4 Contesting ‘Indiannesss’ in Indian Novel: Culture, Language and History

Dr. Sanghamitra Dey

Introduction

The history of the emergence of Indian novel is a simultaneous history of the emergence of ‘Indianness’ or fashioning of a unique Indian self which finds the best medium of wide articulation with the emergence of novel. The genealogy of novel is also, therefore, replete with the nuances of the socio-cultural events affecting the country as the literary history can hardly be aloof from the struggle for national awakening. This module situates the intense dialectic of the re-examination of the issues of language, culture and history in the context of the Indian novel in English.

Objectives

The chapter is designed to help you

• read critically the history of Indian English novel
• understand the important socio-cultural events/contexts instrumental to the history of emergence of novel
• position the major novelists in the proper historical context
• apprehend the major texts
• understand the socio-cultural and literary dynamics of the genre

Exploration of the Main Ideas/Issues/Themes

The history of novel is the history of the process of enculturation in the context of familiarity with an alien language. As we see, during the colonial period, the familiarity with the English tongue and Western culture especially familiarity with the canonical and popular texts were fruitful for the novelists writing in the Indian languages as the knowledge of the classics of Western literature helps one to be accommodated within the power structure in terms of wider circulation and readership. Hence, the beginning of the genre is replete with the borrowed examples, epigraphs, and quotations from Byron, Scott, Cowper, Shakespeare, and Coleridge. The validation of the canon into the indigenous narrative went simultaneously with the rejection of the middle- or low-brow writers like G.W.M. Reynolds, Wilkie Collins, Marie Corelli, Benjamin Disraeli. On the other hand, indigenous novel writing during 1930s and 1940s was highly influenced not by the borrowed ideas but by the events instrumental to the history of the genre as well as the history of Indian nationalism. The history of Indian novel in English as Leela Gandhi opines “while the incipient Indian nation frequently supplied the content and inspiration for the incipient novel form, the novel of the 1930s ‘40s in turn played a very important part in imagining and embodying the radical vision of anti-colonial nationalism. As it happens the diverse range of authors who tried their hand— with varying degree of success—at novel writing, included many who dabbled, with varying degrees of commitment, in the social and political issues which preoccupied the great age of Indian nationalism. At the same time, the nation-centredness of this new generation of Indian novelists was tempered by a characteristic cosmopolitanism of outlook and experience”( “Novelists of the 1930s and 1940s”,168). Indian nationalism was the primary unifying factor in terms of linguistic and cultural experiments. The question of language persisted and most of the contemporary novelists used English and their regional languages as creative medium. C. Rajagopalachari appropriately claimed English as ‘Saraswati’s gift to India’ as English was the best medium for the task of national unification. Mulk Raj Anand consulted Gandhi’s opinion on the propriety of writing exclusively in English, and the latter’s encouraging response was practical and pragmatic: ‘The purpose of writing is to communicate, isn’t it? If so, say your say in any language that comes to hand.’

The process of indigenization and celebration of national imaginary is replaced by the renewed concern with character development and psychological intensity as well as the idea of an estranged individual caught in the web of the deadening aspects of modern life in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Novel characteristically explores the sense of alienation which in turn is reflective of the situation of the Indian writers writing in English. The alienation is seemingly the result of an English education and the consequent elite status which increases the gulf between the writer and the masses. Moreover, the question of taking recourse to the dominant forms of Western fiction becomes apparent. The publication of Midnight’s Children in 1981 is said to have brought about a renaissance in Indian writing in English and the 1980s witnessed a second coming for the Indian novel in English. The appearance of a certain  post-modern playfulness, the renewed interest in history, a celebration of polyphonic language, the reinvention of allegory and magic realism, repeated references to Bollywood, use of cinematic devices, collage,  montage etc. seem to proliferate owing to the publication of Midnight’s Children.

Literary Representations

Beginnings of the Novel in English

Although the 1930s is commonly viewed as the decade of emergence of the Indian novel, we can trace the genealogy into the previous century as Meenakshi Mukherjee opines, “the early English novels in India appeared at a time when the genre was still in a malleable stage… The earliest extant narrative texts in English are the two tracts of imaginary history written by Kylas Chunder Dutt and Shoshee Chunder Dutt in 1835 and 1845 respectively. These were ‘A Journal of Forty- Eight Hours of the year 1945’, published in the Calcutta Literary Gazette, and ‘The Republic of Orissa: A Page from the Annals of the 20th Century’, which appeared in the Saturday Evening Harakuru. Both project into the future, describing battles of liberation against the British, but  end with disimilar resolutions” ( “The Beginnings of the Indian Novel”,93-95). These early narratives can be seen as a part of the pre-novel narrative era in India and the absence of generic expectation marks these. Shoshee Chunder Dutt’s novels like Shunkur (1885) and The Young Zeminder(1883) deal with the question of nationalism and the relation between the British and the Indian subjects. A. Madhavaiah (1872-1925) in Thillai Govindan (1908) deals with similar themes of subjugation and cultural pride as well as an assertion of the antiquity and superiority of Indian civilisation in relation to Europe. Sarath Kumar Ghosh follows the similar theme of cultural assertion in Prince of Destiny: The New Krishna (1909). The attempt to integrate ancient Indian philosophy and the colonial structures of knowledge and power run constant in theses novels. Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya (1838-94) is noted for his only novel written in English, Rajmohan’s Wife which deals with the trials and tribulations of middle-class life. Unlike Chattopadhyaya, Lal Behari Day (1824-94) takes recourse to the marginal sections of the society in Govinda Samanta, or the History of a Bengali Raiyat (1874). The revised edition is renamed Bengal Peasant Life and traces the history of the poor Ugrakshatriya family in West Bengal. The echoes of Fielding are prominent especially when Dey reproduces Fielding’s famous bill-of-fare metaphor at the beginning of Tom Jones in his novel.

The Beginnings of the Indian Novel: Language, History

Meenakshi Mukherjee (92)

“The first is the diversity and range of places from which they appeared. They were published not only from the metropolitan centres of book production like London, Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras, but also from small presses with limited distribution systems in Allahabad, Bangalore, Bezwada, Bhagalpur, Calicut, Dinapur, Midnapur, Surat, and Vellore, making it difficult to claim a continuity of tradition. The second is the eagerness in the titles—A Peep into, Glimpses, Revelation, etc.—to promise the unveiling of some mystery presumably pertaining to a seemingly homogeneous space called India(or ‘The East’ or ‘The Orient’).This tendency was perhaps linked with the author’s choice of language, because, unlike novelists in the Indian languages who were confident about a sizeable readership within their specific region, the writer in English suffered from an uncertainty about his audience. We surmise from clues embedded in the texts that his implicit target must have been the British reader, if not in England, at least the colonial administrator in India”.

Indian Novel in the 1930s and 1940s

As mentioned, the socio-political events of the 1930s and ‘40s were instrumental in shaping the thematic and stylistic experiments of the genre. The fictional world of the novel replicated the cultural hybridity and formation of a national consciousness during these periods. As Leela Gandhi argues, “caught between the sometimes complementary and sometimes opposing claims of home and the world, the novelists of the 1930s and 1940s owed their inspirations and conditions for their emergence to two contexts: the social and political upheavals of the ‘Gandhian whirlwind’ and the era of late-modernism in Europe. At home, this period marked the most visibly triumphant stage of anti-colonial nationalism, culminating in1947 with the much awaited event of Indian independence”( “Novelists of the 1930s and 1940s”168-169). Events like 1930s Civil Disobedience movement “helped to furnish a significantly popular basis for the energies of Indian anti-colonialism. Second, it postulated Gandhi as the icon of such randomly distributed energies. It was at this time that the ‘Mahatma theme’ was announced within the nationalist agitation as a niquely imaginative, carefully symbolic, and irresistibly fictionalisable way of doing politics.” (“Novelists of the 1930s and 1940s”Gandhi, 169)

Hence we witness the proliferation of ‘Mahatma novels’ written in English and also in other Indian languages in this period. Premchand’s Premasharm (1921) and Rangabhumi (1925) in Hindi, Ramantlal Vasantlal Desai’s Gram Lakshmi (1940) in Gujarati, G.T. Madkholkar’s Muktatma (1933) in Marathi, and Satinath Bhaduri’s Jagari (1946) in Bengali use “Gandhi as a governing trope or motif in their fictional exploration of contemporary India” (“Novelists of the 1930s and 1940s”,Gandhi, 169). K.S. Venkataramani (1891-1951) in his first novel, Murugan, the Tiller (1927) deals with the cause of Gandhian economics and his second novel, Kandan, The Patriot: A Novel of New India in the Making (1932) narrativises the 1930s Civil Disobedience movement. K. Nagarajan (1893-1986) wrote Athavar House (1937) which evokes Gandhian nationalism as the backdrop for rendering the saga of the trials and tribulations of a Maharashtrian family settled in the south of India. In Chronicle of Kedaram (1961) he introduces Gandhi as a character within the narrative. R.K. Narayan offers a comic portrait of Gandhi in Waiting for the Mahatma (1955) Bhabani Bhattacharya’s So Many Hungers(1947) deals with  the Quit India movement. The ‘nationalist novels’ written by Muslim writers are peopled with Hindu characters. For example, Aamir Ali’s Conflict (1947) is replete with Hindu characters and it dramatises the national movement through the perspective of the Hindu protagonist, a village boy Shankar whose journey to Bombay changes his life as he is involved in the Quit India movement. Similarly K.A. Abbas’s Tomorrow is Ours: A Novel of the India of Today (1943), explores the issues of nationalism and untouchability and his protagonist is Parvati.

Influence of Gandhi and Nehru in 1930s and 1940s Leela Gandhi

“By and large, the social realism of contemporary fiction seeks its materials and gains its inspiration from the nationalist mobilization and ‘upliftment’ of women, workers, untouchables, and peasants. At best, these narratives tend to represent the colonial encounter itself as a shadowy sub-plot to the larger story of socio-economic transformation. And in this regard, although Gandhi continues to be treated as the ethical centre of the purported turning-upside- down of old hierarchies, a distinctly Nehruvian vocabulary gains currency in the novels of this period….. The consequent rift between Nehru and Gandhi troubles the message of much contemporary fiction. Faced with a choice between Nehruvian modernity and the distinctly non- modern imperatives of Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1910), most novelists attempt an uneasy synthesis of both views. While the bulk of Gandhi novels faithfully narrate the conversion of Westernised ‘foreign educated’ protagonists to simple rural ideals, in reality these stories are often unable to entirely eschew the cosmopolitanism of the Nehruvian alternative”.

Mulk Raj Anand(1905-2004) is the novelist of this era who integrates all strands of “nationalism and cosmopolitanism, modernism and Marxism, and Gandhism and Nehruvian socialism”(Gandhi, 175) in his writing. His first novel Untouchable (1935) narrates the story of the marginal sections of the society in terms of narrating the story of Bakha, a young sweeper who is ostracized. Coolie (1936) and Two Leaves and a Bud (1937) project his concern with questions of cast and class. Coolie, known as a social chronicle narrates the story of young Munoo, an orphan from Kangra and his travels from the idyllic hills to the city of Bombay. Two Leaves and a Bud tells the saga of Gangu, a Punjabi peasant exploited to work in a tea estate in Assam. Anand’s subsequent trilogy —The Village (1939), Across the Black Waters (1941), and the Sword and the Sickle (1942) recounts the life and career of Lal Singh, a Punjabi peasant. Across the Black Waters is perhaps the only ‘world war’ novel in Indian English literature. The Big Heart (1945) tells the story of Ananta, Seven Summers (1951), is a semi-autobiographical work about Anand’s childhood memories. The Private Life of an Indian Prince (1953) is also autobiographical in nature. The Old Woman and the Cow (1960) returns to the theme of peasant life and recounts the life, struggle and consequent transformation of the female protagonist  called Gauri. The Road (1963) is inspired by Untouchable, The Death of a Hero (1964) is based on the life of a Kashmiri freedom fighter. Morning Face (1970) and Confession of a Lover (1976) employ the fictional persona of Krishan Chander and is autobiographical in nature and form.

As argued by Leela Gandhi, “their experiments with social realism, and corresponding attention to the surface of life in pre-Independent India, catches within fiction the complex alliances, misalliances, transformations, and failures of the Indian national movement. Moreover, these novels are pioneering in their effort to render into English the exuberant dialects of northern India. Although awkward, Anand’s exposition of ‘pidgin-English’ prepares the way for the subsequent linguistic and cultural translations of Indian-English writers” (178). Raja Rao(1908-2001) continues the political and ideological preoccupations of Anand. In Kanthapura (1938), the tenets of Gandhian thought emerge in the village through Moorthy, a radical who unifies the villagers to fight against the British. The Gandhian message is imparted in the form of a traditional Harikatha, which introduces Gandhi as an epic hero, born into a Bania family in ‘Gujarat. The Serpent and the Rope (1960) is broader in scope and spans across Europe and India. It offers a spiritual travelogue recounting the story of Ramaswamy and The Cat and Shakespeare (1965) continues the tradition of philosophical fiction. According to Rao, ‘The Serpent and the Rope is a novel of the discovery of the Guru. The Cat and Shakespeare shows how one functions after one has found the Guru.’ The eleventh-century philosopher Ramanujachary’s idea of achieving personal salvation through the simple gestures of surrender or faith is central to The Cat and Shakespeare. Comrade Kirillov (1976) is replete with the figure of Gandhi and The Chessmaster and His Moves (1988) is a saga of doomed love between Sivarama Sastri, an Indian mathematician based in Paris, and a married woman.

Ahmed Ali (1910-1994) is known for his pre-Partition novel, Twilight in Delhi (1940) which offers a culturally representative view of the colonial encounter. Ali chooses the Delhi- based Nihal household and their gradual disintegration over the years 1910-1919. The novel is a saga of the historical erosion of a whole culture when under the authority of Mir Nihal, the family witnesses a succession of unfortunate downfalls. Ali’s novel is narrated through the eyes of the aristocratic Mir Nihal and specifies a specifically Muslim perception of colonial rule. The loss of Mughal hegemony over India is a prime concern in the novel. Ali’s Ocean of Night (1964) is also a remarkable work. Govindas Vishnoodas Desani (1909-2000) is noted for All About H. Hatterr (1948). Set in British India, the novel recounts the tale of the growth and education of the eponymous hero H. Hatterr, son of a European merchant seaman and a lady from Penang. Episodic in structure, this self-conscious novel records his attempt to find a higher truth. It is revolutionary in its linguistic experimentation and the lack of respect and reverence shown to the European canon. Sudhin N. Ghose (1899-1965) wrote an interconnected tetralogy of novels —And Gazelles Leaping (1949), Cradle of the Clouds (1951), The Vermilion Boat (1953), and The Flame of the Forest (1955). This tetralogy, written in the style of a bildungsroman, documents the life and growth of a nameless orphan-narrator over a twenty-year period. Aubrey Menen (1912-89) sketches a different world imbued with the nuances of sexuality in its rigorous objection to all forms of sexual hypocrisy. The Abode of Love (1956) narrates the story of Henry James Prince, a promiscuous curate who debunks the façade of Victorian respectability by propagating a religion where sexual pleasures are viewed through the prism of spiritual satisfaction. The Fig Tree (1957), in a satirical vein narrates the story of a puritanical scientist, Harry Wesley, whose attempt to invent an oral contraceptive results in the production of a fig tree, symbolic of the failure. In other novels, Menen draws upon the creative resources of his mixed parentage. His first novel, The Prevalence of Witches (1947), explores cultural differences between ‘civilised’ and ‘primitive’ people. The Stumbling Stone (1949) is a critique of the false pretensions of London elites and socialites.

R.K.Narayan (1906-2001) is best remembered for works infused with political or social commentary and the creator of the locale-Malgudi, the colonial district town with its varied culture and places- post-office, bank, lanes, suburb, roadside shops, slums, missionary school and government bungalows. In his fiction, Malgudi emerges as the brave new world of India facing rapid urbanisation. Swami and Friends (1935) traces the transition from innocence to experience through the perspective of Swami. The Bachelor of Arts (1937) narrates the saga of a young graduate, Chandran and Narayan’s implicit critique of the kind of education Swami and Chandran receive reverberates in both novels. The English Teacher (1945) is replete with major historical events— British colonialism, Indian independence, the Emergency. The Dark Room (1938) deals with the condition of women in the changing scenario of modern India. Mr Sampath: A Printer of Malgudi (1949) narrates the struggle of the protagonist Srinivas who finds liberation and individual satisfaction after spending years under the ambitions of an eccentric filmmaker, a printer and a deranged artist. A Tiger for Malgudi (1980), where the soul of a human being is trapped inside a tiger, and the repetitive in structure and form Talkative Man (1985) and The World of Nagaraj (1990), illustrate the novelist whose creative powers are dwindling. In Waiting for the Mahatma (1955), Narayan uses as background the Indian freedom movement. The Vendor of Sweets (1967) traces the story of son of a Gandhian vendor who opts for a course of creative writing in U. S.The Painter of Signs (1977) narrates the story of arrival of Daisy, a young woman in Malgudi during Emergency to spread awareness about contraception among illiterate villagers. The Financial Expert (1952) is peopled with con-men, greedy landlords, exploited villagers and The Guide (1958) narrates the story of Raju, the protagonist who leads a miserable life of suffering and pain.

Indian Novel in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s

After Independence, Mulk Raj Anand, R.K.Narayan, and Raja Rao continued to write and in 1960 The Guide won the Sahitya Akademi Award. P.M.Nityanandan (b.1928) produced the first campus novel in Indian English with his Long, Long Days (1960). Manohar Malgonkar (b.1913) wrote The Princes (1963). Khushwant Singh (b.1915) is best known for his novel on Partition, Train to Pakistan (1956) which is set in the small village of Mano Majra, on the banks of the Sutlej, where the only event of importance is a train crossing the railway bridge. I shall Not Hear The Nightingale (1959) chronicles a Sikh joint family of the 1940s. Delhi: A Novel (1989) narrates the varied history of India’s capital city from 1265 to the anti-Sikh riots of 1984. Ruskin Bond (b. 1934) is noted for the acute evocation of nostalgia and melancholic note. The Room on the Roof (1956), won the John Llewellyn-Rhys Memorial Prize. The novel chronicles a lonely Eurasian boy’s quest for bonding. Time Stops at Shamli (1989) sketches a provincial world of mutual fulfillment. Experimentation with different narrative techniques and exploration of the prevailing condition of post-Independence India characterizes the fictional world of Arun Joshi (1939-93). The narrative of The Foreigner (1968) collates time and geographical space and The Apprentice (1974), a monologue tells the story of Ratan Rathore, a government official bearing the burden of guilt necessitated by the prevailing atmosphere of corruption in post-Independence India. The Last Labyrinth (1981) won the Sahitya Akademi Award and uses the trope of the labyrinth as structural device. The City and the River (1990) is a fable about the corruption of power. The Strange Case of Billy Biswas (1971) narrates the story of Bimal Biswas and his obsession with Adivasi culture. Dissatisfaction with the metropolis and modernity is a recurrent feature of the novels of this period. One novel which consequently turned to experimenting with non-Western narrative forms is M. Anantanarayanan’s The Silver Pilgrimage (1961). Anantanarayanan (1907-81) takes recourse to Dandin’s Dasa-Kumara-Charita instead of the Western picaresque novel to narrate the adventures of Jayasurya, a prince of sixteenth-century Sri Lanka. He also uses lines from Shakespeare, Donne and Rilke and Tamil poets such as Avvayar, Pattinathar, and Tiruvalluvar and the result is unique in the history.

Indian Novel since 1980s

Indian novel since 1980s is more dialogic in nature and scope as it proceeds to accommodate a polyphonic linguistic and cultural landscape. The complex process of decolonization results in the trends of reimagining the nation on an epic scale along with the persistent realization of the failure of the nation-state and consequently the novelists explored the theme of alienation from the perspective of rewriting national history. The allegorical parallel of the growth to maturity of the individual and the growth of an independent India, nostalgia for a lost unity are recurrent features in many novels of the period. Experiments with meta-fictional narratives and linguistic potentials came to the forefront.

Upamanyu Chaterjee’s (b. 1959) English, August (1988) deals with the similar idea of choosing the appropriate medium, a new kind of desi English when the protagonist, Agastya, an employee of the Indian Administrative Service, is confronted with a variety of views on the role of English in India. The Last Burden (1933), explore the conflict between tradition and modernity in contemporary India. Fragmentation of national imaginary dominates Rukun Advani’s writing (b. 1955) when he takes up the figure of the fractured and fragmented body politic in Beethoven Among the Cows (1994). Advani’s narrator fears he is doomed ‘to see India crack up like the fragments of my multi-channelled mind’. The death of Nehru in the novel’s opening chapter is symbolic as it predicts the double loss- the loss of innocence for the narrator and the loss of national integration. In his fiction, Amit Chaudhuri (b. 1962) projects Bombay as the symbol of a disconcerting modernity only to be contrasted with Calcutta, ‘the only city I know that is timeless’. A Strange and Sublime Address (1991) and Afternoon Raag (1993) are replete with a poetic evocation of the loss of self. Freedom Song (1998) projects the changes in Calcutta wrought by two decades of communist rule and political violence across the country. In A New World (2000), the picture of Calcutta is ambivalent. The lived realities of Bombay’s hybrid culture is projected in Ravan & Eddie (1995), the saga of Ravan, a Marathi-speaking Hindu and Eddie, a Goan Catholic living in a Bombay chawl whose life symbolizes the tensions and divisions of India. This novel by Kiran Nagarkar (b. 1949) is critically acclaimed.

Amitav Ghosh (b. 1956) is the author of The Circle of Reason (1986) which aims to rediscover a continuing tradition of cultural exchange for India. His landscape spans across geographical locales- across the Indian Ocean to the Gulf states and Egypt. In an Antique Land (1992) deploys similar thematic concerns and recovers the lost traces of historical narrative from the perspective of a slave. The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), a futuristic detective story is concerned with the interconnected relationship between science, history, and colonialism. The Shadow Lines (1988), The Glass Palace (2000), Hungry Tide, The Sea of Poppies meditate on large historical and nationalist issues such as diaspora, migration, refugees, homeland, colonial hegemony, and the economic and cultural subjugation of places by the West, the dislocating effects of Partition. Allan Sealy (b. 1951) is the author of The Trotter-Nama (1988) and The Everest Hotel (1988), Hero (1991). The Trotter-Nama is significant in exploring the fact that historiography as a genre is complicit with the hegemonic tendencies of European Enlightenment with the implied consequence of reductionist tendency. Hence all histories are dissolved into a universal grand narrative. The novel is the chronicle of a family of Anglo-Indians, a community whose existence is disturbing for the imagining of the nations in the context of a categorically homogeneous cultural authenticity.

Shashi Tharoor’s (b.1956) The Great Indian Novel (1989) adapts the story of the Mahabharata to an allegory of modern Indian history and offers an interesting perspective on the development of modern India. Similar themes are explored in Ruchir Joshi’s The Last Jet-Engine Laugh (2001), Sealy’s Hero and Tharoor’s Show Business (1994). The desire to adapt the European form of the novel to indigenous literary traditions, the ‘chutnification of history’ (Salman Rushdie) is a transformative and preservative process of preserving the distinctive flavours and traditions of India. Rushdie’s metaphor is inclusive of the ingredients instrumental to the making of history which does not yield to a single representative apparatus. Mukul Kesavan (b. 1957) and Vikram Chandra (b.1961) address the issue of translating Indian history into the form of the novel. The relationship between the Muslim population and the nationalist movement pervades Looking Through Glass (1995) which looks at a community often marginal to nationalist histories and in the process offers a different perspective on the closing years of the struggle for independence. Vikram Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995) revolves around the fate of Sanjay whose reincarnation as a monkey adds unique perspective to the story. Abhay shoots Sanjay, now the monkey for stealing his new jeans and when Yama, the god of death claims the dying monkey, Ganesh intervenes with a deal of entertainment. If Sanjay is able to narrate his story and everybody is entertained, he will be saved. Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (1993) is based on a romance plot, the choice of a suitable boy for the heroine, Lata Mehra and slowly these novelists transform the alien tongue into a contemporary Indian language.

Summing Up

This module on the history of Indian novel in English situates the genre in the polyphonic linguistic and cultural landscape caught in the web of conflicting socio-cultural contexts. An attempt has been made here to address the dialogic process of colonial encounter and the complex process of decolonization which are instrumental to the exploration of themes of Indianness, persistent alienation and imagining the nation on an epic scale, the desire to rewrite national history, self-fashioning and the politics of resistance, cultural identity in terms of discussions of major novels/ novelists.

Introduction

• The history of the emergence of Indian novel is a simultaneous history of the emergence of ‘Indianness’ or fashioning of a unique Indian self which finds the best medium of wide articulation with the emergence of novel.
• This module situates the intense dialectic of the re-examination of the issues of language, culture and history in the context of the Indian novel in English.

Objectives

The chaper is designed to help you

• read critically the history of Indian English novel
• understand the important socio-cultural events/contexts instrumental to the history of emergence of novel
• position the major novelists in the proper historical context
• apprehend the major texts
• understand the socio-cultural and literary dynamics of the genre

Exploration of the Main Ideas/Issues/Themes

• This section addresses the questions of identity, nationalism, language in the context of the history of the genre.
• The aim is to highlight the transition from indigenous novel writing during 1930s and 1940s highly influenced not by the borrowed ideas but by the events instrumental to the history of the genre.
• The history of Indian nationalism to the renewed concern with character development and psychological intensity as well as the idea of an estranged individual caught in the web of the deadening aspects of modern life in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s is also highlighted.

Literary Representations

The genealogy of novel is also, therefore, replete with the nuances of the socio-cultural events affecting the country as the literary history can hardly be aloof from the struggle for national awakening and this section unfolds the complex history.

Beginnings of the Novel in English

• Although the 1930s is commonly viewed as the decade of emergence of the Indian novel, we can trace the genealogy into the previous century.
• This section discusses the beginnings of the genre in terms of the earliest extant narrative texts in English (the two tracts of imaginary history written by Kylas Chunder Dutt and Shoshee Chunder Dutt in 1835 and 1845 respectively).
• Representative writers like Shoshee Chunder Dutt, A. Madhavaiah, Sarath Kumar Ghosh, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya, Lal Behari Day etc. are also discussed.

Indian Novel in the 1930s and 1940s

• This section discusses the socio-political events of the 1930s and ‘40s instrumental in shaping the thematic and stylistic experiments of the genre.
• The fictional world of the novel replicated the cultural hybridity and formation of a national consciousness during these periods.
• The section addresses events like 1930s Civil Disobedience movement; proliferation of ‘Mahatma theme’ in ‘Mahatma novels’ written by R.K. Narayan, Bhabani Bhattacharya, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, Ahmed Ali etc.

Indian Novel in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s

• This section discusses the development of Indian Novel in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s
• The focus is on the representative writers like Mulk Raj Anand, R.K.Narayan, Raja Rao who continued to write, P.M.Nityanandan, Manohar Malgonkar, Khushwant Singh, Ruskin Bond, Arun Joshi, M. Anantanarayanan.

Indian Novel since 1980s

• Indian novel since 1980s is more dialogic in nature and scope as it proceeds to accommodate a polyphonic linguistic and cultural landscape.
• The complex process of decolonization results in the trends of reimagining the nation on an epic scale along with the persistent realization of the failure of the nation-state.
• Consequently the novelists explored the theme of alienation from the perspective of rewriting national history.
• Experiments with meta-fictional narratives and linguistic potentials came to the forefront in the novels of Upamanyu Chaterjee, Rukun Advani, Amit Chaudhuri, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Chandra, Allan Sealy, Shashi Tharoor.

Reference

• Ahmed, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. New Delhi: Oxford U P, 1992. Print.
• Gandhi, Leela. “Novelists of the 1930s and 1940s”. (168-192). Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna eds. An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003. Print
• Iyengar, K.R. Srinivasa. Indian Writing in English. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Private Limited, 1985. Print.
• Kirpal, Vinay. ed. The Postmodern Indian English Novel: Interrogating the 1980s and 1990s. Bombay: Allied Publishers Limited, 1996. Print.
• Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna eds. An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003. Print
• Morey, Peter. Fictions of India: Narrative and Power. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000. Print.
• Mukherjee, Meenakshi. “The Beginnings of the Indian Novel”. (92-102) Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna eds. An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003. Print
• Mukherjee, Meenakshi. The Twice Born Fiction: Themes and Techniques of the Indian Novel in English. Delhi: Pencraft international, 1971 (first published), 2001. Print.
• Mukherjee, Meenakshi. The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in English. New Delhi: Oxford UP,2000. Print
• Naik, M. K.A History of Indian English Literature. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1982(rpt. 2004). Print
• Naik, M. K and Shyamala A. Narayan. Indian English Literature 1980-2000: A Critical Survey. New Delhi: Pencraft, 2011. Print
• Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.
• Srivastava, Nilam. Secularism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel: National and Cosmopolitan Narratives in English. London: Routledge, 2008. Print.
• Viswanathan, Gauri. The Masks of Conquest. Delhi: Oxford India Paperbacks, 1998. Print Walsh, William. Indian Literature in English. London and New York: Longman, 1990. Print.