New Writing in India

Adil Jussawalla’s anthology of Indian writing was first published in 1974. Today, more than half a century later, it remains one of the landmarks of our literature, featuring writers from various Indian languages, including English, whose works have stood the test of time. The book traces a map of what Jussawalla calls ‘literary and linguistic cross-currents’, through the writings of Nirmal Verma (Hindi), Sunil Gangopadhyay (Bengali), Bhalchandra Nemade (Marathi), P. Lankesh (Kannada) and Ashokamitran (Tamil), among other literary greats. This anthology challenges the colonial notion of Indian literature as a collection of exotica as well as the terrible misconception that modern Indian writing is an inferior mimicry of Western forms. What we have here is a literary record that stands out for the originality of the voices it contains and yet underscores a set of shared themes and artistic concerns that galvanized these writers and brought them together. When this book was first published, the pieces collected here were barely a decade old and hence were presented under the rubric of ‘New Indian Writing’ of the time. But as Amit Chaudhuri reminds us in his introduction to the anniversary edition, the term ‘new’ in the title is not merely a reference to recency but to a ‘self-replenishing, revolutionary’ quality that never diminishes in great literature. Ezra Pound once said that literature is news that stays news. New Writing in India bears testament to those words and to the multifarious tradition of Indian writing.