Indian Literature Quotes

National independence, and the preceding political struggles, helped create the space for literary creation in many post-colonial countries. Much of modern Indian or Chinese literature is inconceivable without the political movement for freedom from foreign rule.

India was China's teacher in religion and imaginative literature, and the world's teacher in trignometry, quandratic equations, grammar, phonetics, Arabian Nights, animal fables, chess, as well as in philosophy, and that she inspired Boccaccio, Goethe, Herder, Schopenhauer, Emerson, and probably also old Aesop.

Being in the Sahitya Akademi, I did know quite a few poets - Jayanta Mahapatra, Sitakant Mahapatra, Sunil Gangopadhyay, to name a few. There were many poets.

India brings out so many different feelings in me. I've been fascinated with India and Indian culture as long as I can remember - ever since the '60s with the Beatles and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

If you ask me, I would love to see works like Sharat Chandra Chatterjee's 'Badi Didi,' Munshi Premchand's 'Nirmala,' and Phanishwar Nath Renu's 'Maila Anchal' come alive on small screen.

From the early days of the Raj, Shakespeare had been woven into the fabric of India's education, and my father understood that in a culture rich with storytelling and fantastical tales, Shakespeare's characters and storylines resonated in a powerful way.

We're at an interesting phase of Asian and Asian-American writing, where we might succeed in having readers look at us as creative individuals who write with fury and fire about the world, and in new ways, without having them say things like "I read a really good Indian book," or "That Malaysian fellow writes very well." So I hope by identifying as Indian I can get people who don't usually read "ethnic" or "Indian" literature to read that literature and enjoy it.

There's a whole form of literature in India which talks about the quest for the perfect man by a woman, where every woman looks for a perfect man but only ends up with half that.

People mostly associate Tagore only with Gitanjali. That is the mistake they make. Gitanjali is just one per cent of his oeuvre.

I want young children to savor and enjoy Tagore like I did since I was a child. He was too great a poet of India to be kept limited to Bengal. Everybody should read and celebrate him.

I'm not just saying this, but I love everything about India.

It's a common notion that if you like Tagore, then he must have had an influence on your life. While I like Tagore's poetry and his thoughts, he doesn't influence my work.

I lived in Calcutta for five months in 1999. While I was there, I read many journals, diaries, collections of letters and histories.

I love the sufiana style of writing in Tagore's poetry.

I think - since I was about 7 years old - that was when I was first introduced to the comics called 'Amar Chitra Katha' that are published in India. They're not about a superhero, but they encompass all the stories of India, the folklore, the mythology, everything. But most of these stories are about Indian historical figures.

As a human being living one's life, one is more open to relief when there is rain or the expectation of rain. That readiness for hope gets manifested in my stories and that of many other Indian writers.

Indian writers have appropriated English as an Indian language, and that gives a certain freshness to the way we write.

Writing in India will not dramatically change till we learn to value books.

And if I were to ask myself from what literature we who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans, and of the Semitic race, the Jewish, may draw the corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact more truly human a life... again I should point to India.

I firmly believe that Tagore should be taught in schools all over India.

When I worked as an editor, I read new novels being published in India every few days. They excited me tremendously for the first fifty pages or so, and boasted some true linguistic genius at times, but none of those writers could occupy more than one mind at once.

The land of Ramakrishna Paramhansa, Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, and Subash Chandra Bose has mesmerised me. I am really happy to meet such lovely people, good and kindhearted people.

When we read with attention the poetical and philosophical monuments of the East--above all, those of India, which are beginning to spread in Europe--we discover there many a truth, and truths so profound, and which make such a contrast with the meanness of the results at which European genius has sometimes stopped, that we are constrained to bend the knee before the philosophy of the East, and to see in this cradle of the human race the native land of the highest philosophy.

Too much of Indian writing in English, it seemed to me, consisted of middle-class people writing about other middle-class people - and a small slice of life being passed off as an authentic portrait of the country.

After doing the Bengali 'Antar Mahal,' I felt I should work with all Indian languages.