Literature

Indian literature is one thing I know relatively little about and I am looking forward to finding out more. For those of you who find it interesting too I have started with a little list of basics.

The main attraction for Kolkata is that it is the home of Rabindranath Tagore, one of India's most famous writers. He was a poet, musician and won the Noble Prize in Literature in 1913. He is, in essence, the poet laureate of Bengal and his home is now a museum in Kolkata.

I have down loaded a few of his books, but I hope to find some when I am there. Also, our birthdays are 1 day (and 109 years) apart. Kinda cool.




The Mahabharata and the Ramayana. These are Indian Epics, and I do mean epic.

The Ramayana's original version in Sanskrit is known as Valmiki Ramayana, dating to approximately the 5th to 4th century B.C. The Indian versions of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana are enormously long. The name of the epic Mahabharata gives you a clue that it is very large in size, since the prefix maha- means "great, big" (it is cognate with the Greek prefix mega-, meaning "big"). In fact, the complete Mahabharata is over 100,000 stanzas long in Sanskrit, over eight times as long as the Greek Iliad and Odyssey combined. There does exist a complete English translation of the Sanskrit text into prose:The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa published in 12 volumes between 1883 and 1896.

I have been familiar with the Ramayana and the Mahabharata since high school, but I never really delved into them much. It has been made into a TV series, comic books, cartoons and interpreted in hundreds of different languages.

I intend to do a little more reading up on the plane. I'll have time.

Some contemporary Indian writers are Chetan Bhagat, R. K. Narayan, Vikram Seth, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Raja Rao, Amitav Ghosh, Rohinton Mistry, Vikram Chandra, Mukul Kesavan, Raj Kamal Jha,Vikas Swarup, Khushwant Singh, Shashi Tharoor, Nayantara Sehgal, Anita Desai, Kiran Desai, Ashok Banker, Shashi Deshpande, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kamala Markandaya, Gita Mehta, Manil Suri, Ruskin Bond, Preeti Shenoy and Bharati Mukherjee. Salman Rushdie and Jhumpa Lahiri, of course being the most popular in the West on the this list.

If you are looking for an accessible read, I enjoyed The Argumentative Indian written by Nobel Prize winning Indian economist Amartya Sen.