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Remembering the Founding

Fathers of Indian English Fiction
BIJAY KUMAR DAS*
Though historically Indian English fiction owes its origin to Bankim
Chandra Chatterjees Rajmohans Wife (1864), its foundation was laid
by Mulk Raj Anand when he published his Untouchable in 1935.
R.K.Narayan and Raja Rao joined him in giving, as it were, a local
habitation and a name to Indian English fiction in nineteen thirties.
Anands Untouchable and Coolie, Narayans Swami and Friends and The
Bachelor of Arts, Raja Raos Kanthapura mark the beginning of Indian
English fiction. And these three novelists continued to write till the
end of the twentieth century.
Now we live in the age of fiction when poetry and drama have
taken a back seat. Thanks to the prizes given exclusively to fiction
(such as The Man Booker prize) and several other prizes, researchers
and critics turn to fiction and espouse its cause at the cost of other
genres of literature. If poetry had its heyday in nineteen seventies and
early eighties, when R. Parthasarathy as the Editor of Oxford University
Press, issued a series called New Poetry from India with poets like
Nissim Ezekiel, Jayanta Mahapatra, Shiv K. Kumar A.K.Ramanujan,
R. Parthasarathy, Keki N. Daruwalla publishing their collections of
poems, in the late eighties and thereafter, till date fiction has taken the
center stage. Novelists like Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, Shashi
Tharoor, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Shashi Deshpande, Arundhati Roy,
Vikram Chandra, Manju Kapur and a host of others came to lime
light in the last twenty five years following Salman Rushdies instant
success with his Midnights Children winning the Booker Prize in
1981. Researchers and critics became so enamoured of the new
authors that they have completely ignored the contribution of Anand,
Narayan and Raja Rao. The purpose of the paper is to highlight and
emphasize the real merit of these three novelists and their contribution
to Indian English fiction.

Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies

Narayan and Rao and appreciated them. If Anand is the novelist

as reformer, Raja Rao is the novelist as metaphysical poet, Narayan
is simply the novelist as novelist, says William Walsh (Narayan 6).
And later on Walsh calls R.K.Narayan, the novelist as moral analyst
(1990 : 96). C.D.Narasimhaiah says, Where distinctions are made
they fall into neat categories of Anand the Marxist, progressive or
committed writer; Narayan the comic genius or writer pure and
simple; and Raja Rao the religious or philosophical novelist (148).
These three novelists have broken new grounds in Indian English
fiction in terms of making innovations in themes and techniques.
They have re-created their characters in their own situations-social,
as well as psychological. If Anand is known for humanism,
Narayan is known for social and psychological realism and Rao
for metaphysical ideas. It is interesting to know that our pioneering
novelists, Anand and Narayan published their first novels with the
help of British novelists, E.M.Forster and Graham Greene respectively
and Rao published his first novel sitting in Paris. Having said
so, let me discuss their works.
Right from his childhood, Anand was a rebel. He was against
the injustice done to the inferior and socially low placed people. In
course of an article he wrote :
Sensing the contempt of the superior whites for the inferior
browns, hearing the big officers abuse the recruits, the
literates ignoring the illiterates, my learned father turning
away from the villager brothers of my mother and from the
soiled clothes copper-smiths of our home town Amritsar, I
became a rebel against the heavy voices, the heavy hands
and the cocked head, (JLA 8).

In the same article recalling how he published his first novel

Untouchable with E.M. Forsters help, Anand wrote :
He (Forster) wrote a preface. A small publisher issued the
novel. It was warmly received. All my novels, then, have
come from self-actualising in the confessional, which is the
source of my protests against religion reduced to ritual,
against lakir ki fakhir to or customs, against the impositions
of the Superiors or Inferiors, as against cruelties to the new
young, against all bondage and for the many freedoms
implicit in political freedom, (JLA (10).

Critics like William Walsh, Alstair Niven, K.R.S. lyengar,

C.D.Narasimhaiah and M.K.Naik have evaluated the works of Anand,
* Professor, Dept. of English, Bardwan University, Bardwan (W.B).
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Anands Cultural discovery of India and Asia through the

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Under the last category fall the social workers, the labour
leaders, all those who believe in progress and can see how
modern science can improve the lot of sufferers and help
bring out the quality of all men, (qtd in Walsh 64).

136-volumes of Marg that he founded in 1948 and edited till the early
eighties is by itself an achievement that will immortalize him ..,
(Kohli 32-33). No wonder that he was elected Fellow of Sahitya
Akademi, Lalit Kala Akademi and Sangeet Natak Akademi, a rare
distinction yet to be surpassed by any one in our country.
Anand was always for highlighting indigenous culture, art and
creating literature out of our own environment. In course of a meeting
with the present author during All India English Teachers Conference in 1996 he told: You, Oriyas you never write on Konarka and
your own culture. (He was referring to contemporary writings in
English from Orissa). Anands important novels include Untouchable
(1935), Coolie (1936), Two Leaves and a Bud (1937), The Village (1939),
Across the Blackwaters (1941), The Big Heart (1945), Seven Summers
(1951), The Private Life of an Indian Prince (1953), Gauri (1960), Morning
Face (1968), Confessions of a Lover (1976), The Bubble (1984), Little Plays
of Mahatma Gandhi (1991) and Nine Moods of Bharata: Novel of a
Pilgrimage (1998).
Social realism is the major concern in his works. He has
brought innovations in fiction by making an touchable the hero or
anti-hero of his first novel, Untouchable, As Marlene Fisher rightly puts
it :

R.K.Narayan published his first novel, Swami and Friends in

1935, the same year Anand published his Untouchable. Thereafter,
Narayan published a number of novels such as The Bachelor of Arts
(1937), The English Teacher (1945), Mr Sampath (1949), The Financial
Expert (1952), Waiting for Mahatma (1955), The Guide (1958), The Man
Eater of Malgudi (1962), The Vender of Sweets (1967), The Painter of Signs
(1977), The Tiger of Malgudi (1983), Talkative Man (1983), The World
of Nagaraj (1990) and Grandmothers Tale (1992).
Narayan created history by creating an imaginary town,
Malgudi (somewhere near the boundary of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka)
the locale of his fictional world. If Anand concentrates on contemporary Indian reality, Narayan dives deep into Indian tradition and
his characters are rooted in that tradition. William Walsh makes a
pertinent comment on this aspect :
Again, one must say that there is deeply in Narayan the
profound Hindu conviction, or instinct for, the fundamental
oneness of existence... . The tension between the one and the
many, a sustaining theme of Hinduism, operates quietly and
unpretentiously throughout Narayans fiction, (R.K.Narayan
167).

The heart of Untouchable, however, is not in its manifest social

plea for the abolition of untouchability. It lies, rather, in the
kind of person Bakha is. It lies in his trustingness, in his
naivete, and in his still unquenchable wonder at life, (29).

Anand takes characters from contemporary life who have been

deprived of their rights by the oppressors. His Marxist leanings are
unmistakable. A person who lived more than twenty years abroad
during his youth, unlike the contemporary diasporic writers was
never in search of home. Home was uppermost in his mind and
deeply engraved in his heart. Hence, he never lost touch with Indian
reality and social conditions. His characters are life like and they
remind us of our own social environment which victimizes them. Of
Anands fiction, Anna Rutherford writes :
Anands characters invariably fall into three classes: the
victims who are usually the protagonists; the oppressors,
those who oppose change and progress, and the goodmen.
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In Narayans fiction we come across the comic relief sprinkled

with humour. The art of story telling is superb. For the art of
narration and evocation of Indian myths, Narayans fiction assumes
a special significance for Indian readers. Take the character of Raju,
the protagonist in The Guide, who wins the trust of people in spite
of himself. That is where we find by the manipulation of the gods,
Raju transforms his character and makes himself acceptable to the
credulous Indians.
Raja Rao, the youngest of the trio dives deep into Indian
metaphysics and gets at the roots of Indian tradition. He tells his
stories by referring to the great epics like The Ramayan and The
Mahabharata. H.M.Williams makes a pertinent observation in this
regard :
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Remembering the Founding Fathers of Indian English Fiction

By choosing to develop the character of an Indian village

Raja Rao moves from realism to symbolism. Helped by the
parataxis of the sentence structure and the flow of the
Indian narrators stream of consciousness, the novel conveys an uncanny impression of the immense longevity into
the twentieth century, of aeons of customs dating back to
a time before the arrival in India of the Aryans. This makes
inevitable the conflation of Ramayan and Mahabharata with
the Swaraj movement; but it does more, it makes us aware
of the timeless and eternal quality of the Hindu consciousness beyond the contingency of the political struggle,
(48-49)

Raja Rao like Chinua Achebe is a forerunner of postcolonial

criticism. If Achebe has emphasized his African idiom to write novels
in his famous work, Novelist as Teacher, Rao has done so
admirably in his Preface to Kanthapura. If Edward Said, Gayatri
Spivak Chakravorty, and Homi K. Bhabha are credited with giving
the theory of postcolonialism and Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and
Helen Tiffin are eulogized for popularizing Postcolonial Theory
(Courtesy: The Empire Writes Back), then Raja Rao and Chinua Achebe
should be given the credit of advocating writing fiction in English
with new idioms and new themes based on the stories of their own
nations. Here is Raja Raos clarion call to write fiction in English
in our own way :
One has to convey in a language that is not ones own the
spint that is ones own. One has to convey the various shades
and omissions of a certain thought-movement that looks
maltreated in an alien language. I use the word alien, yet
English is not an alien language to us. It is the language of
our intellectual make-up-like Sanskrit or Persian was before
- but not of our emotional make-up. We are all instinctively
bilingual, many of us writing in our own language and in
English. We can not write like the English. We should not.
We cannot write only as Indians. We have grown to look
at the large world as part of us. Our method of expression
therefore has to be a dialect which will some day prove to
be as distinctive and colourful as the Irish or the American.
Time alone will justify it, (Preface to Kanthapura).

Raja Raos important novels include Kanthapura (1938), The

Serpent and the Rope (1962), Cat and Shakespeare (1965) and The
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Chessmaster and His Moves (1988). In Kanthapura, Rao has been able
to create a living Gandhi myth through the struggle for independence.
The Kenchamma myth has been dovetailed into the structure of the
novel to show the belief of the villagers in rituals. The idioms befit
the characters and they are recreated like Nissim Ezekiels characters
in their own situations. Expressions like as honest as an elephant,
the pumpkin moon, so you are a traitor to your salt givers, your
humble servant, I lick your feet, son of a concubine, son of
a widow, you donkeys husband, you son of my woman, sourmilk, dung-eating curs, a cow and sparrow story, to stich up
ones mouth, to eat mud, every squirrel has his day, not a
mosquito moved, my right eyewinks, heart - it beat like a drum,
heats squeezed like a wet cloth the affectionate tag brothers is
a typical Indian address to fellow citizens in public meetings etc.
gives evidence to the fact that Raja Rao is deliberately making an
effort to create an Indian English idiom which will be acceptable to
Indians for it acclimatizes an indigenous tradition to English language. (122) Further, Raja Rao gives an account of his work in
the following words :
Starting from the humanitarian and romantic aspect of man
in Kanthapura and The Cow and the Barricades (his early volume
of short stories) -both deeply influenced by Mahatma Gandhis
philosophy of non-violence - I soon came to the metaphysical
novel, The Serpent and the Rope and The Cat and Shakespeare,
based on the vedantic conceptions of illusion and reality. My
main interest increasingly is in showing the complexity of the
human condition (that is, the reality of man is beyond his
person), and in showing the symbolic construed of one
human expression. All words are hierarchic symbols, almost
mathematical in precision, on and of the unknown, (qtd in
Walsh 1990 : 73).

The Serpent and the Rope is a metaphysical novel written in the

puranic tradition (say, The Mahabharata of our country)
C.D.Narasimhaiah makes a pertinent comment in the following
words:
There is plot, character and situation and abundant life
- as it is actually lived in India, in Paris, in Southern France, in
London and Cambridge. There are numerous beautiful stories within
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the central story in the style of the Mahabharata, - of Bhagyanagar

that was Hyderabad, of Lakpati of Lahore, of Iswara Bhatta and
his family; of Radha, Krishna and Durvasa; of Jagannatha Bhatta
and Shajehans daughter; of Tristram and Isecult; of Buddha and
Vassita with her dead son in her arms, not to speak of Buddha
riding in a chariot to a place of no return, leaving his wife and
child behind, their shades hovering for ever in the background; of
the poor Brahmin of Benares carrying his own dead child on his
shoulder to float in the Ganga; of Kabir and Ramananda; of
Budumekayi and the Prince, of Yajnyavalkya and Maitreyi - each of
the stories delightful, poignant and elevating, but having a value
and a significance seen against the main theme of The Serpent and
the Rope, itself a popular myth but most artistically elucidated in
the course of the novel:
The world is either unreal or real - the serpent or the rope.
There is no in-between-the-two - and all thats in-between is
poetry, is sainthood. You might go on saying all the time,
No, no, its the rope, and stand in the serpent. And looking
at the rope from the serpent is to see paradise, saints,
avataras, gods, heroes, universe. For wheresoever you go,
you see only with the serpents eyes. Whether you call it
duality or modified duality, you invent a belvedere to heaven,
you look at the rope from the posture of the serpent, you
feel you are the serpent - you are -the rope is. But in true
fact, with whatever eyes you see there is no serpent, there
never was a serpent. You gave your own eyes to the falling
evening and cried, Ayyo! Oh! Its the serpent,! You run and
roil and lament, and have compassion for fear of pain,
others, or your own. You see the serpent and in fear you
feel you are it, the serpent, the saint, One - the Guru - brings
you the lantern; the road is seen, the long, white road, going
with the statutory stars, Its only the rope. He shows it to
you. And you touch your eyes and know there never was
a serpent. Where was it, where, I ask you? The poet who
saw the rope as serpent became the serpent, and so a saint:
Now, the saint is shown that his sainthood was identification,
not realization. The actual, the real has no name. The rope
is no rope to itself. (232-233)
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And, Narayan and Rao have many things in common. All

the Big Three as William Walsh called them, were influenced by
Gandhi and tried to make a myth around Gandhi in their novels.
All these three lived abroad, and were exposed to western life and
culture. Unlike diasporic writers they never thought of imaginary
homeland - they were firmly rooted in India. All of them won
Sahitya Akademi Award for their novels - R.K. Narayan for The
Guide in 1960, Raja Rao for The Serpent and the Rope in 1963 and
Mulk Raj Anand for Morning Face in 1971. They also won many
other awards at home and abroad. For example, Raja Rao got the
prestigious Neustadt Literary Prize in U.S.A. for his novel, The
Chessmaster and His Moves.
If we compare Anand, Narayan, and Raja Rao with
the novelists of nineteen eighties and nineties says, Vikram Seth,
Vikram Chandra, Sashi Tharoor, Arundhati Roy, Kiran Nagarkar,
Upamanyu Chatterje, and Amitav Ghosh, we find that the great trio
have nothing to fear. If these new novelists have made innovations
in terms of themes and techniques, the great trio have done that in
their own way. The work of the new novelists are marked social
realism, psychological realism, mythical realism, East-West encounter,
immigration and magic realism. Arundhati Roys experiment with
language in terms of new coinages and code mixing is admirable.
Here, we should recall Anands use of Indian words (Punjabi
words)by way of code mixing is no mean achievement. R.K. Narayans
humor is missing in the contemporary Indian English novel, and who
can surpass Raja Raos metaphysical ideas embodied in Indian
tradition? Shashi Tharoors The Great Indian Novel based on The
Mahabharata pales into insignificance when placed by the side of The
Serpent and the Rope.
It is true that recent Indian English novel has gained acceptance both at home and abroad. The migratory movement all over
the world has widened the horizon of fiction. If we look back, we
also find that the great trio has lived both at home and abroad and
had exposure to English as a spoken language in the west. Their
fiction can stand in comparison with fiction in English written
elsewhere in the world in the twentieth century. They are Indian
English canon and it would be difficult to find their rivals in Indian
English Literature.
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References

Indian Way of Thinking in U.R.

Ananthmurtys Samskara :
A Rite for a Dead Man

Anand, Mulk Raj. 2004. Looking Back. Journal of Literature and Aesthetics
4:1-2 (Jan-Dec.).
Fisher, MarLene. 1980. The Wisdom of the Heart : A Study of the Works of
Mulk Raj Anand. New Delhi : Sterling Publishers Private Limited.

MOHUA AHIRI*

Kohli, Suresh. 2004. Journal of Literature and Aesthetics. 4 : 1-2 (Jan-Dec.).

Ananthamurty is a renowned Kannada writer who won the Jnanpith

award in 1995. Samakara is his first novel and is considered as a
classic in Indian literature. Samskara, originally written in Kannada
was published in 1965. It was translated by the renowned poet
A.K.Ramanujan in 1976. The novel was made into a feature film
which was initially banned by the censor board for portraying
sensitive caste issues. But later the film won the presidents gold
medal for the best Indian feature film of 1971. Ananthamurthy, along
with other writers of bhasa literature like O.M.Vijayan and Panniker
in Malayalam, Dilip Chitre and Balachandra Nemede in Marathi ,
Agyey and Nirmal Verma in Hindi, Buddhadev Bose and Amiya
Chakravarti in Bengali and Sitakanta Mahapatra and Manoj Das in
Oriya, experimented with the new facets of language and reality and
thereby ushered modernism into Indian literature. In this paper I
would like to analyse the novel Samskara by linking with it to the
various strands of Indian thought. Is there a specific Indian way of
thinking? Here I wish to study some of the inconsistencies and
discrepancies in the Indian that are quite obvious in this novel.

Narasimhaiah, C.D. 1999. The Swan and the Eagele : Essays on Indian English
Literature, New Delhi: Vision Books.
Rao, Raja. 1989. Foreword. Kanthapura. Delhi : OUP.
Walsh, William. 1990. Indian Literature in English. London: Longman.
____. 1983. R. K. Narayan : A Critical Appreciation. New Delhi : Allied
Publishers Pvt. Ltd.
Williams, H.M. 1976. Indo-Anglian Literature : 1800-1970 : A Survey. Delhi
: Orient Longman.

The epicenter of the story of Samskara is a death of an

anti-brahmanical Brahmin, Naranappa. Naranappa indulged in
licentious ways of living like drinking wine, eating meat, eating in
the company of Muslims and having given up his lawfully wedded
wife, lived with a low-caste concubine Chandri .This made him out
righteous an outcaste. However, this incorrigible brahmin becomes a
bone of contention for the entire Brahmin community after he dies
of fever. The other members of the community deny performing the
last rites necessary for a dead man. The corpse of the libertine
brahmin remains untouched in the aghrahara(an exclusive settlement
of Brahmins). Understanding the gravity of the situation Chandri, the
low born mistress of Naranappa removes all the jewelry from her
* Part-Time Lecturer, Dept. of English, Hooghly Mohsin College, Hooghly.
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