THE VANISHING CONTINUUM OF TRADITION IN CONTEMPORARY INDIAN FICTION

Abstract

This study, titled Tradition, Authenticity, and Disjunction: The Decline of Cultural Continuity in Post-1990 Indian Writing in English, examines the aesthetic and philosophical transformations that have shaped Indian fiction in English since the liberalization era of the 1990s. It argues that, while the global recognition of Indian English writers has expanded the visibility of the nation’s literature, this expansion has often coincided with a loss of inward rootedness—the moral, contemplative, and metaphysical sensibility that informed the works of the earlier generation represented by R. K. Narayan and Raja Rao.

Through close textual and cultural analysis, the article identifies a decisive shift in post-1990 Indian fiction toward cosmopolitan themes, diasporic identities, and political subtexts, frequently at the cost of the ethical and spiritual continuities that once gave the Indian novel its distinctive equilibrium. Writers such as Arundhati Roy and Amitav Ghosh are discussed as exemplars of this new orientation: aesthetically accomplished yet largely disengaged from the deeper ontological and moral imagination that underlay the early Indian English tradition. Their narratives, framed within historical or secular humanitarian paradigms, differ sharply from Narayan’s moral realism and Raja Rao’s metaphysical vision, which were both anchored in what K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar termed the “dharmic equilibrium” of Indian thought.

The article proceeds through five interrelated sections: the first traces the vanishing continuum of tradition under global modernity; the second explores the post-1990 novelist’s crisis of rootedness; the third studies Narayan’s humanism of the ordinary; the fourth interprets Raja Rao’s fiction as metaphysical inquiry; and the concluding chapter proposes a restoration of continuity between literature and inherited meaning. Drawing upon canonical critics such as Iyengar, Meenakshi Mukherjee, Dieter Riemenschneider, and A. S. Knippling, the study situates its argument within comparative modernism and postcolonial theory while insisting on the necessity of cultural self-reflexivity.

Ultimately, the article suggests that the challenge facing contemporary Indian writing in English is not linguistic but ontological: to rediscover, beneath the cosmopolitan idiom of the global novel, the contemplative rhythm that once  made the Indian imagination unique. In recovering that rhythm, the modern writer may reconcile modernity with continuity, and thus renew the moral and metaphysical integrity of Indian literature in English for the twenty-first century.