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5 The Emergence of the Tamil Novel From the 1850s onward, a new form of narrative called the “novel” emerged in most of India’s literary traditions. Manifesting itself first in Bengali and Marathi and moving on to Urdu, Telugu, Hindi, Tamil, and Malayalam, this new genre became increasingly popular in various corners of the subcontinent.1 Critical comparative scholarship , which seeks to explain the intricacies and diverse processes of this spread, has only begun very recently.2 One of the reasons why the early Indian novels are still rather poorly understood is that for most Indian literary traditions the socio-cultural processes that lay behind the emergence of the new genre are still far from clear. For a long time, the widespread assumption that the novel was merely an “imported” genre, a form more or less uncritically taken over from English literature, has prevented any serious attempts to describe the specific social conditions in which novels became an integral part of Indian literatures. This assumption partly rests on the problematic term “novel” itself. In its almost uncanny familiarity, the term hardly alerts us to the fact that what was called a “novel” in nineteenth-century India does not necessarily have to conform to what a Western reader of the twenty-first century may think about novels. An anachronistic or otherwise prejudiced view as to what a novel has to be has more than once marred the appreciation of nineteenth-century Indian texts in their own right and has led to subjective value judgments which 205 1. Though Marathi and Bengali probably produced the earliest Indian novels, this enumeration is not meant in a strictly chronological way. The debates within several of the individual Indian literatures as to which particular work was their “first” novel are still continuing, so that an absolute chronology cannot be given yet. Mukherjee (2002) contains an appendix which is a chronological list of early Indian “narratives,” but it is far from complete (V´tanåyakam Pi¬¬ai’s Tamil novels, for instance, are not included at all). 2. A very useful comparative survey of early Indian novels is Mukherjee (2002). 206 Colonizing the Realm of Words are hardly helpful when we try to explain the emergence of a new genre in the Indian context. The Tamil novel is no exception to this general misunderstanding. With the twentieth-century Western novel as a model in their minds, critics have often discarded V´tanåyakam Pi¬¬ai’s pioneering novels using labels such as “approximation to a novel” or “longwinded moral tale, weary and unprofitable.” But what do we gain by comparing the early Indian novels to, say, their twentieth-century British namesakes? In what follows, I will pursue a different trajectory. I will attempt to describe how the Tamil novel emerged at the intersection of complex social and cultural processes, as an entirely new genre influenced by a multiplicity of determinants. One of them, certainly, was the impact of English education and English literature. But the emergence of the novel also has to be seen against the background of public debates within nineteenth-century Tamil society about cultural advancement and the creation of a new “vernacular” language and literature. Stuart Blackburn (2001) has shown how the novel developed out of a growing need for educational texts and for a new language that was capable of rendering the “Modern” in all its manifold aspects. As Meenakshi Mukherjee has pointed out: “The factors that shaped the growth of this genre since the mid-nineteenth century arose as much from the political and social situation of a colonized country as from several indigenous though attenuated narrative traditions of an ancient culture that survived through constant mutation” (1985: 3). In this chapter, I examine what this means with regard to the Tamil novel. I argue that the earliest Tamil novels emerged as sites of dialogues between tradition and modernity, reality and imagination, didacticism and entertainment, the self and the colonial other, the written and the spoken word, and Tamil and English. In the novelistic texts, the boundaries between these dichotomies become fluid and blurred. Drawing upon Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1975; 1981) influential theorization of the novel as a genre with dialogical capacities, the early Tamil novels can be regarded as multivocal texts. This multivocality has important consequences. It follows that the novel was not simply “imported” from English into Tamil literature, as Sivapatha Sundaram has maintained (1992: 2995), and that it was not a mere “response...

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