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Novels, Society and History
Describe the ways in which the novel in India attempted to create a sense of pan-Indian belonging.
Novels produced a sense of a pan-Indian belonging.
(i)They imagined the nation to be full of adventure, heroism, romance and sacrifice – qualities that could not be found in the offices and streets of the nineteenth-century world.The novel allowed the colonised to give shape to their desires.
(ii)Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay’s (1827-94) Anguriya Binimoy (1857) was the first historical novel written in Bengal.
(iii)Its hero Shivaji engages in many battles against a clever and treacherous Aurangzeb.The imagined nation of the novel was so powerful that it could inspire actual political movements.
(iv)Bankim’s Anandamath (1882) is a novel about a secret Hindu militia that fights Muslims to establish a Hindu kingdom. It was a novel that inspired many kinds of freedom fighters.
(v)Premchand rejected the nostalgic obsession with ancient history. Instead, his novels look towards the future without forgetting the importance of the past.
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After 1740, the readership of novels began to include poorer people.
Novelists in colonial India wrote for a political cause.
Outline the changes in technology and society which led to an increase in the readers of the novel in the eighteenth century Europe.
Write a note on:
The Oriya novel
Write a note on:
Jane Austen's portrayal of women
Write a note on:
The picture of the new middle class which the novel Pariksha-Guru portrays.
Discuss some of the social changes in nineteenth-century Britain which Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens wrote about.
Summarise the concern in both nineteenth-century Europe and India about women reading novels. What does this suggest about how women were viewed?
In what ways was the novel in colonial India useful for both the colonisers as well as the nationalists?
Describe how the issue of caste was included in novels in India. By referring to any two novels, discuss the ways in which they tried to make readers think about existing social issues.
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