The novelist Mulk Raj Anand often spoke of the double burden carried by Indian writers who choose English as their literary language. On the one shoulder, Anand contended, sat the Alps of European tradition, and on the other shoulder, the Himalayas of an Indian past. Some Indian writers of the first half of the twentieth century--such as Anand, R. K. Narayan, and Raja Rao, considered the founding fathers of the Indian novel in English--chose that dual burden, while other writers, such as Rabindranath Tagore, who wrote in his native Bengali, and Premacanda, who wrote in both Urdu and Hindi, eschewed the language of European modernism and its narrative techniques. In the foreword to his novel Kanthapura (1938) Raja Rao explains the problematic relationship facing Indian writers writing in English: "One has to convey in a language that is not one's own the spirit that is one's own."

Among contemporary...