Literary historicism in India could draw on the living repertoire of the great epics, Mahabharata and Ramayana, which were recycled in many forms and spin-offs and imbued, with their deities and myths, the everyday practice of Hindu religious worship. An English prose translation of the entire vast Mahabharata, replacing the stiffly scholarly one by Max Müller, was made by Kari Mohan Ganguli and was published in instalments between 1883 and 1896. Michael Madhusudan Dutta’s Bengali verse epic Meghnad Badh Kavya (“The slaying of Meghnad”, 1861; in nine cantos) was grafted onto characters of the Ramayana; but Dutta also wrote plays (developing a Bengali form of blank verse metre) and sonnets.

The printed historical romance manifested itself in colonial India from the mid-19th century on. Scholars are reluctant to see these as a mere spin-off of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels, but while the themes and some formal qualities are home-grown, other aspects and featurues cannot but recall the format of the historical novel genre that was then popular worldwide from America (Fenimore Cooper) to Russia (Puškin); it would be implausibe to assume an isolated native, parallel development, simultaneously in different Indian states, independent of the global spread of the genre. Typical features are the setting in historical (rather than mythical) times, evoking the independence of pre-Raj native realms, and the combination of love and heroism resulting from the conjuction between the private fate of the protagonist and a formative crisis moment in national history.

The most prominent early examples are Bhudev Mukhopadhyay’s Anguriya Binimoy (1857), Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s/Chatterjee’s Durgeshnandini (“The nobleman’s daughter”, 1865, in Bengali, set in West Bengal during the reign of the 16th-century Moghul Emperor Akbar) and C.V. Raman Pillai’s Marthandavarma (1891; in Malayalam, about the eponymous 18th-century monarch of Travancore, present-day Kerala). Pillai’s book became popular only in its revised edition of 1911, leading to an extension into a Travancore trilogy with the follow-up novels Dharmaraja (1913) and Ramarajabahadur (1918–1919). In Maharashtra, the Marathi writer and publicist Hari Narayan Apte brought out a number of novels, with both contemporary and historical settings, often in his weekly journal Karamanuk (founded in 1890). His debut Mhaisuracha Wagh (1890) was set in 18th-century Mysore under the rule of Tipu Sultan and drew from the English romance Tippoo Sultaun (1840) by the colonial official and India-popularizer Meadows Taylor.

Within Bengal, the historical novel fed directly into the Bengal Renaissance. It dovetailed with literary historicism and patriotism as it was expressed in other genres, both in Bengali and in English (which was a transregional platform language for the various Indian states and language communities). Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s English-language Rajmohan's Wife appeared in 1864 and he kept up a sustained production of contemporary and historical romances, also in his periodical Bangadarshan (as of 1870). But all these efforts, while important for the establishment of a modern Indian literature, were outshone in the mobilizing effect by his most overtly political historical novel of the period, Anandamath (“The Abbey of Bliss”, 1882). Set during the Sannyasin rebellion of the early 1770s and taking from that setting an overtly anti-British tone, the novel was particularly influential in that it contained a poem whose title, Vande Mataram (“I venerate the Mother[land]”) became a nationalist slogan. Set to music and endorsed by Rabindranath Tagore, it became the nationalist alternative to the Empire’s “God Save the Queen”; its title was repeatedly used as slogan or journal title, and the song functioned as a national anthem in the independence movement of the 20th century.

The historical novel in India emerged together with the novel of contemporary manners and coexists with it, and with the mythical imaginary of the epics and ancient religious writings. In the 20th century, national historicism dwindled in printed literature but remained very strong in the medium of film.