Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel: Colonial Difference and Literary Form by Ulka Anjaria (review)

Ulka Anjaria’s Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel challenges conventional ways of understanding both realism as a form and the formal attributes of Indian fiction. Over five chapters, it details the emergence and development of the realist novel in India from the late nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century. It offers a thought-provoking reexamination of key novels in Hindi, English, and Bengali, including Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Anandamath, Rabindranath Tagore’s Ghare Baire, Munshi Premchand’s Godan, Mulk Raj Anand’s Coolie, Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi, and Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay’s Aparajito. Anjaria argues that whereas magical realism has come to be privileged both as the hallmark of third world and postcolonial writing, and as the method that such writing uses to challenge the politics of colonial modernity, in colonial and newly independent India realism was the mode through which writers engaged with questions of colonial injustice, nationalism, the hierarchies of class and caste, and the urban–rural divide. Realist narratives allowed them to debate what form modernity should take in India, and conversely, such debates enabled their wide-ranging experiments with realism. Thus, Anjaria argues, the aesthetic innovations and political visions of Indian realism enabled one another. In the hands of the novelists she discusses, realism was a heterogeneous practice that defies some of the distinctions critics have made between it and other modes of representation.

Anjaria opens her book by remarking that whereas studies of European and American novel have recognized that realism is not simply a “naïve, mimetic representation of an inert and legible world, postcolonial criticism continues to regard the term with embarrassment” (4). Her aim, she declares, is to show that “realism in the colony” was in fact shaped by a self-consciousness on the part of novelists about their difference from Europe and its forms of realism, and “an awareness” of their “secondary status within colonial discourse.” It was this awareness and distance, in part, that allowed Indian writers to play with genre, and to bend realism to accommodate their own concerns. But such remolding was also the result of their own attempts to engage with questions of equality and freedom in India. Thus, Anjaria rightly insists, “realism is a mode of engagement, innovation and imagination within writing under colonialism, rather than . . . [a] colonial leftover” (29). But Anjaria’s work achieves more than a revaluation of simply Indian realism. Her discussions illuminate the limitations of any theoretical understanding of realism that derives only from a reading of European and American fiction. Instead of then seeing Indian novelists as only reshaping established Western norms of realist writing, we might better understand their work as demonstrating that realism, understood as a global practice, is a far more capacious and varied mode than is commonly understood.

However, the force of this argument is compromised by Anjaria’s insistence that all these novelists were engaging in a self-conscious dialogue with European realism and its derivations in India. Such insistence results in an explicit privileging of the novelists’ aesthetic agendas over their political concerns, which runs counter to her declared agenda as well as to what I see as the real implications of her study. Thus, for example, in chapter 2, Anjaria offers a persuasive reexamination of Munshi Premchand’s famous novel Godan, which is widely recognized as realistically detailing the harsh reality of rural poverty. Anjaria demonstrates that Godan in fact acknowledges how much of this harsh reality cannot be depicted. Premchand suggests that what is necessarily excluded by his representation is also ignored by Indian nationalism, and even by left-wing visions of India. In this way, Anjaria argues, Premchand both advances and questions the promise of Indian nationalism as well as the capacity of realism. However, as this fine argument is advanced, she conflates established modes of (European) realism, humanism, and...