Literary Modernity in South Asia

This chapter outlines three broad issues which constitute the field of South Asian literary studies: the standardization of written forms of Indian languages, the location and constitution of texts in the relationships between Indian society and the colonial state, and the rupture between a modern and pre-modern poetics. The chapter focuses on the latter and explores the interplay between tradition and innovation in South Asian literary modernity. In doing so, it seeks to identify some of its key features in terms of its cosmopolitanism, its experimentation, and the nature of the creative choices open to authors and poets in the subcontinent under colonialism.