for example, the Islamic Arabian Nights, the Decameron of Boccaccio, and the stories of La Fontaine and Hans Christian Andersen. The best Sanskrit collection is the Pancatantra (Five Chapters), a compilation of animal fables that has circulated widely in other parts of the world. In Europe the work was known as The Fables of Bidpai, after their narrator.
Buddhist Texts
Written in the Pali language and called collectively the Pali canon, the texts of early Buddhism originated in the first few centuries after the death of Buddha in 483 BC. Pali is a western Indian dialect that was adopted by the Theravada school of Buddhism, and it is often identified with Buddha's own speech. The Dhammapada (Verses on the Buddhist Doctrine) is considered an excellent example of moralistic Indian literature. Another significant work, the Jatakas (Birth Stories), recounts some 500 episodes that supposedly occurred during previous incarnations of Buddha. The work consists of fairy tales, animal stories, ballads, and anecdotes. (See also Buddhism.)
Literature in the Dravidian Languages
Spoken primarily in southern India, the seven major Dravidian languages are Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Gondi, Kurukh, and Tulu. Of these, the literature of Tamil, dating from the 1st century AD, has the longest continuing history.
The oldest non-Sanskrit literature of India consists of the earliest Tamil writings. Called cankam literature because it was believed to have been written in three cankams, or academies, in Madurai, it is represented by eight anthologies of poetry, ten long poems, and a grammar called Tolkappiyam (Old Composition). The poems are classified by theme as akam (interior) for the love lyrics or puram (exterior) for the heroic poems on war, death, the glory of kings, and the poverty of poets.
The literary period from about AD 300 to 900 is known for its Tamil epics, the Cilappatikaram (The Jewelled Anklet) and Manimekalai (Girdle of Gems). The Cilappatikaram, a synthesis of mood poetry in the cankam tradition, contains much Tamil lore and detailed descriptions of daily life in both village and city. The main story line centers on a young merchant who is unjustly executed after he tries to sell his wife's anklet to a treacherous goldsmith who had stolen a similar anklet belonging to the queen. His widow finally proves his innocence. In a twin epic of the Cilappatikaram, Girdle of Gems is a courtesan torn between love for a prince and the religious life. The work is partial to Buddhism, and in the end, after many adventures and much suffering, the heroine chooses religion.
From the 10Th through the 13Th century there was an emergence of literature in other languages: Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam. The first significant work in Kannada is the 9Th-century Kavirajamarga (The Royal Road of Poets), which describes the Kannada country, people, and dialects. Translations and reworkings of Sanskrit classics also became popular.
The major Kannada poet was Pampa, who in the 10Th century created a style that served as the model for all future works in the language. His great epics include a rendering of the Sanskrit classic, Mahabharata, and Adipurana (First or Original Scriptures), a religious work on the life of Purudeva, a hero-saint of Jainism (see Jainism).
One new literary type did emerge in the 12Th century—the vacana, Kannada prose poetry in which holy men expressed radical views on religion and society in their rejections of ritualism and asceticism as well as all the limitations imposed by caste, creed, and sex. Much of this literature was influenced by the bhakti movement, within Hinduism, which emphasized a strong personal attachment of an individual toward his or her god. After the 7Th century bhakti became a widespread and popular form of Hindu religious life, inspiring a substantial quantity of poetry and art.
Islamic Literatures
The period of Muslim influence in India extended over hundreds of years, from the time of the conquest of Sind (now part of Pakistan) in the 8Th century until Queen Victoria was crowned empress in 1857.
The Muslims preferred the regional languages to Sanskrit and thus encouraged the development of popular regional literatures. They also used Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Urdu. Because Arabic was the language of the Koran, Islam's holy book, it was used extensively for scholarship. As late as the 18Th century Shah Wali Allah, one of India's greatest theologians, wrote many treatises in Arabic. The literatures in the Indo-Iranian languages of Baluchi and Pashto were exclusively creations of Muslim writers. Muslims were also the most influential contributors in the Indo-Aryan languages of Kashmiri, Sindhi, and Panjabi. The most distinctive Muslim works were written in Persian and Urdu, however, and they led to the establishment of an Indian school of Persian poetry and to an extensive literature in Urdu.
The first truly great poet in the Persian language in India was Amir Khosrow. Born at Etah, in northern India, he was connected with royal courts all of his life. He wrote five books of divans (poems) that were composed of ghazals, a traditional Muslim form. Altogether his poetry comprised some 200,000 couplets. He is also known for a number of prose works and some longer historical poems.
The period from 1556 to 1657 was the golden age of Persian poetry in India, though most of the poets were not native to the country. They were immigrants from Persia who found refuge from political and religious persecution at the court of the emperor Akbar and his successors (see Akbar). The greatest 17Th-century poet of the Indian school was ʿAbdul Qadir Bedil. His 16 books of poetry contain about 147,000 verses. He was well acquainted with Indian religious and philosophical thought.
Literature in Urdu, one of the official languages of modern Pakistan, began to develop in the 16th century. Poetry, which was dominant for three centuries, was executed mainly in six literary forms. Qasidahs are poems written to earn money by praising kings and noblemen. Haju are derogatory verses, and shahr-ashub are verses lamenting the decline or destruction of a city; both of these types reveal much about the morals and customs of the time. Marsiyeh are elegies or laments read at public gatherings. The masnavi was the preferred form for all descriptive and narrative purposes because it allowed more freedom of expression—only the lines of each couplet had to rhyme, in contrast to the more complex rhyming schemes of other forms. Because the masnavi was a Persian invention, many of the Indian works were abridged versions of Persian originals.
The favorite form of the Urdu poets was the ghazal, a love poem that sometimes dwelled on a mystical love of God. Because of its requirements of rhyme and meter, it required great skill from the poet. The greatest ghazal writers were Mir Taqi Mir in the 18th century and Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib in the 19th century. Mir wrote of love in very simple language, while Ghalib covered a wider range of ideas.
Literature in Indic Languages
Sometime after the 10th century other dialects began to emerge as identifiable languages, each with its own literature. These Indic languages included Hindi, Bengali, Kashmiri, Panjabi, Rajasthani, Marathi, Gujarati, Oriya, Sindhi, and Assamese. Up to the 16th century all of this literature was poetry, and in its early stages it borrowed from the Sanskrit classics for themes and forms.
In Hindi, for instance, the gradual transformation of the older forms of religious lyric to new literary styles based on Western models did not begin until the 18th century. Prem Chand was a pioneer in adapting Indian themes to European forms. His first major novel, Sevasadan (House of Service), dealt with the problems of moral corruption in the Indian middle class. His short stories depict the social evil of arranged marriages, abuses of the British bureaucracy, and the exploitation of the peasants.
The Modern Period
Following the inspiration of Rammohan Ray, the father of modern India, reform-minded Hindus began to take a positive attitude toward Western literature. Early in the 19th century they formed literary clubs to spread the influence of predominantly British works. At the same time Ray also founded a movement to revive the best in Hindu culture. He translated the Upanishads into modern Bengali before publishing a volume on the ethical teachings of Jesus in 1820. (See also Ray, Rammohan.)
The author whose novels established prose as a literary vehicle for the Bengali language was Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. His first notable work was Durgesanandini (Daughter of the Lord of the Fort). It was not outstanding fiction, but with its appearance in 1865 the Bengali novel was born. (See also Chatterjee, Bankim Chandra.)
The best known of all Indian writers in the early 20th century was Rabindranath Tagore, a poet who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1913. He was extremely influential in introducing Western ideas to India and the best of Indian culture to the rest of the world. His Manasi (published in 1890) contains the best of his early poetry. In the stories of Galpa Guccha (1912; Bunches of Tales), he showed his sympathy for the poverty and backwardness of village people. (See also Tagore, Rabindranath.)
In poetry and drama, modern Hindi literature began with Harischandra. His great contributions to the formation of modern Hindi were recognized even in his short lifetime, and he was given the honorific title Bharatendu, meaning “Moon of India.” He began his literary career at age 17, when he founded the first Hindi literary magazine, the Kavivachana-sudha. His plays include satirical farces and several dramas in which he deplores the poverty of India and its centuries of foreign domination.
The modern literature in all Indian languages was inevitably influenced by desire for social reform, antipathy toward British rule, the political activities of Mahatma Gandhi, and new ideologies coming from Europe—particularly socialism and Marxism. Much of the literature tried to revive the great periods of Indian history, such as the Maurya, Gupta, and Mughal dynasties, before the British intervened.
Gandhi urged authors to write for the masses. One of the exponents of Gandhian thought was Jainendra Kumar, an essayist, novelist, and short-story writer in Hindi. He started his literary career in the 1920s, after release from jail for his part in Gandhi's noncooperation movement. Long after India had achieved independence, he was still writing on political issues. His novel Muktibodh, for which he won an award in 1966, dramatizes the dilemma of an idealistic follower of Gandhi who is later caught up in the realities of power politics.
Tamil literature also persisted into the modern period. The first novel in Tamil, the Piratapamutaliyar Carittiram (The Life and Adventures of Prathapa Mudaliar), by Vetanayakam Pillai, appeared in 1879. It is a loosely gathered string of narratives centered on an innocent hero. The major 19th-century writer in Tamil was Rajam Aiyar. In his Kamalampal Carittiram (The Fatal Rumor) he created a classic romance set in a rural scene, a story told with realism, humor, irony, and social satire. In language he followed the classical style, which he intermixed with informal conversation.
The greatest poet in modern Urdu was Muhammad Iqbal, who was known for his influential efforts toward the formation of a separate Muslim state—Pakistan—on the Indian subcontinent. Some of his early poems were collected in a volume titled Bang-e dara (The Call of the Bell) in 1924. Many of his other writings were written in Persian to reach a larger Muslim audience. (See also Iqbal, Muhammad.)
There has been an English literature in India for about 200 years. Among the early writers were Henry Derozio, a social reformer who criticized the religious beliefs and practices of orthodox Hinduism, and Michael Madhusudan Datta, the first great poet and dramatist of Bengali literature. An outstanding woman poet was Sarojini Naidu, called the Nightingale of India. A political activist, she was the first woman to be elected president of the Indian National Congress and to be appointed a state governor. Her collected poems have been published under the titles The Sceptered Flute (1928) and The Feather of the Dawn (1961).
English prose fiction began in 1902 with the novel The Lake of Palms by Romesh Chunder Dutt. The next significant novelist was Mulk Raj Anand, who denounced class and caste distinctions in a series of novels, including Untouchable (1935), The Coolie (1936), and The Big Heart (1945). One of the finest Indian novelists writing in English was R.K. Narayan, whose books include The Financial Expert (1952), Waiting for Mahatma (1955), and The Painter of Signs (1976). Another author whose following is wider outside India is Santha Rama Rau, who went to the United States in 1961. One of the most popular novelists in English has been Raja Rao, whose novels include Kanthapura (1938), The Cow of the Barricades (1947), The Serpent and the Rope (1960), and Comrade Kirillov (1976). A later generation of Indian writers in English included Anita Desai (born 1937), Salman Rushdie (born 1947), Vikram Seth (born 1952), and Rohinton Mistry (born 1952). (See also Narayan, R.K.; Rama Rau, Santha.)
Since about 1400 BC India has had a continuous literature in Sanskrit, which still remains a sacred and learned language for Hindus. The impact of the early literature cannot be overestimated because it had such a powerful impact on later works.
From about the 1st century AD there developed a literature in Tamil, which has also persisted in literary use until the present. Much later, from the 12Th century on, literature's in several other languages appeared—in Hindi, Bengali, Assamese, Punjabi, and Urdu, among others. And from the 11Th century an extensive Islamic literature, primarily in Persian and Urdu, developed as a result of the 8Th-century Islamic conquest of a portion of India (see Islamic literature).
The modern period of Indian literature began in the 18Th century with the colonization of India by the British. There was not a complete break with the past, however. The influence of the early Sanskrit classics could still be seen in the modern novels, poetry, and drama that were being reshaped by Western political ideas and literary styles.
The Sanskrit Classics
The main body of classical Sanskrit literature consists of the Vedas, sacred Hindu writings from about 1400 to 1200 BC; the commentaries on the Vedas in the Brahman's, the Aranyakas, and the Upanishads (1000 to 500 BC); the epic and wisdom literature (400 BC to AD 1000); and poetry in a style called kavya (AD 200 to 1200).
The oldest document in the literature of the Indian subcontinent is the Rigveda, or Veda of the Stanzas, of about 1400 BC. The fundamental text of Brahmanical Hinduism, it is largely a compilation of hymns dedicated to the gods of the ancient Vedic religion (see Hinduism). The second Veda, the Yajurveda (1200 BC), contains sacred formulas recited by priests during sacrifices. The third, the Samaveda (about 1100 BC), also called the Veda of the Chants, is essentially an anthology of Rigveda literature. The fourth, the Atharvaveda (1200 BC), contains hymns, incantations, and magic charms.
While all of the Vedas were written in verse, the Brahmanas (Disquisitions About the Ritual), which were composed in about 1000 to 700 BC, were written in a dry, expository prose. So were the Aranyakas (Books Studied in the Forest), written from 800 to 600 BC. Far more interesting and readable were the Upanishads (Collections of Esoteric Equations), dated from 1000 to 500 BC.
The name Upanishad implies a pupil sitting at the feet of a revered teacher, and the 108 known Upanishads—written in both prose and verse—record the wisdom of a succession of Hindu sages and teachers. These texts form the basis of much later Hindu philosophy. They represent the last stage of Vedic tradition, and the teaching based on them is known as the Vedanta, or conclusion of the Veda. The special concern of the Upanishads is with the nature of reality, and, in spite of the polytheism of the Hindu religion, there is some development toward the concept of a single supreme being.
The chief works in the Sanskrit epic and wisdom tradition are the Mahabharata (Great Epic of the Bharata Dynasty), 400 BC to AD 200; the Ramayana (Romance of Rama), about 300 BC; the Harivamsa (Genealogy of Hari), AD 400; and the Puranas (Ancient Lore), AD 400 to 1000.
The Mahabharata, which contains about 100,000 couplets, is the longest poem ever written. It reached its present form in about AD 400 and consists of a mass of legendary and wisdom material worked around a central heroic narrative concerning the struggle for power between two related families. Within this enormous work is the famous Bhagavadgita (The Lord's Song), the single most significant religious text of Hinduism. This poem, written in the 1st or 2ND century AD, consists of 700 verses divided into 18 chapters. Composed as a dialogue between the warrior prince Arjuna and his friend Krishna, an incarnation of the black god Vishnu, the poem goes beyond a basic war story to consider the nature of God and how He can be known. The Mahabharata has long remained a popular work in the literature of South Asia and Southeast Asia, and many of the incidents that this monumental work relates have been carved in stone, notably at Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom in Cambodia (see Angkor Wat).
The Ramayana is less an epic than a romance, recounting the story of Prince Rama and his wife, Sita. In its present form it consists of 24,000 couplets divided into seven parts. The story presents Rama as the ideal king and Sita as the ideal wife. The poem still enjoys immense popularity throughout India, and in the north its events are enacted in an annual pageant. In other parts of India and the Far East the story has formed a basis for plays and dance.
The Harivamsa is a supplement to the Mahabharata. It deals with the ancestry and the exploits of the god Krishna, together with other Hindu lore.
The Puranas, of which 18 principal ones survive, are encyclopedic works, often of considerable length, that deal with the mythology of Hinduism, the sagas of heroes, and the legends of saints. The most significant of them, the Bhagavata-Purana, celebrates the god Vishnu in his many manifestations, particularly his incarnation as Krishna. This book has had an enormous impact on Indian religion, art, and literature, and some Indian scholars consider it the greatest poem ever written. There are also 18 Upapuranas (lesser Puranas) that treat much the same material used in the major ones.
The kavyas were Sanskrit court epics, mostly in verse of a highly artificial style characterized by elaborate meter and figures of speech. Their subject matter was derived mainly from the earlier epics. The earliest surviving kavya literature was written in the 1st century by a Buddhist, Asvaghosa. The greatest of the kavya poets was Kalidasa, who is believed to have lived in the late 4th and early 5Th centuries (see Kalidasa). The influence of kavya poetry dominated literary taste for a thousand years.
Sanskrit narrative literature is so abundant and rich that for a time it was believed that all folktales originated in India. Many Indian stories have found their way into other literatures—for example, the Islamic Arabian Nights, the Decameron of Boccaccio, and the stories of La Fontaine and Hans Christian Andersen. The best Sanskrit collection is the Pancatantra (Five Chapters), a compilation of animal fables that has circulated widely in other parts of the world. In Europe the work was known as The Fables of Bidpai, after their narrator.
Buddhist Texts
Written in the Pali language and called collectively the Pali canon, the texts of early Buddhism originated in the first few centuries after the death of Buddha in 483 BC. Pali is a western Indian dialect that was adopted by the Theravada school of Buddhism, and it is often identified with Buddha's own speech. The Dhammapada (Verses on the Buddhist Doctrine) is considered an excellent example of moralistic Indian literature. Another significant work, the Jatakas (Birth Stories), recounts some 500 episodes that supposedly occurred during previous incarnations of Buddha. The work consists of fairy tales, animal stories, ballads, and anecdotes. (See also Buddhism.)
Literature in the Dravidian Languages
Spoken primarily in southern India, the seven major Dravidian languages are Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Gondi, Kurukh, and Tulu. Of these, the literature of Tamil, dating from the 1st century AD, has the longest continuing history.
The oldest non-Sanskrit literature of India consists of the earliest Tamil writings. Called cankam literature because it was believed to have been written in three cankams, or academies, in Madurai, it is represented by eight anthologies of poetry, ten long poems, and a grammar called Tolkappiyam (Old Composition). The poems are classified by theme as akam (interior) for the love lyrics or puram (exterior) for the heroic poems on war, death, the glory of kings, and the poverty of poets.
The literary period from about AD 300 to 900 is known for its Tamil epics, the Cilappatikaram (The Jewelled Anklet) and Manimekalai (Girdle of Gems). The Cilappatikaram, a synthesis of mood poetry in the cankam tradition, contains much Tamil lore and detailed descriptions of daily life in both village and city. The main story line centers on a young merchant who is unjustly executed after he tries to sell his wife's anklet to a treacherous goldsmith who had stolen a similar anklet belonging to the queen. His widow finally proves his innocence. In a twin epic of the Cilappatikaram, Girdle of Gems is a courtesan torn between love for a prince and the religious life. The work is partial to Buddhism, and in the end, after many adventures and much suffering, the heroine chooses religion.
From the 10Th through the 13Th century there was an emergence of literature in other languages: Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam. The first significant work in Kannada is the 9Th-century Kavirajamarga (The Royal Road of Poets), which describes the Kannada country, people, and dialects. Translations and reworkings of Sanskrit classics also became popular.
The major Kannada poet was Pampa, who in the 10Th century created a style that served as the model for all future works in the language. His great epics include a rendering of the Sanskrit classic, Mahabharata, and Adipurana (First or Original Scriptures), a religious work on the life of Purudeva, a hero-saint of Jainism (see Jainism).
One new literary type did emerge in the 12Th century—the vacana, Kannada prose poetry in which holy men expressed radical views on religion and society in their rejections of ritualism and asceticism as well as all the limitations imposed by caste, creed, and sex. Much of this literature was influenced by the bhakti movement, within Hinduism, which emphasized a strong personal attachment of an individual toward his or her god. After the 7Th century bhakti became a widespread and popular form of Hindu religious life, inspiring a substantial quantity of poetry and art.
Islamic Literatures
The period of Muslim influence in India extended over hundreds of years, from the time of the conquest of Sind (now part of Pakistan) in the 8Th century until Queen Victoria was crowned empress in 1857.
The Muslims preferred the regional languages to Sanskrit and thus encouraged the development of popular regional literatures. They also used Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Urdu. Because Arabic was the language of the Koran, Islam's holy book, it was used extensively for scholarship. As late as the 18Th century Shah Wali Allah, one of India's greatest theologians, wrote many treatises in Arabic. The literatures in the Indo-Iranian languages of Baluchi and Pashto were exclusively creations of Muslim writers. Muslims were also the most influential contributors in the Indo-Aryan languages of Kashmiri, Sindhi, and Panjabi. The most distinctive Muslim works were written in Persian and Urdu, however, and they led to the establishment of an Indian school of Persian poetry and to an extensive literature in Urdu.
The first truly great poet in the Persian language in India was Amir Khosrow. Born at Etah, in northern India, he was connected with royal courts all of his life. He wrote five books of divans (poems) that were composed of ghazals, a traditional Muslim form. Altogether his poetry comprised some 200,000 couplets. He is also known for a number of prose works and some longer historical poems.
The period from 1556 to 1657 was the golden age of Persian poetry in India, though most of the poets were not native to the country. They were immigrants from Persia who found refuge from political and religious persecution at the court of the emperor Akbar and his successors (see Akbar). The greatest 17Th-century poet of the Indian school was ʿAbdul Qadir Bedil. His 16 books of poetry contain about 147,000 verses. He was well acquainted with Indian religious and philosophical thought.
Literature in Urdu, one of the official languages of modern Pakistan, began to develop in the 16th century. Poetry, which was dominant for three centuries, was executed mainly in six literary forms. Qasidahs are poems written to earn money by praising kings and noblemen. Haju are derogatory verses, and shahr-ashub are verses lamenting the decline or destruction of a city; both of these types reveal much about the morals and customs of the time. Marsiyeh are elegies or laments read at public gatherings. The masnavi was the preferred form for all descriptive and narrative purposes because it allowed more freedom of expression—only the lines of each couplet had to rhyme, in contrast to the more complex rhyming schemes of other forms. Because the masnavi was a Persian invention, many of the Indian works were abridged versions of Persian originals.
The favorite form of the Urdu poets was the ghazal, a love poem that sometimes dwelled on a mystical love of God. Because of its requirements of rhyme and meter, it required great skill from the poet. The greatest ghazal writers were Mir Taqi Mir in the 18th century and Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib in the 19th century. Mir wrote of love in very simple language, while Ghalib covered a wider range of ideas.
Literature in Indic Languages
Sometime after the 10th century other dialects began to emerge as identifiable languages, each with its own literature. These Indic languages included Hindi, Bengali, Kashmiri, Panjabi, Rajasthani, Marathi, Gujarati, Oriya, Sindhi, and Assamese. Up to the 16th century all of this literature was poetry, and in its early stages it borrowed from the Sanskrit classics for themes and forms.
In Hindi, for instance, the gradual transformation of the older forms of religious lyric to new literary styles based on Western models did not begin until the 18th century. Prem Chand was a pioneer in adapting Indian themes to European forms. His first major novel, Sevasadan (House of Service), dealt with the problems of moral corruption in the Indian middle class. His short stories depict the social evil of arranged marriages, abuses of the British bureaucracy, and the exploitation of the peasants.
The Modern Period
Following the inspiration of Rammohan Ray, the father of modern India, reform-minded Hindus began to take a positive attitude toward Western literature. Early in the 19th century they formed literary clubs to spread the influence of predominantly British works. At the same time Ray also founded a movement to revive the best in Hindu culture. He translated the Upanishads into modern Bengali before publishing a volume on the ethical teachings of Jesus in 1820. (See also Ray, Rammohan.)
The author whose novels established prose as a literary vehicle for the Bengali language was Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. His first notable work was Durgesanandini (Daughter of the Lord of the Fort). It was not outstanding fiction, but with its appearance in 1865 the Bengali novel was born. (See also Chatterjee, Bankim Chandra.)
The best known of all Indian writers in the early 20th century was Rabindranath Tagore, a poet who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1913. He was extremely influential in introducing Western ideas to India and the best of Indian culture to the rest of the world. His Manasi (published in 1890) contains the best of his early poetry. In the stories of Galpa Guccha (1912; Bunches of Tales), he showed his sympathy for the poverty and backwardness of village people. (See also Tagore, Rabindranath.)
In poetry and drama, modern Hindi literature began with Harischandra. His great contributions to the formation of modern Hindi were recognized even in his short lifetime, and he was given the honorific title Bharatendu, meaning “Moon of India.” He began his literary career at age 17, when he founded the first Hindi literary magazine, the Kavivachana-sudha. His plays include satirical farces and several dramas in which he deplores the poverty of India and its centuries of foreign domination.
The modern literature in all Indian languages was inevitably influenced by desire for social reform, antipathy toward British rule, the political activities of Mahatma Gandhi, and new ideologies coming from Europe—particularly socialism and Marxism. Much of the literature tried to revive the great periods of Indian history, such as the Maurya, Gupta, and Mughal dynasties, before the British intervened.
Gandhi urged authors to write for the masses. One of the exponents of Gandhian thought was Jainendra Kumar, an essayist, novelist, and short-story writer in Hindi. He started his literary career in the 1920s, after release from jail for his part in Gandhi's noncooperation movement. Long after India had achieved independence, he was still writing on political issues. His novel Muktibodh, for which he won an award in 1966, dramatizes the dilemma of an idealistic follower of Gandhi who is later caught up in the realities of power politics.
Tamil literature also persisted into the modern period. The first novel in Tamil, the Piratapamutaliyar Carittiram (The Life and Adventures of Prathapa Mudaliar), by Vetanayakam Pillai, appeared in 1879. It is a loosely gathered string of narratives centered on an innocent hero. The major 19th-century writer in Tamil was Rajam Aiyar. In his Kamalampal Carittiram (The Fatal Rumor) he created a classic romance set in a rural scene, a story told with realism, humor, irony, and social satire. In language he followed the classical style, which he intermixed with informal conversation.
The greatest poet in modern Urdu was Muhammad Iqbal, who was known for his influential efforts toward the formation of a separate Muslim state—Pakistan—on the Indian subcontinent. Some of his early poems were collected in a volume titled Bang-e dara (The Call of the Bell) in 1924. Many of his other writings were written in Persian to reach a larger Muslim audience. (See also Iqbal, Muhammad.)
There has been an English literature in India for about 200 years. Among the early writers were Henry Derozio, a social reformer who criticized the religious beliefs and practices of orthodox Hinduism, and Michael Madhusudan Datta, the first great poet and dramatist of Bengali literature. An outstanding woman poet was Sarojini Naidu, called the Nightingale of India. A political activist, she was the first woman to be elected president of the Indian National Congress and to be appointed a state governor. Her collected poems have been published under the titles The Sceptered Flute (1928) and The Feather of the Dawn (1961).
English prose fiction began in 1902 with the novel The Lake of Palms by Romesh Chunder Dutt. The next significant novelist was Mulk Raj Anand, who denounced class and caste distinctions in a series of novels, including Untouchable (1935), The Coolie (1936), and The Big Heart (1945). One of the finest Indian novelists writing in English was R.K. Narayan, whose books include The Financial Expert (1952), Waiting for Mahatma (1955), and The Painter of Signs (1976). Another author whose following is wider outside India is Santha Rama Rau, who went to the United States in 1961. One of the most popular novelists in English has been Raja Rao, whose novels include Kanthapura (1938), The Cow of the Barricades (1947), The Serpent and the Rope (1960), and Comrade Kirillov (1976). A later generation of Indian writers in English included Anita Desai (born 1937), Salman Rushdie (born 1947), Vikram Seth (born 1952), and Rohinton Mistry (born 1952). (See also Narayan, R.K.; Rama Rau, Santha.)
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