Salman Rushdie, emerging as the signpost of the postcolonial Indian English fiction with his Midnight’s Children that depicted a glorious, rip-roarious modern India’s new generation and its policies, has in the process, having upturned the ‘soft image’ of India—spiritual, and the traditionally struggling semi-urban/rural India—that our early English writers like R K Narayan, Raja Rao and Mulk Raj Anand had hitherto articulated in a language that is more of Victorian/Edwardian style, truly become the ‘trend-setter’ of fictional writing in India. He and his novel had indeed redrawn the literary map of India, paving the way for exciting themes, mesmeric techniques and amazing creativity in manipulation of the language. The novel, besides winning the Man Booker Prize for the year 1981 and the Booker of Booker award in 2008 for the best Booker novel in 40 years, had influenced and enabled three more Indians win the Man Booker—Arundhati Roy for The God of Small Things in 1997, Kiran Desai for The Inheritance of Loss in 2006 and Aravind Adiga for his The White Tiger in 2008—making the literary world look at India with awe.

The post-Rushdie Indian English novel has thus seen the emergence of many talented writers—writers born in India but educated in the reputed universities of the west and mostly settled in the first world as the Indian Diaspora writers. This new crop of writers—Vikram Chandra, Amitav Ghosh, Chitra Divakaruni, Vikram Seth, Jhumpa Lahiri, Vikas Swarup, Raj Kamal Jha, Amit Chaudhuri, Akhil Sharma and the like—expounding modern and post-modern concepts circling around materialism, consumerism, metropolitan aspirations and the ruckus including immoral pursuit of their ambitions, have drawn multiple portraits of emerging India. Examining the ‘ethnic enclaves’ that have formed out of the migrant middle-class professionals from the postcolonial third world to the first world and their ‘cultures of hybridity’, the western settled writers have focused their attention on the Diaspora’s struggle between tradition and modernism, past and present, and creating a kind of ‘culture in transition’ by drawing on different traditions of the new world and at the same time not giving up their past totally. Issues such as ‘acculturation’, ‘otherness’, ‘conflict between the inherited past and the highly-ranked western culture’ and the resulting search for ‘identity’ and ‘construction of identity’ that have haunted the Diaspora have become the central themes of many of these writers.

Against this backdrop, we have a couple of papers in the current issue that examine the fiction of select modern writers of Indian origin. The first paper, “Simulacra of Identity Interstices: The Select Fiction of Chitra Banerjee and Jhumpa Lahiri”, by K Narasimha Rao, avers that both Divakaruni and Lahiri “weave their stories with a realistic base” that beautifully portrays the ability of their protagonists in balancing the cultural forces that they encounter in their new world. The next paper, “A Comparative Study of the Works of Anita Nair and Vikram Seth”, by Jayashree Hazarika and Maya Vinai, deciphering the similarities between these two writers in terms of the “impact of diaspora in the form of alienation … lurking in the background”, in “their exposition of classical music and dance”, their narration about the struggle of artists to carve out a niche for themselves, wonders “how two different individuals’ ideas about diverse issues can be seen in the same light.” The third paper, “Articulation of ‘Selfhood’ with the Intervention of Postmodernism in Monica Ali’s In the Kitchen”, by Abhisarika Prajapati, asserts that this novel “is an attempt to engage with the ideas of self, selfhood and identity” amidst the pressures of the 21st century man—struggle with contradictory shades and circumstances.

Moving on to yet another issue of 21st century, we have a paper, “Walking with Shadows and the Critique of the Evolutionary Character of Nigerian Narratives”, in which its author, Ignatius Chukwumah, compares the same-sex sexual relationship that the novel, Walking with Shadows, articulated with that of the conventional relationships expounded in the traditional Nigerian literature, and highlights how conventional man-woman sexual relationships offered kinship-lubricants for better understanding of the societal relationships. In the process, the author also makes an obvious statement: that the same-sex sexual relationships being not primed by evolution for reproduction of mankind are not only monumentally anti-evolutionary, but also immensely anti-continuation of the human race on the planet. He further avers that it is precisely for this reason that the society and the kin of the man having same-sex relationship fail to understand him.

The next paper, “Not a Literature of Lament: An Analysis of Emerging Themes and Trends in Tamil Dalit Literature”, by K A Geetha, argues that Tamil Dalit literature is not simply about the angst of the marginalized existence of Dalits but is more about their culture, tradition and language and hence needs to be translated into English. This is followed by a paper, “‘Invocation to Memory Enveloped by Fog’: An Introduction to Missing Person, the 2014 Nobel Laureate Modiano’s Nouveau Roman”, by P Suneetha, tracing the journey of the protagonist “to find out who he is” draws the curtain down when she says that his identity will never be found, for it is as ephemeral as “the sand holds the traces of our footsteps but a few moments.”

Interestingly, in the next paper, “Tess of the D’Urbervilles: An Eco-Critical Reading”, its author, Ram Narayan Panda, analyzes the novel from the perspective of anthropocentrism and non-anthropocentrism and demonstrates how these twin notions operate interpenetrated. The last paper, “Harsha’s Nâgânanda: An Appraisal in the Light of the Rasa Siddhânta”, by GRK Murty, examining how the playwright accomplished rasanispatti, concludes that the predominant rasa of the play is vîra rasa, while sânta, œringâra and karuna rasas become subsidiaries according to the circumstances.

To conclude, I must, with a heavy heart, share here with our patrons that Prof.
S S Prabhakar Rao, the Consulting Editor of the Journal expressed his desire to lay down his editorship owing to his advancing age. Prof. Rao, a literary savant, an erudite scholar, a reputed Steinbeck critic and a passionate trans-creator of Telugu literature in English, has steered the Journal right from its launching for almost a decade and ensured that it carved a niche for itself in the hearts of Sahrudayas, besides getting indexed by Scopus. The editorial team at IUP thanks him profusely for the excellent value-system and scholarly rigor that he displayed in selecting the papers for effective sustenance of the Journal. While assuring him that we shall carry forward his value-system, we wish him a very happy and long life. But we all will miss you and your sane counsel, Professor.

-- GRK Murty
Managing Editor