Indian Writing in English

This article sketches some of the main ideas that informed the work of the post-colonial Indian philosopher Margaret Chatterjee (1925-2019). A philosopher of language and religion, her work straddles the "frozen" traditions of the east and the west, and astutely philosophizes about Gandhian thought in the realm of religious alterity and coevality.

The female characters in Rohinton Mistry’s debut novel
Such a Long Journey are situated in a trebly marginalised position—
they are women by gender, in the post-independence post-colonial
India and Parsi by ethnicity, which is a minority community in the
Indian subcontinent with a history of migration. However, situating
them in this position, Mistry does not allow them a voice of subversion
as all of them are cast in the stereotypical mould. This paper attempts
an analysis of the various major and minor female characters in this
novel and tries to find a thematic relevance in their portrayal as the two
major female characters—Dilnavaz and Miss Kutputia—contribute a
streak of ambiguity central to the design of the narrative of this novel.
Keywords: Gender, ethnicity, migration, ambiguity, narrative.

Preface

A cat answers a poignant call, leaps over the boundary, comes up the stairs and rummages through the library and the racks and hides in the bag. Hung on the wall like a spider, a muddled mind not dead, sometimes hungry, at times a wooden flower and not knowing the real from the ideal, the loner envies the lover of his games. He paints the world in new hues, adds music to many songs and sets the loner’s groaning heart right. He uses his hypnotic charm to restore youth to a stifled life. He has come like rain where the sun rules. He is lofty above the crowd and he gingerly lifts a retired bird on his wind. As love flows sometimes in fairy tales of emotions, you wish you could offer more caresses to a flower but indeed, you take flight in poetic expressions.
Nothing surpasses passion except compassion. If someone tugs at your sleeve and suggests a whirlwind romance what will you do? If you give in to passion, your conscience pricks; if you do not give in, the whole world pricks. I have tried to give expression to a cultural chasm that becomes apparent to one at middle age and only after the best things offered to one have disappeared due to a lag.
When with time life begins to show signs of crumbling, you groan in pain. I have captured the sound of those groans in numerous images. It becomes more hysterical when something emerges from the unknown zones of your heart and tries to conquer time, restrain decay and forces you to push hard against accepted cultural ties. It requires a lofty ideal to deal ideally with a cultural hole. In the following poems one can read the heart’s dilemma at such an interruption. If read in the given sequence, the poems form a storyline.
If Lofty touches you passionately, it would mean that you have not been swallowed up by the chasm.

List of contents:
Lofty Above The Crowd
A Muddled Mind
Rain
Hero Honda
The Atlas
Me On The Wall
Pity
Goals
Over The Boundary
A Cat
Lover
On The Rack
I Wish
Fairy Tales
I Am Not Dead
Hoax
Answering Call
It Has Never Been As Before
False
Games
Panther Passion
The Bag
Another Possibility
Hungry Rhymes
We Shall Talk
Emotions
Sometimes
The Spider On The Wall
Those Stairs
Tug at My Sleeve
A Wooden Flower
Reality
Vegetable Passion
The Fall
The Flight
Forces
In Disguise
The Cobra
I Was Drunk
Caresses
Edging Forward
A Loner
The Naughty Streak

This paper argues that the diasporic writings deal with the paradox of separation and connection with the homeland. While the diasporic connection with ‘past-home’ is revived by audio, visual, and verbal memories through photographs, albums, letters, videos, audios, and recordings, the connection with the ‘present-home’ is retained by a global communication network. Thus, modern communication and technology seem to bring diaspora nearer to home because of which they can retain their connections with the homeland in the host-land. However, it can be seen that modern technology and communication itself allure individuals in envisioning the idea of “would-be-homeland” resulting in their diasporic psychology. Consequently, the diasporic narrative can be divided into parts: In the first part, it is the ‘would-be host-land’ which becomes a place of attraction as it is represented in various media like television, cinema, magazines, internet, books, and anecdotes. An image of prosperity is created of “would-be-host land” which is filled with hope and opportunities for progress. The protagonist is thus already inclined to make a move to this new ‘host-land.’ The second half of the narrative deals with the experience of ‘the moved body.’ The person who migrates to a new place finds it difficult to adjust to a new identity and fails to assimilate in a new environment resulting in a nostalgia for the lost place. This paper attempts to deconstruct the causal aspect of media and means of communication.

This article is a genuine tribute to Shiv K. Kumar, who began his poetic journey with Articulate Silences (1970), consummated it mysteriously with Where Have the Dead Gone? and Other Poems (2014). Where Have the Dead Gone & Other Poems” (2014) is a collection of 67 poems which reveal Kumar’s maturity, imagination and intuitions. He does not wish to give any message through his poetry though the reader himself becomes aware and shows his interest in understanding life through his poems—the poems which speak of the experiences in life.

This research paper critically examines Salman Rushdie's novel Shalimar the Clown from a postcolonial, historical and allegorical perspective. It looks at a key issue in the work: the loss of the Paradise that was Kashmir and the implications and consequences of that loss. The novel is a combination of fiction, history, magic realism and allegory. It looks at the terrible tragedy of Kashmir through the powerfully drawn characters of Boonyi, Shalimar, Max and India. The characters reflect the fates of their nations. They are doomed to self-destruct. Their inheritance is an inheritance of pain and loss. Shalimar is Rushdie's tribute to a lost homeland which has been destroyed by violence. The destruction of Kashmir lies at the heart of this passionately written novel. Shalimar's original profession as a tightrope artiste comes a full circle when he becomes the member of an international terror organization. Walking the tightrope becomes the ultimate symbol and a metaphor for history. Shalimar the Clown analyzes the roots of violence and connects it to the divisions and conflicts caused in the world by neo imperialism and terrorism.

This paper demonstrates how Arun Kolatkar in Sarpa Satra has exploited the Mahabharata myth to register his hatred for the violence, oppression and exploitation. What makes Sarpasatra different from the original story of Mahabharata is that the human world is not seen through the eyes of Arjuna and Krishna but through the eyes of Jaratkaru, a snake woman who makes up her mind to make an end of this violence with the help of her son Aastika. The text Sarpa Satra raises the issue of environmental pollution and the ecological problems that appear out of the forest fire.

Contents









Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………......i

Preface…………………………………………………………………………………..ii-iii


1. Arundhati Roy - A Profile…………………………………………………..…..1-4

2. Roy as a Literary Artist in The God of Small Things ………………………....5-25

3. Roy as a Literary Social Activist in The Algebra of Infinite Justice…………26-45

4. Roy’s Linguistic Novelty …………………………………………….…...….46-58

5. Roy on the Touchstone of Criticism………………………………...….…….59-64

Bibliography……………………………………………...…….…………………….65-68

In the following question select the word which is word. Q1. INDISCREET a. reliable b. honest c. prudent d. stupid Q2. SOLICITUDE a. insouciance b. ingenuity c. propriety d. austerity Q3. In the sentence there is a bold word or phrase the options conveys almost the same meaning as the bold word or phrase in the sentence Select that option which is nearest in meaning It is preposterous on your part to look for a job without first completing your education a. Wise b. Imperative c. Advisable d. Most admirable e. Very absurd In the following questiones, fill in the blank space Q4. The success that he has gained, though striking enough, does not, however, commensurate . . . the efforts made by him. a. About b. From c. With d. Beside

Speeches of Swami Vivekananda and Subhash Chandra Bose: A Comparative Study deciphers the speeches of Swami Vivekananda and Subhash Chandra Bose to trace out the thought patterns, revealed through the language, and thus to find out the points of similarities and dissimilarities for the final evaluation without harming the reputation of the two. 

(Speeches of Swami Vivekananda and Subhash Chandra Bose: A Comparative Study. Bareilly: Prakash Book Depot, 2006. Pp. 118. Rs. 200/-. ISBN: 81-7977-149-0)

Braj Kachru is a major figure in linguistics and English studies, and he has left us an intellectual legacy that speaks to a wide range of fields in language studies, including sociolinguistics, variation studies, bilingualism and multilingualism, applied linguistics, second language acquisition, and teaching English as a second or foreign language. This article sets out to provide a detailed and nuanced study of the intellectual trajectory of one of the most influential figures in contemporary sociolinguistics and English studies. 1 | INTRODUCTION Braj Kachru is a major figure in linguistics and English studies, along with their ancillary fields, sociolinguistics, variation studies, bilingualism and multilingualism, applied linguistics, second language acquisition, and teaching English as a second or foreign language. He brought about a change in the way we understand the use of English around the world. He exposed the limitations of contemporary colonial, ethnocentric models of teaching English, which insisted on one proper way-the native speaker's way-of using English as the only one appropriate for any occasion. He showed that it is limiting to view the many ways in which English is used in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere as erroneous perversions of this ideal. Instead, the educated versions of the different usages should be seen as parallel, legitimate varieties of English, systematic in structure and autonomous in function, resulting from the interplay of linguistic and social contexts of their learning and use. In fact, the differences are creative innovations that extend or enrich the resources of English to express new meanings, values, and experiences not encountered in native uses. Hence, what is needed is a pluralistic conception of English-beautifully captured in the term 'world Englishes'-which recognizes that there is more than one model of English and that different models are appropriate for different contexts. In adumbrating this new paradigm through a half-century of meticulous scholarship and energetic advocacy, Kachru 'liberated' the language of hundreds of millions of non-native speakers of

Nation is a concept that draws lot of attention for its complicated discourse. It impacts the
lives of its citizens in multiple ways. The inception of national consciousness in the minds of its
people creates chaos in their personal as well as public life. The dichotomy of nation as a discourse
is its inherent problematics of memory, forgetting, brutality, glory, necessity of common past,
topography, remembrances, amnesia, suffering, marginalization and politics of control, violence and
plethora of issues that complicates the human life. It also restricts the life, ideology, emotions
within the confines of national borders. These blurred lines on the spatial geography, encroachment,
wars, bloodshed brings out the hollowness and absurdity of popular concept of nationalism and
patriotism when thought on the universal levels.
K. Satchidanandan, a Malayalam poet, raises questions on the changing cartography and
futility of war and borders in his poetry collection, Questions from the Dead(2021). The
communion with nature and human beings across the world preaches the values of universal
brotherhood, peace, love, compassion. He gives hopes of possibility of utopian world where living
and non-living beings would dwell with harmony and co-existence. While portraying the futility
and absurdity of nation, war and borders, he also keenly observes the nation within the nations
caused due to unequal distribution of resources, discrimination, prejudices, and marginalization.
The present paper attempts to trace the critique of nation, nationalism and necessity of
peace, love, compassion for universal brotherhood and harmonious co-existence as reflected in K.
Satchidanandan‟s selected poems from his recently published poetry collection entitled as
Questions From the Dead (2021).
Keywords:
Nation, Nationalism, Boundaries, Borders, War, Peace, Compassion, Universal brotherhood,
Harmony, Co-existence, Civilization, Culture, Language, History, Race, Memory, Amnesia,
National Consciousness

Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's first novel, Rajmohan's Wife, has generally been considered as the first Indian novel in English. Makarand Paranjape even goes one step further to consider it as Asia's first English novel. Though the novel is constructed following the track of a romance and adventure story mingled with the elements of mystery and suspense, trysts, feudal intrigues, burglaries, abductions and love confessions, it also impressively delineates the feelings and passions of modern woman through the character of the heroine against the backdrop of an old, feudal, rural setting of Bengal. Thus the protagonist of the novel may be seen as a strong and firm character unhesitant to declare her own passion, but at the end also, she is deprived of the justice she deserves. This article is an attempt to show how far the novelist successfully depicts the heroine as a representative of the unshackled, new woman of modern India.

“Art needs three things to sell, it is Entertainment, Entertainment and Entertainment” Dialogue from the movie, 'The Dirty Picture' (2009). Exactly the current trend of Indian writing in English is apt for the quote. Recently even the standard and literary authors have also been influenced by the commercialisation culture of literature. In other ways they were forced by the publishers to spice it up their works by adding some erotic elements or characters. It is a kind of joy that the reader gains from that part, which is very well understood and used for marketing gimmicks. Upamanyu Chatterjee, Chetan Bhagat & Novoneel Chakraborty etc has started using this strategy of making erotic elements as a stage that helps for the „take off‟ of their works. This transition is happening because of us, yes the readers. We are responsible for this kind of so-called transition towards eroticism. This paper takes into account and makes a study of novels written by Upamanyu Chatterjee which are recently published and categorised as
"Contemporary Indian writing in English‟ and could be placed under this phase of transition. Why this eroticise culture is trending in the recent days? The Study tries to get a reasonable answer.

“Abhijit Sarmah's Dying with a Little Patience transports us into a world of fine wit, opulence, and stark imageries. It opens up alternate worlds, democratic and egalitarian—spaces that question the existent social condition, create an alternate reality, and dare to undo the state of apathy and brutality that pervades our current scenario.”
—Dr. Namrata Pathak, author of That’s How Mirai Eats a Pomegranate

The post-Rushdie Indian English novel very often tends to be a ‘nation narrative’. These novelists paradoxically connect nations with individuals assuming nation as a myth. They try to deconstruct India as a nation from her fragments. These writers even question the identity of the nation. The contemporary Indian English novelists celebrate the fractured, the fragmented identity of the nation. They also interrogate the falsity of the notion of secularism.  Though it is pretty difficult to locate Kiran Nagarkar in the post – Rushdie generation, being a different kind of novelist, his fiction does share the prominent features of the post – Rushdie Indian English novel. His Ravan and Eddie (1991) certainly raises the issues of nationalism, secularism, and making of the nation. In a typical postmodernist way, Nagarkar deconstructs the homogenous and harmonious world through the novel Ravan and Eddie.

The extreme violence that women suffer during conflict does not arise solely out of the conditions of war; it is directly related to the violence that exists in women's lives during peacetime. Throughout the world, women experience violence because they are women, and often because they do not have the same rights or autonomy that men do. They are subjected to gender-based persecution, discrimination and oppression, including sexual violence and slavery.
(Elizabet Rehn and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. (2002, 10)

Arundhati Roy laments on the large-scale human rights violations in India and abroad as a writer and social activist as the outcome of fascism, new imperialism, globalization and privatization. Every religion and every political party have their contribution to injustices on the powerless class of the world. The nexus between elite class and governments are exposed through her writings. They together conspire against the powerless class. No one is there to protect their rights and raise voice against the wholesale violation of human rights and the right to freedom of life. The agents of the globalization have colonized knowledge. They also twist the language for their advantages to misguide the masses. For them war is peace, selling the public wealth to corporate is a development and raising voice against human rights violation is anti-national. Poor villagers in India and poor people all over the world suffer for the sake of the rich. The world is under the terror of the fangs of the beast of fascism, nationalism, terrorism, privatization etc. For saving humanity from the clutch of this new imperialism and their agents in the third world countries, there is an urgent need of unification of powerless class all over the country and abroad.

The book consists of three parts– Introduction, Select Speeches and Questions-Answers. In the first chapter of Introduction, which consists of 5 chapters, Singh details Swami’s eventful life. In the Second Part of the book Singh has meticulously selected some of Swamiji’s speeches which are especially useful to Indian young people who have to do the onerous task of nation building. The third part Questions-Answers has been designed to help the students and readers of Vivekananda literature.

(Swami Vivekananda: Select Speeches. Bareilly: Prakash Book Depot, 2004 & 2012 (Second Enlarged Edition with ISBN). Pp. 190. Rs. 80/-. ISBN: 978-81-7977-466-3)

Journey of feminine consciousness in Indian English fiction by women-novelists The novel has emerged as one of the most prolific, comprehensive, picturesque, assertive depiction of social and cultural life of modern India. It has brought to the fore the nation and its sub-cultural groups with such a vibrant elegance that it is recognized as the most articulate and eloquent of all the literary genres in India today. Novelists continue to articulate different sections of the Indian pluralistic contemporary society. While portraying a variety of hues and colours from the wide spectrum Indian social, cultural, economic and political realities, novelists not only experiment with stylistic techniques and linguistic nuances but also delineate the psychological problems like sense of alienation, rootlessness, anxiety, tumult, paranoia, search for identity in their works. In this tremendous success and growth of the novel, women novelists are not lagging behind their male counterparts in creativity and articulation of their inner thoughts. They have made rich contribution towards the growth and enrichment of Indian novels in English. Their novels essentially bring to the fore, the gender discrimination and the double standards of our society towards women-folk. By delineating the inner minds of their protagonists, the women novelists reveal with a feminine sensibility, not only the aggressive male domination but also identify oppression through the religion, society and culture. While acknowledging various streams of Indian literature and a good number of talented and accomplished women novelists in other Indian languages, the paper brings into focus only women writing in English. It surveys the journey undertaken by the women novelists to reflect and assert feminine consciousness through the art of novel writing. Taking into account three novels written by three women novelists namely Kamala Markandaya's Nector in a Sieve (1954), Anita Desai's Cry, the Peacock (1963) and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997) in successive periods, the paper identifies a remarkable shift from male-centred narratives to the women-centred narratives in Indian writing in English. These women novelists present an authentic portrayal of women's lives and stories in an innovative narrative technique. Above all, the paper draws attention to the strong interconnection between the world of words and the contemporary reality. The chronological order of these three novels not only brings under focus the growing feminine consciousness through the characters of their female protagonists but also daringly presents the feminine perspective of various contemporary issues with an Indian sensibility. These women illustrate befittingly, how the legends, myths, traditional beliefs, culture and above all, orthodox attitudes apart from reinforcing the patriarchal practices in our society but also turn women-folk into either inferior creatures or objects of pleasure. Kamala Markandaya is an outstanding post-independence novelist endowed with an artistic acumen and a female sensibility. Her novel, Nector in a Sieve (1954) is set in an anonymous village of South India and movingly presents the various events which centre around the life of Rukmani, the protagonist and narrator of the novel. Written in a first-person narrative, it brings forth her life in a reminiscent mood. The youngest of the four daughters, Rukmani, at the age of twelve, was given in marriage to Nathan, a tenant farmer by her father, once a powerful village headman. The man that her family found for her is poor in everything but " in love and care " (NS 2). By getting married at twelve, bearing her first-born at thirteen and five more till twenty four, she evidently started looking much elderly than her age. Her man, Nathan is below her status and economically very weak. When she looks at the house built by her husband, she ponders " this mud hut, nothing but mud and thatch was my home. " (NS 4).

The present paper seeks to closely explore Kurt Vonnegut " s Slaughterhouse-Five in terms of Judith Herman " s surveys and categorization of post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms. It is an attempt to analyze the conflict between the will to deny horrible events experienced by the protagonists of the novel in World War II and the will to proclaim them aloud. The psychological distress symptoms including the inability to sleep, lack of concentration, flashbacks and state of surrender are thus investigated in the narrator and Billy Pilgrim as the two figures who are suffering from PTSD. These symptoms are analyzed in a way to call attention to the existence of unspeakable secret and simultaneously as means to deflect attention from it. The protagonists are both subjected to the dialectic of trauma in that they find it difficult to remain clearheaded, to see more than a few fragments of the picture at one time, and to retain all the pieces and to fit them together. It is even more difficult to find a language that conveys persuasively what they have seen.

Anand Neelakantan’s novel 'Asura: the tale of the Vanquished' is a unique retelling of the epic story of Ramayana as it is from the perspective of the dead, defeated and “vanquished” Ravana. This paper analyses the human condition of the popular villain character Ravana in the text to gain understanding of his psychology and the political standpoint of the novel. In this pursuit to understand the becoming, or construction, of Ravana, this paper also aims to unravel the concept of evil as a construct.

The Mahabharata is the world's most analyzed and interpreted work which has been able to generate more than one rendering without losing its freshness each time. It has been retold in various forms such as literature, drama, film, TV series, web series, cartoons and short films. Each new narration tries to deconstruct the multi-narrative structure into the individual narration by a particular character. There are several modern versions of fictions available which try to voice the inner minds of the protagonist characters such as Draupadi, Bhima, Arjuna, Duryodhana and Karna. Various TV serials have also been produced to reach to the wider range of the audience. B. R. Chopra's Mahabharata series (1988-1990) on DD National is the best known example. But the representations of the present era does not merely focus on it as the history of the people depicting the great deeds of Lord Krishna on earth but also provides innumerable insights on dharmaandadharmain modern terms. One such series-Dharmakshetra (2014-2015) which aired on Epic channel provides a touch of court room drama after the Kurukshetra war where the leading characters are defining their own state of dharma-adharma in front of Chitragupta-an Indian deity who keeps record of the deeds of people before attaining heaven. There are total 26 episodes in the entire series depicting the point of view of each of them. Like a courtroom each character is called by Chitragupta to

Shashi Tharoor's Riot is a very unconventional novel. The notion that in a culturally, and religiously diverse country like India truth can never be singular, is very much visible in the course of this narrative. In the rendition of the story, many uncomfortable histories of postcolonial India is represented with distinctive style keeping in mind their relative importance to the novel. This postmodern text touches many sensitive themes while dealing with the many lives of its characters. One such theme is Truth, thus the paper tries to analyze the narrative structure of the novel so as to unravel the multiplicity of ‗truths' in its ambit.

This paper examines Vikram Chandra’s detective novella, “Kama,” suggesting that it incorporates both postcolonial and postmodern concerns into a broadly noir structure, in order to raise questions about epistemology and ontology.  Chandra portrays the attempts of the marginalized Sikh policeman, Sartaj Singh, to forge an ethics of investigative practice amid the divisive communal politics of postcolonial Bombay/Mumbai and the disintegration of his marriage.  Like his American hard-boiled forebears, Chandra describes the “mean streets” of an urban milieu, but demonstrates that the legacies of colonialism make it almost impossible for a detective in late-1990s Bombay to remain an unsullied “white knight”.

There is a Kashmir that tourists know about: the one with houseboats, carpets, the one called the Paradise on Earth. There is another Kashmir the world knows through the newspapers, that of militants, a place embroiled in the Indo-Pak border conflict. Madhuri Vijayʼs debut novel is a “fictional” attempt to know Kashmir from both extremes—the latter more than the former—through the lense of a woman visiting here for the first time.

Among debut Indian English novels, few have aroused as much controversy as Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, whether on theme or style of narration. Perhaps the most striking feature in a novel is the linguistic innovation the novelist makes. Arundhati Roy won the Booker prize of 1997 for the stylistic innovations in her debut novel. An analysis of Roy's narrative style is quite complicated, for its structure implies many levels of reading. She writes in a style markedly different from many of her contemporaries. To express her thoughts Roy invents an almost code-language suffused with cross-references, so that it seems the novel invents the language in which it is written. The God of Small Things clearly merits critical study for despite its veneer of simplicity, it is a complex postmodernist and ‗writerly' text that invites evaluation from various angles.

Review for Book: Sudhir K Arora. Literary NECTAR for Competitive Examinations in English. Bareilly: Prakash Book Depot, 2017. Pp. 346. Price: Rs. 298/-. ISBN: 978-81-7977-616-2.

MLA Citation: Chauhan, Abnish Singh. Review of Literary NECTAR for Competitive Examinations in English, by Sudhir K Arora. Creation and Criticism, vol. 2, joint issue nos. 6-7, July-Oct 2017. Web Page.

Dalit literature is the saga of resistance against the hegemony of Brahmanic literature which pretends to be omniscient and all-encompassing while presenting a narrow, one sided, twisted and biased view of reality. Society is changing. So it is obvious that the role of literature and expression must be changed accordingly. An inferiority complex attached with ‘being Dalit’ is reduced considerably. It is time taking process and will go with time. So it is essential that our approach towards Dalit literature must be changed. There is a drastic change in dalit consciousness in last decades. The depressed consciousness of dalits is changing. It is replaced by asserting themselves in every field. Dalits, who were practically invisible from socio-political arena, are making their presence everywhere. They are giving their contribution to society. So our literature must encompass the changing role of dalits. In the present paper we propose the concept New Dalitism as a changed way of expression in the current and emerging socio-political milieu. This is required to differentiate it with the previous approach. Contrary to the Dalitism which is to highlight the disabilities and difficulties and seek sympathy, Neo Dalitism is to question the very literature which justifies this caste hierarchy. It is to develop not only a healthy (not sympathy) image for dalit but an image of appreciation for the people who have been unjustly victimised over the centuries and endured it. It is not to artistically portray the sorrows, tribulations, slavery, degradation and poverty endured by Dalits, but question them and rewrite them from dalit points of view. It is critically examining and pointing out the flaws on the basis of which this caste system is based.

Rabindranath Tagore's Chitra, a play in one act, abounds in stylistic features. Tagore's dexterous use of figurative language is indisputably inimitable. The play is a creative adoption of an exquisitely beautiful love story of the legendary lovers, Chitra and Arjuna, which forms a memorable episode in The Mahabharata. So the content and the style of presentation are in quite congruence in the play. There are only two levels in the discourse structure of the play-at the first or overarching level the writer is the addresser and the reader the addressee, and the text of the play forms the message, while at the second or embedded level are the characters in the play as the addressers and the addressees and what the characters communicate to each other forms the message. There is no other level of discourse between the character as the addresser and the reader as the addressee. The dramatic discourse consists of all the five major speech acts of constative, directive, commissive, expressive, and declarative. The plenteous use of parallelism is one of the outstanding features of the play. Sheer magical music flows throughout the drama.

Beginning with an analysis of how often Indian women writers have been relegated to the limbo while writing a history of the emergence and evolution of Indian short fiction in English, this paper is an attempt to highlight the contribution of Indian women writers in shaping the form of short story as we find it today in India. It takes into its purview almost all the Indian women writers who have published short story collection/collections in English. This paper focuses mainly on the annotated chronological bibliography of Indian women’s short fiction in English as even the information available is scant and therefore, requires a compilation.