From the Rigveda to the modern novel — the many streams of Indian literary tradition.
The four Vedas (Rig, Sama, Yajur, Atharva) are India's oldest literary texts, composed in Vedic Sanskrit. Classical Sanskrit literature flourished under the Guptas, producing works like Kalidasa's Abhijnanasakuntalam and Meghaduta, alongside the epics Ramayana (Valmiki) and Mahabharata (Vyasa), and treatises like Kautilya's Arthashastra.
Sangam literature, composed in Tamil roughly between the 3rd century BCE and 3rd century CE, is among India's earliest bodies of secular literature, covering love, war, ethics, and governance — key works include the Tolkappiyam (grammar) and the Tirukkural.
Persian became the court language under the Delhi Sultanate and Mughals, producing chronicles like Ziauddin Barani's Tarikh-i-Firoz Shahi and Abul Fazl's Akbarnama. Amir Khusrau, often called the "father of Urdu literature," wrote in both Persian and early Hindavi.
Modern literature in regional languages flourished from the 19th century onward, entwined with social reform and the freedom struggle — figures like Rabindranath Tagore (the first non-European Nobel laureate in Literature, 1913, for Gitanjali) and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (who wrote "Vande Mataram") are especially significant for GS.
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