CHAPTER TWO ———————— The Painful Search

N EXAMINING the development of Indian English fiction, as well as the literatures in other Indian languages, one must consider I ’s long-standing indigenous narrative tradition, the richness of which such poet–philosophers as Prabhachandracharya carefully explored and defined ever since the tenth century.1 Over and against the recognition of a vast repertoire of indigenous fictional forms there is the overwhelming eurocentric assumption of the novel as an entirely Western legacy transplanted to India and adopted by Indians under the impact of Western education. Yet critics like , , and C.D. Narasimhaiah2 have consistently traced the novel back to India’s classic literary tradition, which existed long before British colonial rule. Not surprisingly, colonial discourse devoted its energies to alienating India from its own cultural past in order to

1 Prabhachandracharya offered six alternative definitions of fiction: (i) fiction is a recollection of what one has observed in the past; (ii) fiction is a verbal reconstruction of an experience; (iii) fiction is generalization from particulars; (iv) fiction is that which is based on facts that do not exist; (v) fiction is what cannot be understood with- out the help of a real experience of life; (vi) fiction is where words are used in their symbolic sense. Dayanand Bhargava, Theories of Fiction in Indian Tradition (Jodhpur Studies in English, 1991), vol. 5: 75. 2 See, for instance, C.D. Narasimhaiah, The Rise of the Indian Novel, ed. Narasim- haiah & C.N. Srinath (Mysore: Dhvanyaloka, 1986), Meenakshi Mukherjee, Realism and Reality (New : Oxford UP, 1985), particularly the chapter “From Purana to Nutana,” and Makarand Paranjape, Towards a Poetics of the Indian English Novel (: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2000). 62 THE ROSE AND THE LOTUS  impose its own cultural hegemony and “create secular hierarchies in- compatible with the traditional order.”3 However, if we examine more closely the nature of this developing literary genre, especially with the aid of the seminal study of the theory of the novel articulated by Mikhail Bakhtin in The Dialogic Imagination, any eurocentric assumption will appear in all its naivety:

The novel comes into contact with the spontaneity of the incon- clusive present […]. Characteristic of it is an eternal re-thinking and re-evaluating […]. The novel, after all, has no canon on its own. It is, by its very nature, not canonic. It is plasticity itself. It is a genre that is ever questing, ever examining itself and subjecting its established forms to review. Such, indeed, is the only possibility open to a genre that structures itself in a zone of direct contact with developing reality.4

The actual interpretative consequences of these definitions articulated by Bakhtin compel us to look radically at the nature of the novel as some- thing that is a-geographical, fundamentally anticanonical, and antihierar- chical; its extraordinary complexity, indeterminacy, and semantic open- endedness can be fully understood only in the process of its continuous unfolding. What we have in the specific case of Indian literatures is even more complex, as the impact of Western traditions, along with India’s own mainstream tradition (marga) and the various regional traditions (desi) contribute to creating a kind of tripartite dialogic relationship from which a ‘thrice-born’ fiction emerges. On one level, this cultural complex- ity seems to be very close to all the features that Ruth Prawer Jhabvala considers essential to an Indian work:

The Indian novel cannot become a distinctive genre and its creators cannot be really true to their basic artistic instincts until they produce novels which would be bits of prose-poetry, anecdotes, lots of philo- sophising and musing, an oblique kind of wit and an ultimate self-

3 Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (1983; : Oxford UP, 2004): ix. 4 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Hol- quist, tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 1981): 27–39.