2. The ancient Indian literary tradition was primarily oral
i.e. sung or recited.
Early Indian literary works were either poetic or
philosophical works.
The earliest literary works in India were the Sanskrit
sacred Vedic texts.
3. Vedas
-first Indian literary work
-it was a collection of Sanskrit hymns that was orally
transmitted
-either sung or recited
-composed as early as 1500 to 1200 BCE but they were
written down only at the end of the first millennium
BCE
-the oldest Veda texts date to around 11th century.
4. Two great epic poems
-Ramayana
-Mahabharata
-created sometime between the 6th and 1st
century BCE.
Mahabharata
-the longest poem in the world
- 100,000 stanzas strong
5. religious importance of the early Sanskrit texts and the
influence of Sanskrit on many Indian languages
enabled Sanskrit literature to flourish over one
millennium
most Sanskrit works from the so-called classical
Sanskrit literature have been lost
6. The most prominent surviving Sanskrit literary from
the classical period include the:
-Abhijnanasakuntalam by Kalidasa
-Arthashastra and Neetishastra by Chanakya
-Vasavadatta by Subandhu and his son Skandagupta
-Dashakumaracharita by Dandin
-Kama Sutra by Vatsyayana.
7. literary works that were created between the 11th and
early 19th century reveal a major influence of Buddhist
and Jain works
Sanskrit gradually give way to the Prakrit language,
especially in Buddhist and Jain texts as well as other
common Indian languages
8. The Muslim invasions from the early 8th century
onwards and of course the arrival of the British also
left their mark on Indian literature
The period following the decline of the Classical
Sanskrit literature until the mid-19th century was
dominated by the so-called bhakti or devotional
poetry in all Indian languages.
9. Mid-19 century
- The period of the modern Indian literature starts
with the first movements for independence
Influenced by both adaption of the Western thoughts
and ideas on the other hand their rejection
10. Mid-19th and Mid-20th century
the rise of a large number of literary works which often
incorporated both the elements of Sanskrit and Western
literature
20th
emergence of the Indian English literature which refers
to literary works that are written by Indian authors in
English language
11. Rabindranath Tagore
V. S. Naipaul
R. K. Narayan (Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer
Narayanaswami)
Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay
Salman Rushdie
Mahadevi Varma
Arundhati Roy
Kiran Desai
