India

Abstract

Some outstanding events concerning the Indian English novel from 1960 to the present coincide with the margins of this period. At the outset, Raja Rao’s The Serpent and the Rope was hailed as a classic by many, the Great Indian Novel by some, but debunked by others as a tiresome Vedantic imposture; it was followed a year later by the presentation of the 1961 Sahitya Akademi Award to R.K. Narayan for his The Guide (1958). Recently, Raja Rao was restored to pre-eminence when, upon the long-awaited appearance of The Chessmaster and His Moves (the first of a novel trilogy), he was awarded the 1988 Neustadt Prize.¹ This international acclaim of epoch-signifying status, however, was quickly eclipsed by Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) — or, rather, by the scandal of the disastrous Islamic reception of this work followed by the notorious death-sentence imposed on Rushdie. The hostility generated between reality and fiction has escalated into life-and-death situations even more terrifying and bizarre than the omniscient author of the self-fulfilling prophecies in The Satanic Verses bargained for.