India: a watershed decade

Reviewed title: Sen, K. & R. Roy (eds.) 2013. Writing India Anew: Indian English Fiction 2000-2010, Amsterdam University Press, ISBN 9789089645333

This collection of fourteen critical essays is an eclectic mix of scholarship which addresses, in the editors’ words, “the new corpus of writing” (9) in Indian English fiction (IEF). This ‘new corpus’ refers to contemporary IEF, that which emerged in the first decade of this millennium and can be distinguished from seminal novels such as Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) and the work of well-known authors like Vikram Seth, Anita Desai or Shashi Tharoor. The editors suggest in their introduction that contemporary IEF has freed itself from the shackles of traditional theoretical categorization including ‘postcolonialism’ or ‘postmodernism’, yet they acknowledge that it is evidently concerned with the issue of transculturalism and mobility as international borders, both real and imagined, become increasingly porous.