Introduction the Lower Caste Characters in Indian English Fiction

12 Introduction The Lower Caste Characters in Indian English Fiction The Rise of Indian Novel: Human being is a peculiar social animal on the planet. One of the distinctive aspects of human beings compared to other animals is their instinctive urge to express their experiences, feelings, joys, sufferings, pains etc.; and literature is one of the media for this. In the early phases of human history, oral narrative traditions catered to this urge. Later on, literature, as a form of human expression, evolved with genres like poetry, drama, fiction, and so forth. Therefore, literature possibly can best be described by situating it in its socio-cultural phenomena, as no literature can be produced in a vacuum. The novel, as a literary phenomenon, is pre-eminently a social form, and is concerned with social issues and relationships. The novel, as one of the major and most effective forms of literature, “gives artistic form to the relationship of man and society,” and is “the organic product of a particular environment in a particular society in a given time.”1 It is deeply rooted in the socio-political, economic and cultural facets of the society. It frequently mirrors life, thereby becoming a representation of the society. Henry James’ opinion aptly sums up the connection between the novel and society: “The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.”2 Henry James, in “The Art of Fiction” (1884), argues that the art of the painter and the art of the novelist is analogous. He draws an analogy between the painter and the novelist while giving a general description of the novel thus: [A]s the picture is reality, so the novel is history…The subject matter of fiction is stored up likewise in documents and records, and if it will not give itself away, as they say in California, it must speak with assurance, with the tone of the historian.3 Thus, it can be said that the rise of the novel in India is not merely a literary phenomenon, but pre-eminently a social one. It is closely associated with social, 13 political and economic ethos of the country. It synchronises with the rise of the reformist zeal in the 19th century Indian society - mainly the upper caste Hindu society bound to tradition and customs. Here, a cursory look at some reformist movements, will help to understand the connection between the rise of Indian novel, and the reflection of socio-political and cultural aspects of the society in it. There were attempts to reform the age-old Hindu society on religious and social grounds. Many of these reforms were carried out during the period of Lord William Bentinck, the then Governor General of the East India Company in India from 1828 to 1835. For example, the most well-known of the reforms carried out by Bentinck was the abolition of sati by a law passed in 1829, in response to Raja Ram Mohan Roy’s vigorous campaigns against it. With this law, the custom of sati was prohibited in December 1829 in Bengal, and in 1830 in Madras and Bombay. Bentinck also passed a law against the ritualistic female infanticide to emancipate women from the tyranny of custom and blind faith. Another important measure taken by Bentinck was the banning of the custom of thagi- ritual murder and robbery in the name of goddess Kali. Other social reformists like Akshaykumar Dutt argued in favour of marriage reforms, which would include widow-remarriages, and courtship before marriages. The rise of novel in India coincides with such developments in society. It is bound up with these moments in the country’s history. Being a social phenomenon, it mirrors these social issues and relationships of society. For example, the first novel in Marathi, Yamuna Paryatan (1857) by Baba Padmanji (1837-1906), a Christian convert, deals with a major 19th century problem, viz. pitiable conditions of Hindu widows, and their remarriage. The novel narrates the story of Yamuna, a poor girl, who has attended a missionary school, marries an enlightened Hindu, Vinayak to keep her mother’s promise. When the couple sets out on a journey, Yamuna comes to know the pathetic plight of Hindu widows in India. Latter, she has to confront with the same situation after her husband’s death. When Vinayak dies in an accident, Yumuna’s mother-in-law wants to shave Yumuna’s head, and strip her off all her jewellery to follow the strictures of religious and caste conventions. But, Yamuna does not want to fall prey to such conventions, and runs away. She takes shelter in the house of a Christian couple, and finally remarries. Padmanji’s concern for widow-remarriage is also shared by Gauri Dutt in Devarani Jethani Ki Kahani (1870), a Hindi novel. 14 These examples show that the Indian novel represents social reality as it derives its theme, content and subject matter closely from the prevalent social issues and concerns. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Rajmohan’s Wife is the first novel in English. It appeared in serial form in the Calcutta Weekly, The Indian Field, in 1864. It was published in book form only in 1935. The novel as a form arrived first in regional languages, and then in English4 as Meenakshi Mukherjee points out: Within about twenty-five years after the passing of the Educational Minutes of 1835 which made English the official language of higher education in India, the new narrative form called the novel began to emerge, first in Bangla and Marathi (renamed upanyas and kadambari respectively) to be followed soon after in Hindi, Urdu, Tamil and Malyalam.5 Before Rajmohan’s Wife, the two tracts of imaginary history – Kailash Chunder Dutt’s “A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945” appeared in the Calcutta Literary Gazette in 1835; and Shoshee Chunder Dutt’s “The Republic of Orissa: A Page from the Annals of the 20th Century” published in The Saturday Evening Harakuru in 1845. They are considered the precursors of the Indian English novel, and “Both project into the future, describing battles of liberation against the British but end with dissimilar resolutions.”6 But, the novel as a genre in Indian English literature, has evolved with Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Rajmohan’s Wife - a significant beginning in Indian English fiction, and, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee is the originator of the genre. The novel, Rajmohan’s Wife is important as far as the canon formation of Indian English fiction is concerned. Krishna Kripalani points out Chatterjee’s role in establishing the novel as a genre in Indian English fiction thus: It was Bankim Chandra who established the novel as a major literary form in India. He had his limitations, he too was romantic, effusive and indulged a little too freely in literary flashes and bombast, and was no peer of his great contemporaries, Zola and Dickens, much less of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. There have been better novelists in India since then, but they all stand on Bankim’s shoulders.7 The novel, Rajmohan’s Wife, sets the formula of representing social issues within a certain framework. The novel deals with the problems and role of women in patriarchal society in the 19th century of an upper caste Bengali family. The novel 15 delineates sufferings of the beautiful but passionate Matangini who is expected to embody the ideals of a submissive wife, and her conflicts with her bullying and villainous husband Rajmohan, who represents patriarchal mindset. Kripalani’s observation about Chatterjee becomes significant and valid in the sense that the way the novel paves the way for its successors - the upper caste urban middle and upper class writers in English, who hardly go out of the turtle shell and address significantly the country’s greatest sickness, i.e. caste until Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable in 1935. The lower caste people form a considerable share in Indian population, still they are neglected in Indian English fiction. The upper caste novelist, Chatterjee hardly deals with the lower caste lives in his novels as observed by Raj Kumar: Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, a very important Bengali writer once wrote that for the oppressed, oppression by countrymen belonging to higher castes was not less galling than oppression by arrogant foreigners. Yet, in Bankim’s fourteen novels there is not one that deals with caste oppression, nor are there any characters in his fiction who come from the category of untouchables.8 Within this purview, it is worthwhile here to take a brief survey of issues and themes that Indian English fiction has preoccupied itself with in lieu of representations of issues of caste, and of lower caste characters.9 But before undertaking this, the term ‘lower caste’ as used in this thesis needs some clarification. Use of the Term ‘Lower Caste’: Indian society is based on thousands of castes and sub-castes, which poses a problem: how to be accurate to the vocabulary and language usages about castes, and thus be ‘politically correct’. The term, ‘lower caste’ is routinely used as a binary opposition to ‘upper caste’. The term, ‘upper caste’ is used to refer to those people/groups, who are cream of the society, and enjoy benefits of the caste prerogatives, and are privileged because of their high caste status, mostly in relation to the Brahmin - dvija. Throughout the thesis, the term ‘lower caste’ is used to refer to the group of people, who are stigmatised, exploited and oppressed because of their caste status. It is used in a comparative sense to talk about the lower castes as it refers to the protagonists who are oppressed, stigmatised, and dehumanised, because of 16 their lower order in the ladder of the oppressive and hierarchical Indian caste system.

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