Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India

    Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India

[alert-success] Realism and Reality - Meenakshi Mukherjee

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       Meenakshi Mukherjee, an Indian writer, through her work Realism and Reality talks about Indian novels, it’s history, and it’s attributes. Indian novels have a distinguished characteristics, as Meenakshi compares it with the European novels, and also gives the description of it’s history.

 Since the mid-nineteenth century arose as much from the political and social situation of a colonized country as from several indigenous though attenuated narrative traditions of an ancient culture that survived through constant mutation.

        Indian novels have aroused to prominence after the intervention of colonisers and also by the influence of mutated ancient indigenous literature. Despite the influence of European ideas, Indian novels have been quite different from the western ideas. Then the western novel has an identity quite different from that already existing narratives like epic, romance, and saga. Two theories are there to define the rise of novel in west, the growth of modern capitalism, and the emergence of individualism. The novel’s existence can be traced from even before the time of west, Kadambari in Sanskrit from the seventh century, and the tenth century Japan narrative in prose fiction. But there are certain difference between the old narratives and the modern one, as the former has cyclic narration, and the latter rather have linear than cyclic. And also the modern novelist has, the consciousness of time and space that is a special feature to reality, as they gives prominence to individualism.

Their inability to find a fictional town… allowed novelists to employ, without doing violence to the reality of mid- nineteenth century ‘Indian’ life.

        The western ideas is insufficient to make the Indian novels real, as they can not make any fictional place without an offence against the reality. Because the reality in Western countries can not be a real one, as the life has depicted by them is unfamiliar to Indian settings. Indian novelists has to operate in a tradition- bound society… His life was mapped out by his family or his community or his caste. So there no case form them to have individuality. Then the novel of O. Chandu Menon, Indulekka, which is a very famous novel, but lacks the attribute of realism, as Chandu Says, it is evident that no ordinary Malayalie  lady can fill the role of the heroin in such a story. My Indulekka is not, therefore, an ordinary Malayalie lady, as she has given the right to choose her partner, which is not normal to other Indian women. And Western man-woman relation is quite different fro Indian, it is obstacle to an Indian writer.

 Indian literature did not have any tradition of this variety of realism because it was based on a rather different view of reality.

Indian novels lacks the reality as the Western ideas suggests, as many Indian novelists are bound by a traditional ideas.

        The modern writer wants to express every genre in the literature as an institution of literary genres. And Indian writers has many alternatives to the word novel, upanyas from Bengali, Kadambari from Marathi, naval from Urdu, and katha from Sanskrit. This differences in terminology does not matter as the formal aspirations for novels are similar to everyone. And many Indian novelists have not contributed to this genre for the sake of eminence, but for money, out of the need to write something, and they do not have anything to read and delight.

         Until the eighteenth the Indian literature is similar to verse form, so only after this arises the prose form of literature. Some writers wants to contribute something without an influence of West, as they have been influenced by English literature and how much by European and American literature are hardly anything. Despite any limitations the Indian novels are beginning to acquire it’s own distinctive character.