The Poetics and Stylistics of Nirmal Verma: From the Grammar of Indefiniteness to the Subversion of Gender Oppositions

Abstract

Nirmal Verma, who spent his youth in Shimla and the Summer Hill, before later becoming a fellow of the IIAS, has explained in numerous essays the specific function and intrinsic quality of art and, especially, literature, in particular Indian literature. His theories have in the past repeatedly been discarded as an artificial desire to invent roots for himself in the Indian tradition in order to legitimate a novelistic style that is largely made up of foreign influences. The view that Nirmal Verma's novelistic art is an adaptation of European technics and notions is indeed quite widespread in the Indian literary establishment.