Indian Literature

Ancient Indian literature is far wider than its sacred texts. Alongside the Vedas sit epics, dramas, love poetry, law books and science manuals. They were composed mainly in two languages: Sanskrit and Prakrit. Prakrit is a broad term for the spoken languages that branched away from Sanskrit, of which Pali is an old form.

The Vedas. Veda means "knowledge". The four Vedas were handed down orally and are usually dated to about 1500–1000 BCE. Each carries the slogan Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam ("the world is one family"). The four are:

• Rig Veda: the oldest, 1,028 hymns in 10 mandalas (books). Most hymns praise Indra, with Agni, Varuna and others.
• Yajur Veda: a handbook of sacrificial rites and mantras, in two recensions, Shukla (white) and Krishna (black).
• Sama Veda: the "book of chants", whose melodies are the root of Indian music.
• Atharva Veda: spells, charms and cures for everyday life, also called Brahma Veda.

Attached to each Veda are the Brahmanas (ritual commentary), the Aranyakas ("forest books"), and the Upanishads. The Upanishads are over 200 philosophical treatises also called Vedanta ("end of the Veda"). They deal with the soul and moksha (liberation). The Upanishads form the Jnana-kanda (knowledge section), and the Aranyakas form the Karma-kanda (ritual section).

The epics. Two Mahakavyas shaped Hindu memory:

• Ramayana: by sage Valmiki, the Adikavi (first poet). It has 24,000 verses in seven khandas and tells the story of Rama and the four aims of life (Purushartha: dharma, artha, kama, moksha).
• Mahabharata: attributed to Ved Vyasa. It grew from 8,800 verses (Jaya) to 1,00,000 verses. It contains the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna's counsel to Arjuna on selfless duty (Nishkama Karma).

The Puranas (18 major Mahapuranas, e.g. Bhagvata, Vishnu, Matsya) retell creation and dynastic history in simple stories. Two famous didactic fable collections are the Panchatantra (by Vishnu Sharma) and the Hitopadesha (by Narayan Pandit).

Classical Sanskrit drama and poetry. Grammar was fixed by Panini's Ashtadhyayi, and the rules of theatre by Bharata's Natyashastra. Major dramatists and works:

• Kalidasa: Abhijnana Shakuntalam, Malavikagnimitra, Vikramorvasiya. Malavikagnimitra tells the love story of Agnimitra, the son of Pushyamitra, founder of the Sunga dynasty.
• Sudraka: Mrichchhakatika ("The Little Clay Cart"), the romance of the poor brahmin merchant Charudatta and the courtesan Vasantasena.
• Vishakhadatta: Mudrarakshasa (Chandragupta Maurya's rise to power) and Devichandragupta. Note that Devichandragupta is his work, not Bilhana's.
• Bhasa: thirteen plays are attributed to him, including Swapnavasavadatta and Madhyama-vyayoga. Bhavabhuti: Uttara Ramacharitam.
• Harshavardhana: Ratnavali (first mention of Holi), Nagananda, Priyadarsika.

Do not confuse the plays with the technical treatises. Patanjali's Mahabhashya is a grammar commentary on Panini, and Bhamaha's Kavyalankara is a work on poetics, not drama. Court links are also tested. Tradition places Kalidasa at the court of Chandragupta II. The lexicographer Amarasimha, author of the Amarakosha, belongs to the same Gupta court, not to Harshavardhana's. Panini lived centuries before Pushyamitra, so he could not have adorned a Sunga court.

In poetry (Kavya), Kalidasa also wrote Kumarasambhava, Raghuvamsa and the lyric Meghaduta. Jayadeva's Gita Govinda (12th century) sings of Radha and Krishna. Harisena's praise of Samudragupta is inscribed on the Allahabad pillar. Later historical kavyas are favourite matching pairs: Bilhana wrote the Vikramankadevacharita, in praise of the Chalukya king Vikramaditya VI, and Nayachandra Suri wrote the Hammira-Mahakavya, on the Chauhan ruler Hammira. Law and statecraft gave us the Manusmriti, Kautilya's Arthashastra and Somadeva Suri's Nitivakyamrita. The two great law texts differ on marriage. The Arthashastra permits a wife deserted by her husband to seek divorce and remarry. The Manusmriti gives her no such right. Medieval Kashmir produced Kalhana's Rajatarangini, a chronicle of its kings.

Sangam (Tamil) literature. Sangam means a fraternity or assembly of poets, held under Pandya patronage. The surviving corpus has roughly 2,381 poems. They were composed between about 300 BCE and 300 CE. Key points:

• Two themes: aham/agam (the "inner field", love) and puram (the "outer field", war, ethics, public life).
• Three Sangams were held. The surviving grammar is the Tolkappiyam (by Tolkappiyar).
• Poetry was arranged in eight anthologies, the Ettuttokai, and the ten idylls, Pattupattu.
• The saint Thiruvalluvar wrote the Tirukkural. Avvaiyar was a famed woman poet.
• The poems mirror their society. The poets knew the Varna classification, and the verses describe material culture, a strong warrior ethic, and a belief in magical forces.
• Vatakkiruttal: a stark Sangam practice in which a king defeated in battle committed ritual suicide by starving himself to death.
• After the Sangam age, the Padinen Kilkanakku (Eighteen Minor Works) continued the aham and puram traditions of Sangam poetry.
• Two later Tamil epics: Silappadikaram (by Ilango Adigal) and Manimekalai (by Sattanar).

These two faiths preserved their teachings in the spoken languages of the people, giving India a vast non-Sanskrit canon.

Buddhist literature. The Buddha preached in Pali, and the canon splits into two:

• Canonical: the three Tipitakas ("baskets"): the Vinaya Pitaka (monastic rules), the Sutta Pitaka (sermons on morality and dharma), and the Abhidhamma Pitaka (philosophy and metaphysics).
• Non-canonical: above all the Jatakas, tales of the Buddha's past lives (he is said to have passed through 550 births).

Other notable texts:

• Dipavamsa and Mahavamsa: Pali chronicles of Sri Lanka.
• Milinda Panha: the dialogue between the Indo-Greek king Menander (Milinda) and the monk Nagasena.
• Buddhacharita: a life of the Buddha in Sanskrit by Ashvaghosha.
• Visuddhimagga: a Theravada treatise by Buddhaghosa (5th century).

Jain literature. Jain monks wrote first in Ardha-Magadhi Prakrit. Later they also wrote in Sanskrit, Tamil (during the Sangam age), Kannada, Gujarati and Marathi. The sacred texts are the Agamas:

• The canon comprises 46 texts, including the 12 Angas (the oldest being the Acharanga Sutra), the 12 Upangas and the Mulasutras.
• The Svetambara sect accepts the Agamas re-compiled at the council of Vallabhi (Gujarat) in the mid-5th century CE. The Digambara sect rejects them. It reveres works like the Shatkhandagama instead.

Key Jain authors and works:

• Bhadrabahu: teacher of Chandragupta Maurya, who wrote the Kalpa Sutra (lives of the Tirthankaras).
• Umasvati: Tattvartha-sutra, on logic and ethics.
• Hemachandra: grammars of Sanskrit and Prakrit.
• The "three gems" of Kannada, Pampa, Ponna and Ranna, were Jain poets. Pampa is called the "father of Kannada".

The medieval centuries brought Persian to the courts of the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals. At the same time, the Bhakti and Sufi movements drove a flowering of devotional verse in the people's own tongues.

Persian. It became the court language with the coming of Turks and Mughals:

• Amir Khusrau of Delhi: poet of the Diwan, Nuh Sipihr and the Masnavi Duwal Rani Khizr Khan.
• Ziauddin Barani: Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi. Ibn Battuta left a famous travel account.
• Under the Mughals: Babur's Tuzuk-i-Baburi (in Turkish), the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, Gulbadan Begum's Humayun-nama, and Abul Fazl's Ain-i-Akbari and Akbarnama. Akbar had the Mahabharata translated into Persian as the Razmnama.

Urdu. It grew from the meeting of Persian and Hindi. It follows Hindi grammar but is written in the Persian script. In the south it was first called Dakkani.

• Amir Khusrau: the first poet to use early Urdu, then called Hindavi, as a medium of poetic expression. His court works were in Persian, but this pioneering step belongs to Urdu's story.
• Mirza Ghalib: the great poet of the Diwan.
• Mir Taqi Mir, Sauda and Dard were masters of the eighteenth-century ghazal, building on the path Khusrau had opened.
• Muhammad Iqbal wrote Bang-i-Dara and the song Saare Jahan Se Achcha.

Hindi and the Bhakti poets. Hindi grew from Apabhramsa. The Bhakti movement shunned Sanskrit and wrote for the common people. The first Hindi book is the Prithviraj Raso. The great Bhakti poets were:

• Kabir: famous for his dohas (couplets).
• Tulsidas: the Ramcharitmanas, in Awadhi.
• Surdas: the Sur Sagar, on Krishna's childhood.
• Mirabai: devotional songs to Krishna. Rahim and Raskhan also wrote on Krishna.

Sufi and Sikh strands. Malik Muhammad Jayasi wrote the Sufi romance Padmavat. In Punjab, Baba Farid and Bulleh Shah composed Kafis sung by the masses. The great love epic Heer-Ranjha was written by Waris Shah. Sikh scripture also grew in this period. The Adi Granth was compiled in 1604 under Guru Arjan Dev in the Gurmukhi script. It includes hymns of Bhakti and Sufi saints such as Kabir and Baba Farid. It was later expanded into the Guru Granth Sahib under Guru Gobind Singh.

Foreign visitors left written accounts of India in every age. These accounts are a key source of history because they describe what insiders took for granted: prices, roads, taxes, courts and everyday customs.

The earliest and most tested are four ancient visitors. Their chronological order is a classic exam point: Megasthenes, then Fa-Hien, then Hiuen Tsang, then I-tsing.

• Megasthenes: a Greek ambassador sent by Seleucus Nicator to the court of Chandragupta Maurya around 302 BCE. His account is the Indica.
• Fa-Hien: a Chinese Buddhist pilgrim who travelled in India around 399–414 CE, during the reign of Chandragupta II of the Gupta dynasty.
• Hiuen Tsang (Yuan Chwang): a Chinese pilgrim who stayed from about 629 to 645 CE, during the reign of Harshavardhana. He studied at Nalanda and wrote the Si-Yu-Ki.
• I-tsing: a later Chinese pilgrim, in India around 671–695 CE. He came by the sea route and also studied at Nalanda.

Hiuen Tsang's record of daily life rewards careful reading. He reported that roads and river routes were not fully safe, since travellers did face robbery. He described trial by ordeal: the guilt or innocence of an accused person was tested by fire, water or poison. He also noted that tradesmen paid duties at ferries and at barrier stations along the roads.

A second cluster came in the seventeenth century, when French travellers visited Mughal India:

• Jean-Baptiste Tavernier: a French gem merchant who made six voyages to the East. He elaborately described India's diamonds and diamond mines, especially the Golconda mines.
• Francois Bernier: a French physician at the Mughal court. His travel account analyses Mughal society and economy.
• Jean de Thevenot and Abbe Barthelemy Carre: other French travellers of the same century who described the Deccan and the coastal towns.

Under colonial rule the focus turned to prose and to nationalism. Many regional literatures came into their own during this period. The modern era of Hindi is called the Adhunik kaal.

Hindi. Nationalist and reformist writing led the way:

• Bharatendu Harishchandra: the drama Andher Nagari and Bharat Durdasha.
• Munshi Premchand: novels such as Godan and stories such as Shatranj ke Khilari, written in both Hindi and Urdu.
• Harivansh Rai Bachchan: Madhushala. Maithili Sharan Gupt and Suryakant Tripathi 'Nirala' were leading poets.
• Mahadevi Verma: a major woman writer, awarded the Padma Vibhushan.

Bengali, Odia and Assamese. Bengali rose to the front rank. It was helped by the Baptist Mission Press set up by William Carey at Serampore in 1800. English interest in Indian texts began even earlier: Charles Wilkins made the first English translation of the Bhagavad Gita in 1785.

• Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar were early voices. Vidyasagar's tract Bahuvivah (1871) attacked the practice of polygamy.
• Dinabandhu Mitra: the play Nil Darpan (1858–59), which exposed the exploitation of peasants by the indigo planters.
• Bankim Chandra Chatterjee: Durgesh Nandini (1865), the first major Bengali historical novel, followed by Anand Math (1882) and Debi Chaudhurani. Anand Math, the source of our national song Vande Mataram, is based on the Sanyasi Rebellion of the late eighteenth century.
• Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in 1913 for Gitanjali. He was the first Indian, and first Asian, to do so. In 1905, during the Swadeshi Movement, he composed Amar Sonar Bangla, later the national anthem of Bangladesh. In 1919, at Madanapalle in Andhra Pradesh, he translated the national anthem Jana Gana Mana from Bengali into English.
• Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar: Desher Katha, a book that warned against the colonial state's "hypnotic conquest of the mind". It inspired swadeshi street plays and folk songs. Its title word "desh" meant the whole country, not just Bengal.
• Odia began with Sarala Das. Assamese drew on its buranjis (court chronicles) and on the poetry of Shankardev.

Chronology questions mix these literary dates with other landmarks of the age. Two useful anchors: Satyendranath Tagore became the first Indian to enter the Indian Civil Service in 1863, and the Arya Samaj was founded in 1875.

Other regional literatures. The nationalist wave touched every language:

• Gujarati: Narsinh Mehta's Krishna-bhakti songs, and K. M. Munshi's Prithvi Vallabha.
• Marathi: Saint Jnaneshwar's commentary on the Gita, and Bal Gangadhar Tilak's newspaper Kesari.
• Telugu: its golden age came under Krishnadevaraya of Vijayanagara. He wrote Amuktamalyada and kept the ashtadiggajas (eight poet-gems, led by Allasani Peddana) at his court.
• Kannada: the Kavirajamarga (under Rashtrakuta king Amoghavarsha I) and the "three gems" Pampa, Ponna and Ranna.
• Kashmiri: the mystic poetess Lal Ded and the saint Nund Rishi.

Indians also wrote in English. Sarojini Naidu, the "Nightingale of India", published the poetry collection The Golden Threshold in 1905. Modern Indian theatre grew in the same years:

• Bijon Bhattacharya: the play Nabanna, on the Bengal famine of 1943. A common trap attributes it to Nabin Chandra Das.
• Vijay Tendulkar: the Marathi play Ghashiram Kotwal.
• Urdu theatre: it depended heavily on the Parsi theatre for its stagecraft and audiences.

The leaders of the freedom struggle were also prolific writers. Their books spread nationalist ideas, recorded the movement from within, and are tested as author-and-work pairs.

Mahatma Gandhi wrote Hind Swaraj in 1909, his core statement on self-rule. In jail he translated ancient Indian religious lyrics into English under the title Songs from Prison. He traced his deepest convictions to John Ruskin's Unto This Last, a book on economics and ethics. Its central message, that the good of the individual is contained in the good of all, transformed his life. Gandhi rendered this ideal as Sarvodaya, the welfare of all.

Lala Lajpat Rai wrote biographies of Mazzini, Garibaldi, Shivaji and Shrikrishna. He lived in America for some years during his exile and was later elected to the Central Legislative Assembly. He also left his Autobiographical Writings. Other tested pairs:

• V. D. Savarkar: The First Indian War of Independence, which recast the 1857 revolt as a national war.
• Surendranath Banerjee: A Nation in Making, his memoir of early nationalist politics.
• Subhas Chandra Bose: The Indian Struggle, his account of the movement.
• Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, his major philosophical work.
• Rabindranath Tagore: Sadhana, a set of lectures on Indian thought.
• Lal Bahadur Shastri: translated the autobiography of Marie Curie into Hindi.

Newspapers and journals were the nerves of the national movement. Editors used them to attack social evils, build public opinion and carry nationalist ideas past censorship. Examiners pair each journal with its founder.

• Som Prakash: a Bengali weekly started in 1858 by Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, a leading social reformer. It became a platform for reform debates.
• Al-Hilal: an Urdu weekly founded in 1912 by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. It urged Muslims to join the nationalist movement.
• The Indian Sociologist: published from London by Shyamji Krishna Varma, the founder of India House, a centre for Indian students abroad.
• The Talwar: published from Europe by Madame Bhikaji Cama, the revolutionary who unfurled an Indian flag at Stuttgart in 1907.
• Bande Mataram: the English daily edited by Aurobindo Ghosh, the voice of militant nationalism in Bengal.
• Commonwealth: a journal brought out by Annie Besant, the Home Rule leader, alongside her paper New India.
• Vanguard: the emigre Communist journal of M. N. Roy, issued from abroad as an early mouthpiece of Indian communism.