This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Folklore, Myth, and Indian Fiction in English, 1930-1961 Amar, Shruti Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 28. Sep. 2021 Folklore, Myth, and Indian Fiction in English, 1930-1961 Shruti Amar Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy King’s College London 1 There is no village in India, however mean, that has not a rich sthala-purana, or legendary history of its own. Some god or godlike hero has passed by the village—Rama might have rested under this pipal tree, Sita might have dried her clothes …or the Mahatma himself on many of his pilgrimage might have slept in this hut…to make the repository of your grandmother always bright—Raja Rao *** I began my writing career by rendering Punjabi folktales told to me by my mother. I think the folk tales of our country are some of the most perfect literature of the unlettered life and the in-betweens of feelings of people, with a vital sense of life and death. —Mulk Raj Anand *** Genders are Genres. The world of women is not the world of men. Some of the tales are creations of women’s fantasy that deny in imagination the restrictions of reality, the constraints of family and custom. —A. K. Ramanujan 2 Thesis Abstract The thesis examines the complex relationship between folklore, myth, and Indian writing in English, with reference to a number of novels and short stories written between 1930 and 1961. I look in detail at the works of five writers: Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand, Sudhindra Nath Ghose, R. K. Narayan, and Balachandra Rajan. With the rise of the novel in India during the late nineteenth century, vernacular writers started to experiment with the form and style of fiction. Writing in various regional languages, they frequently drew on oral tales and devised new modes of narration. Such experimentation, however, was not confined to vernacular fiction. In this thesis, I argue that novelists writing in English such as Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan and several others similarly developed a distinct style of writing, as influenced by myth, folklore and folk performances. Like the bhasa writers, they too began to experiment with the form of the novel and short-stories by incorporating tales, songs, and proverbs, and their performative dimensions. Folklore centred on women became crucial to this experimentation. It is this engagement with the myths, folk tales, songs and proverbs that this thesis investigates. Along with the novels of Raja Rao, Sudhindra Nath Ghose, R. K. Narayan and Balachandra Rajan, I analyse the short stories of R. K. Narayan and Mulk Raj Anand in order to understand the complex inter-textual links between written and oral traditions. There are two dimensions to my inquiry. First, through a series of close readings, I investigate how - both in terms of theme and structure - the use of myths, folk tales, songs and proverbs help to evoke, dramatise or even ironise complex situations within the text. Second, I pay special attention to the elements of performance in some of these novels. The sustained engagement of these authors with woman-centric folklore remains a strong sub-theme in the thesis; such engagement also encapsulates the various literary debates on the status of woman in South Asia and provides a glimpse into their everyday lives. In each of my chapters, I investigate the method employed to create a new form of fiction and also how such inclusion constructs the characters as well as the relationship between them within the complex strand of caste and gender hierarchies. Though the thesis sets out to broadly discover the intricate yet inevitable relation between the folk and the written, I have kept the time period between 1930 and 1961. The period is in itself relevant in modern South Asian history as it records the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial era and so my focus remains on the texts produced during this phase. The recurrent nationalist discourse that finally culminated in the independence, as well as the partition in 1947, allowed the authors to set their fiction within the backdrop of a complex historical and political situation that offered as well as required various literary responses. The writers I argue particularly borrowed from the native mythology and folklore to respond to this change. The thesis thus intends to provide a broader perspective on the various ways in which pre-colonial and postcolonial narrative forms intermingled with each other to transform the colonial legacy. 3 Table of Contents Abstract 3 Table of Contents 4 Acknowledgment 6 Illustrations 8 Introduction 9 A. Folklore and Myth in the Context of South Asia B. Beyond the curtain: Women and Folklore C. Folklore, Myth, and Early Indian Novels in English D. Multiculturalism, Inter-texuality and Cultural translation, 1930-1961 E. “Women Question” in Indian Fiction in English Chapter One Orality and Myth in the Novels of Raja Rao 51 1.1 Early Childhood and Literary Influences on Raja Rao 1.2 Caste, Gender, and Peasant Politics: Kanthapura and the Kannada folk tradition 1.3 Technique, Style and Orality in Kanthapura 1.4 “Myth as Technique” in The Serpent and the Rope Chapter two Folk Imagination and Singing Women in the Short Stories of Mulk Raj Anand 102 2.1 Orality, Women, and Tales 2.2 The Short Stories as ‘Neo-folk tales’ 2.3 Women, folk song, and Narrative Fiction Chapter Three “Telling Tales”: Folk Technique in the Fiction of R. K. Narayan 135 3.1 Talkative Man and his World 3.2 The Tales of Inner Household: Akam 3.3 The Short Stories as Akam 3.4 The Man-Eater of Malgudi: Myth or Folktale? 3.5 Rangi as Mohini: Devadasi politics and the Narrative Fiction 3.6 Human, Animal, and Divine 4 Chapter Four The Novels of Sudhin Ghose and the Bengal Folklore 189 4.1 From Elite to Popular: Rise of Print in Nineteenth-century Bengal 4.2 Early Childhood and Literary Influences 4.3 Text and Performance: Kathakata tradition in the Novels of Ghose 4.4 Women and Folklore in the Novels of Ghose Chapter Five “Battle as Metaphor”: Tamil Folk Myth in B.Rajan’s The Dark Dancer 232 5.1 A Scholar in the Making: Early Life and Literary Influences 5.2 The Image of the Dark Dancer 5.3 Sita in the South Indian Folklore 5.4 Kamala as Folk Sita Conclusion 270 Bibliography 281 5 Acknowledgement First of all, I would like to thank my supervisor Santanu Das whose guidance and constant support has been crucial in the making of this thesis. Through his patience, thorough feedback and good will he has transformed a very tiny idea into a whole thesis. He often helped me during tough times and has gone out of the way to turn the thesis into a reality. He made me understand my strengths as well as my weakness. I thank him for helping me to develop a critical perspective on gender politics, postcolonial theory and numerous cultural and social issues, as well as for his innumerable coffees and wit that turned a rather solitary research journey into fun. Without his unconditional support and enthusiasm, the production of this thesis would not have been possible. I am also grateful to Prof Josephine McDonagh for her guidance and encouragement throughout the research period. Always enthusiastic about the present research, she stood by me in some critical periods. Her comments and suggestion have been significant in developing the research idea. She will always remain a source of inspiration for me. I would also like to thank Prof. Javed Majeed whose suggestions and critical comments have changed the course of this thesis. No amount of gratitude is enough for the kind of help that I have received from the British Library. I shall always remain grateful for its support. The warmth and the affection of its staff members cannot be translated into words. I am also thankful to Senate House Library and its staff members as well as to King’s College London for a number of conference grants which helped me to participate in various conferences. The thesis offers a special tribute to Mahasweta Devi. I was fortunate to meet Mahasweta just before the beginning of the research. Gentle in her attitude but fierce in her writing, the celebrated author will remain a critical influence for the progeny.