Colonial Karma

Book excerpt: Although the Indian novel in English has received unprecedented acclaim on the global stage over the last two decades, most readers outside India are unaware of its long history. Colonial Karma offers a much-needed overview, tracing the Indian English novel from its nineteenth-century colonial origins to the turn of the twenty-first century, with each chapter focusing on a particular historical moment. It links the development of the novel in India with that of nationalism, showing how English-educated Indians sought to solve their problems of individual and civic action by redefining the concept of karma to create a new, hybrid idea of action. The term "colonial karma" refers both to plot action in the literary texts and, more broadly, to the persistence of colonialist and nationalist thought in post-independence India. After considering early works in English and in Indian languages by Bankimchandra Chatterjee, O. Chandu Menon, and Rabindranath Tagore, Colonial Karma discusses novels by a wide range of writers, including K.S. Venkataramani, Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan, Raja Rao, Anita Desai, Salman Rushdie, Shashi Deshpande, Githa Hariharan, and Arundhati Roy.