sem 3 presentation

 Hello reader :)

201 Indian English Literature-Pre Independence from PandyaMayuri

202 Indian English Literature-Post Independence from PandyaMayuri

203 post colonial from PandyaMayuri

204 criticism paper from PandyaMayuri

205 Cultural Studies from PandyaMayuri

Assignment on paper no. 205

This is a blog on assignment paper number 205 Cultural Studies and my topic is Five types of Cultural studies. 

Cultural studies is one of the more controversial intellectual formations of the 1990s and the first decade of the third millennium. It has experienced a period of rapid growth in the academy, appearing at many universities in a variety of forms and locations (although rarely as degree-granting departments). At the same time, it has been broadly attacked both from inside the university and outside academia.

There are at least five distinct uses of cultural studies, making it difficult to know exactly what people are attacking or defending. It has been used to describe, alone or in various combinations:

1.Any progressive cultural criticism and theory (replacing "critical theory," which served as the umbrella term of the 1980s);

2.The study of popular culture, especially in conjunction with the political problematic of identity and difference;

3.So-called "postmodern" theories that advocate a cultural or discursive constructionism (and, thus, supposedly embrace relativism);

4.Research on the politics of textuality applied broadly to include social life, especially based in poststructuralist theories of ideology, discourse, and subjectivity;

5.A particular intellectual formation that is directly or indirectly linked to the project of British cultural studies, as embodied in the work of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS).

Second, the New Left emerged as a small but influential discussion group, and included many immigrants from the "colonies." It was sympathetic to (but not aligned with) the growing Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The New Left had a specific and ambivalent relation to Marxism, engaging Marxist theory and politics even as it criticized it for its failure (and inability?) to account for and respond to the challenges posed by the importance of ideology, colonialism and imperialism, race, and the failures of existing socialism. This work was enabled by the translation and publication of the early writings of Marx and a wide range of European Marxist thinkers.

Third, the British university system was, to put it mildly, elitist and classist, in terms of its student population and in its isolation, aestheticization, and limitation of culture to the field of the arts. Many of the influential early figures in cultural studies were working-class or immigrant students attending university on scholarship, who were driven to look for other accounts of culture that both expanded its referent and took it more seriously.

Finally, many of these figures were deeply influenced by their experience as teachers in various institutions of adult education outside the university. If nothing else, this experience played a role in convincing them, first, of the importance of culture (and intellectual work on culture) to both political struggle and people's everyday lives, and second, of the fact that the important questions do not usually respect the disciplinary boundaries of academic competence and expertise. 

Five Types of Cultural Studies

1.British Cultural Materialism

2.New Historicism

3.American Multiculturalism

4.Postmodernism & Popular Culture

5.Postcolonial Studies

1.British Cultural Materialism

Cultural studies is referred to as "cultural materialism" in Britain, and it has a long tradition. In the later nineteenth century Matthew Arnold sought to redefine the "givens" of British culture. Edward Burnett Tylor's pioneering anthropological study Primitiae Culture (1877) argued that "Culture or

civilization, taken in its widest ethnographic sense, is a complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law,custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by

man as a member of society" (1). Claude Levi-Strauss's influence moved British thinkers to assign "culture" to primitive peoples, and with the work of British scholars like Raymond Williams, to attribute culture to the working class as well as the elite. As Williams memorably states: "There are no masses; there are only ways of seeing [other] people as

masses" .

To appreciate the importance of this revision of "culture" we must situate it within the controlling myth of social and political reality of the British Empire upon which the sun never set,an ideology left over from the previous century. In modern Britain two trajectories for "culture" developed: one led back to the past and the feudal hierarchies that ordered community in the past; here, culture acted in its sacred function as preserver of the past. The other trajectory led toward a future, socialist

utopia that would annul the distinction between labor and leisure classes and make transformation of status, not fixity, the norm. This cultural materialism furnished a leftist orientation"critical of the aestheticism, formalism, antihistoricism, and apoliticism common among the dominant postwar methods of academic literary criticism"; such was the description in the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (Groden and Kreiswirth L80).Cultural materialism began in earnest in the 1950s with the work of F. R. Leavis, heavily influenced by Matthew Arnold's

analyses of bourgeois culture. Leavis sought to use the educational system to distribute literary knowledge and appreciation more widely; Leavisites promoted the "great tradition" of

Shakespeare and Milton to improve the moral sensibilities of a wider range of readers than just the elite. 

2.New Historicism

New historicism frequently borrows terminology from the marketplace: exchange, negotiation, and circulation of ideas are described. H. Aram Veeser calls "the moment of exchange" the

most interesting to new historicists, since social symbolic capital may be found in literary texts: "the critic's role is to dismantle the dichotomy of the economic and the non-economic, to show

that the most purportedly disinterested and self-sacrificing practices, including art, aim to maximize personal or symbolic profit" (xiv). Greenblatt adds that "contemporary theory must situate itself . . . in the hidden places of negotiation and exchange" ("Towards a Poetics of Culture" 13). Bourdieu's insights are again a resource, especially his definition of tllte habi-

tus, a "system of dispositions' ' comparable to what linguists analyze as the sum of tacit knowledge one has to know to speak a given language.

Example

Some of the example in movies and boycott bollywood is also example of cultural studies. 

Tanhaji

The recently released ‘Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior’ has hit the jackpot at the box office. Based on the legendary exploits of Maratha braveheart Subedar Tanaji Malusare, the Om Raut directed historical drama has won the hearts of audiences and critics alike. The film has earned a whopping total of almost Rs. 119 crores from the domestic box office and has earned Rs. 152 crores worldwide, making ‘Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior a clean ‘Box Office Hit’ as per the observations of many trade analysts.

Frankly speaking, this outburst from the ‘woke’ intellectuals wasn’t entirely unexpected, since the portrayal of Aurangzeb hit the nail right on the head. If you wondered what Aurangzeb was knitting in the trailer sequences, it was his actual profession that gave him his daily bread and butter. Aurangzeb lived an extremely austere life as he used to sew skull caps with his own hands apart from selling handwritten copies of the holy Quran for his living. He never took anything from the state exchequer for his personal expenses.

Keshari

History and movie debate with each other Kesari, set in 1897, follows the events in the Battle of Saragarhi, fought between the 21 Sikh Regiment soldiers, in the British army, and thousands of Afghans. The numbers tell their own story. Add to this the usual Kumarisms – patriotic fervour, unmitigated courage, inspirational belief – and you have a tailor-made film for him. But here’s the thing: Kesari is 150 minutes long, but the bare bones of its centrepiece, the Battle of Saragarhi, isn’t even in the picture for the first 35 minutes.

The initial segment, needlessly padded, sets up the metaphorical battleground. We first see the Afghans about to behead a woman for fleeing her husband’s house. Ishwar Singh (Kumar), a Sikh soldier, fires a bullet and saves her. He’s transferred to a different province for disobeying orders, where he’d fight the famed battle. Then we encounter the customary religious pride: Ishwar tells the Afghans that everything is fair game except his turban. There’s more information feeding: the film cuts to a flashback, detailing how Ishwar and his wife, Jiwani (Parineeti Chopra), fell in love and got married (right down to a song awkwardly shoehorned).

The film needs this contrived conflict because, as we know, the Britishers, not the Afghans, are the real villains here. All of this could have been smartly condensed in a few minutes, but Singh, unmindful of pacing and tonality, and relying on banal storytelling tropes, allows the obvious to run unchecked. The forced subplots don’t end there though. When Ishwar meets the new band of soldiers, his fellow fighters and compatriots, he’s unimpressed, as they lack motivation and discipline. You know the old trick: conflicts would lead to camaraderie, as the soldiers get ready for the eventual fight

But what is more disappointing is that Kesari tells us nothing new about the Battle of Saragarhi. 

3.American Multiculturalism

In 1965 the Watts race riots drew worldwide attention. The Civil Rights Act had passed in1964, and the backlash was well under way in 1965: murders and other atrocities attended the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery. President Lyndon fohnson signed the Voting Rights Act. The "long, hot sum-

mer" of 1966 saw violent insurrections in Newark, Detroit,Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, Atlanta, San Francisco-the very television seemed ablaze. The Black Panther Party was founded. James Meredith, the first African American student to enroll at the University of Mississippi, was wounded by a

white segregationist. Julian Bond, duly elected State Representative, was denied his seat in the Georgia House. Nearly all African American students in the South attended segregated schools, and discrimination was still unquestioned in most industries. Interracial marriage was still illegal in many states. 

1. African American Writers

African American studies is widely pursued in American literary criticism, from the recovery of eighteenth-century poets such as Phillis \A/heatleyto the experimentalnovels of Toni Morrison. In Shadow and Act (1964) novelist Ralph Ellison argued that any "viable theory of Negro American culture obligates us to fashion a more adequate theory of American culture as a whole". This seems too obvious even to mention today,when American arts, fashion, music, and so much besides is based upon African American culture, from Oprah to Usher. But in Ellison's day, the 1950s, such an argument was considered radical.

2. Latina/o Writers

Latina / o. Hispanic. Mexican American. Puerto Rican. Nuyorican. Chicano. Or maybe Huichol or Maya. \Alhich names to use? The choice often has political implications.We will use the term "Latina/ o" to indicate a broad sense of

ethnicity among Spanish-speaking people in the United States.Mexican Americans are the largest and most influential group.of Latina/o ethnicities in the United States.

3. American Indian Literatures

In predominantly oral cultures, storytelling passes on religious beliefs, moral values, political codes, and practical lessons of everyday life. For American lndians, stories are a source of strength in the face of centuries of silencing by Euro Americans.

4. Asian American Writers

Asian American literature is written by people of Asian descent in the United States, addressing the experience of living in a society that views them as alien. Asian immigrants were denied citizenship as late as the 1950s. Edward Said has written of orientalism, or the tendency to objectify and exoticize Asians,and their work has sought to respond to such stereotyping.Asian American writers include Chinese, Japanese, Korean,Filipino, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Polynesian, and many other peoples of Asia, the Lrdian subcontinent, and the Pacific. These cultures present a bewildering arcay of languages, religions,social structures, and skin colors, and so the category is even more broad and artificial than Latina/o or American Indian.Furthermore, some Asian American writers are relatively new arrivals in the United States, while others trace their American forebears for generations, as Mexican Americans do. Names can get tricky here too: people with the same record of residence and family in the United States might call themselves Chinese, Chinese American, Amer-Asian, or none of the above.In Hawaii the important distinction is not so much ethnicity as

being "local" versus haole (white).

4.Postmodernism and Popular Culture

1. Postmodernism

Postmodernism, like poststructuralism and deconstruction, is a critique of the aesthetics of the preceding age, but besides mere critique, postmodernism celebrates the very act of dismembering tradition. Postmodernism questions everything rationalist European philosophy held to be true, arguing that it is all contingent and that most cultural constructions have served the function of empowering members of a dominant social group at the expense of "others." Beginning in the mid-1980s, postmodernism emerged in art, architecture, music, film, literature,sociology, communications, fashion, and other fields. 

2. Popular Culture

There was a time before the 1960s when popular culture was not studied by academics-when it was, well, just popular cul-

ture. But within American Studies programs at first and then later in many disciplines, including semiotics, rhetoric, literary criticism, film studies, anthropology, history, women's studies,ethnic studies, and psychoanalytic approaches, critics examine such cultural media as pulp fiction, comic books, television,

film, advertising, popular music, and computer cyberculture.They assess how such factors as ethnicity, race, gender, class,age, region, and sexuality are shaped by and reshaped in popular culture.

5.Postcolonial Studies

Postcolonialism refers to a historical phase undergone by Third World countries after the decline of colonialism: for example,when countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean separated from the European empires and were left to rebuild themselves. Many Third World writers focus on both colonialism and the changes created in a postcolonial culture.Among the many challenges facing postcolonial writers are the attempts both to resurrect their culture and to combat the preconceptions about their culture.

(Words:2104) 

Assignment on Paper no. 204

This is a blog on Assignment Paper no. 204 Contemporary Western Theories and Film Studies and my topic is Queer Theory. 

Definition of queer theory

    an approach to literary and cultural study that rejects traditional categories of gender and sexuality. 

The word “queer,” like the word “performance,” has a vexed historical trajectory. Once a pejorative slur targeted at gender and sexual nonconformists, queer is currently also a hip signifier of postmodern identity. To embrace “queer” is to resist or elide categorization, to disavow binaries (that is, gay versus straight, black versus white) and to proffer potentially productive modes of resistance against hegemonic structures of power. This deployment of queer, then, exemplifies the traits of performance in that “its definitional indeterminacy, its elasticity, is one of its constituent characteristics.” In academic circles queer has become a catalyst for theorizing not only gender and sexuality in ways that detach them from singular or rigid identitarian markers, but also a way to discuss race and class in antiessentialist ways. A poor, fifty-year-old, African American female rugby player from the southern United States might be considered “queer,” for instance, because each of the adjectives that describe her do not comport with the traditional ideas of who plays rugby. According to this logic, this particular player is queer because she is anomalous, odd, or strange in the world of rugby. It is this oddity and strangeness that queer theorists would use to argue that all identity is fraught because it is always already mediated through language and ceded to those who have the power to control representation. Thus this player's queerness can be taken as subversive because her presence in the rugby league - a sport typically populated by white middle-class men - transgresses the image of the “rugby player” in the social imaginary and potentially deconstructs power relations within the context of rugby as a sport. Through the slide from personal pronoun to active verb (for example, “I am a queer” to “The actor queered the character”), the term has been reappropriated to activate a way to theorize subjectivity, social relations, and culture in general.(Cambridge) 

Queer theory is a tool that can be used to reconsider sociopolitical, historical, and cultural norms and values. Similarly, in qualitative research, queer theory tends to analyze the narratives of LGBTQ+ people and groups in ways that seek to queer everyday experiences. Both the theoretical framework and the narratives collected and analyzed in qualitative research are significant to unpacking business-as-usual in and across sociocultural contexts. This is especially true for systems of schooling, whereby LGBTQ+ people and groups are marginalized through schooling and schools, a process of exclusion that is detrimental to queer youth who are learning in spaces and places specifically designed against their ways of being and knowing. The significance of qualitative research as it meets the framework of queer theory is that it offers a practically and institutionally queered set of voices, perspectives, and understandings with which to think about the everyday in schools. This becomes increasingly important as schooling has historically been a place in which LGBTQ+ students and groups have resided at an intersection, where the sociopolitical and cultural marginalization that keeps the status quo in place crosses with contemporary values that both interrupt and reify such histories.

(Oxford) 

In 1993, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick asked a genre-defining question: “What’s queer?” (p. 8). The complexity behind this inquiry has historical and contemporary implications, particularly as they intersect with educational contexts. Defining “queer” is a task wrought with sociocultural, political, and historical challenges, as Sedgwick and other queer theorists (e.g., Butler, 1990; Cohen, 1997; Lorde, 1984; Halberstam, 1998) have argued. For example, even among an open set of possibilities and perspectives that is central to wrestling with definitions, queer theory, and the research that is engendered by and through queerness are not immune to questions of colonization and of co-opting narratives in the name of political agendas that call for equity but narrow the terms under which access is available (Cohen, 1997).

The multiplicity of dimensions, differences, and similarities that constitute queerness, its forever-fluid identities and forms, and numerous scholarly lenses answer Sedgwick’s question as a productive knot of possibilities. Within this knot there is a sense of temporality imbued with potential (Muñoz, 2009) that reaches through fictional discourses (Butler, 1988) and is grounded in everyday challenges. Queer literature is often characterized by theories that press for more fluid “both/and” perspectives, attention to everyday practices and policies that impact queer and questioning peoples, and modes of qualitative research that focus on the methodological opportunities afforded by various constructions of “queering” research practices and possibilities.

Queer theory and its relationship to qualitative research is significant to higher education, sociocultural understandings, and experiences for marginalized populations in schools for at least the following three reasons. First, there is a question about what queerness means, a question that is often unpacked through sociohistorical, contemporary, and self-reflexive lenses. Queerness is therefore one possible way to think about scholarly fields and offer a particular kind of critique of academic understandings. Second, as cis-normative and heteronormative perspectives remain the status quo for norms and values in everyday school culture, queer theory put into practice through qualitative research can serve as a powerful tool with which to shift historical and contemporary understandings in schools and communities. This is an intentional move away from deficit models of queer youth. A moment when research can redefine the image of the wounded queer child and focus on questions of agency within the challenges queer youth face in schools (e.g., Brockenbrough, 2012; Carlson & Linville, 2016; Wozolek, 2018). Finally, because the consequences for such scholarship strongly inform the ways of being and knowing of marginalized youth in schools, implications for this work are similarly significant. In sum, queer theory is therefore not only important to the productive movement of qualitative research and education, but also to questions of equity and access for some of the most vulnerable youth living and learning in schools today.

This article begins by giving a brief historical outline of queer theory. This is important because, as is discussed in the section “The Contours of Qual, Queer Theory, and Education,” educational places and spaces are significant to the historical contexts that have informed the field. Next, the article briefly defines the contours of queer theory in qualitative research and education. Then there is an exploration into the implications of queer theory and qualitative research as it is resonant with education. This examination is carried out by specifically looking at three facets: the implications of queer theory for academic understandings, the impact of the field on schools and schooling, and the influence that such theories and ideas have on the everyday lives of students. Finally, the article discusses potential next steps for the field as it continues to act as a bloom space (Stewart, 2010) for effective ideas, ideals, and possibilities.

Queered Histories

Queer theory has a rich, longstanding history of voices and perspectives that consistently and continually seek to define, redefine, and trouble the boundaries and borders of its theoretical frameworks and the multiple fields they touch (e.g., Abelove, Barale, & Halperin, 1993; Butler, 1990; de Lauretis, 1991; Halberstam, 1998, 2011; Hall, Jagose, Bebell, & Potter, 2013; Johnson, 2016; Johnson & Henderson, 2005; Sedgwick, 1993). In other words, queer theory was not ahistorical prior to 1991, when Teresa de Lauretis coined the term and thus named the field. In fact, it can be argued that those scholars and scholarship that are widely regarded as foundational were retroactively brought under the umbrella of the burgeoning field now known as queer theory. In short, it was not queer theory but work about queer ways of being and knowing that underscored the field prior to its early nomenclature.

Part of the difficulty in defining queer theory as it relates to qualitative research is that there have always been queer voices in qualitative work. Regardless of what is formally discussed in terms of queer ways of being and knowing (e.g., Gilbert, 2014; Sedgwick, 1993), whether it is hidden cultures that exist with an undercurrent of queer voices (e.g., Kumashiro, 2002; Pinar, 1998), or that which is explicitly and implicitly silenced from heteronormative spaces (e.g., Brockenbrough, 2012; Lorde, 1984; Miller & Rodriguez, 2016), queer perspectives and voices have always been, and continue to be, present. Whether they do this, for example, through broad social behaviors in science (e.g., LeVay, 1996; Stein & Plummer, 1994), or the arts (e.g., Halberstam, 2005), queer ideas permeate scholarly fields. In short, a complex web of queer theory has always existed in the form of narratives across qualitative research.

Although these stories are central to the meta narratives of the field, they ultimately belong to people and groups that compose a counterculture that is steeped in sociopolitical challenges and successes. These histories exist across layers of scale, from individual voices to polyvocal cultural understandings (Bakhtin, 1981; Gershon, 2018). For example, within the United States, queer theory resonates, from Two-Spirit identities (Driskill, Finley, Gilley, & Morgensen, 2011) and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, to Emily Dickinson’s love poems and Audre Lorde’s essays (Bronski, 2012). It has roots that reach from the Mattachine Society, extend to the Stonewall Riots, and are enmeshed with the AIDS epidemic. It is a culture that lives in rock and roll, the glam of the 1970s, and the glitter of Studio 54. Although not always identified as “gay” at the time, these spaces opened the epistemological closet (Sedgwick, 1990) of queer ways of being into the places of heteronormative culture. While figures like David Bowie and nvironments like the discotheque were not always discussed in terms of queerness, it took a particular kind of heteronormative privilege not to see particular icons and places as having an eye toward the LGBTQ+ community.

As queer spaces and places disrupted the cis-hetero patriarchy, these events proliferated across scholarly dialogues. The destabilization of normalized ideas about sex, gender, and power existed across theoretical conversations (Butler, 1990; Foucault, 1978; Rubin, 1984), and resonated with qualitative inquiry that was rooted in sociocultural implications (Bersani, 1987; Lather & Smithies, 1997). In other words, as scholars read across contexts and understood everyday activism as having as much significance as theoretical understandings, qualitative frameworks were deeply impacted.

Example

Many Bollywood movies have explored various social issues such as child marriage, polygamy, dowry system, casteism and terrorism. However, homosexuality, a taboo subjectin Indian society and religion, has yet not been fully explored in Bollywood. “Homosexualityrefers to sexual behaviour with or attraction to people of the same sex or to a homosexualorientation.” Gay refers to male homosexuality whereas lesbian refers to femalehomosexuality.

Indian society is largely conservative and the films dealing with the subject of homosexuality,centring on the problem of homosexuality, are in reality being made for a society where it isstill deemed taboo to talk about homosexuality openly, let alone expose the issue on the bigscreen. But contemporary Indian cinema has undergone substantial changes over the last couple of decades. To be at a same stage as that of the rest of the world in this age ofglobalisation and modernisation which is trying to shake some of our cultural roots, someIndian film directors have attempted to deviate from the typical romantic movies to try anddelve into controversial and even taboo topics such as homosexuality.

 

GAYS AND LESBIANS IN POPULAR HINDI CINEMA:

To discuss about the portrayal of homosexual characters in Popular Hindi Cinema, we can broadly defined it into two categories:- one consists of movies like Fire, Girlfriend, My Brother Nikhil, Dostana I Am where the homosexual characters are central to the narrative of the movie and other consists of movies like Kal Ho Na Ho (KHNH), Rules Pyaar Ka Superhit Formula, Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd., Fashion where these characters are secondary to the narrative. But regardless of the category, these movies try to show the reaction of society to homosexuals in general.

(Words:2167) 

Video

Assignment on Paper no. 203

This is a blog on Assignment Paper no. 203 Postcolonial Studies and my topic is 'Foe' as a postcolonial novel. 

John Maxwell Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa, on 9 February 1940, the elder of two children. His mother was a primary school teacher. His father was trained as an attorney, but practiced as such only intermittently; during the years 1941–45 he served with the South African forces in North Africa and Italy. Though Coetzee’s parents were not of British descent, the language spoken at home was English.

Coetzee received his primary schooling in Cape Town and in the nearby town of Worcester. For his secondary education he attended a school in Cape Town run by a Catholic order, the Marist Brothers. He matriculated in 1956.

Coetzee entered the University of Cape Town in 1957, and in 1960 and 1961 graduated successively with honours degrees in English and mathematics. He spent the years 1962–65 in England, working as a computer Thought programmer while doing research for a thesis on the English novelist Ford Madox Ford.In 1963 he married Philippa Jubber (1939–1991). They had two children, Nicolas (1966–1989) and Gisela (b. 1968).

In 1965 Coetzee entered the graduate school of the University of Texas at Austin, and in 1968 graduated with a PhD in English, linguistics, and Germanic languages. His doctoral dissertation was on the early fiction of Samuel Beckett.For three years (1968–71) Coetzee was assistant professor of English at the State University of New York in Buffalo. After an application for permanent residence in the United States was denied, he returned to South Africa. From 1972 until 2000 he held a series of positions at the University of Cape Town, the last of them as Distinguished Professor of Literature.Between 1984 and 2003 he also taught frequently in the United States: at the State University of New York, Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago, where for six years he was a member of the Committee on Social Thought.

Coetzee began writing fiction in 1969. His first book, Dusklands, was published in South Africa in 1974. In the Heart of the Country (1977) won South Africa’s then principal literary award, the CNA Prize, and was published in Britain and the USA. Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) received international notice. His reputation was confirmed by Life & Times of Michael K (1983), which won Britain’s Booker Prize. It was followed by Foe (1986), Age of Iron (1990), The Master of Petersburg (1994), and Disgrace (1999), which again won the Booker Prize.

Coetzee also wrote two fictionalized memoirs, Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002). The Lives of Animals (1999) is a fictionalized lecture, later absorbed into Elizabeth Costello (2003). White Writing (1988) is a set of essays on South African literature and culture. Doubling the Point (1992) consists of essays and interviews with David Attwell. Giving Offense (1996) is a study of literary censorship. Stranger Shores (2001) collects his later literary essays.

Coetzee has also been active as a translator of Dutch and Afrikaans literature.

In 2002 Coetzee emigrated to Australia. He lives with his partner Dorothy Driver in Adelaide, South Australia, where he holds an honorary position at the University of Adelaide.

Foe as a Post colonial Novel

J. M. Coetzee’s 1986 novel Foe is a postcolonial reworking of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The novel differs from other examples of postcolonial writing that undermine canonical authority by way of constructing alternative narratives and seeking to reassign agency to the deprived and marginalized subjects of colonialism. Coetzee shifts the focus away from the level of competing narratives to an alternative account of the genesis of the canonical text itself. The article argues that Coetzee produces a postcolonial critique of a second order by weaving together intertextual and metafictional elements. At the centre of this project stands the question of authorship. The struggle for authorial authority between the novel’s multiple author figures lays bare the structures of power and repression at work in the creation of colonialist literature by drawing attention to the acts of omission and silencing in its wake. 

Foe differs significantly from other postcolonial re-writings of canonical texts. Unlike Rhys in her prequel to Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Coetzee neither tries to fill the blank spots of the colonial narrative, nor does he attempt to undermine canonical authority by way of reassigning agency to the deprived and marginalized subjects of colonialism. His protagonist Susan Barton ultimately fails in her attempt to defend her narrative against the fictionalization of the professional writer Mr Foe and Friday’s mutilation renders the project of giving authentic voice to the experiences and aspirations of colonized people (within as well as beyond the dominant discourse) impossible. Foe evades such simplistic alternatives by shifting the postcolonial critique to the very heart of the canonical text, its production process and thus onto the question of its authorial authority. Consequently, Coetzee’s the novel does not discredit or dismantle the colonial discourse primarily by way of a postcolonial alternative narrative but by laying bare the structures of power and repression at work in the creation of colonialist literature. Re-writing becomes an exercise in opening up canonical fiction to the present while preventing it from being conclusive or teleological. 

Coetzee produces a postcolonial critique of a second order by interweaving intertextual and metafictional elements. By complementing the intertextual web of canonical and postcolonial texts with elements concerning the nature and practice of literature in general, Coetzee shifts the focus away from the level of competing narratives to an alternative account of the genesis of the canonical text itself. The novel’s multiple author figures (Susan Barton, Mr Foe and the historic Defoe) stand at the centre of this project.

Coetzee, however, casts the intertextual web wider. Besides challenging the colonial discourse in which Defoe’s novel occupies a central place, Coetzee’s ‘canonic intertextuality’ in Foe is not limited to re-writing Robinson Crusoe (Attridge, 1996: 169) but incorporates both the figure of the eighteenth-century author and several elements and characters of Defoe’s works. From the vantage point of a moment before the historic Defoe had turned to writing Robinson Crusoe, Coetzee speculates on the process preceding ‘the ‘fathering’ of the novel as genre’ and the omissions and silences that took place along the way. With hindsight, (De)Foe appears as personification of authorial manipulations. He effaces Susan from her own account in order to construct the Robinson ‘myth of the male pioneering spirit’ (Head, 1997: 115). He transforms the mute Friday (whose silence is both a reminder of the total exclusion of the colonized from the dominant discourse and an implicit challenge to its foundation, Western logocentrism) into the self-subordinating noble savage seeking to mimic his master. Put differently, rather than targeting the colonialist narrative of Robinson Crusoe head-on, Coetzee draws his readers’ attention to the formative elements of the colonial discourse and exposes the structures of power underpinning it.

In the final part of Foe, the dense, intersecting and overlapping textual levels of the novel converge in a surreal dreamlike scene full of contradictions and indeterminacies. Author, narrator and reader become indistinguishable. The unidentified narrator, ‘a fictional stand-in for the reader’ enters  Foe’s study (indicated by the reference to the commemorative blue plaque and the recourse to Susan’s vision of a stairway leading to the author’s hideout (F: 49). The room is littered with bodies (among them those of Susan and Mr Foe) resembling mummies. Friday is there too, barely alive. On the table, the narrator discovers Susan’s initial letter to Mr Foe. Upon reading her first words (‘Dear Mr Foe, at last I could row no further’)—from this point onwards the quotation marks used throughout the text to uphold the illusion of an autobiographical account disappear—the narrator/ reader literally dives into the underwater world surrounding Cruso(e)’s island. Like the room of the previous scene, the sea surrounding the wreck of the slave ship is full of dead bodies. Swimming into the hulk of the sunken vessel, it turns into the ship on which Susan Barton travelled. Her dead body lies besides that of the ship’s captain. She has never reached Cruso’s island, she has never passed on her account to Mr Foe, who never wrote Robinson Crusoe or Roxana. The text annuls itself; it robs itself of any closure (Spivak, 1990: 17).Again, Friday is there and again he features as the only animate body in the scene. Opening his tongueless mouth, a ‘slow stream, without breath, without interruption’ washing everything in its way comes out (F: 157). This cascade of surreal images is the climax of Coetzee’s dismantling of authorial authority, including his own. Taken together, the chain of conjured up images—the commemorative plaque dedicated to Daniel Defoe, the unread account of Susan Barton and Friday’s speechless underwater utterance is a stark reminder of the price of asserting authorial authority: marginalization, repression, silencing. Coetzee may be ‘asserting his authority,’ but at the same time he demystifies ‘the writer’s art (including his own),’ in the final part of the novel, ‘to find the traces of other voices, and to question any attempt at authority’. of his novel is emblematic of his second-order postcolonial critique. Colonialism is essentially a project of fixating differences. The colonizer imposes the closures of imperialism onto the colonized, simultaneously inscribing and marginalizing alterity. Put differently, both colonialism and canonicity depend on what it excludes. By denying closure, Coetzee destabilizes the very foundations of colonialist teleology and authorial authority. The one who possesses the key to the closure of the narrative is Friday. Friday’s utterance, however, remains unheard, his narrative unwritten.

Coetzee establishes a link between authority and marginality, merging them and reminding his audience of ‘the way the self-of-writing embodies counter-voices’ and that alterity and strangeness constitute essential conditions of literary narratives. This tension between the authoritarian nature of the narrative and the omnipresence of its discontents highlight what Linda Hutcheon has called the ‘contradictory doubleness’ of the novel. The novel, she stresses, is a potentially dangerous genre for it simultaneously reacts against and authorizes repression.Conflating colonialism and authorship, Coetzee exposes this fundamental ambivalence at work within and produced by the literary narrative. Through his self - critical exploration into questions of authorial authority, he, hence, provides a new vantage point from which a critical rethinking of questions concerning colonial marginalization and the  possibilities of postcolonial agency is made possible.

Word (1740) 

Assignment on Paper no. 202

Hello readers:) This is a blog on assignment Paper no 202 Indian English Literature-Post Independence and my topic is Nissim Ezekiel as a modern Poet. 

Nissim Ezekiel

Biography

Nissim Ezekiel is an Indian poet who is famous for writing his poetry in English. He had a long career spanning more than forty years, during which he drastically influenced the literary scene in India. Many scholars see his first collection of poetry, A Time to Change, published when he was only 28 years old, as a turning point in postcolonial Indian literature towards modernism.

Ezekiel was born in 1924 in Bombay to a Jewish family. They were part of Mumbai's Marathi-speaking Jewish community known as Bene Israel. His father taught botany at Wilson College, and his mother was the principal of a school. Ezekiel graduated with his bachelor's degree in 1947. In 1948, he moved to England and studied philosophy in London. He stayed for three and a half years until working his way home on a ship.Upon his return, he quickly joined the literary scene in India. He became an assistant editor for Illustrated Weekly in 1953. He founded a monthly literary magazine, Imprint, in 1961. He became an art critic for the Times of India. He also edited Poetry India from 1966-1967. Throughout his career, he published poetry and some plays. He was professor of English and a reader in American literature at Bombay University in the 1990s, and secretary of the Indian branch of the international writer's organization, PEN. Ezekiel was also a mentor for the next generation of poets, including Dom Moraes, Adil Jussawalla and Gieve Patel. Ezekiel received the Sahitya Akademi cultural award in 1983. He also received the Padma-Shri, India's highest honor for civilians, in 1988.

Ezekiel died in 2004 after a long battle against Alzheimer's Disease. At the time of his death, he was considered the most famous and influential Indian poet who wrote in English.

Despite the fact that he wrote in English, Ezekiel's poems primarily examine themes associated with daily life in India. Through his career, his poems become more and more situated in India until they can be nothing else but Indian. Ezekiel has been criticized in the past as not being authentically Indian on account of his Jewish background and urban outlook. Ezekiel himself writes about this in a 1976 essay entitled "Naipaul's India and Mine," in which he disagrees with another poet, V.S. Naipaul, about the critical voice with which he writes about India. "While I am not a Hindu and my background makes me a natural outsider," Ezekiel writes, "circumstances and decisions relate me to India. In other countries I am a foreigner. In India I am an Indian. When I was eighteen, a friend asked me what my ambition was. I said with the naive modesty of youth, 'To do something for India.'" We can see this attitude at work in Ezekiel's poetry—even when his poems are satirical, they come from the voice of a loving insider rather than someone who is looking from the outside. In this way, Ezekiel's poems are quintessentially Indian because they exist there. Ezekiel writes, "India is simply my environment. A man can do something for and in his environment by being fully what he is, by not withdrawing from it. I have not withdrawn from India."

The critic Vinay Lal argued in 1991 that it is not surprising that a poet like Ezekiel brought about so much literary change in India: "It is perhaps no accident either that the first blossoms of the birth and growth of modern Indian poetry in English should have come from the pen of a poet who, while very much an Indian, belongs to a community that in India was very small to begin with, and has in recent years become almost negligible, a veritable drop in the vast ocean of the Indian population."

As a Poet

Nissim Ezekiel is a great Indo-Anglian poet. Versatility is the outstanding characteristic of his poetry. The Indian contemporary scene, modern urban life, human relationship, love and sex and spiritual values are the major themes of his poetry. He has experimented endlessly with form and craft. Flawless craftsmanship makes his poetry unique.

As a poet of Indian urban life Ezekiel is a poet of city life. In his poem we find the description of Bombay. It is the symbol of any modern city. Through this symbol the poet has presented the ugliness, dirt, wickedness, inhumanity and squalor of life.Ezekiel's poetry shows his philosophical and religious bent of mind. He always stresses the need for commitment, sincerity and integrity. His attitude to religion is rational, logical, secular and humanistic. He believes in the religion of love and charity.poetic style Ezekiel is a great craftsman. He has a rich sense of humour and wit. To attack on absurdities and follies of life, he takes help of irony. He shows a keen sense of form and structure. Words are chosen and used carefully. He frequently uses colloquial English. His conversational tone is interesting. Ezekiel's symbols and images are evocative.Thus Ezekiel is a versatile poet. He has prepared a grand path for the new poets. He has made a valuable contribution to stylistic facilities in Indo- Anglian poetry.

Nissim Ezekiel (b. 1924) happens to be one of the most productive talents and most distinctive poetic personalities of modern India. Having produced seven volumes of poetry to date,1 he is acknowledged by all and sundry as an established Indian-English poet of the post-Independence era.Ever since 1952, when his first verse collection, A Time to Change, appeared in London, he has been writing poems and publishing them in book form or in various national and international periodicals, and hence he may verily be called the perfect barometer of modern India's literary atmosphere. Through his numerous other endeavors - editing, teaching, advertising, anthologizing, and encouraging the younger generation of poets - he has only further strengthened his position in the literary world.

In the recent past Ezekiel has taken his critics by surprise with his two Oxford University Press publications (from New Delhi) Hymns in Darkness (1976) and Latter-Day Psalms (1982) and belied their misconceived predictions about his artistic growth and vitality. In this connection, it may be pointed out that Chetan Karnani's unwarranted commentary on Ezekiel's recent verse - that it shows "a marked decline"2 - is somewhat untenable and unacceptable,keeping in mind the poet's wholehearted devotion to the noble cause of the Muse. William Walsh, a noted English critic of our day, is rather nearer the truth when he remarks that Ezekiel's poetry is "fastidiousp oetry, at once spontaneous and controlled." The austerity of Ezekiel's poetic art, the condensation of his style, the economical precision of his language, the impressiveness of his imagery, the sharpness of his wit and irony, the contemporaneity of his subjectm atter - all these immediately render him a "modern" poet of great relevance and significance. In what follows I attempt to trace modernity in Ezekiel's poetry, with special reference to his 1982 collection. 

 The modernity of Ezekiel's verse is found in his skillful execution of wit and irony. All "modern"poets such as the Sitwells, Pound, Eliot, the confessionals, and the symbolists are prone to "wit" and "irony." Here is a flash from Ezekiel: "She didn't know beggars in India / smile only at white foreigners" ("Poverty Poem," LDP, 13). This excerpt contains an obvious truth as well as an ironic dig at the low begging habits of Indian paupers. The poem"Healers" is also sarcastic in its tone and temper,hitting hard as it does at "the unplanned city" that harbors "a death-wish" in the midst of mercantile people (mark the first two lines in particular for this).In another poem, "Jewish Wedding in Bombay," the poet laughs loudly in an ironic mood at the Jews who are out to enjoy life, mixing up confusedly the sacred ceremony of marriage with beef-eating, pork-relishing, and "betting and swearing and drinking": "Even the most orthodox, it was said, / ate beef because it was cheaper, and some even risked / their souls by relishing pork. // The Sabbath was for betting and swearing and drinking" (LDP, 18). One should not be taken aback in reading these lines highlighting unexpected acts of sacrilege, for it is Ezekiel's habit to juxtapose contrasts and contradictions in his poetry.The cumulative effect of these lines is to be marked in the closing words of the poem, an effect created by the poet's alert ironic vision and witty remarks.Thematically, modernity is usually equated with contemporaneity of a work's content. Ezekiel is quite modern from the viewpoint of his deft handling of current subjects and his masterly treatment of immediate surroundings. 

If his "Poverty Poem" attempts to expose the stark, harsh reality of hunger, starvation, and nakedness in the vast and sprawling subcontinent, his "Jewish Wedding in Bombay" and"Songs for Nandu Bhende" (four in number) and"Latter-Day Psalms" highlight his own social, personal, and religious commitments and predicaments in a busy and crowded metropolis. Even such early poems as "Urban" and "A Morning Walk" from The Unfinished Man (1960) or "Night of the Scorpion"and "In India" from The Exact Name (1965)- the latter volume being somewhat philosophical rather than topical in its content - largely dwell either on the banality of the metropolis of Bombay and its attendant horrors of rootlessness and dehumanization of modern life or on the immediate environment of familial and social estrangement. The poet's anti dowry stance, a crying need of the hour in the Indian context, is quite evident: "There was no dowry because they knew I was 'modern' / and claimed to be modern too" ("Jewish Wedding in Bombay," LDP,18). 

Words(1622). 

Assignment on Paper no. 201

Hello readers:) This is blog on assignment 

Paper:201 Indian English Literature-Pre Independence and my Topic is Ravindranath Tagore as a great Indian English Writer. 

Rabindranath Tagore

Biography

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was the youngest son of Debendranath Tagore, a leader of the Brahmo Samaj, which was a new religious sect in nineteenth-century Bengal and which attempted a revival of the ultimate monistic basis of Hinduism as laid down in the Upanishads. He was educated at home; and although at seventeen he was sent to England for formal schooling, he did not finish his studies there. In his mature years, in addition to his many-sided literary activities, he managed the family estates, a project which brought him into close touch with common humanity and increased his interest in social reforms. He also started an experimental school at Shantiniketan where he tried his Upanishadic ideals of education. From time to time he participated in the Indian nationalist movement, though in his own non-sentimental and visionary way; and Gandhi, the political father of modern India, was his devoted friend. Tagore was knighted by the ruling British Government in 1915, but within a few years he resigned the honour as a protest against British policies in India.

Work

Tagore had early success as a writer in his native Bengal. With his translations of some of his poems he became rapidly known in the West. In fact his fame attained a luminous height, taking him across continents on lecture tours and tours of friendship. For the world he became the voice of India’s spiritual heritage; and for India, especially for Bengal, he became a great living institution.

Although Tagore wrote successfully in all literary genres, he was first of all a poet. Among his fifty and odd volumes of poetry are Manasi (1890) [The Ideal One], 

Sonar Tari (1894) [The Golden Boat], 

Gitanjali (1910) [Song Offerings], 

Gitimalya (1914) [Wreath of Songs], and Balaka (1916) [The Flight of Cranes]. 

The English renderings of his poetry, which include The Gardener (1913)

Fruit-Gathering (1916)

The Fugitive (1921), do not generally correspond to particular volumes in the original Bengali; and in spite of its title

Gitanjali: Song Offerings (1912) the most acclaimed of them, contains poems from other works besides its namesake. Tagore’s major plays are 

Raja (1910) [The King of the Dark Chamber]

Dakghar (1912) [The Post Office] 

Achalayatan (1912) [The Immovable]

Muktadhara (1922) [The Waterfall]

Raktakarabi (1926) [Red Oleanders]. He is the author of several volumes of short stories and a number of novels, among them Gora (1910), Ghare-Baire (1916) [The Home and the World], and Yogayog (1929) [Crosscurrents]. Besides these, he wrote musical dramas, dance dramas, essays of all types, travel diaries, and two autobiographies, one in his middle years and the other shortly before his death in 1941. Tagore also left numerous drawings and paintings, and songs for which he wrote the music himself.

Rabindranath Tagore's writing is deeply rooted in both Indian and Western learning traditions. Apart from fiction in the form of poetry, songs, stories, and dramas, it also includes portrayals of common people's lives, literary criticism, philosophy, and social issues. Tagore originally wrote in Bengali, but later reached a broad audience in the West after recasting his poetry in English. In contrast to the frenzied life in the West, his poetry was felt to convey the peace of the soul in harmony with nature.

Tagore’s career, extending over a period of more than 60 years, not only chronicled his personal growth and versatility but also reflected the artistic, cultural, and political vicissitudes of India in the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century. Tagore wrote in “My Life,” an essay collected in Lectures and Addresses (1988), that he “was born and brought up in an atmosphere of the confluence of three movements, all of which were revolutionary”: the religious reform movement started by Raja Rammohan Roy, the founder of the Bramo Samaj (Society of Worshipers of the One Supreme Being); the literary revolution pioneered by the Bengali novelist Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, who “lifted the dead weight of ponderous forms from our language and with a touch of his magic aroused our literature from her age-long sleep”; and the Indian National Movement, protesting the political and cultural dominance of the West. Members of the Tagore family had actively participated in all the three movements, and Tagore’s own work, in a broad sense, represented the culmination of this three-pronged revolution.

The earliest influences that shaped Tagore’s poetic sensibility were the artistic environment of his home, the beauty of nature, and the saintly character of his father. “Most members of my family,” he recalled in “My Life,” “had some gift—some were artists, some poets, some musicians—and the whole atmosphere of our home was permeated with the spirit of creation.” His early education was administered at home under private tutors, but, Tagore wrote in My Boyhood Days (1940), he did not like “the mills of learning” that “went on grinding from morn till night.” As a boy, he was admitted to four different schools in Calcutta, but he hated all of them and began frequently to play truant. Nature was his favorite school, as he recorded in “My Life”: “I had a deep sense, almost from infancy, of the beauty of nature, an intimate feeling of companionship with the trees and the clouds, and felt in tune with the musical touch of the seasons in the air. ... All these craved expression, and naturally I wanted to give them my own expression.” His father, Debendranath, popularly called Maharshi (Great Sage), was a writer, scholar, and mystic, who for many years had been a distinguished leader of the Brahmo Samaj (Theistic Church) movement founded by Raja Rammohan Roy.

In Letters to a Friend (1928) Tagore told C.F. Andrews, “I saw my father seldom; he was away a great deal, but his presence pervaded the whole house and was one of the deepest influences on my life.” When Rabindranath was 12 years old, his father took him on a four-month journey to the Punjab and the Himalayas. “The chains of the rigorous regime which had bound me snapped for good when I set out from home,” he wrote in his Reminiscences. Their first stop was at Bolpur, then an obscure rural retreat, now internationally known as Santiniketan, the seat of Visva-Bharati University founded by Tagore on December 22, 1918. This visit was Tagore’s first contact with rural Bengal, which he later celebrated in his songs. The Tagores’ final destination was Dalhousie, a beautiful resort in the Himalayas. Overwhelmed by the beauty and majesty of the mountains, young Tagore wandered freely from one peak to another. During the sojourn, Debendranath took charge of his son’s education and read with him selections from Sanskrit, Bengali, and English literatures. Debendranath also sang his favorite hymns and recited to Rabindranath verses from the metaphysical Hindu treatises, the Upanishads. Stephen N. Hay surmised, in Asian Ideas of East and West, that “the special attention Debendranath had paid to his youngest sons” during this trip and the sense of liberation experienced by Rabindranath miraculously transformed him “from ugly duckling into much-admired swan.” In Hay’s view, “the pleasurable memory of sudden recognition consequent to a glamorous journey may have remained for the rest of Rabindranath’s life a stimulus to re-enact this archetypal experience.”

Among other influences, Tagore acknowledged three main sources of his literary inspiration: the Vaishnava poets of medieval Bengal and the Bengali folk literature; the classical Indian aesthetic, cultural, and philosophical heritage; and the modern European literary tradition, particularly the work of the English Romantic poets. Underlining Tagore’s many affinities with the European mind, Alexander Aronson, in Rabindranath through Western Eyes, tried to fit him into the Western literary tradition, but, as Edward J. Thompson pointed out in Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Dramatist, “Indian influences, of course, were the deepest and touched his mind far more constantly than any European ones, and at a thousand points.” Harmoniously blended and synthesized in Rabindranath were the sensuous apprehension and the mythopoeic tendency of the English romantics, the vision of the great mystics of India, the metaphysical quest of the sages of the Upanishads, the aesthetic sensibilities of an ancient poet like Kalidasa, and the devotional spirit of the medieval Vaishnavite poet-saints and the Bauls—mendicant wandering religious minstrels of Bengal.

Tagore began writing poetry at a very early age, and during his lifetime he published nearly 60 volumes of verse, in which he experimented with many poetic forms and techniques—lyric, sonnet, ode, dramatic monologue, dialogue poems, long narrative and descriptive works, and prose poems. “Unfortunately for both the West and for Tagore,” Mary M. Lago pointed out in Rabindranath Tagore, “many of his readers never knew—still do not know—that so many of his poems were written as words for music, with musical and verbal imagery and rhythms designed to support and enhance each other.” His Gitabitan (“Song Collection”), containing 2,265 songs that were all composed, tuned, and sung by himself, not only started a new genre in Bengali music, known as Rabindrasangit, but, in Lago’s view, became “an important demonstration” of his “belief in the efficacy of cultural synthesis. He used all the musical materials that came to hand: the classical ragas, the boat songs of Bengal, Vaishnava kirtan [group chanting] and Baul devotional songs, village songs of festival and of mourning, even Western tunes picked up during his travels and subtly adapted to his own uses.” Such spirit of experimentation and synthesis marked Tagore’s entire creative career.

Arriving in London in June 1912, he gave these translations to English painter William Rothenstein, who had visited India in 1910 and had shown interest in the poet’s work. Deeply impressed, Rothenstein had copies typed and sent to poet William Butler Yeats, poet and critic Stopford Brooke, and critic Andrew Bradley—all of whom enthusiastically received them. On June 30, Tagore gave a reading of his poems at Rothenstein’s house to a distinguished group of fellow poets, including American poet Ezra Pound, who was at that time the foreign editor of Poetry, founded by Harriet Monroe. Pound wanted Poetry to be the first American magazine to print Tagore, and in a letter of December 24, 1912, he wrote to Harriet Monroe that Tagore’s poems “are going to be THE sensation of the winter.” In November 1912, the India Society of London published a limited edition of 750 copies of Gitanjali, with an introduction by Yeats and a pencil-sketch of the author by Rothenstein as frontispiece. In December 1912, Poetry included six poems from the book. And thus the Gitanjali poems reached both sides of the Atlantic to an ever-widening circle of appreciative readers.

The Beginning of Rabindranath Tagore's career as a writer in English was sudden and without any particular creative compulsions. Till the publication of his first English work Gitanjali (Song Offerings), published by the India Society, London, in 1912, Rabindranath, though a celebrity in Bengal, was an obscure figure outside the Bengali-speaking area in India, and totally unknown in the West. At that time he was fifty-one years old and his place in the history of Bengali literature was firmly assured. The prolific writer that he was, he had already produced more than twenty odd books of verse, nearly a dozen plays, a considerable number of essays and short stories and three major novels.

The tremendous enthusiasm with which Gitanjali was greeted by many distinguished poets and thinkers in England, including W.B. Yeats who wrote a brilliant introduction to it, prompted Rabindranath to translate more of his writings. During the next ten years he published more than a dozen books of prose, poems and plays in quick succession in response to the growing interest of western readers in his writings. Undoubtedly he is the only major writer in the literary history of any country who decided to translate his own works to reach a larger audience. His decision to become his own translator, and subsequently to write in English, though not entirely beneficial to him, was nonetheless a momentous one.He wrote primarily in Bengali, but his writings in English, including self-translations, fill four large volumes. Virtually no other major Indian writer has been so prolific.Tagore wrote numerous works, especially fiction, political essays, and travelogues, which have little overt spiritual content.

Conclusion

Indian English writer Rabindranath Tagore was one of the best inspirations for every Indian writer who wants to write in English. 

Words (2073).