9.3 — Indian Literature

A literary tradition that has been continuously produced for over three thousand years, in more languages than any other, and whose oldest texts were transmitted for centuries without being written down at all.

The oldest layer

What are the Vedas, and how were they preserved?

Four collections of hymns, formulas and commentary in Vedic Sanskrit — Rigveda, Yajurveda, Samaveda and Atharvaveda — with the Rigveda generally dated to around 1500–1200 BCE.

They were transmitted orally for well over a thousand years before being written, and the fidelity achieved is one of the most remarkable feats in the history of information.

The method was deliberate redundancy. Reciters learned the text in multiple additional orders: padapatha, each word in isolation; kramapatha, in overlapping pairs (1-2, 2-3, 3-4); and further schemes reciting words forwards and backwards in interlocking patterns — jata, ghana and others.

A single omitted or altered word breaks several of these patterns simultaneously, and it is detectable by anyone who knows them. It is, in engineering terms, an error-detecting code built entirely from human memory, and it worked: manuscripts from widely separated regions and centuries agree to a degree that astonished the philologists who first compared them.

The Vedas' religious content is covered in Volume VII. What belongs here is that they are also the oldest continuously used literature in the world, in the specific sense that people are reciting them today in a form that has changed very little.

What is Panini's grammar, and why do computer scientists cite it?

Around the fifth or fourth century BCE, Panini produced the Ashtadhyayi, a description of Sanskrit in about 4,000 rules.

It is not a grammar in the school sense. It is a generative system: a set of ordered rules with defined precedence that, applied to root forms, produces the correct word for any grammatical situation. It uses abbreviations, metarules that govern how other rules apply, and a technique for resolving conflicts between rules — the more specific one wins.

That structure is essentially a formal language specification, and the resemblance to how programming languages are defined is close enough that Panini is routinely cited in the history of computer science. The linguist Noam Chomsky has acknowledged the connection to his own work, and the notation used for context-free grammars is sometimes called Panini-Backus form.

A 2022 doctoral thesis by Rishi Rajpopat proposed a solution to a rule-conflict problem that had been argued over for 2,500 years, which is a reasonable indication that the text is still an active research object.

What are the epics?

The Mahabharata, at roughly 100,000 verses, is the longest epic poem in the world — about ten times the Iliad and Odyssey combined. It tells of a dynastic war between two branches of a family, and it contains within it the Bhagavad Gita, a dialogue on duty and action delivered on the battlefield before the fighting begins.

Its own claim about itself is worth quoting: what is found here may be found elsewhere, and what is not found here is found nowhere. It is a war epic with law codes, philosophy, genealogy and folk tale embedded in it, assembled over centuries.

The Ramayana, attributed to Valmiki, is shorter and tighter — the exile of Rama, the abduction of Sita, the war to recover her, and the deeply uncomfortable ending. It exists in dozens of regional versions with substantially different emphases: Kamban's Tamil version, Tulsidas's Hindi Ramcharitmanas, Krittibas's Bengali, and versions across South East Asia in Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia and Laos, where the story arrived over a thousand years ago and has been continuously performed since.

The variation is the point. A. K. Ramanujan's essay "Three Hundred Ramayanas" is the standard treatment, and it argues that there is no original against which the versions are deviations.

Volume VII covers both epics properly, at length.

The classical period

Who is Kalidasa?

The most celebrated Sanskrit poet and dramatist, probably fourth or fifth century CE, and almost nothing is known about his life.

His works include the plays Abhijnanashakuntalam, Vikramorvashiyam and Malavikagnimitram, and the poems Meghaduta — in which an exiled spirit asks a passing cloud to carry a message to his wife, and the poem is largely the route description — and Raghuvamsha and Kumarasambhava.

The German reception is worth recording. When Sir William Jones's translation of Shakuntala reached Europe in 1789, Goethe wrote an epigram about it and Herder and the Schlegels took it as evidence that European literature was not the only mature tradition. It contributed directly to the founding of Indology as a field, and to European Romanticism.

What else is in the classical corpus?

The Panchatantra, a collection of animal fables framed as instruction for princes, probably third century BCE or earlier. It is one of the most travelled books in history: translated into Middle Persian, then Arabic as Kalila wa Dimna, then Hebrew, Latin and virtually every European language, and its stories are ancestral to Aesop's later reception and to a substantial part of European fable literature.

The Jataka tales, stories of the Buddha's previous births, similarly widespread.

The Tirukkural, in Tamil, 1,330 couplets on virtue, wealth and love — deliberately non-sectarian, which is why it is claimed across religious traditions.

Sangam literature in Tamil, from roughly the third century BCE to the third century CE, is a body of around 2,400 poems by hundreds of named poets, a substantial number of them women. It is remarkable for being secular, worldly and concerned with interior emotional life, categorised into akam, the inner world of love, and puram, the outer world of war and public life. There is nothing comparable of that date anywhere.

The Arthashastra, the Natya Shastra, the Kamasutra — treatises on statecraft, drama and pleasure respectively, all of which are far drier and more systematic than their reputations suggest. The Kamasutra is largely a manual of urban civility, of which the sexual material is one section.

The devotional and the vernacular

What was the bhakti movement, in literary terms?

A shift, from roughly the sixth century in Tamil country and spreading north over the following thousand years, from Sanskrit to spoken languages and from ritual to direct personal devotion.

Its literary consequence is enormous. It is why the major modern Indian languages have deep literary traditions: writing devotional poetry in Marathi, Kannada, Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi or Gujarati established each as a literary language.

It was also socially disruptive by design. A great many of the poets were from outside the priestly and warrior castes — weavers, tanners, farmers, and a substantial number of women. Kabir was a weaver. Ravidas was a leatherworker. Mirabai was a Rajput princess who left her marriage. Akka Mahadevi, in twelfth-century Karnataka, walked out of a marriage and composed in Kannada. Lal Ded in Kashmir did the same.

The Sufi tradition in India ran parallel and intersected with it, producing Amir Khusrau, Bulleh Shah and Baba Farid, and a shared vocabulary of love as a metaphor for the divine that is common to both.

The modern period

What was the Bengal Renaissance?

A period from roughly the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century in which Bengal produced an unusual concentration of literary, scientific and social innovation, largely in Calcutta.

In literature: Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, whose Anandamath contains the song Vande Mataram; Michael Madhusudan Dutt, who wrote an epic retelling the Ramayana with the demon king as the sympathetic figure; Rabindranath Tagore, covered in 9.2; Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, whose novels about women's position were widely translated across India.

The context matters. It happened where and when it did because Calcutta was the colonial capital, print was available, English education produced a class fluent in two traditions, and the encounter forced a set of arguments — about religion, caste, widow remarriage, education, and what to keep — that produced enormous quantities of writing.

It has been criticised as an elite phenomenon, largely upper-caste Hindu and male, whose reforms benefited a narrow group. Both the achievement and the criticism are accurate.

Who are the major modern Indian writers by language?

A short selection, because a full one would run for pages.

Hindi: Premchand, whose stories about rural poverty and debt are the standard entry point; Nirmal Verma; Krishna Sobti; Mahadevi Verma. Urdu: Manto, whose Partition stories are the most unflinching writing about that event; Ismat Chughtai, prosecuted for obscenity in 1944 for a story about a woman's desire; Faiz Ahmed Faiz; Ghalib and Iqbal earlier. Bengali: Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, whose Pather Panchali became Ray's film; Mahasweta Devi, who wrote about tribal communities and campaigned alongside them; Jibanananda Das. Malayalam: Vaikom Muhammad Basheer; O. V. Vijayan; Kamala Das, who wrote in both Malayalam and English about sexuality with a directness that was unprecedented. Kannada: U. R. Ananthamurthy, Shivaram Karanth, Girish Karnad. Tamil: Subramania Bharati, Perumal Murugan. Marathi: Vijay Tendulkar; and the Dalit literature movement from the 1960s — Namdeo Dhasal, Daya Pawar, Baby Kamble — which produced a body of autobiography and poetry from inside caste oppression that had no precedent.

What is Indian writing in English, and why is it argued about?

Fiction by Indians in English, from R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao in the 1930s, through to Rushdie, Roy, Ghosh, Seth, Desai, Adiga and a large contemporary field.

The argument is about access and attention. English-language Indian writing is far more visible internationally, wins the international prizes, and commands advances that writers in Indian languages cannot approach — while being written by and often about a small English-educated stratum.

Rushdie made the argument sharper in 1997 by asserting that Indian writing in English of the preceding fifty years was stronger than writing in the other Indian languages over the same period, which was widely and forcefully disputed.

The counter-position is that Indian-language literatures are larger, older, more varied, and read by far more people, and that the visibility gap reflects the economics of international publishing rather than quality — and that the translation infrastructure to test the claim barely exists.

That is the useful conclusion. The question is not settleable while so little is translated, which is why the 2022 International Booker for a Hindi novel mattered beyond the book.

What comes next

The next page is about the raw material of all of this — words themselves, where they come from, and why English is the way it is.