Indian English Literature has a relatively short but highly charged history. In 1793, Sake Dean Mahomed wrote perhaps the first book by an Indian in English, called The Travels of Dean Mahomed. However, most early Indian writing in English was non-fictional work, such as biographies and political essays. This began to change in the late 1800s, when famous Indian authors who wrote mostly in their mother tongue, began to try their hand at writing in English. In the early 1900s, Rabindranath Tagore began translating his works from Bengali to English. Starting in 1917 Dhan Gopal Mukerji wrote many children’s stories that were set in India. Soon after, a new generation of Indian authors, who wrote almost exclusively in English.What made Narayan’s, Anand’s and Rao’s writing different from the Indian authors before them was that their stories were about the contemporary man on the street. There was also an Indianness to their work, in terms of the words they used and their style of writing. Their works were the forerunners to the magnificent diversity of Indian writing in English that we see today. This book is a chronological study of Indian English writers and their works.
