ABSTRACT
Unlike Indian poets writing in English in the late 19th century, early practitioners of the English-language novel in India did not so obviously set out to mimic the form and style of their English counterparts. Instead, Indian English novelists, while clearly appropriating the form of the European novel and being influenced thematically and structurally by some of the great European practitioners of the genre, soon began to adapt it to suit their own literary and political purposes. From the late 19th century and through the early decades of the 20th, Indian novelists began to develop their own forms of the novel, drawing on Sanskrit and Persian narrative forms and on India's oral narrative traditions as well as on European literary examples.
