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The 1943 Bengal famine had severely changed the social landscape in rural Bengal. Thousands of peasants who mortgaged or sold their lands to the economic elite to migrate to Calcutta for food had to start over landless and precarious. Married women who were forcibly repudiated by their husbands (“talaq”) during the famine had to abide by the religious law of purdah (of keeping women at home) and accepting death by hunger. Abu Ishaque’s 1955 novel, Surja Dighal Bari (The Ominous House) evocatively captures these harrowing moments of hunger and poverty in the majority rural population through the life-events of Jaigun and her family. The novel shows how a resilient single mother’s will to work and provide for her children is crushed by the male elite through religious injunctions and social alienation. In this essay, I will comment on the intersection of land, hunger, purdah, and patriarchy, reading them together as an instance of “postcolonial disaster,” which conspires to produce an endless condition of precarity for the socio-economically vulnerable in post-independence rural East Pakistan, and consequently a raw esthetic of realism in the postcolony.

Despite the wide availability of "regional novels" in India, academic scholarship in this area has been surprisingly lacking. For environmental literary scholars, this is unfortunate because regional narratives compellingly capture the conflicts between local social dynamics and global capitalist cultures, resulting in an aesthetic that is ecologically sensitive and stylistically complex. In this essay, I will first situate the Gandhian call for ruralism as an important reason behind the rise of regional narratives in late-colonial India. Then, drawing from Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee's eco-materialism and recent scholarship in "peripheral realism," I will show how the noted Bengali novelist Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay in his classic Hansuli Banker Upakatha (1947/51; The Tale of Hansuli Turn) historicizes the tragic fate of the Kahar tribe in the face of colonial-capitalist developments in the rural interiors of Bengal. Closely engaging with the complex narrative structure of the novel, especially his pitting of a social realist narrative of "tradition versus modernity" against an experimental style "upakatha" or tale, I will argue that Tarashankar's literary peripherality is socio-ecologically aware and self-consciously political, representative of world-literary aesthetics.

Magical realism is a world literary genre that stages and enables radical crossing of illicit boundaries. Intradiegetically, the mode explores questions of faith on the same ontological level as rationality. In the Arabic and Hebrew-Mizrahi contexts, magical realism serves to puncture the purportedly rational language of the state with the fantastic as a vehicle of minoritarian empowerment. These texts narrate subaltern histories without constantly reproducing the hegemonic language of Othering and subjugation. They disrupt dominant national, ethnic, religious, racial and gender historiographies and ontologies in their respective contexts, but this disruption is all the more powerful when Arabic and Hebrew texts are placed in relation extradiegetically. The networks of relationality created by this dual reading allow us to see ‘Arabness’ with the proverbial third eye – from the positions of minority and majority simultaneously, thereby allowing for a complex, textured and multifaceted understanding of its identitarian and performative meanings.

J. M. Coetzee’s Youth (2002), born in the heated times of the reconciliation of races in South Africa, has invited scholarship primarily on two areas: the problem of storytelling and the nature of place. Its predominant aspects, modernism, and post-war London have hardly been taken up for an analytical discussion on the issues of land, race, and storytelling. These aspects merit attention for three specific reasons: to understand the nature of exile for a white intellectual or artist from a peripheral colonial geography to a white metropolitan centre and the related notion of ‘real’ and ‘configured’ racial foreignness in post-war London; to comprehend the ‘evental’ in art and city-space as against the everyday and the contemporary influenced by 1920s European modernism; and to see the masculinist aspect in such project, especially in relation to the problem of love. The essay concludes with the argument that the author’s repeated focus on the aspect of John’s conscious dismissal of his essentially...

Indira Gandhi became the Prime Minister of India at a time when heavy sociopolitical discontent was on the rise due to the widespread conditions of poverty, hunger, inflation, and unemployment. Unable to tackle the situation and threatened by mass political mobilisations led by Jayprakash Narayan and by legal jurisdiction against her, Gandhi declared a national Emergency. This Emergency was marked by several “disciplinary” measures such as imprisoning thousands of people, gaging the press, and, most notoriously, mass sterilisation and slum clearance programmes. While there remains an astonishing paucity of historical-sociological works on this area, novelists have long engaged with the period and attempted to recover voices suppressed by the measures. This chapter will read three novels by Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children, 1981), Nayantara Sahgal (Rich Like US, 1985), and Rohinton Mistry (A Fine Balance, 1996), written immediately or much after the catastrophic event. It will argue that these novelists have used realism to represent the human struggle against the repressive machinery and the larger-than-life character of Gandhi. They have, however, employed notably different aesthetic modes. While Rushdie has used a magical realist mode which is mainly symbolic-descriptive in nature, Sahgal and Mistry have offered a cogent critique of the emergency. But, their critical realist mode is marked by an upper-class perspective (for Sahgal) or by a focus on the minor population (lower class, lower caste characters). Together these modes, the chapter argues, have constituted a dynamic case of Emergency realism in India.

British colonialism in South Asia was marked by modernisation programmes of agriculture and industry. These programmes resulted in a long-term agrarian and food crisis which then led to a number of catastrophic events in the long twentieth century. The present book is about three such events from India’s late-colonial and postcolonial periods—the 1943–1944 Bengal famine, the 1967–1972 Naxalbari movement, and the 1975–1977 national emergency. It argues that these events are all linked with the historical crisis and yet distinct in their nature and orientation. The chapter contends that such a condition of relation through difference can be better understood via a reading of form and mode of the novels of these events. It shows that writers have predominantly used the realist form to represent the long-term historical crisis, while they have employed a range of modes—from social realist, critical realist to metafictional, urban fantastic, gothic, and others (many of which are conventionally understood as anti-realist or non-realist). These modes have shaped their realisms into a deeply heterogeneous and dynamic form, and, in so doing, composed the aesthetic framework of catastrophe-prone, crisis-ridden condition of life and living in postcolonial India, which is called here as “catastrophic realism.” The chapter situates the link between crisis and event by drawing upon the works of Fredric Jameson, Veena Das, Shahid Amin, and Louis Althusser. Its take on catastrophic realism is mediated through a thorough reading of realism, form, and mode in the European and postcolonial/Indian contexts, where Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s pre- and post-partition stories are offered as examples.

The 1943 Bengal famine was caused by a long-term agrarian crisis, aggravated by the conditions of the Second World War and the rise of speculative capitalism (black-marketing and hoarding). The famine led to wide food crisis conditions in late-colonial and postcolonial Bengal and gave birth to a rich literary-artistic culture. Many of these literary works, especially novels, have been criticised for their weak structure and unconventional style. This chapter first makes a theoretical framework for reading disaster and literary form, or rather famine and realism in this context. Then it elucidates the theoretical readings with examples from two novels. Bhabani Bhattacharya’s So Many Hungers! (1947) was written immediately after the famine and in the context of India’s decolonisation. The novel, the chapter argues, uses an analytical-affective mode within realism wherein it not only analyses the historical reasons responsible for the famine but also situates the affective aspects (the social and gender violence) in an ethnographic/journalistic style. These are then combined with nationalist-utopian dreams in the postcolonial period. Amalendu Chakraborty’s Ākāler Sandhāne (In Search of Famine, 1982) is set in postcolonial Bengal. The novel shows how modernisation programmes have been averse to the social conditions of starvation and malnutrition in rural Bengal which are a consequence of the long-term agrarian crisis and the 1943 famine conditions. In order to represent these conditions, Chakraborty uses a metafictional mode: about a film on the famine set in a remote village severely affected by the famine. Through the film-making project, Chakraborty is able to bring to focus the complex questions of commitment in politics and aesthetics, of modernity and rurality, and of colonial disaster and postcolonial slow violence.

This chapter engages with the Naxalbari uprising in Bengal. A crucial event in postcolonial India, this uprising was a consequence of food crises in the wake of the 1943 Bengal famine. The militant faction of the Left known as the CPI (ML) played a significant role, both sparking and high-jacking the movement, creating confusion among followers and allowing for a negative representation in popular media. Focusing on the literary representational aspects, this chapter studies two novels by Mahasweta Devi to understand the reception of the movement—Hajar Churashir Maa (Mother of 1084) and Operation? Bahai Tudu. I contend here that Devi uses a quest mode in which her protagonists appear to make both physical and psychological journeys to understand the characters and ideologies of their militant family members or political comrades. These novels, set both in urban and rural areas, complicate the questions of student agitation, peasant insurgency, and militant leftism, all of which constituted the political axis of the movement. Devi combines these issues with the less discussed questions of caste and gender during the movement to demonstrate that the bourgeoisie and the middle class could hardly understand or would barely listen to the peripheral insurgent. Devi composes these aesthetic conditions through an assortment of experimental narrative strategies such as one-day narratives, dreams, dialogue, memory, and debate as well as of a critical narrator and the use of the non-death of the insurgent. Drawing upon Michael Lowy’s formulations, the chapter reads these strategies as composing the failed quest mode within the critical irrealist form.

The Naxalbari movement sparked two kinds of immediate literary representation: disillusion and despair by an urban protagonist and a historically specific, analytical, aesthetically dynamic projection showcasing the struggles of urban and tribal-peasant resistance, as in Devi. The movement was followed by economic liberalisation in the country and a consumerist Left politics in West Bengal marked by clearance of slums and of informal means of trading on the streets for courting multinational capital. Nabarun Bhattacharya, son of Mahasweta Devi, satirises these practices in his novels, Harbart (1994) and Kāngāl Mālshāt (2003). Bhattacharya’s writing has mainly dealt with the victimised and marginalised communities in the postcolonial urban metropolis—beggars, hawkers, domestic helps, small state-level workers and businessmen, mad people, loafers, criminals, etc. In these novels, he has turned these characters into active resistant beings. They declare war against the state’s anti-people practices taking recourse to fantastic powers such as flying in the air or using occultism and black magic to confuse and subdue statist apparatuses. In their militant politics, Bhattacharya brings the Naxalite tactics and ideology, that the state may want to marginalise and crush these people but they will continue to live, politicise themselves, furnish them, in the absence of capital and resources, with the powers of the other-worldly and vandalise state machinery in a way that resembles the Naxalite guerrilla warfare. Calling the dominant modes in these novels as urban fantastic and drawing further upon Michael Lowy’s concept of “critical irrealism,” this chapter situates the capitalist injunctions and a utopian-transformative ideology of resistance from the weak in the aftermath of the historical Naxalbari movement.

Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee’s Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire is an important extension of his sustained research interest in British imperialism in South Asia. The structure of this book, star...

In the last few years, postcolonial literary studies has witnessed several major field-shaping publications (Wilson, Sandru, and Welsh 2010; Lazarus 2011a, 2011b; Quayson 2012; Huggan 2013)1 which ...

The 1943–1944 Bengal famine is a watershed in Indian history. Born of a long-term crisis in agriculture and economy in British South Asia and of the immediate reasons of World War II, nationalist agitation, black-marketing practices, and others, the famine responded powerfully to the contemporary socio-economic questions and shaped the literary-cultural productions in its wake. The writers of the famine attempted to understand the causes and effects through their use of literary form. Reading the works of Sukanta Bhattacharya and Bijan Bhattacharya, this chapter investigates how the poets and theater artists spoke of the use of a realist literary vocabulary which would address the suffering of its times, analyse the historical reasons and material conditions responsible for the famine, and help mobilize a trenchant critique of colonialism, imperialism, and establishment politics.

Review of Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel by Ulka Anjaria

The proposed paper attempts to investigate the nuanced layers of multiculturalism and ethnicity in\ud Australia through the lens of the Chinese-Australian writer, Ouyang Yu. His novel, The Eastern Slope\ud Chronicle, written from the perspective of a student’s cooperation with the term ‘postcolonial’, throws a\ud compulsive doubt on the celebration of multiculturalism. Whereas the novel deals with central\ud ‘postcolonial’ questions like nationhood, political relation between countries, repatriation, violence, and\ud immigrant identity, its unabridged and cut-and-dried presentation of the corporate packaging of terms like\ud multicultural and postcolonial or the body of the diasporic student as the product of study and university\ud research invites more critical thoughts on university space, the category of international student or the\ud commodification of feelings like love, emotion and soul. In a way, it seeks the irony and economy of\ud ‘affect’ in a supposedly ‘postcolonial’ novel.