India is a bewildering experience. Spatially, it spreads over 32,80,483 square kilometers, has a land frontier of 15,200 kilometers and a coastline of 6,083 kilometers. Containing 15% of the world population, India's teeming variety is reflected in its twenty (or more) officially recognized languages. Is this an intimidating Tower of Babel or God's Plenty? Each language has a literature that has been a-growing for 1,000 years. And Sanskrit and Tamil have a literary history spanning 2,000 years.

For the present volume, the segment chosen is the land south of the Vindhyas. But the segment is vast enough. South India has four major languages: Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu. All of these languages have an one-thousand years old history. Of these, the history of Tamil literature takes us further back by another thousand years. Each linguistic region has always been a veritable beehive of literary activity and this century has seen phenomenal expansion because of the facilities afforded by printing and publishing. Choosing representative writers, even if we restrict ourselves to the 80s, is no easy task. And there is a considerable amount of writing in Sanskrit as well. The language is very much alive and has been an effective instrument in the hands of scholars and creative writers.