2025/2026

South-Asian Literature in English

ID 979735

Category 'Best Course for Broadening Horizons and Diversity of Knowledge and Skills'

Category 'Best Course for New Knowledge and Skills'

Type: Optional course (faculty)

Delivered by: Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies

Where: Faculty of Humanities

When: 3 module

Open to: students of all HSE University campuses

Instructors: Tatiana Dubyanskaya

Language: English

ECTS credits: 3

Contact hours: 36

Course Syllabus

Abstract

The 200-plus-years-long history of intensive English-Indian literary relations brought into life a large number of important literary works, which describe India and Indians from the Western perspective and/or which are written by authors of South-Asian origin, primarily in English, as direct or indirect responses to the colonial situation. Many texts, created by South-Asian authors in the 19th-21st centuries, are also categorised as “Indian Writing in English”; this body of literature, which has constituted one of the key subject-matters of both Colonial and Postcolonial studies, is often recognized as “the best-known segment of Indian literature internationally” (H.Trivedi). The increasing popularity of Indian writing in English has made quite a few India-born or ethnically-Indian writers international literary celebrities in the modern world. The present course will try to look into the circumstances that made this outstanding growth in the role of English texts in the Subcontinent possible and led to the triumphant popularity of modern writers like Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Amitav Ghosh, Aravind Adiga, Rohinton Mistry et al in the international book-market.