Part-I
THE RISE OF THE NOVEL
(i) The novel is a modern form of literature. It is born from print, a mechanical invention. In ancient times, manuscripts were handwritten. These circulated among very few people. In contrast, because of being printed, novels were widely read and became popular very quickly. Novels produced a number of common interests among their scattered and varied readers.
(ii) The novel first took firm root in England and France. Novels began to be written from the seventeenth century, but they really flowered from the eighteenth century. New groups of lower-middle class people such as shopkeepers and clerks, along with the traditional aristocratic & genttlemanly classes in England & France now formed the new readership for novels.
(iii) As readership grew and the market for books expanded, the earnings of authors increased. This freed them from financial dependence on the patronage of aristocrats, and gave them independence to experiment with different literary styles.
(iv) Henry Fielding, a novelist of the early eighteenth century, claimed he was ‘the founder of a new province of writing’ where he could make his own laws. The novel allowed flexibility in the form of writing.
(v) Walter Scott remembered and collected popular Scottish ballads which he used in his historical novels about the wars between Scottish clans. The epistolary novel, on the other hand, used the private and personal form of letters to tell its story.
(vi) Samuel Richardson’s “Pamela,” written in the eighteenth century, told much of its story through an exchange of letters between two lovers. These letters tell the reader of the hidden conflicts in the heroine’s mind.
The Publishing Market
(i) Initially, novels did not come cheap. Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) was issued in six volumes priced at three shillings each – which was more than what a labourer earned in a week.
(ii) Technological improvements in printing brought down the price of books and innovations in marketing led to expanded sales.
(iii) In France, publishers found that they could make super profits by hiring out novels by the hour. The novel was one of the first mass – produced items to be sold.
(iv) There were several reasons for its popularity. The worlds created by novels were absorbing and believable, and seemingly real. While reading novels, the reader was transported to another person’s world, and began looking at life as it was experienced by the characters of the novel.
(v) Novels allowed individuals the pleasure of reading in private, as well as the joy of publicly reading or discussing stories with friends or relatives.
(vi) In rural areas people would collect to hear one of them reading a novel aloud, often becoming deeply involved in the lives of the characters.
(vii) In 1836 a notable event took place when Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers was serialised in a magazine. Magazineswere attractive since they were illustrated and cheap. Serialisation allowed readers to relish the suspense, discuss the characters of a novel and live for weeks with their stories.
The World of the Novel
(i) In the nineteenth century, Europe entered the industrial age. Factories came up, business profits increased and the economy grew.
(ii) Cities expanded in an unregulated way and were filled with overworked and underpaid workers. The unemployed poor roamed the streets for jobs, and the homeless were forced to seek shelter in workhouses.
(iii) The growth of industry was accompanied by an economic philosophy which celebrated the pursuit of profit and undervalued the lives of workers.
(iv) Charles Dickens wrote about the terrible effects of industrialisation on people’s lives and characters. His novel “Hard Times” (1854) describes Coketown, a ficitious industrial town, as a grim place full of machinery, smoking chimneys, rivers polluted purple and buildings that all looked the same.
(v) Dickens criticised not just the greed for profits but also the ideas that reduced human beings into simple instruments of production.
(vi) Dickens focused on the terrible conditions of urban life under industrial capitalism. His Oliver Twist (1838) is the tale of a poor orphan who lived in a world of petty criminals and beggars.
(vii) Emile Zola’s Germinal (1885) on the life of a young miner in France explores in harsh detail the grim conditions of miners’ lives. It ends on a note of despair: the strike the hero leads fails, his co – workers turn against him, and hopes are shattered.
Community and Society
(i) The novel created in them a feeling of connection with the fate of rural communities.
(ii) The nineteenth-century British novelist Thomas Hardy, for instance, wrote about traditional rural communities of England that were fast vanishing. This was actually a time when large farmers fenced off land, bought machines and employed labourers to produce for the market.
(iii) The old rural culture with its independent farmers was dying out. We get a sense of this change in Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge (1886). It is about Michael Henchard, a successful grain merchant, who becomes the mayor of the farming town of Casterbridge. He is an independent – minded man who follows his own style in conducting business. He can also be both unpredictably generous and cruel with his employees. Consequently, he is no match for his manager and rival Donald Farfrae who runs his business on efficient managerial lines and is well regarded for he is smooth and even – tempered with everyone. We can see that Hardy mourns the loss of the more personalised world that is disappearing, even as he is aware of its problems and the advantages of the new order.
(iv) The novel uses the vernacular, the language that is spoken by common people. By coming closer to the different spoken languages of the people, the novel produces the sense of a shared world between diverse people in a nation. A novel may take a classical language and combine it with the language of the streets and make them all a part of the vernaacular that it uses.
The New Woman
(i) The eighteenth century saw the middle classes become more prosperous. Women got more leisure to read as well as write novels. And novels began exploring the world of women – their emotions and identities, their experiences and problems.
(ii) The novels of Jane Austen (1775-1817) give us a glimpse of the world of women in genteel rural society in early- nineteenth – century Britain. They make us think about a society which encouraged women to look for ‘good’ marriages and find wealthy or propertied husbands.
(iii) But women novelists did not simply popularise the domestic role of women. Often their novels dealt with women whobroke established norms of society before adjusting to them. Such stories allowed women readers to sympathise with rebellious actions.
(iv) In Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, published in 1874, young Jane is shown as independent and assertive.
Novels for the Young
(i) Novels for young boys idealised a new type of man : someone who was powerful, assertive, independent and daring.Most of these novels were full of adventure set in places remote from Europe. Books like R. L. Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) or Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book (1894) became great hits.
(ii) G.A. Henty’s historical adventure novels for boys were also wildly popular during the height of the British empire. They aroused the excitement and adventure of conquering strange lands.
(iii) Love stories written for adolescent girls also first became popular in this period, especially in the US, notably Ramona (1884) by Helen Hunt Jackson and a series entitled what Katy Did (1872) by Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, who wrote under the pen – name Susan Coolidge.
Colonialism and After
(i) The novel originated in Europe at a time when it was colonising the rest of the world. The early novel contributed to colonialism by making the readers feel they were part of a superior community of fellow colonialists.
(ii) The hero of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) is an adventurer and slave trader. Shipwrecked on an island, Crusoe treats coloured people not as human beings equal to him, but as inferior creatures. He rescues a ‘native’ and makes him his slave. He does not ask for his name but arrogantly gives him the name Friday. But at the time, Crusoe’s behaviour was not seen as unacceptable or odd, for most writers of the time saw colonialism as natural.
(iii) Colonised people were seen as primitive and barbaric, less than human; and colonial rule was considered necessary to civilise them, to make them fully human. It was only latter, in the twentieth century, that writers like Joseph Conrad (1857 – 1924) wrote novels that showed the darker side of colonial occupation.
(iv) The colonised, however, believed that the novel allowed them to explore their own identities and problems, their own national concerns.
Part-II
THE NOVEL COMES TO INDIA
(i) Stories in prose were not new to India. Banabhatta’s Kadambari, written in Sanskrit in the seventh century, is an early example. The Panchatantra is another. There was also a long tradition of prose tales of adventure and heroism in Persian and Urdu, known as dastan.
(ii) The modern novel form developed in India in the nineteenth century, as Indians became familiar with the Western novel. The development of the vernaculars, print and a reading public helped in this process.
(iii) Some of the earliest Indian novels were written in Bengali and Marathi. The earliest novel in Marathi was Baba Padmanji’s Yamuna Paryantan (1857), which used a simple style of storytelling to speak about the plight of widows. This was followed by Lakshman Moreshwar Halbe’s Muktamala (1861).
(iv) Translations of novels into different regional languages helped to spread the popularity of the novel and stimulated the growth of the novel in new areas.
The Novel in South India
(i) Novels began appearing in south Indian languages during the period of colonial rule. Quite a few early novels came out of attempts to translate English novels into Indian languages.
(ii) O. Chandu Menon, a subjudge from Malabar, tried to translate an English novel called Henrietta Temple written byBenjamin Disraeli into Malayalam.His delightful novel called Indulekha, published in 1889, was the first modern novel in Malayalam.
(iii) Kandukuri Viresalingam (1848 – 1919) began translating Oliver Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield into Telugu. He abandoned this plan for similar reasons and instead wrote an original Telugu novel called Rajasekhara Caritamu in 1878.
The Novel in Hindi
(i) In the north, Bharatendu Harishchandra, the pioneer of modern Hindi literature, encouraged many members of his circle of poets and writers to recreate and translate novels from other languages.
(ii) The first proper modern novel was written by Srinivas Das of Delhi. Srinivas Das’s novel, published in 1882, was titled Pariksha-Guru (The Master Examiner). It cautioned young men of well-to-do families against the dangerous influence of bad company and consequent loose morals. Pariksha-Guru reflects the inner and outer world of the newly emerging middle classes. The characters in the novel are caught in the difficulty of adapting to colonised society and at the same time preserving their own cultural identity. The novel tries to teach the reader the ‘right way’ to live and expects all ‘sensible men’ to be wordly-wise and practical, to remain rooted in the values of their own tradition and culture, and to live with dignity and honour.
(iii) The writings of Devaki Nandan Khatri created a novel-reading public in Hindi. His best-seller, Chandrakanta-a romance with dazzling elements of fantasy-is believed to have contributed immensely in popularising the Hindi language and the Nagari script among the educated classes of those time.
(iv) It was with the writing of Premchand that the Hindi novel achieved excellence. He began writing in Urdu and then shifted to Hindi, remaining an immensely influential writer in both languages. He drew on the traditional art of kissa-goi (storytelling). Many critics think that his novel Sewasadan (The Abode of Service),published in 1916, lifted the Hindi novel from the realm of fantasy, moralising and simple entertainment to a serious reflection on the lives of ordinary people and social issues. Sewasadan deals mainly with the poor condition of women in society. Issues like child marriage and dowry are woven into the story of the novel. It also tells us about the ways in which the Indian upper classes used whatever little opportunities they got from colonial authorities to govern themselves.
Novels in Bengal
(i) In the nineteenth century, the early Bengali novels lived in two worlds. Many of these novels were located in the past, their characters, events and love stories based on historical events.
(ii) The old merchant elite of Calcutta patronised public forms of entertainment such as kabirlari (poetry contests), musical stories and dance performance.
(iii) The great Bangla novelist Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay would host a jatra in the courtyard where members of the family would be gathered. In Bankim’s room however a group of literary friends would collect to read, discuss and judge literay works. Bankim read out Durgeshnandini (1865), his first novel, to such a gathering of people who were stunned to realise that Bengali novel had achieved excellence so quickly.
(iv) Initially the Bengali novel used a colloquial style associated with urban life. This style was quickly replaced by Bankim’s prose which was Sanskritised but also contained a more vernacular style.
(v) The novel rapidly acquired popularity in Bengal. By the twentieth century, the power of telling stories in simple language made Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay (1876-1938) the most popular novelist in Bengal and probably in the rest of India.
NOVELS IN THE COLONIAL WORLD
If we follow the history of the novel in differnt parts of India we can see many regional peculiarities. But there were also recurring patterns and common concerns. What inspired the authors to write novels ? Who read the novels? How did the culture of reading develop ? How did the novels grapple with the problems of societal change within a colonial society ? What kind of a world did novels open up for the readers ? Let us explore some of these questions by focusing primarily on the writing of three authors from different regions : Chandu Menon, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and Premchand.
Uses of the Novel
(i) Colonial administrators found ‘vernacular’ novels to be valuable sources of information on native life and customs. Such information was useful for them in governing Indian society, with its large variety of communities and castes.
(ii) Indians used the novel as a powerful medium to criticise what they considered a defect in their society and to suggest remedies. Writers like Viresalingam used the novel mainly to propagate their ideas about society among a wider readership.
(iii) Novels also helped in establishing a relationship with the past. Many of them told thrilling stories of adventures and intrigues set in the past. Through glorified accounts of the past, these novels helped in creating a sense of national pride among their readers.
(iv) At the same time, people from all walks of life could read novels so long as they shared a common language. This helped in creating a sense of collective belonging on the basis of one’s language.
(v) People living in different regions speak the same language in different ways – sometimes they use differnt words for the same thing; sometimes the same word is pronounced differently. With the coming of novels, such variations entered the world of print for the first time. The way characters spoke in a novel began to indicate their region, class or caste. Thus novels made their readers familiar with the ways in which people in other parts of their land spoke their language.
The Problem of Being Modern
(i) Although they were about imaginary stories, novels often spoke to their readers about the real world. But novels did not always show things exactly as they were in reality.
(ii) Social novelists often created heroes and heroines with ideal qualities, who their readers could admire and imitate.
(iii) In many novels written during the colonial period,the ideal person successfully deals with one of the central dilemmas faced by colonial subjects : how to be modern without rejecting tradition, how to accept ideas coming from the West without losing one’s identity.
(iv) Chandu Menon portrayed Indulekha as a woman of breathtaking beauty, high intellectual abilities, artistic talent,and with an education in English and Sanskrit.
(v) The heroes and heroines in most of the novels were people who lived in the modern world. Thus they were different from the ideal or mythological characters of the earlier poetic literature of India.
(vi) Under colonial rule, many of the English – educated class found new Western ways of living and thinking attractive. But they also feared that a wholesale adoption of Western values would destroy their traditional ways of living.
Pleasures of Reading
(i) As elsewhere in the world, in India too, the novel became a popular medium of entertainment among the middle class. The circulation of printed books allowed people to amuse themselves in new ways.
(ii) Picture books, translations from other languages, popular songs sometimes composed on contemporary events, stories in newspapers and magazines – all these offered new forms of entertainment.
(iii) Detective and mystery novels often had to be printed again and again to meet the demand of readers: some of them were reprinted as many as twenty – two times !
(iv) The novel also assisted in the spread of silent reading. We are so used to reading in silence that it is difficult for us to think that this practice was not very common in the past. Sometimes novels were also read in this way,but in general novels encouraged reading alone and in silence. Individuals sitting at home or travelling in trains enjoyed them. Even in a crowded room, the novel offered a special world of imagination into which the reader could slip, and be all alone. In this, reading a novel was like daydreaming.
WOMEN AND THE NOVEL
(i) Many people got worried about the effects of the novel on readers who were taken away from their real surroundings into an imaginary world where anything could happen.
(ii) Some parents kept novels in the lofts in their houses, out of their children’s reach. Young people often read them in secret. This passion was not limited only to the youth.
(iii) But women did not remain mere readers of stories written by men ; soon they also began to write novel. In some languages, the early creation of women were poems, essays or autobiographical pieces.
(iv) A reason for the popularity of novels among women was that it allowed a new conception of womanhood.
(v) Rokeya Hossein (1880-1932) was a reformer who, after she was widowed, started a girl’s school in Calcutta. She wrote a satiric fantasy in English called Sultana’s Dream (1905) which shows a topsy-turvy world in which women take the place of men. Her novel Padmarag also showed the need for women to reform their condition by their own action.
(vi) Hannah Mullens, a Christian missionary and the author of Karuna o Phulmonir Bibaran (1852), reputedly the first novel in Bengali, tells her readers that she wrote in secret.
(vii) In the twentieth century, Sailabala Ghosh Jaya, a popular novelist, could only write because her husband protected her. As we have seen in the case of the south, women and girls were often discouraged from reading novels.
Caste Practices, ‘Lower – Castes’ and Minorities
(i) Indulekha was a love story. This concerned the marriage practices of upper – caste Hindus in Kerala, especially the Nambuthiri Brahmins and the Nayars. The story of Indulekha is interesting in the light of these debates.
(ii) Novels like Indirabai and Indulekha were written by members of the upper castes, and were primarily about upper-caste characters. But not all novels were of this kind.
(iii) Potheri Kunjambu, a ‘lower-caste’ writer from north Kerala, wrote a novel called Saraswativijayam in 1892, mounting a strong attack on caste oppression. This novel shows a young man from an ‘untouchable’ caste, leaving his village to escape the cruelty of his Brahmin landlord. He converts to Chirstianty, obtains modern education, and returns as the judge in the local court. Meanwhile, the villagers, thinking that the landlord’s men had killed him, file a case. At the conclusion of the trial, the judge reveals his true identity, and the Nambuthiri repents and reforms his ways. Saraswativijayam stresses the importance of education for the upliftment of the lower castes.
(iv) In Bengal too a new kind of novel emerged that depicted the lives of peasants and ‘low’ castes. Advaita Malla Burman’s (1914-51) Titash Ekti Nadir Naam (1956) is an epic about the Mallas, a community of fisherfolk who live off fishing in the river Titash.
(v) Vaikkom Muhammad Basheer (1908-94), for example, was one of the early Muslim writers to gain wide renown as a novelist in Malayalam.
THE NATION AND ITS HISTORY
(i) The history written by colonial historians tended to depict Indians as weak, divided, and dependent on the British. These histories could not satisfy the tastes of the new Indian administrators and intellectuals.
(ii) Such minds wanted a new view of the past that would show that Indians could be independent minded and had been so in history. The novel provided a solution. In it, the nation could be imagined in a past that also featured historical characters, places, events and dates.
(iii) In Bengal, many historical novels were about Marathas and Rajputs. These novels produced a sense of a pan- Indian belonging. The novel allowed the colonised to give shape to their desires.
(iv) Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay’s (1827-94), Anguriya Binimoy (1857)was the first historical novel written in Bengal.
(v) The imagined nation of the novel was so powerful that it could inspire actual political movements. Bankim’s Anandamath (1882) is a novel about a secret Hindu militia that fights Muslims to establish a Hindu Kingdom. It was a novel that inspired many kinds of freedom fighters.
The Novel and Nation Making
(i) Imagining a heroic past was one way in which the novel helped in popularising the sense of belonging to a common nation. Another way was to include various classes in the novel so that they could be seen to belong to a shared world.
(ii) Premchand’s novels, for instance, are filled with all kinds of powerful characters drawn from all levels of society. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Premchand rejected the nostalgic obsession with ancient history. Indeed, his novels look towards the future, without forgetting the importance of the past.
(iii) Drawn from various strata of society, Premchand’s characters create a community based on democratic values.
(iv) Godan (The Gift of Cow), published in 1936, remains Premchand’s best -known work . It is an epic of the Indian peasantry.
New terms
(1) Gentlemanly Classes : People who claimed noble birth and high social position. The standard setters for proper behaviour.
(2) Epistolary : Written in the form of a series of letters.
(3) Serialised : A format in which the story is published in instalments, each part in a new issue of a journal.
(4) Vernacular : The normal, spoken form of a language rather than the formal, literary form.
(5) Satire : A form of representation through writing, drawing, painting etc. that provides a criticism of society in a manner that is witty and clever.
(6) “Kissa-goi” : Art of story telling.
(7) Dastan : The long tradition of prose tales of adventure and heroism in Persian and Urdu were known as dastan.
Add to your Knowledge
(1) Novel writing is a modern form of literatue. It first took firm roots in England and France-Henry Fielding., Samuel Richardson etc. are some 18th century novelists. Charles Dicken’s first publication was a collection of essays entitled “sketches by Boz” in 1836.
(2) The industrial age of nineteenth century influenced contemporary literary works. Charles Dickens’s ‘Hard Times’ and Oliver Twist’ and Emile Zola’s ‘Germinal’ are examples of this.
(3) A common theme in European paintings by the nineteenth century was images of women reading silently, in the privacy of the room. Jane Austen’s work ‘Pride and Prejudice’ gives a glimpse of the world of women in early nineteenth century Britain.
(4) The modern novel form developed in India in the nineteenth century. The vernacular, print and a reading public helped in popularising it, both in South as well as North India.
(5) In North India, Bharatendu Harishchandra was the pioneer of modern Hindi writing. Srinivas Das, Devaki Nandan khatri, Premchand etc. are some other Hindi writers. B.C. Chattopadhyay and R.N. Tagore wrote in Bengali. Ramashankar Roy, Fakir Mohan Senapati wrote in Oriya.
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