The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature

Professor in Contemporary Literature Amit Chaudhuri
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
 9780375713002
0-375-71300-X

In recent years American readers have been thrilling to the work of such Indian writers as Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth. Now this extravagant and wonderfully discerning anthology unfurls the full diversity.

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of Indian literature from the 1850s to the present, presenting todays brightest talents in the company of their distinguished forbearers and likely heirs. The thirty-eight authors collected by novelist Amit Chaudhuri write not only in English but also in Hindi, Bengali, and Urdu. They include Rabindranath Tagore, arguably the first international literary celebrity, chronicling the wistful relationship between a village postal inspector and a servant girl, and Bibhuti Bhushan Banerjee, represented by an excerpt from his classic novel about an impoverished Bengali childhood, Pather Panchali. Here, too, are selections from Nirad C. Chaudhuris Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, R. K. Narayans The English Teacher, and Salman Rushdies Midnights Children alongside a high-spirited nonsense tale, a drily funny account of a pre-Partition Muslim girlhood, and a Bombay policier as gripping as anything by Ed McBain. Never before has so much of the subcontinents writing been made available in a single volume.