The

Novel in India

The classical traditions Narrative, both written and oral, have existed in India for millennia. Until relatively recently, most Indian texts religious, secular and even scholarly were composed in verse rather than prose. The ancient epics the Ramayana (whose earliest version was likely composed between the 5th and 4th century BCE) and the Mahabharata (eight times longer than the Iliad and the Odyssey put together and composed between 300 BCE and 300 CE), are undoubtedly the core narratives of Indian civilization. Written in Sanskrit, Indias classical language, and transposed over the centuries into Indias numerous vernacular languages, they are cherished, internalized and debated by Indians to this day. Their popularity is doubtless due to the ease with which they weave religious doctrine and ethical dilemmas into gripping tales of love and war, dynastic succession and family rivalry. Both epics teach us that good will ultimately triumph over evil and that the dharmic order will prevail; at the same time they unstintingly expose the petty frailties found even among the virtuous, the cruelties and ambiguities of all wars even just ones -, and the transience of all things. If the Sanskrit epics reflect the perspective of the old Hindu lites, consisting of the kshatriya warrior-princes and the Brahman priestly caste, then the literature of the ancient Tamils (an ethnolinguistic group

located in the far South of India) reveal somewhat different priorities. The Tamil epics Silappadikaram (The Tale of the Ankle-Bracelet, 1st century CE) and Manimekalai (1st or 2nd century CE), for example, are based on the lives of merchants and courtesans. They foreground surprisingly strong female protagonists and derive their ethical framework from established non-Hindu religious traditions, such as Jainism and Buddhism. Perhaps the most travelled Indian text, however, is the Panchatantra (The Five Principles, compiled between the 4th-6th centuries CE), a compendium of animal fables and magic tales that became hugely popular in innumerable translations, chiefly into Arabic and then into the languages of Europe. The Panchatantra imparts lessons in shrewd wisdom and prudent worldly conduct through frame stories that contain tales within tales. The beasts in these stories - crafty jackals, strong but dull-witted lions, hypocritical cats, and so forth - are human enough to impart life lessons relevant to us but inhabit a natural order stripped of the piety and sentimentality common to high literary genres. So many languages! 18 major modern languages are recognized by the Indian Constitution, with Hindi considered the official language of the country. Of these, the four languages spoken in south India Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, and Telugubelong to the Dravidian family of languages, while all the rest are Indo-Aryan (and thus distantly related to English): Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kashmiri, Konkani, Manipuri,

Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, and Urdu. At current census-based estimates, Hindi is spoken by about 390 million people, while four other languages are spoken by over 40 million people each: Bengali, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu. Apart from Tamil, which is considerably older, and Urdu, which acquired its literary prestige in the 17th century, all the modern Indian languages emerged at roughly the same time as the modern languages of Europe, viz. between 900 and 1300 CE. Most modern Indian languages thus have distinct literary traditions of almost one millennium. Colloquial Hindi and Urdu the two main languages of North India - share a common grammatical structure and lexical base, while their literary forms differ considerably: Urdu looks to Persian and Arabic for inspiration, while Hindi looks to Sanskrit. Their divergent histories are largely the result of religious and communal politics, but their crossfertilization, in such realms as music and Bollywood cinema, has enriched Hindus and Muslims alike. Finally, we must not forget English. Originally the language of British colonial administration and Western education, English has survived and flourished in postcolonial India as a lingua franca, as the language of the pan-Indian lites, as a vehicle of social mobility and as a window to the wider world. India has the second-largest number of English speakers in the world, after the United States. Once mocked as a form of colonial mimicry and cultural cringe, Indian English has more recently produced a spate of award-winning novels and now occupies a significant place in global Anglophone literature. The Novel

While the novel is by no means an exclusively western genre, its ascendancy closely matches the spread of modern European culture since the late 18th century. It is the youngest literary genre in existence and defined most broadly by its length and by its choice of prose over poetry. The European tradition of the novel as the genre of extended prose fiction is rooted in several earlier traditions, namely the novella, or short story, and the medieval "romance, which in turn looks back to the epic form. The novel shares with the epic and the romance the basic traits of a story and a story-teller. The epic strives to embody tradition; it is an amalgam of myth and history; its heroes can be divine as well as mortal. The romance focuses on quest and adventure as its basic elements of plot; its events dramatize primal desires, hopes and fears expressed as archetypal experiences rather than as an individuated biography. By contrast, the novel insists on a more mundane and secular sense of life; its chief interest, in Northrop Fryes words, is "human character as it manifests itself in society." Its heroes do not have to derive from legend or past history; they are often far from heroic. Its subject matter tends to be familiar, credible or plausible, without recourse to magic or supernatural causes. The modern novel presupposes a world that can be discovered by the senses and situated in the social world. It thus emphasizes specific, observable details and individualizes its characters by locating them precisely in time, space and the structures of everyday life. On the one hand, the novel recognizes the individual as socially produced; on the other hand, it endows the individual with

psychological depth and a new sense of agency. The novelistic hero tends to evolve or grow during the course of the novel: he or she is fleshed out rather than static or one-dimensional. The sources for the eighteenth-centuryEuropean novels new interest in the individual and society were numerous: newspaper journalism, criminal biographies, spiritual autobiographies, books of etiquette and travel narratives. The nineteenth-century realist novel sequenced events and represents the world in a way that assumed an essentially coherent and meaningful universe of cause and effect. Causality was attributed to a complex interplay of history, society, nature and the responsive capacity of individuals and social groups. At the same time the novelistic hero frequently experienced a rift or conflict with his environment. The perceived gap between the hero and society has frequently been the source of the novels critical power, its awareness of social injustice and emotional complexity. Since the eighteenth century, and particularly since the Victorian period, the novel has replaced poetry and drama as the most popular literary form. Its popularity increased as its social scope expanded to include characters and stories about women, as well as the middle- and working classes. The Novel in India The novel in India is generally believed to have emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century. As in England, where the rise of the novel is

associated with the industrial revolution and emergence of a new bourgeois sensibility, so in India the novel's beginnings are generally linked to the penetration of the new market economy into the Indian countryside and the advent of modernization and Westernization. The impact of British education the key to employment in the colonial bureaucracy and a range of activities brought into being by the new British order - led to the steady rise of an English-speaking bourgeoisie deeply influenced by English literature, empirical and scientific analysis, and liberal reformist social ideals. With the consolidation of British rule in the mid-nineteenth century, and the transition of authority from the East India Company to the direct rule of the English Crown, both the rulers and the ruled began to devote more attention to the ethic of improvement, Enlightenment notions of human dignity and individual self-determination. In India as in England, the novel served in part as the bearer of these new values.