INDIAN ENGLISH FICTION : A BIRD’S EYE VIEW

The novel is the most eclectic of all literary forms and should be
approached as such without and rigid notions drawn from the past. this is
all the more necessary while dealing with the post- Independence India
novel in English which has a distinctive character of its own. Indian-English
fiction today has indeed grown into a significant aspect of world literature.
One can almost notice in its development a parallel to the multi. Faceted
advance ment of the Indian society since Independence. What was largely a
nationalistic writing in nineteen thirties and in the following decade, has
become a literature of immense aesthetic and socio cultural significance of
modern India.

The novel in the India has its rise in Bengal, for it was in Bengal that
this new literary form found its earliest pioneers and exponents. The credit
of writing first novel in English goes to Bankim Chandra, who also
established novel as a major literary form in India. His Rajamohan’s Wife,
the Indian field of 1864. It may not be possible to adjudge Rajmohan’s wife a
good novel in English but as a pioneering work it certainly deserves praise.
In fact, it was a successful demonstration of Bankim Chadra’s conviction
the it was possible to write about Indian life and to describe Indian scenes in
the alien language without being imitative.

Nineteen twenties saw the diffident appearance of Indian English

novel which gathered momentum and established itself in the following two
decades. By the time India achieved her Independence Indian English fiction
has already made its mark as a branch of literature. Nineteen sixties and
seventies witness a rich harvest of Indian English novel. In output, it second
only to poetry (Since every second Indian thinks himself to be a poet).

The growth of Indian-English novel is not consistent. Opining on the

subject Prof. V.A. Shabane underlines the following point.

“The Indo-Anglian novel is in many ways a haphazard growth and its

fortuitous development is partly product of lack of clear objectives. An
objective like the images of India or western reader is more of ten a pious
platitude than a genuinely realized artistic goal.

It would be rewarding if we take individual novelist into

consideration. in this connection. let us first examine with six Mulk raj
Anand. He achieved prominence with six novels published between 1930
and 1942 which provide a discontinuous but homogenous picture of the
urban proletariat, the low castes and the peasantry before and after the first
world war. The moss important of them is coolie.

His First three novels : Untouchable (1934), Coolie (1936) and Two
leaves and bud (1937) form a trio: all three have the victim hero of the
oppressed and doomed outcast proletarian. In these novels India is
portrayed as she ‘ really’ is “ Warts and all” with no concessions to the
romantic orientalise which had been fashionable in an earlier period. The
Village (1939) Across the Black waters (1940) and The sword and the sickle
(1942) are based on realism. As a novelist he has always oscillated between
outright propaganda on the one hand and more universal sympathetic
realism on the other. In The old woman and the Cow (1960) and the Road
(1961) the tendentiousness is too obvious. But his autobiographical novels,
seven summers (1951) and Morning Face (1968) are more relaxed and less
obviously coloured by prejudices. Anand broke new ground in The Private
Life of an Indian prince (1953). Although the novel has a political theme-the
problem of the princely states in free democratic India it is assimilated to a
psychological theme : the tragic collapse of the hero’s will-power, his self
destruction in the face of events that are beyond his control.

R.K. Narayan is hold in high esteem both in England and in U.S.A.

Dom Moraes called him “Indian Forester”. Prof P S.
 Sundram has rightly suggested that Narayan’s novels are eminently
readable. Narayan’s Book spring from the mud and river of Malgudi Malgudi
is for him what Wessex was to Hardy He wrote a number of novels. His first
novel, Swami and friends (1935) made an instant appeal to the leading
writers and critics to England. Graham Greene hailed it as “a book in ten
thousand”. In his early novels, Swami and Friends (1935), the Bachelor of
Arts and the English Teacher, the autobiographical element is
unmistakable. The Dark Room, is a study of domestic disharmony, the
financial Expert, Mr. Sampath, are novels of no great consequence. The
Guide brought him the sahitya Akademi Award. It is a remarkable novel.
The Maneater of Malgui strikes a now note with its malgudi setting.
Narayanan’s Sense of humour, his modesty, his command over English, his
choice of words, his irony, the complete absence in him of pomposity and
pretence, and his rooted ness in religion and family give authenticity to his
writings and make them both wise and companionable. His works have been
called “Comedies of sadness”. Though they spring from Indian soil but they
have universal appeal.

Raja Rao is now adjudged as India’s Most stgnificant novelist writing

in English. He has already set an excellence in the art of writing fiction. As
the author of Kanthapura, The serpent and the Rope, and the cat and
shakespeare, Raja Rao has earned an enviable place for him, in the map of
Indan English Fiction. Kanthapura described the whole gamut of the
Gandhian Revolution in a microscopic way. Prof. K.R.s. Iyengar rightly
objserves that the theme of Kanthapura may be summed up as “Gandhi
and our village It is vertable grammar of the Gandhian myth.” Kanthapura is
indeed Raja Rao’s Ramayana. the Serpent and the Rope, Makes an attempt
to turn Indian mysticism and Vedant philosophy into a subject of a regula
novel, using many techinical resources of the modern novel developed by
prouse, Henry James and jame Joyce, Sncluding interior monologue,
extensive retrospective narrative, and sumblism. tha Cat and shakespeare
has been well received in America It evoked a good deal of critical comments.
In it Raja Rao attempted to produce heavily symblioc exploration of the
Indian consciousness. But in this novel Raja Rao does not succeed in
making an advance on the Serpent and the Rope. on the other hand, it
becomes more obscure. Raja Rao’s Contribution lies in revitalizing the past
of India so as to make it relevent today. Of him it must be said that he made
India meaningful not merely to the europeans but Indians as well.

The close of world war Il, saw wuite a large number of writers
experimenting in the art of fiction Govind Desani’s All about H.Hatterr, was
a comic novel relying for its effects on outrageous and fantastic farce and
acrobatic exuberance of language. Desani spent the war years in England,
where he lactured for the Ministy of information. Uner the mask of
deliberate inter-racial buffoonery, All about, H.Hatter celebrates the
triumph of all “Mad Hatters”. Against the obstinate world of fact.

Ruth prawer Jhbvala, not withstanding her birth, has become a

leading light in the field of indo-Anglian fiction. She has achieved world-wide
recognition as one of India’s leading writers of fiction. she is in a way unique
and the advantages as well as disadvantages of her literary situation are
peculiar to her. The advantage lies in her special position of being a
European living in India, the disadvantage lies in her not being a born,
grasspooted Indian. She has more than half a dozen novels to her credit.
She cocentrates upon family-life social problems and personal relationships
with the typically Indian institution of the extended family, with all its
opportunities for intrigue, clash between generations and marital feuding.

Jhabvala’s art of fiction pursues the path of the comic and evolves the
form of a social comedy of manners. she excels in presenting incongruities of
human character and situations. her novel, Heat and Dust (1975) was
awarded the prestigious Booker prize in London The novel in about two
English women and their life in India 25 years before an after Independence,
Especially the social attitude to inter-racial sex ralations. it is the story as
narrated in the 70s by a grand daughter about her grand father’s first wife,
Olivia, who left her English Husband, a Civil servant, for a Nawab who
exercises a fascination for her ever since she first met him. The grand
daughter, who is the narrator, comes out to India with a bunch of letters to
unravel the mysteries of her grandfather’s life. But she has too somewhat
similar experiences. She lives in a cheap rented room over the bazaar in
Sitapur, the town in central India where Olivia’s scandal was enacted. She
has an affair with a English hippy, who is passing through the Indian mystic
stage and calls himself Chidananda or Chid for short. Later, like her
grandfather, she too is attracted to an Indian bureaucrat, Inder Lal. Again,
like her grandmother, she conceives a child a similar situation recreated
within a time scale of 50 years. Whereas, in Olivia’s time, that is about
1923, all such affairs were frowned upon by their contemporaries, in the 70s
it is hardly noticed.

The two women separated by half a century deal with predicaments in

different ways. It is easier for the narrator who is a part of the permissive
society and being a modern girl to be courageous and live in a world without
censure. Mrs. Jhabvala offers on comment except through the experiences
of the narrator. To cite an example, a Christian missionary who has been in
india for 30 years assures her that “anything human means nothing here”
and also warns her about food and water at Satipur and about leaving
things lying around Jhabvala is preoccupied with the environment only,
with India as its focal point. As proof. Shahane rightly observes that her
style is the subject, and this ‘subject’ is India in relation to a western
creative writer’s sensibility. This amorphous Indian landscape, natural as
well as human, comes within the range of her descriptive and narrative
ability and she projects upon It her visionary power greatly circumscribed by
her naturalistic and ironic traits.

Khushwant Singh, a Sikh journalist and diplomat (born in 1915),

started out as “enfant terrible” of Indian English Literature. His
contributions to Indian English writing have avoided both propaganda of
any sort and prudishness.
 In Khushwant Singh’s fictional world the comic is in extra- cably
linked up with social and moral criticism and also with the free play of mind
in a spirit of detachment. The problem of the relationship between comedy
and tragedy is of prime importance in the assessment of Khushwat Singh’s
major novel, Train to Pakistan. It is a grim story of individuals and
communities caught in the vortex of partition of undivided india into two
states in 1947. Juggat Singh, in the act of saving the life of Nooran, his
beloved, at the cost of his own life, attains almost a tragic grandeur, which
is the culmination of Kushwant Singh’s vision of life. I shall not Hear the
Nightingale, another novel dealing with the fortunes of a Sikh family
(1942.43) , offers insights into life, customs and moves of the Sikhs against
the background of a politically resurgent India.

The novels of Manohar Malgaonkar reminds us of Khushwant Singh’s

though they have equally obvious affinities with the stories of Rudyard
Kipling and the Indian novels of John Masters. Like Khushwant Singh,
Malgaonkar writes about the tragedy, the despair and the heroism of Indian
Indepenence and the blood communal ‘Vicesection” which followed. Distant
Drum, is the story of an Indian officer’s Love affairs, one with a woman and
the other with a regiment, the 4th satpuras. Malgaonkar tells the story by a
series of falshbacks from the present to the heroic days of the World war II.
when the satpura were “Blooded”. The sequence of the battle of sittan bridge
and the post-war Delhi riots are vividly narrated. Another novel, The princes
suffers from excessively romantic tratment. In a Bend in the Ganges (1964)
Malgaonkar turns from military life to the freedom struggle of Indian
nationalist on the background of the Japanese invasion of British asian
territories in the Second world war. While Malgaonker shares Khushwant
signh’s obsession with beroism and the marital virtures. emphasising these
elements in the Indian tradition at the expense of Gandhism and ahimsa, he
reminds us of kipling and John Masters in his treatment of regimental
codes, Military leadership and “Clannists” Behaviour
“If both Khushwant singh and Manoher Malgaonkar intoxicate us
writes H.M. Williams, with a heavy wine of adventure and action that brings
a touch of optimism to the picture of the contemporary India they
present,we return to a still grimmer, more harrowing presentation of Indian
Life in the recent novels of two Indian women,Kamala Markandaya and
anita Desai, who unite in seeing the essential tragedy of Indin as the loss
truly human, the truly personal, beneath the welter of impersonal or social
forces, whether of blind nature or of man himself in all his folly and
wickedness and blindness. Kamala Markandaya and Anita Desai are typical
of the decades of the nineteen fiftries and sixties in exploring the anguish of
the human and personal in modern society, dominated by processess,
machines and speed by the tyranny of the impersonal .
Anita Desai (born 1937) has made her mark as a front rank novelist of
mixed German and Bengali blood, she studied English literature at Delhi
University and achived some success with short-stories before publishing
her novels. Her first novel cry The peacook (1963), Mostly takes the form of
interior monoogue, delineating the tragic mental break down of a young
woman, Maya. herr marriage with Gautama proved to be a failure, the vonel
consists almost entirely of Maya’s Interior monologue in which her obsession
with her father and her hypersensitively sensyous reaction to experience are
dramatised in poetic highly charged metaphorical prose. Her second novel,
voices in the city has more in common with camus’s the outsider, than with
any Indo- anglian predecessor, while the technique of stream of
consciousness is indebted to the pioneering of proust, Virginia woolf and
James Joyce.
It is an “ essential” novel that explores the inner climate of youthfull
despair though there is satire, satire on the conformin middle classes, satire
on the phoney artists and tyrannous parents, satire on the British who still
hold economic power, satire on social conformity, Voices in the city, remains
primarilly a tragic exploration of personal suffering, suffering which is the
consequence of the feverish sensitivity of young intellectuals who have lost
their way in contemporary India.
Prof. B.Rajan’s the Dark Dancer (1911) has all the intellectual subtlety
and irony that one expects of a sensitive critical mind, though somewht
lacking in warmth. He like Kamala Markanday, portrays a marriage of “
East and west” against the turbulence of the post Independence days.
Too Lang in the west (1961) is a comic wersion of the East-West
proble, but a comedy sharpened by and acied and satirical obervation of
the indian intellectual scene. The beroince, Nalini, columbia University.
When she returns to India after her absence “too long in the west” she finds,
she has to choose a husband in the Indian manner from the applicants who
have replied to matrimonial advertisements inthe newspaper. prof Rajan is
highly successful at explouring with detached and tragi-comic irony the
dilemma of the disorientated Indian.