EARLY INDIAN FICTION

Kanthapura . Rajmohan’s Wife . Untouchable

S H I S H I R K U M A R C H A U D H A R Y - 2 0 0 6 C S 5 0 2 2 2

Texts Referred

• Bankim Chandra Chatterjee – Rajmohan’s Wife

• Mulk Raj Anand – Untouchable

• Raja Rao – Kanthapura

Brief History

• 1930s is generally seen as the decade when Indian English Novel took off

• The early novels were published from a variety of places – not only metros like London, Calcutta, Bombay, etc but also small places like Calicut, Bhagalpur, Bangalore, etc

Brief History

• The titles showcased some sort of expectancy or titillations– A Peep into …– Glimpses of …– Revelations …

• These seem to promise the unveiling of some mystery – the ‘east’ or ‘India’

Language vs. Identity• Raja Rao – “One has to convey in a language that is not one’s

own the spirit that is one’s own”

• Mulk Raj Anand – “the double burden on my shoulders, the Alps of the European tradition and the Himalayas of my Indian past”

• English may be the language of our intellectual make-up but not of our emotional make-up.

• Need of a dialect as a method of expression much like the Irish or the American English.

Potential Readership

• Authors’ confusion about their potential readership

• The implicit target readers were British– Texts have ethnographic details or lexical and semantic emphases

• Rajmohan’s Wife – Local Bengali Vegetables called Salad• Rajmohan’s Wife / Kanthapura – Extended description of typical Indian

household / society

– Author Lal Behari Day announces in his Govinda Samanta that there are no ‘taverns’ for the young peasants to spend their evenings in and that there is no concept of ‘courtship’ or ‘making love’

Conditions and Issues

• Social and political upheavals of nationalism

• Social and political issues dominated

• Upliftment of women, untouchables and peasants

• Rift between Nehruvian and Gandhian ideals

RAJMOHAN’S WIFE

Introduction• Written by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee in 1864.

• Arguably the first novel by an Indian in English Language

• Appeared as episodes in Indian Field. Published as a novel in 1935

• Bengali Version – Vari-Vahini

• First three chapters are translations of this Bengali version by Mr. Brajendra Nath Banerji

• Narrative Style – Third Person, uses Westernized English

Women

• The carefully drawn portrait of Mantangini is a unique contribution of the traditional and the radically new– the heroine is always shown with a companion who

serves to highlight the former’s beauty– several of the images used are taken from long-standing

literary conventions

• Images of women – timid and weak– strong and spirited

An Image of Modern India

• No description of the rural or feudal India– Set up near Calcutta

• No exclusive comment on the British Raj– Benign image of the colonial rule

• Mantangini - not just a character, but the “spirit” or personification of modern India itself. This is an emergent, hesitant, yet strong-willed and attractive India.

Other Imageries

• Rajmohan – Lumpenised proletariat under colonialism, alienated from its own people and country

• Madhav – The sensible, learned and elite class that is concerned for the rise of a modern India

• Mathur – The elite class that is both corrupt and unscrupulous

UNTOUCHABLE

Introduction• Written by Mulk Raj Anand in 1935 - He was involved in

Indian Non Co-operation Movement

• Considered his finest and most controversial novel

• Story – A day in the life of an “untouchable” named Bakha

• Conveys with urgency and barely disguised fury what it might feel like to be one of India’s untouchables

• Confused about the targeted readership – uses Pidgin English and explanatory footnotes

Main Themes

• Atrocities of Untouchability– Author constructs events to vent out the feelings of the sufferer– Feelings that follow – Why was I even born, self-pity, afraid of

receiving a favor, sequence of contemplation on fields etc.

• Increasing awareness in the society– The characters of Havildar Charat Singh and Iqbal Nath Sarshar

• Reformist Solutions– Philosophic resignation– Conversion to Christianity– Gandhi vs. Nehru

KANTHAPURA

Introduction

• Written by Raja Rao in 1938

• Gandhian Novel – It portrays the participation of a small village of South India in the national struggle called for by Gandhi.

• A fictional but realistic account of how people in India lived their lives under British rule and how they responded to the ideas and ideals of Indian nationalism

Narrative Style

• Omniscient First Person Narrator – An old woman

• Rao makes a deliberate attempt to follow the traditional Indian narrative style

• Describes at the onset – sthala-purana

• Use of the English language to make it conform to the local rhythm

• Various emotional sequences are expressed by breaking the formal English syntax to suit the sudden changes of mood and sharp contrasts in tone

Main Features• Village as the microcosm of the nation - Entrenched with caste

hierarchies, religious beliefs, etc

• Chronicles the formation of a national identity within a village affected by events occuring outside the geographical limits

• Underlines the homogenising tendency of nationalism– “Swadeshi” congressmen adopt the European model of nation– Sankaru insists on speaking Hindi even to his mother instead of the

local language Kannada– The Hindi teacher is not from any Hindi speaking region but a

Malayali

• Any pure form of nationhood untouched by colonialism is seriously questioned

Main Features• Tension between Brahmanism and Nationalism and collusion between the

former and colonialism

• Paradoxical Treatment of the lower castes

• Narrative exhibits a non-historic consciousness in the beginning – Kanthapura as Sthalapurana, history of Goddess Kenchamma, mythicizing of nationalist figures, etc

• When colonialism disrupts narratives of the community, it introduces ‘history’

• Importance of colonialization in helping to come out of the mythical mentality and realize the factual truths

Conclusion

• Indian authors began to write in English to supposedly target the British Readers

• Conscious of the National Identity

• National and Social Reforms were the driving force behind the literary works

• Difficulty of Language

References

• Blog - http://sotosay.wordpress.com/

• The Allegory of Rajmohan’s Wife. Makarand R. Paranjape

• Wikipedia

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