CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Of the various forms of literary art, the novel is regarded as the most popular

and effective medium for embodying and recreating the complex and varied

experiences of mankind. "The novel is the privileged arena where languages in

conflict can meet, bringing together, in tension and dialogue, not only opposing

characters, but also different historical ages, social levels, civilizations and other,

dawning realities of human life. In the novel, realities that are normally separated can

meet, establishing a dialogic encounter, a meeting with the other" (Fuentes, qtd. in

Cundy 83).

Lionel Trilling considers the novel "the most effective agent of the moral

imagination" (Trilling 215) in our time. The novelist's vision of life is the regulating

intelligence that informs and irradiates the material of his fictional works. The novel

also reflects the spirit of the age that shapes the artist's sensibility and prompts his

vision. Salman Rushdie says: "At times such as the ones we are all living through, it's

a thing that the novel can offer, which very few other kinds of writing can: to take you

inside people's hearts and minds and make you see how it is. Or at least a version of

how it might be. I think it's valuable" (qtd. in Brockes 5).

Implicit in the very cotlception of the novel as a literary genre is a paradox. A

novel, according to Henry Jarnes, is "a personal, a direct impression of life" (qtd. in

Wimsatt and Brooks 682). It is also conceived as an organic thing, and this implies,

as a corollary, an impersonal art with the work growing in accordance with some

inner principle of its own be:mg, and not merely as a creation of the writer's ego,

feelings or opinions.

The development of the novel reflects a move towards a new interest in the

complexities of everyday experience. Most novels are concerned with ordinary people

and their problems in the societies in which they find themselves. "For me, the value

of the novel as a form, is that it is able to incorporate elements of every aspect of life"

(Ghosh 5). In fact, novels tend to tell the same few stories time and time again,

frequently focusing on the ter~sions between individuals and the society in which they

live, presenting characters who are at odds with that society. The basic pattern sets

certain individuals against society or their family because it is primarily the story of

individuals - they have individual impulses and desires, personalized lifestyles and

world-views, and yet they have to face up to the fact that they are members of a

family and a society. The zest for life expresses itself through conflict. In beauty.

according to Nietzsche, "contrasts are overcome, the highest sign of power thus

manifesting itself in the conquest of opposites" and the most convincing artists are

precisely those "who make harmony ring out of every discord" (qtd. in Wimsan and

Brooks 565). In dealing with this inherent conflict, the novelist generally moves in

one of two directions, either suggesting that individuals ought to conform to society's

standards or suggesting that society is in such a bad state that individuals are bound to

feel alienated. The complications the novelist creates within the familiar pattern of

characters at odds with their society, or with other characters or with themselves, give

one a vivid sense of what it is like for particular individuals to be caught in certain

situations. The richness of detail in interesting and memorable scenes creates a

distinctive impression of the complexity of the conflict. The page-by-page texture of

the novel makes the conflicts come to life and seem relevant to the readers at large.

Given the complexity of human life and experience, novelists no longer share

the traditional confident assumption of their ability to understand and describe the

world. Novels challenge, in ii variety of ways, the traditional perception of an ordered

and coherent world which underpins the pretensions to reproduce reality in fiction

although the very idea of "reality" conflicts with the term "fiction." But then, "Trurh

is stranger than fiction," anti the function of fiction is to reveal the ultimate realiv.

that is, the Truth, though this end may be achieved by imagination working in tandem

with an acceptance of empirical reality. Giving imaginative configuration to the

average human being's sense that he is, and yet is not, at home in the world enablss

the novelist to take into accc'unt the observed heterogeneity and conflict of things and

situations. The profound sense of disorder that is found in most great literature is

stirred by the aesthetic possibilities of radical forms of alienation, maladjustment, and

contradiction.

The devaluation of reality in one form or another continues in the

contemporary theory and practice of fiction. Fiction offers the aesthetic pleasure of

complexities, complications, suspense and unravelment. Many binary opposites are

represented side by side -- lived experience and fantasy, fictional history and

contemporaneity go into the making of many novels. Magical realism, for instance, is

characterized by "two conflicting but autonomously coherent perspectives, one based

on an enlightened and rational view of reality and the other on the acceptance of the

supernatural as part of everyday reality"(Chanaday 2 1).

Under the influence of postshucturalism, the theoreticians of fiction and the

novelists themselves seem tc~ have clearly abdicated their claims to see the novel as an

articulation of experience that is palpable and real. The latter-day novelists'

preoccupation with self-reflexivity imparts to the genre a philosophical touch. The

new novelists do not shy away from self even if they move away from the subject. For

many of them, even treatment of history is no more than a source of parody and

distortion. If modernism evinced a desire to escape from a chaotic contemporary

history into a more reassuring past, postmodernism can be said to represent a further

step in the literary movemer~t away from the burden of history. "History itself, with all

its modem horrors, has become too awesome a subject for most modem writers and

critics to contemplate. Silence, fantasy, and myth, science fiction, grotesque comedy,

meta-fiction, surrealistic fiction and fables - these seem to be the only responses

possible" to socio-religious and political handicaps of the latter half of the twentieth

century (Afzal-Khan 137). No longer the lord of his creation standing over his

handiwork, the novelist has dissolved and dispersed himself. Thanks to the

deconsmctionist demolition of its foundations, the novel of today no longer performs

the reportorial, commentative function that the realist novel did.

The contemporary novel creates a structure that cuts across surfaces and

depths, sometimes flying laterally into fantasy and myth as also hard facts and the

reality of experiences. "It was not for nothing that Bakhtin considered this novel

paradigmatic of what he termed a dialogic imagination, for in its realism it

incorporates disparate experiences and holds them in balance7'(Raina 156). Bakhtin

identified the novel as the "open-ended" literary form of the modem age, reflecting

and bringing together many languages ("heteroglossia"). These languages are not

simply linguistic, but socio-itleological idioms and forms, voices from different strata

of cultural experience:

The novel is the only developing genre and therefore it reflects more

deeply, more essentially, more sensitively and rapidly, reality itself in

the process of its unfolding. Only that which is itself developing can

comprehend tfevelopment as a process. The novel has become the

leading hero in the literary development of our time precisely because

it best of all r~-flects the tendencies of a new world still in the making;

it is, after all, the only genre born of this new world and in total affinity

with it. (Bakhtin 7)

India's contribution to world literature of the twentieth century has been

mostly in the field of fiction in English. An unprecedented and large number of Indian

novelists, many of whom have proved themselves competent as storytellers and

innovative as experimenters, seem to be able to give expression to their creative urge

in no other language than English. Indian novels in English, although a distinctive and

notable force in world fiction: constitute an obviously paradoxical genre in that

creative expression of a nation is being sought in an alien medium even as the nation

possesses a rich literary heritage of its own, both oral and written, as also a plenitude

of regional languages.

One major reason for. this is that the vernacular literatures are unable to attract

a worldwide or even a nation-wide readership. Moreover, several Indian writers have

been able to assimilate the social scenario of modem India in the throes of change and

the complex dilemmas confronting it in its efforts to find solutions to the problems

bedevilling it. They resort to a suitable medium to make their newly-found voice

heard all over the world.

The adoption of English as an instrument of creative communication has

ramifications beyond convenience. As Vikrarn Seth says, "The English language has

been taken over, or taken to heart [...I by people whose original language historically

it was not" (Iyer 46). The f a c that English-speaking people in India cut through class,

caste, ethnic, religious, geographical and vernacular barriers illustrates that this

unique literature has far outreached the scope conceived and foreseen by its pioneers.

The novelist's problem of re-locating himself using the English language for bearings

has been expressed by many, quite clearly: "One has to convey in a language that is

not one's own the spirit that is one's own [...I" (R.Rao 5-6). English, for the

postcolonial writer in India, is the inevitable choice for historical reasons. Amit

Chaudhuri gives the following description of the postcolonial writer:

What makes [nim] new is the paradoxical confluence, within him, of

two cultures, creating a unique persona and sensitivity. This new

sensibility is [. . .] not the outcome of creative genius, but the result and

unwitting by-product of colonialism and history. The postcolonial

writer is strange and unique not, primarily, because of his gift, but

(because of) his peculiar historical condition, and it is his first creative,

or writerly, function to recognize and be conscious of that condition.

(Chaudhuri 20)

Indian fiction in English as a recognizable literary phenomenon has only a

brief history, beginning in the: 1930s (most earlier attempts being either amateurish or

sporadic in nature). "The Big Three" in Indian fiction in English (Walsh 26) - Mulk

Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan, and Raja Rao - emerged in the 1930s, a time ripe for the

emergence of literary giants who made long strides that brought international

recognition to the Indian novel in English. It may not be a coincidence that the novel

in English emerged in India in the 1930s, the decade prior to Independence, when

there was an urgency to foreground the idea of a composite nation. Indian fiction in

English originated and developed as a result of exposure to Western culture, through

the language of the colonizers. It came of age in the period immediately preceding

Indian Independence from the very Britishers who had introduced the new genre as

well as the language, both of which have been put to good use by generations of

Indian writers. About half a century later, it is sufficiently clear "that this was the

form peculiarly suited to the Indian sensibility, and the one to which Indian writers

have made a distinct and significant contribution" (Walsh 26).

The first generation of writers, as a ballast to the supposed alienness /elitism of

the language, tended to deploy certain thematic or formal devices to tether their texts

to indigenous contexts. The themes handled by the older generation of novelists in

English for a long time remained predictably pan-Indian - the national movement,

Partition of the country, thz clash between tradition and modernity, faith and

rationality, east-west confrontation, disintegration of the joint family, exploitation of

women, and so on. In this project they have been, in a way, defining "Indian"

concerns as against local or :regional issues. The novel as a genre has traditionally

been implicated in the constniction and consolidation of the idea of the nation. The

history of the Indian novel in English is the chronicle of the discourse of the nation,

the totalisation of Indian cu l t~ re through a dissemination of ideas that construct the

field of meanings and symbols associated with national life, at the same time

differentiating it from what is not Indian. In its brief history, it has been visibly

concerned with defining such a national identity.

Indian fiction in English has always held a mirror up to Indian social life, and

down the decades, it has explored the varied facets of Indian society. The gruesome

poverty, the Independence smlggle, the trauma of the Partition, social changes, crisis

of identity, emerging experiences of alienation and anarchy - all these have figured on

the screen of the Indian novel in English.

The "Big Three" ruled the roost till the arrival of authors like Bhabani

Bhattacharya, Manohar Malgaonkar, Kamala Markandaya, Nayantara Sahgal, Anita

Desai, Shashi Deshpande, h u n Joshi, Khushwant Singh and several others in the

post-Independence period. A.part fiom the "Big Three," who have continued to be

productive in the nineteen eighties, these writers have exploited the radical challenges

and innumerable conflicts faced by the Indian nation in the throes of a transition from

a pre-urban civilisation to an !.ndustrialized and westernized society. But it was in the

nineteen eighties, with the arrival of the "midnight's children" that "an exciting period

of a redrawing of the literary map of India" (V. Rao 10) was inaugurated. In fact, the

novel Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie could be taken as the starting point of

a whole generation of new Indian writers in English - often called the "Ghosh

generation" (Advani 16) or "Stephanine school" (Trivedi 183). India's paradoxical

status as an ancient civilization as well as a newly independent nation is evident in the

works of this decade as they strive to accommodate modernity within the long-

standing traditions of story-telling. It is as if two generations of writers have come

into their own during this dec:ade so that "it would be no exaggeration to say that the

best English fiction in the world is being written by Indians or those of Indian orign"

(Paranjape 2 1-22).

The tension that is in evidence in the works of the 80s is between conformity

and non-conformity, between a traditional order and the disruption of this order.

between the notion of the desirability of social order and the awareness of the

inevitability of social disorder. In these novels, antagonisms get designed very

naturally by the confrontation of contradictory positions and attempts at blunting them

for the sake of conformity in ideologies, religious belief systems and conventions.

Many of these conflicts do not acquire tragic crises, and yet they do point to a

violence of feelings and thoughts.

It is generally agreed that the sudden profusion, liveliness and visibility of the

Indian fiction in English of the 1980s can be traced back to the success of one seminal

novel, Rushdie's Midnight's Ch~ldren (1981). The novel celebrates the plenitude of

India in the postmodemist mode, challenging several assumptions. One mch

assumption is that major nc~vels that change the literary map of the world must

necessarily engage with issuzs in western culture; another notion is that English is

primarily the language of Britain and America to be altered, shaped or fashioned only

by them. In retrospect, Midnight's Children doubtless has had a crucial role to play in

the reversal of the centre-periphery paradigm in English literary history and culture. It

dissolves the concept of the great tradition propagated by F.R.Leavis into a plurality

of traditions, coming from many races, regions, and cultures.

In the trail-blazing ,'Midnig/zt's Children, Rushdie attempts to recreate the

illusive, multi-dimensional reality of Indian life, giving the reader a taste of the

heterogeneity of the culhlral space Indians inhabit. His staple method i s the technique

of magical realism in which history, myth, allegory, satire, personal details, fantasy

are all welded together. The purpose is to dislocate language irrevocably in order to

find new meanings and even to go beyond them in surprising and innovative ways.

This has prompted the writers of the time to give a complex image of reality emerging

from new perceptions of a rare kind. These novels introduce a variety of fictional

languages, a heteroglossia, that includes "the Indian folk-tale, the Mahabharara,

journalism, and the memory patterns of the extended family, radically deconstxucting

traditional novel forms" (James 154).

The new fiction of the 1980s presents a virtual mosaic in terms of thematic

variety, differences in taste, pe:rceptions and presentational styles. The literary scene is

renewed and quickened by the opening up of new possibilities and innovative

techniques to give expression to an utterly changed sociological, political, economic,

and psychological landscape. The 1980s occupy a significant place in the history of

the Indian novel in English for a variety of reasons. Some promising novelists

published their first works which vouch for their originality and unprecedented

inventiveness as also the courage to break fiee of meaningless literary conventions.

Midnight's Children, in which Rushdie conjured up a generation of Indians born at

midnight of 151h August 1947 at the same time as the significant and promising birth

of the new Independent India, became an international literary success. It created a

real generation of its own in the form of a host of young Indian novelists

enthusiastically following in Kushdie's footsteps and referred to by the New York

Times as "Rushdie's Children." "It is the privilege and the curse of midnight's

children," Rushdie reminds us towards the end of his novel, "to be both masters and

victims of their times" (552). The new writers have faithfully lived up to this

9

definition in their portrayal of modern India. The 80s also witnessed Indian novelists

and their works acquiring unprecedented honours and recognition. As Viney Kirpal

points out, "If international acclaim is any measure of literary merit, then it is

fascinating to note that almost every second novel of the 80s has either been awarded

a prize or has been shortlisted for it"(Kirpa1 xiv).

With the publication of the masterpieces of emerging young talent as also of

the still fecund older generati~3ns whose literary output span decades, the Indian novel

in English acquired in the India of the eighties much the same importance as the novel

in eighteenth-century England, proving the veracity of Ian Watt's statement about the ~

1 gth century English novel:

This [the previous] literary traditionalism was first and most fully

challenged by the novel, whose primary criterion was truth to

individual experience - individual experience which is always unique

and therefore always new. The novel is thus the logical literary vehicle

of a culture which[. . .]has set an unprecedented value on originality.

(Wan 13)

Some of the notable works published during the 80s are R. K. Narayan's A

Tiger for Malgudi (1983), Talkative Man (1983) and The World of Nagaraj (1990);

Mulk Raj Anand's The Bubble (1984); Raja Rao's The Chessmaster and his Moves

(1988); Arun Joshi's The Last Labyrinth (1981); Anita Desai's The Village by the Sea

(1982), In Custody (1984) and Baumgartnerk Bombq~ (1988); Nayantara Sahgal's

Rich Like Us (1985), Plans .for Departure (1986) and Mistaken Identity (1989);

Shashi Deshpande's Roots arzd Shadows (1983) and That Long Silence (1989);

Kamala Markandaya's Pleasirre City (1982); Kbushwant Singh's Delhi(1989);

Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981), Shame (1983), The Satanic Verses

(1988) and Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990); Amitav Ghosh's The Circle of

Reason (1986) and The Shadow Lines (1988); Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate

(1986); Upamanyu Chattejee's English, August: An Indian Stoiy (1988); Shashi

Tharoor's The Great Indian N(9vel (1989); Allan Sealy's The Trotter-Nama (1988)

Farrukh Dhondy's Bombay Duck (1990); Firdaus Kanga's Trying to Grow (1990);

Boman Desai's The Memory of Elephants (1989), and so on.

The fiction of the eighties often presents the rare picture of a strife - the

contrastive tension between form and what is formed. In this struggle, often the

content seems to overtake the conventional form and its narrative structures. A strong

urge to overcome the baniers of established narrative styles and apparent interest in

experimentation as also a search for new themes and variations on old themes can be

noticed in many writers of this period. In the words of Ira Pande, "their narratives,

their characters and their language are pan of a pattern that emerges whenever a social

order changes, when suppressed voices find utterance and a new world opens" (Pande

381.

The 1980s witnessed yet another phenomenon - an increasing urge for

freedom from restraints. This, a progressive weaning process, has resulted in a fieer

and more daring structure o:f narrative styles - flowing and improvised presentation

free from inhibitions and fears of being reprimanded by critical voices however

mighty they may be. These writers, in fact. effect a radical change by re-defining the

very language of fiction by partly going mythopoeic and transmuting the Indian

reality in new-fangled ways, while at the same time trying to find their own voices.

By presenting the human predicament in its extreme psychic intensity in a subtle

idiom and imagery, these novels become a metaphor for the times, enshrining every

man's discovery of his true :self and reflecting the lived reality of the Indian society.

Euphoric as it may sound, the fact remains that these novelists have brought an

"innovative energy and comic irreverence" (Mukhejee 24) replacing the earlier

earnestness and realism.

Standing as they do in a complex relationship to a dual Indian and European

cultural heritage, the Indian novelists writing in English work within and against the

dual tradition - oral and literary, Indian and English, male and female - that each

inherits as part of his or her literary legacy. They explore the disparity between myth

and reality, the issue of women's place in society, the expatriate's shared sense of

alienation from community, family, tradition and values. the experience of emptiness

in relationships, and the clash between the inner world and outside pressures.

The post-Midnight's Children phase has witnessed a preoccupation with new

themes and those issues which were left untreated by Indian novelists in English.

Certain opposites such as literary language versus ordinary language and literature as

art versus literature-in-society are addressed with ori@nality in this period as are

postcolonial issues like the struggle within one's self, the clash with the 'other' and

the institutionalized forms of societal control, remnants of the colonial past within

which one is constrained to operate. The Indian, exposed to the West through his

education but unable to let go of his Indian past, is caught in an emotional and

spiritual dilemma. How this atfects his confused present is a fresh theme explored by

some of these writers. Issues such as ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class and human

rights also are handled by these writers. Novelists who published their first novels

in the mid-eighties have brought "a new internationalism to their fiction, a

contemporaneity to their outlook with a daring experimentation in form and structure

while at the same time wiping out the linguistic barriers that inhibited the earlier

novelists" (D.Rao 161). They have set the tenor for a new thrust in Indian fiction in

English.

The theme of cultural dualism which lies deeply entrenched in the

consciousness of every educated Indian is explored in the novels which artistically

focus the themes of uprootedness, social and racial tensions and prejudice, the conflict

between tradition and materialism, faith and reason, the search for one's true self and

the painful experience of exile and alienation. It is the dialectic of the organized life

and the life of disorder that forms the fictive co-relates of the dynamics of these

novels.

In 1989 Timothy Brennan proposed a new category of novelists: the third

world cosmopolitans - who are globally visible, whom the reviewers in New York

and London hail as interpreters and authentic voices of the Third World (Brennan 34).

The third-world cosmopolitans emerge from a non-western culture, but their mastery

over the current idiom of the metropolitan meta-language of narrative ensures their

favourable reception in the global centres of publication and criticism. One implicit

expectation from third world cosmopolitan writers (also known as postcolonials) is

that they will highlight the experience of colonialism as theme or metaphor. What in

progressive American universities is now called Colonial Discourse Theory privileges

colonialism as the framework for the major cultural experience of the century, and it

is these academies now that set the terns for critical debates and creative enterprise in

the world. Most of Indian fictional literature has been conditioned by other, either

older or newer, more local, diverse and complex pressures and intricate social

hierarchies along with what can be explained by British rule in India.

Many of the books that have attracted international attention recently happen

to be those that have successfully manipulated western forms of fabulist narratives

and a postmodernist mode with local legends and popular fables as a means of

mythicizing contemporary reality. Another issue to which value is attached in the

west these days is cultural hybridity, which is said to offer certain advantages "in

negotiating the collusions of language, race and art in a world of disparate peoples

comprising a single, if not unified world"(Brennan 35).

Experiences of root1e:;sness and displacement are thus privileged in the

cosmopolitan discourse. Michael Ondaatje (born in Sri Lanka, educated in England.

living in Canada) describes hi:< fictional characters darkly as "international bastards,

born in one place, choosing to live elsewhere. Fighting to get back to or get away

from our homelands all our livesn(qtd. in Iyer 48). But the problem is that for those

who live at home, who are not global migrants, the reality of India has to be daily

confronted at a non-metaphoric level. India may be a discursive space for the writer of

Indian origin living elsewhere, but those living and writing here would seldom make

figurative use of something as amorphous as the idea of India, because s h e has a

multitude of specific and local iexperiences to turn into &opes and play with.

As Aijaz Ahmad has pointed out, even in India there seems to be developing a

new urban culture "for whom only the literary document produced in English is a

national document. All else is regional, hence minor and forgettable, so that English

emerges in this imagination not as one of the Indian languages, which it undoubtedly

is, but as the language of literary sophistication and bourgeois civility" (Ahmad 75).

The growing visibility of English as a language of literature in India seems to be an

irreversible process.

The crucial years of 1975-'77, when the Emergency was imposed on India,

mark a watershed in the psyche of the Indian who saw it as the return of the

repressive, "colonial" rule and resented it strongly. The post-Emergency period hardly

offers any certitudes to hold on. Whereas during the Gandhi-Nehru period, there were

discernible and clear-cut goals, in the post-Emergency period, ideologies and

institutions have been questioned. and doubts of many kinds have been raised about

the efficacy of the ideal of democracy in India. Added to this, during the 1980s, the

collapse of the Soviet Union and the Left wing ideology brought about changes in the

belief systems of the Indian novelists. All these factors together "have left writers and

intellectuals in India and i n the Third World, groping wildly in darkness"

(Ramachandran 54). It has made the Indian novelist turn to history for a theme in as

deliberate and studied a manner as his precursors did during the 1920s and '30s. In

place of the British ruler, Mrs. Gandhi with her authoritarianism (metaphorised in the

Emergency) becomes a major figure in some of these new novels. The first to capture

this theme is Salman Rushdie':; Midnight's Children. In Shashi Tharoor's words, this

is the novel that went on to "label a generation and rejuvenate a literature" (Tharoor

239). Midnight's Children is that fictional creation which in a way pulled together all

the earlier phases of the Indian novel in English - the historical, the social, the

political, the psychological, the metaphysical - into one hold-all of a book, and

concurrently revolutionized fictional technique.

The Indian novel in English of the 1980s is different from its precursors both

in technique and sensibility, and quite unlike the Euro-American postmodern novel.

Indian society with its traditional, feudal, patriarchal structures (consolidated further

during the period of colonization) seems to offer ample material and scope to a

novelist desirous of subverting and dismantling power structures, resulting in

conflicts. Official versions of history, patriarchal versions of womanhood, and

institutionalized versions of the subaltern are some of the discourses that are being

contested and undermined by the post-1980 Indian novelists in English. They

destabilize given versions, undermine their ideological underpinnings, subvert them

with the installation of newer versions to correct the relations of power in

contemporary Indian society. All these are reflective of the dichotomies and

contradictions exposed in the conflicts gone into by these novelists.

Deconstructing the hidden ideologies of patriarchal society that mould a

woman, and making a frontal attack on long-revered traditional assumptions and

stereotypes about women is common to the many women-centred Indian novels of the

80s. Novels by Shashi Deshpande and Nayantara Sahgal openly dismantle the

prevalent modes of socia1iz:ation that go into the construction of an ideal woman,

wife, mother. Focus is also on certain experiences unique to women that have never

earlier received the attention they deserved. Several Indian women novelists, who are

not conscious adherents to fkminist ideology, unobtrusively pose questions about the

repressive forces shaping women's existence, challenge traditional assumptions about

female nature and roles, and suggest new patterns of existence. As Flora Alexander

points out, "the fact of their gender has had some effect on their experience and their

perceptions of the world, and this is in some measure reflected in the nature of the

fiction they write" (Alexander x).

One of the significant and vital aspects of the contemporary social life of India

is the co-presence of many cultures, a potential challenge for any contemporary

writer. "Today's novelists inherit a frontierless, de-territorialised world and are as

polycultural as they are cosmopolitan" (Doreswamy 45). Many Indian writers easily

transcend the geographical boundaries of India and are riphtly called the new

transcultural writers, and defined as follows:

[They] are something different. For one, they are the products not so

much as of colonial division as of the international culture that has

grown up siEce the war, and they are addressing an audience as mixed

15

up and eclectic: and uprooted as themselves. They are the creators, and

creations, of a new post-imperial order in which English is the lingua

franca. (Iyer 48)

All literary forms and narratives that presume a single centre, have once more

broken down. It is this space that postcolonial writing in English occupies. The

postcolonial writer, with his authentic individuality, is not bereft of a culture, but he is

in the process of creating for :himself a new culture. But since he is more mobile, it is

more difficult to define. In the novels taken up for analysis, the language of formal

discourse is integrated with memory, myth, history, oral tales and gossip to capture

the texture of daily existence, the quarrels and alliances of Indian life. Realism is

blended with fabulation, linearity with a cyclic notion of time long before

postmodernism made such eriterprises trendy. The epithet Indian Fiction in English

refers not only to the language which forms the medium of the writing, but conveys

the larger heritage of culture, tradition and ethos.

The writers of the 1980s, in an attempt to harmonise the conflicting

experiences into a meaningful pattern, respond to the impinging experience of

multicultural heterogeneity. Instead of camouflaging emerging conflicts, they attempt

an expose of the same as of the essence of their narratives. "It may perhaps be that

nature has a liking for contraries and evolves harmony out of them and not out of

similarities [...I. The arts [.. .] apparently imitate nature in this respect" (qtd. in

Wimsatt and Brooks 45).

Conflict is built into the human psyche, mainly owing to the uniqueness of the

human person, and it recun; in every area of human activity, be it personal,

professional, familial, social, cultural, economic, political, psychological or spiritual.

The pressures and paradoxes inherent in life extend into literature, sometimes as

dialectical opposites, but increasingly as twin faces of the same phenomenon or

process. Contemporary fiction is marked by a sense of multiplicity, fragmentation,

instability of meaning, dissensus, breakdown of assumptions and heterogeneity rather

than consensus and totality.

The concept of paradigm, popularised by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of

Scientijic Revolution, is now used to indicate a pattern or model or an outstandingly

clear or typical example or archetype. In this study, the phrase paradigms of conflict

would mean typical or outstanding specimens of confrontations and encounters of a

broad spectrum presenting themselves in many forms and shapes. The study explores

the concept of conflict as emerging from the experiences, thoughts, feelings and

interactions of characters in the effort to come to terms with life. It examines the

layered plurality of self and rnilieu represented in the fiction of the period. The human

psyche seeks emotional and intellectual clarity in a world that seems to grow

increasingly impersonal, corltradictory and meaningless. The complex ambiguity of

human beings leads to conflicts of varied types in the process of growth and

development. An equilibriurr~ of conflicting impulses, according to Richards, suggests

"not the lifeless balance of deadlock, but the vibrant poise of the completely co-

ordinated personality" (qtd. in Wimsatt and Brooks 616-1 7).

This study examines the selected novels of representative writers, published

during the period from 1981 to 1990. An in-depth study of the novels of three

generations of writers, beginning with the pioneering "Big Three," namely, Mulk Raj

Anand, R.K.Narayan and Rija Rao, moving on to the post-Independence generation

of Kamala Markandaya, Ndyantara Sahgal, Anita Desai, Khushwant Singh, Arun

Joshi, Shashi Deshpande, a.nd finally, the "midnight's children" Salman Rushdie,

Amitav Ghosh, Shashi Tharoor, Vikram Seth, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Boman Desai,

Firdaus Kanga, Farmkh Dhondy and Allan Sealy is attempted. The study is confined

to a close reading of selected novels. The prose works of the authors having a direct

bearing upon the thesis have been made use of.

The main effort in the study is to examine the various manifestations of

conflict that preoccupy writers of fiction and shape their writing strategies. Conflict is

found to be pervasive in every aspect of human endeavour and transactions. In the

attempt to define themselve:;, to come to terms with reality, human beings encounter a

variety of conflicts which force them to virtually re-define the self. The novelists not

only explore the implication:j of conflict, but fictionally recreate them in order to

project a heightened awareness of reality.

The study makes use of concepts and ideas from deconstruction,

postmodemism, postcolonial theory, sociology and psychology. The writers are found

to be moving out of the realistic mode to find fresh confidence in experimental,

postmodemist fiction, which represents an attempt to go beyond realism and

modernism. In the last decades of the twentieth century the poetics of traditional and

modem prose, its established and enthroned methods of expression and structures, has

been questioned. It has become minimized in meaning in favour of "a creative

realization of a totality of vis~on and structure in the chasm of the 'broken modernistic

monument"' (Cvetanovski 428).

In postcolonial literature, oppositions and convergences form an intermeshing

framework which cannot be reconciled in terms of binary opposites alone. Besides,

the influences operating on tnese writers are much more diverse than those stemming

from a one-to-one relationship with the erstwhile colonizers. There is a spreading of

susceptibilities and influences from other cultures and from sub-streams and parallel

traditions within the indigenous culture. These complexities must he recognized as "a

text is ideologically constituted to make certain kinds of statements or transport

meanings of particular social, cultural and political value" (Syal6).

Postcolonial writing is actively engaged in the act of decolonizing the mind,

fundamentally concerned wil:h challenging the language of colonial power, unlearning

its worldview, and negotiating new modes of representation that both contest the

dominant mode, and give voice and expression to the once-colonised people.

Postcolonial writers express their own sense of identity by refashioning English in

order to enable it to accommodate their experiences. They challenge, rather than

confirm, generally-held values. Their "local" concerns are fundamental to their

meanings, not of secondary importance. "The postcolonial world is one that is being

made rather than one which is already established [...I. [postcolonial literature]

references a certain kind of world making, one that involves definite processes of

composition and decomposition, weighting, ordering, deletion and supplementation

and deformation"(Harper 50).

The increasing hyb~idity and liminality of cultural experience fit the

postmodernist attack on totalities and essentialisms, and dovetail with some of the

postmodernist characteristics: the simultaneous doubleness of perspective and the

central effects of parody, as observed in most writers of the 80s. The anti-essentialist

model of postcolonial identity construed as differential and relational rather than fixed

and essential, harbours no nostalgic desire for roots unlike in the earlier fiction.

Opting for a matrix of practices embedded in the local and the particular, these writers

resort to the frequent use of random techniques, mixed styles, increasingly provisional

methods and uncertain type:; of fiction reflecting the superficiality of contemporary

existence. Yet, "the local and the global need not be thought of as mutually exclusive

perspectives, but as aspects of the same reality which help reposition each other in

more nuanced ways"(Loomba 25 1).

The Indian novelist bas, of necessity, to capture the postcolonial reality, he has

to delve into the ongoing pnxess of hybridization, which is found radically changing

the very fabric of Indian society. In order to admit eastern themes, the western form of

the novel mutates and develops to become something else entirely: the hybrid,

postcolonial text. Bakhtin's ideas about "the text as a site of snuggle benveen

authority and popular culture I...] shifts authority away from the author to those

forces acting on, and within, the text from society and politics"(Peck and Coyle 137).

Conflicts are of the essence of life at all levels; they add to the dynamics of

human existence; they enliven the life presented in literature, and they tend to

permeate literature in incrt:asingly striking ways, as observed in Indian fiction in

English of the 1980s. The depiction of manifestations of conflict follows a certain

over-all pattern, but what niakes an examination of this pattem truly challenging are

the interesting variations within the over-all pattem. The variations emerge from the

different causes and types of conflict depicted, the protagonists' individual methods of

dealing with these conflicts, and, most interestingly, the authors' different approaches

to the same complex problem of human conflict. The attitudinal aspect becomes even

more intriguing as a close examination of the texts exposes interesting contradictions

between attitudes explicitly expressed and those thrown up by unconscious nuances in

the text.

Some of the novels taken up for this study directly foreground and handle the

theme of conflict. The different novels highlight different types of conflict and

different possible resolutions of it. The focus is also on the narrative strategies

evolved by the various authors to express the theme and the authors' attitude to the

entire problem, expressed implicitly or explicitly through the text. Creating a flexible

theoretical framework using those aspects of theory which have universal

applicability, suggests "the need for synthetic critical approaches which can, and do,

take account of the multipl~city, complexity and the intersection of apparently

conflicting orientations which we find in the writing" (O'Callaghan 43).

A fully comprehensive assessment of as large, varied and challenging a body

of writing as Indian fiction in English of the 1980s is outside the scope o f the present

study. Yet, a few generalizations to illuminate its larger thematic and artistic concerns

may be ventured. Also, some of the more important novels can be subjected to a

closer scrutiny to determine the extent to which certain milestones individually

contribute to and modify the pattern that becomes discernible at the end of a decade of

major achievements.

There is freshness and vitality in the novels of Salman Rushdie, Allan Sealy,

Shashi Tharoor, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth and others,

which explore the hitherto untouched layers of life and experience which would not

have occurred to the earlier novelists as being capable of lending themselves to

creative transmutation. They turn to life and experience as they know them first hand.

The need to romanticize the poor vanishes in the face of the onslaught of the

genuinely felt and experienced pain of living. They contend that there are agonies

more intense than those of being economically deprived. The urge to examine one's

roots (Sealy), critically scrutinize dogmas, political or otherwise, one has inherited

(Rushdie), the stress and strain of living in an urban setting (Sahgal and Anita Desai),

or a confrontation with one1:$ gender status (Shashi Deshpande) are issues, among

others, they feel, of significance for a creative writer.

An interest in exploring their own lives and identity as well as that of their

community has led a number of novelists in this decade to an exploration of their

ethnic origins. Boman Desai, Firdaus Kanga and Farmkh Dhondy are Parsees by birth

and focus on the life and manners of their community. Allan Sealy is an Anglo-Indian

and his epic saga of an Anglo-Indian family deals with the dilemma of the community

after the dismantling of the Raj.

For the Indian writer in English there may be unarticulated compulsions -the

ethnic, linguistic, communal and political differences, which can resist any attempt at

homogenization, because his "premise is the fantastic claim of one individual to

embody the impossible diversity of India3'(Cronin 15). The novels that deal with the

ordinary middle-class family's preoccupations and vicissitudes provide a realistic

social commentary on disintegrating family values and ties. The politico-social novels

bring in large documentary passages about the Partition, the Khalistan agitation, the

Emergency of 1975-77, and so on. Although such documentary intrusion conflicts

with the novel's literary inviolability by breaking the fictional illusion, the

innovations reflect "the radical wishes to alter being, to change, to reshape, destroy it,

to leave it different from what it is"(Jameson 17). In the novels of Rushdie,

Ghosh(The Shadow Lines), Sahgal(Rich Like Us), Tharoor (The Great Indian Novel)

and many other contemporary writers, multiple readings of history and current politics

are provided to destabilize the official version. In each, the life of the protagonist is

intertwined with the history of the nation. The metafictional works of the post-

Rushdie generation deconst~uct well-established notions of history, family, tradition

and patriarchy for their ideological underpinnings.

The new English fiction ventures into new themes, and experiments with new

techniques and approaches ':o handle those themes. The novelists come to their task

without any preconceived notions. This encourages them to focus on a vast and

comprehensive canvas and to invest their themes with epic dimensions. The 1980s

mark a golden age in the history of Indian fiction in English, in terms of both literary

output and the variety of themes explored and techniques introduced. The innovative

modes of exploring new fictional landscapes and changing sensibilities mirror an

eventual coming to terns with a complex legacy and an exciting, but challenging

ambience. In the Bakhtinian vocabulary of verbal conflict, these novels exemplify

"the constant struggle hetween the centripetal forces that seek to close the world in

system and the centrifugal forces that battle completedness in order to keep the world

open to becoming" (Clark and Holquist 79-80).

Chapter Two of this thesis deals with the conflicts at various levels of familial

relationships as presented in the selected novels of different authors of the 80s. The

intimate interactions of this type have undergone a process of change which has

touched not only the fringes of the family, but also its core. This has provided fresh

themes for Indian novelists desirous of subverting time-honoured perceptions vis-a-

vis the Indian family.

In Chapter Three, the problem of socio-cultural conflicts, reflecting the

multiple layers of social stratification is examined, as revealed in rhe different novels

of the period. The man-milieu contrast and the agony of not being accepted owing to

differences in religious faith, caste, community, colour, language all contribute to the

deep chasms separating one individual from another. The novels explore the massive

network of relationships between different segments of people with a distinctive

dialectic of absence and presence, passivity and revolt, relationships threatened and

crumbling, inconsistencies and ambiguities, hidden agendas and ulterior motives as

the canvas on which to work.

Chapter Four deals with other aspects of cross-cultural conflicts, as presented

by the novelists. The minority cultures and their survival in the Indian subcontinent

are taken up by these novels. The Parsi diaspora with the concomitant sense of loss,

nostalgia and the inter-cultural conflicts engendered by extra-territorial loyalties finds

a corresponding equivalent in the Anglo-Indian dilemma, as evidenced in these

works. The problems of alienation and rejection receive much attention. The theme of

East-West encounter posits the clash of value systems much more than differences in

social behaviour, as also the culhlral ambivalence of the westemised Indian elite.

22

Chapter Five examines political conflicts from the colonial days up to the anti-

Sikh riots of 1984 as they are presented in the works of the period. In these novels, the

struggle for Independence, the Partition of India on religious lines, the power games

played in Delhi, the Emergency imposed on the nation, the overthrow of the tyrant,

the tyrant's return to power are all treated as issues of far-reaching consequences for

the nation. Political corruption at various levels, and misuse of power are presented as

de-stabilising Indian democracy and mocking the lot of the masses, through the

profuse use of parody, allegory, the ironic mode of narration and contestatory voices

that undermine official versions and install alternative versions of Indian history and

politics.

Chapter Six devotes itself to a close examination of the inner turmoil which

racks the modem Indian in terms of the ontological uncertainties and erosion of faith

typical of the times. The conflict between spirituality and materialism, rationalism and

religious faith, illusion and reality, mind and body, all occupy the attention of

novelists. Spiritual ambivalence and psychological turmoil are found to be

cocomitants of contemporary lndian life. The division within the self is seen to be the

hardest to reconcile. The hiah~s between what the individual aspires for and the hard

reality of what he achieves, between what he professes and what he practices, and

behveen what he really is and what he would like to be taken for has an insidious

effect on his inner being.

Chapter Seven, which is the conclusion of the study, tries to unravel patterns

of presentation of conflicts in a critical perspective. Conflict is seen as the formative

element in determining the action in these novels. The paradigms of conflict resist the

eternal Indian temptation to fatalism, acquiescence and complacency and enliven life

presented in these works. They present challenging ways to negotiate the difficult

terrain of selfhood and nationhood. The novelists' vision of life as an odyssey from

innocence to experience, a great move forward from being to becoming gets

authenticated by the presentation of these conflicts.

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