Once upon a time Hindi novelists and poets participa¬ted actively in the Independ¬ence struggle, craved being jailed with their political heroes, and wrote their blister¬ing indictments of immorality in all spheres of life, in large novels packed with innocence and experience. No longer. The age of the Neta soon revealed its true colours, and the genre of political novels with their pithy moral aphorisms and large sprawling plots soon became suspect. But once the newspapers and the mass media had aroused an interest in the eventfulness of the larger life of a nation, the literate public demanded something more from a novel than an introspective subjec¬tive analysis of another mid¬dle-class mind. There was a danger latent here. The Indian novel has a natural tendency to follow a liberal causality, guided more by the rhythms of a plot and an often para¬doxical logic of life, rather than the strict sequence of clock and history.
Jan-Feb 1982, volume 6, No 4