Ludmila Volná atempts to explain the problems associated with identifying the literature written by Indian authors in the English language. Indian writing in English is most often classified as belonging to "postcolonial literature", a term generally used for a field of study that examines how literature deals with the departure of a society from its colonial past and the exploration of the common features of postcolonial societies, or to "new literatue in English", a term that allows the possibility of concentrating on the significant features of a singular culture. In the second part of her paper, Volná characterizes Indian anglophone writing, which includes drama, poetry, and fiction. Volná discusses fiction themes and style, and analyzes new narrative techniques and styles in the context of traditional "realistic" writing.
This article deals with the Hindu cosmological imagery of water as presented in the Indian novel in English. The writers show a great interest in water as a means of depicting a transformation and/or re-birth of both the Indian society and the individuals in it relying on the water as symbolizing a beginning of a new life/identity in the Hindu cosmology. This is rendered vividly, for example, through the Nārada and Mārkandeya myths, where the two sages, after a passage through water, experience a new identity or a world perception totally different from that known to them before. R. K. Narayan, an author who lived all his life in India, deals in his novel The English Teacher with the spiritual transformation of the main character, Krishnan, which is accompanied and accomplished by different entities of water. He is oppressed both by the colonial condition and by personal tragedy, whereas Saleem, the main character of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, who is made to represent the country, acquires in the jungle of the Sundarbans an understanding of the necessity of adopting elements of other cultures. Two other authors, Anita Desai and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, develop the theme of the woman’s condition as a representation of the counterpart and contradictory images of water and sun/fire. Desai’s Fasting, Feasting relates the Indian condition to that of another culture and Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices addresses the problems of the Indian concept of marriage in the diaspora while using mythological imageries of other cultures.