Indo-Anglian Fiction since Independence

By Dr. M. N. PANDIA

During the comparatively short period of some nine years, India has made substantial and creditable progress in many a field of activity. She framed her constitution, successfully went through a general election, tackled the seemingly insurmountable refugee problem, liquidated the Indian States in the interests of solidarity and unity, fought the ravages and threats of famine, gave a fillip to heavy industries, encouraged the development of art and culture, raised her status in the comity of nations, and thereby, as also by her policy of neutrality, peace and friendship, attracted the notice as also the attention of the Big Powers abroad.

She played host to numerous countries, their political and administrative heads, as well as to writers and literary men, who, drawn by the desire to witness the rebirth of this great country, came to her shores with eager eyes and questioning minds. These saw India at first-hand, and left behind, their reaction in print. ‘Ambassador’s Report’ spoke of the impressions and activities of the author’s family during the eighteen months spent here, during which period it got to know the country intimately, sympathetically. A Minneapolis star and Tribune reporter stayed four months, travelled 10,000 miles, criss-crossed India and ‘This is India’ was the outcome. A Scottish medical missionary, George N. Patterson, put his experience on record in his ‘Journey with Loshay’. And there are others of the same ilk. These go to show how India appealed to the West and how it made them frame judgments, some of them erroneous may be, and how India emerged from her shell of ages of silence and neglect. Among those that so turned to India are writers of fiction, both Indian and foreign, and it is gratifying to see how on this front also there is much that demands attention and respect. Hitherto, India had been mostly a mysterious, enigmatical, voluptuous land of Maharajas and elephants and snakes, with some inscrutable dark-skinned muscular Indian in the near distance. But when India showed her mettle, things began to alter, though not completely, nor quickly. Though the English language was considered secondary, the quota of fiction in it did not show any remarkable decline, and served, on the contrary, to bridge the gulf of ignorance and misunderstanding that had yawned for sometime past. Both Indians and aliens turned to this medium of expression and played upon it delicately, as on a fine instrument, to the general credit of the land of their birth or their interest.

With closer understanding came greater awareness and hence a better sense of realism. Subjects hardly touched on earlier became normal, and the attitude, altered, for many. Formerly most Western novelists had looked at India from a singular, incredible angle; now new horizons opened up, old horizons widened. Even Indian writers proved somewhat more alive to the epical happenings and reflected the scenes and sounds in their pages.

The Independence struggle naturally became a favourite subject and imagination was allowed to work around it, some times using facts of history in the stride, to varying lengths. The older preoccupation with the possible results of such a struggle, the emphasis on the need for freedom, the bitterness engendered by a foreign domination, having ceased to operate, writers could now “gather their material out of the new events that were shaping before their eyes, from the way of life of the group of people with whose psychology and background they are most familiar.”

And so we have had novels dealing with both the social and the political scenes in a wide sense.

Shri R. K. Narayan’s ‘The Financial Expert’, ‘Mr. Sampaths, ‘Waiting for the Mahatma’, ‘The English Teacher’ deal with the Malgudi locale in the author’s gentle manner, observant, pathetic, and sympathetic. Margayya, the Financial Expert, is a money lender, a versatile self promoter. Beginning as an adviser to local farmers he rises high and in the interim secures a pornographic tract which leads him on to fortune, but only for a while. In the end, he finds himself under the tree, wherefrom he had started life and as innocent of his shady practices as a child unborn. This leaves Margayya, if not his son Babu, so individual a character that when ‘the crude forces of justice and reality enter, they seem a wholly unwarranted, if inevitable, intrusion. The sad overtones, the smooth plot-craft, the grave comedy, raises the story beyond the confines of Malgudi and makes Margayya as great a character as any of Gogol’s or of Chekhov’s. The coincidences, as well as the Griselda-manner of Meenakshi and Brinda, Margayya’s wife and daughter-in-Law, do not add to the haunting beauty of the novel to any great extent. But Mr. Sampath is a character of a different stamp. Like one of Dryden’s creations in ‘Absalom and Achitophel’, he is many things by turns–a printer and publisher of “The Banner”, edited by Shrinivasa, a film producer at the Sunrise Pictures–as “there is no encouragement for the arts in our country, I’ve always wanted to serve art and provide our people with healthy and wholesome entertainment.’ This over, he is the lover for a time and this brings him back to where he started from, the printing trade. The fanciful creation never ceases to interest and the author’s acquaintance of the twin poles of printing and filming, coupled with his unobtrusive humour and irony in the treatment of social topics, make the book come alive in no mean manner. ‘Waiting for the Mahatma’ on the other hand lifts the novel out of this realm, for there, one is conscious, though again in Shri Narayan’s naive way, of the undercurrents of history in the making. For, Sriram, the young hero, falls in love with Bharati, and for her sake apparently, joins the freedom movement; he is jailed, like Bharati, for his acts; and their imprisonment over, they decide to get married at Delhi. Gandhiji has told them, ‘I’ll be your priest’ and it is only the sad and dastardly assassination that prevents him from being one. The Mahatma appears here more as a man with a ‘disconcerting common sense’ than a saint, and yet we hear the distant and muffled, perhaps a little Malgudi-ed, echoes of the 1942 movement, and of the Mahatma’s teachings, as of jail life, of those days of rising tempo.

Some relation to these events finds expression in ‘Some Inner fury’ by Kamala Markandaya wherein too is posed the same political struggle with a live motif thrown in, for here is a dilemma, confronting the character, between love for the country and for the heart’s choice. A more rigorous treatment faces the reader of ‘Inquilab’ hailed as ‘the first great novel of the Indian Revolution’. Here, besides Gandhiji and Shri Nehru, we meet other national leaders and through the eyes of Anwar, a product of Hindu-Moslem fusion, a sangam of diverse streams of blood and cultures, witness the tumultuous happenings from the days of the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre, Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, who once gave us ‘Tomorrow is ours’ and thus held a sensitive measuring rod to the heart of the young, here turns to the communal problem and to history of the recent times, breathing life into accidents which, for many, are yet too near to be forgotten. Pearl Buck’s ‘Come, my Beloved’, though somewhat dissatisfying as a novel, with its somewhat incomplete understanding of things Indian, revitalizes the political scenes,–the Civil Disobedience movement, the Prince of Wales’ visit, the Delhi Darbar. Even the last Macard, Ted, ultimately cannot bear the idea of his daughter marrying the Indian Dr. Jatin Das however good in himself, and so Livy leaves India for all time, ‘since nothing could be helped, and whatever had been was ended.’ Whatever this separatism might imply, we get some picture of India through Darya Sapru and his friend David and we see how India became gradually more self-conscious as generations of the Macards succeeded one another.

‘Private Life of an Indian Prince’ by Dr. Mulk Raj Anand is again a wonderfully good addition to his other novels wherein too, a picture of the changing face of India is clearly made visible. ‘The Big Heart’, ‘The Sword and the Sickle’ had brought India to pre-Independence-struggle days, but that which succeeded it, we get from these pages. How the reluctant dragon of an Indian princeling fought hard till the very end to evade accession to the Indian Union, and to maintain his power, prestige, position, and non-moral, irresponsible life, is appealingly brought out within its 340 pages. The meeting between Sardar Patel and Victor Edward George, Ashok Kumar, Maharaja of Shampur, attached to Ganga Dasi to distraction in preference to his true-to-lndian-culture-tikyali Maharani, Indira Devi, is one of the remarkable sections of this ‘tragi-comedy’. A clear picture of the intrigue, oppression and maladministration in some feudal Indian States coupled with the oddities of their rulers, the growth of Praja Mandals, is well portrayed, and yet, such is the author’s artistry that we feel a little sad when the former ruler of Shampur ends his days in an asylum, watched by his noble wife, whose children he had got killed or rendered unhappy and abandoned by those to whom he had given his all. Here we have history and romance, fused inseparably, yet beautifully. Christian Weston deals with a somewhat similar situation in her ‘The World is a Bridge’. It is 1947 and in some Indian States the rulers are clinging desperately to the dying glimmerings of authority. The Westernised Maharaja, Vikram of Katakhpur, is one such and we see how the land lay in those days. Again, the communal tension which was a constant source of anxiety receives her attention. Feroze Hammidullah, the painter Anand, Kiran, the shepherd girl Javni provide her with this theme as also with the love interest that keeps the book on the emotional keel.

In these novels we see how old themes are now touched by a new grace. The Maharajas and their States, as Kincaid described them in his books or as John Buchan in his ‘Three Hostages’, are now no longer so unreal and distant. They may not all be like Bromfield’s Maharaja of Ranchipur and his royal, efficient consort of ‘The Rains Came’, but they are not the show pieces of a diseased mind; ‘similarly, the Indians are no longer always the mysterious or unscrupulous or ignorant people of former times or of Miss Agatha Christie’s ‘Hickory Dickory Dock’ but living, intellectual, feeling specimens of the homo sapiens.

Another consequence of Independence was the partition of India and the uprooting of countless homes and families. John Masters who is reportedly intending to ‘do’ India in 35 novels and who has already given us ‘Nightrunners of Bengal’, ‘The Deceiver’s’, ‘Lotus and the Wind’, ‘Coromandal’, speaks in ‘Bhowani Junction’ of this disturbed phase in the life of our nation. This locality is the focal point, happening to be the centre of rail movements. The novel tries to deal with three problems, at once: the position of Anglo-Indians in ‘Congressmen’s India’, the love-interest when different races feel attracted, and the transfer of authority to the new governments, which was marked by terrible blood baths where Col. Rodney Stone tries to preserve order. His latest publication ‘Coromandal’ traces the early history of the ancestors of Savages under Charles I. Thanks to old Voy, the poacher, Jason Savage is fired with dreams of the East–of Coromandal–and the inestimable treasure trove on Mount Meru and reaches India and gets entangled in intrigues of numerous kinds. There is not much here that could enliven a reader’s interest in the India of Master’s imagination. The social novels have also dealt with India in a big way. ‘Nectar in a Sieve’ the first from Kamala Markandaya’s pen, gives us a moving picture of life of farmers in South India and their courage, suffering, optimism and poverty. How the growth of a tannery decoys the sons of the soil from the land to far and near distances, how hunger and starvation and poverty dog the lives of peasants and of Nathem, Rukmini and their children, how they have learnt to submit to the inevitable Fate, also is sensitively brought out. Shakuntala Shrinagesh’s ‘The Little Black Box’ turns the mind to a hospital ward and the expectations of relatives from the bedridden sick patient. The small-mindedness and covetousness of people is neatly exposed as also the state of some of our impoverished hospitals. This novel deals with the plot in a new way by adoptting the diary form, while Sudhir N. Ghose speaks of a fascinating folk-tale in his ‘The flame of the forest’. Mrs. Hilda Saligman and Herman Hess deal with Gautama Buddha in ‘When Peacocks Danced’ and ‘Siddhartha’; Maugham’s ‘The Razor’s Edge’ deals with the peace that is found in the East and of the spiritual solace that Larry Darrel sought in vain elsewhere.

Rummer Godden’s ‘Kingfishers Catch fire’ takes the reader to a Kashmiri setting and to the theme of Indo-anglian misunderstanding, so well touched on by Mr. Forster some years ago. This time the rift is between the friendly and simple peasants and the English Sophile and her children. The author of “The River” does not seem to know her Indians as well as the land of their habitation and could this be the barrier that prevents a fusion of lives? If she deals with the rapprochement problem from the Kashmiri and bucolic angle, Ira Morris in “The Bombay Meeting” deals with it from the metropolitan, literary, inter-national standpoint. Authors and critics from far and near foregather at Bombay and this is how the young American writer, Jason Cole gets to know the Hindu wife of a Parsi member, Shakuntala Clubwalla and to fall in love with her. This ultimately leads to the narration of her sad experiences on the partition of the country when she lost her father, in pitiable circumstances. The presence of the Maharaja of Purjai, of the radical Clubwalla; of the Muslim progressive, Dr. Hamid, counselling sympathetic understanding between religious groups; the politics of Mr. Mukherji, devout Hindu, yet remarkably westernized–the presence of all these give to the plot a contemporaneous flavour. Most of all, the Maharajas who walk in and out of the pages of these novels remind one of the words of The Duke of Windsor used in his ‘A King’s Story’ wherein he observes:

‘Among the Indian autocrats, I found a way of life, almost feudal, sometimes barbaric, that had persisted for centuries, impervious to the growing uproar in British India,’ and it was this princely, self-centred order whose liquidation Mulk Raj Anand so strikingly penned in his pages.

C. L. Holden’s ‘Videhi’ speaks of the social scene and of the caste-restrictions that create unhappiness and barriers many times. The heroine is wedded to Kalyan and feeling unhappy, escapes for a while to get educated and independent, only to return home, wiser, sadder more loyal, thus, in effect, telling us both how, for the Indian woman, her husband is still the ultimate reality, and how there is little else for the married women. We have not gone far from the Doll’s House.

Bhattacharya’s ‘He Rode a Tiger’, wherein is displayed the life of Kalo, the blacksmith and of his daughter, Chandralekha; their struggle for existence and their striving to keep away from temptation; his suffering in the days of the Bengal famine of the forties; his play on the credulity of his people, his final return to spiritual purity–is a novel that deserves the highest praise, among recent publications of that genre.

Dr A. T. W. Simeon’s ‘The Mask of a Lion’ speaks of another profession, that of tailoring and mentions Govind, stricken by leprosy and thus highlights the condition of such of our less fortunate brethren as happen to be victims of the dread disease. But beyond this, he stresses the need for a sympathetic outlook and of rehabilitating them. Mixed with these pious desires is his attempts to understand India and to give a sociological document of significance.

The new freedom and education that has become available to some women in India has led to the cult of free career girls and they form part of Mrinalini Sarabhai’s ‘This Alone is True’. Parvati takes to the fine art of dancing in defiance of orthodoxy and leaves her affianced. The life that one has to undergo, not always a happy one, to learn dancing, finds a telling picture, as also the opposition between the new and the old schools of thought, in the pages of the novel; another career is broadcasting and it, too, has its associated consequences for some. This R. Prawer Jhabhwalla treats in her ‘To whom she will’, set in Delhi, with the loves of two radio announcers, Amrita and Hari Sahani, who find their differing social background an obstacle.

The film industry, has attracted some talent of late and there is no sufficient reason to exclude it from the range of the far seeing novelists’ orbit. ‘Poison and Passion’ by D. C. Home therefore depicts the seamy side of the line, its frauds and mounte banks, its trials and its temptations, as also its pitfalls. Tushar, his friend Ramesh, Ira, Sandhya who dies of tuberculosis, are some of the chief characters of this somewhat confusing maelstrom. Nursing is another profession that engages some attention when Anna Piper writes ‘Love on the Make’ featuring a Maharaja’s baby with ginger hair and the Ranee Josephine who is ousted from her royal consort’s heart. It is a gay extravaganza, not to be seriously taken, ultimately.

The Indian underworld of crime appears in a big way in ‘I am a Smuggler’ by Charles Evelyn, a thriller set in Bombay and Calcutta. ‘The Upward Spiral’ gives the author’s, Dilipkumar Roy’s views on life in the person of the hero, Asit, and stresses the spiral ways by which God draws man upward. The habitat is Kashmir for the most part and the chief characters, Swayamanande of the Dhumel Hermitage, Mala, the heroine who, for a time strays from the straight and narrow path of hermitage regimen, to marry the young artist Amar, to return to the fold chastened, Asit, Tapar, Eric Johnson, the devoted disciple of Gurudev and the Police Commissioner.

Thus the last few years of post-Independence in India have been no blot for us, no blank, in fiction; they have meant intensely and meant good. There has been a plentiful variety and a deep desire to understand and portray the numerous cross currents of life. There has been much improvement in the plot-craft, in the portrayal of incidents and character; the English Language has been used delicately, sensitively and with an Indianness typical of those writing in a foreign tongue. There has been delving and research but one wishes that the variety were still wider. For instance, the novelist, like the poet might let his eye in fine frenzy rolling, give to certain of our problems the legitimate treatment they deserve. The evils of linguism, casteism, the life of uprooted refugees and their heroism and adjustability, the future of the English language in India, the need for family planning, India of the first five-year plan, renascent, revitalized, strong–these are some of the themes that are crying for the deft, thorough touch of the novelist’s hand. The English language is yet not so neglected as it would possibly be in course of time. Will not our Indo-anglian novelists listen to the call of the land and in this rich and expressive medium put across to the western audience the deep seated desires, aspirations, and hopes of our people, their desire for international harmony and brotherhood, and thus through this avenue interpret ‘the Mystic’ East to the West and bring about the concord and harmony so necessary, so vital, so urgent? Let us hope fervently that the novels that come from the West also would be more true to life and not to a jaundiced vision of India which has erroneously or deliberately been taken to be the India of to-day by some writers, with little justification. ‘Nurtured from childhood in the widespread belief that the East is a mysterious place, and in its bazaars and narrow lanes, secret conspiracies are being continually hatched, the Englishman can seldom think straight on matters relating to these lands of supposed mystery. He never makes an attempt to understand that somewhat obvious and very unmysterious person, the Easterner. He keeps well away from him, gets his ideas about him from tales abounding in spies and secret societies, and then allows his imagination to run riot’–let us hope that this state of affairs will no longer exist.

Back