“Da Leda e il Cigno alla Masala Coke, ovvero dal romanzo inglese in India al romanzo indiano di lingua inglese nel mondo”

Indian culture is playing an increasingly imposing role in shaping new scenarios of Globalization. This article
tries to highlight the possible contribution offered to the international literary scene by the multifarious
variegated corpus of fiction represented by the Anglophone Indian Novel both in its domestic and diasporic
dimensions. In recent years writers from the Indian subcontinent have achieved a global readership and a
prominent translational status: this is manifest for instance in their repeated appearances on shortlists for
international book prizes. This study aims at tracing, in the peculiar hybrid quality of the Indian novel in
English, some recurrent trends which are, nonetheless, discernible. Its emergence out of the colonial
encounter and the subsequent birth of the nationalist feelings and awareness have marked for example its
dominant preoccupation with both history and nation and these come together to shape its ineluctably
postcolonial character. The concern with place/displacement, with identity and belonging, and above all
with the question of language cannot but be topical to the literature of a country which has seen the rise
of the genre in coincidence with the fundamental experiences of foreign domination, conquest of
independence and mass migration.