CBSE - Novels, Society and History

As the middle classes became more affluent, women got more leisure time to read and write novels. Also, novels began to explore the world of women, their emotions, identities, experiences and problems. Domestic life became an essential subject of novels- a field women had an authority to speak about.

Robinson Crusoe's actions that make us see him as a typical coloniser are many. Shipwrecked on an island inhabited by coloured people, Crusoe treats them as inferior beings. He is portrayed as "rescuing" a native and then making him a slave. He gives him the name Friday, without even caring to ask for his name. Colonised people were seen as barbaric and primitive, and colonialism became their self-professed civiliser. Crusoe was a direct representation of this ideology of colonisers.

After 1740, the readership of novels began to include poorer people because of the introduction of circulating libraries, low-priced books, and also because of the system of hiring out of books by the hour. This made books easily available to the poor people, who could not afford books earlier due to high costs and absence of lending libraries.

Novelists in colonial India wrote for a political cause because the novel was a powerful medium for expressing social defects and suggesting remedies for the same. It also helped establish a relationship with the past. Since people from all walks of life could read novels, it was an easy way to popularise anti-colonial ideas. It also helped bring about a sense of national unity among the people.

→ Print made novels to be read widely and become popular quickly.
→ Novels produced a number of common interests and a variety of readers.
→ Readers were drawn into the story and identified themselves with the lives of fictitious characters. They now could think about issues like love and marriage, proper conduct for men and women.
→ Prosperity, due to industrialisation, made new groups join the readership for novels. Besides the aristocratic and gentlemanly classes, new groups of lower-middle-class people such as shopkeepers and clerks joined in.
→ The rise in the earnings of authors freed them the from the patronage of aristocrats. They could now experiment with different literary styles. Epistolary novel – Samuel Richardson’s Pamela – written in the 18th century was the first of its kind. It was a story told through letters.
→ Books became cheap and even the poor could buy them. Circulating libraries made books easily accessible. Publishers also started hiring out novels. Books could now be read in private or could be heard by more people, while one of them read it out.
→  Magazines serialised stories (Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers was the first), illustrated them and sold them cheap.
All these changes increased the number of readers.

In 1877-78, Ramashankar Ray started to serialise the first Oriya novel, "Saudamini"; but it remained incomplete. Orissa's first major novelist was Fakir Mohon Senapati. He wrote "Chaa Mana Atha Guntha" that deals with land and its possession. This novel illustrated that rural issues could be an important part of urban concerns.

The novels of Jane Austen give us a glimpse of the world of women in genteel rural society in midnineteenth century Britain. Women, at that time, were encouraged to look for a good marriage and find a wealthy and propertied husband. Her famous novel 'Pride and Prejudice' depicts this well. It writes 'it is the truth, universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of good fortune must be in want of a good wife'. The main characters are shown to be pre-occupied with marriage and money.

The novel "Pariksha-Guru" portrays the difficulties of the new middle class in adapting to colonised society while preserving its cultural identity. It emphasises that Western ideals must be inculcated, but without sacrificing the traditional values of middle-class households. The characters in this Hindi novel by Srinivas Das are seen endeavouring to bridge the two different worlds of modern education and traditional ethics.

Social changes in 19th century Britain highlighted by Thomas Hardy
→ The breaking up of rural communities because of industrialization. Due to industrialization, peasants who toiled with their lands were disappearing as large or big farmers enclosed lands, bought machines and employed labourers to produce for the market.
→ In his novel ‘Mayor of Casterbridge’, Hardy mourns the loss of the more personalized world which is being replaced by a more efficiently managed urban culture.

Social Changes Highlighted by Charles Dickens
→ Charles Dickens wrote mainly about the emergence of the industrial age and it’s effects on society and the common people.
→ Growth of factories and expanded cities led to the growth of business and economy and increased the profits of capitalists.
(iii) At the same time workers faced immense problems. Use of machines resulted in unemployment of ordinary labour; they became homeless, creating a problem of housing. Pursuit of profit became the goal of factory owners while the workers were undervalued and almost lost their identity Human beings were reduced to being mere instruments of production.

The concern in both nineteenth-century Europe and India about women reading novels bore more or less similar fears. Women were seen as easily corruptible and an imaginary world that the novel provided was seen as a dangerous opening for the imaginations of its readers. In certain Indian communities, it was felt that women who read novels would leave their domestic environments and aspire to be part of the outside world- the male domain.
This suggests that women were viewed as delicate and incapable of being independent. They were merely expected to marry a man who could take care of their financial needs while they maintained his household and remained subservient to him.

The novel in colonial India was useful for both the colonisers as well as the nationalists on account of a variety of reasons. Colonial rulers found "vernacular" novels illuminating for the information they provided on native customs and life. It was useful in the governance of this diverse country. Indian nationalists used the form of the novel to criticise colonial rule and instill a sense of national pride and unity amongst the people.

Indians used the novel as a powerful medium to criticise what they considered defects in their society and to suggest remedies. The issue of caste was included in Indian novels for this same purpose. Novels like Indirabai and Indulekha were written by members of the uppercastes with upper-caste characters.
→ Potheri Kunjambu, a lower-caste writer from north Kerala, wrote a novel called Saraswativijayam in 1892. It was a direct attack on caste oppression. The novel’s hero, an ‘untouchable’ leaves his village to escape from cruelty of a Brahmin overlord. He converts to Christianity, receives modern education and returns to his village a judge of a local court. In the meantime, the villagers bring the landlord to his court, they believe the landlord’s men had killed the hero. The judge reveals himself and the Nambuthri landlord repents and promises to reform. The novel emphasises the role of education in uplifting the lower classes.
→ In 1920, a Bengali novel Titash Ekti Nadir Naam (1956) written by Advaita Malla Burman takes up the cause of ‘low castes’. The people described are the Mallas - community of fishermen. The story covers three generations and describes the oppression of the upper castes. The lives of the Mallas is tied with river Titash. As the river dries, the community dies too. This novel is special because the author himself a ‘low caste’ describing the anguish of low-caste people.

The ways in which the novel in India attempted to create a sense of pan-Indian belonging were:
→ Many historical novels were about Marathas and the Rajputs which produced a sense of a pan—Indian belonging in Bengal. They imagined the nation to be full of adventure, heroism, romance and sacrifice. The novel allowed the colonized to give a shape to their desires.
→ Bankim’s Anandmath is a novel about a secret Hindu militia that fight Muslims to establish a  Hindu kingdom. It was a novel that inspired many kinds of freedom fighters.
→ Shivaji, the hero of the novel Anguriya Binimoy (1857) written by Budhadeb Mukhopadhyaya’s (1827-94) engages in many battles against clever and treacherous Aurangzeb, what gives him courage and grit is his belief that he is a nationalist fighting for the freedom of Hindus.
→ Imagining a heroic past was one way in which the novel helped in popularising the sense of belonging to a common nation. It was another way to include various classes in the novel so that they could be seen as belonging to a shared world. Premchand’s novels, for instance, are filled with all kinds of powerful characters drawn from all levels of society.

Q.1: - What is an ‘Epistolary novel’?
(a) Novel written in the serious of letters.
(b) Novel based on a biographical account
(c) Novels written in poetic verse
(d) None of these.
Q.2: - It is truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a
 good fortune must be in want of a wife. The above lines have been illustrated from the novel –
(a) Pride and Prejudice (b) Mayor of caster bridge
(c) Pamela (d) Treasure Island
Q.3: - Who wrote ‘Hard Times’?
 (a) Charles Dickens (b) Walter Scott
 (c) Thomas Hardy (d) Emile Zola
Q.4: - What did “Kissa Goi” means—
 (a) The art of story telling (b) Moralizing
 (c) Slave Trade (d) Vagabond
Q.5: - The first novel to be serialized was—
 (a) Hard Times (b) Oliver Twist
 (c) Pickwick papers (d) Mayor of caster bridge
Q.6:-The first Indian novel was written in—
 (a) Malayalam (b) Bhojpuri
 (c) Punjabi (d) Marathi
Q.7: - The first modern novel in Malayalam is –
 (a) Sevasadan (b) Pariksha Guru
 (c) Indulekha (d) Rajesekhara
Q.8: - Who is the author of ‘Pamela’?
 (a) Leo Tolstoy (b) Samuel Richardson
 (c) Thomas Hardy (d) Charles Dickens
Q.9: - In which year was Emile Zola’s ‘Germinal’ published?
 (a) 1584 (b) 1885 (c) 1886 (d) 1874
Q.10:-Who wrote the famous novel ‘Jungle Book’?
 (a) Rudyard Kipling (b) R. L. Stevenson
 (c) Hunt Jackson (d) Jane Austen 
 
 
 Answer Key of Multiple Choice Questions
1. ( a ) 2. ( a ) 3. ( a ) 4. ( a )5. ( c ) 6. ( d ) 7. ( c ) 8. ( b ) 9. ( b ) 10. ( a ) 

To colonial administration –
1. A source to understand native life and customs.
2. It helped to govern Indian society with various communities and castes.
3. Novels helped to know the domestic life dresses religious worships etc.
4. Some of the books were translated into English by British administrators or Christian missioners.
To Indians –
1. Indians used the novels as a powerful medium to criticize defects what they considered in the society and to suggest remedies.
2. To established relationship to its past.
3. To propagate their ideas about society.
4. It glorified the accounts of the past and helped in creating sense of National Pride among the readers.
5. Novels helped in creating a sense of collective belongingness on the basis of one’s language.

1. The world created by novels were absorbing, believable and seemingly real.
 2. While reading novels, The readers was transported to another person’s world and began looking at life as it was experienced by the characters of the novel.
3. Novels allowed individuals the pleasure of reading in private as well as publicity.
4. The storied of novels were discussed in homes meetings or even in offices.

1. A story is published in installments, keeping the suspense for the next issue.
 2. Serialization allowed readers to relish the suspense discuss the characters of a novel and live for weeks with their stories.
3. This was possible science the magazines were illustrated and cheap and affordable.

1. They were written in the language of common people.
2. Vernacular novels produced a sense of shared world between diverse people of a nation.
3. Novels also draw from different styles of languages. A novel may tale a classical
 language and combine it with the language of street to make them all a part of vernacular that it uses.
4. Novels were read individually. Sometimes in groups also.

1. Munshi Premchand was one of the greatest literary figures of modern Hindi and Urdu literature.
2. He began writing in Urdu and then shifted to Hindi.
3. His novels lifted the Hindi novels from the realm of fantasy.
4. Premchand wrote on the realistic issues of the day i.e. communalism, corruption, zamidari dept, poverty and colonialism etc.
5. He wrote in traditional art of “Kissa - Goi”.

1. When Industrial Revolution began factories came up, business profits increased but workers faced problems.
2. Cities expanded in an unregulated way and were filled with over worked and unpaid workers.
3. Deeply critical of these developments, novelists such as Charles Dickens wrote about terrible effects of industrialization on people’s lives and characters.
4. His novel ‘Hard Times’ depicts a fictions industrial town as a grim full of machinery, smoking chimneys and rivers polluted.
5. Dickens criticized not just the greed for profit but also the ideas that reduced human beings into simple instruments of production.
6. Dickens’ ‘Oliver Twist is the tale of poor orphan who lived in a world of petty criminals and beggars.
 Oliver was finally adopted by a wealthy man and lived happy ever after.
7. Emili Zola’s ‘Germinal’ was written on the left of a young miner but it ends up in desire. It didn’t have happened like Oliver Twist of Dickens.