International Research Journal , July 2010 ISSN- 0975-3486 RNI: RAJBIL 2009/30097 VOL I *ISSUE 10

Research Paper—English
INDIAN ENGLISH NOVEL WRITING:
SHIFTING THEMES & THOUGHTS
(With special Referance to Salman Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh)

July, 2010 * Farbat Singh

1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212
1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212
1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212
1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212
* Asst.*Prof.
Assicate
English
Prof.Rashtriya
Comm.Dept.
Sanskrity
Sant Gadge
Snasthan,
Maharaj
Deemed
Mahavidyalaya,
University Triveni
Walgaom.
Nagar
1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212
1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212
1234567890123456789012345678901212345678901234567890123456789012123456789012345678901234567890121234567890123456789012345678901212
A B S T R A C T
Most of the Indian English novels of recent times written by migrant writers have chosen materials for
their art from contemporary Indian socio-cultural situations. They also undertake the exploration of the
*relationship
Asst. Porf. in English
between Rashtriya
the East Sanskrit
and the West. Sansthan,
It has become Jaipur
a recurring theme in contemporaty Indian
English fiction because of the nature of the linguistic medium the novelist uses.
Fictional reworking of mythology and history has given new significance and possibilities to the Indian
English novel writings. Salman Rushdie and Shashi Tharoor and Amitav Ghosh often return to Indian
history and mythology. Midnight’s Children, Shame and The Moor’s Last Sigh deal with the complex
working of the muslim psyche caught up in the historical and cultural labyrinth of the subcontinent. The
Circle of Reason, The Calcutta Chromosome and The Shadow Lines express the blind follow of the English
by the Indians, the encounter between the west rationality and Indian myth, and hollowness of national
identity and national boundaries.
Introduction : limitations of a liberal bourgeo’s consciousness define
India enjoys an enriched heritage of different his work and the social conditions of alienation tend to
genres of literature -drama, poetry and fiction. R. deprive him of a comprehensive vision and commitment
Parthasarthy does not seem to be correct when he says to change, yet his achievement in fictionalizing the re-
“Indian verse in English did not seriously begin to exist ality of Indian life with intensity and genuineness, with
until after the withdrawal of the British from India.”1 But pholosophical insight and artistic ingenuity has to be
reality lies somewhere near the statement that Indian acknowledged with without reservation. Masterpieces
literature like many other literatures of the world, too has like Untouchable, Kanthapura, The Guide, All About H.
undergone many changes. This shows that Indian En- Hatterr, Midnight’s Children and a large number of good
glish literature is in the making through the emergence novels which stand the test of time are sufficient proof
of new traditions, by means of a process of negation and for the maturity this genre seems to have attained.
assimilation. Earlier English literature was qualitatively Like the novel form in our regional literatures,
different from the present ones and centred on issues of Indian English novel too had its origin towards the end
a relatively peripheral nature. Indian English literature of the nineteenth century. An organic product of the
has steadily been enriched by shifting patterns and new concrete socio-political-cultural environment of the ep-
traditions. och, as K.S. Ramamurti, convincingly shows in his Rise
One can easily notice a remarkable change in of The Indian 2
Novel in English (1987), this “twice born-
contemporary discoureses on Indian English novel. fiction” has been developing, with many ups and downs,
Today the author or novelist or dramatist has learnt to over the years, through continual seareches and experi-
address himself to the fundamental issues intrinsic to ments, towards a nature art form geniune and credible.
creative and critical activity in the Indian English situ- It is quite clear that the central artistic concern with the
ation. Now issues like postcoloniality, multiculturality, Indian English novelist has always been to develop an
indegenization, nativism, the social and political agenda Indian form of the novel and not merely to write a novel
of criticism and the like are being treated with great on Indian reality in English.
importance in preference to a variety of relatively incon- Findings :
sequential issues. By and large, the Indian English Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Rajmohan’s Wife
novelist has attempted to face the reality around him (1864), Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935) and Raja
with greater courage and responsibility. It is true that the Rao’s Kanthapura (1938) deal with the real social and
40 fjlpZ ,ukfyfll ,.M boSY ;q,’ku
International Research Journal , July 2010 ISSN- 0975-3486 RNI: RAJBIL 2009/30097
political problems of the then India. Both of these novels
speak of social reforms. Novels published in the period
from 1935 to 1960 delineat the experience of the colonial
age and dilemmas of post-independent reality. The writ-
ers of the thirties and forties - Mulk Raj Anand, R.K.
Narayan, K. Nagarjan and K.S. Venkataramani, and K.A.
Abbas,AhmedAli, Humayun Kabir, Kamala Markandiya,
Khuwant Singh, Nayantara Sahgal of the fifties— have
more or less spoken about the realities of colonial and
post-colonial India. Novelists of Rushdie’s generation
- Vikaram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Shashi Tharoor,
Upamanyu Chatterjee etc. - are the makers of new pat-
terns and traditions. Among most of these novelists are
those who are setlled in the West. As a matter of fact,
they are struggling to give pattern to their new destiny.
In their novels these novelists depict the post-colonial
world plagued by neo-colonial catastrophe like eco-
nomic disorder, social malaise, govermental corruption
and state repression. Some of the sensitive writers re-
sponded to these by migrating to less repressive and
more comfortable lands.
The post-colonial migrant literature fore-
grounds and celebrates a historical ‘weightlessness’ as
Salman Rushdie puts it. The experience of cultural trans-
plantation lends new perspectives and creative possi-
bilities for these writers and they have fashioned as-
tounding artistic patterns. Located in the mertropolitan
West they tend to recreate the contemporary social
milieu and cultural crisis in their native land and attempt
to redefine it in the emerging post-colonial context. They
mix the past, the present and the future and the imperial
and the colonial cultures in their fiction, dislocating time
and subverting the imperial purpose in the process.
Received history is tampered with, rewritten and re-
aligned from the point of view of the victims of its
deconstructive progress. They explore and expose the
residual effects of foreign domination in the political,
social and economic spheres. Dispossession, cultural
fragmentation, colonial and neo-colonial power struc-
tures, post-colonial corruption, cultural degeneration
and the crisis of identity are some of the major preoccu-
pations in The writings of Salman Rushdie and Amitav
Ghosh.Salman Rushdie, with the publication of
Midnight’s Children (1981) jolted the very foundation of
the Indian English novel. Its energy, stylistic innova-
tions and the use of fantasy as an expressive device
really shocked the tradition bound Indian novelists.
Unable to deracinate himself from his embedded roots
in India, Rushdie grapples assiduously with the Indian
reality which he reconstructs imaginatively in
Midnight’s Children. In Midnight’s Children, the chil-
dren born at the stroke of midnight at the very moment
when India won freedom, develop the capacity to com-
41 RESEARCH ANALYSIS AND EVALUATION
VOL I *ISSUE 10
municate with each other telepathically. Rushdie’s Shame
(1983) presents the subcontinental historical and cul-
tural realities. The country referred to in the novel could
be any country that has been ruined by corruption and
dictatorship. The novel offers a fantasized interpreta-
tion of degenerate post-colonial society that denies
freedom and justice to women. Shashi Tharoor’s The
Great Indian Novel (1989) is a retelling of the political
history of the 20th century India through a fictional
recasting of events, episodes and characters from the
Mahabharat. The novelist defamiliarzes contemporary
political events by resorting to epic devices. K. Ayyappa
Paniker says how Tharoor has achived it: “The super-
imposition of the political events of the 20th century on
the basic structure of Mahabharat is made plausible by
variations in stylistic levels and tones”3
Amitav Ghosh belongs to the literary tradition
that was fostered and nourished by Rushdie, Shashi
Tharoor and others. Like many of his contemporaries he
has been immensely influenced by the political and
cultural milieu of post-independent India. The Circle of
Reason (1986) is a skilfully constructed novel encom-
passing a world that stretches from a remote village in
Bengal to the shores of the Mediterranean. The novel
marks a break from the traditional themes of the Indian
English novel. The immediacy of experience of the real-
ity is conveyed to the readers by a medley of devices;
ironic mode of narration and recreating a magical world.
R.K. Dhawan comments on its technique; “The all em-
bracing structural principles of magic and irony elo-
quently weave the total pattern of the novel”.4 The
Shadow Lines (1988), set in Calcutta of the 1960’s moves
with an easy felicity through Calcutta and Dhaka and
London. The time span of the novel extends from 1939
to 1979 with the 1964 being a very important year for the
characters. Memory links the past to the present and
many of the characters live more in the past than in the
present. The novel seems to mock even the concept of
exclusive national identity. Even ideals nurtured by the
freedom struggle suddenly seem meaningless.
In an Antique Land (1992), a non-fictional novel
delineates some ordinary unheroic characters with their
encounters with religious rites and social customs. It
mingles history, geography, voyages, trade, adventure,
magic, memory and multiple viewpoints. Ghosh brings
in his memory of his childhood experience of riots in
Dhaka. The post-colonial undertones of the novel can-
not be underestimated. As history was written by the
colonizers, it hardly took note of the achievements of the
subject, colonized people. In The Calcutta Chromosome
(1996) the two worlds of science and counter-science,
European rationality and Indian myths are brought to-
gether against the backdop of Calcutta’s streets, mar-
International Research Journal , July 2010 ISSN- 0975-3486 RNI: RAJBIL 2009/30097
kets and monuments. Displacement has been a central
process in his fictional writings, departures and arrivals
have a permanent symbolic relevance in his narrative
structure. Countdown (1999) expresses Ghosh’s views
on the nuclear lobby in both India and Pakistan. He sums
up his argument for the nuclear weapons very suc-
cinctly. He states that the motivation for India’s nuclear
programme was enhancement of status and not imag-
ined threat to our northern frontiers. The Glass place
(2000), an epic novel, tells the history of the 20th century
across three generations spread over three interlinked
parts of the British Empire: Burma, Malaya and India.
Summing up Most of the Indian English novels of recent
times written by migrant writers have chosen materials
for their art from contemporary Indian socio-cultural
situations. They also undertake the exploration of the
relationship between the East and the West. It has be-
come a recurring theme in contemporaty Indian English
fiction because of the nature of the linguistic medium the
novelist uses. This operates as an acknowledgemetnt of
the disruptions in the self and society as seen in Rushdie’s
The Moor’s Last Sigh. Closely identified with the East-
West encounter is the conflict between spirituality and
materialism which is a recurring strand in many of these
novels.Nostalgia for a glorious ideal, coupled with a
disenchantment with the betraying directions India has
taken after Independence, is another major concern of
the Indian English novel. Fictional reworking of mythol-
ogy and history has given new significance and possi-
VOL I *ISSUE 10
bilities to the Indian English novel writings. Salman
Rushdie and Shashi Tharoor and Amitav Ghosh often
return to Indian history and mythology. Midnight’s Chil-
dren, Shame and The Moor’s Last Sigh deal with the
complex working of the muslim psyche caught up in the
historical and cultural labyrinth of the subcontinent.
Though like novels of any other period, the expatriate
fiction too presents the psychodrama of human rela-
tions, their predominant quality is defined by their post-
modernist propensities. Transcending barriers of genre,
narrative, time, history and location, Rushdie’s The
Moor’s Last Sigh is typically post-modernist in its themes
and technique. Rushdie celebrates “the plurality, the
excess of culture, the rootlessness which means that if
one does not belong to one place, then one belongs to
many.”5 The celebration of difference, of marginaltiy, of
ethnicity, of sexualities which were once considered
deviant, mocked at the modernist sorrow for a fractured
self and revelled in disruptions and fragmentations.
Through the fictional technique of magic realism the
marginalized consciousness may fracture constructed
reality in fabulous forms to express its own heightened
sense of reality. Self-reflexivity and confessionality
characterise fictional works of Rushdie and Ghosh. The
development of a creative artist-writer’s consciousness
and how the creative life is entangled with emotional
existence form the focus of many a work of fiction of
these post-independence novelists.

R E F E R E N C E
1. R. Parthasarathy Introduction, Ten Twenitieth Century poets. Madras: Oxford University Press, 1976. 2. K.S. Ramamurti Rise
of the Indian Novel in English. Delhi: OUP, 1987. 3. Ayyappa Paniker “Reminiscential and Subversive.” Littcrit 16.1.2 (1990):
14 4. R.K. Dhawan (ed.) The Novels of Amitav Ghosh. New Delhi: Prestige, 1999. 5. Salman Rushdie Imaginery Homelands:
Essays in Criticism. 1981-1991, London, Granta, 1991 Bibliography Ghosh, Amitav The Circle of Resean. New Delhi: Prestige,
1986 —. The Shadow Lines. New Delhi: Prestige, 1988. —. In an Antique Land. New Delhi: Prestige, 1992. —.The Calcutta
Chromosome. New Delhi: Ravi Dyal, 1996 —.The Glass Palace. New Delhi: Prestige, 2000. —.The Hungry Tide. New Delhi:
Prestige, 2004. Punekar, Mokashi “Indo-Fiction: Problems of Periodisation”. Littcrit 3.2 (1977):1. Rushdie, Salman
Midnight’s Childdren, New York; Avon Books, 1980. Tharoor, Shashi “Yoking Myth To History.” Littcrit 16.1.2
42 fjlpZ ,ukfyfll ,.M boSY ;q,’ku