5 - The Road Less Traveled: Modernity and Gandhianism in the Indian English Novel

Summary

Modernity did not germinate organically in Indian soil; it was British colonialism that brought modernity to India. Colonialism grafted varieties of new economic, cultural, political, and intellectual structures on what was largely a feudal setup. These new “Western” formations were progressive, to say the least, and continuously created fault lines between the modern and the ancient. The nation, as an artifact of modernity, is also believed to have emerged from colonialism, from the “sense of unity” resulting from being a single colony of the British, who for the first time consolidated the multifarious communities of India (Panikkar, “History”). The ensuing nation was both what Partha Chatterjee calls “derivative” (Nationalist) – being modern and secular – and the antithesis of that very modernity, which was based on an indigenous, hence nativist, perception of the nation. The latter representation is ordinarily called cultural nationalism. Some historians have assigned to Indian nationalist history the status of a “palimpsest,” characterized by a certain borderlessness, wherein the traces of the new order only partially overwrite the systems of the past (Saberwal 434).

In the 1930s and 1940s, cultural nationalists threw up a ubiquitous model of village societies – the unchanging Indian village republic – that was seized upon by the fiction writers of the period and celebrated in their many works. These were the last two crucial decades of colonial rule in India, when an identifiable nationalist ideology, with Gandhi at its helm, was being shaped to free India from colonial rule and step forward into modernity. During these years, fiction writers employed images of the Indian village community to promote national self-consciousness in literature, which worked well within the parameters of Gandhi's theory of swaraj or home rule. Paradoxically, the idea of India as a land of villages was incompatible with a rising modernity that accompanied the birth of the nation. This chapter takes up three Anglophone authors of that era – Raja Rao, R. K. Narayan, and Mulk Raj Anand – to discuss the dynamic ways in which the appropriation of a Gandhian national identity, based on the village model, was contrary to the cosmopolitanism that was a necessary accompaniment of colonial modernity in India.