Sharma, Alpana, “Indian nationalism and Indo-Anglian literature: A critical re-evaluation of writing race into the English language (R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao, Salman Rushdie, Bharati Mukherjee)”, PhD thesis, UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH, 1990. Brief summary.

“Leading Indo-Anglian scholars and authors valorize an Indian national identity in Indian writing in English that is based finally on essentialist notions of Indianness. My dissertation examines selected Indian novels in English by R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao, Salman Rushdie, and Bharati Mukherjee to show that nationalist claims to Indianness have limited, rather than expanded, the scope of Indo-Anglian studies. The novels of an earlier generation of Indian writers coming out of British colonialism have been privileged by Indo-Anglian critics because they supposedly express strong nationalist identifications…. The writing of a more recent generation of Indian immigrant writers has been largely ignored by nationalist critics because it calls into question the essentialist truths of nationalism that have been traditionally ascribed to Indo-Anglian literature…. I re-define Indo-Anglian studies as the study of a highly political and global category of literature about (and not necessarily in) the Indian subcontinent that records the conditions of multicultural, multilingual Third World, post-colonial discourses.” From the abstract.