Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel

Ulka Anjaria's Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel challenges conventional ways of understanding both realism as a form and the formal attributes of Indian fiction. Over five chapters, it details the emergence and development of the realist novel in India from the late nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century. It offers a thought-provoking reexamination of key novels in Hindi, English, and Bengali, including Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay's Anandamath, Rabindranath Tagore's Ghare Baire, Munshi Premchand's Godan, Mulk Raj Anand's Coolie, Raja Rao's Kanthapura, Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi, and Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay's Aparajito. Anjaria argues that whereas magical realism has come to be privileged both as the hallmark of third world and postcolonial writing, and as the method that such writing uses to challenge the politics of colonial modernity, in colonial and newly independent India realism was the mode through which writers engaged with questions of colonial injustice, nationalism, the hierarchies of class and caste, and the urban–rural divide. Realist narratives allowed them to debate what form modernity should take in India, and conversely, such debates enabled their wide-ranging experiments with realism. Thus, Anjaria argues, the aesthetic innovations and political visions of Indian realism enabled one another. In the hands of the novelists she discusses, realism was a heterogeneous practice that defies some of the distinctions critics have made between it and other modes of representation.Anjaria opens her book by remarking that whereas studies of European and American novel have recognized that realism is not simply a “naïve, mimetic representation of an inert and legible world, postcolonial criticism continues to regard the term with embarrassment” (4). Her aim, she declares, is to show that “realism in the colony” was in fact shaped by a self-consciousness on the part of novelists about their difference from Europe and its forms of realism, and “an awareness” of their “secondary status within colonial discourse.” It was this awareness and distance, in part, that allowed Indian writers to play with genre, and to bend realism to accommodate their own concerns. But such remolding was also the result of their own attempts to engage with questions of equality and freedom in India. Thus, Anjaria rightly insists, “realism is a mode of engagement, innovation and imagination within writing under colonialism, rather than ... [a] colonial leftover” (29). But Anjaria's work achieves more than a revaluation of simply Indian realism. Her discussions illuminate the limitations of any theoretical understanding of realism that derives only from a reading of European and American fiction. Instead of then seeing Indian novelists as only reshaping established Western norms of realist writing, we might better understand their work as demonstrating that realism, understood as a global practice, is a far more capacious and varied mode than is commonly understood.However, the force of this argument is compromised by Anjaria's insistence that all these novelists were engaging in a self-conscious dialogue with European realism and its derivations in India. Such insistence results in an explicit privileging of the novelists' aesthetic agendas over their political concerns, which runs counter to her declared agenda as well as to what I see as the real implications of her study. Thus, for example, in chapter 2, Anjaria offers a persuasive reexamination of Munshi Premchand's famous novel Godan, which is widely recognized as realistically detailing the harsh reality of rural poverty. Anjaria demonstrates that Godan in fact acknowledges how much of this harsh reality cannot be depicted. Premchand suggests that what is necessarily excluded by his representation is also ignored by Indian nationalism, and even by left-wing visions of India. In this way, Anjaria argues, Premchand both advances and questions the promise of Indian nationalism as well as the capacity of realism. However, as this fine argument is advanced, she conflates established modes of (European) realism, humanism, and mainstream Indian nationalism. So, for example, early in the chapter, Anjaria quotes Elizabeth Ermarth as suggesting that “the genial consensus of realistic narration” reinforces “the uniformity at the base of human experience and solidarity of human nature.” From this, she concludes that realism necessarily implies a commitment to “humanist uplift” and an understanding of humanity as an organic whole. Thus, she writes, “Premchand suggests that realism on its own will not bring about human equality but rather must balance its utopic vision for common humanity with a simultaneous awareness of the reality of difference” (45). But surely it was nationalism rather than realism that was the object of Premchand's critique. Surely, too, despite the commitment of some realist writers to a utopic vision, much realist fiction has been historically committed to exploring difference (of class, of gender, of religion, and in India, of caste and colonialism). It is one thing to argue that Premchand's experiments with form are inextricable from his social and political visions, and quite another to suggest that any literary writer or program actually assumed that realism “on its own” would bring about social change.A similar privileging of formal experimentation and, consequently, a flattening of realism is also evident elsewhere. In an otherwise fine chapter on Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi, Anjaria suggests that realism necessarily works with a model of “linear, progressive time” (107), one that is particularly conducive to being appropriated by bourgeois nationalist ideologies as they suggest the utopic development of an “imagined community.” Ali self-consciously complicates such an appropriation by his depiction of nostalgia among the Muslim elite, and suggests that such nostalgia indicates their alienation from the dominant narrative of Indian nationalism. But inasmuch as nostalgia is not simply an object of Ali's analysis but also becomes his own mode of representation, and inasmuch as his novel demonstrates that “the nation” was never a singular space in India, surely in the first place Twilight in Delhi alerts us against a reductive equation of realism with linearity, and of the nation with “empty homogenous time.” Indeed, Anjaria seems to suggest as much when she writes that it is “postcolonial theory beginning with Benedict Anderson” that has misunderstood the multiple temporalities in which a nation always exists (108). If it is a certain theory of the nation and the novel that has gotten it wrong, rather than “realism,” then should we not understand Indian realisms as emerging from a different history of the nation? In India, nationalisms emerged unevenly across diverse regions and among different religious and cultural and linguistic communities, so that the relationship between nationalism and “the novel” (and indeed nationalism and print culture) as posited by Anderson in his Imagined Communities must necessarily be qualified. This is the case even when—or especially when—novels strain to discuss the possibilities of a pan-Indian nationalism (as is the case with Indulekha, O. Chandu Menon's 1889 Malayalam novel). Despite the fact that a hegemonic pan-Indian nationalism did emerge, these competing visions did not simply dissolve, but rather animated and complicated literary imaginations in every part of the country. Of course, this is not to suggest that there were no shared features between novels in different languages, or that Indian novelists did not ever self-consciously argue with Western literary theories and practices, or those who sought to transplant them to India. Given the engagement of the Progressive Writers in India (a group that includes most of the writers Anjaria discusses) with European socialism, that would be a ridiculous assumption. Indeed, one of Anjaria's achievements in this book is to contest the critical view that the formal innovations of the Progressive Writers happened in spite of, rather than because of, their political visions.The need to rethink the relationship between literary realism and nationalism is most sharply demonstrated through Anjaria's examination of novels written between 1925 and 1940, each of which features Gandhi as a character. Even though I cannot agree that in these novels Gandhi is presented largely as “a crucible of literary experiment” (97), Anjaria offers a fine-tuned examination of how both Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable and Raja Rao's Kanthapura use Gandhi to probe the limits of Indian nationalism, and reflect on the relation of individuals to the nation by reanimating allegory as a method. They demonstrate that allegory is not antithetical to realism (as is generally presumed) but an intersecting mode of signification. In her final and perhaps most compelling chapter, Anjaria shows how Satyajit Ray's films Aparajito and Apur Sansar remake, in the idiom of “modernist realism,” an earlier novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay which is marked by a Romanticist desire to create characters and a narrative style that will transcend the details of everyday existence. Anjaria is most persuasive when she demonstrates how realist fiction is formally because politically supple, and how formalist experimentation accompanied (rather than impelled) debates about progressive nationalism. The longing for, and the fractures of, realist form are thus part of the challenges faced by Indians who desired not just freedom from colonialism, but also freedom from other oppressive hierarchies. While gender is startlingly absent as a concern in Anjaria's account of this body of fiction, and one cannot help wishing she had dealt with at least one woman writing in India, the major achievement of this book is provoke us to rethink the global lineages and the formal as well as political attributes of realism

Aesthetics · Art · Bengali · Colonialism · Epistemology · Indian literature · Literature · Magic realism · Modernity · Narrative · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Realism · History · Law · Literary Theory and Cultural Hermeneutics · Literature, Magical Realism, García Márquez · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies