Streets to the Psyche

The history of Indian Writing in English (IWE) follows the socio-political and cultural changes of the Indian subcontinent. This article aims to make a comparative study of two most iconic authors in the Indian literature Mulk Raj Anand and Anita Desai. Although Anand, writing in the colonial era, introduced the subaltern-the untouchables, coolies and peasants, as the central figure in his narrative, Anita Desai, writing in post-independence India, changed the subject of the narrative to the inner world of the urban middle-class person, heralding the introduction of the so-called psychological realism. The paper explores how this shift in the strategy of the Indian English novel between the external, socio-economic battlegrounds of Anand to the internal and psychological ones of Desai reflects the change of the Indian English novel itself. In a critical comparison of Anand, Untouchable (1935) and Coolie (1936) as well as the works of Desai, which is Cry, the Peacock (1963) and Clear Light of Day (1980), the present paper will examine their thematic obsessions as well as their methods of narration and their ideological dedication to administration. In the end the paper concludes that as Anand is psychosomatically right about the structural maladies in Indian society, so too Desai is psychosomatically right about the dispersed state of the Indian psyche in the modern world

Colonialism · Ideology · Indian English · Narrative · Psyche · Literary Theory and Cultural Hermeneutics · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · South Asian Studies and Diaspora