Colonial Influence, Postcolonial Intertextuality: Western Literature and Indian Literature

India, with its colonial history and contemporary postcolonial culture, offers a rich site for the study of both influence and intertextuality. Through the rise of “Orientalism”, it was India which first exercised a literary influence on the West, an equation that was utterly reversed later through colonial intervention. Though some Indian critics have been only too keen to acclaim or denounce the influence of the West, the discriminating response of Indian writers offers more complex examples of both influence and intertextuality as forms of reception.