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Literary Review
Origins of a genre
THE book, edited by the distinguished scholar Prof. Meenakshi Mukherjee, brings together essays by 14 eminent literary and historical authorities who look at some of the early novels in different Indian languages.
A.R. Venkatachalapathy in his analysis of Tamil novel readership in the interwar years refers to Prof. Mukherjee's guideline of enquiry in her 1985 work Realism and Reality: Novel and Society in India which changed the mode of examining the origins of the genre in India. She emphasised that it was wrong to imagine that the Indian novel was altogether a derivative form copied from the West.
It has been remarked that in North America the novel arrived at about the same time the nation was born. Using this metaphor, would it be reasonable to ask if Indian nationalism tracing its roots to the period of the Sepoy Mutiny had anything to do with the birth of the novel here? It seems doubtful because, as Namwar Singh observes, even today many middle class English-educated intellectuals are not prepared to accept the 1857 event, so to speak, as a War of Independence.
The end of the 19th Century really marked the time when novels of class made their appearance here. Here it must be noted that the period bore very little resemblance to the literary and artistic climate of the time termed fin de siecle in Europe. In India social conditions were far different with the growth of an intellectual class, among them novelists and essayists who craved for social change. For the fulfilment of this urge the novel seemed an ideally suited medium. Here it must be added that before the story-telling in print reached its modern stage of a more or less sincere attempt to mirror contemporary life, it had passed through several centuries of development through the oral tradition, highlighting the life of kings and super-heroes with the struggles, triumphs and failures of ordinary individuals overlooked at the best of times.
Almost all the essayists suggest that the Indian novel from the earliest times stood apart from its Western counterpart. However, there are instances of replication with the "realism" of Victorian fiction having made a deep impression on those who had enjoyed the benefits of English education. Ruswa's Umrao Jan Ada (1899) in Urdu was allegedly modelled on G.W.M. Reynold's Rosa Lambert.
The mere hunt for the first novel in each language could be enjoyed as a trivial pursuit but the purpose of the essayists in this volume is to go even beyond such an exercise. The aim is to form an understanding of the compulsions which led writers taking to this medium to address problems touching the human condition. The first novel in Telugu was written by Naraharisetty Gopalakrishnama in 1872. Yet, there is the interesting observation in C. Vijaysree's essay that when Kandukuri Veeresalingam's Rajsekhara Charitra appeared in 1878, "it was hailed as the first novel in Telugu."
Veeresalingam had enemies without number because of the fact that he was a radical social thinker. No less a person than the outstanding educationist Dr. C.R. Reddy attested at a memorial convened to mourn the death of Veeresalingam in 1919 that "Taken all in all, Veeresalingam is the greatest Andhra of modern times."
Indian novels reflected strong cultural identities. Interestingly, it's on record that some of the more enlightened British administrators and even missionaries encouraged creative literary writing in regional languages. There is the case in point of the influence in the 19th Century of "Brown's College" on the history of Telugu literature.
As Tilottoma Misra suggests, in Assam the Asamiya language was restored to its rightful place in schools by the missionaries though the British administration had replaced the language with Bangla. The missionary and other printing presses that cropped up in Assam as elsewhere, helped not a little in the promotion of creative writing. The first Asamiya fiction narrative in prose happened to be a rendering of Pilgrim's Progress.
In Saroj Bandopadhyay's account, there is a reference to an opinion that Alaler Gharer Dulal (1858) by Pyarichand Mitra was the first Bangla novel, an "imperishable work" inasmuch as it affirmed that "the true material of literature is all around us at home."
About Bankimchandra Chatterjee's first novel Rajmohan's Wife (1864) the question is often asked as to why a writer who in a very short time was going to become an immortal in Bangla prose chose the medium of English for his first fictional venture. Bankimchandra is widely extolled for his patriotic novel Anandamath to which we owe the anthem "Vande Mataram", though some of his other works are valued as being of equal social significance.
Malayalam's ascendancy in the genre is traced with perception by Udaya Kumar, centering his analysis on works such as Chandu Menon's Indulekha and Sarada as also works by C.V. Ramana Pillai and others.
Govardhanram Tripathi's famous four-part novel Sarasvatichandra has for long years remained a canonical text of Gujarati literature, observes Tripid Suhrud. Interesting are the speculations on the genre concerning translations of, for example, Marathi novels, in the contribution by Aniket Jaaware. And so on.
There is much else in this well-indexed, fascinating enquiry which offers in the bargain many insights into social history.
Early Novels in India, edited by Meenakshi Mukherjee, Sahitya Akademi, p.270, Rs. 140.
JAIBOY JOSEPH
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