“Indian English Fiction I: Beginnings Of An Autonomous Idiom”

Abstract

Throughout its existence English language has changed, especially after coming into contact with other cultures, languages, people etc. and in each case benefiting enormously. The result of the long journey of change is that English language comes in
different versions belonging to different regions and communities. It is primarily through the use of English for creative purposes that today we encounter diverse literatures in English-literatures that are essentially different from each other as well as from the native English literature, but fundamentally alike in that they are the result of creative expression of people from various parts of the world. Since language tends to change differently in different places, the English as used by the native writers is different from that of the Indian, African, Caribbean, Canadian writers, and even from each other.
The aim of the paper is precisely to foreground this ‘difference’ through Indian fiction writing. As the title of the paper suggests, it talks about the process of acculturation, nativisation, Indianization as employed by the major writers of Indian English, describing briefly the slow growth of writing in the sub-continent in relation to the development of popular literacy and popular education in English, to the rise of national feeling and finally to the Indianization of the foreign language.