Indian Themes In English Fiction: A Socio-Literary Study

The image of India in the British Literary imagination and the gradual shift of the writers attitude to the image is themain thrust of the socio-literary study. It explores, in a beautiful and lucid language, the western literary response to India and its people from a typical Eurocentric perspective beginning from the Anglo-Saxon chronicle to the present day. Simultaneously it analyses the socio-cultural facts and factors that influenced the writers? perceptions and responses and examines various points of view and voices that shaped the two distinct images of India in the British and Anglo-Indian writings before and after Independence. The study attempts to dispel age-old inaccuracies, cliches, guesses and half-truths that were made part of the fictional India and put the Indo-British encounter in its proper perspective. Indophils, Indologists, literary scholars and social scientists interested in Asiatic, Anglo-Indian and colonial studies would find the book as a very useful resource book and reference tool. For common reader the treatment of issues like race and colour, empire and colonisation, mutiny?, nationalism, partition and patriotism and the whole range of Indo-British relationships would be quite interesting and enlightening.