Assess the contribution of the major Indian English novelists. How have these novelists enriched the genre of Indian English Novel?

Assess the contribution of the major Indian English novelists. How have these novelists enriched the genre of Indian English Novel?

Indian English novel that had started its journey with the publication of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Rajmohan’s Wife underwent a radical change in the course of time as regards its style and motif. The early seed of Indian English novel was found in journals like The Calcutta Literary Gazette and Saturday Evening Hurkaru. Kylash Chunder Dutt’s A Journal of 48 Hours of the Year 1945 published in The Calcutta Literary Gazette in 1835 and Shoshee Chunder Dutt’s Republic of Orissa: Annals from the Pages of the Twentieth Century published in The Saturday Hurkaru in 1845 were the earliest attempts but they were more tales than novel proper. The true journey began only after Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Rajmohan’s Wife, the first and the only novel written by Chatterjee in English appeared in the Calcutta weekly, The Indian Field in serialized form and finally got published in book form in 1935. At the initial stage, from the sixties up to the end of the nineteenth century, writers from Bengal and then from Madras played their crucial role towards the development of English novel. Among them, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Romesh Chandra Dutt, Toru Dutt and Rabindranath Tagore from Bengal and A. Madhaviah and T. Ramakrishna Pillai from Madras deserve to be mentioned.  Their style of writing was mostly imitative or we can say westernized, chiefly inspired by the British novelists of the last and the present centuries and the motif lies in socio-historical themes.

A change of style from imitative to originality and a remarkable addition of political motif to socio-historical motif were seen in the nineteen thirties when three literary giants- Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan and Raja Rao made their appearance on the literary scene. Truly they paved the path of Indian English novel to modernity and made it free from traditional imitative style to modern form of originality. Indian English novel that had been suffering from instability and lack of recognition since the last century became an established form at the hand of the major trio. Mulkraj Anand’s Untouchable (1935), R.K. Narayan’s Swami and Friend (1935) and Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938) led the form to the height of supremacy in the forties.  Change of motif from past to contemporary events made these novels more realistic than earlier examples.................................................................................................................................................

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