CHAPTER

THREE
THE STRANGE CASE
OF BILLY BISWAS
(1971)
 CHAPTER - 3

THE STRANGE CASE OF BILLY BISWAS (1971)

Arun Joshi's second novel, The Strange Case of Billy Biswas is

dedicated to the writer's father. Arun Joshi's interest is directed towards

delineating the individuals quest for the self in all its varied forms. Most

of his fiction is either an existentialist fable or psychic drama. Arun

Joshi's primary interest in his novels that are built around the dark and

dismal experiences of the soul. In one of his interviews Joshi himself

admitted that he was led to writing to explore "that mysterious

underworld, which is the human soul."1 There are a number of influences

that have worked on him. He is well aware of having been influenced by

existentialist writers in general and Albert Camus in particular. In an

interview with Purabi Banerji he admits that "he has been influenced by

the existentialists like Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre and Soren

Kierkegaard."2 This novel is a continuation of a development upon the

first novel The Foreigner. As in The Foreigner, the probe into the depth5

of human psyche continues in this novel. Arun Joshi carries his study of

human predicament in the pretentious, ostentatious, and morally and

spiritually barren modem world, a step further in this novel. The novel is

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an attack on the corruption of "Civilized" modern life. The Strange Case

of Billy Biswas develops the theme of anxiety and alienation more

effectively than the treatment meted put in his first novel, The Foreigner.

K.R.S. Iyengar remarks: "In The Strange Case of Billy Biswas (1971),

Arun Joshi has carried his exploration of the consciousness of hapless

rootless people a stage further, and has revealed to our gaze new gas-

chambers of self-forged misery."3 Billy is psychic person given to

conscience and sometimes to visions and hallucinations. This novel has

Billy or Bimal Biswas as the central character, and the whole novel

rotates around him. Be gets strength to resolve the inner conflict through

the process of emotional involvement and ultimately he reaches a stage

where he has an intuitive perception of a suprarational bonding with a

certain mode of existence in harmony with the very centre of man's

existence. On the comparison between Sindi and Billy Urmil remarks:

"Sindi in The Foreigner and Billy Biswas in The Strange Case of Billy

Biswas seem to be exploring things, trying to find out their own bearings

and moorings. They are disillusioned and convinced that it would be

pointless for them to try to participate in the indifferent anglicized social

world of-India."4 In The Strange Case of Billy Biswas Arun Joshi

portrays how a man of extraordinary sensibilities is destroyed by the

process of individuation. Billy and Sindi represent the predicament of the

70
seeker-who am I? Where am I From? and they oscillate between the

modem and the primitive. Billy's quest is deeper than Sindi's. Billy is not

an alienated person. He has a family. He is not "anchorless" in the way

Sindi is. Billy has an impressive though strange personality. He is bom

and brought up in a fairly comfortable background. He comes "from the

upper-upper crust of Indian Society"(9). His family has "all claims of

aristocracy" (12). It had originally come from Bengal. His grand-father

had been the Prime Minister of a famous princely State in Orissa. His

father after completing his law studies at the Inner Temple, had practised

law at Allahabad and Delhi. His father has been justice of the Supreme

Court of India and earlier he had been an ambassador to a European

Country. Billy has had his education in Britain and America. He is a

Ph.D. from New York in Anthropology with a peculier bent of mind.

Billy explains his fascination for anthropology to Romi: "All I want to do

in life is visit the places they describe, meet the people who live there,

find out..... the aboriginalness of the world." (10) Billy is a lecturer in the

Delhi University. He has a friend like Romesh Sahai (Romi). Yet Billy

has no interest in civilized world. He wants to live alone. He has no social

life. He likes loneliness and society doesn't matter for him. He is much

interested in the exploration of his inner being. Romi rightly remarks:

71
 If life's meaning lies not in the glossy surfaces of our

pretensions but in those dark mossy labyrinths of the soul that

languish forever, hidden from the dazzling light of the sun, then I

do not know of any man who sought it more doggedly and, having

received a signal, abandoned himself so recklessly to its cell. In

brief, I know of no other man who so desperately pursued the

tenuous thread of existence to its bitter end, no matter what trails of

glory or shattered hearts he left behind in his turbulent wake."(8)

He never cares his family. He has no attachment with his family

members. He lives with them but has no interest. Everybody is stranger

for him. He is all alone, isolated and alienated man. He writes to Tuula

Lindgren:

"It seems, my dear Tuula, that we are swiftly losing what is known

as one's grip on life. Why else this constant blurring of reality?

Who am I? Who are my parents? My wife? My child? At times I

look at them sitting at the dinner table, and for a passing moment, I

can not decide who they are or what accident of Creation has

brought us together. "(97)

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Billy is a different character who doesn't like to go anywhere. He is an

introvert. Although he belongs to a highly placed bourgeois society with

good ancestral background, he feels stifled. He suffers from acute social

alienation and he cannot identify himself with the society to which he

belongs. His is an attempt to find out viable alternatives for "the most

futile cry of man.... in........smart society.(7) Romi says at the opening of

the novel

"As I grow old. I realize that the most futile cry of man is his

impossible wish to be understood. The attempt to understand is probably

even more futile. If in spite of this I propose to relate Billy's story, it is

not so much becauseJjclaim toJiave understood him as it is on account of

a deep and unrelelieved sense of wonder that in the middle of the

twentieth century, in the heart of Delhi's smart society, there should have

lived a man of such extraordinary obsession: "(7)

Billy is a different type of character. He tries to liberate the self

from normative demands of the money-worshipping social context and

diagnose the malady - the crookedness of the world. Romi says he is "a

man of extra ordinary obsessions." He is "an unusual person of brilliant

intellect, profound sensibility and extraordinary obsessions."5 Romi likes

him very much. He is "one of those rare men who have poise without

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pose." (11) Billy has not only aristocratic background but also an

impressive and effective voice. One would never fail to notice "the

strong, rather British accent of his speech" with "words (that) had a

cadence, a compulsive quality that engaged you in spite of yourself."(l 1)

He talked in "soft cultivated voice" "without gestures" (11). He had dark,

deep and almost "inhumanly sharp eyes" (43). Most people who met him

considered him a light - hearted good sport, but his eyes which were the

dominating feature of his face never lost their deep sombre look. Billy

always carries a "Singular air" and has a "peculiar intensity of

concentration." (44) Billy chooses to live in Harlem, the black ghetto of

America, being -fone-offthejvorse slums of New York City. "(9) Though

he could afford to live at some better place. But it is a natural choice for

him because he feels that it is "the most human place he could find."(9)

Romi meets Billy in New York who offers him to share with him his

apartment which he gladly accepts.

Billy is sick with the frenzied rush of the material world, and his

deep- rooted "existential" restlessness drives him far away from the

madding crowd of money-minters and property - grabbers. He hates so

called modem society or life. Billy's predicament results from the

confusion of values in civilised society. He says, "Who was I? Where had

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I come from? Where was I going?" (122) He dislikes this type of life

that's why he chooses Anthropology. Billy studies Anthropology, while

his father, Mr. Biswas, thinks that his son is doing engineering in a

western University. He becomes very much angry when he comes to

know that Billy has done Ph.D. in Anthropology. Romi sums up his

impression of Billy: "It was around his interest in the primitive man that

his entire life had been organised." (14). ,

Billy finds modem civilization fast degenerating, as well as

normless and meaningless. He is not bothered about cultural alienation;

what teases him is the superficial reality of life; He is dissatisfied with the

modem civilized culture, its standards and its mores which are

perennially being imposed by its corrupt agents on creatures aching with

listlessness. He himself explains :

"What got me was the superficiality, the sense of values. I don't

think all city societies are as shallow as ours. I am, of course,

talking mainly of the so - called upper classes. I didn't really get to

know the others. I don't think I have ever met a more pompous, a

more mixed-up lot of people. Artistically, they were dry as dust

Intellectually, they could no better than mechanically mouth ideas

that the west abandoned a generation ago. Their idea of romance

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 was to go and see an American movie or go to one of those

wretched restaurants and dance with their wives to a thirty - year -

old tune. Nobody remembered the old songs, or the meaning of the

festivals. All the sensuality was gone. So was the poetry. All that

was left was loud mouthed women and men in three - piece suits

dreaming their little adulteries." (178-79)

He considers himself a misfit, misplaced and does not enjoy that he has

earned for himself by virtue of his qualifications. He finds happiness

neither in family nor in teaching. He feels himself "pinned down there,

like a dead butterfly. Billy wants some peaceful life. The artificiality and

pretentions of the bourgeois society are repulsive to him. He is a rich man

but in America he stays at Harlem in New York though he could very

well afford to live at some better place like Manhattan. But it is a natural

choice for him because he feels that it is "the most human place he could

find." (9) This is a place where he finds the reality of life and no so called

formality.

Billy is a strange man from his childhood. His longing for his

spiritual being can be traced to a very young age of fourteen when he

feels concerned with the eternal questions like "who was I?" Billy hears

his first call from primitive world at the age of fourteen: "Yet almost from

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the very first day almost from the moment that we emerged from the

railway station something odds started to work within me."6 When he

goes to Bhubaneswar he says: "The first thing that hit me about

Bhubneswar was the landscape." (123). The sculptures at Konark, it

seems to him, are capable of giving him a solution to his questions about

the problem of his identity. He is led to understand: "What appealed to

me was the shades of the same spirit that I spoke of although I knew then,

I know now, that the spirit was a much, much older force, older than the

time when man first learned to build temples. If anyone had clue to it, it

was only the adivasis who carried about their knowledge in silence,

locked behind their dark inscrutable faces." (124) The quest forces him to

accompany a chauffeur in a village near Bhubaneshwar. He looks them.

He is a sensitive man and feels a strange sensation: "Something similar

happened to me then." (124-25) He says:

"First a great shock of erotic energy passed through me,"

although, mind .you, there was nothing particularly erotic about the

whole business except once when a boy and a girl, their arm

around each other, loitered past me giggling and tumbled into the

bush beyond. The shock of erotic energy was followed by the same

feeling of unreality or, as I said, a reality sharper than any I had

77
 . ever known. It was a bit like having taken a dose of a hallucinatoiy

drug, something I realized many years later when I was in Mexico.

I remember saying to myself, even though I was only fourteen, I

remember saying "something has gone wrong with my life. This is

where I belong. This is what I have always dreamt of." (125)

Billy seeks a world uncontaminated by hypocrisy and selfishness.

i

He suffers from dislocation and a sense of isolation. Both Sindi and Billy

act as foreigners to society as also to themselves and wander over the face

of the earth in search of the essence of the 'source of existence.' "Billy

does not like American society and life style: "White America, he said,

was too much civilized for him."(9) He chooses to live in Harlem, which

is "one of the worse slums of New York City." (9)

Billy has two friends Romi and Tuula. Tuula is a sweet girl. Tuula

and Romi are the two persons who understand the dilemma of Billy's life.

She is an "extraordinary intuition" (177) who always helps Billy. She

knows what is going on "in the dark, inscrutable, unsmiling eyes of Bimal

Biswal." (19) She is a Swedish girl yet her values are centred around the

vitalizing force of this life which brings her closer to Billy. She is a

sensitive girl and understands the reasons and impacts of hallucinations in

Billy's life. She is humane and believes in the Hindu philosophy of life.

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Billy feels at home in her company and is fond of her. She is getting

advanced training in psychiatric social work at Columbia in the United

States. She is "strongly interested in India, especially in her tribal people,

a subject about which Billy knew enough to keep her engaged not one but

a hundred nights." (17-18) "It was with Tuula Lindgren that Billy had

spent all those summer evenings and that she was the second person who

had any clue to what went on in the dark, unscrutable, unsmiling eyes of

Bimal Biswas." (19) Billy feels alienated. He wants to share his feelings.

He thinks that except this life there is other side too. He describes to

Tuula:

"The otherSide. You know what I mean, don't you. Most of us are

aware only of the side on which we are bom, but there is always

the other side, the valley beyond the hills; the hills beyond the

valley." (18-19).

He says about the other side: "That Other Thing was, and is, after all,

what my life is all about." (189)

Tuula always thinks about him because he is not a normal person.

His views are different. Tuula tells Romi that Billy "feels something

inside him.... A great force, unkraft, a - a primitive force.- He is afraid of

79
it and tries to suppress it.... But it is very strong in him, much stronger

than in you or me. It can explode any time." (23) Billy's choice of Books,

music, places reflects his deep interest for the primitive life. He likes to

play drum. One day he was playing a drum suddenly a little negro girl

comes: "Soon after Billy had finished, the little negro girl moved over

next to him. She sat very close to him so that their knees nearly touched.

They stayed like that for the rest of the night. I think she had been greatly

moved —sexually I mean - by the drumming." (21-22) His passion about

music is seen in the "music session" - he has at a party in George's

apartment:

"Billy's session ‘ -..for “that was how it came to be known

subsequently - lasted for nearly a quarter of an hour. I am certain it

was nothing very skilful or sophisticated from the view point of

music. What it had, I think was a mesmeric pull that held us by its

sheer vitality. Little package of sound detonated in the smoke

filled air in quick succession, falling in one rhythm or another,

creating patterns of Sound that deep down I knew were not mearly

that but carried a more fundamental message although what it was

I, or Billy for that matter, could not have said." (17)

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During long walks with Billy, Romi observed his talks "revealing not

only the mind of the speaker but also the dark unknowable layers of the

mysterious world that surrounded us." (26) Billy wants to penetrate deep

into human life. Billy explains to Romi how he often had hallucinations:

"the same odd feeling of being in a place other then where I was, in a

place very, very old, at times a wilderness, at other times full of strange

primitive people" (180) and that "It would be like a great blinding flash

during which I would be totally unaware of anything else. And invariably

it left me with the old depressing feeling that something had gone wrong

with my life. I wasn't where I belonged." (181) Billy frequently discusses

with Tuula who tells him "in a very mild form such hallucinations

occured in everyone all art in a way flowed out of them," but she advises

him that "I should not encourage them too much." (181)

The strong streak of primitivism is always present in Billy. The

modem society does not attract him. He is "very depressed and really

shaken up." (181) He explains that "I was so shaken up that the first thing

I wanted to do was to get back home." (181) He is educated in America

and well settled there but he dislikes the corrupt modem civilization.

Billy does not like the artificial mode of life prevalent in America, He is

feeling home- sickness. He finds himself "itching to be back" (27), to a

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congenial atmosphere. His itch for India is an itch for accomplishment of

the relevance of life. He comes back to India and is appointed Professor

in Anthropology at the Delhi University. In India too he finds nothing

different. He does not find the phoney, consumerism ridden world of

Delhi much different from the American materialistic society. He remains

very upset by his hallucinations, he says: "I had grown terribly affraid of

myself some part of me. I thought terrible things might happen unless I

did not do something drastic. What with being an Indian and having been

brought up in a close knit family, the only thing I could think of was to

get married. It was like taking out insurance on my normalcy." (182) His

mother introduces him to Meena, a beautiful girl. Her father is a retired

civil servant. Billy marries Meena Chaterji, who is a Bengali. At that time

he finds no better girl than Meena. He expected Meena to help him to put

a_ check on hallucinations but he was greatly mistaken as it was a

marriage between "uneven minds." Meena represents the hollowness and

super-ficiality of the modem phoney society. Meena's lack of empathy

and sufficient idea of human suffering lead to a marital fiasco. "Her

upbringing, her ambitions, twenty year of contact with a phoney society -

all had ensured that she should not have it. So the more I tried to tell her

what was corroding me, bringing me to the edge of despair so to speak,

the more resentful she became." (185) Meena fails to engage his soul, to

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satisfy his inner urge. She is "quite unusually pretty in a westernized sort

of way," "never sort of words" and talks "almost entirely in English in

that unique, rather flat, accent that is .to be. found among your ladies

taught in convents." (37) She fails to communicate with Billy. She does

not try to understand what troubles him inwardly, rather she becomes

resentful whenever he tries to speak out his mind. He doesn't like Meena's

family. He says: "And the first thing I hear on entering Meena's house is.

some -ten-year-old American pop record braying like an ass fit to burst,

and two of her silly cousins clapping their hands and wiggling their hips

as if that was the greatest music in the world. That certainly was not the

India that I had come back for." (60) One day he goes to picnic with

Meena and her friends. There one person says that "All banjaras were

thieves and their women no better than whores." (60) After listening this

Billy gets annoyed.

Billy is a pagan, a primitive man. He is a tribal personality by taste

and temperament and an urbanised individual only in his outward

appearance. His perception of other world is further intensified by an

incident. When he defends before his father the child-sacrifice by a clerk

"to propitiate the Goddess Kali in order that the clerk's young son,

suffering from leukemia, should get well." (52) Billy believes that the son

83

■V*
recovered because of the sacrifice and he says: "Similar cases have been

reported from Africa, Indonesia, Japan, from even a country like Sweden.

As for as India is concerned,' there are enough such cases to fill a

thousand - page volume. Look up the court records of any of the tribal

agencies, and you will know what I mean." (54) He means to say that the

clerk, at the time of the crime was operating under the laws of the world

other than this world, when his father doesn't believe his, Billy says: "It is

only after it happens to oneself that one comes to believe." (54) Once

again he says: "there are worlds at the periphery of this one, above it and

below it, and around it, of which we know nothing until we are in them."

(54-55) ...... ...... ;___ ___ __

Billy hates this type of society. In India too, the people are nothing

more than apes mimicking the forsaken ideas of West. He tells Romi: "I

don't think I have ever met a more pompous, a more mixed-up lot of

people. Artistically they were dry as dust. Intellectually, they could no

better than mechanically mouth ideas that the West abandoned a

generation ago." (179) Billy writes a letter to Tuula: "When I return from

an expedition, it is days before I can shake off the sounds and smells of

the forest. The curious feeling trails me everywhere that I am a visitor

from the wilderness to the marts of the Big City and not the other way

84
round." (96) He explains this so-called civilized society in a satirical tone:

"I see a roomful of finely dressed men and women seated on downy sofas

and while I am looking at them under my very nose, they turn into a

kennel of dogs yawning (their teeth showing) or snuggling against each

other or holding whisky glasses in their furred paws." (96) Billy says

them dogs. He finds civilized societies hollow with preference of money

and material progress over personal fulfillment. He says: "I sometimes

wonder whether civilization is anything more than the making and

spending of money. What else does the civilized men do? And if there are

those who are not busy earning and spending - the so called thinkers and

philosophers and men like that-they are merely hired to find solution,

throw light, as they say, on complications caused by this making and

spending of money." (96-97)

Billy says that today's man is only money minded. Their morality

is degrading day by day. Wordsworth explains this in his Sonnet "The

World is Too Much With Us."

"The world is too much with

us;

late and

soon,

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 Getting and spending, we lay waste

our powers,

Little we see in nature that is

ours;

We have given our hearts away, a

sordid boon."

Billy's quest for self is just like Raju and Rosie in R.K. Narayan's

Guide. R.K. Narayan in Guide and Aran Joshi in The Strange Case of

Billy Biswas have dealt with the quest for self from different angles. In

Guide, Raju, the protagonist is placed in a dilemma to eke out his

maturity the hard way. He seeks self - realization in the traditional Indian

way by seeking nirvana. In Billy there is a primitive, mystic force at work

which .instills in him a desire to join the tribal world. Billy wants some

peace not money and Tuula too. Hence, he likes Tuula who treats "money

for what it was: a whole lot of paper" (177) and hates the world that

hangs "on this peg of money." (97) He wants some help from Meena but

she fails to satisfy his inner urge. Within a year Billy realized that he had

committed a blunder. She is not able to give peace and satisfaction that

Billy badly require. She is a product of "phoney society." (185) He is not

satisfied with Meena and says: "Communication between us was soon

86
reduced to zero." (186) Billy is east, Meena is west, both east and west

cannot meet together. His marriage proves to be an ill-fated decision

taken in a hurry as their life turns into the "most precarious of battlefield."

(81) Meena fails to understand "why he is so unhappy" (77), "Why he is

always annoyed with me." (76) She does not understand what's the

matter: "God knows what the matter is. All I know is that Billy is getting

stranger and stranger with every passing day." (75) She finds that Billy is

now different man. Romi, too, notices the change in Billy and says: "I

had never felt so strange with Billy Biswas." (69) and that "He seemed

duller than most dull men that I usually, met." (70) Romi is very sad for

Billy and says.:__ ___ ’_______

"It was as though some part of him had gone on strike. All my

words simply sank upon his listless mind without so much as

causing a ripple. Gone was the staggering intelligence, the

spectroscopic interests, the sense of humour. He had either turned

banal, something that I had seen happen often enough, or, unknown

to us, he was turned upon some obsecure segment of himself,

ferreting out a bitter secret, settling an old score, whatever it might

have been, the Billy Biswas I had known was finished, snuffed out

like a candle left in the rain."(70)

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 He is unhappily married. To betray his loneliness, he had married Meena

but now he is an uncared for person. He feels that he has been caught in a

cobweb. He tells Romi: "my own married life so quickly went to pot."

(179) It is "ill-conceived," "ill-fated like a ship that gets smashed up in a

gale." (185) He says to Romi that the marriage "might have been saved if

Meena had possessed a rare degree of empathy or even a sufficient idea

of human suffering. These, I am afraid, She did not have. Her upbringing,

her; ambitions, twenty years of contact with a phoney society - all had

ensured that she should not have it. So the more I tried to tell her what

was corroding me, bringing me to the edge of despair so to speak, the

more resentful she became." (185)

Billy realises that all his efforts to integrate with society are futile,

these are simply enhancing his restlessness. He listens to his inner self.

.. He tries to find his identity in Meena . but fails. Meena herself

acknowledges to Romi: "Perhaps I just don't understand him as a wife

should." (76) He turns introvert and lackadaisical. He forsakes his

responsibilities towards his family, his wife and his son. To Romi's

question, "But, don't you think you had responsibilities towards her,

towards your son?" Billy replies. "I had greater responsibilities towards

my soul." (186) "He is a pilgrim of the spiritual world."8 He feels irritated

88
and disgusted in the civilized modem society. He begins to loss his grips

on life and experience a blurring of reality. He starts, to whine and to lie

and sham. He starts to behave in a manner that in other men he had

always despised. He wants some one who can share his suffering. He

meets Rima Kaul. Billy says Rima can Help him. Rima and Meena, both

are different. Billy describes his feeling about Rima. I feel very happy

when she says: "Oh, how misunderstood you are, my poor boy. I know

how you feel. Those who harass you should be put to death straightway."

(188) The seduction of Rima Kaul an innocent girl in Bombay by Billy is

the evidence of his estrangement not only from his family but also from

his true self. But very soon he is given to understand that his relationship

with Rima is nothing but his degradation. He says "After it (seduction)

was over I looked into her clear trusting eyes, and I had a first glimpse of

my degradation." (188) Once again he says:

"The worst of it was that in spite of this knowledge of my

degeneration, I continued to behave as before, I continued to whine

and lie and sham. I found that I could not stop. I met her three or

four times after that. Each time I would determine to be honest -

with her, with myself - and each time I would start to play the part

as soon as I got the chance. You have no idea how ridiculous and

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 fraudulent it became. I offered to divorce Meena and marry her

even though Rima herself never even hinted at such a thing. I

agreed to start living with her as soon as possible. And all the time

I knew that I intended no such thing." (188)

Billy asks himself whether he belongs to the category which has this self

- image. He is seeking something else. He feels horrified at his behaviour.

He tells Romi:

"It gradually dawned on me that a tremendous corrupting force was

working on me. It was though my soul were taking revenge on me

for having denied it for so long that other things that it had been

clamouring for. Here, you swine, if you have not the guts to break

away from this filth, well, then I am going to wallow in it until

makes you sick." (189)

He says that no one can satisfy his soul. He thinks neither Meena nor

Rima Kaul is a lady meant for him as both differ from him a great deal. If

Meena is in quest of material wealth, Rima Kaul wants something

different. After Sometime he writes a letter to Tuula about a woman:

"A strange woman keeps crossing my dreams. I have seen her on

the streets of Delhi, nursing a child in the shade of a tree or hauling

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 stone for a rich man's house, I have seen her buying bangles at a

• fair. I have seen her shadow at a tribal dance, and I have seen her,

pensive and inviolable, her clothes clinging to her wet body, beside

a tank in Benares. And once I saw her, her face strangely luminous

in the twilight, loading a freight train with sulphur on a siding in

one of our eastern ports. Yes, this woman keeps crossing my

dreams causing in me a fearful disturbance, the full meaning of

. which I have yet to understand." (225-226)

This time, "It is a quest for self-realization for a union with the missing

part of his soul."9 Billy out of tune with the civilized world is constantly

tormented by .the;persistent call of voice from the uncorrupted world with

no pretensions and sophistications. Billy realized that his responsibility

towards his soul is more than towards the family.

"It was like a warning signal. It was as though a master mind has

arranged the whole things to give me preview of what awaited me if I

continued to defy its calls." (189)

Billy, thus, has two clear options: "I could either follow this call,

this vision, whatever the cost, or be condemned to total decay." (190) He

later tells Romi: "Deep down we are afraid that the price of making such

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choices is terrible not realizing that the prices of not making them is even

more terrible." (190)

He thinks that the primitive world is calling him. Someone is

waiting for him: "They all seemed to be waiting and watching and staring

at me. It was as though I was not Bimal Biswas, graduate of Columbia,

the only son of a Supreme Court Judge, husband of Meena Biswas, and

father of a handsome child; it was as though I were not all this but the

first man on earth facing the earth's first night. -"Come", it said. "Come to

our primitive world that would sooner or later overcome the works of

man. Come. We have waited for you. Come, Come, Come, Come. Why

do you want to go back? This is all there is on earth. This and the woman

waiting for you in the little hut at the bottom of a hill. You thought New

York was real. You thought New Delhi was your destination. How

mistaken you have been! Mistaken and misled. Come now, come. Take

us until you have had your fill. It is we who are the inheritors of the

cosmic night." (120-121)

Billy looks into future with his insight and instinct that tell him

what to follow and what to avoid: It is these flushes of vision that lead

him to seek suitable spiritual companion. He believes:

92
 "If anyone had a clue to it (real self) it was only the Adivasis who

carried about their knowledge in silence, locked behind their dark

inscrutable faces."

Now he hates the so-called civilized world, too much. He says, "I feel

suffocation in this society" I can't live here:

"Layers upon layers was peeled of me until nothing but my.

primitive self was left trembling in the moonlight." (121)

Billy's interest in anthropology gives him an opportunity to look at

supernatural things, social facts from a different angle. During one of his

anthropological expeditions along with his students he goes to Maikala

hills. Here he feels that he belongs to the primitive jungles rather than to

the cities. His otherself has grown stronger and he realizes that he has

been running after illusory appearances. He decides to participate in.a

reality which in itself is the truth, namely his "true being" Billy all of a

sudden disappears from the face of the earth into the sal forests. The

whole area is combed for a year to trace him but the efforts proved futile.

People believe that he has been killed by a man eater. There he meets, the

Bhils and their leader Dhunia, he eats, drinks and waits for the rising of

the moon and "he could for the first time see clearly the change entering

93
him while he sat in the purple shadows, he had the first terrible

premonition that he might not go back."(137) The night he saw the tribal

dance he had the premonition that it might not be possible for him to go

back.

Billy leaves the civilized society because he is conscious that

staying in it will yield evil consequences. He withdraws from trivialities

of life in the sophisticated society, which fails to sustain him and fulfill

his urge for a meaningful life. His disappearance is not an escape from

the realities of life but an escape from the sordid, inept, meaningless

existence in the civilized materialistic world into the real life. Billy's

escape is a journey from darkness to light, from restlessness to

equanimity. This novel is just like D.H. Lawrence's The Woman Who

Rode Away. The novelist initially establishes the character of woman and

the degradation and utter inanity of the life around her:

"Her surroundings are already so squalidly dead that we can well

believe that she would choose another kind of death."10

Billy's quest for self begins and he knows that he will be able to

peep into dark cells of his soul by fleeing from the suffocating modem

civilized society. The tribal's dedication to the deity and their deep and

94
over powering love for him becomes the driving force and code of his

activities. This is a state of consciousness where Billy's identity merges

into the cosmic identity. It is his love for the tribals and love in return

from them which gives him a feeling of rootedness, belongingness. His

state of consciousness can be described by a few lines in Wordsworth's

Tintem Abbey:

"........... that serene and blessed mood

In which the affections gently lead us on

Until the breath of this corporeal frame

And evenlhe motion of our human blood

Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

In body and become a living soul;"

Romi is a collector so once on a tour of the Maikala Hills and "the plains

of Central India-ravaged by a terrible drought," he suddenly sees Billy

wearing "a loin cloth and nothing else." (102) He takes him to his

bungalow and spends the whole day and night in his company listening to

the story about his life after disappearance. He tells Romi, "I feel that

layers of superficiality were peeled off until nothing but my primitive self

95
was.left." Billy is thoroughly tribalized. He wears a loin-cloth and grows

beard. He eats their kind of food, speaks their language and wears their

kind of dress. Billy likes tribal people because "nobody here is interested

in the prices of food grains or new seeds or roads or elections and stuff

like that." (113) He feels happy in the forest not because of money,

position or a job but because of "the earth, the forest, the rainbows, the

liquor from the mahua, an occasional feast, a lot of dancing and love

making, and more than anything else, no ambition, none at all." (148)

Billy says to Romi: " We talk of the supernatural, violent death, trees,

earth, rain, dust storms, rivers, moods of the forest, animals, dance,

singing." (113) He is also driven to the forests with "a sudden interest in

my own identity." (122)

His embrace of primitive life is a part of the maturation of his

being. Now he begins to realize his own self. When he finds his real self

among the forest people, he is a different being, refuses to do anything

with the modem civilized world. His fascination for the primitive life,

really speaking, is a search for his identity: "It was more or less the same

with me except that I could not figure out what excited or troubled me

unless it was a sudden interest in my own identity. Who was I? Where

had I come from? Where was I going?" (122)

96
 When Billy sees the primitive girl Bilasia, his frenzied search is

calmed. She is the essence of the primitive force and thus she is able to

enliven the soul of Billy, unlike Meena and Rima who had repelled and

deadened it. H.M. Prasad remarks: "Meena deadens his senses, Rima

corrupts him and the material civilization kills his innate natural instinct.

It is Bilasia who causes explosion of senses - the proper medium to reach

soul. Billy renounces the civilized world and its symbols in Meena and

Rima."12 His first meeting with Bilasia in Dhunia's hut on the night prior

to his disappearance brought about a change in him: "It was as though,

during that half hour, it was not Bilasia I had been waiting for but my

future, my past, indeed the very purpose of my life." (Ill) The oil lamp

there is "lending a voluptuousness to her full figure until the whole hut

seemed to be full of her, and only of her." (116) Her presense transforms

him altogether: "It was I who had changed. Or, rather, quite suddenly and

unaccountably I had ceased to resist what was the real in me. All that I

had been confusedly driving towards all my life had been crystallized,

brought into focus, so to speak, by what I had gone through during the

interval between this visit and the time I had first met Bilasia." (116)

Bilasia is a woman of Billy's own taste and temperament. He finds

happiness in her company. "She is both Laurentian and Blackean." 13 In

his search for Billy, Romi proposes to meet Bilasia as it is obvious to him

97
that "the only hope of resolving the crisis lay through her." (224) To him,

she looks "not merely a human being but also the embodiment of that

primal and invulnerable force that had ruled these hills, perhaps this

earth, since time began."

Billy is now no longer interested in thing which provided the

sustenance to life in a civilized society. Billy realizes that uptil now he

has been "squandering the priceless treasure of his life on that heap of

tinsel that passed for civilization" (141). To him, Bilasia has "that

untamed beauty that comes to flower only in our primitive people." (143)

Bilasia is a manifestation of the divine force and Romi says about

her:

"What was Bilasia? What is the playful effervescence of mountain

stream? What is sunlight filtering through a glade? What is the

thunder of a volcano or the hardness of granite? .... I had the

distinct, if somewhat confused, feeling that I was facing not merely

a human being but also the embodiment of that primal and

invulnerable force that had ruled these hills, perhaps this earth,

since time began and that, our proud claims to the contrary, still lay

98
 in wait for us not far from the doorstep of our air conditioned

rooms," (223-224)

Bilasia is an integral part of nature and an embodiment of the primitive

world and it is she who helped Billy to replace his restlessness with

"Divine" serenity. Billy himself has no ambition now. The humdrum of

the city life on the problems and tensions arising out of making and

spending of money no longer disturb the peace and equanimity of his

mind. Billy is lured by Bilasia's sensuality:

"Her hair was loose. Just behind her left ear there was a red flower.

The necklace of beads glowed a little in the darkness. Her enormous eyes,

only a little foggier with drink, poured out a sexuality that was nearly as

primeval as the forest that surrounded them. Come, come, come, she

called, and Billy Biswas, son of a Supreme Court Justice went." (141-

142).

Billy's union with Bilasia is not only the union of two bodies but

also a union of a split - self to realize the whole. He discovered in her:

"that bit of himself that he (had) searched for all his life and without

which his life (was) nothing more than the poor reflection of a million

others." (142). Billy says to Romi. "Becoming a primitive was only a first

99
step, a means to an end. Of course I realized it only after I ran away. I

realized that-1 was seeking something else." (189)

Bilasia, he feels, is the essence of the primeval force: "Bilasia, at

that moment, was the essence of that primitive force that had called me

night after night, year after year." (142) Now, his love for primitivism

becomes a realization. "Something grave and decisive happened during

those thirty - six hours." (144) He relates to Romi the story of his

complete metamorphosis: "I arrived at the fork in my life that, without

being conscious of it, I had waited for all my life. I took the turning that

was as irrevocable as it was awesome. Why all this happened to me I

don't know, and even if I knew, I could not put it into words." (144)

For Bilasia money is nothing more than paper and she refuses to

accept it in place of Billy. Billy understands that this is the place where

he belongs, in a manner he has been released from the insolubility of the

Indian upper crust. That happiness which may be like poison at first but

becomes nectar at the end, which springs from a clear understanding of

the self, is divinity. He knows that his love for the primitive is a step

towards his spiritual awareness, his realization of the soul, his

existentialist quest for meaning and values in life, he talks to Romi on this

issue:

100
 "That Other Thing was, and is, after all, what my life is all about'

You mean yours desire to become a primitive?

He hesitated.

I don't want to sound too pompous, old chap.

"What is that?"

He seemed to be thinking.

'God?' I prompted.

'There, there, old chap, that is too big a word:'

'Something like that?'

'yes, something like that?' (189)

Bilasia can be compared to Tuula Lindgren who exerts a great influence

during Billy's stay in New York. She is the first person whom Billy meets

and finds devoid of superficiality. Tuula understands his mind and

suggests to him to keep a check on his hallucinations; while Bilasia

helped him win over hallucinations and see reality. With the removal of

dream illusion and ignorance, and direct knowledge of his real nature and

self, he regains his basic and natural equipoise and peace. He views the

world and all the creatures from a completely changed and revolutionized

stand point.

101
 Like the "Sadhakas" of 'Tantra', Billy hankers after self -

realization, the experience of identification with the divine. He gets a

spiritual pleasure out of his 'sadhana' and therefore, cannot think of going

back to "the bourgeois filth" of the materialistic civilization.

Billy and Querry, the protagonist of Graham Greene’s A Burnt Out

Case is same. A successful and renowned architect of Europe, Querry,

relinquished the materialistic life and went to the remote Congo region in

the Central Africa to live with the socially - ousted lepers in quest of

inner peace and self - knowledge. Samuell Beckett’s novel Murphy, too,

deals with similar theme. Murphy, the hero, absconds from the civilized

world. He, in the_same.manner as Billy is hunted by the representatives of

the civilized world and dies midway. Billy’s renunciation is reminiscent

of Siddhartha’s renunciation of wife and child along with the luxuries of

materialistic world in search of the ultimate truth about human existence.

Like Siddhartha, Billy is bom and brought up in a royal family. His

mother tells an incident from Billy’s boyhood of having “run away from

home” (51) at the age of fourteen. He gets “stranger and stranger with

every passing day.” (75) Like Siddhartha, he sees that the life in the

world is continuous suffering. He has no attachment towards his family.

102
 Billy’s withdrawl from the world is in the nature of a reflex-action.

He withdraws in order to preserve himself from “those rapacious

representatives of civilization.” (143) “Long before his physical

disappearance into the saal forests of the Maikala Hills, he had ceased to

belong to the world.”14 He gets self - realization when he meets the tribal

girl Bilasia. “He feels that he has suddenly discovered that bit of himself

that he has searched for all his life and without which his life is nothing

more than the poor reflection of a million others.”(142)

Joy Abraham remarks: “It is interesting to note that the union of

Billy and Bilasia can be taken as the human soul’s longing for reunion

with the divine as-symbolized by Krishna, the union of “Jeevatma” with

“Paramatma.” Billy, like Sindi, is in search of a world of meaningful

relatedness which he can find neither in white America nor in the upper-

class Indian society. That was the beginning of his quest to understand

himself and the nature of reality, something beyond oneself. Becoming a

primitive is the first step, a means to an end and in the second stage he is

still seeking something “else”.....This again is not an escape from order

and form into reckless freedom, for, interestingly enough, in this second

phase as a tribal we see order and form of a different kind”15

103
 Billy experiences their joys and sorrows, living their beliefs and the

tribal people soon adore him as their 'Mahaprasada.' He becomes as he

himself thinks, “some sort of a priest” (191) His embrace of primitive life

is a part of the maturation of his being. Now he begins to realize his own

self. When he finds his real self among the forest people, he is a different

being, refuses to do anything with the modem civilized world. In

rejecting modem society he rejected all wrong self - images to recognize

his tme self. His acceptance of the deaths of Rima Kaul and his mother

with calmness reflects his maturation. Billy’s calm acceptance of death is

sign of his living in close proximity with Nature where life and death are

natural routine events, imbued with a meaning which people outside

don’t understand. He is a son of Nature.

Dhunia, the head of the tribals, is aware of the fact that Kala Pahar

“the black rock” and “master of us all” has called Billy to consummate

his search for identity. This search cannot be completed in the imperfect,

futile and phoney world of the civilized people but can be accomplished

in the shelter of the Kala Pahar. Billy sick of the modem civilization,

abandons it. Billy is entirely transformed. He wears loin-clothes, has

grown beard, and is regarded as demi - god by the local tribals,

completely tribalised, giving the impression of great vitality. His skin had

104
darkened because of constant exposure to sun. It was stretched tightly

emphasizing the muscles of his body. His hair was lighter and longer.

Billy seeks something divine and 'Divine' he himself becomes - he

is accepted as the king by the tribals. He is a kind of mangod, and

“avatara” to the tribals and a faith of this kind is in tune with the Indian

tradition: “The East is trying to see God in man (hence the avataras or

incarnations) while in the West the difference and distance between God

and man is unbridgeable.” “As soon as Billy arrived in their world

Chandtola came to life, it started glowing after a long time; tigers run

away at his sight, he can revive a dead man. He is believed to be the

mythical sculptor-king who ruled over the region thousands of years ago.

Dhunia takes Billy to be the mythical sculptor king come alive with his

queen Devi Ma and priest who looks after them. Dhunia tells Romi: “He

(Billy) is like rain on parched lands, like balm on a wound. These hills

have not seen the like of him since the last of our kings passed away.”

(159-160) His return signifies the end of their misries as Chandtola, the

white - faced cliff of the village, has come to life again and has begun to

glow when Billy goes there with Bilasia as predicted by Devi Ma. He is a

man having great healing powers as the manifestation of “Kala Pahar’s”

will. Dhunia sees him sending a tiger away who had been roaming the

105
jungle for a week killing their cattle and bringing back his grandson to

life who “had been dead for two hours.” (159) As soon as Billy comes out

of the confines of the primitive world, things began to go wrong. Romi

discusses with Billy his magical powers. Once during these discussions, a

shadow distracted him, taking him entirely in its embrace. It seemed to

have come out of the temple and say “There are things that the like of you

may never know. There are circles within circles and worlds within

worlds. Beware where you enter” (190) Romi observes the divine force in

Billy as he predicts rains when there is no sign of rain. Billy with his

healing touch and knowledge of the harbal medicines “cured Situ, Romi’s

wife, of an agonizing chronic migraine. This incident gives the story a

turn. Billy had warned Romi not to disclose about his whereabouts to

anybody. He cautions Romi: “If they ever get hold of me, they will not

leave me alone. And you know what havoc it will play with my life

here.”(151) However things go beyond Romi’s control and his pestering

wife compels him to disclose the secret and lets Meena and Mr. Biswas

know about Billy’s being alive. Romi tries his best to protect Billy from

the destructive hands of the civilized world. But Billy’s father, a one time

ambassador and retired supreme court judge sets the whole government

machinery moving to trace Billy with an idea “to drag him upto Delhi by

force.” (207) A young and enthusiastic IPS Officer, Mr. Rele, is

106
appointed to execute this plan. He zealously carries out the search. He

belongs to a society which, with its middle - class mentality does not

hesitate in branding men like Billy as “irresponsible fools” and “common

criminals” (231) and can go to any limit in preventing them from going

astray from the norms. The more Romi tried to convince them of the

undesirability of their efforts, the more “they converted the story..... into

a stereotype childish escapade which was all that their ordinary minds

were capable of.” (206) During one of the raids on the tribals, a constable

is speared to death by Billy. This irritates Mr. Rele, who is bent upon

nabbing the culprit dead or alive. “The search of Billy is turned...... into a

man hunt.”(232) Despite Romi’s best efforts of avoid the tragedy, Billy is

shot dead by a “Havildar.”

“Billy”, I cried. “Billy.”

He opened his fast-glazing eyes for a moment and appeared to look

at me.

“You bastard’s he said hoarsely.

Then he died. (233)

In the last two words uttered by Billy, “You bastards”, he slaps his

verdict on this inhumane world which knows no other way of “disposing

107
its rebels, its seers, its true lovers.” (240) Romi is deeply grieved at

Billy’s “end so unbearably tragic” (241) and feelingly reflects:

“Gradually it dawned upon us that what we had killed was not a man, not

even the son of a “Governor”, but some one for whom our civilized world

had no equivalent. It was as though we had killed one of the numerous

mangods of the primitive pantheon.”(236) Thus ends the existentialist

quest of Billy for values and meaning of life in the mad, bad, absurd

world where none tries to understand his problem even after his death.

Meena, Mr. Biswas, the Chief Secretary, Rele along with his men, Situ

and others are “only the representatives of a society which, in its middle-

class mediocrity, bracketed men like Billy with irresponsible fools and

common criminals and considered it their duty to prevent them from

seeking such meagre fulfillment of their destiny as their tortured lives

allowed.” (131-132)

Billy, who had dared “to step out its stifling confines” (240)

ultimately had to pay price with his life for not conforming to the norms

of the so called civilized society. “The strange case of Billy Biswas had at

last been disposed of. It had been disposed of in the only manner that a

humdrum society knows of disposing its rebels, its seers, its true

lovers.”(240)

108
 Billy a “refugee from civilization” (140) feels established in the

primitive world where he finds his identity, his roots. When the people

from the civilized world try to take him back, he prefers to die rather than

succumbing to their black and deep desires. Billy’s end was “as certain as

the end of solitary boats beating against the maelstrom.” (240) His death

“should not be taken as the death of an isolationist but as the triumph of

his ideals and principles.”17 Billy in a way finds his self in the primitive

world and his search is a conscious search. He thinks that a change could

be brought about in society through Romi. Romi tries to save him out of

the tribal world which ultimately leads to destruction. The search for the

higher values of life becomes the crux of Billy’s life but is cut short by

his tragic end. Billy thinks that Romi betrays him and he says “You

bastards.”(233) It is just like Julius Caesar said, “Et tu Brute” (You too

Brutus) in Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare. “In The Foreigner, it is

Sindi who infringes the society and in The Strange Case of Billy Biswas

it is the society that is responsible for the tragedy of Billy.”18 For the

representatives of modem society like Meena, Billy’s father, Billy is

somebody being caught hold of by the tribal world and the man needs to

be saved. This clash between modem day world and somebody who

wants to. make a change in it prevails till the end. That the protagonist is

killed in the end reflects the indifference of the civilized society.

109
 “Billy Biswas is a Gandhian as far as his understanding of the

present civilization goes; a Wordsworthian as he finds happiness in tribal

life of simplicity and grace.19 Due to his untimely death his quest for

something higher and nobler, something nobler remains incomplete in the

same manner, as that of the sculptor king who failed to carve the face of

god. There is a two words in the title, of the novel, “Strange” and “Case.”

Billy’s case is “strange” because he is a Ph.D. in Anthropology from New

York, he is a son of bourgeois society but all these things does not attract

him and he chooses the primitive life of the tribals. His “Case” is an

interesting psychological case-study for psycho - analysts and

psychiatrists.

Arun Joshi while dealing with the meaningless existence of man in

this modem world, has also tried to present solutions to the problems. In

The Strange Case of Billy Biswas, through the characterization of Billy,

Joshi suggests a different approach. Billy is' thoroughly simplistic in his

search of divine values. Manohar Bandopadhyay writes about Arun Joshi

and this novel:

“There are however few examples in the realm of Indian fiction

where such themes have been powerfully exploited and given

sustained treatment to match its world counterpart, when a new

110
 ground was broken by Aran Joshi in 1971 with his second, and so

far the best novel, The Strange Case of Billy Biswas, a censorious

war had sparked off damning the author for display of escapism

and defeatist alienation. Of course, the critics could not disagree for

its gripping tale, absorbing study of tribal life and the moving story

of male - female union in the “final embodiment of the human

spirit.” And quite recently there has been a positive renewal of

opinion about the novel of which we have almost no parallel in

Indo - English fiction. In this novel Joshi picked up the theme of

the maladjusted hero and rather added a new dimension to his work

in portraying his hero’s straggle not merely for his quest of identity

but also for his uncompromising search of ‘seifs spiritual reality”’20

The novelist, in this novel, has dealt with the chaotic state of man

in the modem world, the world which is engulfed within the detrimental

and abominable claws of technology. The contradictions and the

aimlessness in Billy’s character is due to the nostalgic predilection for the

native culture to which he is exposed. Aran Joshi suggests that the

technology development has taken a wrong turn and needs to be

redirected. The technology is felt to be becoming more and more

inhumane. Meenakshi Mukherjee says, “The Strange Case of Billy

111
Biswas is a compelling novel about a strange quest drawing upon myth

and folk - lore to reiterate its elemental concerns.”21 Joshi says that the

modem civilization can be saved by love of truth and beauty, sympathy

with the oppressed and beliefs in the brotherhood of man, justice and

mercy, and above all by limitation of the machinery. “The machines

should not be allowed to cripple the limbs of man.”22 As Gandhi once

said: “I am aiming not a eradication of all machinery, but limitation.”23

In the end of this novel we can say that this novel shows the

continuation of the theme, search for self-realization which abruptly came

to an end in The Foreigner. However, the character of Billy Biswas is

much different from-Sindi Oberoi. The first part of the novel, reveals the

degradation. of human values by the material progress of modem

civilization. The search for identity in this novel assumes a spiritual

dimension. It is bom out of the socio-cultural clashes to which Billy is

subjected. Billy finds himself rootless and alienated from individuals,

society and civilization. In the latter part he becomes “refugee from

civilization.” (140) He goes in the world of tribals where he finds his

identity, his roots. When the people from the civilized world try to take

him back, he prefers to die rather than succumbing to their “black and

deep desires.” The so-called civilized world destroys him by all means,

112
the tribal world “guarded him as his own.” (241) Until his reappearance

from “the sanctuary of the great god of the primitive world.” (241) The

novel is brilliant satire on modem civilization. Like Thomas Moore’s

Utopia, it is successfully portrays the old idealistic mode of life. That’s

why the hero is called “The Primitive Pilgrim.” 24 R.K. Dhawan observes

that the novel is about a mystical urge.

«|S aja r{« rja aja )|a )|a

113
 References

1. Sujatha Mathai, “I’m a Stranger to My, Books,” The Times of

India, July 9, 1983.

2. “A Winner’s Secrets, An Interview with Purabi Banerji,” The

Sunday Statesman, Feb. 27, 1983.

3. K.R.S. Iyengar, Indian Writing in English, 1962, rpt., New Delhi,

Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1984, P. 514.

4. Urmil, “The Quest for self in Arun Joshi’s The Strange Case of

Billy Biswas,” in The Novels of Arun Joshi, A Critical Study by

M.K. Bhataagaf:P7'42.

5. M.V.R. Chandran, Book Review in The Deccan Herald on

31.10.1971, P.38.

6. Ibid, P. 122.

7. William Wordsworth, “Wordsworth Poetry and Prose", (London,

Rupert Hart-Davis, 1955), P.536.

8. H.M. Prasad, Arun Joshi, (New Delhi, Amold-Heinemann, 1985),

P. 53.

114
9. Ibid, P. 55.

10. Graham Hough, The Dark Sun: A Study of D.H. Lawrence

(London: Gerald Duckworth, 1966) P. 141.

11. Wordsworth’s "Tintem Abbey."

12. H.M. Prasad, Arun Joshi (New Delhi, Amold-Heinemann, 1985),

P.58.

13.Ibid, P. 58.

14. Jasbir Jain, “Foreigners and Strangers, Arun Joshi’s Heroes,” The

Journal ofIndian Writing in English 5, No. 1 (Jan. 1977), P. 54.

15. Joy Abraham, "The Narrative Strategy in The Strange Case of

Billy Biswas," R.K. Dhawan (ed), The Novels of Arun Joshi, P.

191.

16. Prabhakar Machwe, Modernity and Contemporary Indian

Literature (Delhi, Chetna, 1978), P. 105.

17. A.N. Dwivedi, Studies in Contemporary Indian Fiction in

English (Allahabad, Kitab Mahal, 1987), P. 313.

115
18. Mukteshwar Panday, Arun Joshi: The Existentialist Element In

His Novels, (New Delhi : B.R. Publishing Corporation, 1998),

P.87.

19. Mallikarjun Patil, “Arun Joshi’s Fictional Forte,” in The Novels of

Arun Joshi by M.K. Bhatnagar. (New Delhi : Atlantic Publishers

And Distributers, 2001), P. 142.

20. Manohar Bandopadhaya, Book review in The Patriot, dated

1.8.1982.

21. Meenakshi Mukherjee, The Twice Born Fiction, (New Delhi,

Arnold-Heinemarm, 1971), P. 203.

22. Shiva Nand Jha, A Critical Study of Gandhian Economic

Thought (Agra, Laxminarayan Aggarwal, 1955), P. 126.

23.Ibid, P. 128.

24.H.M. Prasad, Arun Joshi (New Delhi: Amold-FIeinemann, 1985),

P.46.

116