India And The Contemporary World Ii Chapter 8 Novels, Society And History

Actions of Robinson Crusoe:

(i)Shipwrecked on an island, Crusoe treats coloured people not as human beings equal to him, but as inferior creatures.

(ii)He rescues a ‘native’ and makes him his slave.

(iii)He does not ask for his name but arrogantly gives him the name Friday. 

 The changes in technology and society:

(i)Technological improvements in printing brought down the price of books and innovations in marketing led to expanded sales.

(ii)In the nineteenth century, Europe entered the industrial age. Factories came up, business profits increased and the economy grew. 

(iii)The growth of industry was accompanied by an economic philosophy which celebrated the pursuit of profit and undervalued the lives of workers.

(iv)The vast majority of readers of the novel lived in the city. The novel created in them a feeling of connection with the fate of rural communities.

(v)The novel uses the vernacular, the language that is spoken by common people. By coming closer to the different spoken languages of the people, the novel produces the sense of a shared world between diverse people in a nation

The Oriya Novel:

In 1877-78, Ramashankar Ray, a dramatist, began serialising the first Oriya novel, Saudamani. But he could not complete it. Within thirty years, however, Orissa produced a major novelist in Fakir Mohon Senapati. The title of his novel Chaa Mana Atha Guntha, translates as six acres and thirty-two decimals of land. It announces a new kind of novel that will deal with the question of land and its possession. It is the story of Ramchandra Mangaraj, a landlord’s manager who cheats his idle and drunken master and then eyes the plot of fertile land owned by Bhagia and Shariya, a childless weaver couple. Mangaraj fools this couple and puts them into his debt so that he can take over their land.

 Jane Austen's portrayal of women:

The novels of Jane Austen give us a glimpse of the world of women in genteel rural society in early-nineteenth-century Britain. They make us think about a society which encouraged women to look for ‘good’ marriages and find wealthy or propertied husbands. The first sentence of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice states: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’ This observation allows us to see the behaviour of the main characters, who are preoccupied with marriage and money, as typifying Austen’s society.

Pariksha-Guru:

(i)Pariksha-Guru, The Master Examiner. was written by Srinivas Das. This novel was published in 1882.

(ii)Pariksha-Guru reflects the inner and outer world of the newly emerging middle classes. The characters in the novel are caught in the difficulty of adapting to colonised society and at the same time preserving their own cultural identity.

(iii)The world of colonial modernity seems to be both frightening and irresistible to the characters. The novel tries to teach the reader the ‘right way’ to live and expects all ‘sensible men’ to be worldly-wise and practical, to remain rooted in the values of their own tradition and culture, and to live with dignity and honour.

(iv)In the novel, the characters attempt to bridge two different worlds through their actions: they take to new agricultural technology, modernise trading practices, change the use of Indian languages, making them capable of transmitting both Western sciences and Indian wisdom.

(v)The young are urged to cultivate the ‘healthy habit’ of reading the newspapers. But the novel emphasises that all this must be achieved without sacrificing the traditional values of the middle-class household. 

The novels began exploring the world of women – their emotions and identities, their experiences and problems.

(i)Many novels were about domestic life – a theme about which women were allowed to speak with authority. They drew upon their experience, wrote about family life and earned public recognition.

(ii)The novels of Jane Austen give us a glimpse of the world of women in genteel rural society in early-nineteenth-century Britain.But women novelists did not simply popularise the domestic role of women.

(iii)Often their novels dealt with women who broke established norms of society before adjusting to them.  In Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, published in 1847, young Jane is shown as independent and assertive.

(iv)In some languages, the early creations of women were poems, essays or autobiographical pieces. In the early decades of the twentieth century, women in south India also began writing novels and short stories.

(v)A reason for the popularity of novels among women was that it allowed for a new conception of womanhood.

The novel in colonial India proved itself very useful for both the colonisers as well as the nationalists:

(a)Novel in colonial India for colonisers:

Colonial administrators found ‘vernacular’ novels a valuable source of information on native life and customs. Such information was useful for them in governing Indian society, with its large variety of communities and castes. As outsiders, the British knew little about life inside Indian households. The new novels in Indian languages often had descriptions of domestic life. They showed how people dressed, their forms of religious worship, their beliefs and practices, and so on. Some of these books were translated into English, often by British administrators or Christian missionaries.

(b)Novel for the nationalists:

Novels produced a sense of a pan-Indian belonging. 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.

The imagined nation of the novel was so powerful that it could inspire actual political movements. Bankim’s Anandamath 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

The issue of caste in novels in India:

(i)Indulekha was a love story. But it was also about an issue that was hotly debated at the time when the novel was written. This concerned the marriage practices of upper-caste Hindus in Kerala, especially the Nambuthiri Brahmins and the Nayars.The story of Indulekha is interesting in the light of these debates. Suri Nambuthiri, the foolish landlord who comes to marry Indulekha, is the focus of much satire in the novel.

(ii)Potheri Kunjambu, a ‘lower-caste’ writer from north Kerala, wrote a novel called Saraswativijayam in 1892, mounting a strong attack on caste oppression. This novel shows a young man from an ‘untouchable’ caste, leaving his village to escape the cruelty of his Brahmin landlord. He converts to Christianity, obtains modern education, and returns as the judge in the local court.

The first is a Bengali novel named Titash Ekti Nadir Naam.

It was a new type of novel. Infact from the 1920s in Bengal new type of novel emerge that depicted lives of peasant and low caste. Advaita Malla Burman’s (1914–51) Titash Ekti Nadir Naam (1956) is an epic about the Mallas, a community of fisherfolk who live off fishing in the river Titash. The novel is about three generations of the Mallas, about their recurring tragedies and the story of Ananta, a child born of parents who were tragically separated after their wedding night. Ananta leaves the community to get educated in the city. The novel describes the community life of the Mallas in great detail, their Holi and Kali Puja festivals, boat races, bhatiali songs, their relationships of friendship and animosity with the peasants and the oppression of the upper castes. Slowly the community breaks up and the Mallas start fighting amongst themselves.

The second novel is Hindi novel:

It is a work of Dhanpat Rai (Prem Chand). A new cultural influences from Godan (The Gift of Cow),published in 1936, remains Prem Chand’s best-known work. It is an epic of the Indian peasantry. The novel tells the moving story of Hori and his wife Dhania, a peasant couple. Landlords, moneylenders, priests and colonial bureaucrats-all those who hold power in society - form a network of oppression, rob their land and make them into landless labourers. Yet Hori and Dhania retain their dignity to the end.

A.

England and France

C.

Leo Tolstoy was a famous German novelist who wrote much on rural life and community

B.

Dicken’s Oliver Twist is the tale of a young man who lived in a world of petty criminals and beggars

A.

Pickwick Papers

C.

Russian

C.

Only (iii) and (iv)

A.

1882

A.

Chandu Menon

Tips: -

M. Imp.

C.

Epistolary novels

C.

Thomas Hardy

D.

Treasure Island

C.

Samual Richardson

D.

Henry Fielding

A.

Charles Dickens

Tips: -

M. Imp.

D.

Jane Austen

C.

Thomas Hardy—Pickwick Papers

A.

Jane Austen was the pen-name of Mary Ann Evans.

B.

Oliver Twist

C.

Germinal

A.

Emile Zola

A.

Devki Nandan Khatri

Tips: -

M. Imp.

B.

 The gift of cow

C.

Mayor of Casterbridge

B.

Durgeshnandini

B.

Robinson Crusoe

A.

Jane Eyre (1847)

D.

all the above-mentioned features

C.

R. Krishnamurthy was the most popular historical novelist in Malayalam. He wrote under the pen-name ‘Kalki’

C.

produce sense of national belonging and cultural equality with their colonial masters

B.

Prem Chand

A.

Kandukuri Viresalingam

C.

Devaki Nandan Khatri

C.

Srinivas Das

D.

all of these

C.

R.L. Stevenson

A.

Rokeya Hossein

C.

education

C.

Vaikkom Muhammad Basheer

A.

Godan

D.

Charles Dickens

B.

Baba Padmanji

B.

Charles Dickens

D.

Rudyard Kipling

B.

Durgeshnandini

D.

All of these

C.

Rokeya Hossein

 Tolstoy.

Zola was a great French author who wrote a novel Germinal (1885). He had given the miners, the voice of revolution in this novel.

Henrik Ibsen was a Norwegian Playwright. He was born in 1828 C.E. He criticised the middle class, newly emerged in Europe in his writing works.

The novel were first written in England and France.

New groups of lower-middle-class people such as shopkeepers and clerks, along with the traditional aristocratic and gentlemanly classes in England and France formed the new readership for novels.

(i) Epistolary novel: Written in the form of a series of letters.

Writer: ‘Pamela’ of Samuel Richardson.

(ii) Serialised novel: Published as a serial-a format in which the story is published in instalments, each part is a new issue of a journal.

Writer: ‘Pickwick Papers’ of Charles Dickens.

The Novel in Assam:

(i)The first novels in Assam were written by missionaries. Two of them were translations of Bengali including Phulmoni and Karuna.

(ii)In 1888, Assamese students in Kolkata formed the Asamya Bhasar Unnatisadhan that brought out a journal called Jonaki.

(iii)This journal opened up the opportunities for new authors to develop the novel. Rajanikanta Bardoloi wrote the first major historical novel in Assam called Manomati in 1900.

(iv)It is set in the Burmese invasion, stories of which the author had probably heard from old soldiers who had fought in the 1819 campaign.

(v)It is a tale of two lovers belonging to two hostile families who are separated by the war and finally reunited.

Usage of the novels to India:

(i)Colonial administrators found novels a valuable source of information on native life and customs. Such information was useful for them in governing Indian society, with its large variety of communities and castes.

(ii)As outsiders, the British knew little about life inside Indian households. The new novels in Indian languages often had descriptions of domestic life. They showed how people dressed, their forms of religious worship, their beliefs and practices, and so on.

(iii)Indians used the novel as a powerful medium to criticise what they considered defects in their society and to suggest remedies.

(iv)Novels also helped in establishing a relationship with the past. Many of them told thrilling stories of adventures and intrigues set in the past. Through glorified accounts of the past, these novels helped in creating a sense of national pride among their readers.

(v)At the same time, people from all walks of life could read novels so long as they shared a common language. This helped in creating a sense of collective belonging on the basis of one’s language.

The novel Hard Times was written Charles Dickens.

(i)The novel Hard Times describes Coketown, a fictitious industrial town, as a grim place full of machinery, smoking chimneys, rivers polluted purple and buildings that all looked the same.

(ii)Here workers are known as ‘hands’, as if they had no identity other than as operators of machines.

Godan is known as an epic of the Indian peasantry:

(i)Godan, The Gift of Cow, was published in 1936, remains Premchand’s best-known work.

(ii)The novel tells the moving story of Hori and his wife Dhania, a peasant couple.

(iii)Landlords, moneylenders, priests and colonial bureaucrats – all those who hold power in society – form a network of oppression, rob their land and make them into landless labourers.
Yet Hori and Dhania retain their dignity to the end.

Tips: -

M. Imp.

(a) (iv) Odd is Thomas Hardy. Because he is a male novelist and other are lady novelist.

(b) (iv) Odd is Treasure Island. Because it is only adventurous novel given among the above list.

1. JANE EYRE

2. EPISTOLARY

3. SATIRE

4. NAYAR

5. K3SSA-GAI

6. SERIALISED

7. DASTAN

8. VERNACULAR

Nationalism spreads when people begin to believe that they are all part of the same nation, when they discover some unity in that binds them together. But how did people belonging to different communities, regions or language groups develop a sense of collective belonging.

This sense of collective belonging came partly through the experience of united struggles. But there were also a variety of cultural processes through which nationalism captured people's imagination.

(i) History and fiction, folklore and songs, popular prints and symbols, all played a part in the making of nationalism.

 (ii) The identity of India came to be visually associated with the image of Bharat Mata, which was created in 1870 by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, who wrote ‘Vande Mataram’ as a hymn to the motherland. Inspired by the Swadeshi Movement, Rabindranath Tagore painted his famous image of Bharat Mata.

 (iii) The idea of nationalism was also developed through reviving Indian folklore. In late-nineteenth-century India, nationalists began recording folk tales sung by bards and they toured villages to gather folk songs and legends. This was done to promote the traditional culture that had been corrupted and damaged by outside forces.

C.

Nationalists did it because it gave a true picture of traditional culture.