96

How to Read an Indian Novel

JAMES W. EARL*

Contemporary Indian literature remains largely unknown in the United States, in spite of its
considerable present-day energy and diversity. The few writers who have made an impression
(R. K. Narayan, Vikram Seth) are inevitably read in a kind of literary isolation: texts without
context.

Salman Rushdie (Damme, 50)

I begin a course on the Indian English-language novel with this quotation from Salman
Rushdie. It raises the question, just what is the context of the Indian novel? If college
syllabi posted on the Internet are any guide, Indian novels are being read today mostly in
the context of global post-colonialism. In the classroom at least, in the West, the context
for Rushdie and other Indian English-language writers seems to be the literatures of the
Carribean, Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, read under the aegis of Franz
Fanon, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak.
For all its obvious attractions, this global approach has its limitations. First of all, it
begins with Rushdie, as if he were the Indian novels fulfillment and its norm. Rushdie
has cooperated with this error by embracing his role as patron and arbiter of Indian
writing, both in the New Yorker Indian Fiction Issue from which the above quotation is
taken, and his Vintage Book of Indian Writing, 19471997. For many readers today, then,
the most immediate context of the Indian novel is Salman Rushdiewho, ironically, is
widely resented among Indias literary establishment as an inauthentic, non-Indian voice
(Chandra, Cult of Authenticity). Rushdie overshadows scores of goodand some
greatIndian English-language novelists who share little with him literarily.
There is a second, even more serious, limitation to the global post-colonial approach.
Granting that Indian novels, both colonial and post-colonial, are open to political
analysis, the problem remains that they are still read as novels. The novel is a European
genre, with a typical narratology, typical forms and aesthetics, typical social and cultural
functions, and most of all a typical focus on the modern individual. V. S. Naipaul
describes the genre of the novel (reasonably) as a response to the here-and-now (226),
and he considers Indias other-worldliness incompatible with it. Several Indian critics
?

Prof. James W. Earl, Department of English, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403, USA.

Literary Imagination, volume 9, number 1, pp. 96117

doi:10.1093/litimag/imm014
The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars
and Critics. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

James W. Earl

97

have argued that Indias de-emphasis on individualism makes the term Indian novel
something of an oxymoron (Ramamurti, 2).
The English novel has a history of its own, the latest chapter of which might seem
to be the Indian novel. Born with English colonialism, the English novel was reborn
(some would say given a second life) when the colonies, including India, gained
their independence. It has even been argued that the same socioeconomic conditions
(e.g., industrialization) that contributed to the rise of the novel in England in the first
place gave birth to it again in India a century later. Thus, India might be said to have its
own Defoe, its own Fielding (Ramamurti, 26768). Such a formulation has its own
colonialist twist: it comprehends the Indian novel as a sub-genre of the English novelas
if English novel were a Platonic form, manifesting itself whenever and wherever
socialeconomic conditions are right.
There is a third and even greater limitation to the global approach: whatever the
Indian novel might share with other post-colonial literaturesand that is obviously a
great dealit nevertheless grew in its own native soil, in Indias unique historical and
cultural situation. The distinctive character of the Indian tradition should not be effaced
in our search for a universal theory, whether of the novel or of post-colonialism. There is
a good deal more to India than the Raj or the absence of the Raj.
Approaching Indian novels from the West inevitably yields subtly distorted readings.
These are nicely illustrated in the second-hand copies I buy: many contain underlinings
and marginal notes by students who tend to mark passages of even negligible importance
having to do with Westerners. In the first chapter of my copy of R. K. Narayans Vendor
of Sweets, for example, a previous reader has marked this sentence:
Normally he would not have bothered to design a piece of furniture, as the family always
sat on the polished floor, but he had frequent visits from a Mr. Noble, an Englishman,
the District Collector, who came for lessons in astrology, and found it painful to sit on
the floor, and even more painful to extricate himself from the sitting posture at the end of the
lessons. (8)

This reader did not bother to mark the next passage, where Jagan the sweets-vendor,
who prides himself on his Gandhian principles, looks up from reading the Bhagavad
Gita in his shop to bark, Captain, that beggar should not be seen here except on Fridays.
This is not a charity home! (9); or Jagans outburst when he discovers that his son is
going to America to learn how to write novels: Going there to learn story-telling!
He should rather go to a village granny, he said . . .. Did Valmiki go to America or
Germany in order to learn to write his Ramayana? (34) And seldom marked are the
many passages in the novel that reflect how much Narayan himself learned from Valmiki
and the village granny (a thinly veiled reference to his own grandmother, as we learn in
The Grandmothers Tale and My Days).
My students too tend to pay special attention to Western characters and Western
influence in Indian novelsostensibly out of concern for colonial and post-colonial
themes, but mostly, I sense, because these provide moments of familiarity and
identification in what are generally disorienting narratives. It is like the relief a
Westerner feels running into other Western travelers in India; or consider how
Richard Attenborough makes Gandhi accessible to Western audiences in the film
Gandhi, by always placing at his side one Westerner or another with whom we can

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How to Read an Indian Novel

safely identify. Gandhis Autobiography, written in Gujarati for Indian readers, offers
quite a contrast: whereas Attenborough focuses on nonviolent resistance (which
Gandhi learned from Ruskin, Tolstoy, and Thoreau, rather than from India), in the
autobiography that theme is inseparable from Gandhis religious beliefs, social and
sanitary reforms, sexual renunciation, fasting, folk-medicine, and a host of his other
passions that are distinctly Indian. Students find the movie immediately accessible,
the Autobiography, at least at first, bizarre.
Naturally we are interested in colonial and post-colonial themes in Indian Englishlanguage novels; and naturally, as English-speaking Westerners, we are interested in how
the novels exhibit and analyze English influence and Westernization in India. After all,
both their language and their genre are conspicuous legacies of colonialism. But there is
another equally natural approach, and that is the one I take in my course: it is possible to
read these novels as Indianas part of an indigenous storytelling tradition extending
back to Indias ancient epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata; reflecting the long
literary tradition that includes the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Puranas, and the
classical drama of Kalidasa; embodying the rasa aesthetics of Bharata and other classical
theorists; borrowing from the fables, parables and linked tales of the Pancatantra,
Hitopadesa, and Kathasaritsagara; and bearing the imprint of kavya and bhakti poetry
to name just a few of the many basic texts and traditions still influential today in Indias
many languages.
It would hardly be surprising if Indian novels were to reflect Indian concepts and
habits of thought! Many of these concepts and habits of thought strongly impinge on the
way a novel might be constructed: ways of theorizing and representing character and
motivation, for example, or plot and causality; ways of deploying imagery and
symbolism, or weaving together thought and feeling, of imagining the body, nature,
family, the life-world, inspiration, unity or closure. One of the founders of the genre in
English, Mulk Raj Anand, complains, European critics think that there may be some
deeper humanist currents behind my novels, but they dont know the background of my
philosophical quest or the Indian experience (Berry, 80). For Anand, as for most Indian
novelists, the natural context of the Indian novel is India.
The case for a deep Indian tradition shaping the Indian novel is stronger even than the
analogous case in the West, where the Classics and the Bible (not to mention Humanism,
the Enlightenment and Romanticism) are obvious enough influences upon the novel
from its beginnings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Western readers are
thoroughly accustomed to traditional Western conceptions of plot, cause and effect,
character, mimesis, unity, economy, tension, conflict, catharsis, etc., even in their
absence. Compared to the Western tradition, however, Indias is far more conservative
and pervasive. Indias ancient literature is a much more active ingredient in modern
Indian life than our ancient literature is in ours. For example, the Ramayana and the
Bhagavad Gita strongly shaped Gandhis village-centered anti-modern vision, which
dominated Indias experience for the first half of the century, and thus coincidentally
dominated the early development of the Indian novel.
Indias ancient epics are still alive today, revered as sacred texts by official and popular
culture alike. They remain as influential in modern India as Homer was in ancient Greece,
or the Koran is in the Islamic world. In The Great Indian Novel, Shashi Tharoor recounts
Indias modern history as a slightly different version of the Mahabharata. The conceit is

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99

only an extreme case of the general rule that Indian novels are firmly rooted in Indian
literary tradition. Tagores The Home and the World is a miniature Ramayana; Raja Raos
Kanthapura is famously described by Iyengar (391) as a Gandhi-purana; Narayans
Grandmothers Tale evokes the stories of Damayanti and Savitri from the
Mahabharata; Sealys Everest Hotel is rooted in Kalidasas Ritusamhara (The Gathering
of Seasons)the main character is even named Ritu, season.
Although Indian novels may look Western enoughalthough they are written in
English, borrow liberally from Western authors, include Western characters, often
focus on the Westernization of India, observe Western cultures through Indian eyes
or India through Western eyestheir narratives are almost always generated from
the immense stock of indigenous stories, which their authors allude to constantly
and explicitly. It is a perfectly natural approach for an Indian critic to ask, What
tale is this novel retelling? Why is this character named Rama, or that one Savitri,
or Ritu? Beyond such source-hunting, however, we should keep in mind that
indigenous stories bring with them indigenous concepts of plot, character, unity,
realism, symbolism, etc.
Because Western readers may be unaware of these indigenous concepts, Indian novels
often present us with a sort of optical illusion: what looks perfectly familiar can in fact
mean something quite unexpectedlike a beautiful necklace in an Indian shop,
which when we ask to try it on turns out not to be a necklace but prayer-beads; or the
white sari that looks perfectly bridal to us, but is Indias costume of widowhood.
In the world of Indian novels there are numberless examples of such cross-cultural
(in fact, colonialist) misreadings.

A Few Optical Illusions

1. Readers of Rushdies Midnights Children will recognize the little flourish in
the following sentences as a signature feature of that books style:
Close-up of my grandfathers right hand: nails knuckles fingers all somehow bigger than
youd expect. (31)
Leaflet newspaper mosque and wall are crying: . . . HartalApril 7, agree mosque newspaper
wall and pamphlet . . .. He is not sure if the hartal of pamphlet mosque wall newspaper is his
fight. (32)
Bearers guests washerwomen stream into the room and flap at the burning fabric with dusters
towels and other peoples laundry. (33)

This small but extremely memorable device, the unpunctuated series, is a distinctive
grammatical idiosyncracy of Midnights Children. Readers of the Western modernist
novel are delighted by such stylistic novelties. Perhaps Rushdie picked it up from the
only Western novel that uses it (at least the only one I know of), Saul Bellows Humboldts
Gift. But perhaps not; for, as rare as this stylistic trait may be in English, it is so
common in the Indian languages that it has its own grammatical term, dvandva
(technically, a dual compoundthe more general term is sam:sa, joining). In Sanskrit
and in modern languages like Hindi and Malayalam, nouns or adjectives can be listed
in this way, simply by stringing them together without conjunctions or punctuation.
Among the many examples cited in Whitneys Sanskrit Grammar is this one:
rogacokapar;t:pabandanavyasan:ni, disease pain grief captivity misfortune (p. 486).

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How to Read an Indian Novel

When the trope appears in Arundati Roys God of Small Things, as in the unforgettable
orangedrink lemondrink man, one wonders if it was borrowed from Rushdie or
from Malayalam speech, or both. In any case it is probably not just a Western
modernist tic.
Such stylistic effects will only be half-understood by readers unacquainted with
Indian languages and culture. As another example, note how Amit Chaudhuri lapses into
the Indian languages fondness for passive participial constructions:
Through this lane we passed till noises were heard and lights were seen. All the family
was there, in the courtyard adjoining the small temple, and already there was a singer
performing inside, his voice heard and serenely ignored as it came through the loudspeaker.
(Afternoon Raag, 221)

In the West, writers generally avoid passive constructions as weak; but in India,
for millennia writers have considered them decorous polite correct classical. Whitney
again: The construction of a passive verb (or participle) with an instrumental of the
agent is common from the earliest period, and becomes decidedly more so later,
the passive participle with instrumental taking to no small extent the place of an active
verb with its subject (p. 95). This common decentering of the grammatical subject in
Indian languages implies, perhaps, a decentering of the subject in a larger sense. In any
case, what used to be called Babu English, and is sometimes still dismissed as
Hinglish, often lends a genuinely Indian inflection to what is in fact a polished and
accomplished English.
2. A less trivial sort of illusion, again illustrated by Rushdie, is exemplified in the
structure of The Satanic Verses or The Ground Beneath Her Feet, or in Chandras Red
Earth and Pouring Rain. The intertwining, layered narratives of these novels seem
calculated to puzzle the reader at each new twist, making us wonder what relative status
to assign alternate histories, or stories within dreams within stories.
Every time I go to sleep the dream starts up from where it stopped. Same dream in the same
place. As if somebody just paused the video while I went out of the room. Or, or. As if hes
the guy whos awake and this is the bloody nightmare. His bloody dream: us. Here. All of it.
(Satanic Verses, 83)

It might seem obvious that such mental labyrinths are an example of postmodern
technique, a` la Borges Pynchon Calvino, purposely undermining the readers assumptions
about knowledge, reality and truthexcept that similar Moebius-looping frame
narratives are also common in the Indian epics. For example, not only does Valmiki
write himself into the plot of the Ramayana, but he has the poem recited within itself to
its own hero. Vyasa, the putative author of the Mahabharata, appears in his own epic
toonot only as the progenitor of its heroes, but as the author, who intervenes in the
action at will. An even more extreme case is the medieval Kathasaritsagara, where
storytellers acting in one story suddenly remember that they were gods or demons in
previous lives and recount their otherworldly stories within looping frame narratives that
outdo the Arabian Nights.
I knew that I would be free of the curse when Puspadanta arrived, said Kanabhuti. At that
very moment, Vararuci remembered his origins and spoke as if he were waking from a deep
sleep, I am that same Puspadanta. Listen to the story from me . . .. (Somadeva, 6)

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101

What postmodern technique could Rushdie not have learned from the Indian literary
tradition? That is a good question, but a related one is more profound: what purpose did
such narratives serve when they were written in the fifth century BCE or the tenth CE?
Traditional Indian storytelling techniques were invented to serve an ancient Indian belief
system, not a modern Western lack of one. What traditional Indian ideas might we
be mistaking for our own postmodern bewilderment when we read Indian novels?
It is tempting, even inevitable, to compare Indian novels to European ones we have
read, just as I have compared Midnights Children to Humboldts Gift, and the Satanic
Verses to Borges, Pynchon, and Calvino. Similarly, Chaudhuris lush objectivity in
passages like the following might strike a Western reader as an odd marriage of Virginia
Woolfs stream-of-consciousness and the detachment of A. S. Byatt or Adam Thorpe:
They gazed into the mirror and at each other with vague, approving looks, and sometimes
bent down to help each other with their hair. Like lilypads, they floated on a surface of
images. They dabbed themselves with perfume; each drop of strong perfume could spread
like a rumour around the room and then the house. (A Strange and Sublime Address, 58)

Chaudhuris relentless vivid metaphoricity, however, and the continuous bright light he
trains on the smallest details of life, are actually more reminiscent of the Indian epics than
of Western models. The length and the slow pace of the Ramayana encourage the poet to
linger and embellish every scene:
A sorrow such as she had never known swept over her, and Rama saw his mother fall down in
a faint, like a broken plantain tree. He came to her side and helped her up, and as she stood
there in her desolation, like a mare forced to draw a heavy load, he brushed away the dust
that covered her whole body. (II.17)

3. A third sort of illusion, trivial perhaps but symptomatic, can be illustrated by the use
of proper names. In Indian novels, characters names are often withheld, or withheld for a
long time and then introduced in a casual way. In Tagores The Home and the World,
for example, Nikkis sister, an important character, is never named. In Raja Raos
Kanthapura the narrators name, Achakka, is mentioned only once, and even then so
incidentally that only the most attentive reader will catch it. Narayan offers many
examples: in Mr. Sampath, the eponymous hero is referred to only as the printer for
sixty-seven pages before his name is finally mentioned passingly in conversation; the
Talkative Mans name is Madhu, introduced only at the very end of that book; and in
A Tiger for Malgudi, we never learn the name of The Master. When someone asks him,
Who are you? he replies, You are asking a profound question. Ive no idea who I am!
(103) The same question and response appear as a joke in Mr. Sampath: when an old man
asks, Who are you? Srinivas answers, It is a profound question. What mortal can
answer it? (9) When Srinivas regrets the joke and does answer the question, he still does
not tell his name, but simply says I am a frantic house-hunter; and even when the old
man takes him home, he still never tells his name. In Anita Desais In Custody the main
characters surname is first mentioned only after a hundred pages; and in Chaudhuris
Afternoon Raag we have another narrator who never bothers to reveal his name.
Is this common oddity calculated enough to qualify as a literary feature? Is it a
technique for creating a kind of suspense? It certainly had that effect on this Western
reader, at least before I had read enough novels to realize how common it is. Now I
suspect it reflects Indian social practice: whereas Westerners learn to announce their

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How to Read an Indian Novel

names as one of their first speech acts, Indians typically withhold their names out of
politeness. Perhaps it is another symptom of a broader attitude toward subjectivity,
like the decentering of the subject in passive sentence structure. In an Indian family,
people are often addressed not by name but by relationship, e.g., little brother. It is also
traditional for Indian women not to speak their husbands names; and unlike Westerners,
Indians seldom ask for ones name directly. The treatment of names may be social rather
than literary, then; but it is still a signature of Indian storytellingone of many such
signatures.
4. The greatest illusion of all, however, the one that accounts for these others, is the
most elusive: it is an assumption that most of us bring to our reading, that human nature
is more or less the same everywhere, and that our common humanity allows us to identify
with characters (and authors) from other cultures, as long as they seem recognizable and
interpretable. Westerners tend to assume that the self is the self, that novels explore their
characters (and authors) selves, and that language creates a natural inter-subjectivity.
We innocently and unconsciously project our own subjectivity into our reading. It is a
sort of inadvertent mental colonialism which can infect our every interpretation.
This problem of subjectivity is a classic issue of Indian-English criticism. The novelist
Balachandra Rajan protests, The inwardness of Indianness, we are told, cannot be
captured by a language essentially foreign; the subtlest and most vital nuances are
accessible only to a living speech with its roots in the soil and in the organic past (85).
Is it possible even to discuss such a thing as the inwardness of Indianness, or Indian
subjectivity, without falling into gross essentialism? If Indian inwardness resists
language, we can only infer it indirectly and notice it gradually. In the process of reading
Indian novels our awareness of Indian otherness emerges slowly, as experience allows us
to notice as unfamiliar what at first seems familiar. That, at least, has been my experience.
Let us assume, then, that Indian English-language novels do have a number of
distinctive featuresstructural, narratological, stylistic, aesthetic, etc. When these seem to
depart from Western norms, as with Rushdies lists, or frame-narratives, or the treatment
of names, Western readers unfamiliar with Indian traditions are apt to read them
as modernist and postmodernist experimentationthat is, as yet another case of
Euro-American influence. If we want to avoid or minimize this tendency, how well do we
have to know the Indian literary tradition? How many Indian novels does one have to
read before recognizing such features as typically Indian, rather than as reflective of
Western models?

Reading Sixty Novels

Answering this question requires some intuition, and I do not want to exaggerate my own
expertise, which anyone could equal with only a few years of study. As a European
medievalist I have long had a comparatists interest in the Indian epics; as a teacher of
World Literature and Humanities I became familiar with the Bhagavad Gita, Kalidasas
S:kuntala, some bhakti poetry, the elements of Hinduism and the art of the Hindu
temple. These interests were deepened by a summer in India and a year of Sanskrit study.
Then for a few years I focused my pleasure-reading on some sixty Indian novelsby
Tagore, Banerji, Anand, Narayan, Rao, Markandaya, Desai, Jhabvala, Rushdie, Mistry,
Mukherjee, Alexander, Seth, Chaudhuri, Chandra, Tharoor, Roy, Sealy, the younger

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Desai, Nigam, Suri, and Mishrawith generous amounts of criticism of these writers,
most of it Indian, some Western.
(It should be noted that Rushdie is the only writer on this list whom one might
identify as a Muslim, albeit a secular one. Perhaps that is another reason why Rushdie
does not seem to me the norm or fulfillment of the Indian novel. It is a limitation of the
following discussion that I have not sought out Indian Muslim writers specifically,
and have not explored distinctly Islamic influence on these novelists. Rather, I focus on
what is usually called the Hindu tradition. Although we should not confuse Hindu with
Indian, what I am calling here the Indian novel, Indian philosophy and Indian
literary practices, are easily recognized as more Hindu than Muslim. This awkwardness
seems to be endemic in Indian literary studies.)
Only after the first twenty novels did I arrive at something like a critical mass,
and begin to feel comfortable generalizing about them the way I am doing here.
Forty novels later, my perceptions have changed considerably. Narayan, who seemed at
first no more than delightful, has grown in stature; read in full and in context, he now
towers as an innovative, wise and gentle genius working in miniatures, like Borges.
Naipaul reports the same discovery: What had seemed speculative and comic . . . turned
out to be something else, the expression of an almost hermetic philosophical system.
(India, 1217). Also, the more I read the three giants who gave the Indian Englishlanguage novel shape in the Thirties, Anand, Rao, and Narayan, the more I was impressed
by their achievements. These three, with their sharply distinct interests, ideas, styles and
temperaments, during their long and varied careers staked out the Indian novels rich
possibilities. When I began this essay all three were alive and active, almost as old as the
century; they will all be gone by the time it is in print.
A hundred more novels by these and other authors still beckon from the
bookstore shelves, and it will be many years before I can claim to have read even the
two Indian epics in their vast entirety. A Western reader, especially one starting late, is
always playing catch-up; but for all the problems of perception, for all the optical
illusions, I console myself that foreigners sometimes notice what natives take for
granted.
Now I will itemize some of the indigenous conceptions of plot, character, unity, etc.
mentioned earlier, which are characteristic of the Indian novel. These are the stylistic
features that have gradually emerged in my reading, which have allowed me to approach
the issue of the otherness of Indian subjectivity. No single novel displays all these features,
and some novels are unmarked by any of them; but by calculating their density in any
novel, I locate it on a rough continuum stretching from the strongly indigenous to the
highly Westernized. I speak only of style, rather than subject matter, insofar as those are
separable. At the indigenous end of the spectrum there is Banerjis Pather Panchali, then
Tagore, Narayan, Anand, and Rao; toward the other end are Markandaya, Jhabvala,
Alexander, Mukherjee, Tharoor, Kiran Desai, and several of todays young writers,
who are strikingly Western in style; in the middle range are Anita Desai, Rushdie, Seth,
Sealy, Mistry, Chandra, Chaudhuri, and Roy.
There is nothing very surprising in this list; it turns out to be roughly chronological, and
reflects the growing importance of expatriate Indian writers addressing an international
audience in a more and more international style. Of course, it is wrong to say that some
novels are more Indian than others. There is no real India, and no Indian novelist,

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How to Read an Indian Novel

certainly none writing in English, has ever been free of Western influence. Even so, if we
watch for the following several features, and adopt this nomenclature tentatively, we do
notice some interesting and unexpected things. For example, Narayans later novels seem
less Western than his early onesindicating that as he matured as a writer he gradually
shed his Western models and rediscovered the voices of Valmiki and the village granny.
The same may be true of Tagores novels: the early Binodini is more Western in plot and
character development than Home and the World and Quartet.
Then there is the optical illusion of Anands style: what initially looks like Western
social realism in his novels turns out to be surprisingly Indian, owing much more to
Gandhi and Nehru than to Marx, Zola, or Sinclairin fact, Soviet and Marxist critics
have long made this complaint (Cowasjee, 99, 153). Another surprise: Markandayas
popular and influential Nectar in a Sieve is really quite Western in style, stylistically closer
to Pearl Bucks The Good Earth than to traditional Indian narrative. However, we must be
wary of overhasty judgments: for example, the critic Meenakshi Mukherjee explains that
Seths Suitable Boy, which Western critics always compare to Jane Austen, might just as
well been written in Bengali, where a tradition exists of long three-decker realistic stories
about families (Chandra, Cult of Authenticity). By my calculation, those writers
emerging in the generation after Rushdie who are most Indian in style are Sealy,
Chaudhuri, and Roy; and their Indianness certainly does not make them less modern
and innovative than those writing in more Western stylesquite the opposite.
Such judgments must seem very subjective, and to some degree they are. They are not
entirely impressionistic, however, because they depend on the following list of indigenous
concepts and stylistic features, which seemed to compile itself as I read my first sixty
novels.

Eight Stylistic Features of Indian Novels

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has said that in order to be true to Indian reality, a truly Indian
novel would be bits of prose-poetry, anecdotes, lots of philosophizing and musing,
an oblique kind of wit, and an ultimate self-surrender, a sinking back into formlessness,
into eternity . . . (G. Mishra, 10). Raja Raos The Cat and Shakespeare leaps to mind as
the fullest examplebut not the only oneof the rambling, formless, poetic, and
philosophizing Indian novel she describes.
I have a system of no logic, and that is the story. What logic can speak of Usha? How and
what shall I say about Shantha? She lives backward, as it were, when, with her rounded belly,
she moves forward. Birth is instantaneous with time. Who is born where? Time is born in
time. And that is Shantha. (32)

Many Indian novels veer in this direction stylistically in their attempts to be true
to Indian realitynot objective but subjective reality. The elements of this style
which I touch on here are plot, character, irony, drama, emotion, form, orality, and
allegory.

1. Plot
The well-known term karma provides a convenient starting-point. Karma is
often translated action, and would seem therefore to be a key component of plot;
but as a philosophical and religious term it has no equivalent in European thought.

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105

Without hazarding a definition, we can say at least that in a novel karmic action does not
consist of chains of observable causes and effects, but rather a sort of action-at-a-distance,
moral reverberations of events often outside the novels range, or in the distant past, even
in characters previous lives. Actions are meaningful, but often they just seem to happen
because they ought to, without a particular realistic causality. When conceived of as
karma, then, a novels action is likely to feel disconnected to a Western reader, surreal,
parabolic, or postmodern; but surreal, parabolic and postmodern only approximate the
Indian concept by appropriating it into our vocabulary without trying to understand it.
To imagine a Western analogy to how karmic plot actually works, we might imagine a
Western novel in which characters are immersed in astrological or divine determinism,
which operates silently behind, in tandem with, or in opposition to the personal
motivations that constitute the realistic plot. Ancient and medieval Western literature is
sometimes structured this way, and these unrealistic elements in ancient epic and
medieval romance pose problems for many readers; but in the novel, where realistic
expectations are higher, where the genre is realistic by its nature, the problem is more
acute.
Narayans novels have exemplified such karmic surrealism since 1935. His chief
characters can hardly be called protagonists; rather, they are hapless, caught in plots they
cannot understand or even affect, much less control. To Western readers these characters
often seem shallow and comicalso many passive Walter Mittys caught in a world of
such complex social pressures that their thoughts and emotions easily become disengaged
from the reality to which they are expected to conform.
Sriram felt parched, and looked at the tray longingly. He wished he could go up and buy a
crescent. The thought of biting into its cool succulence was tantalizing. He was at a distance
and if he left his seat hed have no chance of getting back to it. He watched a lot of others
giving their cash and working their teeth into the crescent. Waiting for the Mahatma makes
one very thirsty, he thought. (Waiting for the Mahatma, 2122)

The combination of sharp observation (working their teeth into the crescent) and the
odd, passive illogic of the last thought is typical. Characters like Sriram do not act, but are
acted upon. When Narayans characters do act, they are inevitably chastened by the
experience, as in The Guide, Mr. Sampath, or The Financial Expert. Why do things happen
to these characters? Because they do; because they must; perhaps even because they
have happened before, in Indian myth, legend, or literature. Minor characters invade
the plot and vanish again like so many gods or demons delivering news, advice, gifts,
or punishments. These novels may be realistic in some sense, but the world they seem to
portray realistically is one where action is seldom a result of willed choice, and seldom
results in predictable outcomes.
Interestingly, Narayans women tend not to be as helpless as his men. They are often
strong-willed incarnations of traditional heroines like Radha, Savitri, Sakuntala,
Damayanti, Sita, or Mother India (as in Waiting for the Mahatma, The Painter of Signs,
Grandmothers Tale, and Talkative Man). Many, however, like the archetypal wife
Savitri in The Dark Room, drift in the karmic tides as helplessly as the men. When they try
to act, the results are usually disappointment, or, at best, necessity. Savitris return to her
brutal and faithless husband at the end of The Dark Room may seem disappointing to us,
but in the world of the novel it is as natural and inevitable as gravity.

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Tagores novels, thirty years earlier and written in Bengali rather than English, can be
described in much the same way, for all the differences between Tagores style and
Narayans. Although Tagore could never be mistaken as comic, as Narayan often is,
his characters seem similarly undeveloped and incapable of strong action, even when
caught in dramas of mythic dimensions. The three characters in Home and the World are
modern incarnations of Rama, Ravana and Sita. Nikhil, like Rama, does only what he
must, not what he wishes. Quartet fits the same mold, two men and a woman locked in a
spiritual battle; what little action there is is patterned by moral necessity rather than
the characters choices and motivations, which are left vague, at least by Western
standards.
Lets go back to Uncles house in Calcutta, I suggested to Sachish.
I am not ready for that, Sachish replied.
I couldnt see what he meant. He went on: Once I tried to base my life on intelligence and
found that it couldnt take lifes full weight. Then I tried to build my life on ecstatic devotion
and found it was bottomless. Intelligence is an aspect of my self, and so is mysticism. It is not
possible to balance oneself on oneself. Unless I find some support I cant return to the city.
Tell me what to do, I said. (6162)

2. Character
As action can be defined by karma, character can be defined by dharma, which is the
moral necessity just referred to. A dharmic definition of character is not psychological or
even characterological by Western standards. Why do the characters of Narayan, Anand,
and Rao, the three great English-language novelists of the Thirties, always seem so thin,
even when deep in meditation or thickly embedded in relationships, if not action?
Their emotions seem to be blown this way and that by random events. Wisdom may
sometimes hold them steady, but we seldom feel the force of personal conviction or
personality, as we expect in Western characters. The same might be said of Tagores
characters: although they are certainly held morally responsible, they seem not to be
independent agents determining their actions. Nikhil, the central character in The Home
and the World, refuses to intervene when his wife takes up with another man, and refuses
to act when Bengal rises against the British. He speaks of both at once:
I must not lose my faith: I shall wait. The passage from the narrow to the larger world is
stormy. When she is familiar with this freedom, then I shall know where my place is. If I
discover that I do not fit in with the arrangement of the outer world, then I shall not quarrel
with my fate, but silently take my leave . . .. Use force? But for what? Can force prevail against
Truth? (45)

Such dharma-characters can be found in every sub-genre of the Indian novel:

in Anands dry Gandhian realism (Untouchable, Coolie, Two Leaves and a Bud), the
witty parables of Narayan (Financial Expert, Mr. Sampath, Talkative Man), or Raos
brooding interiority and chaotic stream of consciousness (The Serpent and the Rope,
The Cat and Shakespeare).
Dharma is what one must do, and characters are often measured by how well they
respond to their individual dharmas. It is not an inner drive or a destiny, but ones
personal relationship to society and God. Ones dharma is not self-evident, however;
it has to be discovered and understood before it can be followed. The tension in

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these novels, then, is often between a character who seems to know his dharma and
acts according to it, and another who falls under the others charasmatic spell as he
struggles to understand his own dharma. Western readers are likely to think of these two
types as strong and weak characters, but that would be a mistake. Strong characters
like Sandip in The Home and the World or Sampath in Mr. Sampath may be self-assertive,
but they are often weak in understanding; and weak characters like Nikhil or Srinivas
in the same novels may be spiritually strong even in their confusion and inaction.
Vivekananda captures this contrast with sutra-like economy: Activity is the manifestation of inferior strength, and calmness of the superior (119). Truly strong characters, like
the wonderful Govindan Nair in The Cat and Shakespeare, may be worthy gurus; but since
dharma is not a system of moral absolutes, it is always difficult to tell exactly how worthy
they are. Truly weak characters, on the other hand, like Anands destitute Bakha, Munoo,
and Gangu, may actually be true to their dharmas uncomprehendingly, and therefore
morally strong even in their utter bewilderment and passivity, while the unearned
strength of their oppressors actually masks weakness.

3. Irony
Karma and dharma together imply ethical ideas that bear little resemblance to Western
ethics, and in some ways contradict them flatly. Many of my students are put off by the
key doctrine of non-attachment that the Bhagavad-Gita offers as the highest wisdom.
Be intent on action [karma], not on the fruits of action;
avoid attraction to the fruits and attachment to inaction!
Perform actions, firm in discipline, relinquishing attachment;
be impartial to failure and successthis equanimity is called discipline [yoga].
(II, 4748)

Like karma and dharma, non-attachment has literary consequences in the representation of plot and character. Plot is often conceived along quite different lines
than in the West, where we are accustomed to conflict/resolution, or loss/renewal.
In these novels, it is more likely to take the form of attachment/non-attachment.
For example, the surprise ending of Suitable Boy, a novel so apparently Western that
it is compared to Pride and Prejudice, only makes sense when we realize that the heroine
Lata has finally achieved a proper indifference to the very issue that Western readers care
most aboutromantic loveand submits to her daughterly dharma, agreeing to marry
a man she does not love. Similarly, at the end of The Serpent and the Rope Ramaswami
breaks all his attachments, including his marriage, to seek an Indian guru in
a consummate act of passive submission. In Indian terms, these are positive,
strong resolutions.
Nonattachment may also account for many of the weak characterizations mentioned
earlier. Raos Ramaswamy, for example, strikes Western readers as cold and infuriatingly
abstract. Many of Naryayans characters also seem curiously detached from the action
around them, and other characters learn from experience to become detached. Western
readers can be forgiven if at first they find the endings of novels like The Bachelor of Arts
and The World of Nagaraj anticlimactic, as their passionate plots dissolve and the hero
drifts free in what looks like acquiescence or indifference. In The Painter of Signs this

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resolution takes place only in the last few sentences, after Raman has been suddenly
ditched by Daisy:
He looked at the key in his hand. To hell with it, he said, and slung it into the dry
fountainan act which somehow produced the great satisfaction of having his own way at
last. He mounted his cycle and turned towards The Boardless [a hotel]that solid, real world
of sublime souls who minded their own business. (143)

We may suspect such endings are ironic, but that is probably a mistake; we are instead
peering into the depths of non-attachment, for the authors own ironic detachment is
another of this themes stylistic byproducts. Even Anand, with his Marxist commitment
to social reform, was criticized from all sides for his commitment to action rather than to
the fruits of actionas revealed in this conversation with Gandhi:
[Gandhi asked] Why write a novel? Why not a tract on untouchability? I answered that a
novel was more human and could produce contrary emotions and shades of feeling, whereas
a tract could become biased, and that I liked a concrete as against a general statement.
The Mahatma said: The straight book is truthful and you can reform people by saying things
frankly. I said: Though I do want to help people, I believe in posing the question rather
than answering it. (Berry, 40)

Detachment is also one of the doctrines of European modernism, of courseone

thinks of Flauberts and Joyces dicta about the artist as a god, above and indifferent to his
creationbut Anand understands the concept in distinctively Indian terms: The novelist
should try to become the great god, Brahma, who creates mankind, but is not responsible
for it (quoted in Cowasjee, 38).
Non-attachment is a metaphysical as well as ethical concept. Hindu asceticism, like
asceticism in other religions, is a statement about the value of the physical world in
relation to another, higher one. In Rohinton Mistrys A Fine Balance, one character says,
Thats the secretto distract your senses. Have I told you my theory about them? I think that
our sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing are all calibrated for the enjoyment of a perfect world.
But since the world is imperfect, we must put blinders on the senses. (238)

The image of blinders comes alive in another novel published in the same year, Vikram
Chandras Red Earth and Pouring Rain: one of the two protagonists, Sanjay, must always
wear an eye-patch, because while one of his eyes sees the physical world, the other sees the
spiritual one. By an odd coincidence, the exact same motif appears in Rushdies The
Ground Beneath Her Feet, published four years later: one of his two protagonists, Ormus
Cama, has to wear an eye-patch for the same reason. In the West, the analogous concept
is symbolized by blindness, like Teresiass, which allows the seer to see inwardly. The
Indian motif probably derives from the the third eye of Siva, which is focused on
the invisible world.

4. Drama
Indian narrative often seems to avoid tension and conflict, but in a different way than,
say, Waiting for Godot or Western ironic postmodernism. A typically laconic,
non-dramatic style of Indian narrative may be a consequence of the features we have
already mentionedplot, character, and nonattachment. Anand says as much in a 1946
essay on Indian short stories, summarized by Berry: Having remarked the subtle

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interplay of situation and character leading to climax and denoument in Western fiction,
Anand observes that in Indian fiction the two elements are dissociated. Thus Indian
stories, he submits, offer merely a series of collisions, with little interplay of character
and situation, unresolved crises, and abruptness of treatment. (41)
An especially clear case among our novels is Narayans Financial Expert. In the
middle of part two of the novel, and right in the middle of one of its clearly demarcated
sections, suddenly and without any preparation, several years pass by and the
main character Margayya is no longer poor but wealthy (118). It takes the reader
a while to catch onand this is only one of several such transitions in the novel.
Anita Desai complains, a little obtusely, about a similar stylistic problem in Tagores
Home and the World:
A dramatic tale, yet not particulary dramatic in the telling . . .. Events with highly dramatic
potential are set aside in a line or two, action takes place off-stage, as it were, and whole pages
are given over to rhetorical display, presented with such rococo elaboration as to make the
novel seem like an ornate edifice of Victorianism. (12)

Rococo elaboration, however, is as typically Indian as it is Victorianas Indian art,

religion, and epic poetry demonstrate superabundantly.
This odd sort of plot constructiondramatic without being dramaticis also
typically Indian. One has only to read Indias most famous drama, Kalidasas S:kuntala,
to see how traditional it is. Almost all of the key events in the plot of the play are left
unstaged. In the first act the king in disguise woos the heroine, but she leaves before
discovering who he is; when the action resumes in the next act the recognition has already
taken place. In act three he proposes marriage, but the scene is interrupted, and when act
four begins the marriage has already been consummated. Other important moments in
the plot are also conspicuously omitted in this waythe curse, the loss and recovery of
the ring, the kings recognition of S:kuntala, etc. Aesthetically, the play is totally
normative in the Indian tradition. It conforms to the Bharatas N:tya S:stra (The Rules
of Drama) in the way Oedipus conforms to Aristotles Poetics. Bharata does not conceive
of a play as an intersection of plot and character, but as a sequence of emotional rasas
(flavors)love, humor, pathos, violence, heroism, fear, loathsomeness, and wonder
(later theorists add quietude). The playwrights focus is not so much on the plot itself,
but on the opportunity it provides for the construction of these emotional states,
sometimes pure, sometimes mixed, in the audience.
Later theorists extended rasa aesthetics to all the literary genres. Novels like The
Financial Expert and The Home and the World are naturally influenced by this Indian
approach to art. Western readers may respond as Desai does, with the thought that
Tagore simply is not a very good novelistwhich may be true in European terms, but in
Indian terms he is a very great writer.

5. Emotion
The rasa aesthetic helps account for another striking feature of these novels: by Western
standards Indian novels, like Indian popular films, often seem sentimental.
If sentimentality is defined as an overindulgence in emotion, especially the conscious
effort to induce emotion in order to enjoy it, or the effort to induce an emotional
response disproportionate to the situation, and thus to substitute heightened and

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generally unthinking feeling for normal ethical and intellectual judgment (Harmon and
Holman), it is definitely not a vice in Indian art. The rasa aesthetic makes it the artists
goal precisely to produce emotions in stronger and purer forms than can ever be
experienced in life.
The most Indian novel on my indigenous style scale happens to be the one most
open to this charge of sentimentality. Pather Panchali is a lyrical evocation of Banerjis
childhood in a remote village untouched by Western influence. The authors emotions are
recollectedbut hardly in Wordsworthian tranquility! Almost every page bursts with
childish exclamation pointsas for example this one, where little Durga imagines that
when she marries she will have to leave the village.
Trees! Yes. Durga loved her trees! She loved the village too, every stick and stone in it, and the
river, and the path that led down to it. She had known them all her life so naturally and
intimately that they had become part of her. Yet now she was beginning to learn that love
could hurt. Something seemed to be telling her that she was going to lose them, and she
longed to be able to gather them all in her arms and hold them close for ever. How could she
live without them? They were her own dear friends, her life-long companions; and as she sat
there she tried to picture them to herself, one by one: that dear path under the mangosteen
tree; the bamboo grove behind the house; the river steps with the evening shadows creeping
along them. Shadows! The thought stayed with her, for today the shadows were black and
frightening under that cloud of separation which she felt thickening overhead. And there was
Opu too, her darling brother, whom she could not bear out of her sight even for an hour.
The thought that she might have to leave him behind and go far away made her heart very
heavy. And suppose she did not come back! Like her Auntie Nitom who once lived in this
very house! (199200)

Those who have seen Satyajit Rays film version of this novel will remember Durgas
death shortly after this scene. By the end of the movie, many in my class are sobbing
unashamedly. In the second and third films of the trilogy, Opus father dies, then his
mother, and finally his young wife, plunging him and the audience into deeper and
deeper misery. Although my students seem to have a remarkably high tolerance for
sentimentality generally, the final scene of the trilogy, in which Opu is at last reunited
with his little son, and walks smiling into the sunrise with him on his shoulders,
often strains it to the breaking point.
By Indian standards, however, these emotions are not excessive. The scene quoted
above evokes the one in Kalidasas play, where S:kuntala bids the jasmine goodbye as she
leaves the forest to join her husband:
S2KUNTALA: Oh! Priyamvad:, even though my heart yearns to see my lord once more,
now that I am deserting the Hermitage, my feet move forward with painful reluctance.
PRIYAMVAD2: The bitterness of parting is not yours alone; look around and see how the
Holy Grove grieves, knowing the hour of parting from you is near:
The doe tosses out mouthfuls of grass, the peacocks dance no more:
pale leaves flutter down as if the vines are shedding their limbs.
S2KUNTALA: O Father, I have to say goodbye to M:dhav;, my woodland sister.
KANVA: Yes, my child, I know how much you love her; here she is, to your right.
S2KUNTALA (coming close to the jasmine, throws her arms round it): O M:dhav;, beloved
sister, twine your branching arms round me; from today, I shall be far, far away from you.
Dear Father, do care for her as if she were me. (224)

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Similarly, the final scene of Rays film, where father and son are reunited, evokes the
final scene of Kalidasas play, where the father finds his little son waiting for him in
heaven.
What saves these scenes from the charge of sentimentality is the classical rasa aesthetic.
The purified sentiment of the innocent girl leaving home is poised between scenes
dominated by other equally purified emotional flavorscomedy, eros, tragic violence,
adult griefand these juxtapositions create complex emotional effects. The play, like the
film, is an emotional symphonyas are some other fine novels that might easily be
mistaken for sentimental, like Narayans The English Teacher or Anands Coolie. Anand,
in fact, has a European vocabulary for this traditional Indian aesthetic:
More than romanticism and realism I believe in expressionism, which is the heightening of
the drama of the body-soul in all its various implications. Every Indian seems to be, almost
biologically, an expressionist. It is our system. (Berry, 34)

An instructive contrast is provided by Markandayas Nectar in a Sieve, a one-note

tear-jerker in which Rukmani, a stereotype of suffering Mother India, simply endures
the deepening humiliations of poverty, hunger, starvation and death. The book is entirely
Western in style. Markandaya builds to a heartbreaking crescendo, the tableau of
Nathans death in the mud in the pouring rain; but our emotional response, no matter
how strong, cannot make the book a great work of art. My students find it moving,
but Samuel Goldwyns cruel definition of sentimentality comes to mind: if you want to
make an audience weep, just take a boy and a dog, and kill the dog.

6. Form
By Western standards Indian narrative is famously uneconomical and un-unified,
alternately overwhelming and taxing to the Western reader. Arundati Roy memorably
pokes fun at Westerners shortcomings in this regard in The God of Small Things:
Tourists were treated to truncated kathakali performances (Small attention spans,
the Hotel People explained to the dancers). So ancient stories were collapsed and amputated.
Six-hour classics were slashed to twenty-minute cameos. (121)

The Mahabharata and Ramayana are only the most obvious examples. They are not
only extraordinarily long, they are also extraordinarily digressive. In traditional Indian
narrative, the problems of length and form are inseparable. Raja Rao addresses the
problem in his first novel, Kanthapura. He warns the Western reader that to be faithful to
the Indian narrative tradition, he has adopted what may seem to be a peculiar style in
English:
There must be something in the sun of India that makes us rush and tumble and run on.
And our paths are paths innumerable. The Mahabharata has 214,778 verses and the
Ramayana 48,000. The Puranas are endless and innumerable. We have neither punctuation
nor the treacherous ats and ons to bother uswe tell one interminable tale. Episode
follows episode, and when our thoughts stop our breath stops, and we move on to another
thought. This was and still is the ordinary style of our storytelling. I have tried to follow it
myself in this story. (viiviii)

Another interesting example is again Banerjis Pather Panchali. The novels translator,
T. W. Clark, translates it only so far, justifying his decision to end the novel where he does
because the author just did not know when to stop.

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Why was the author of another mind? This question is difficult to answer; but the title Pather
Panchali may provide a clue. The audience who listened to the chanting of the old panchalis,
which went on from day to day, were so enthralled by the immediate present, by the incident
which was being chanted to them at any one time, that few of them could have given any
thought to the structure of the work as a whole. It had to run its course, episode by episode;
and it was the episodes which were to them important. So I suggest it was with Banerji.
His naive genius could not have realized the dramatic quality of his creation. (1516)

Satyajit Ray ends his film version at the same place, so there must be some logic in
the decision; but one suspects the problem is not so much Banerjis naivete as the
short attention span of the Western reader/viewer, including in this case even the
translator himself.
A more recent example is Chaudhuris plotless Strange and Sublime Address. At one
point the author reflects on the Indianness of his style. The same qualities that define the
folk-voice of the traditional village storyteller, he says, also shape the contemporary urban
experience:
Why did these houses seem to suggest that an infinitely interesting story might be woven
around them? And yet the story would never be a satisfying one, because the writer,
like Sandeep, would be too caught up in jotting down the irrelevances and digressions that
make up lives, and the life of a city, rather than a good storytill the reader would shout
Come to the pointand there would be no point, except the girl memorizing the rules of
grammar, the old man in the easy-chair fanning himself, and the house with the small,
empty porch that was crowded, paradoxically, with many memories and possibilities.
The real story, with its beginning, middle, and conclusion, would never be told, because it
did not exist. (54)

(Note the long string of passive constructions in that paragraph.)

It is amusing to think that Vikram Seths Suitable Boy was rejected by the Booker Prize
judges because of its length. Extraordinary length is perhaps the most obvious aesthetic
feature of Indian narratives, just as florid extravagance is perhaps the most obvious
quality of Indian art generally. Rushdie is a prime example of such exuberant
superabundance. He attracts Western readers nevertheless, because he is as sophisticated
and canny as Banerji was naive, as alert to the expectations of Western readers as Banerji
was indifferent to them.

7. Orality
No list of Indian narrative techniques can omit oral storytellingthe rambling style of
Narayans village granny and Raos Achakka telling her story of Kanthapura on the
verandah. Oral storytelling plays a part in nearly every Indian novel, and embedded
stories often display in a particularly clear and condensed form the features of novel style
I have been listing. In Chapter 13 of Pather Panchali, for example, Opu goes to school for
the first time, in a grocery shop where the owner alternately recites the Ramayana and lets
the children overhear their elders exchange stories. Some of these stories have a rough
Arabian Nights quality about them, tales of everyday marvels, like this one:
On the road to the indigo factory, you know where it is, there is a place they call Naltakuris
Jol. Out beyond therethis happened a long time agoa villager named Chondor Hajra
his brother was Moti Hajrahad gone to cut trees in the jungle. It was during the monsoon
and the rain had caused a number of earth-slides. All at once his eyes fell on a certain patch of

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mud and he saw something in it that looked like the rim of a brass jar. Thats what it was,
so he dug it up and when he got it home he found it was full of old coins. Thats why
Chondor Hajra was able to live for so long like a lord. Shanyal had seen all this with his own
eyes. (114)

What kind of story is this? As in many of the novels I have been discussing, something
happens to somebodyaction without agency. A simple eventa poor man stumbles
upon a pot of goldcan have moral, perhaps even supernatural, implications; and
the familiar (you know where it is) is rendered wonderful, even magical, by the tellers
tone of voice.
Some of the stories Opu hears are even simpler, like this one:
Another day Shanyal was telling a story about a certain placehe had forgotten its name
but a large number of people lived there in times gone by. It was about nightfall and he and
his party were going through a forest of tamarind trees. The thing they were going to see was
called Chika mosque; he repeated the name several times. Opu was not clear at first what
the thing was, but as the story developed he realized that it was an old ruined house. It was
almost dark by then, and as they were entering, a swarm of small bats swished past them.
Opu could picture it all: darkness everywherea tamarind junglenot a soul aboutan old
broken doora swarm of bats swishing past them as they went inand inside it was as dark
as the inner room on the west side of Ranus house. (115)

What kind of story is this? An oral story, a storytellers story, a story in which images
and the emotions they produce in the listener are more important than the rambling,
vague or half-forgotten plot, and more important than character, which resides mostly in
the voice of the teller. Unsurprisingly, it is a story like Pather Panchali itself.
But surprisingly, this ancient storytelling tradition, with all its apparatus of gods and
demons and supernatural forces, has not produced a tradition of magical realism in the
Indian novel, as oral traditions have in other postcolonial literatures. Of my sixty novels,
only Rushdies and Chandras are marked by magical realism (though supernatural
elements in Narayans English Teacher and A Tiger for Malgudi might be argued to
qualify).

8. Allegory
The qualities of Indian narrative enumerated thus far (karma, dharma, yoga, rasa,
sentimentality, excess, and orality) together foster another feature, this one of paramount,
summary importance: there is a nearly pervasive tendency in the Indian novel, as in
Indian narrative generally, toward allegory and parable, implicit or explicit. In this regard
the Indian novel sharply differs from its Western analogue, in which allegory and parable
are rare. In the world of the Western novel, allegory is a distinct genre, but in India from
time immemorial it seems to have been an aspect of narrative generally. It is a fascinating
question, how the Indian novel can remain allegorical and realistic at the same time.
An important example of such allegory to Western readersstudents find it an
inevitable topic for term papersis the way female characters in Indian novels so often
symbolize the sufferings of Indiathe allegory of Mother India. I have already mentioned
Rukmani in Nectar in a Sieve and Bimala in The Home and the World, but we could add
Bharati in Waiting for the Mahatma, Bimla in The Clear Light of Day, and many others.
India is also allegorized by male characters, most obviously Saleem in Midnights Children
and Sanjay in Chandras Red Earth and Pouring Rain, and by at least two animals,

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the tiger in Narayans A Tiger for Malgudi, and the snake in Sanjay Nigams The Snake
Charmer. Most of these allegories are explicit: Bimala and Saleem actually feel the burden
of their own symbolism, and Bharati is given the name of India (Bharat) by Gandhi
himself. Some are implicit, however: the meaning of Narayans tiger only dawns on us
slowly, after he is liberated from the lion-tamer Captain (i.e., Britain) by the Gandhi-like
Master; and Nigam identifies the snake that is bitten in two with the partition of India
only in an interview (Snake Charmer, Readers Guide, 7).
There are a number of ways to account for the pervasive allegory of Indian narrative.
One is the unabated influence of the ancient and traditional myths on modern writers;
another is the tendency toward narrative in Indian philosophy, which typically takes the
form of parables; another, more elusive, is the nature of Indian individualism, or nonindividualismthe problem referred to earlier as Indian inwardness or subjectivity.
That is the track I want to follow here in my conclusion: the Indian novel, rather than
pursuing the Western novels typical interest in the modern individual, instead preserves
a more ancient and traditional form of narrative, in which meaning radiates outward
from the actions of individuals, rather than inward. Action, that is, does not manifest the
uniqueness of characters so much as their universal significance. The Indian novel thus
has the potential of subverting, or at least avoiding, an important aspect of Western
modernity, the modern concept of the individual, which the Western novel was more
or less expressly developed to represent.
It is a difficult line of thought, since our largely unarticulated assumptions about the
modern individual guide our thinking, even as we make them the object of our thought.
My students have much the same problem in regards to Western pre-modernism.
A Western reader coming for the first time to Indian novels, or to Western medieval
literature for that matter, is not likely to notice how differently characters have been
conceived, because on the surface they seem to be individuals like us. Narayan says,
The material available to a story writer in India is limitless. Within a broad climate of
inherited culture there are endless variations: every individual differs from every other
individual, not only economically, but in outlook, habits and day-to-day philosophy. It is
stimulating to live in a society that is not standardized or mechanized, and is free from
monotony. Under such conditions the writer has only to look out of the window to pick up a
character (and thereby a story). (Malgudi Days, 7)

This simple, somewhat disingenuous approach to storytelling seems not to challenge

Western assumptions about characterbut appearances are deceiving. Americans live in
a highly standardized and mechanized society, and although we like to think of ourselves
as unique individuals, we tend to assume that people are essentially the same, except for
being caught in differing historical, cultural and social circumstances. As Lee Patterson
puts it,
In late-twentieth-century America, perhaps in the West as a whole, human life is conceived in
terms of a basic unit, the autonomous, free, self-determining individual. This is a being
understood as possessing a whole and undivided selfhood, an inner entity known through
a sense of immediacy and plenitude and constituted above all by a self-aware consciousness
and an executive will. The behavior of these individuals is in turn typically understood
as freely chosen rather than socially or historically determined: people are what they choose
to be. (3)

James W. Earl

115

According to Patterson, the modern Western subject understands himself not as

historically or culturally determined, but free. Scholars disagree on when this
understanding emerged in history, but Classical Antiquity and most of the Middle
Ages can safely be called pre-modern in this sense. Many of the problems my students
encounter in Indian fiction are also encountered in the epic traditionnot only the
Indian epics, but Western epics from The Iliad to Beowulf. The epic hero may be an
individual, but he is not an autonomous, free, self-determining individual. His debt to
history and culture is almost total.
It is a paradox deserving much further consideration that modern Western
subjectivity, as Patterson describes it, for all its claims of uniqueness, freedom
and autonomy, in fact renders everyone essentially alike; whereas the more social,
collective, and diffuse subjectivity one discovers in the epic, and in the immemorial
traditions of India, and in Narayans novels, sees everyoneeveryone outside our
windowas essentially different. The Indian novel, therefore, is not just another
novel, not just another story of modern individuals like ourselves, and not just
another post-colonial literature; it challenges the Western reader to accept the otherness
of India.
Anyone with an interest in India can find scores of handbook explanations of Indian
philosophy subtler than the broad strokes I have painted with here. I hope, however,
that the point has been made, that the Indian novel should always be read in an
Indian context. The gradual Westernization of the Indian novel that I have charted,
culminating in Rushdies international postmodern style, is hardly a fulfillment of
the genre. Perhaps it is even a falling away from Indias (and the Wests) great
narrative traditions.

Bibliography
My First Sixty Indian Novels
The list is ordered chronologically by the date of each authors earliest work; it includes
some short story collections and autobiographies.
Chatterjee, Bankim-Chandra. Krishnakantas Will, trans. J. C. Gosh. New Directions,
1962. (in Bengali, 1878)
Tagore, Rabindranath. Binodini, trans. K. R. Kripalani. East-West Center Press, 1959. (in
Bengali, 1902)
. The Home and the World, trans. S. Tagore. Penguin, 1985. (in Bengali, 1915)
. Quartet, trans. Kaiser Haq. Heinemann, 1993. (in Bengali, 1916)
Banerji, Bibhutibhushan. Pather Panchali: Song of the Road, trans. T. W. Clark and
T. Mukherji. Rupa and Co., 1990. (in Bengali, 1929)
Anand, Mulk Raj. Untouchable. Penguin, 1940. (1935)
. Coolie. Penguin, 1945. (1936)
. Two Leaves and a Bud. Liberty Press, 1954. (1937)
Narayan, R. K. Swami and Friends. University of Chicago, 1980. (1935)
. The Bachelor of Arts. University of Chicago, 1980. (1937)
. The Dark Room. University of Chicago, 1981. (1938)
. The English Teacher. University of Chicago, 1980. (1945)
. Mr. Sampath, the Printer of Malgudi. University of Chicago, 1981. (1949)

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How to Read an Indian Novel

. The Financial Expert. Time, 1966. (1952)

. Waiting for the Mahatma. Michigan State University Press, 1955.
. The Guide. Penguin, 1980. (1958)
. The Man-Eater of Malgudi. Penguin, 1983. (1961)
. The Vendor of Sweets. Penguin, 1983. (1967)
. Malgudi Days. Penguin, 1982. (short stories, 1971)
. My Days. Ecco Press, 1999. (autobiography, 1973)
. The Painter of Signs. Penguin, 1982. (1976)
. A Tiger for Malgudi. Penguin, 1984. (1982)
. Talkative Man. Viking, 1987. (1986)
. The World of Nagaraj. Viking, 1992. (1990)
. The Grandmothers Tale and Selected Stories. Ecco Press, 1994. (short stories)
Rao, Raja. Kanthapura. New Directions, 1963. (1938)
. The Serpent and the Rope. Overlook Press, 1987. (1960)
. The Cat and Shakespeare. Orient Paperbacks, 1965.
Markandaya, Kamala. Nectar in a Sieve. New American Library, 1954.
Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer. Heat and Dust. Simon and Schuster, 1991. (1976)
Desai, Anita. Clear Light of Day. Penguin, 1982. (1980)
. In Custody. Penguin, 1994. (1984)
. Baumgartners Bombay. Penguin, 1989. (1988)
. Journey to Ithaca. Penguin, 1996. (1995)
Rushdie, Salman. Midnights Children. Penguin, 1991. (1980)
. The Satanic Verses. The Consortium, 1992. (1988)
. The Moors Last Sigh. Vintage, 1997. (1995)
. The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Henry Holt, 1999.
Seth, Vikram. The Golden Gate. Penguin, 1986. (1985)
. A Suitable Boy. Harper Collins, 1993.
Mukherjee, Bharati. The Middleman and Other Stories. Grove Press, 1988. (short stories)
. Jasmine. Grove press, 1989.
. The Holder of the World. Fawcett Columbine, 1993.
. Leave It to Me. Fawcett Columbine, 1997.
Tharoor, Shashi. The Great Indian Novel. Arcade, 1989.
Chaudhuri, Amit. Freedom Song: Three Novels. Borzoi, 1999. Includes A Strange and
Sublime Address. (1991), Afternoon Raag (1993), and Freedom Song (1999).
. Real Time. Picador, 2002. (short stories, autobiography)
Mistry, Rohinton. Such a Long Journey. Vintage, 1991.
. A Fine Balance. Vintage, 1995.
. Swimming Lessons. Vintage, 1997. (short stories)
. Family Matters. Borzoi, 2002.
Alexander, Meena. Manhattan Music. Mercury House, 1997.
Candra, Vikram. Red Earth and Pouring Rain. Back Bay Books, 1995.
Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. Random House, 1997.
Sealy, J. Allan. The Everest Hotel. IndiaInk, 1998.
Desai, Kiran. Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard. Anchor, 1998.
Nigam, Sanjay. The Snake Charmer. Penguin, 1999. (1998)
Mishra, Pankaj, The Romantics. Random House, 2000.

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Suri, Manil, The Death of Vishnu. Norton, 2001.

Other Works Cited

Berry, Margaret, Mulk Raj Anand: the man and the novelist. Oriental Press, 1971.
The Bhagavad Gita, tr. Barbara Stoller Miller. Bantam, 1986.
Chandra, Vikram. The Cult of Authenticity: Indias cultural commissars worship
Indianness instead of art. Boston Review January 25, 2000.
Cowasjee, Soros, So Many Freedoms: A Study Of The Major Fiction Of Mulk Raj Anand.
Oxford, 1977.
Gandhi, M. K. An Autobiography, or The story of my experiments with truth, trans.
Mahadev Desai. Beacon Press, 1993. (in Gujarati, 1927)
Harmon, William, and C. Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 7th ed. Prentice-Hall,
1996
Iyengar, K. R. Srinivasa, Indian Writing in English. Sterling Publishers, 1985.
Mishra, Ganeswar. The Novel as Purana: A Study of the form of The Man-Eater of
Malgudi and Kanthapura, in Geoffrey Kain, ed., R. K. Narayan: Contemporary Critical
Perspectives. Michigan State University Press, 1993.
Naipaul, V. S., An Area of Darkness. Macmillan, 1965.
. India: A Wounded Civilization. Vintage, 1976.
Patterson, Lee, Chaucer and the Subject of History. University of Wisconsin, 1991.
Rajan, Balachandra. Identity and Nationality (1964), in Grundlagen zur Literatur in
Englisher Sprache, Band 4: Indien, ed. Gerhard Stilz, pp. 8183. Wilhelm Fink Verlag,
1982.
Ramamurti, Maturam, The Rise of the Indian Novel in English. Sterling Publishers, 1987.
The Ramayana of Valmiki, Vol. 2: Ayodyakanda, tr. Robert P. Goldman. Princeton, 1984.
Rushdie, Salman. Damme, This is the Oriental Scene for You! An Introduction to Indian
Fiction. The New Yorker, June 23 and 30, 1997, pp. 5061.
, ed. The Vintage Book of Indian Writing, 1947-97. Vintage, 1997. (anthology)
Somadeva. Tales from the Kathasaritsagara, tr. Ashia Sattar. Penguin, 1997.
Vivekananda. Raja-Yoga. Advaita Ashrama, 1982.
Whitney, William Dwight, Sanskrit Grammar. Harvard University, 1987.

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