PCP Lectures – MA English Part 1 and 2

Hey guys

I hope you’re aware of and attending the PCP lectures for MA English Part 1 and 2 held at the University.These are important and will help your preparation immensely, so please do not miss out on them.

Posting the timetable for the same in case you haven’t already picked it up from the University website.

What do you need?

Hello

Many of you have emailed me requesting to put up study material on the blog. Whereas I do intend to put up a lot this month, the issue I’m facing is the sheer quantity of notes that will take a ton of time to upload.

So, what I would like you guys to do is shoot me an email asking for topics you most need notes for and I shall start there.  You can send in your requests on nihalanisonia@gmail.com.

Happy Reading. :)

 

 

 

MA English Syllabus 2014-1015 University of Mumbai

 

A Matter Of Time – Shashi Deshpande

Shashi Deshpande is an award winning Indian Novelist. She is a winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award, for the novel ‘That Long Silence’. Shashi Deshpande’s novels primarily present a social world of many complex relationships. She is regarded as a feminist writer and frequently writes about women belonging to the Indian middle class, who are brought up in a traditional, environment and are struggling to liberate themselves and seek their self-identity and independence. Shashi Deshpande gives minute details of development of girl-child in her novels. She has displayed a series of girl-children, where each girl faces a different problem within the family.  She also brings forth the issue of violence against women, whether physical, mental or emotional, which is a concern that crosses all borders and all classes of women. Feminism and its crusade against a male dominated society is of special importance in the Indian context and thus also finds a special place in Deshpande’s novels.

Shashi Deshpande has presented in her novels the modern Indian woman’s struggle to find and consolidate her place and identity in a society that stands conflicted on the cusp of tradition and modernity. She portrays how this social conflict has caused women of today to feel torn between contrasting demands and requirements of tradition on one hand, and the aspirations, freedom and equality of the modern world on the other.

Despite her profound feminist sensibilities, Deshpande doesn’t limit her writing to this area only. She extends her deep psychological insight and understanding to explore various human relationships. However, there is no denying that the relationship that interests her most is that of husband and wife. As it does not exist in isolation but is steeped in the values and ideology of the prevalent society, Deshpande illustrates how the patriarchal oppression and gender differentiation operative within the institution of the family and the male-centred Indian society at large, affects the man-woman relationship.

 In ‘A Matter of Time’, Deshpande sensitively throws light on all the above themes through the lives, personalities and choices/decisions/reactions of her characters.  Deshpande also  explores these questions from the larger framework of existentialism by dwelling on the nature of identity, destiny, human will and the meaning and purpose of existence.

 The novel ‘A Matter of Time’ moves beyond feminist concerns in that it raises the existentialist question itself. The important truth revealed is that self-pity is not the answer. It is only through a process of self examination and self-searching, through courage and resilience that one can change one’s situation from despair to hope. Shashi Deshpande among the writers of the present day, highlights the image of the middle-class woman sandwiched between tradition and modernity. She lays open the inner world of the Indian woman in a realistic manner.

 Emotional Suffering: Kalyani’s fears are based on patriarchal oppression that condemns women to the margins of silence. In the ‘A Matter of Time’ the most striking example of silent suffering is Kalyani who spends nearly forty years in total silence with her husband, Shripati who thus punishes her for losing their son, a male heir. Sumi like her mother, is a suffering oppressed and wronged woman. Yet she does not question the man; her oppressor. Although Sumi manages to keep her feelings on a tight leash, it is Aru who finds it difficult to come to terms with the situation. Sumi urges Aru to let him go for her own sake.

Aru soon realizes that they are trapped into inactivity by that greatest of fears—the fear of losing face. Gopal’s desertion is not just a tragedy; it is both a shame and a disgrace. Later on in the novel, Shankar’s mother–in-law tells Sumi, “….Go back to your husband, he’s a good man. If you’ve done wrong, he’ll forgive you. And if he has—women shouldn’t have any pride .”

 Social Suffering: ‘A Matter of Time’ focuses on social control and pressure, emotional exclusion and abuse. Aru asks Gopal “why did you get married at all, why did you have children?” He had nothing much to say and Sumi, his wife, in her reaction, personalized what the whole novel is devoted to; silent, brooding women, unhappy, clinging to their past, yet living in the present society. Sumi reflects on the fact that that the kumkum on the forehead of a woman means everything in their society. Separated from her husband, she feels discriminated, to the point of fearing for the future of her daughters.

 Search for Identity: Shashi Deshpande’s novel deals with the theme of the quest for female identity, the complexities of the man-woman relationship specially in the context of marriage, and the trauma of a disturbed adolescence. The Indian woman has for years been a silent sufferer. While she has played different roles of a wife, mother, sister and daughter, she has never been able to claim her own individuality. In ‘A Matter of Time’, Kalyani emerges as the most powerful character in the novel. It is a pitiable story, but one of deep endurance and strength. By the mirroring of her own story in her daughter Sumi’s life gives Kalyani the courage to let go of the past and come to terms with her own failed marriage.

Monetary Suffering:  Shashi Deshpande tries to bring out the idea of a woman explicating herself and emerging out of the cocoon of self-pity to spread her wings of self-confidence. It is ironical that both Shripati and Gopal have taken sanyas of sorts; both of them have renounced house-holding much before the prescribed time and before they have fulfilled their duties. In doing so, they have left the house-holding duties to the women. Sumi tried to reclaim herself by indulging in gardening, learning the scooter, becoming economically independent and by writing plays. Aru has taken her promise of being Kalyani’s daughter….her son seriously. It is almost as if at the end of the novel she has taken upon the responsibilities of the householder upon herself. Aru had rushed to Kalyani and kneeling by her huddled body said, “Amma, I’m here, I’m your daughter, Amma, I’m your son, I’m here with you…” (Deshpande, 1996: 233). It is Aru who takes charge at home, doing all the things that have to be done. “She has the concentration of a rope-walker, holding the weight of her grief in her two hands, not as if it is a burden, but to balance herself.” She tells Gopal, “Yes, Papa, you go. We’ll be alright, we’ll be quite alright, don’t worry about us.” (Deshpande, 1996: 246)

 Style and Language:

Deshpande’s style lacks that strand of exoticism so easily found in Indian novels in English. It is not the kind of novel where spices are always being crushed and mixed while the characters explain what a puja is. Those elements are in there, but they are treated as daily routine and mixed up with Aru’s moped or with the printing company giving shelter to Gopal. Dehspande is a “home-grown writer”, because she has never studied or lived abroad. Her background doesn’t include literature studies, so her writing is not an exercise in style but a way of expressing her feelings and thoughts. I’ll quote a passage from Ritu Menon’s foreword to the novel that explains it all:

‘Deshpande is quite clear that, for her, finding her own voice meant not just a woman’s voice but a literary voice of her own: no magic realism, no concessions to “marketability”, no themes or situations that pander to a so-called Western audience, no adapting her style to what a target readership might prefer. One will not find in her novels any element of the “exotic”, a National Geographic-land-and-its-people kind of treatment of the unfamiliar. Rather than serve up a dish that experiments with the spices of the Orient, Deshpande assumes her readers’ familiarity with the everyday ingredients of her offerings, relying upon their fresh, home-cooked flavor to have readers asking for more. Her writing style is marked by an absence of flamboyant or literary flourish. Nor does she beguile us with a Merchant Ivory-like gloss on “Indian Culture.” So, she has never, for example, felt any disjunction between her social self and her literary self, of the kind that critics have noted in other women writers writing in English’

Technically, Deshpande uses an alternating first person/third person voice to present what she calls a ‘double perspective’: the past and present in continuous interplay and overlap.

Deshpande places the failed marriage of Sumi and Gopal firmly at the centre of the novel and it is juxtaposed with other marriages: Kalyani and Shripati, Manorama and Vithalrao in particular. This juxtaposition is possible thanks largely to the double perspective which she presents thus, exploring the simultaneity of past and present, thematically and structurally. As has been noted in all her novels, the past is presented in the first person (usually by the heroine), the present in the third. In a decisive break, the first person voice in the novel is that of Gopal even though both Sumi and Gopal have imaginary, tortured discussions in their own minds with each other throughout the novel.

Despande usually, self-confessedly begins with the characters first; even the themes emerge from the characters.

Deshpande allows herself many references to the Indian epic tales, as a guide to follow or a path to avoid. This gives an indefinite aura to the novel, because the meaning of the stories of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are complicated and apt to personal reshaping, sometimes radical reshapings and appropriations.

It has been said that Deshpande rewrites the same novel over and over. Her fictions in fact often begin with a married woman going back to her parents’ household and goes on with family secrets being slowly revealed. In spite of this, it is a writer Ifing myself often going back to, for her complex, insightful thoughts of what it means to be a woman or what it means to be living in this world.

Other aspects:

 Gopal-Sumi Relationship:

Existential aspects of Gopal’s philosophy: In the novel, Gopal abandons his wife and children because, “I stopped believing in the life I was leading, suddenly it seemed unreal to me and I knew I could not go on.” has changed. When he is told that his wife Sumi has changed, he wonders, “Changed from what? Is there one inviolate self, derivation from which becomes change?…Myriad selves locked in one person. From which self has Sumi changed?”

Sumi remembers Gopal telling her that it is never possible to disclaim the past. In her mother’s house again, she finds herself inclined to agree with him. “Gopal was right. Kalyani’s past, which she has contained within herself, careful never to let it spill out has nevertheless entered into us…it has stained our bones.”

According to Deshpande there is a sharp difference between a man’s world and a woman’s world. However, Gopal is different in the sense that he is able to present the whole aspect of his personality to a female and not just a part of himself. But, the sharp demarcation in a man’s and a female’s worldview still exists. When Gopal saw Sumi put the baby to her breast he felt that they belonged together, they were together in a magic circle in a way in which he never could be. “A man is always an outsider…..for a woman, from the moment she is pregnant, there is an overriding reason for living, a justification for life that is loudly and emphatically true. A man has to search for it always and forever.”

In his quest to discover himself and man’s relation to the universe he realises, “Emptiness is always waiting for us…… All human ties are only a masquerade.” However, Ritu Menon makes a pertinent point, “Would Sumi, a daughter, a wife, and most importantly a mother, ever feel the need to walk out of her family? If she did, would she walk out? I suspect that my answers to both the questions would have to be no.”According to Gopal, destiny is just us, and therefore inescapable, because we can never escape ourselves. However, Sumi wonders, “If Gopal’s life is shaped by what he is what about us, the girls and me? We are here because of his actions: how does this fit in?”

Mother-daughter relationship:

The mother-daughter relationship has also occupied an important place in Deshpande’s fiction. She does not give much credence to the mother as angel or goddess who is valorised in Indian culture. Instead, she presents us with different facets of the mother-daughter relationship as she is acutely aware that the prevalent patriarchal ideology is more often than not too strongly ingrained in women for them to treat their daughters as human beings in their own right. This is evident in Manorama’s treatment of Kalyani. Manorama wanted a son; instead there was Kalyani. For Manorama she became the visible symbol of their failure to have a son. Moreover, she fulfilled none of the dreams Manorama had for her. When it was clear that Manorama could have no more children, she became afraid that Vithalrao might adopt a son or marry again. Kalyani was good at Maths and wanted to be an engineer but Manorama did not allow her to complete her schooling and instead married her off to her own brother, Shripati. “Perhaps, after this, Manorama felt secure. The property (Vishwas) would remain in the family now,” (Deshpande, 1996: 129) the narrator informs us.

Patriachal Society:

The all-pervasive hold of the patriarchal worldview is made obvious right in the beginning of the novel in the description of the ancestral house. The ancestral house, Vishwas or the Big House is a living presence in the novel. The name of the house is not derived from the abstract quality of trust but from an ancestor, the man who came down South with the Peshwa’s invading army and established the family there. Still, the house proclaims the meaning of its name by its very solidity. This very solidity also makes it obvious that it has been built by a man not just for himself, but for his sons and his son’s sons.

CONCLUSION

Shashi Deshpande an eminent novelist has emerged as a writer possessing deep insight into the female psyche. Focussing on the marital relation she seek to expose the tradition by which a woman is trained to play her subservient role in the family. Her novels reveals the man-made patriarchal traditions and uneasiness of the modern Indian woman in being a part of them. Shashi Deshpande uses this point of view of present social reality as at is experienced by women. To present the world of mothers, daughters and wives is also to present indirectly the fathers, sons and husbands the relation between men and woman, and between women themselves. Her young heroines rebel against the traditional way of life and patriarchal values. The words which we always associate with what we consider to be the concept of an ideal woman are, self-denial, sacrifice, patience, devotion and silent suffering. In the ‘A Matter of Time’ is an exploration of Kalyani, Sumi and her daughters Aru. Shadhi Deshpande’s fiction is an example of the ways in which a girl child’s particular position, social reality and identity and psychological growth determine her personality.

According to the narrator, the hero and heroine do not matter so much in the story of an arranged marriage; it is the parents. The truth of this statement is borne out in Manorama’s marriage to Vithalrao. Manorama was the daughter of a poor village Brahmin while Vithalrao was an educated son of a well to do man from Bangalore. Vithalrao’s father did not hesitate to do what could have damned him in the society he lived in: make an offer to a girl’s father for his son. Also, it was Manorama’s mother who had sent her daughter to Yamunabai’s school at a time when schooling for a girl was something that could come in the way of her marriage prospects. And she did this in spite of the fact that Yamunabai and most her students were not Brahmins. Moreover, Manorama’s mother had induced her husband to write a letter to Vithalrao’s father about the disaster that struck, just a month before the wedding was to take place: Manorama ‘grew up.’ When Kalyani at last gave birth to a son he turned out to be mentally retarded. While coming to Bangalore for the vacations, the four year old child somehow got lost at VT station. Premi tells Aru, “Baba had gone to check the reservations, leaving Amma with the children, when he returned the boy wasn’t there.” (Deshpande, 1996: 140)

It is clear that Shripati suspected Kalyani of deliberately losing the mentally retarded child whom she found difficult to manage. Kalyani and her daughters did not see Shripati for nearly two months as he went on searching around the city like a madman for his lost son. Even though he was distraught and frantic for his son, it was an act of public desertion as he left Kalyani and her daughters on the platform, surrounded by curious strangers.

After this, Kalyani like Sumi, later, went with her daughters to the ancestral home. After being forced by Manorama on her deathbed, Shripati returned back to Kalyani after more than two months. However, he stayed in his room and never spoke to her again. Like Premi told Anil, “My father never spoke to me until I was ten…. the truth was a father who stayed in his room, who never came out, never spoke to you.”. The first time he really talked to her was after her medical exams when he summoned her to his room to tell her that she was getting married to Anil.

As stated earlier, the husband-wife relationship does not exist in isolation. It gets affected by myriad factors. Manorama never relented in her anger towards her daughter. There was more to it than the disgrace of her coming back home, a rejected wife. Manorama’s treatment of her daughter adversely affected her relationship with Vithalrao and the rift between them never healed. Vithalrao had a stroke soon after and for this, too, Manorama held her daughter responsible.

Kalyani has turned the very weapon employed against her into her armour. Her silence is a mode of resistance which is highly potent because it does not allow anyone even a glimpse of her feelings or thought process. It puzzles Aru to distraction as she attempts to fathom the inscrutable nature of Kalyani and try to reconcile her contradictory attitudes towards her. Aru is in some ways the heroine of the novel as the omniscient narrator herself admits: “Is Aru the heroine? Why not?…Perhaps there’s this too, this above all, that Aru is trying to make sense of what is happening, her consciousness moving outside herself and reaching out to the others as well as embracing, in fact, the whole of what is happening.” (Deshpande, 1996: 185)

In her attempts at making sense of the situation, she gradually moves towards an understanding that perhaps, whatever we do, we are always giving the past a place in our lives. However, Kalyani has come to terms with the past and she reminds Sumi of a spider she had seen a few days ago, spinning an intricate delicate web into a beautiful design because of the variety of relationships she has at present. As the narrator says, the family does not seem to realise that “the real miracle is Kalyani herself, Kalyani who has survived intact, inspite of what Shripati did to her, Kalyani who survived Manorama’s myriad acts of cruelty.” (Deshpande, 1996: 151)

During a conversation, the talk veers towards a person who was interested in Goda and who died a year later. At this point Goda shudders involuntarily, prompting Sumi to wonder whether it is this that has helped Kalyani to endure everything; the fact that Kalyani has the right to all the privileges of the wife of a living husband. After Shripati’s death, they find in his will he has left the house to ‘Kalyani, daughter of Vithalrao and Manorama.’ Goda had looked anxiously at Kalyani when Anil read the will, but for Kalyani, clearly, there was no sting in the words that took away her marital status. “On the contrary, it is as if the words have given her something more than the house, restored something she had lost; they seem, in fact, to have strengthened her.” (Deshpande, 1996: 245). The words have given her back her identity. is suddenly killed in an accident along with Shripati. It is interesting that the accident takes place when they have just mentioned Madhav, the lost son. In fact Sumi takes a while to realise that Shripati is referring to the lost boy. She is surprised that he is taking about the child to her and turns around and sees a look of brooding tenderness on his face. It is the only time that father and daughter utter his name and both die with it on their lips. As Ritu Menon notes, it is ironical that Kalyani’s silence is broken with the deaths of Shripati and Sumi.

(Deshpande, 1996: 234) Ever since she had heard Kalyani’s story from Premi, after initial tumult, she had been left with two images: a woman, her two daughters by her side, frozen into an image of endurance and desperation; and a man, moving all over a city, tirelessly searching for his lost son. Even when Kalyani learnt about Sumi’s death and cried out “I lost my child Goda” (Deshpande, 1996: 244), Aru couldn’t help wondering whether it was a declaration of innocence when it was too late and did not matter anymore or was she referring to Sumi. But when she saw Goda envelop her in the folds of her love and compassion she realised that it did not matter. Forgiveness has no place in this relationship, acceptance is all.

1996: 238)

 Credits and References:

http://literaryindia.com/Literature/Indian-Literature/Sindhi-Literature/sindhi-language.html

http://www.museindia.com/featurecontent.asp?issid=36&id=2533

http://booksofgold.blogspot.com/2010/12/matter-of-time-by-shashi-deshpande.html

literaryindia.com/Literature/Indian-Authors/794.html

 Also read:

Sumi is sitting on the couch watching television, when her husband Gopal, instead of sitting beside her like he has always done, chooses an armchair. He tells her that he’s leaving her. The television in the meantime is still showing a ridiculous clown and the circus. Sumi is left with three daughters to look after and she cannot pay the rent of her flat alone, so she decides to go back to her parents’ home. The tensions in the family grow, even though everyone tries to help and cheer Sumi up. Aru, Sumi’s older daughter, is particularly angry at her father for leaving them without giving an explanation. Gopal in the meantime is living with one of his former students and cannot explain, neither to his daughter or his ex-wife, why he has left, if not by telling them that he was not feeling at ease. Little by little, the cracks in the family are revealed: Kalyani, Sumi’s mother, hasn’t spoken with her husband (who is also her uncle) in thirty years, despite the fact that they live in the same house. Nonetheless Gapal is the real protagonist of the story: he is the one who reflects on the pain of living and puzzles over the meaning of ancient Hindu texts. Deshpande gives Gopal a level of introspection that usually women writers reserve for female characters. He is present and absent at the same time: the novel begins with Gopal and ends with Gopal, but “formally” the main characters are all women.

 

 

Swami and Friends – R.K. Narayan — Notes

(MA English Part 1 Paper 1)

Swami and Friends is the first of a trilogy of novels written by RK Narayan, a celebrated English novelist from India.

RK Narayan started his prolific writing career with this novel Swami and Friends written in 1935. It is full of humor and irony. Narayan started writing this novel with the words “It was Monday morning…” to the auspicious time his grandmother chose for him. Like many of his fictional grandmothers, he was close to his grandmother who was well versed with astrology. Despite this it took time for the budding writer to be acknowledged as an author. Fortunately for him, he had helped from many quarters, such as the well-established author British author Graham Green. He called Swami and Friends a work of “remarkable maturity, and of the finest promise…and is the boldest gamble a novelist can take. If he allows himself to take sides, moralise, propaganda, he can easily achieve an extra-literary interest, but if he follows Mr. Narayan’s method, he stakes all on his creative power.”

The novel is set in pre-independence days in India, in a fictional town – Malgudi, which has almost become a real place in India today, due to the wide recognition and popularity of Narayan’s many novels. His novels are known for their ‘deftly etched characters, his uniquely stylized language and his wry sense of humor’.

Swami and Friends is the story of a 10-year-old boy, growing up during this particular time, his innocence, wonder, mischief and growing pains. He is a student at Albert Mission School, a school established by the British which gives importance to Christianity, English literature and education. His life is dramatically changed when Rajam – a symbol of colonial super power – joins the school and he and Rajam become friends.

At first glance, Swami and Friends is nothing more than a simple, charming story of a ten-year old boy who lives in a world of (in his eyes) bossy adults – be they parents or teachers at school – and his friends and enemies at school. His life is fairly complex and he has a tough job to do: pleasing both his demanding peers and also the dour world of adults around him. He manages his tough balancing act for a while but then two incidents change his life forever. Finally, he gets out of trouble, but the cost is heavy: he loses the friendship of Rajam, the son of the Police Superintendent and is devastated at his departure at the end.

The central theme of the novel is growing up of young Swami. He is a spontaneous, impulsive, mischievous and yet a very innocent child. His character is a child in the fullest sense of the world. Through Swami’s eyes the reader gets to peak in to the pre-independence days in South India. The life portrayed in the novel is accurate in its description of the colonial days – the uprisings, the rebellions, the contempt and the reverence the natives had for their subjugator, together with varied elements that have become one, such as cricket and education.

Unlike many colonial and post-colonial writers Narayan does not directly attack or criticize the colonial system, although elements of gentle criticism and irony directed towards the colonial system, are scattered through out Swami and Friends and all his other novels. He has rather directed his creativity at depicting the life of the people at the time. It is almost as if he is charmed by these unsophisticated and simple, yet eccentric people and their lives. It is unclear if he refrained from an all out attack on the British colonial system out of choice or reverence. But it seems at this point in his career, (and during this particular point of India’s history), when he is starting out as an author, he would write to the English speaking audience in India and for the vast audience abroad. Hence it would be folly to attack the very system that would sustain him as a novelist, his career of choice. Asked about why he was unbothered about the prevailing political crisis and other happenings during the time, Narayan replied in an interview thus ” When art is used as a vehicle for political propaganda, the mood of comedy, the sensitivity to atmosphere, the probing of psychological factors, the crisis of the individual soul and its resolution and above all the detached observation which constitutes the stuff of fiction is forced into the background.” Beyond this, he also had tremendous regard for the English language and literature as an aesthetic past time, and was not blind to its value in that regard.

The absence of criticism on the colonial system maybe also due to the fact that Narayan simply believed the colonizer and the colonized could live together in harmony, benefiting each other. Most Englishmen and the natives certainly seem to do so in his novels, such as Mr Retty (Swami and Friends) and Matheison (Waiting for the Mahatma). The rice mill owner Mr Retty was “the most Indianized of the ‘Europeans’….and was the mystery man of the place: nobody could say who he was or where he had come from: he swore at his boy and his customers in perfect Tamil and always moved about in shirt, shorts and sandaled feet.” Mr Matheison feels strongly for Indians and considers himself Indian. “You see, it is just possible I am as much attached to this country as you are.” Only Mr Brown seems to be the ‘black sheep’ in this regard. His Western mind is only capable of “classifying, labeling and departmentalizing…” And the gentle criticism and irony directed towards him was in the same way directed towards his fellow countrymen. In his mind British or Indian, they were all human beings with prejudices, follies, errors, kindness and goodness, each in varying degrees.

Narayan’s success as a writer emerges from his portrayal of a unique culture, and yet at the same time a subtle criticism of the alien political power. For this he used the tools of humor and irony. His success in reconciling these two opposing ends is seen in the fact that Narayan’s novels are received well both in his native country India and all around the world.
When the novel unfolds, we are told that Swami has four friends. ‘He (Swaminathan) honoured only four persons with his confidence’ – Somu, the Monitor, who carried himself with such an easy air; Mani the mighty Good-For-Nothing; Sankar, the most brilliant boy of the class and Samuel who was known as the Pea, who had nothing outstanding about him, like Swami, but they were united in their ability to laugh at everything. Swami’s relationships with each of these friends were different, but he cherished them all. This harmonious existence is threatened with the arrival of Rajam. Rajam is the colonial superpower that Narayan introduces. He symbolizes the new Indian middle class that Thomas Babington Macaulay anticipated in his now famous 1835 Minute on Education ‘a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.’

“He (Rajam) was a new-comer; he dressed very well- he was the only boy in class who wore socks and shoes, fur cap and tie, and a wonderful coat and nickers. He spoke very good English, exactly like a European; which meant that few in the school could make out what he said.” The last sentence in the quotation actually runs beyond its literary meaning. Rajam brought up in a different atmosphere than that of his fellow classmates did in fact speak differently and few understood what he said. Rajam wanted to be better than the rest, to be successful, to impress and to lead. As the novel progresses we see that he is neither affectionate, loyal nor faithful to his friends. At the same time he is confident, intelligent and rarely if ever loses his composure. He has developed the proverbial ‘English stiff upper lip.’ Swami was greatly impressed by Rajam and wanted to be friends with him. And when he finally does so, this friendship initially creates friction between his earlier friends.

The turning point in his young life comes when impulsively he decides to join a rebellion against the British. He was however, not being patriotic, but rather impulsive, and was enjoying breaking windowpanes by throwing stones. He is punished harshly by the principal and in a moment of desperation runs away from the school. He is later admitted to another school – Board High School. It is during this time that Rajam, Mani and Swami form a Cricket Club and set a date for a match against another cricket club. Swami is now under pressure by Rajam to attend cricket practices; he skips his drill classes in order to do so, and gets into trouble with the drill teacher. In yet another moment of desperation he runs away both from school and home. He gets lost on the road, but is found by a cart-man and is brought home. He learns that he had indeed missed the cricket match, which he took such pains to practice for.

Rajam stubbornly refuses to see him after this, and after a lapse of some days Swami comes to know through Mani that Rajam’s father was transferred and was moving the next day. Swami is crushed, but in his innocence, he erroneously thinks that Rajam will relent and forgive. Rajam had decided otherwise and hardened himself against forgiving. There is immense poignancy in the parting seen between the friends. It is heightened by the fact that the reader knows that Rajam has not and will not forgive Swami, while Swami believes that he is forgiven and is grieving for his “dearest friend’s” departure:

“At the sight of the familiar face Swaminathan lost control of himself and cried: ‘Oh Rajam, Rajam you are going away. When will you come back? Rajam kept looking at him without a word and then (as it seems to Swaminathan) opened his mouth to say something, when everything was disturbed by the guard’s blast and the hoarse whistle of the engine.……Rajam’s face with the words still unuttered on his lips, receded”

Swami did not have the money to buy a lavish gift for Rajam, but had thoughtfully decided to give him an English book “Anderson’s Fairy Tales” and writes on the flyleaf ‘To my dearest friend Rajam’. In this last episode Narayan stresses the difference between the thoughtless Rajam and his devoted two friends Swami and Mani. Rajam was ‘dressed like a European boy’, his very appearance was alien to them, but it is not only on the outside that Rajam was different, but even within, as the reader sees through out the novel and especially at the end. To Narayan, Rajam’s ways and thinking are different, much like the “Europeans.” Rajam in his superiority does not feel he owes anybody explanations or farewells. He came, he conquered and he will go as he pleases. This attitude of Rajam’s is akin to that of the colonizer who came, conquered, made drastic changes in the lives of Indians and then left just as abruptly as he had come, leaving chaos behind. Rajam was the symbol of that ‘class of people’ the British colonizer bred, who invariably became alien and even contemptuous to their very own culture.

The novel, first intended for a very young audience, later expanded into a universal one, for its simple narrative and depiction of colonial India. Today in India it is recommended as a textbook or a reference book. One of the most glaring facts about the novel is the similarity of children through out the world, and how they have not changed since the time the novel was written. Children are all mischievous, impulsive and innocent like Swami. They all play and enjoy just like Swami, and try to circumvent doing homework by ingenious excuses and methods. Like Swami most children – even today- attend schools that do not nourish their heritage and culture, throughout the world including the US.

The criticism of the educational system and the lack of faith in it is a common theme of Narayan. It runs throughout this trilogy Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts and The English Teacher. Narayan’s own father who was a principal did not think much of the system as Narayan and his many fictional characters, such as Swami, Chandran, Krishna, Sriram and a host of others. But the educational system comes under grave criticism in this trilogy, and discussed at length in The English Teacher. (Read The English Teacher web page in this site.) It is not that Narayan thought that education was useless, but rather that the school and education system founded by the British was irrelevant. He was maybe among the second generation of persons who received a formal education in India during the time, and saw how his grandparents and many other of his countrymen surviving, thriving and living as good human beings, perhaps even better than the ‘educated folk,’ without any education.

R.K.Narayan’s first short novel, Swami and Friends, also provides the setting for his later novels and short stories, Malgudi. Malgudi is the typical Indian middle and lower-middle class town and something that provides a window into the life-blood of South India: its unique culture, its simple people and also its paradoxes.

Swami is a paradox throughout the narration. R.K.Narayan does a wonderful job in bringing out his emotional pysche. While Swami sincerely and innocently believes in the sanctity of his friendship with Rajam, Rajam remains aloof and impersonal. Swami’s relationship with his peer group is very complex as so-called ‘friends’. The novel is full of irony and subtle wit. And also disturbing. Friendship at that age is nothing more than peer pressure and this is a fact that Swami cannot fathom. He tries to impress his friends and peers. He acts impulsively and loses control of himself on more than one occasion. He gets little emotional support at home or from his peers. School is a place where life is tough. Constant pressure from all directions finally tells on Swami and he bends.

Narayan also gently laughs at the world in which Swami lives. The paradoxes of pre-independence India, the alternating aloof and passionate nature of the people, the confusions that encompass the mind of a child in such a volatile environment: all those things are brought out beautifully. Narayan takes a dig at the educational system too as envisioned by the British masters. The use of the cane, the degrading and humiliating nature of the ‘stand-up-on-the-desk’ punishment, the heavy workload are all shown up by Narayan for what they are: a cruel way of education which mass-produces unimaginative clerks and subordinate staff to serve in the British administrative machine. The real irony of this is seen when Swami runs away from the Board High school and feels nostalgic about his old school: the Albert Mission.

In the final analysis, Swami and Friends is more than the story of a child. It is the story of a generation of Indians who are born and brought up in the shadow of the British colonial Raj and who inherit the confusions of the cultural and social conflict. This is best seen where Swami is seen alternatively admiring and envying Rajam: the rich boy who walks to school dressed like a ‘European’. Swami is caught between two worlds as represented by Mani and Rajam. Rajam who stands for all that is posh and urbane, smooth and unemotional, well educated yet hard and ruthless in a way. The other end is Mani who is rough, untamed, naive, emotional and yet loyal. The masterly irony is seen because these two characters not only meet but (in Swami’s eyes) they also apparently get along well. To the end, Swami cannot understand the difference and hence the pathos in the final scene.

Narayan passes no judgement on anybody. He presents Swami for what he is and also the world around him for what it is. His style is smooth and simple. His sentences are crisp, yet unconventional. His use of certain ‘Indianisms’ might alienate the foreign reader, yet they convey his meaning adequately. The apparent discontinuity of narration at places serves to enhance, rather than dispel, the overall effect. The cultural aspect is very visible throughout: for example Swami’s fearful respect towards his father, his closeness to his grandmother, his turbulent relationships at school and his total emotional isolation in spite of physical proximity to so many people are so typical of Indian life where visible demonstration of love and care are seen as signs of weakness and a thing of shame. Throughout Swami grovels in darkness around him and yet does not see himself as being in the dark: that is the final irony and the one the cuts deepest.

A highly readable novel that can be read on all levels. While my review focusses more on the psychological aspects of the book, the book can also be read without all this mental baggage. That is what keeps Swami and Friends evergreen and fresh at even this day and age.

Narayan and Humour

Humour and laughter are the greatest virtues that God has bestowed on man.

A sense of humour makes one see one’s proper place in this world, and teaches him to see things in proportion. Both humour and laughter are universal, though there are national differences on certain aspects. They have their place in all arts and their enjoyment leads to aesthetic experience of a unique kind.

The humour of situation and character represent the higher forms of humour. R.K.Narayan has written stories in which humour arises out of situation or character or stories in which situation and character combine to produce the humorous effect. Narayan has excelled in producing humour of situation as well as of character. He has taken his raw material from the people and events around him.

On Defining and Describing Humour

Humour in a situation depends neither on verbal means nor on characters, but purely on the situation that turns out to be funny due to a juxtaposition of incongruities.

Henry Bergson applies the techniques of repetition, inversion and reciprocal interference of series. By repetition he means a combination of circumstances, which recur several times, contrasting with the changing stream of life. Inversion means “topsy-turvy- dom”, where the situation is reversed and the roles inverted. A child trying to teach its parents, a character who lays a trap in which he is the first to be caught, the villain who is the victim of his own villainy-in every case the root is the inversion of roles and a situation which recoils.

With regard to reciprocal interference of series, Bergson observes that “a situation is invariably comic when it belongs simultaneously to two altogether independent series of events and is capable of being interpreted in two entirely different meanings at the same time” (123). An equivocal situation, which provides two different meanings, one plausible and the other real, is a good example. Misunderstanding and mistaken identity also cause the humour of situation. The present article focuses on how R.K.Narayan produces humour effectively through situation and character in the novel Swami and Friends.

Realism of Children’s World in Swami and Friends

Swami and Friends (1935), Narayan’s first novel, is remarkable for his understanding of child psychology and for his depiction of the buoyant world of school boys in a realistic and convincing manner. About this book Graham Greene wrote:

It was Mr.Narayan with his Swami and Friends who first brought India, in the sense of the Indian population and the Indian way of life, alive to me… Swami is the story of a child written with complete objectivity, with a humour strange to our fiction, closer to Chekhov than to any English writer, with the same underlying sense of beauty and sadness (28).

 

Questions that may be asked :

1. Explain why Swami’s character is loveable and likeable.

2. Discuss the language and the method of story telling Narayan has used in Swami and Friends.

3. Discuss the irony and humor present in the novel.

4. What part does colonialism play in the novel? Do you think the author or the characters are overly considered about their political system?

 

Citations:

Narayan R. K. Swami and Friends. East Lansing: The Michigan State College Press, 1954

http://www.stud.uni-goettingen.de/~s098642/narayan.htm

http://www.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/rraley/research/english/macaulay.html

http://www.wmich.edu/dialogues/texts/swamiandfriends.htm

http://www.stud.uni-goettingen.de/~s098642/narayan.htm

http://www.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/rraley/research/english/macaulay.html

http:://www.nybooks.com/articles/14016 

http://www.languageinindia.com/feb2010/gunaswamyandfriends.html

Impact of the Renaissance on English Literature

Impact of the Renaissance on English Literature

MA English Part 1 Paper 3

Background Topic

“Renaissance” literally means “rebirth.” It refers especially to the rebirth of learning that began in Italy in the 14^th century, spread to England by the sixteenth century, and ended in the mid-seventeenth century (earlier in Italy). During this period, there was an enormous renewal of interest in and study of classical antiquity.

This impulse by which the medieval society of scholasticism, feudalism, and chivalry was to be made over into what we call the modern world came first from Italy. The Renaissance movement first received definite direction from the rediscovery and study of Greek literature, which clearly revealed the unbounded possibilities of life to men who had been groping dissatisfied within the now narrow limits of medieval thought.

Yet the Renaissance was more than a “rebirth.” It was also an age of new discoveries, both geographical and intellectual. Both kinds of discovery resulted in changes of tremendous significance for the modern-day Western civilization.

The Renaissance affected the cultural, social, political, religious and intellectual structures and mind-sets in England. Prior to the Renaissance, the whole sphere of knowledge had been subjected to the mere authority of the Bible and of a few great minds of the past, such as Aristotle. Scientific investigation was almost entirely stifled, and progress was impossible. The whole field of religion and knowledge had become largely stagnant under an arbitrary despotism. The Renaissance meant the death of such medieval thought and scholasticism which had for long been keeping human thought in bondage. Secondly, it signalised a revolt against spiritual authority-the authority of the Pope. The Reformation, though not part of the revival of learning, was yet a companion movement in England. This defiance of spiritual authority went hand in hand with that of intellectual authority. Renaissance intellectuals distinguished themselves by their flagrant anti-authoritarianism.Thirdly, the Renaissance implied a greater perception of beauty and polish in the Greek and Latin scholars. This beauty and this polish were sought by Renaissance men of letters to be incorporated in their native literature. Further, it meant the birth of a kind of imitative
tendency implied in the term “classicism.”Lastly, the Renaissance marked a change from the theocentric to the homocentric conception of the universe. Human life, pursuits, and even body came to be glorified. “Human life”, as G. H. Mair observes, “which the mediaeval Church had taught them [the people] to regard but as a threshold and stepping-stone to eternity, acquired suddenly a new momentousness and value.”.The “otherworldliness” gave place to “this-worldliness”. Human values came to be recognised as permanent values, and they were sought to be enriched and illumined by the heritage of antiquity. This bred a new kind of paganism and marked the rise of humanism as also, by implication, materialism.

Thus, to the minds which were being paralyzed under medieval system, Greek literature brought the inspiration for which they longed. It gave rise to a movement called Humanism characterized by the philosophy of secularism, the appreciation of worldly pleasures, and above all the assertion of personal independence and individual expression. Zeal for the classics was a result as well as a cause of the growing secular view of life. Men thus affected — the humanists — welcomed classical writers who revealed similar social values and secular attitudes. Modern historians are perhaps more apt to view humanism as the germinal period of modernism. Desiderius Erasmus, one of the greatest humanists, occupied a position midway between extreme piety and frank secularism. Francesco Petrarch represented conservative Italian humanism.

Another humanist trend which cannot be ignored was the rebirth of individualism, which had been suppressed by the rise of a caste system by the Church and by feudalism in the Middle Ages. Everything was regulated by law and custom. The individual who attempted to challenge authority and tradition, in matters of thought or action, was either discouraged or crushed.The period from the 14th century to the 17th worked in favour of the general emancipation of the individual. Italy had come into contact with the diverse customs of the writings of Dante, and particularly the doctrines of Petrarch and humanists like Machiavelli, emphasized the virtues of intellectual freedom and individual expression. In the essays of Montaigne the individualistic view of life received perhaps the most persuasive and eloquent statement in the history of literature and philosophy.

Individualism and the instinct of curiosity were vigorously cultivated. Honest doubt began to replace unreasoning faith. Finally, the spirit of individualism to a certain degree incited the Protestant revolt, which, in theory at least, embodied a thorough application of the principle of individualism in religion.

Another movement that the Renaissance ushered in was Neoplatonism, a school of religious, mystical philosophy based on the teachings of Plato and his followers, notably Plotinus. Neoplatonism attempted to reconcile the nascent Christian doctrine with the classical philosophies of Greek and Roman society.During Renaissance, Neoplatonism was fundamental to the school of the Cambridge Platonists, whose luminaries included Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, Benjamin Whichcote andJohn Smith, all graduates of Cambridge University. Coleridge claimed that they were not really Platonists, but “more truly Plotinists”: “divine Plotinus”, as More called him.Later, Thomas Taylor (not a Cambridge Platonist) was the first to translate Plotinus’ works into English.

^{Impact of the Renaissance on non-creative} literature:

• English educationists and scholars travelled to Italy to personally read manuscripts of the fleeing Greek scholars. They returned to imbibe these classical teachings in their curriculums at Oxford.

• The Scholemaster by Sir Roger Ascham

• Puts forward his views on the teaching of the classics. His own style is based upon the ancient Roman writers.

• Inspired by Cicero and Seneca

• teaching men to admire and imitate the masterpieces of antiquity or what we call today ‘classicism’.

• On Prose: Erasmus – Praise of Folly is”the best expression in literature of the attack that the Oxford reformers were making upon the medieval system.

• Sir Thomas More’s Utopia “true prologue to the Renaissance.'” More’s Utopia is an imaginary island which is the habitat of an ideal republic. By the picture of the ideal state is implied a kind of social criticism of contemporary England. , More discredits mediaevalism in all its implications and exalts the ancient Greek culture. reverses medieval beliefs.” Utopia created a new genre in which can be classed such works as Bacon’s The New Atlantis (1626)

• Bacon, Machiavelli: Elizabethan age-the age of the flowering of the Renaissance

• Influenced both in their style and thought-content by the revival of the antique classical learning.

• Sidney in Arcadia, Lyly in Euphues, and Hooker in The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity write an English which is away from the language of common speech, and is either too heavily laden—as in the case of Sidney and Lyly-with bits of classical finery, or modelled on Latin syntax, as in the case of Hooker. Cicero  and Seneca seemed to these writers very obvious and respectable models.

• Bacon however stands as a representative of the materialistic, Machiavellian facet of the Renaissance, particularly of Renaissance Italy. He combines in himself the dispassionate pursuit of truth and the keen desire for material advance.

• On Poetry:

• Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey were pioneers of the new poetry in England. After Chaucer the spirit of English poetry had slumbered for upward of a century.

• It is with “these two courtiers that the modern English poetry begins.”

• Tottel’s Miscellany – one of the landmarks of English literature

• Wyatt had travelled extensively in Italy and France and had come under the spell of Italian Renaissance.

• Imported into England various new Italian metrical patterns.

• They gave English poetry a new sense of grace, dignity, delicacy, and harmony which was found by them lacking in the works of Chaucer and the Chaucerians alike.

• influenced by the love poetry of Petrarch and they did their best to imitate it.. There is much of idealism, if not downright artificiality, in this kind of love poetry.

• Wyatt to have introduced the sonnet into English literature, and of Surrey to have first written blank verse. Both the sonnet and blank verse were later to be practised by a vast number of the best English poets.

• On Drama:

• It is interesting to note that English dramatists came not under the spell of the ancient Greek dramatists “(Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the tragedy writers, and Aristophanes, the comedy writer) but the Roman dramatists (Seneca, the tragedy writer, and Plautus and. Terence! the comedv writers). It was indeed unfortunate, as Greek drama is vastly superior to Roman drama. Gpfboduc is a slavish imitation of Senecan tragedy and has all its features without much of its life.

^• Seneca remains one of the few popular Roman philosophers from the period. He appears not only in Dante, but also in Chaucer and to a large degree in Petrarch, who adopted his style in his own essays and who quotes him more than any other authority except Virgil; in the Renaissance, printed editions and translations of his works become common, including an edition by Erasmus and a commentary by John Calvin.^[9] Ralph Waldo Emerson, John of Salisbury, Erasmus and others celebrated his works. French essayist Montaigne, who claimed not to have studied on Seneca and Plutarch,^[9] was himself considered by Pasquier a “French Seneca”; similarly, Thomas Fuller praised Joseph Hall as “our English Seneca”. Many who have considered his ideas not to be particularly original, still argued he was important in making the Greek philosophers presentable and intelligible.

•

• Later on, the “University Wits” struck a note of independence in their dramatic work. They refused to copy Roman drama as slavishly as the writers of Gorboduc andRoister Doister. Even so, their plays are not free from the impact of the Renaissance; rather they show it as amply, though not in the same way. In their imagination they were all fired by the new literature which showed them new dimensions of human capability. They were humanists through and through. All of them—Lyly, Greene, Peele, Nashe, Lodge, Marlowe, and Kyd-show in their dramatic work not, of course, a slavish tendency to ape the ancients but a chemical action of Renaissance learning on the native genius fired by the enthusiasm of discovery and aspiration so typical of the Elizabethan age. In this respect Marlowe stands in the fore-front of the University Wits. Rightly has he been called “the true child of the Renaissance”.

•

• It need not be supposed that the emancipation of the ego that the Renaissance effected was wholly beneficial to the human race. Yet, that aspect of the Renaissance which combated the sovereignty of tyrant, feudal lord, class, corporation, and tradition, has, for better or worse, had a tremendous influence upon the subsequent history of England and its literature. Indeed, it was during thethis era that the freedom of individual expression and opposition to authority was first brought to the surface and became an integral part of the western intellectual tradition and is amply reflected in Renaissance English Literature.

Rajmohun’s Wife by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay Notes

 MA English Part 1 Paper 1

Rajmohun’s Wife is India’s first novel written in English.

Important aspects questions raised by the novel:

• · Implications and consequences of writing in English as opposed to Bangla
• · The “realistic” mode of representation used in the novel
• · The entire question of “Woman” in the nineteenth century.

Rajmohun’ Wife by BCC is a potent site for discussing crucial questions about language, culture, colonization, and representation.”

It may be read as a sort of national allegory.

Bankim can be seen as one of the creators of Indian nationalism, who used devises such as allegory and personification extensively to convey his ideas.  Sri Aurobindo praised Bankim for trying to create what was nothing short of “a language, a literature and a nation”.He also claimed that Bankim “will rank among the Makers of Modern India”. Sri Aurobindo claimed that Bankim not only fashioned a new language which could “combine the strength, dignity or soft beauty of Sanskrit with the nerve and vigour of the vernacular,” but, what was more important, practically invented “the religion of patriotism”. Bankim was able to do this by giving the country “the vision of our Mother”:

He had the gift and the foresight in those times, to envision the Modern India that we live in today and and reveal it to others through his profound and purposeful allegorical writing. This revelation found its beginnings in Rajmohan’s Wife.

Rajmohan’s Wife is infact argued to be an allegory of modern India, of the kind of society that can rise out of the debris of an older, broken social order and of the new, albeit stunted, possibilities available to it under colonialism.

To explicate this allegory, Rajmohun’s Wife provides a backdrop a traditional Indian society and all its complex ideological, political, social, and cultural aspects. He then places the protagonist of the story, Matangini, who is the flesh and blood equivalent of Bankim’s vision of Modern India in her courage, strength, spirit and righteousness, against the limiting, unjust and socially judgmental society of old India. This contrast beautifully illustrates the differences between confining, patriarchal Indian society of that day and age and the newly emergent, liberating Modern Indian society of the kind that Bankim envisions.

Each character is much more than the portrayal or representation of an individual.  That the characters are individuals cannot be disputed, but their collective features and how these features reflect the spirit of their age and society will be more important.  Viewed in this light, the characters become embodiments of social conditions and ideological configurations.  They are not merely individual moral agents, but carriers of larger socio-cultural thematic baggage.

The time in which this novel was set in was characterized by its struggle for national existence which sets culture moving and opens to it the doors of creation.  That much of Bankim’s life and certainly most of his writing was employed in the creation of such a national culture is now hard to dispute.

At the heart of such a culturalist-allegorical reading of the novel is, of course, Matangini, the heroine of Rajmohan’s Wife. We see her first in opening pages of the novel as an eighteen-year old “perfect flower of beauty”:

Matangini:

Matangini’s carefully drawn portrait is a unique contribution of the traditional and the radically new.  It uses several elements from both classical and folk forms.  Several of the images used are taken from long-standing literary conventions. The description of Matangini may be typical in certain respects, but her actions are not.  She’s an entirely new kind of heroine, someone who is not timid and weak, but strong and spirited.  She carries the plot forward with her own kinetic energy and though thwarted, does not end up entirely defeated.

Matangini is not just Rajmohan’s wife, but the “spirit” or personification of modern India itself.  This is an emergent, hesitant, yet strong-willed and attractive India. It is not the India of villages or the old India of feudal times.  This India has been born near the capital, Calcutta, and is full of new possibilities.  But, this beautiful and powerfully drawn image of India is also shown as burdened by sorrow and anxiety. It is neither free nor happy, but its energies and powers are under the control of an unworthy husband. No wonder, the very first chapter begins with a temptation and a transgression.  Matangini, who has been forbidden from going to fetch water from the river, is cajoled by Kanak into doing so.  Matangini, thus, crosses the threshold, thereby exposing herself to Madhav, her brother-in-law, and setting the plot in motion.  Once Matangini has stepped “over the bar,” she can never return to her “designated first world” but must make the “irretrievable choice of making the other world [her] permanent home”.  The defining features of modern India are thus its energy, its adventurousness, its unwillingness to be confined by tradition, and its desire to break free.  The restlessness, vitality, charm, and drive of an emerging society are thus embodied in Matangini.

Mathur:

The next chapter is symmetrical to the first in that it introduces us to two male characters, one of whom is clearly a foil to the other.  The older man, Mathur, is crude, vulgar, and corpulent.  Tall, stout, dark, “he had something positively unattractive about him”. Almost bald, his fat body oozes out of his Dacca muslin shirt; he has a gold amulet, a gold chain, gold studs on his shirt, and wears rings on all the fingers of his hands.  This is the picture of a corrupt and unscrupulous man, the villain of the novel.  He is described as “an exceedingly apt scholar in the science of chicane, fraud and torture”.  It is not surprising that it is he who wishes to steal the will from Madhav and who later imprisons Matangini in his cellar, “determined to gratify at once both revenge and lust”.

Madhav:

The other man, the hero of the novel, is Madhav, “a remarkably handsome young man of about twenty-two”. Madhav is from Calcutta, an English educated, progressive zamindar, in total contrast to Mathur.  What Madhav lacks, though, is Matangini’s energy and vitality:  “His clear placid complexion had turned a little dull either through want of exercise or too much comfort”. We will remember that Mathur’s complexion has been described as “dull and dark” earlier.  Thus, both men are dull, a quality which signifies tamas or lethargy, ignorance, sloth.  Matangini, in contrast, is full of lustrous power and charm.  Clearly, the shakti or the energy that both men wish to possess, she is seen as the person who can give value, meaning, and direction to the lives of these indolent men.

Both Mathur and Madhav represent different kinds of social privilege and prestige. Bankim is implying that unless the privileged are yoked in the service of society, they lack direction or purpose.  Their lives are wasted in idle self-indulgence, or worse, in wickedness and fraud.  Yet, Bankim is quick to contrast the attitudes of the two cousins to Matangini.  While Mathur regards her merely as a sexual object, a potential conquest, Madhav admonishes him against prattling about “a respectable woman passing along the road” .  Sexual mores are thus of great importance in the novel; the chaste, the respectable, the self-regulating are seen as virtuous, while those who are sexually predatory or transgressive are not forgiven. This is in keeping with Bankim’s larger view of Dharma, but also creates a tension between the desired and the forbidden.

Fight for Modern India:

It is clear that Matangini is the object of desire; whoever wins her affection will be the real winner in the novel.  The struggle is for modern India—to whom will it belong?  The contenders are not just the asuric or demonic Mathur and the daivic or angelic Madhav, but the man who is her husband, Rajmohan.

Rajmohun:

The latter is described as “the very image of Death” when he is first seen in the novel.  By now, we already know that the marriage is a failure.  It is, in fact, clear through the novel that the two do not seem to have any sexual relations, though Rajmohan is the very embodiment of jealousy.  Rajmohan is shown as a cruel, brutish man of enormous strength but of a warped moral sense.  In chapter three he shouts at his wife, “I’ll kick you to death”. His utter lack of consideration for Matangini is one aspect of his personality; the other is that he is willing to rob is own benefactor.  Perhaps, it is that ingratitude that decisively turns Matangini away from him. Rajmohan is frequently angry and abusive with Matangini; there is a deep frustration in him in not being able to possess what by right is his.  He is the unhappy husband who chafes bitterly at not being worthy of his wife’s acceptance.

But the real question is who or what does Rajmohan represent?

We have seen that Mathur and Madhav respectively stand for the reactionary and the progressive elites who are vying for the control of the emerging nation.  If so, then what of Rajmohan?  I would argue that Rajmohan stands for the lumpenised proletariat under colonialism, alienated from its own people and country.  Thus, Rajmohan’s alienation from Matangini is symbolic of proletariat being unable to “man” the nation, so to speak. Impoverished and brutalised, the underclass cannot shepherd the delicate and precious blossom of the new nation in the making. The struggle for/of the nation is often a struggle between the colonial and the national elites, with the national proletariat sidelined totally.  Yet, for the struggle to bear fruit, the proletariat needs to line up behind the worthy elite in the latter’s attempt to overthrow imperial rule. In this novel, the elite is symbolically split into the worthy and the unworthy, while the proletariat is seen to be criminalised, brutish, and alienated.  Matangini is the spirit of the nation, a type of “Mother India,” whom Bankim deified so eloquently and popularly in “Bande Mataram,” in Anandamath.

Destruction of Old Order: Rise of the Servant Class

Bangshibadan Ghose, the progenitor of clan to which Mathur and Madhav belong is a menial servant to begin with.  His rise signifies the destruction of the old order of pre-colonial India and the rise of an intermediate class under colonial rule.  The manner of Bangshibadan’s elevation is typical of Bankim’s narrative strategy.  When the zaminder dies, his young wife, Karunamayee, takes the servant as her lover. Again, the woman becomes the embodiment of power and wealth; by attaining Karunamayee, Bangshibadan comes to possess the fortune, which is now in contention.  The split in the elite that I mentioned earlier is evident in the contrary dispositions of two of Bangshibadan’s sons.  Ramakanta, the elder son, is industrious and hardworking, but closed to English education and modernity.  His son, Mathur, thus comes to represent a corrupt and dying tradition.  The other son, Ramkanai, though indolent and extravagant, educates his son Madhav in Calcutta.  What is implied is that the rightful heir to the “e/state” that is India ought to be someone who combines the industry of Ramakanta and the education of Madhav; only such a person can be the worthy partner of Matangini and “husband” the modern nation.  The third son, Rajgopal, dying childless, has bequeathed his property to Madhav, the worthier of his two nephews.  It is this will, which legalises the bequeath, that Mathur is after.  If Matangini represents the future of India, Ramgopal’s will represents its past.  Who should inherit the legacy of the past and direct the future of the country—this is the question at the heart of the novel. Madhav’s offer to help Rajmohan is yet another instance of the responsible elite trying to fulfil its duties to the underclass, but in this case, it is Rajmohan who rejects Madhav’s offer.  Matangini intervenes to insure that the past does not entirely miscarry.  She saves Madhav, but cannot consummate her love for him.  The ideal combination of the past, present, and future is not to be.  But though the experiment fails, it does highlight some choices before the nation.

Conclusion:

At the end of the book, after many adventures, Madhav is saved, Mathur hangs himself, and Matangini is banished.  Matangini, whose boldness makes her risk her life to save her love, Madhav, is, however not rewarded at the end of the book. She is sent back to her father’s house and the novelist tells us that “she died an early death”.  The energy of the new India that she represents cannot find fruition in this novel.  Her union with Madhav is impossible, though both personally and ideologically they constitute the basis of the new India that is to come. That is, for Bankim, India’s destiny is to be shaped by the new English-educated elite, but somehow this cannot be affected easily.  There are insurmountable barriers to this project of refashioning India.  Perhaps, the real hitch was the hidden but dominant and all pervasive colonial presence.  India’s modernization was not smooth, but badly distorted.  There is no easy or happy end in sight to Matangini’s problems.

What is interesting is that in this novel, the colonial power is seen as benign.  The “shrewd and restlessly active Irishman” who is the Magistrate, ensures that justice is done, that Mathur cannot escape by bribing the police.  British rule is thus seen as paternalistic and providential, an interlude when India can recover her strength. Justice, equity, impartiality, and peace—both colonial authorities and their Indian collaborators often cited these supposed features of British rule in justifying the Raj—are, apparently, endorsed in this novel as characteristic of British rule.  What we therefore see is a complex picture of colonialism in which though the colonial authority is not directly criticised, the heroine, Matangini, cannot find the means to fulfil her self.  Her love is thwarted, her aspirations crushed, her life threatened.  What is more, she is imprisoned and almost raped.  In the end, her survival against all odds is itself almost a miracle.  But Matangini’s life is not a success.  She does not get what she deserves.  Her courage, fearlessness, loyalty, in fact, her loveliness, is itself wasted.

Bankim, then, found himself in an impossible situation, somewhat like Matangini. Just as Matangini and Madhav –and many other pairs of doomed lovers in Bankim—suffer from two forms of contradictory desire, so does Bankim, in his attitude to the Raj. It is this contradictory consciousness that Kaviraj has called “unhappy.” On the one hand is the “socially sanctified” form of desire within marriage, but, on the other hand, is the more powerful, “socially unsanctified form of passion … that threatens the mapping and the whole architecture of the social world” (Kaviraj 6).  In Bankim’s own thinking they correspond, respectively, to the politically sanctioned approval of British rule and the prohibited desire to be emancipated from it.

I have been suggesting that the tragedy of Matangini, a tragedy of unfulfilled potential, frustrated love, and self-sacrificing heroism is also, allegorically, the tragedy of a newly emergent India.  This India, whose possession is fiercely contested by forces of tradition, modernity, and colonialism is, in the end, a broken if not defeated India.  It is an India that is beset and oppressed from all sides, an India whose coming into its own is frustrated.  Perhaps, at a more propitious time, the combination of forces required to guide its destiny might emerge; as far as the novel is concerned, this possibility is postponed.  Matangini’s transgressions are thus only partially successful.  The dream of creating a new society from the remnants of a decaying older order is thus a failed experiment in this novel.  Like Hester Prynne, Matangini will have to wait for an other time and space before she or someone like her can live happily with her chosen mate.  In the meanwhile, her struggle and sacrifice do leave a mark on society.

In Rajmohan’s Wife, Bankim was trying not just discover the right formula to write a successful novel but also the right formula to create a new India.  The project of inscribing a new India continues in many other novels and novelists throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.  In Rabindranath Tagore’s Gora (1909), for example, we find the seeds of a new society in the union of Gora and Suchorita on the one hand, and of Binoy and Lolita on the other.  With the guidance of Anandamoyi and Poresh babu, the younger generation is offered a fresh opportunity to refashion a new world. In Rajmohan’s Wife, however, Matangini’s efforts are not rewarded with success. Yet, her survival is in itself a kind of partial success.  There is hope for India, but the experiment to recreate the nation will have to be conducted again, with different actors. It is not that Bankim did not write stories with happy unions between the heroes and heroines; but these tales lacked the power and dynamism of those novels, such as Rajmohan’s Wife, Durgeshnandini, Kapalakundala, Bishbriksha, Krishnakanter Will, andRajasingha.

Before I end, I would like to return to the symbolic significance of Rajmohan’s Wife as the “first” Indian English novel.  As in the murky beginnings of any genre, the commencement of Indian English fiction too is shrouded in mystery.  Kylash Chunder Dutt’s A Journal of 48 Hours of the Year 1945 (1835), Shoshee Chunder Dutt’s The Republic of Orissa:  Annals from the Pages of the Twentieth Century (1845), or Panchkouree Khan’s The Revelations of an Orderly (1849), are all very difficult to find.  Toru Dutt’s Bianca or A Young Spanish Maiden (1878) is incomplete.  Even Rajmohan’s Wife as we know it today is not entirely the book that Bankim wrote, but is a reprint of a reconstruction that Brajendra Nath Banerji published in 1935.  The first three chapters of the novel, which was originally serialised in the weekly, Indian Field, are unavailable. What Banerji obtained is the complete text of the novel except the first three chapters. Banerji used Bankim’s Bangla translation of these missing chapters to translating them back into English.  So the text that we have today is made up of three chapters that are an English translation of Bakim’s Bangla translation of the English original, plus the remaining chapters as Bankim had written them originally in English.

This inaccessibility of the “original” text is a part of the mystery of Rajmohan’s Wife.  Just as we shall never know exactly what Bankim really wrote in the first three chapters, we shall also never be able fully to grasp the significance of this originary text.  The text is thus an emblem not just of a false start or of failed experiment at the creation of a new India, but also, in a sense, of an unfinished project, both artistically and ideologically.  It is not incomplete only in that it is unavailable in its original form; it is also incomplete in the sense that it’s completion is indicated elsewhere, in some other time or text. It’s real meaning can therefore only be conjectured at or reconstructed.  This reconstitution of a lost or unavailable text is, however, not a fanciful or irresponsible exercise.  For the serious student of Indian English literature, it is an attempt to reconnect with a period pregnant with possibilities, a moment of creation, when not just a genre but a nation was being invented.  The infinite possibilities in that beginning need to be harnessed when we look at the numerous trajectories that emerged out of that initial churning.  Rajmohan’s Wife, when read allegorically, illustrates one such possibility for both the genre and the nation.  Tantalisingly evasive, the text nevertheless leaves a valuable trace, which we may construe as an attempt, or essay at both novel writing and nation building.

The importance of Rajmohan’s Wife only increases when we realise that it is probably not just the first English novel in India, but in all of Asia.  Its dramatic location at the cusp of history only adds to its fascination.  In Bankim’s slender work, not just a new India, but an emerging Asia seeks to find its voice in an alien tongue. In this effort, a spark shoots across the narrative sky in the form of a new beautiful, spirited, and romantic heroine, Matangini.  There has been nothing like her in Asian fiction before.  Created from an amalgam of classical, medieval, and European sources and a totally unprecedented imaginative leap into what might constitute a new female subjectivity, Matangini is a memorable character.  In all of Indian English fiction, there are few women who have her capacity to move the narrative. She, moreover, embodies the hopes of an entire society struggling for selfhood and dignity.  Her courage, independence, and passion are not just personal traits, but those of a nation in the making.  This subtle superimposition of the national upon the personal is Bankim’s gift to his Indian English heirs.  The trail of an epoch making novel like Midnight’s Children (1981) can thus be traced back to Bankim’s more modest trial as far back as 1864.

Though we may no longer subscribe to the idea that certain master narratives dominate human history and imagination, we can still appreciate the interconnectedness of stories, their multiple and entangled paths, their complex emergences and tangled endings.  That the story of Rajmohan’s Wife is connected with other stories is what I have been trying to show.  It would be reductive and self-defeating to see it as an isolated and unsuccessful attempt at writing in English or as a part of just one story, the story of Bangla vs. English as the medium of creative writing in India. Rajmohan’s Wife gains in value and interest when we see it as a part of the story of modern India itself.  This is a story that is still being written; in that sense it is a work in progress, which is exactly how I’d like to see Rajmohan’s Wife too.  As a work in progress, rather than a false start, it negotiates one path for India’s future growth and development.  In this path, the English-educated elites of the country must lead India out of bondage and exploitation.  While the Rajmohans and Mathurs must be defeated, Matangini must find her happiness with her natural mate, Madhav.  However, the latter is not possible just yet; Matangini has therefore retreat to her paternal home.  Like an idea ahead of its time, she must wait till she can gain what is her due.  But not before she enjoys a brief but hard-earned rendezvous with her paramour and smoulders across the narrativescape of the novel with her disruptive power. Indeed, the novelty in Bankim’s novel is precisely the irruption, the explosion that Rajmohan’s wife—both the character and the story—causes in the narrative of modern India.  Like a gash or a slash, the novel breaks the iterative horizons of a somnambulant subcontinent, leaving a teasing trace that later sprouts many new fictive offshoots.

Even at the risk of an anti-climactic conclusion, I must end with a disclaimer.  My enthusiasm of Rajmohan’s Wife must not be misconstrued as an attempt to prove that it is a great novel or a highly significant literary work.  On the contrary, it is a rather modest, even slight effort compared to Bankim’s mature masterpieces.  Yet, I believe that it’s symbolic, metaphorical, and allegorical importance ought to be recognized.  It is how we read this text, the sorts of concerns that we can bring to bear on it that makes it possible for us to see the role it played in the shaping of modern Indian culture.  The text, when read against Bankim’s own project, and the larger project of imagining a nation, becomes luminous and productive in ways that are unavailable when we regard it either as a false start in the wrong language or an eminently forgettable, juvenile first novel.

Source:  http://www.makarand.com/acad/AllegoryofRajmohansWife.htm

Rajmohan’s Wife by Bankimchandra Chatterjee

Source: http://www.ch.8m.com/rajmohanswife.htm

Rajmohan’s Wife by Bankimchandra Chatterjee (1838-94) is acknowledged to be the first Indian novel in English. Bankimchandra Chaterjee’s maiden work, it was serialised more than 130 years ago, in 1864, in Indian Field, a weekly magazine published in Calcutta, and did not appear in the book form during the author’s life time. Bankimchandra went on to write fourteen more novels, amongst them Durgeshnandini (1865), Anandamath (1882), and Rajsingha (1893), all in his mother tongue, Bengali. Bankimchandra had started to translate his novel into Bengali but that the work had not gone beyond the seventh chapter. Brajendra Nath Banerjee translated the first three chapters from this Bengali version when he located parts of the serialised version, and published Rajmohan’s Wife in the book form for the first time in 1935. In the preface to that edition of the novel, Brajendra Nath Banerjee writes, ‘Strangely enough, Bengal’s first great novelist, like Bengal’s first great modern poet, made his debut in the field of literature in the English language.’The story: The protagonist of the novel is the young and brave Matangini but she is mentioned here only as Rajmohan’s Wife. Matangini is just eighteen years old. Her beauty is beyond description. But she is married to a crude man of bad character. Rajmohan’s cruelty does not end in forbidding his wife all freedom; she cannot even go out of the house to fetch water, a common enough work done by women in those days. 30 year old Kanak, a Kulin girl is the only friend Matangini has. Rajmohan teams up with robbers and plans to rob Madhav, his brother-in-law. The aim is to rob them of their possessions, and to steal a will. As luck would have it, Matangini listens to the plans forged by her husband and the two other robbers. As Madhav is none other than the husband of her sister, Hemangini, Matangini decides to go and inform them what is about to befall them. She sets out alone in the dark night, arrives at her sister’s house, wakes them up, and informs Madhav of the robbers’ plans without mentioning her husband’s involvement. At that time, she also declares her love for Madhav, but finds no solace when she discovers that her love is returned. Madhav gets his men together, and all of them succeed in scaring the robbers away. When Matangini returns home, her husband is waiting for her, ready to kill her but his robber friends come at that time. During the argument that ensues, Matangini escapes. With the help of her friend, Kanak, she finds shelter in the house of Mathur, who was Madhav’s cousin. Though very wealthy, Mathur is a bad character, and it was he who was behind the attempted robbery. Madhav is kidnapped and imprisoned in Mathur’s house. Of course, he does not know where he is. In a room upstairs Matangini is also held imprisoned by Mathur who lusts after her. She is being starved so as to break her resistance. It is Mathur’s eldest wife, Tara, who noticing her husband’s restlessness, steals his keys when he is asleep, opens the forbidden rooms, and discovers Madhav. Both of them are attracted by the cries of a human being in distress. Going after the voice, they find and rescue Matangini. Soon afterwards, one of the robbers is caught, and he confesses. On getting this news, Mathur kills himself. Rajmohan is banished from the country. Matangini is sent back to her parents’ house, and dies shortly afterwards. Thus the novel is mainly about the travails and sufferings of women, and of the intrigues, greed and cruelty that was part and parcel of every day life. Even the title of the book speaks volume about the status of women. A passage from the novel: ” The dainty limbs of the woman of eighteen were not burdened with such abundance of ornaments, nor did her speech betray any trace of the East Bengal accent, which clearly showed that this perfect flower of beauty was no daughter of the banks of the Madhumathi, but was born and brought up on the Bhagirathi is some place near the capital. Some sorrow or deep anxiety had dimmed the lustre of her fair complexion. Yet her bloom was as full of charm as that of the land-lotus half-scorched and half-radiant under the noonday sun. Her long locks were tied up in a careless knot on her shoulder; but some loose tresses had thrown away that bondage and were straying over her forehead and cheeks. Her faultlessly drawn arched eyebrows were quivering with bashfulness under a full and wide forehead. The eyes were often only half-seen under their drooping lids. But when they were raised for a glance, lightning seemed to play in a summer cloud. Yet even those keen glances charged with the fire of youth betrayed anxiety. The small lips indicated the sorrow nursed in her heart. The beauty of her figure and limbs had been greatly spoilt by her physical and mental suffering. Yet no sculptor had ever created anything nearly as perfect as the form half revealed by the neat sari she wore. the well-shaped limbs were almost entirely bare of ornaments. there were only churis on the wrists an a small amulet on her arm. These too were elegant in shape.” Kulin girl: In the 19th century Bengal there was a big shortage of Kulin (high caste brahmin) men. Thus polygamy was well spread. A Kulin brahmin made a profession of marriage. He would marry many women, and these women – Kulin women/girls – were married only in name, and stayed with their parents. About this edition: This edition is especially valuable because of the foreword and afterword provided by Meenakshi Mukherjee, Professor of English Literature at the University of Hyderabad. Mukherjee writes in detail about the plot of the novel, the consequences of his using the English language, and comments on the importance of the novel in understanding the social life of the 19th century Bengal. She analyses Bankimchandra’s style of writing in this novel, and shows its connection to both the indigenous Sanskrit literature and the Victorian English novel tradition. The afterword is a must for all those who are interested in the history of the English literature in India. Mukherjee has also provided a very useful bibliography.

Background:

Source: http://www.shvoong.com/books/classic-literature/1982793-rajmohan-wife/

Literary critics claim it be the first Indian Novel in English. It is known by its bold protagonist Matangini who knows how to speak her mind. Unlike a proverbial coy homemaker, she wants to explore her sexuality. It is a path breaking step for a beautiful but ‘woman’ in eighteen century who has fallen in live with brother in law.

Her husband is opposite to her character- a very strange man.

Matangini is a superwoman as her travails as a middle class woman with high hopes for her individuality sets her apart from others.

Undoubtedly, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay has depicted a real life character.

No wonder, literary critics have hailed it as a literary piece.

————

About the Author,  Bankim Chandra Chatterjee or Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay:

Source: http://www.southasiabooks.com/rajmohans-wife-p-71993.html

Marking Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s debut as a writer, Rajmohan’s Wife is the first published novel in English by an Indian. The novel was serialised in 1864 in a short-lived magazine published from Calcutta, but it did not appear as a book in the author’s lifetime. The book soon went into oblivion. A neglected but an interesting book, its plots and characters symbolically map the birth of modern India as well as the modern Indian woman through political, cultural and social contexts.

Famously known as being the writer of Vande Mataram, the national song of India, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee was the first to break the dry monotony of Bengali prose and bring in a touch of informality and intimacy. The letter part of his career brought out best sellers like Kapalakundala and Krishnakanta’s Will. He remains to be one of India’s most celebrated writers.

Rajmohan’s Wife : Indian Dilemma and Bankimchandra Chatopadhyay

Source: http://prosepot.blogspot.in/2010/09/rajmohans-wife-indian-dilemma-and.html

Literature is one which we read and one which we live. What matter if it is in Telgu? Punjabi? Gujrati? Latin? French? Hindi ? or English? And what matter if it is not in any language but Ellipsis? We watch the theater of Silence and mime … don’t we? We convey our feelings to our loved ones in words but sometimes we just let it be or show them . So how far it affects whether an author writes at full length or just gives a sign … ultimately the author’s aim should be accomplished. One such an attempt made by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay in his first debut novel in English , Rajmohan’s Wife , can be called an unsuccessful success .Unsuccessful in attracting readers of his time but successful in accomplishing of author’s aim through it.

The novel was serialized in 1864 in the weekly periodical , the Indian Field , edited by kishori Chandra Mitra. It is notable that he begun his literary career through English novel but then after abandoning English language for fiction, he wrote fourteen novels in Bangla , among the most famous are – Durgeshnandini , Anandamath and Rajsingha. It is well known that Bankimchandra ji was the prominent literary figure of nineteenth century India. Who can forget his song in Anandamath – Vande Matram – which became our National Song after Independence. We can also not forget him for the realism he brought in literature through his novels. And for this particular feature Rajmohan’s Wife becomes a very important study.

As we know that Bankimchandra ji was one of seven in the first batch of graduates from newly established Calcutta University , he was well known with English literature as well as Sanskrit literature. In this novel while he is directly influenced by Victorian novels which portray social realities with the aim of reformation , he is also unconsciously overpowered by Sanskrit poetic literature due to which he gives a romantic and poetic description of feminine beauty as in Sanskrit it is called “nakh shikh varnan”. Thus the novel is blend of many outer influences as well as his own unconscious.

I had been always fond of Bengali novels for they present a different Indian world. For example if you read Sharatchandra chatterji’s novel – Devdas , Parineeta , Viraj Bahu , Charitraheen etc. they are all great stories of love , loss , morality , sin and so on and so forth. Rajmohan’s wife is not different from them but as it precedes them and still the Real World seems so real we are full of wonder and appreciation for the bravery of novelist.

My first impression of this novel was peculiar. Actually you don’t realize, when you began reading the novel and when it has finished. I suppose it is the biggest drawback of the novel . The author seems to be bored and burdened and ends abruptly though from the initial lengthy introductions of families and character it seems he had planned to write a long novel. Another problem is that of Deviation of Register , it is a technical term in English Literature which suggests that author deviates from the norms of register (mixing of dialects) . For example , Rajmohan speaking in the old English – “deceive me not . Canst thou?” “Thou” an archaic word is not expected from moder man in speech. Also Bankim time and again refers to English things or places to insert Englishness in his novel for it seems he wrote for English people of his time .For instance , a Bengali village girl refers to a destroyed Biblical city “Jericho” which is something weird. But lets digest all his faults because the novel is not all compact of weirdness it has substance and it has weight and it has many more things to remember – among which one is the strong character of Matangini , the heroine of the novel.

It is noticeable that though Bankim follows unconsciously the style and pattern of Victorian literature he gives his female characters a unique distinction and especially to heroine – a Strong and firm character that is rarely found in any Victorian novel . In most Victorian novels females were portrayed as submissive and passive , they did not possess unique qualities of their own . On the contrary . Matingini is brave and even braver than the hero himself – Madhav. She confesses her love for her sister’s husband – Madhav. While Madhav also loves , he asks Matangini to forget him , he is even shy to express his love for her. We are told that Madhav appreciates Matangini’s braveness and pure and firm character but no where we see him appreciating her in public. Surely women are more firm and determined in Bankim’s novels than men. Most men are corrupt and loose – characters and women are sufferer. Whatever reality Bankim shows and sympathizes with women’s fate and miseries , he is not that bold to give justice to women . He deliberately makes them say that they are sinners and they are bad and so they must suffer. Matangini at the end suffers as her creator is in dilemma that what to do with her fate and he ends abruptly. Dilemma is the keyword of Victorian Literature – dilemma between Faith and Reason and it is also prominent in this novel. And here the dilemma is between author’s inborn Hindu Samskara and his consciousness of rigidness of Hindu society . He is well aware of bad practices of polygamy of Kulin Brahmin boys and also of corrupt characters of rich males. But he is not able to answer the question he himself puts up – Why women is not master of her own destiny? The ready made solution is – she has to suffer which he has given.

But the character of Matangini stands alone and shines in spite of her disappearance into cruel fate and even the attitude of other female characters like Kanak and Tara can not be forgotten…. in fact the whole novel can not be forgotten for its a beautiful example of early Indian English novel – it has distinct Indianness wrapped in a simple fresh English language.

Rajmohan’s wife – First Indian English Novel

Source: http://www.scribd.com/doc/101201700/Raj-Mohan

Rajmohan’s wife, it seems, is the first published English novel by an Indian. It has also the distinction of being Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s debut novel as a writer. It is valuable in the sense that he never wrote in English again and turned to Bengali, to become one of the most influential Bengali writers with great works like – Durgesh Nandini, Anandamath etc, which stirred nationalist feelings in the then public. They made him timeless and are still being read by lots of people all over India in various languages. The novel is first serialized in 1864, but did not appear as a book until 1935. The very story from revival of all the chapters of this book till its first appearance as a book is interesting in itself. I think I wrote about it in this post. It has the capability to become a small novella in itself!

Coming to the story, I am not very sure why it was particularly named after Matangini, Rajmohan’s wife. But, it is an interesting read, talking about the plot. Rajmohan is one of the aids of Mathur Ghose who plans to attack his cousin Madhav Ghose. Matangini overhears Rajmohan discussing his plans to attack Madhav’s house with his friends Bhiku and Sardar. She is worried as she has a great deal of affection for Madhav and his wife Hema, who happens to be Matangini’s own sister. Concerned, she ventures out to Madhav’s home and informs him the situation, thus saving them from an attack planned at that very moment. She is welcomed by a furious Rajmohan as she returns home. Rajmohan rushes forward to kill her. At that very moment, Bhiku and Sardar arrive. In the brief interlude, Matangini escapes from the house. By the quirk of fate, she ends up taking shelter in Mathur Ghose’s house, which is nearer to Rajmohan’s house. Dramatically, she disappears when she is sent back to her husband, on his request.

Madhav is held captive by the person who eyes his property. I am tempted to write the full story here, but… in case you want to read it sometime, I don’t want you people to curse me for telling the story from beginning till the end. Better read a book than read about it.

Hmm… I can’t say the book is a very great book. But, yeah, it was a good read. It was gripping enough. However, the language appeared a bit archaic for me. Somehow, after around 150 years since its birth, I think bookish English changed a lot. The style of frequently trying to put on a conversation with the reader like – “my dear reader…” reminded me of my horrible experience with Kanthapura. However, this had such conversations only occasionally. Perhaps, that was why it was readable. The descriptions were greatly elaborate. Sometimes, this elaborate-ness bored me. Who will tolerate those descriptions which appear to be infinite, when one is thinking about what’s going to happen in the next scene?

My final verdict: It can be read for three reasons:

1.

For its historical significance

2.

For its considerably readable plot

3.

A very well written preface and after word by Meenakshi Mukherjee

Thanks to the library, I read India’s first English novel! Thanks to IISc, at which I read this novel taken from my college’s library , for it gave me ample time to read and write about it. Thanks to Microsoft Research too, but for whom, I would have never found this solitude to read it peacefully!

The Allegory of Rajmohan’s Wife: National Culture and Colonialism in Asia’s First English Novel

Source: http://www.makarand.com/acad/AllegoryofRajmohansWife.htm

By reprinting Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s Rajmohan’s Wife, Ravi Dayal has made available an important 19th century text for renewed consideration, if not reinterpretation. Professor Meenakshi Mukherjee, the editor of the reprint, in her Foreword and Afterword, highlights several important areas for debate and discussion. Of these, the most important ones are the implications and consequences of writing in English as opposed to Bangla; the “realistic” mode of representation used in the novel; and the entire question of “Woman” in the nineteenth century. The text is, as Mukherjee says, “a potent site for discussing crucial questions about language, culture, colonization, and representation.” While this is true, Mukherjee does not provide a framework within which these issues that she identifies may be read productively if problematically.

I believe the latter is possible if the novel is read as a sort of national allegory. Frederic Jameson, it may be recalled, claimed that:

All third-world texts are necessarily, I want to argue, allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories, even when, or perhaps I should say, particularly when their forms develop out of predominantly western machineries of representation, such as the novel. (69).

I would not like to engage with Aijaz Ahmad’s incisive and relentless interrogation of “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness” (see Chapter 3 of In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures), except to say that we would do well to question binary oppositions between the so called “First” and “Third” world, not to speak of singular and reductive ways of theorising their literatures. But, having accepted that national allegories are common to both Western, canonical and other postcolonial literatures, I think it would be useful to see if Rajmohan’s Wife can be read in this manner.

Indeed, it is not at all unusual to read Bankim as one of the creators of Indian nationalism, who used devises such as allegory and personification extensively to convey his ideas. Sri Aurobindo made such an interpretation in the essays that he wrote as early as 1894, the year of Bankim’s death, in Indu Prakash, arguing that what Bankim was trying to create was nothing short of “a language, a literature and a nation” (“Our Hope in the Future”: 102). That Anandamath (1882), despite Bankim’s additions of pro-British statements in the second edition of 1883, inspired generations of Indian freedom fighters. Both a national song and a battle cry, it influenced generations of revolutionaries as well as moderates. In a later essay, “Rishi Bankim Chandra,” Sri Aurobindo, writing in a nationalist newspaper also called Bande Mataram, said that Bankim in his later works “will rank among the Makers of Modern India” (345). Sri Aurobindo claimed that Bankim not only fashioned a new language which could “combine the strength, dignity or soft beauty of Sanskrit with the nerve and vigour of the vernacular,” (345), but, what was more important, practically invented “the religion of patriotism” (346). Bankim was able to do this by giving the country “the vision of our Mother”:

It is not till the Motherland reveals herself to the eye of the mind as something more than a stretch of earth or a mass of individuals, it is not till she takes shape as a great Divine and Maternal Power in a form of beauty that … the patriotism that works miracles and saves a doomed nation is born. To some men is given to have that vision and reveal it to others. It was thirty-two years ago that Bankim wrote his great song and a few listened; but in a sudden moment of awakening … and in a fated moment somebody sang Bande Mataram. The Mantra had been given in a singe day a whole people had been converted to the religion of patriotism. The Mother had revealed herself. … A great nation which has had that vision can never again bend its neck in subjection to the yoke of a conqueror. (“Rishi Bankim Chandra” 347)

Sri Aurobindo’s panegyric written in the heady days of his revolutionary activism is not exaggerated. For decades, several martyrs to the cause of India’s freedom went to the gallows with the cry “Bande Mataram” on their lips. The novel Anandamath was itself translated into all the major Indian languages and widely circulated for decades after Bankim’s death. One indication of its impact is the fact that there are seven different translations of the book in Hindi alone (Bose 125).

I would like to suggest that though the pronounced nationalism of Anandamath belongs to a later phase in Bankim’s career, it’s beginnings may be found in Rajmohan’s Wife. This is because Bankim’s larger project was nothing short of the task of imagining a nation into existence through his fictional and non-fictional writings. Consciously or unconsciously, that is what he strove to accomplish. As Sudipto Kaviraj puts it:

An imaginary community can only have an imaginary history. The actual history of Hindus and Indians could, by definition, never capture what was wanted of it, a history of mobilized action. Only a fictional history can show such reconstructed Hindus or Indians, putting men of the future inside events of the past. That is why the task wanted of this historical discourse could never be accomplished by a discourse of facts, but by a discourse of truth, or poetry, of the imagination. (131)

It is only in the “mythic discourse” of novels that such a task can be accomplished. Kaviraj calls this discourse of Bankim’s “imaginary history,” after Bhudev Mukhopadhyay’s famous phrase “Swapnalabdha Bharatvarser Itihas,” the title of an influential essay. The phrase is felicitous because of its multiple semantic possibilities: not only does it mean the more obvious history of India as revealed or obtained in a dream, but it also suggests that the Bharatvarsha or India that it refers to is itself revealed or obtained in a dream—and therefore imaginary.

There are many other reasons to tempt us to read Rajmohan’s Wife as an imaginary history of modern India. For long, Rajmohan’s Wife has been considered the first Indian English novel. Subhendu Kumar Mund’s contrary claim that Panchkouree Khan’s The Revelations of an Orderly, possibly first published in Benares Recorder in 1846 and later reprinted in London by James Madden in 1849 is the first Indian English novel (9) cannot be taken seriously. By no stretch of imagination can this be called a novel. This text is, moreover, as yet not widely available. It has not, therefore, even partially robbed Rajmohan’s Wife of the glamour attached to initiatory texts. By setting itself up as a sort of originary exemplar of a certain cultural encounter, the novel seems to promise much. However, the only exemplary value that most critics have derived from it is to regard it as a “false start,” the road that should not have been taken. Sunil Kumar Banerji’s and Kaviraj’s books on Bankim don’t even mention the book. Mukherjee, in addition, cites Sri Aurobindo, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Sisir Kumar Das, and Jogesh Chandra Bagal in support of such a view and also shows how Bankim himself advised Romesh Chandra Dutt to write in Bangla (151-154). Mukherjee argues that though Bankim accepted English as a valid medium for political and polemical writings, the mother tongue was the preferred language of imaginative literature. The parallel with Michael Madhusudan Dutt, the first modern Bangla poet, is too obvious to ignore. In the latter’s case, the repudiation of English was not just more categorical, but more moving and pathetic (see Mukherjee 151). All this evidence supposedly goes to show that the only thing that Rajmohan’s Wife exemplifies is a wrong cultural turn, which Bankim himself rectified when he switched to Bangla with Durgeshnandini two years later.

It is not my purpose to oppose the “false start” view merely on grounds that a hundred years later, Indians have proved that they can write complex and satisfying novels in English. In fact, I would argue just the opposite: that however “good” or “successful” these English novels are, they can’t accomplish what novels written in Bangla, Hindi, Marathi, Kannada, and so on, do. The kind of Indian experience that can be represented in English is different from what is available in other Indian languages. That Bankim was well aware of these limitations is obvious; therefore his switching to Bangla was not just accidental or fortuitous, but deliberate and felicitous both aesthetically and politically. And yet, I think Rajmohan’s Wife cannot be dismissed merely as a false start. It is much more than an indirect commentary on the limitations of writing a novel about India in English. What the novel actually offers is a way of mapping the Indian society of that period on a complex grid of ideological, political, social, and cultural coordinates. The novel accomplishes this through richly textured negotiation of cultural choices for a newly emergent society, which for the sake of convenience, we may call modern India. In other words, it is my contention that Rajmohan’s Wife is really an allegory of modern India, of the kind of society that can rise out of the debris of an older, broken social order and of the new, albeit stunted, possibilities available to it under colonialism. The novel shows both the glimmer of hope and a more realistic closure of options towards the end.

In order to read the novel in this manner, we shall have to agree that each character is much more than the portrayal or representation of an individual. That the characters are individuals cannot be disputed, but for the kind of reading that I have in mind, their typical and collective features will be more important. Viewed in this light, the characters become embodiments of social conditions and ideological configurations. They are not merely individual moral agents, but carriers of larger socio-cultural thematic baggage. Such a reading will not seem implausible when we bear in mind that the latter half of the 19th century was a period of intense cultural reformation during which nothing short of what Frantz Fanon called a national culture was to emerge. As Fanon put it in The Wretched of the Earth:

A national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence. (188).

For Fanon, this struggle for the creation of a national culture mobilizes what is the best and most energetic in a society:

It is the fight for national existence which sets culture moving and opens to it the doors of creation. Later on it is the nation which will ensure the conditions and framework necessary to culture. The nation gathers together the various indispensable elements necessary for the creation of a culture, those elements which alone can give it credibility, validity, life and creative power. (197)

That much of Bankim’s life and certainly most of his writing was employed in the creation of such a national culture is now hard to dispute. To read Rajmohan’s Wife as a part of this larger project is therefore to accept an invitation that the author and his texts so clearly extend to us.

At the heart of such a culturalist-allegorical reading of the novel is, of course, Matangini, the heroine of Rajmohan’s Wife. We see her first in opening pages of the novel as an eighteen-year old “perfect flower of beauty”:

The dainty limbs of the woman of eighteen were not burdened with such an abundance of ornaments, nor did her speech betray any trace of the East Bengal accent, which clearly showed that this perfect flower of beauty was no daughter of the banks of the Madhumati, but was born and brought up on the Bhagirathi in some place near the capital.. Some sorrow of deep anxiety had dimmed the lustre of her fair complexion. Yet her bloom was as full of charm as that of the land-lotus half-scorched and half-radiant under the noonday sun. Her long locks were tied up in a careless knot on her shoulder; but some loose tresses had thrown away that bondage and were straying over her forehead and cheeks. Her faultlessly drawn arched eyebrows were quivering with bashfulness under a full and wide forehead. The eyes were often only half-seen under their drooping lids. But when they were raised for a glance, lightening seemed to play in a summer cloud. Yet even those keen glances charged with the fire of youth betrayed anxiety. The small lips indicated the sorrow nursed in her heart. The beauty of her figure and limbs had been greatly spoilt by her physical or mental suffering. Yet no sculptor had ever created anything nearly as perfect as the form half revealed by the neat sari she wore. (3)

This carefully drawn portrait is a unique contribution of the traditional and the radically new. As Ganeswar Mishra shows, it uses several elements from both classical and folk forms. For instance, the heroine is always shown with a companion who serves to highlight the former’s beauty; besides, several of the images used are taken from long-standing literary conventions (10). But Bankim’s dissatisfaction with literary conventions was well known: “It is characteristic of the Sanskrit school that they seldom venture an original composition” (Mishra 5). The description of Matangini may be typcial in certain respects, but her actions are not. She’s an entirely new kind of heroine, someone who is not timid and weak, but strong and spirited. She carries the plot forward with her own kinetic energy and though thwarted, does not end up entirely defeated.

Matangini, I contend, is not just Rajmohan’s wife, but the “spirit” or personification of modern India itself. This is an emergent, hesitant, yet strong-willed and attractive India. It is not the India of villages or the old India of feudal times. This India has been born near the capital, Calcutta, and is full of new possibilities. But, this beautiful and powerfully drawn image of India is also shown as burdened by sorrow and anxiety. It is neither free nor happy, but its energies and powers are under the control of an unworthy husband. No wonder, the very first chapter begins with a temptation and a transgression. Matangini, who has been forbidden from going to fetch water from the river, is cajoled by Kanak into doing so. Matangini, thus, crosses the threshold, thereby exposing herself to Madhav, her brother-in-law, and setting the plot in motion. What Malashri Lal called “the law of the threshold,” thus, seems to operate in the very first Indian English novel. Once Matangini has stepped “over the bar,” she can never return to her “designated first world” but must make the “irretrievable choice of making the other world [her] permanent home” (Lal 12). The defining features of modern India are thus its energy, its adventurousness, its unwillingness to be confined by tradition, and its desire to break free. The restlessness, vitality, charm, and drive of an emerging society are thus embodied in Matangini.

The next chapter is symmetrical to the first in that it introduces us to two male characters, one of whom is clearly a foil to the other. The older man, Mathur, is crude, vulgar, and corpulent. Tall, stout, dark, “he had something positively unattractive about him” (7). Almost bald, his fat body oozes out of his Dacca muslin shirt; he has a gold amulet, a gold chain, gold studs on his shirt, and wears rings on all the fingers of his hands. This is the picture of a corrupt and unscrupulous man, the villain of the novel. He is described as “an exceedingly apt scholar in the science of chicane, fraud and torture” (17). It is not surprising that it is he who wishes to steal the will from Madhav and who later imprisons Matangini in his cellar, “determined to gratify at once both revenge and lust” (119).

The other man, the hero of the novel, is Madhav, “a remarkably handsome young man of about twenty-two” (8). Madhav is from Calcutta, an English educated, progressive zamindar, in total contrast to Mathur. What Madhav lacks, though, is Matangini’s energy and vitality: “His clear placid complexion had turned a little dull either through want of exercise or too much comfort” (8). We will remember that Mathur’s complexion has been described as “dull and dark” (7) earlier. Thus, both men are dull, a quality which signifies tamas or lethargy, ignorance, sloth. Matangini, in contrast, is full of lustrous power and charm. Clearly, the shakti or the energy that both men wish to possess, she is seen as the person who can give value, meaning, and direction to the lives of these indolent men. Both Mathur and Madhav represent different kinds of social privilege and prestige. Bankim is implying that unless the privileged are yoked in the service of society, they lack direction or purpose. Their lives are wasted in idle self-indulgence, or worse, in wickedness and fraud. Yet, Bankim is quick to contrast the attitudes of the two cousins to Matangini. While Mathur regards her merely as a sexual object, a potential conquest, Madhav admonishes him against prattling about “a respectable woman passing along the road” (10). Sexual mores are thus of great importance in the novel; the chaste, the respectable, the self-regulating are seen as virtuous, while those who are sexually predatory or transgressive are not forgiven. This is in keeping with Bankim’s larger view of Dharma (see Haldar 55-58), but also creates a tension between the desired and the forbidden.

It is clear that Matangini is the object of desire; whoever wins her affection will be the real winner in the novel. The struggle is for modern India—to whom will it belong? The contenders are not just the asuric or demonic Mathur and the daivic or angelic Madhav, but the man who is her husband, Rajmohan. The latter is described as “the very image of Death” (12) when he is first seen in the novel. By now, we already know that the marriage is a failure. It is, in fact, clear through the novel that the two do not seem to have any sexual relations, though Rajmohan is the very embodiment of jealousy. Rajmohan is shown as a cruel, brutish man of enormous strength but of a warped moral sense. In chapter three he shouts at his wife, “I’ll kick you to death” (13). His utter lack of consideration for Matangini is one aspect of his personality; the other is that he is willing to rob is own benefactor. Perhaps, it is that ingratitude that decisively turns Matangini away from him.

Rajmohan is frequently angry and abusive with Matangini; there is a deep frustration in him in not being able to possess what by right is his. He is the unhappy husband who chafes bitterly at not being worthy of his wife’s acceptance. But the real question is who or what does Rajmohan represent? We have seen that Mathur and Madhav respectively stand for the reactionary and the progressive elites who are vying for the control of the emerging nation. If so, then what of Rajmohan? I would argue that Rajmohan stands for the lumpenised proletariat under colonialism, alienated from its own people and country. Thus, Rajmohan’s alienation from Matangini is symbolic of proletariat being unable to “man” the nation, so to speak. Impoverished and brutalised, the underclass cannot shepherd the delicate and precious blossom of the new nation in the making. The struggle for/of the nation is often a struggle between the colonial and the national elites, with the national proletariat sidelined totally. Yet, for the struggle to bear fruit, the proletariat needs to line up behind the worthy elite in the latter’s attempt to overthrow imperial rule. In this novel, the elite is symbolically split into the worthy and the unworthy, while the proletariat is seen to be criminalised, brutish, and alienated. Matangini is the spirit of the nation, a type of “Mother India,” whom Bankim deified so eloquently and popularly in “Bande Mataram,” in Anandamath.

Bangshibadan Ghose, the progenitor of clan to which Mathur and Madhav belong is a menial servant to begin with. His rise signifies the destruction of the old order of pre-colonial India and the rise of an intermediate class under colonial rule. The manner of Bangshibadan’s elevation is typical of Bankim’s narrative strategy. When the zaminder dies, his young wife, Karunamayee, takes the servant as her lover. Again, the woman becomes the embodiment of power and wealth; by attaining Karunamayee, Bangshibadan comes to possess the fortune, which is now in contention. The split in the elite that I mentioned earlier is evident in the contrary dispositions of two of Bangshibadan’s sons. Ramakanta, the elder son, is industrious and hardworking, but closed to English education and modernity. His son, Mathur, thus comes to represent a corrupt and dying tradition. The other son, Ramkanai, though indolent and extravagant, educates his son Madhav in Calcutta. What is implied is that the rightful heir to the “e/state” that is India ought to be someone who combines the industry of Ramakanta and the education of Madhav; only such a person can be the worthy partner of Matangini and “husband” the modern nation. The third son, Rajgopal, dying childless, has bequeathed his property to Madhav, the worthier of his two nephews. It is this will, which legalises the bequeath, that Mathur is after. If Matangini represents the future of India, Ramgopal’s will represents its past. Who should inherit the legacy of the past and direct the future of the country—this is the question at the heart of the novel. Madhav’s offer to help Rajmohan is yet another instance of the responsible elite trying to fulfil its duties to the underclass, but in this case, it is Rajmohan who rejects Madhav’s offer. Matangini intervenes to insure that the past does not entirely miscarry. She saves Madhav, but cannot consummate her love for him. The ideal combination of the past, present, and future is not to be. But though the experiment fails, it does highlight some choices before the nation.

At the end of the book, after many adventures, Madhav is saved, Mathur hangs himself, and Matangini is banished. Tara, Mathur’s faithful and long suffering first wife, plays an important role in saving Matangini. She represents the best of residual culture, those vestiges that though soon to be eclipsed, will serve a constructive role in the building of the new world. Matangini, whose boldness makes her risk her life to save her love, Madhav, is, however not rewarded at the end of the book. She is sent back to her father’s house and the novelist tells us that “she died an early death” (126). The energy of the new India that she represents cannot find fruition in this novel. Her union with Madhav is impossible, though both personally and ideologically they constitute the basis of the new India that is to come. That is, for Bankim, India’s destiny is to be shaped by the new English-educated elite, but somehow this cannot be affected easily. There are insurmountable barriers to this project of refashioning India. Perhaps, the real hitch was the hidden but dominant and all pervasive colonial presence. India’s modernization was not smooth, but badly distorted. There is no easy or happy end in sight to Matangini’s problems.

What is interesting is that in this novel, the colonial power is seen as benign. The “shrewd and restlessly active Irishman” who is the Magistrate, ensures that justice is done, that Mathur cannot escape by bribing the police. British rule is thus seen as paternalistic and providential, an interlude when India can recover her strength. Justice, equity, impartiality, and peace—both colonial authorities and their Indian collaborators often cited these supposed features of British rule in justifying the Raj—are, apparently, endorsed in this novel as characteristic of British rule. What we therefore see is a complex picture of colonialism in which though the colonial authority is not directly criticised, the heroine, Matangini, cannot find the means to fulfil her self. Her love is thwarted, her aspirations crushed, her life threatened. What is more, she is imprisoned and almost raped. In the end, her survival against all odds is itself almost a miracle. But Matangini’s life is not a success. She does not get what she deserves. Her courage, fearlessness, loyalty, in fact, her loveliness, is itself wasted.

That Bankim personally confronted this dilemma is clear in an essay such as “Bharatbarsher Svdhinata Ebang Paradhinata” (India’s Independence and Dependence):

All work of governance is now in the hands of the Englishmen—we are unable to do anything on our own because we are dependent on others. Because of this we are not learning how to protect our country and how to govern our country—our national qualities are not getting any scope for their fulfilment. Hence it must be agreed that in this respect dependence is an impediment to progress. But we are learning European literature and science. If we were not dependent on a European nation, we would not have been fortunate enough to enjoy this bliss. So on the one had our dependence has been harmful to us and on the other hand we are making progress. (Quoted in Haldar 100)

Bankim, then, found himself in an impossible situation, somewhat like Matangini. Just as Matangini and Madhav –and many other pairs of doomed lovers in Bankim—suffer from two forms of contradictory desire, so does Bankim, in his attitude to the Raj. It is this contradictory consciousness that Kaviraj has called “unhappy.” On the one hand is the “socially sanctified” form of desire within marriage, but, on the other hand, is the more powerful, “socially unsanctified form of passion … that threatens the mapping and the whole architecture of the social world” (Kaviraj 6). In Bankim’s own thinking they correspond, respectively, to the politically sanctioned approval of British rule and the prohibited desire to be emancipated from it.

I have been suggesting that the tragedy of Matangini, a tragedy of unfulfilled potential, frustrated love, and self-sacrificing heroism is also, allegorically, the tragedy of a newly emergent India. This India, whose possession is fiercely contested by forces of tradition, modernity, and colonialism is, in the end, a broken if not defeated India. It is an India that is beset and oppressed from all sides, an India whose coming into its own is frustrated. Perhaps, at a more propitious time, the combination of forces required to guide its destiny might emerge; as far as the novel is concerned, this possibility is postponed. Matangini’s transgressions are thus only partially successful. The dream of creating a new society from the remnants of a decaying older order is thus a failed experiment in this novel. Like Hester Prynne, Matangini will have to wait for an other time and space before she or someone like her can live happily with her chosen mate. In the meanwhile, her struggle and sacrifice do leave a mark on society.

In Rajmohan’s Wife, Bankim was trying not just discover the right formula to write a successful novel but also the right formula to create a new India. The project of inscribing a new India continues in many other novels and novelists throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. In Rabindranath Tagore’s Gora (1909), for example, we find the seeds of a new society in the union of Gora and Suchorita on the one hand, and of Binoy and Lolita on the other. With the guidance of Anandamoyi and Poresh babu, the younger generation is offered a fresh opportunity to refashion a new world. In Rajmohan’s Wife, however, Matangini’s efforts are not rewarded with success. Yet, her survival is in itself a kind of partial success. There is hope for India, but the experiment to recreate the nation will have to be conducted again, with different actors. It is not that Bankim did not write stories with happy unions between the heroes and heroines; but these tales lacked the power and dynamism of those novels, such as Rajmohan’s Wife, Durgeshnandini, Kapalakundala, Bishbriksha, Krishnakanter Will, and Rajasingha.

Before I end, I would like to return to the symbolic significance of Rajmohan’s Wife as the “first” Indian English novel. As in the murky beginnings of any genre, the commencement of Indian English fiction too is shrouded in mystery. Kylash Chunder Dutt’s A Journal of 48 Hours of the Year 1945 (1835), Shoshee Chunder Dutt’s The Republic of Orissa: Annals from the Pages of the Twentieth Century (1845), or Panchkouree Khan’s The Revelations of an Orderly (1849), are all very difficult to find. Toru Dutt’s Bianca or A Young Spanish Maiden (1878) is incomplete. Even Rajmohan’s Wife as we know it today is not entirely the book that Bankim wrote, but is a reprint of a reconstruction that Brajendra Nath Banerji published in 1935. The first three chapters of the novel, which was originally serialised in the weekly, Indian Field, are unavailable. What Banerji obtained is the complete text of the novel except the first three chapters. Banerji used Bankim’s Bangla translation of these missing chapters to translating them back into English. So the text that we have today is made up of three chapters that are an English translation of Bakim’s Bangla translation of the English original, plus the remaining chapters as Bankim had written them originally in English.

This inaccessibility of the “original” text is a part of the mystery of Rajmohan’s Wife. Just as we shall never know exactly what Bankim really wrote in the first three chapters, we shall also never be able fully to grasp the significance of this originary text. The text is thus an emblem not just of a false start or of failed experiment at the creation of a new India, but also, in a sense, of an unfinished project, both artistically and ideologically. It is not incomplete only in that it is unavailable in its original form; it is also incomplete in the sense that it’s completion is indicated elsewhere, in some other time or text. It’s real meaning can therefore only be conjectured at or reconstructed. This reconstitution of a lost or unavailable text is, however, not a fanciful or irresponsible exercise. For the serious student of Indian English literature, it is an attempt to reconnect with a period pregnant with possibilities, a moment of creation, when not just a genre but a nation was being invented. The infinite possibilities in that beginning need to be harnessed when we look at the numerous trajectories that emerged out of that initial churning. Rajmohan’s Wife, when read allegorically, illustrates one such possibility for both the genre and the nation. Tantalisingly evasive, the text nevertheless leaves a valuable trace, which we may construe as an attempt, or essay at both novel writing and nation building.

The importance of Rajmohan’s Wife only increases when we realise that it is probably not just the first English novel in India, but in all of Asia. Its dramatic location at the cusp of history only adds to its fascination. In Bankim’s slender work, not just a new India, but an emerging Asia seeks to find its voice in an alien tongue. In this effort, a spark shoots across the narrative sky in the form of a new beautiful, spirited, and romantic heroine, Matangini. There has been nothing like her in Asian fiction before. Created from an amalgam of classical, medieval, and European sources and a totally unprecedented imaginative leap into what might constitute a new female subjectivity, Matangini is a memorable character. In all of Indian English fiction, there are few women who have her capacity to move the narrative. She, moreover, embodies the hopes of an entire society struggling for selfhood and dignity. Her courage, independence, and passion are not just personal traits, but those of a nation in the making. This subtle superimposition of the national upon the personal is Bankim’s gift to his Indian English heirs. The trail of an epoch making novel like Midnight’s Children (1981) can thus be traced back to Bankim’s more modest trial as far back as 1864.

Though we may no longer subscribe to the idea that certain master narratives dominate human history and imagination, we can still appreciate the interconnectedness of stories, their multiple and entangled paths, their complex emergences and tangled endings. That the story of Rajmohan’s Wife is connected with other stories is what I have been trying to show. It would be reductive and self-defeating to see it as an isolated and unsuccessful attempt at writing in English or as a part of just one story, the story of Bangla vs. English as the medium of creative writing in India. Rajmohan’s Wife gains in value and interest when we see it as a part of the story of modern India itself. This is a story that is still being written; in that sense it is a work in progress, which is exactly how I’d like to see Rajmohan’s Wife too. As a work in progress, rather than a false start, it negotiates one path for India’s future growth and development. In this path, the English-educated elites of the country must lead India out of bondage and exploitation. While the Rajmohans and Mathurs must be defeated, Matangini must find her happiness with her natural mate, Madhav. However, the latter is not possible just yet; Matangini has therefore retreat to her paternal home. Like an idea ahead of its time, she must wait till she can gain what is her due. But not before she enjoys a brief but hard-earned rendezvous with her paramour and smoulders across the narrativescape of the novel with her disruptive power. Indeed, the novelty in Bankim’s novel is precisely the irruption, the explosion that Rajmohan’s wife—both the character and the story—causes in the narrative of modern India. Like a gash or a slash, the novel breaks the iterative horizons of a somnambulant subcontinent, leaving a teasing trace that later sprouts many new fictive offshoots.

Even at the risk of an anti-climactic conclusion, I must end with a disclaimer. My enthusiasm of Rajmohan’s Wife must not be misconstrued as an attempt to prove that it is a great novel or a highly significant literary work. On the contrary, it is a rather modest, even slight effort compared to Bankim’s mature masterpieces. Yet, I believe that it’s symbolic, metaphorical, and allegorical importance ought to be recognized. It is how we read this text, the sorts of concerns that we can bring to bear on it that makes it possible for us to see the role it played in the shaping of modern Indian culture. The text, when read against Bankim’s own project, and the larger project of imagining a nation, becomes luminous and productive in ways that are unavailable when we regard it either as a false start in the wrong language or an eminently forgettable, juvenile first novel.

Note:

I am grateful to Professor Meenakshi Mukherjee for taking the trouble to read through two drafts of this paper. Her comments were not only useful but saved me from one or two errors. I also thank my student Baidik Bhattacharya for reading this paper carefully and offering his useful responses.

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Lal, Malashri. The Law of the Threshold. Shimla: IIAS, 1995.

Mishra, Ganeswar. How Indian is the Indian Novel in English. Bhubaneswar: Department of English Utkal University, 1990.

Mund, Subhendu Kumar. The Indian Novel in English: It’s Birth and Development. New Delhi: Prachi Prakashan, 1997.

Paper II – Linguistic and Stylistic Analysis – Books and Notes

For MA Part 1 students, this paper is often the most challenging as it requires a genuine understanding and application of linguistic principles and concepts. However, it is this very paper that determines whether you hit and cross that coveted 60% as it offers the most opportunities to score. Essentially, it is your program’s grammar subject and one has to deal with it exactly how one dealt with high school grammar, although at higher levels of difficulty. So if grammar was your forte back in school, you’re pretty must set to tackle what Paper II will throw at you. In case of the contrary, I suggest you get down to the basics, strengthen your foundations and only then progress to gradually building on the more advanced topics of this subject. (Like mathematics, you wouldn’t jump straight to trigonometry without first gaining a sound understanding of basic geometry, right?)

Books to refer to:

1. For basic grammar, Wren and Martin is a good generic for high school English grammar  and composition.

2. For Paper II of MA English Part 1, University of Mumbai gives out its own text book. It is available at the University itself and will be handed to you on a show of your ID card. If you haven’t collected this text already, do so immediately.

Is this in-house University of Mumbai text on Linguistic and Stylistic Analysis any good?

It has its pros and cons. Usually, paper setters limit the exam questions only to the topics covered in this text. In that respect, it is quite self-sufficient and you won’t need another source (only for this paper. other subjects need a lot of note-hunting!). However, the manner in which topics are explained in the book is very convoluted and confusing. Very often, you will finish reading an entire chapter and still be wondering what it is that the author was trying to say. It doesn’t convey the point easily and beats around the bush. It also skips many important background basics which makes it tougher to grasp a topic completely.

 

MA English Part 1 – Subject Papers

P – 1  Indian Literature in English (1820s onwards)

P – 2  Linguistics & Stylistic Analysis Of Texts

P – 3  Literature Of English Renaissance & Restoration

P – 4   Nineteen & Twentieth Century American Literature

Welcome to ‘Quotable Teacher’.

This blog is a guide for students pursuing MA English (Part 1 and 2) from IDOL, Mumbai University.

You may check MA English Part 1 and 2 pages for notes, references, content and other helpful links to help get through your course exams.

I hope you find what you’re looking for on this blog.

For further help and information, shoot an email to nihalanisonia@gmail.com. 
Good luck and Happy Reading,
Sonia Nihalani.