2 - The Epistemic Work of Literary Realism: Two Novels from Colonial India

Summary

Early in the 1870s, in response to a competition for a prize to be awarded for the best novel on the “Rural Population and Working Classes of Bengal,” Lal Behari Day (1824–92) wrote his novel Govinda Samanta, or Bengal Peasant Life (1878). Day, who had converted to Christianity in his youth and spent much of his life as a pastor and missionary in small towns in Bengal, chose to write in English. The novel won the prize and was widely reviewed, and it is indeed remarkable for its naturalistic portrayal of the life of peasants. Its ethnographic efforts won the admiration of Charles Darwin, who wrote about how much “pleasure and instruction” he derived from reading it (quoted in Saha viii).

Approaching Day's novel in the twenty-first century, when our knowledge of Indian history and society has gained considerable depth, it would be instructive to ask what it in fact says about the life of Bengali (or Indian) peasants in colonial India. How does it present “Bengal Peasant Life”? Is, for instance, its ethnographic effort, its attempt to portray peasant life with sympathetic knowledge, linked to the author's ideological investments and anxieties? Is its effort to write realistically – avoiding conventional exaggerations – successful? What, we may ask, is the novel primarily about?

My questions point to hermeneutical issues that literary scholars have been discussing for a few decades now. In this chapter, I propose to read Day's novel as a particular, and indeed ideological, way of referring to colonial Indian society. My suggestion is that it would be more instructive to read Day comparatively, in the Indian multilingual literary and cultural context, than it would to place him in the history of the Indian novel in English. To explore part of this suggestion, I read Day's text together with a novel written some twenty-five years later in an Indian language, Oriya (now officially spelled Odia). The Odia novel, Chha Mana Atha Guntha (Six Acres and a Third, 1897–99), by Fakir Mohan Senapati (1843–1918), is clearly not written with English readers in mind, and its representation of rural Indian society is mediated – self-consciously, even obsessively – by a narrator who questions the colonialist assumptions of those of his Odia readers who were “English-educated.”