The Nation and Its History

5 The Nation and its History The history written by colonial historians tended to depict Indians as weak, divided, and dependent on the British. These histories could not satisfy the tastes of the new Indian administrators and intellectuals. Nor did the traditional Puranic stories of the past – peopled by gods and demons, filled with the fantastic and the supernatural – seem convincing to those educated and working under the English system. Such minds wanted a new view of the past that would show that Indians could be independent minded and had been so in history. The novel provided a solution. In it, the nation could be imagined in a past that also featured historical characters, places, events and dates. In Bengal, many historical novels were about Marathas and Rajputs. These novels produced a sense of a pan-Indian belonging. They imagined the nation to be full of adventure, heroism, romance and sacrifice – qualities that could not be found in the offices and streets of the nineteenth-century world. The novel allowed the colonised to give shape to their desires. Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay’s (1827-94) Anguriya Binimoy (1857) was the first historical novel written in Bengal. Its hero Shivaji engages in many battles against a clever and treacherous Aurangzeb. Man Singh persuades Shivaji to make peace with Aurangzeb. Realising that Aurangzeb intended to confine him as a house prisoner, Shivaji escapes and returns to battle. What gives him courage and tenacity is his belief that he is a nationalist fighting for the freedom of Hindus. Fig. 24 – Image from the film Chemmeen. Many novels were made into films. The novel Chemmeen (Shrimp, 1956), written by Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai (1912-99), is set in the fishing community in Kerala, and characters speak a variety of Malayalam used by fisherfolk in the region. The film Chemmeen, directed by Ramu Kariat, was made in 1965. The imagined nation of the novel was so powerful that it could inspire actual political movements. Bankim’s Anandamath (1882) is a novel about a secret Hindu militia that fights Muslims to establish a Hindu kingdom. It was a novel that inspired many kinds of freedom fighters. Many of these novels also reveal the problems of thinking about the nation. Was India to be a nation of only a single religious community? Who had natural claims to belong to the nation? 5.1 The Novel and Nation Making Imagining a heroic past was one way in which the novel helped in popularising the sense of belonging to a common nation. Another Fig. 25 – A still from the Kannada film Chomana Dudi (Choma’s Drum, directed by B.V. Karanth in 1975). The film is based on a novel of the same title written in 1930 by the celebrated Kannada novelist Sivarama Karanth (1902-1997). way was to include various classes in the novel so that they could be Box 9 seen to belong to a shared world. Premchand’s novels, for instance, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) developed the are filled with all kinds of powerful characters drawn from all levels Bengali novel after Bankim’s death. His early novels were historical; he later shifted to writing stories of society. In his novels you meet aristocrats and landlords, middleabout domestic relationships. He was mainly level peasants and landless labourers, middle-class professionals and preoccupied with the condition of women and people from the margins of society. The women characters are nationalism. Both concerns are featured in his Ghare Baire (1916) translated in 1919 as The strong individuals, especially those who come from the lower classes Home and the World. The story is about Bimala, and are not modernised. Unlike many of his contemporaries, the wife of Nikhilesh, a liberal landlord who Premchand rejected the nostalgic obsession with ancient history. believes that he can save his country by patiently bettering the lives of its poor and marginal Instead, his novels look towards the future without forgetting the sections. But Bimala is attracted to Sandip, her importance of the past. Drawn from various strata of society, Premchand’s characters create a community based on democratic values. The central character of his novel Rangbhoomi (The Arena), Surdas, is a visually impaired beggar from a so-called ‘untouchable’ caste. The very act of choosing such a person as the ‘hero’ of a novel is significant. It makes the lives of the most oppressed section of society as worthy of literary reflection. We see Surdas struggling against the forcible takeover of his land for establishing a tobacco factory. As we read the story we wonder about industrialisation and its impact on society and people. Who does it serve? Must other ways of living be sacrificed for it? The story of Surdas was inspired by Gandhi’s personality and ideas. husband’s friend and a firebrand extremist. Sandip is so completely dedicated to throwing out the British that he does not mind if the poor ‘low’ castes suffer and Muslims are made to feel like outsiders. By becoming a part of Sandip’s group, Bimala gets a sense of self-worth and self-esteem. Rabindranth also shows the contradictory effects of nationalist involvement for women. Bimala may be admired by the young males of the group but she cannot influence their decisions. Indeed she is used by Sandip to acquire funds for the movement. Tagore’s novels are striking because they make us rethink both man-woman relationships and nationalism. Godan (The Gift of Cow), published in 1936, remains Premchand’s best-known work. It is an epic of the Indian peasantry. The novel tells the moving story of Hori and his wife Dhania, a peasant couple. Landlords, moneylenders, priests and colonial bureaucrats – all those who hold power in society – form a network of oppression, rob their land and make them into landless labourers. Yet Hori and Dhania retain their dignity to the end. Activity Read Godan. Write briefly on: Ø How Premchand depicts the life of peasants in the novel. Ø What the novel tells us about the life of peasants during the Great Depression. Fig. 26 – Portrait of Premchand (18801936). Conclusion We have seen how, over the course of its history in both the West and in India, the novel became part of the lives of different sections of people. Developments in print technologies allowed the novel to break out of its small circle of readers and introduced fresh ways of reading. But through their stories, novels have also shown a capacity to include and focus on the lives of those who were not often known to literate and middle-class circles. We have seen some examples of these in Premchand, but they are equally present in the works of other novelists. Bringing together people from varied backgrounds produces a sense of shared community. The most notable form of this community is the nation. Equally significant is the fact that by bringing in both the powerful and the marginal peoples and cultures, the novel throws up many questions about the nature of these communities. We can say then that novels produce a sense of sharing, and promote an understanding of different people, different values and different communities. At the same time they explore how different groups begin to question or reflect upon their own identities. 1. Explain the following: a) Social changes in Britain which led to an increase in women readers b) What actions of Robinson Crusoe make us see him as a typical coloniser. c) After 1740, the readership of novels began to include poorer people. d) Novelists in colonial India wrote for a political cause. 2. Outline the changes in technology and society which led to an increase in readers of the novel in eighteenth-century Europe. 3. Write a note on: a) The Oriya novel b) Jane Austen’s portrayal of women c) The picture of the new middle class which the novel Pariksha-Guru portrays. Write in brief Write in brief Discuss 1. Discuss some of the social changes in nineteenth-century Britain which Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens wrote about. 3. In what ways was the novel in colonial India useful for both the colonisers as well as the nationalists? 4. Describe how the issue of caste was included in novels in India. By referring to any two novels, discuss the ways in which they tried to make readers think about existing social issues. Discuss 2. Summarise the concern in both nineteenth-century Europe and India about women reading novels. What does this suggest about how women were viewed? 5. Describe the ways in which the novel in India attempted to create a sense of pan-Indian belonging. Project Imagine that you are a historian in 3035 AD. You have just located two novels which were written in the twentieth century. What do they tell you about society and customs of the time? Project