Trends in Indian novels in English in post-Independence era

Post-Independence Indian English Fiction

Post-Independence Indian English fiction is virtually synonymous with Post-colonial Indian English fiction. The visibility of Indian English fiction dates back to the fourth decade of the twentieth century when Mulk Raj Anand, R.K.Narayan and Raja Rao published their novels in English. 

Mulk Raj Anand

                R.K.Narayan

Raja Rao

Anand’s Untouchable (1935) and Coolie (1936), Narayan’s Swami and Friends (1935) and Bachelor of Arts (1936) and Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938) are the pioneering Indian English novels based on socio-political realism. Then came the partition of the sub-continent and a number of significant novels on the theme of partition were published. They include Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956), B.Rajan’s The Dark Dancer (1959), Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) and Manohar Malgaonkar’s A Bend in the Ganges (1964).

Khushwant Singh

B.Rajan

Attia Hosain

Manohar Malgonkar

If we take a look at the trends in Indian English fiction, we will be struck by realism that underlies this genre in the post-Independence period. We come across five broad types of realism – social realism, psychological realism, historical realism, mythical realism and magic realism in Indian English fiction. Women novelists like Kamala Markandaya, Nayantara Sehgal and Shashi Deshpande lay emphasis on social realism and family relationship. Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve and A Handful of Rice deal with stark social realism depicting how the transition in the society affects family relationship. The women in women’s fiction seeks an identity of her own, independent of her husband. Shiv K. Kumar has rightly observed this with reference to Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence:

In That Long Silence, Jaya the protagonist, resents the image of a wife ‘yoked’ to her husband – ‘a pair of bullocks yoked together’. This is the image that haunts her all the time. So married to Mohan – a sedate, well-placed business executive – she secretly wishes to savour existential freedom through some disaster befalling him. So she feels ‘relieved’ when he is charged with embezzlement and they have to live in a sort of hide-out. She now feels redeemed as a woman with an identity of her own, seeing her husband rudderless and pathetically dependent upon her – this man whose ‘fastidiousness, passion for neatness and order had amazed me when married’ (23).

  

Nayantara Sehgal writes about the political situation in the country, and politics becomes a metaphor for her fiction. Anita Desai, on the other hand, dives deep into human psyche and writes about psychological realism. In course of an article, “The Indian Writer’s Problems”, Anita Desai says,

By writing novels that have been catalogued by critics as psychological and that are purely subjective, I have been left free to employ simply, the language of the interior. Even when two characters meet, they use this particular type of language – the language of their thoughts, their interior selves – which has nothing to do with geography and can be written in any language (Explorations in Modern Indo-English Fiction, 225).  

Anita Desai experiments this in her Sahitya Akademi Award winning novel, Fire on the Mountain. The novel depicts the predicament of women in a society that fails to satisfy their desire and fulfil their hope. There is a need for women to understand each other. That is why Desai brings a kind of reconciliation between Nanda Kaul, the protagonist and her great grand daughter, Raka towards the end of the novel.

Mythic realism we find in the fiction of Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel and Kiran Nagarkar’s Cuckold. Tharoor by borrowing names from the Mahabharata for his characters makes an effort to give the myth contemporay relevance. Nagarkar’s Cuckold won him the Central Sahitya Akademi Award for 2000. Cuckold is a different kind of novel, the like of which we don’t find in Indian English literature. It is a culmination of history and legend, artistically woven into framework of fiction. Nagarkar has done a good deal of research in Rajput history to write the novel. The time of the novel is the sixteenth century India and the locale is the Rajput Kingdom of Mewar. The novelist has made an attempt to resituate the text in the historical context. The protagonist is Bhojraj, Meerabai’s husband and the novel is depicted from his point of view in the first person narrative. The canvas of the novel is vast - it encompasses four kingdoms : Rajput Kingdom of Mewar (Capital : Chittor), Muslim Kingdom of Gujarat (Capital : Ahmedabad), Muslim Kingdom of Malwa (Capital : Mandu), Muslim  Kingdom of Delhi (Capital : Delhi) – and the characters of the novel are drawn from history. It contains 49 chapters with an ‘Epilogue’, ‘Afterword’ culminating in the closing ‘Historical Note’.

This is one of the finest novel written in English in our time. Based on history and myth, the novel acclimatizes our tradition and heritage to English language. It gives a lie to the critics who denigrate Indian English novelists and writers for what they call, the lack of ‘authenticity’ in their works. It is a novel about India’s past which combines the historicity of fiction with fictionality of history. It richly deserves the Sahitya Akademi Awards and perhaps, much more.

Vikram Seth created history by writing a novel, The Golden Gate in verse for which he won Central Sahitya Akademi Award in 1988. This novel and An Equal Music are set in U.S.A. and characters are drawn from that society. Seth has proved that Indian novelist do not write about India only, they also write about other countries and the world. In that respect, Indian English fiction can stand comparison with fiction written in English anywhere in the world outside Anglo-American tradition. Upmanyu Chatterjee has contributed substantially to Indian English fiction. His novels English August and The Last Burden depict family relationship in contemporary society.

Indian English novelists have experimented with magic realism following Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1980). Amitav Ghosh is very successful in handling magic realism in his fiction. His best known novel Shadow Lines (which won Sahitya Akademi Award in 1989) re-creates history in fictional terms. For him ‘History is Textuality/Textuality is History’. His Glass Palace and The Hungry Tide are well known novels. Gita Hariharan makes use of magic realism in her novel, The Thousand Faces of Night (1992) and When Dreams Travel (1999).

Novelists like Amit Chaudhuri who won Sahitya Akademi Award for his novel A New World for the year 2002 and Allan Sealy who won the Sahitya Akademi Award for his novel, The Trotter-Nama for the year 1992 have contributed to the growth of Indian English fiction and popularized it abroad. Vikram Chandra’s Red Earth and The Pouring Rain brought a new kind of experimentation with myths of the land. His re-creation of myths in fictional terms is very successful.

Feminist criticism and gender studies have emboldened women writers the world over to write freely about love and sex and above all about a woman’s right to consummate love the way she likes. This gave rise to the description of lesbian relationship in fiction as Manju Kapur has done in A Married Woman. A woman’s right to choose a lover and have a love child became favourite themes with women novelists as we find in R.P.Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust and Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing. Manju Kapur depicts love relationship between woman-student and a married professor resulting in marriage in Difficult Daughters. Arundhati Roy depicts love and sex boldly in The God of Small Things. Here, Ammu chooses her low caste lover Velutha against all odds of the society.

Indian English fiction faces two challenges – one, at home posed by Bhasa literature novels and two, abroad posed by English language novels written the world over. Indian English novelists belong to three groups  - one group of writers like Shashi Deshpande and Kiran Nagarkar and many others who stay in the country and write in English, the second group of writers like Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh and many others who divide their time between the country and abroad and write about their country and also other countries, and the third group of immigrant writers (or writers of Indian origin) like Bharathi Mukherjee, Rohinton Mistry, Salman Rushdie and many others also write about India and the Indian sub-continent. Here it may be mentioned that some academic novelists like Shiv K. Kumar and Manju Kapur who have gone abroad and lived there for some time also write about their own country and draw their characters from contemporary society. Shiv K. Kumar’s A River with Three Banks (1998), is a brilliant novel on communal hatred and tension between different communities in our country. It portrays the communal holocaust in the aftermath of partition in 1947. It can be read as a sequel to Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan. It is a novel about love and hate, marriage and divorce, revenge and forgiveness against the backdrop of partition. Mulk Raj Anand makes a pertinent comment on this novel:

Shiv K. Kumar’s novel has both beauty and power. It recreates in a language that glows with fragrance and colour, not only the trauma that one associates with partition, but also love, compassion and forgiveness that it evoked even in the midst of communal frenzy. Here is a poet’s visualization of the India of 1947 – its brutality and romance, its agony and ecstasy (blurb, A River with Three Banks).

Indian English novelists writing in India or abroad or those who write both in India and abroad, are essentially writing in the same way and producing national literature in English language. This new national literature in English is not very much different from Bhasa literatures written in different regional languages of our country. Bruce King emphasizes this point when he says that, “Just as there is no clear dividing line between the new national literatures in English and their overseas branches in the United States or England, so there is no clear division between the new national literatures in English and in local languages”.

Post-Independence Indian English fiction is post-colonial Indian English fiction because it continues to evoke colonial legacies in the contemporay society and seeks to compete with English language fiction for international prizes like the Commomwealth Fiction Prize, and the Booker Prize, etc. In sum, post-Independence Indian English fiction is rich in thematic content and it has acquired as idiom of its own which can be called, ‘Indian English Idiom’. It is immensly readable.