Both scenes were not synchronous, nor did they get along. I’m talking about Indian literary writings and the rest of global literature during the incipient phase of the 20th century. That era’s clock faced two world wars, and amid them, a roving light—Sigmund Freud—who dug deep into the mysterious unconscious world.
If you scan through archaic Indian culture, you’ll see that Indian Yogis had already preached and deciphered the inner world through yoga and meditation. But those precious Indian gems remained confined in a loop—ever existent but never brought to the forefront. Freud condensed it under the open sky. If we follow his lead, we see the outer world’s proportion is minor when we dive into the different realms of the human mind and its inner niche. The infinite ocean lingers beneath the chalked surface. The Indian Yogis talked; Freud dug. But what happened in India is ironic.
Sometimes, after reading just one page of Kafka, I feel as though someone has touched the most silent corner of my mind—something no Hindi novel ever dares to reach.
Kafka, on the day World War I erupted across Europe, wrote in his diary: “Germany has declared war on Russia – swimming lesson in the afternoon.”
It wasn’t indifference—it was focus. While the world burned outside, Kafka was mapping the inferno within. That turn inward still eludes much of Indian literary writing. Kafka doesn’t follow the mundane scale of importance.
His absurdity distorts measurement—turning a trivial act into a cosmic burden, and a catastrophe into a passing murmur.
Like a stoic, he sees uniformity in every atom and the entire universe, making no distinction between a man waking late and a man condemned without reason. In Kafka’s world, it is not events that matter, but the inner machinery of response—how the soul crumbles under invisible rules.
The Indian Progressive Writers—during the time of Marxist upheaval—set aside India’s Yogic culture and scriptures. A glaring example of that concoction is the book From Volga to Ganga by Rahul Sankrityayan. He tried to dust off and distort India’s ancient culture beneath the red revolution. This book was hyped to its zenith during India’s postcolonial government, when Russia was closely knit with India.
But let me return to the main seam.
When Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust were peeling off the layers of the inner world to reach the soul’s raw skin—a limitless unfolding—most Indian writers were still writing about the village, morality, family drama, and national purpose. They were marching in the body when the world had already entered the mind. Few were exceptions—like Jainendra and Nirmal Verma—who tried to venture into the abstract world. Very few count.
Has that scenario changed now?
No. Even today, Indian Hindi literature remains grounded in the visible, still orbiting the same themes—the farmer, the riot, the caste wound, the dutiful daughter, the moral thrust. It lacks the mental earthquakes, the abstract ache, the dream that trembles, the souls that disintegrate without headlines. Contemporary Hindi fiction and criticism still cling to the old bite, orbiting around old poles like:
Social realism
Caste and class struggle
Moral reform and activism
Identity politics (Dalit, feminist, tribal, backward voices)
Language purity (Sanskritized or Urdu-heavy Hindi)

In brief, the Progressive Movement (Pragativad) still casts its long shadow—just updated to include newer ideologies. Many short and long fictions still follow a linear narrative vehicle, with a moral, social, or political center and a clear “message.”
Global literature, meanwhile, celebrates writers who offer emotional ambiguity—like Orhan Pamuk; Murakami’s philosophical openness; or the experimental forms of Roberto Bolaño.
But Hindi literature’s ideological voice often feels overdetermined, not mysterious or layered—less exportable to the aesthetic ears of a postmodern global reader.
Then came a new wave—Ret Samadhi by Geetanjali Shree.
In this book, she loosened the ancestors’ anchor and flushed her ink in an experimental form—wordplay, stream-of-consciousness, digressions, meta-textual moments, unexpected metaphors, mystical-poetic texture, non-linear unfolding—and most importantly, unlike many Hindi writers, she does not preach. Though the moral arc is traceable and the themes are still rooted in familiar grounds—partition, caste, gender, identity, Indo-Pak trauma—she still builds a glowing, distinct ground.
Ret Samadhi became the first Hindi novel to win the International Booker Prize. Hindi was finally recognized on the global literary stage.