What Was So New about the New Story? Modernist Realism in the Hindi Nayī Kahānī (original) (raw)
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Comparative Literature, 2019
This essay examines the Hindi Nayī Kahānī, or New Story, Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which was influential for the short stories, criticism, and literary history that its writers produced. Incorporating a view toward the larger “metaliterary” corpus in relation to which properly “literary” nayī kahānī texts were written, the essay shows how the Movement inaugurated a modernist realism characterized by attention to genre, rhetoric, and style on one hand, and commitment to social reality on the other. Combining rhetorical strategies—such as shifting narrative voice, allegorical descriptions of landscape, and implicit reference to authorship and the condition of postcolonial literary production—with structural and thematic tensions between form and content, this mode developed an interchangeability between author, reader, and character, which did not previously exist in Hindi literature and which reconfigured the category of the middle class in the universally recognizable terms of alienation. Using the case of the nayī kahānī, the essay offers a new literary historical approach that moves beyond sweeping accounts of a single postcolonial mode to attend to regional realisms and modernisms.
"Changing Language and Themes in the Twentieth Century Indian Fiction-Critical Perspective"
isara solutions, 2022
Every literature is a reflection of its own period. The twentieth century in India is remarked to be the era which changed the face of India forever. The pre-independence struggle along with the changing political and social atmosphere set the tone for the early 1900s, while the crux of these uprisings led to the ultimate freedom for India from the British colonial rule in mid-1940s. The years that followed were of disarranged and distorted constructions of a new India. From going through the brutal and horrifying partition, to conquering problems internally, India was losing many battles after winning the war. It is at this time, when literature of partition, of history turned into words, came to form a huge canon of its own. The themes changed, from one kind of struggle to another, from past glories to present victories and hopeful futures. On the other hand, India had also to come around the newly acquired language which it couldn't shake off its tongue-English. English kept on cumulating new meanings for Indians by becoming a language they had learned under compulsion and slowly being accepted as a language they felt is now their own. To say that India only went through major political changes in the twentieth century is a huge understatement; as cultural, social, economic, lingual, and psychological changes were equal contributors to twentieth century Indian literature, arisen out of this modern history. This paper attempts to journey across these changing themes and language(s) from the early twentieth century to the dawn of twenty-first, when Indian fiction in English explored, expanded, and underwent many impactful currents of change, only today, to be widely accepted in the West as refined and worthy.
Gender, Genre, and the Idea of Indian Literature: The Short Story in Hindi and Tamil, 1950-1970
2012
Author(s): Mani, Preetha Laxmi | Advisor(s): Dalmia, Vasudha; Hart, George | Abstract: In the wake of Indian Independence, the short story emerged as the most active genre in both Hindi and Tamil literature, establishing new representations of selfhood and citizenship that would shape popular expression across India for decades to come. This genre thus provides an important window into the cultural production of enduring paradigms of Indian modernity and citizenship in the context of national efforts to create an all-Indian identity after decolonization. My dissertation is motivated by an interest in explaining how post-Independence Hindi and Tamil short stories mobilized and constructed representations of the "Indian citizen," locating them within a regionally specific cultural context, as well as the broader imaginings of a modern India. I ask: what was literature's role in establishing universal understandings of the Indian citizen in the postcolonial moment? I addr...
Ebeling 2021 The emergence of the novel in India and competing modes of realism
in: Göttsche, Dirk, Rosa Mucignat and Robert Weninger (eds.). Landscapes of Realism (= Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages, CHLEL), vol. 1, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2021. pp. 89–99, 2021
During the second half of the nineteenth century, people across India began to write books they called "novels, " sometimes using traditional terms for 'story' or 'prose narrative' in their respective language, sometimes simply using the English term "novel. " Only recently critics have acknowledged that this 'emergence of the novel' in India was not simply the importation of a Western form or a borrowed genre, but rather a set of complex sociocultural processes that varied signi cantly from one linguistic region and literary tradition to another. is chapter examines the question of realism in the early novels written in Indian languages, i.e., the question of how precisely the earliest Indian novels related to the societies from which they originated.
2022
MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studies; ACLA Rene Wellek Prize Honorable Mention for Best Overall Book in Comparative Literature; MSA First Book Prize Shortlist; AIIS Prize in Humanities for First Book Shortlist Indian literature is not a corpus of texts or literary concepts from India, argues Preetha Mani, but a provocation that seeks to resolve the relationship between language and literature, written in as well as against English. Examining canonical Hindi and Tamil short stories from the crucial decades surrounding decolonization, Mani contends that Indian literature must be understood as indeterminate, propositional, and reflective of changing dynamics between local, regional, national, and global readerships. In The Idea of Indian Literature, she explores the paradox that a single canon could be written in multiple languages, each with their own evolving relationships to one another and to English. Hindi, representing national aspirations, and Tamil, epitomizing the secessionist propensities of the region, are conventionally viewed as poles of the multilingual continuum within Indian literature. Mani shows, however, that during the twentieth century, these literatures were coconstitutive of one another and of the idea of Indian literature itself. The writers discussed here—from short-story forefathers Premchand and Pudumaippittan to women trailblazers Mannu Bhandari and R. Chudamani —imagined a pan-Indian literature based on literary, rather than linguistic, norms, even as their aims were profoundly shaped by discussions of belonging unique to regional identity. Tracing representations of gender and the uses of genre in the shifting thematic and aesthetic practices of short vernacular prose writing, the book offers a view of the Indian literary landscape as itself a field for comparative literature.
LITERATURE NARRATING REALITY: PERSPECTIVES ON SELECTED INDIAN WRITINGS
The paper tries to focus some realities that Indian society faces and feels with different socio-historical phases through the lens of Indian English novel. In Indian context realism is structured round various cries in the history of India and Indian Writings in English endorses the socio-economic-psychic realities under the segmental banner of Partition literature, Dalit literature, Pre-and Post-Independence literature. This study is based upon the exhaustive reading and analysis of some major texts of selected novelists of the post-Independent Indian Writings in English. The prime issue hovers round the study is of the depiction of realism.
Towards New Horizons in Indian English Literature
Indian English poetry started with the poems of Henry Derozio, Kashiprasad Ghose, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Manmohan Ghose. These poets were influenced by their English contemporaries of romanticism viz. Byron, Shelley, Keats, Scott and Moore. Toru Dutt was one among these romantic poets who emphasized on India and her heritage by incorporating a large number of Indian legends in her verse. The romantic Toru Dutt is also a predecessor in respect to the use of the tree in verse as demonstrated by “Our Casuarina Tree”, a predecessor in respect of childhood memories recalled with nostalgia or regret.The poets of the second phase, still romantic in spirit were Sarojini Naidu, Rabindranath Tagore, Aurobindo Ghose and Harindranth Chattopadhyaya. The poetic output of these poets was prolific. Romanticism of these Indian poets was fraught with nationalism, spirituality and mysticism. It was therefore different from English romanticism. Indian romanticism widened the poet’s vision. While Aurbindo’s was the search for the Divine in Man and Tagore’s was the quest for the beautiful in Man and Nature. Both were philosopher poets. Sarojini Naidu’s romantic muse underscored the charm and splendor of traditional Indian life and Indian scene. She had a fine ear for verbal melody as she was influenced not only by English poetry but also by the Persian and Urdu ongoing process of openness in form, reliable and unreliable narration with multiple points of view, and shifting focalisation. In this section of the anthology i.e. “Indian English Short Story” there are five well researched papers. The first paper titled “The women as bonded labourers: A study of Mahasweta Devi’s “Dhouli”, “Shanichari” and “The fairytale of Rajbasa” the author of this paper explores the stories of women who dare to transcend the confines of patriarchy, thereby redefining the ambit of the feminine space. The next paper “Women on the Threshold of Change in Shashi Deshpande’s Shorter Fiction” deals with the changing role of women with the changing time. The paper titled “Mother as a symbol of Compliance in Shashi Deshpande’s The Legacy and Other Stories” tries to portray the stains of agonized motherhood, which seem to come out of the pages, are a blot on a man’s face, who has for centuries, remained insensitive to her prayers, pleas and entreaties, what-so-ever. The paper “Myths Restructured in Shashi Deshpande’s Stone Women” puts forth the seemingly high-pedestalled goddesses in true colours, thus bringing home the crude fact that woman may try to change her form, appearance, position, attire and what not, but can never succeed in altering the male psyche, that has been moulded, dried and conditioned in the furnace of male dominance and superiority. The author of the paper titled “Empowered Women of Shashi Deshpande” tries to highlight how the protagonists of Deshpande now wish to have a whiff of free and fresh air for themselves.
2015
Given the unprecedented intellectual and critical activity in the field of literary and cultural studies, theorists, creative writers and public intellectuals have grown conscious of the arbitrariness and fluidity of the ideological and epistemological structures at work in the theory industry. The form as well content of modern literary texts come under the influence of these structures or thought processes in one way or the other. In these literary and theoretical complexities, there is a possibility of exploring and re-reading the great oeuvre of Progressive Writings. This paper will study, how certain literary and ideological experiments employed by various Progressive writers are still as relevant as they were in late 1930’s and early 1940’s, when the movement was at its peak. Progressive writers’ departure from the ponderous romantic and imaginative ebullience and formal and lexical intricacies of the nineteenth and early twentieth century poets and fiction writers and embraci...