South Asia

Overview

Sanskrit and Tamil are among the oldest living literary languages in the world, and epics composed before our era are still recited. The modern novel was born in Bengal in the nineteenth century, with Bankim Chandra and then Tagore, the first non-European author to receive the Nobel, in 1913. English became in the twentieth century an Indian language in its own right, and Rushdie's Midnight's Children opened in 1981 a world market for that literature. Indian cinema produces more films than any other country. Bombay alone releases more than a thousand films a year.

What circulates

Delhi and London publish Indian English, which travels; the twenty-two official languages of India each have their own publishing, prizes and readers, with hardly any translation among them. A novel in Malayalam may have more readers than an anglophone novel from the same country and remain unknown in Mumbai.

Limits of this grouping

India weighs here with all its demographic and publishing weight, and the five other countries look slight beside it, although Bengal is read on both sides of a border drawn in 1947. Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan have traditions of their own that this proximity overshadows. Afghanistan, a neighbour by language, is filed under Central Asia.

Works cited

• NovelThe Chieftain's Daughterদুর্গেশনন্দিনীBankim Chandra Chattopadhyay · 1865Bengal in the time of Akbar, between Mughals and Pathans, where three love stories cross around a captive prince.Literature
• NovelMidnight's ChildrenSalman Rushdie · 1981A child is born at the very instant a country becomes independent, and the book holds that his life and that of the state govern each other. Thirty years of history pass through a single family.Literature
• NovelPather Panchali: Song of the Little Roadপথের পাঁচালীBibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay · 1929A boy's childhood in a poor village in Bengal, at the beginning of the twentieth century, seen at the level of the seasons and of play.Literature
• CinemaLine of DestinyරේඛාවLester James Peries · 1956A village on the island thrown into turmoil by a prediction and by a healing gift attributed to a child.Cinema