Ulka Anjaria’s new monograph challenges conventional understandings of realism in colonial and postcolonial literatures. As she shows, realism has been treated as marginal to the field, “subsumed to an overarching narrative of stagnation and aesthetic conservatism” (165), and ignored in favor of supposedly more interesting modes such as magical realism. Anjaria sets out to undermine this presumption of unsophistication by examining a set of Indian progressive novelists, working mainly in the 1930s, who stressed their commitment to realist aesthetics and the goal of representing the everyday world of the colonized. They include both well- and lesser-known figures such as Premchand, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, Ahmed Ali, and Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, who wrote in Hindi, English, and Bengali, and who argued that realism affirms the humanity of the colonized and thus contributes to national liberation. Through a series of close, historically contextualised readings, Anjaria demonstrates that the realism of these texts is far from the naïve, reductive, conservative, or essentialist form depicted by much postcolonial criticism. On the contrary, she uncovers a depth of formal and philosophical complexity that belies not only the hostile interpretations of subsequent criticism, but even the politico-aesthetic pronouncements of the authors themselves.
The major interest of this book lies in the ambivalence that Anjaria’s attention to textual detail uncovers. The four substantive chapters each address a significant theme of 1930s realist literature—the presentation of the ordinary Indian as “human”; Gandhi as a symbol of national possibility; the past as an object of nostalgia; and the bildungsroman as an expression of nationalism. In each, Anjaria reveals that critical assumptions about realism—that it is committed to unitary subjectivity, incommensurable with allegory, affirms teleological temporalities, and is clearly distinct from modernism—are oversimplifications. Rather, she presents an account of colonial realism as “highly metatextual, […] constituted not by ideological certainties but by contradictions […] and profound ambivalence as to the nature of the ‘real’ world being represented” (5). This is perhaps most ambitiously expressed in her chapter on Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi, a novel that she notes has been read as a nostalgic lament for the lost Mughal past, and contrasted unfavorably to Salman Rushdie’s supposedly more sophisticated retelling of Indian history in Midnight’s Children. By highlighting the tension between the novel’s competing temporal frameworks—one predicated on the linear temporalities of national time and the other on the interruptive moment of performance—Anjaria shows that Ali’s nostalgia is actually ambivalent as to its object. Such a reading reveals the openness of Ali’s realism to sophisticated analysis, while complicating his insertion into literary-historical narratives predicated on a straightforward sense of which national history (Indian or Pakistani) his work supposedly narrates.
Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel is therefore a valuable contribution to the ongoing project of reexamining realism in postcolonial studies—a movement seen in recent books and articles by critics including Neil Lazarus, Eli Park Sorenson, and Susan Andrade. It introduces texts with which many authors will be unfamiliar and will also appeal to readers working on Indian literature and progressive fiction, as well as on the relationship between realism and nationalism more broadly. Moreover, in her afterword, Anjaria points out that recognizing the sophistication of colonial realism has the further benefit of recontextualising subsequent literary developments. The formal heterogeneity pursued by figures like Rushdie, for example, comes to seem more continuous with the past than it at first appears. This is a further strength of the book, in that it demands that we reconsider our understanding not only of realism but also of the modes typically defined in opposition to it. Anjaria’s emphasis on ambivalence, however, also raises questions about where, if anywhere, realism’s boundary is to be drawn. If, as she argues in her final chapter, experimental works like Bibhutibhushan’s Aparajito are to be considered realist, what would a truly antirealist text look like (and what would its politics be)? For a work like Anjaria’s, predicated on tracing the nuances of individual texts, this is hardly a problem. Rather, it is an open question that the renewal of interest in realism should make possible for postcolonial critics to explore.
