Indian Literature & Language

Indian literature, writings of the Indian subcontinent,

produced there in a variety of vernacular languages,
including Sanskrit, Prakrit, Pali, Bengali, Bihari, Gujarati, Hind
i, Kannada, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Oriya, Punjabi, Rajasthani, T
amil, Telugu, Urdu, Lahnda, Siraiki, and Sindhi, among others,
as well as in English. The term Indian literature is used here to
refer to literature produced across the Indian subcontinent
prior to the creation of the Republic of India in 1947 and within
the Republic of India after 1947.
Earliest Indian Literature
The earliest literature is of a sacred character and dates
from about 1400 BC in the form of the Rigveda. Rigveda is
the oldest document in literature of south Asia. This work
stands at the beginning of the literature of the Veda,
or canonical Hindu sacred writings, which as a whole is
roughly contemporary with the settlement of the Indo-
Aryan peoples in the Punjab and farther east, in the
Mesopotamia of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers.
The language of the Rigveda, which is a compilation of
hymns to the high gods of the Aryan religion, is complex
and archaic. It was simplified and codified in the course of
the centuries from 1000 to 500 BC, which saw the
development of prose commentaries called
the Brahmanas, Aranyaka’s, and Upanishads. While
there must have been a long tradition of grammarians, the
final codification of the language is ascribed to Panini (5th
or 6th century BC), whose grammar has remained
normative for the correct language ever since. This
language is called Sanskrit (Tongue Perfected).
 Mahabharat
Like most Sanskrit poetry, the Mahabharata consists of
couplets, two successive lines with the same metre.
 Generally, one metre is used throughout the poem,
though for stylistic effects other metres may be
interspersed. The epic metre, or shloka, is a very fluid
one that lends itself excellently to improvisation.
The Mahabharata is the longest poem in history, with
about 100,000 couplets, more than seven times the size
of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey combined. Its characters
go back to around 1000 BC, but in its present form the
epic could not have been composed before 400 BC.
From that time until AD 400, it underwent continuous
elaboration, by insertions of episodes (one of which is
related in the religious poem called the Bhagavad-
Gita), accounts of separate adventures of the heroes,
tales generated by their ancestors, and so on; and in the
end it became a storehouse of general Hindu lore, with
lengthy didactic books inserted.
 Ramayana
While the unity of the Mahabharata has been disrupted
by interpolations, the unity of the second epic,
the Ramayana, has been remarkably preserved. It is
less an epic than a romance, recounting the story of
prince Rama and his wife Sita.
 Buddhist Texts
The earliest records of Buddhism are not textual but
inscriptional, in the famous edicts of the Mauryan
emperor Ashoka, who reigned c. 269–232 BC. Among
these inscriptions on stone, the so-called 13th rock edict
—in which Ashoka, after the massacre of
the Kalinga’s (modern Orissa), abjures war—is the most
moving document of any dynastic history. The
inscriptions were written in a variety of Prakrit’s; that
is, Indo-Aryan languages closely cognate to, but
considerably later than, the earliest stabilized Sanskrit.
Islamic Literature
  Arabic
Arabic was the language of the conquerors of Sind. But
it enjoyed more permanent prestige as the language of
the Qur’an, the sacred book of Islam; as such it was
extensively used for religious scholarship during
the medieval period. Even as late as the 18th
century, Shah Wail Allah, the greatest theologian to
have lived in India, wrote his most
important treatises in Arabic. Arabic was also used early
for historiography and for making Indian scientific
books available to the Middle East in translation. One
does not find, however, much in the way of significant
Arabic belle’s letters in India.
 Urdu
Earlier varieties of Urdu, variously known
as Gujari, Hindawi, and Dakhani, show more affinity with
eastern Punjabi and Haryani than with Khari Boli, which
provides the grammatical structure of standard modern
Urdu. The reasons for putting together the literary products
of these dialects, forming a continuous tradition with those
in Urdu, are as follows: first, they share a common milieu,
consisting of Sufi and Muslim court culture, increasingly
dominated by the life and values of the urban elite; second,
they display wholesale acceptance of Perso-Arabic literary
traditions, including genres, metres, and rhetoric; third,
they show an increasing acceptance of Perso-Arabic
grammatical devices and vocabulary; and fourth, they tend
to prefer Perso-Arabic forms over indigenous forms for
learned usage. Urdu literature began to develop in the 16th
century, in and around the courts of the Quṭb Shāhī and
ʿĀdil Shāhī, kings of Golconda and Bajpur in the Deccan
(central India). In the later part of the 17th
century, Aurangabad became the centre of Urdu literary
activities.
Modern Literature Of India
 Hindi
 Modern Hindi literature began with Harishchandra in
poetry and drama, Mahavir Prasad Dvivedi in criticism and
other prose writings, and Prem Chand in fiction. This
period, the second half of the 19th century, saw mainly
translations from Sanskrit, Bengali, and English. The
growth of nationalism and social reform movements of
the Arya Samaj led to the composition of long narrative
poems, exemplified by those of Maithili Sharan Gupta;
dramas, by those of Jayashankar Prasad; and historical
novels, by those of Prasad, Chatureen Shastri, and
Vrindavan Lal Varma. The novels drew mainly on the
periods of the Maurya, Gupta, and Mughal empires.
 Gujrati
In Gujarāt, too, the advent of British rule deeply influenced
the literary scene. The year 1886 saw
the Kusumamālā (“Garland of Flowers”), a collection of
lyrics by Narsingh Rao. Other poets include Kalapi, Kant,
and especially Nanalal, who experimented in free verse and
was the first poet to eulogize Gandhi. Gandhi, himself a
Gujarati, admonished poets to write for the masses and
thus inaugurated a period of poetic concern with changes in
the social order. Many incidents in Gandhi’s life inspired
the songs of poets. The Gandhi period in Gujarāt as
elsewhere gave way to a period of progressivism in the
class-conflict poetry of R.L. Meghani and Bhogilal Gandhi.
In post-independence India, poetry has tended to become
subjectivist and alienated without, however, fully
superseding the traditional verse of devotion to God and
love of nature.
 Marathi
The modern period in Marathi poetry began
with Kesavasut and was influenced by 19th-century
British Romanticism and liberalism, European nationalism,
and the greatness of the history of Mahārāshtra. Kesavasut
declared a revolt against traditional Marathi poetry and
started a school, lasting until 1920, that emphasized home
and nature, the glorious past, and pure lyricism. After that,
 the period was dominated by a group of poets called
the Ravikiraṇ Maṇ ḍ al, who proclaimed that poetry was not
for the erudite and sensitive but was instead a part of
everyday life. Contemporary poetry, after 1945, seeks to
explore man and his life in all its variety; it is subjective and
personal and tries to speak colloquially.
 Tamil
In the second half of the 19th century two tendencies were
present in Tamil literature. One was the old traditional
prose style of the Patiṉeṇ-kīḻkkaṇakku, or
“Eighteen Ethical Works” learned and severely scholastic;
among others, V.V. Svaminatha Iyer and Arumuga Navalar
wrote in this style. Another tendency, begun by Aruṇ ācala
Kavirāyar in the 18th century, sought to bring the spoken
and written languages together. This tendency developed on
one side into such works as the operatic play Nantaṉār
Carittarak Kīrttaṉai by Gopalakrishna, and on the other
into ballads, often based on the lore of the
Sanskrit Purāṇas. Despite attempts to affect a synthesis
between the two languages, however, the scholastic style
has continued to have a profound influence on modern
Tamil literature; the normal spoken language, in fact, never
became a literary medium.
 Malayalam
In Malayalam the modern movement began in the late 19th
century with Asan, who was temperamentally a pessimist—
a disposition reinforced by his metaphysics—yet all his life
was active in promoting his downtrodden
Ezhava community. Ullor wrote in the classical tradition, on
the basis of which he appealed for universal love,
while Vallathol (died 1958) responded to the human
significance of social progress.