NCERT Extracts - Print Culture and the Rise of the Novel
Category : UPSC
India and the World of Print
- India had a very rich and old tradition of handwritten manuscripts - in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, as well as in various vernacular languages.
- Manuscripts were copied on palm leaves or on handmade paper
- From 1780, James Augustus Hickey began to edit the Bengal Gazette, a weekly magazine that described itself as "a commercial paper open to all, but influenced bynone’.
- The first to appear was the weekly Bengal Gazette, brought out by Gangadhar Bhattacharya, who was close to Rammohun Roy.
- Rammohun Roy published the Sambad Kaumudi from 1821 and the Hindu orthodoxy commissioned the Samachar Chandrika to oppose his opinions.
- By the 1870s, caricatures and cartoons were being published in journals and newspapers,
- In East Bengal, in the early nineteenth century, Rashsundari Debi, a young married girl in a very orthodox household, leamt to read in the secrecy of her kitchen.
- From the 1860s, a few Bengali women like Kailashbashini Debi wrote books highlighting the experiences of women - about how women were imprisoned at home, kept in ignorance, forced to do hard domestic labour and treated unjustly by the very people they served.
- In the 1880s, in present day Maharashtra, Tarabai Shinde and Pandita Ramabai wrote with passionate anger about the miserable lives of upper-caste Hindu women, especially widows.
- In Punjab, too, a similar folk literature was widely printed from the early twentieth century. Ram Chaddha published the fast-selling Istri Dharm Vichar to teach women how to be obedient wives.
- Jyotiba Phule, the Maratfaa pioneer of ‘low caste’ protest movements, wrote about the injustices of the caste system in his Gutanigiri (1871).
- In 1878, the Vernacular Press Act was passed, modelled on the Irish Press Laws.
The Novel
- Stories in prose were not new to India. Banabhatta’s Kadambari, written in Sanskrit in the seventh century, is an early example.
- The earliest novel in. Marathi was Baba Padmanji’s Yamuna Paryatan (1857), which iised a simple style of storytelling to speak about the plight of widows.
- Chandu Menon, a subjudge from Malabar, tried to translate an English novel called Henrietta Temple written by Benjamin Disraeli into Malayalam.
- This delightful novel called Indulekha, published in 1889, was the first modem novel in Malayalam.
- Kandukuri Viresalingam (1848-1919) began translating Oliver Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield into Telugu.
- In the north, Bharatendu Harishchandra, the pioneer of modem Hindi literature, encouraged many members of his circle of poets and writers to recreate and translate novels from other languages.
- Many novels were actually translated and adapted from English and Bengali under his influence, but the first proper modem novel was written by Srinivas Das of Delhi
- The writings of Devaki Nandan Khatri created a novel-reading public in Hindi.
- His best-seller, Chandrakanta - a romance with dazzling elements of fantasy is believed to have contributed immensely in popularising the Hindi language and the Nagari script among the educated classes of those times.
- It was with the writing of Premchand that the Hindi novel achieved excellence.
- He began writing in Urdu and then shifted to Hindi, remaining an immensely influential writer in both languages.
- He drew on the traditional art of kissa-goi (storytelling). Many critics think that his novel Sewasadan (The Abode of Service), published in 1916, lifted the Hindi novel from the realm of fantasy, moralising and simple entertainment to a serious reflection on the lives of ordinary people and social issues.
- Bankim read out Durgeshnandini (1865), his first novel, to such a gathering of people who were stunned to realise that the Bengali novel had achieved excellence so quickly.
- In 1888, Assamese students in Kolkata formed the Asamya Bhasar Unnatisadhan that brought out a journal called Jonaki. This journal opened up the opportunities for new authors to develop the novel.
- Rajanikanta Bardoloi wrote the first major historical novel in Assam called Manomati (1900). It is set in the Burmese invasion, stories of which the author had probably heard from old soldiers who had fought in the 1819 campaign. It is a tale of two lovers belonging to two hostile families who are separated by the war and finally reunited.
- Within thirty years, however, Orissa produced a major novelist in Fakir Mohon Senapati (1843-1918). The title of his novel Chaa ManaAtha Guntha (1902) translates as six acres and thirty-two decimals of land.
- Rokeya Hossein (1880-1932) was a reformer who, after she was widowed, started a girl's school in Calcutta. She wrote a satiric fantasy in English called Sultana's Dream (1905) which shows a topsyturvy world in which women take the place of men.
- Indulekha was a love story. But it was also about an issue that was hotly debated at the time when the novel was written. This concerned the marriage practices of upper- caste Hindus in Kerala, especially the Nambuthiri Brahmins and the Nayars.
- Potheri Kunjambu, a 'lower-caste' writer from north Kerala, wrote a novel called Saraswativijayam in 1892, mounting a strong attack on caste oppression. This novel shows a young man from an 'untouchable' caste, leaving his village to escape the cruelty of his Brahmin landlord.
- Vaikkom Muhammad Basheer (1908-94), for example, was one of the early Muslim writers to gain wide renown as a novelist in Malayalam.
- Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay's (1827-94) Anguriya Binimoy (1857) was the first historical novel written in Bengal.
- Bankim's Anandamath (1882) is a novel about a secret Hindu militia that fights Muslims to establish a Hindu kingdom. It was a novel that inspired many kinds of freedom fighters.
- Premchand’s novels, for instance, are filled with all kinds of powerful characters drawn from all levels of society.
- The central character of his novel Rangbhoomi (The Arena), Surdas, is a visually impaired beggar from a so-called 'untouchable' caste. The very act of choosing such a person as the 'hero' of a novel is significant.
- Godan (The Gift of Cow), published in 1936, remains Premchand's best-known work. It is an epic of the Indian peasantry. The novel tells the moving story of Hori and his wife Dhania, a peasant couple.
- Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) developed the Bengali novel after Bankings death.
- Both concerns are featured in his Ghare Baire (1916) translated in 1919 as The Home and the World.
