Novel forms: Literary realism and imaginations of modernity in India, 1930--1940

In this dissertation, I argue that the realist novel played a crucial role in imaginations of modernity in 1930s India. Like other political, economic and literary forms inherited through colonialism, the realist novel was doubly inflected, foreign to India but becoming increasingly associated with, and implicated in, anti-colonial nationalism as Independence loomed closer. In a broad reading of the important novels written in English, Hindi and Bengali over the 1930s, including works by Premchand, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Ahmed Ali and Manik Bandyopadhyay, I trace a pattern by which literary innovations of form, narrative structure, characterization, genre and theme are seen to reveal alternative modes of inhabiting the self, history, the nation, and the state to those inherited through empire. The conflicts that ensue emerge not only in the stories the novels tell, but in the seams and ruptures wrought on the novel form by the very mode of their telling. While literary criticism derived from the European novel and postcolonial criticism have often ironically converged to underplay the relevance of terms such as 'realism' for understanding the Indian novel---the former stressing its derivative nature and the latter its subversive one---this dissertation seeks to revive attention to genre, but without losing sight of the inherent provisionality of traditional generic categories in the Indian context.; To this end, each chapter argues that what might seem to be failures in a realist mode of representation are in fact innovations on realism that are suited to a unique, rather than imitative, Indian modernity. Remaining attuned to both historical and formal questions, I situate each novel within its literary tradition and also within the body of criticism that has emerged around it, in particular within postcolonial studies. The goal is to highlight each novel's innovative qualities within a larger framework of the relationship between literary realism, the novel, and modernity, as it is lived and imagined.