BEGC-103: Indian Writing in English

Guess Paper-I
Q. What is Indian English novel?
Ans. The Indian English novel evolved as a subaltern consciousness; as a reaction to break
away from the colonial literature. Hence the post- colonial literature in India witnessed a
revolution against the idiom which the colonial writers followed. Gradually the Indian English
authors began employing the techniques of hybrid language, magic realism peppered with
native themes. Thus from a post -colonial era Indian literature ushered into the modern and
then the post-modern era. The saga of the Indian English novel therefore stands as the tale of
Changing tradition, the story of a changing India. The stories were there already in India
steeped in folklores, myths, written in umpteen languages as India is always the land of
stories.
Authors and legendary sages have been recognized to have devoted volumes of paper, pen
and ink in priceless poetry or drama, dedicating each meticulous thought to penning down
immortal creations that still arrests attention. However, it was only in the Later Vedic Age that
one gets to witness the foremost and original and initial stages of Indian novel writing under
the masters like sages Valmiki or Vyasa. Indian novels began to be first written in Sanskrit
only, with the said literary body being divided into - Vedic Sanskrit, Epic Sanskrit and
Classical Sanskrit literatures. Setting apart the first two ages with their distinctive genres, it
was precisely in the Classical Sanskrit age that the plan and notion of `novels` began to be first
shelled out in India, lending a solid shape to the still-now floating criterion. The Classical age
in Sanskrit literature was the time when fables and fictional novels were begun to be given a
distinct shape for the common mass. As such, beginning from that period and still going on in
the current scenario, Indian novels have time and again impressed upon the reading public as
well as fetching esteemed and honored accolades both the country and overseas. Indian
novels have been unbeaten enough to exhaustively reflect the history, society, political
domain, economic status and tradition of Indian subcontinent, traversing ages.

Q. Give detailed summary of “The Tiger for Malgudi”.

Ans. A Tiger for Malgudi is a 1984 novel by Indian author R.K. Narayan, written from the
perspective of a tiger named Raja, who recounts his life, up to and including his uneventful
elderly life in an exhibit in the Malgudi zoo. Raja speaks nostalgically about his memories of
the wild before being captured by humans, while acknowledging the meditative life his
carceral existence now affords. Through its personification of Raja, the novel validates the
experiences and emotions of animals who are too often neglected by their captors,
promoting cultures of nonviolence between humans and animals.
The novel begins as Raja remembers his early life. He was born in the Indian jungle.
Growing quickly, he seized his rightful place at the top of the food chain. He recalls the
other creatures of the jungle feared him. Raja lived most of his young life in the broad swath
of jungle called the Mempi Range. He was not an indiscriminate killer or despotic ruler, but
was surely a dominant and occasionally ruthless one: he punishes those animals who deny
him respect, and feasts on other animals liberally. At the same time, he has compassion for
certain creatures. One day, Raja’s sense of supremacy is undermined when a female tiger
challenges his arrogance. They fight and are an equal match, nearly killing each other. A
wise jackal inspires them to speak to each other rather than fight. Obeying his words, they
surprisingly become friends, then become mates and bear children.
One day, Raja’s three cubs are tragically killed by a group of hunters. He seeks revenge by
stalking human villages and eating their livestock but is captured by a man called “Captain”
who runs a traveling circus. Captain and his wife, Rita, train Raja to perform stunts. In the
stunt that comes to be Raja’s most famous, he drinks milk alongside a goat. The stunt goes
awry one day when Raja embraces his predatory impulse and kills the goat. Enraged,
Captain takes him out of the show.
Madan, a film director, comes to Captain asking to feature Raja in a film. They strike a deal,
but Captain delays for so long that he irritates Madan. Finally, they start filming. In one
scene, Raja is to stage a fake fight with the strongman Jaggu. Jaggu, afraid of Raju, almost
backs out of filming. In one attempt to film, Raja upsets Captain, who electrocutes him with
a cattle prod. The rod does not subdue Raja as intended; the tiger retaliates by killing
Captain. The film set erupts into chaos, and Raja flees.
Raja makes it to the city of Malgudi. He roams throughout the city, terrifying its denizens.
Yet, Raja has given up using violence to influence humans and hopes only to be free again.
Nevertheless, deeply curious about humans, he visits many cafes and businesses. He even
visits a school after following a group of children. He falls asleep in the headmaster’s office;
when he wakes, the principal and other staffs are cowering and call for help.
Alphonse appears with a gun but doesn’t dare to enter the office. A spiritual leader known
only as “the Master” also appears, attempting to placate the people assembled outside the
office door. Alphonse drinks too much rum before attempting his rescue mission for the
headmaster. He passes out, and the Master enters the office instead. Raja is surprised that he
is able to understand the Master’s speech, unlike other humans. The Master orders Raja to
leave calmly with him, and he complies, amazing the onlookers.
Raja and the Master travel throughout India spreading a philosophy of nonviolence. They
travel into the mountains and live for a while in a cave. There, they are visited by many
people who want to emulate the Master. One day, a woman appears and demands that the
Master returns to her and their children, whom he abandoned. The Master replies that he is
now a different person, just as Raja is no longer a violent beast. Disheartened, the woman
returns to the city.
Raja becomes an old tiger. He finds it more difficult to hunt and protect himself. To help his
friend along, the Master invites a zookeeper from Malgudi to their cave. The zookeeper
offers to take care of Raja and proves to be friendly and compassionate. The Master gives
Raja a final assignment: to move into the zoo and make children happy. The zoo will also
render hunting unnecessary, enabling a nonviolent life for him. Now two old friends, Raja
and the Master part ways. The Master tells him that their spirits will meet again, when their
bodies are no longer necessary. A Tiger for Malgudi ends with this philosophical union
between man and animal, suggesting that all creatures can and should strive for peace.

Q. Discuss about the origin and rise of the novel.

Ans. The novel originated in the early 18th century after the Italian word "novella," which
was used for stories in the medieval period. Its identity has evolved and it is now considered
to mean a work of prose fiction over 50,000 words. Novels focus on character development
more than plot. In any genre, it is the study of the human psyche.
The Beginning: The ancestors of the novel were Elizabethan prose fiction and French heroic
romances, which were long narratives about contemporary characters who behaved nobly.
The novel came into popular awareness towards the end of the 1700s, due to a growing
middle class with more leisure time to read and money to buy books. Public interest in the
human character led to the popularity of autobiographies, biographies, journals, diaries and
memoirs.
English Novels: The early English novels concerned themselves with complex, middle-class
characters struggling with their morality and circumstances. "Pamela," a series of fictional
letters written in 1741 by Samuel Richardson, is considered the first real English novel. Other
early novelists include Daniel Defoe, who wrote "Robinson Crusoe" (1719) and "Moll
Flanders" (1722), although his characters were not fully realized enough to be considered
full-fledged novels. Jane Austen is the author of "Pride and Prejudice" (1812), and "Emma"
(1816), considered the best early English novels of manners.
Novels in the 19th Century: The first half of the 19th century was influenced by the
romanticism of the previous era. The focus was now on nature and imagination rather than
intellect and emotion. Gothic is a strain of the romantic novel with its emphasis on the
supernatural. Famous romantic novels include "Jane Eyre" (1847) by Charlotte Bronte, the
prototype of many succeeding novels about governesses and mystery men; "Wuthering
Heights" (1847) a Gothic romance by Emily Bronte; "The Scarlet Letter" (1850), and "The
House of Seven Gables" (1851), gothic, romantic tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne about
puritanism and guilt; and "Moby Dick," (1851) Herman Melville's work on the nature of
good and evil.
Victorian Novels: The novel became established as the dominant literary form during the
reign of Queen Victoria of England (1837-1901). Victorian novelists portrayed middle-class,
virtuous heroes responding to society and learning wrong from right through a series of
human errors. Sir Walter Scott published three-volume novels and ingeniously made them
affordable to the general public by making them available for purchase in monthly
installments. This marketing tactic lead to the writing innovation of sub-climaxes as a way to
leave readers wanting more each month. Notable Victorian authors include Charles Dickens,
considered the best English Victorian novelist, who wrote "A Christmas Carol" (1843) and
Lewis Carroll, (Charles Ludwidge Dodgson), who wrote "Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland" (1864) and "Through the Looking-Glass" (1871).
Realism and Naturalism: The rise of industrialization in the 19th century precipitated a
trend toward writing that depicted realism. Novels began to depict characters who were not
entirely good or bad, rejecting the idealism and romanticism of the previous genre. Realism
evolved quickly into naturalism which portrayed harsher circumstances and pessimistic
characters rendered powerless by the forces of their environment. Naturalist novels include
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe, which was a major catalyst for the
American Civil War; "Tom Sawyer" (1876) and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"
(1885), the latter of which is considered the great American novel written by Mark Twain
(Samuel Langhorne Clemens).
Modern Novels: The 20th century is divided into two phases of literature--modern literature
(1900-1945) and contemporary literature (1945 to the present), also referred to as
postmodern. The characters in modern and contemporary novels questioned the existence of
God, the supremacy of the human reason, and the nature of reality. Novels from this era
reflected great events such as The Great Depression, World War II, Hiroshima, the cold war
and communism. Famous modern novels include "To The Lighthouse" (1927) by English
novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf; "Ulysses" (1921), by Irish novelist and short story
writer James Joyce; "All Quiet on the Western Front" (1929), the most famous World War I
anti-war novel by German novelist and journalist Erich Maria Remarque and "The Sound
and the Fury" (1929) by American novelist and short story writer William Faulkner, which
depicts the decline of the South after the Civil War.
Postmodern Novels: Realism and naturalism paved the way into postmodern surrealistic
novels with characters that were more reflective. The postmodern novel includes magical
realism, metafiction, and the graphic novel. It asserts that man is ruled by a higher power
and that the universe cannot be explained by reason alone. Modern novels exhibit a
playfulness of language, less reliance on traditional values, and experimentation with how
time is conveyed in the story. Postmodern novels include: "The Color Purple" (1982) by Alice
Walker; "In Cold Blood" (1966) by Truman Capote; the non-fiction novel "Roots" (1976) by
Alex Haley; "Fear of Flying" (1973) by Erica Jong; and the leading magical realist novel, "A
Hundred Years of Solitude" (1967) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Q. Explain an Introduction as a feminist poem.

Ans. It is a feminist poem because it promotes the principles of feminism. Kamala Das
ingeniously mixes it with many other concerns which are common to men too but mostly it
is a feminist poem because it speaks for the assertion of womanliness, the betrayal of men
regarding the equal respect, the condition in which the society wants to keep a woman and
contain her.
The poem strictly speaks out against the whole nature of surrounding which constrains a
woman in every aspect.

Q. There are three major themes present in Shashi Deshpande's novel the binding vine.
Discuss them.
Ans. The Binding Vine has several themes that can be broadly separated for discussion: the
themes of human relationships, women's bonding, death and fear. The theme of death and
agony runs as a current all through the novel; the theme of marriage gives rise to women's
issues and pushes the novel towards a feminist discussion; the theme of human
relationships works on the social as well as metaphysical levels and makes the reader brood
over man-woman I relationships; and finally the theme of women's bonding gives a
psychological I purview to the novel.
Feminism Before we find out the feminist theme in The Bidng Vine, let us give some thought
to feminism in general. What is feminism? Feminism can be simply defined as a socio-
economic political movement started in the West in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
It demanded right to property, right to vote and legal rights. Later, women demanded
equality and raised many more issues concerning women's status in the family and society.
Of late, many feminists are voicing their concern for women's marginalization, and abuse of
the female body. . When we study The Binding Vine in the light of these issues we discover
that I Shashi Deshpande very subtly shows women's submission, their lack of voice, the
society's attitude to their suffering and the abuse of women's body, I through the various
women characters. But, she also shows the changes in social perception. For example, Urmi
certainly has more choices than her predecessors like Mira, Akka or Inni. Here we pause for
a while and ask, "Is Shashi Deshpande a Feminist Writer?" Shashi Deshpande does not call
herself a feminist writer. But she feels strongly for women and exposes the social norms that
are detrimental to women's development. In this sense, she is a feminist. In an interview she
says, "I am a feminist in the sense that, I think, we need to have a world, which we should
recognize as a place for all of us human beings. There is no superior and inferior, we are two
halves of one species" (R.S. Pathak, ed. The Fiction of Shashi Deshpande, p. 254). She
recognizes the "inherent potential" within all human beings and gets irritated to see how
society discriminates against women, advocates Sati, considers it a loss when a girl is born
and a gain when a boy is born. All these points pertain to the women question and some of
these are taken up in this novel.
Patriarchal: Power In The Binding Vine men are absent except Dr. Bhaskar and Kalpana's
father. Kalpana's father comes and goes like a shadow and Dr. Bhaskar has a minor role to
play. Despite these facts, men are powerfully depicted. The three main women characters,
around whom this novel revolves, suffer indirectly because of their men. Other women like
Akka, Inni, Shakutai and Sulu suffer directly. Thus, Shashi Deshpande creates a world in
which men exert their influence and women have no voice. If they break their silence, they
suffer like Kalpana. However, Unni's brother Amrut is presented in a favourable light.
Should Women Speak? : We can answer this question with the help of Kalpana's rape case.
Kalpana has a dream-she wants to marry the boy of her choice. She rejects Prabhakar, her
Sulu Mavshi's husband. She is, however, raped and silenced forever. Only a person like
Urmi can speak out for her. Her speaking out may not help Kalpana directly but it generates
public opinion and creates awareness. When Kalpana's rape case appears in the media, there
are demonstrations, questions in the Assembly and publicity is given to the suffering family.
This proves to be both good and bad-good because the hospital authorities are instructed
not to shift Kalpana to any other hospital, and also because chances are that Kalpana may
get justice indirectly if the culprit is punished; it is bad because this exposure brings the
family into the lime-light. When the case is reopened, Sulu realizes the truth about her
husband Prabhakar and commits suicide.
Urrni is the representative of the new woman and becomes the mouthpiece for the suffering
women. She gives them their voice. She takes up a hard stand for Kalpana with her own
family when they advice her to keep away, she argues with Dr. Bhaskar and the police
officer, and most of all she convinces Shakutai to let the case come on record. Obviously,
Shakutai understands her society better than Urmi does and is apprehensive that the
community may castigate them. She is right in one sense. The stigma will harm Sandhya's
future. Deshpande very subtly shows how the social values work. In a case like this the
blame always falls on the woman. Nobody mentions Prabhakar. We do not even know his
whereabouts. The focus is on Kalpana. Shakutai blames her for dressing up too gaudily and
attracting male attention, Sulu fiinks she should have agreed to marry Prabhakar. The police
officer and all the others consider her frivolous and some even hint that she could be a
"professional". Only Urrni stands by her.
In Unni's psyche, the cases of Mira and Kalpana overlap and become one. In both, the
question of woman's right to her body is of prime significance. Mira's diary and poems show
her emotions. She does not have a voice but she manages to record her intimate feelings in
her verses. Thus, her need to express her emotions is satisfied. Her poems have strong
feminist ideas and Urmi wants to get these verses published. Her point is that women like
Mira had a voice but they never got a chance to express themselves. "They never had a
chance. It's not fair, it's not fair at all. And we can't go on pushing itwhat happened to them-
under the carpet forever because we're afraid of disgrace" (p. 174). Urrni may be right
theoretically but practically, she cannot get past the social question. She has to consider
many aspects if she is to think of giving publicity to Mira's poems: Vanaa is against it
because it concerns her father, Kishore would be hurt because it pertains to his father and
mother.
Through Mira and Kalpana, the author takes up another significant issue, i.e. woman's right
to her own body. In patriarchy, man the male, considers himself the owner of a woman's
body. Mira's husband exerts his full right on her, stifling her right to say "no". She has to
submit to him against her wishes. Even the .older women like her mother and other relatives
advise her to quietly follow her man:
Don't tread paths barred to you Obey, never utter a 'no'; Submit and your life will be a
paradise, she said and blessed me (p. 83).
This advice is not acceptable to Mira. She resists it and when her demand is not recognized,
she suffers. She is miserable despite all comforts. Mira and Kalpana are not fortunate
enough to get the right to their body but Urmi manages to get it to some extent.
Urmi shows the courage to walk out of her bedroom on her nuptial night to Themes show
Kishore, her husband, that their life together will not be a trap. It will give them both the
freedom required to be individuals. Shashi Deshpande shows social changes very subtly
through Urmi's urges. Kishore is reserved by temperament; he does not express himself
much and is a distant figure both physically and socially. Urmi has some happy moments
with him, she loves him also but she craves for a kind of togetherness, which she finds in Dr.
Bhaskar's company. When Dr. Bhaskar obliquely hints at his love for Urmi, Urmi undergoes
strange conflicting feelings-she cannot be unfaithful to Kishore; but somewhere deep within
her, she enjoys Dr. Bhaskar's attention.
Feminists want a woman to have the right to her body. It signifies that man should not own
her. She must have a voice to decide her own course of lifeand she should decide whether to
have children or not. Theoretically, this may sound good but again socially, this is not
permissible. Deshpande agrees that women must demand respect for their body but there
are many social and psychological issues. For example, Mira resents her husband, but she
feels elated at her approaching motherhood. For a woman, motherhood is fulfilling. When
Mira conceives and feels the "stirring of life" within her, she forgets all her bitterness.
Similarly, Urmi as a mother is possessive about Kartik and she grieves endlessly for Anu.
The bestial assault on Kalpana and the insensitivity of Mira's husband lead us to see another
thematic pattern-love and marriage- running all through the novel. Our next section deals
with it.
The Theme of Love and Marriage: Marriage is the oldest institution of human society, on it
has hinged social discipline and a sense of security. But of late, this institution has come
under scrutiny. Particularly in literature, the writers are questioning it. Shashi Deshpande
does not repudiate it. She upholds it and at the same time she shows us its weak spots.
There are several married couples whose lives come under her examination. Urmi-Kishore,
Vanaa-Harish, Mira-Akka and their husband, Inni and Urmi's Papa, Shakutai and her
husband and SuluPrabhakar. These marriages are not described in the novel but there are
many probing questions and revelatory remarks to show how satisfying or dissatisfying
they are or were.
Let us take Mira, first. Mira was married to a young man who loved her immensely. She was
eighteen then, when the proposal came from the "boy's" side, and the family was jubilant
because it was immensely elevating for the family honour; and nobody could think of
rejecting it. It was not even thought necessary to take Mira's opinion. From the social angle,
Mira was fortunate to go into a good middle-class family and have a loving husband. For
Mira, however, her husband's obsessive love was a torture. She could never accept him. She
in fact, feared his advances. What could be called love, was obsession and when love
becomes too demanding, it loses its value. Shashi Deshpande subscribes to the view that
love should be a source of happiness and strength in our life. Love has the power to offset
the distress we encounter during our struggle for existence. When love becomes oppressive
and too demanding, it turns sadistic. Here, sadistic does not mean perverted, it means with
the tendency to find conscious or unconscious gratification in enslaving a partner. Mira's
husband was not a bad man; he was compulsive. His love was a trap. It did not give her
sufficient space of her own, a will of her own, and the freedom to say 'no'. This was what
Mira resented. She remained an unhappy wife, despite all comforts.
Akka was his second wife. She was educated and was a teacher. She was twenty-two' when
the proposal to marry the widower (Mira's husband) came and the family accepted it
without a second thought because from the social standard of her time Akka was past
marriageable age. Akka soon realized that she was brought into the family not as a "bride"
but as a "mother". As a wife Akka remained unfulfilled. She gave birth to Vanna but she
never received love fiom her husband. Vanna too felt that her father did not love her. In her
conversation with Urmi, she discloses her feelings.
What these two women were looking for was love. Unfortunately, neither got it. Mira
received an obsessive love, bordering on lust. She was scared of it; Akka got a husband who
was distant from her. She got a daughter from him but love eluded her. Mira shows her
scars through her writings; Akka shows her wounds when she bursts out weeping in front
of Urmi and Vanaa. The grief of being a rejected wife kept on rankling in her heart for
decades. Though Akka was stoic and she had borne life's assaults with courage, the hurt of
being an unloved wife always remained with her.
Urmi and Kishore seemed to make a good couple. Kishore gave her enough individual
freedom, never questioned her and when he was around, he was tender to her. Their love
relation was not a trap; it was egalitarian. Kishore was so quiet by disposition that he
sometimes appeared remote. As Urmi says, "Kishore will never remove his armour, there is
something in him I will never reach" (p. 141)). Urmi knows it is Kishore's basic nature and
she accepts it. She too loves him, though she is not submissive. Their marriage is normal but
there .is an undercurrent which could not be explained. Urmi resents his coldness and feels
attracted towards the warmth and closeness, which Dr. Bhaskar exudes. That does not,
however, mean that she is unfaithful to Kishore.
The marriages of Inni and Papa (Urmi's father) and Vanaa and Harish are based on the
traditional concept of submissive wives and dominating husbands. Vanna is a caring wife
and Harish is a loving husband but there is no sense of equality between them. Urmi does
not like Vanaa's attitude and wants her to assert herself. Even Inni, Urmi's mother, never
asserted herself. Papa was dominating. It was always his will that prevailed. It was Papa's
decision to send Unni to Baiajji and Aju at Ranidurg. It hurt Inni though she could never
raise her voice to stop him from sending Urmi away. Despite this, Themes both of them had
an innate tenderness. Urmi realizes this when she sees the last look in Papa's eyes before he
dies and Inni's distraught state after his death.
These descriptions pertain to middle-class families. In the lower strata of society love and
marriage have yet another connotation. Shakutai and Sulu do not know what is a husband's
love because it is his lust they encounter. Shakutai's husband leaves her with three children
to stay with another woman. Sulu's husband Frabhakar has evil intentions and in his
proposal to marry Kalpana, it is his lust not love. Marriage as such is meaningless for
women like Shakutai, Sulu and Kalpana but a man's presence is important as security. Urmi
is right in her assessment when she tells Dr. Bhaskar that for women like Shakutai marriage
has only one meaning "you are safe from other men" (p. I 88).
Shashi Deshpande raises several questions regarding marriages-whether arranged or love.
After reading Mira's diary, Urmi ponders, "What is it like I with a man you don't know?' (p.
63). Even her marriage, which is a love marriage, leads her to admit that she does not know
Kishore sufficiently "I have lived with the hope that some day I will (reach him). Each
relationship I always imperfect, survives on hope" (p. 141). This leads us to explore another
theme-the theme of human relationship.
The Theme of Human Relationships: Shashi Deshpande's novels generally centre on
family relationships. In one of her interviews she has said:
Human relationship is what a writer is involved with. Person to person and person to
society relationships-these are the two primary concerns of a creative writer and, to me the
former is of immense importance. My preoccupation is with interpersonal relationships and
human condition. (R.S. Pathak, p. 17).
In The Binding Vine human relationships are explored with all possible pros and cons-
husband-wife, mother-daughter, male-female, mother-child, woman-woman bonding and
human bonding. Thus, the central theme of the novel is the "binding vine" of relationships
that ties us together. We cannot shrug it off because it is love that is the binding vine. As
Mira says in one of her poems:
Desire, says the Buddha, is the cause of grief; but how escape this cord this binding vine of
love? (p. 137)
Urmi broods, "I feel I have found the word which will help me to solve the rest of the
crossword". A few sentences later she tell Amrut that women do not want to be dominated.
No human being likes to be dominated. We all want love. "The most important need is to
love. From the moment of our births, we struggle to find something with which we can
anchor ourselves to this strange world we find ourselves in. Only when we love do we find
this anchor" (p. 137).
Relationships, according to Deshpande should not be a trap. They must give sufficient
freedom to -the other to grow as an individual.
Urmi realizes how all relationships bind us at the human level. Urrni has no Binding Vine
relation, so to say, with Shakutai and her family, but on the human level she feels one with
them all. Their concern becomes her concern; their grief becomes hers. She helps them as
much as she can. Shakutai also reposes full faith in Urmi. When Urmi is around, Shakutai
feels secure. She even seeks Urmi's advice and trusts her opinion. The unfortunate woman
has no support system in her hour of need. Her husband comes, sheds tears and goes away;
Sulu offers no consolation; and Prabhakar on whom Shakutai depends, has turned out to be
a villain. It is Urmi who stands as her anchor; she becomes a bridge between Shakutai and
the doctors, Shakutai and Vanaa, Shakutai and the media.
Human relationships mean building bridges between situations and across people. The
man-woman relationship is based on the bridge of understanding and common well being.
There is an undercurrent of love and affection that gives meaning to it. When love becomes
selfishly blind, the bond loosens and misery follows. The author explores the relationship
between Mira and her husband. Mira was looking for love; all she got was its compulsive
version. Akka and her husband also could not build up a sound and healthy relationship
because her husband could not move beyond his deceased wife's memory. The children are
sufferers in both these cases-Kishore is undemonstrative and remote and Vanna is insecure.
But fortunately, they do not fail to establish healthy relationships in life-Vanaa and Harish
are happy, Unni and Kishore are also happy.
The mother-daughter relationship is also very fragile in this novel. Urmi and Inni are always
arguing. Urmi is sharp-tongued and flippant with her mother. When her mother shows
concern for her health, Urmi often gets irritated. Their conversation is never normal, it is
always sharp. Urmi harbours a secret grudge against her mother for sending her away to
Ranidurg. Urmi's perception clears when her mother tells her how her father took the
decision single-handedly without ever asking Inni. Urmi now feels sorry for her mother. She
realizes how dominating her father was.
The mother-daughter relationship is seen in all its tender aspects in the UrmiAnu
relationship. Urmi is like a tree and her infant daughter is like a creeper around her. Her
daughter is her world. Her passing away leaves Urmi empty. Shashi Deshpande explores
the mother-daughter relations at yet another level when she describes the Shakutai-Kalpana
relationship. The daughter is not very respectful towards her mother. She rejects her
mother's advice and follows her own whims in dressing up, going out and in her decision to
marry the boy of her choice. Her mother regrets all this after the rape incident. She also
regrets not having understood Prabhakar7s motives. There is, however, no chance now to
set right the wrong. The mother-daughter relationship flounders on the rock of
misunderstanding. Similarly, Mira does not abide by her mother's rules set for a daughter.
She fails to identify with her self-effacing and weak mother.
A very strong sense of woman-woman bonding is shown in the novel. Urmi feels a kind of
bond between herself, Mira and Kalpana. Mira is dead and goae. But in her diaries and
poems Urmi reads a message for all women. Urmi also empathises with Kalpana and
Shakutai. She is tender and understanding towards them. Her heart goes out to Shakutai
and she becomes one with her to fight against injustice.
The ending of the novel sums up Urmi's understanding of the strong bonds of relationship
that tie us at a human level: the act of living may be futile but we all struggle to survive
because we live in a web of relationships.
 BEGC-103: Indian Writing in English

Guess Paper-II
Q. Discuss about the character in “The Other Woman”?
Ans. In the present story, the characters do not simply stand for individuals but also
represent 'types.' This means that the author has used her characters to represent people of a
certain social background and they reflect the peculiarities of our contemporary society.
Maganlal: Maganlal is a rich man who has inherited the family jewellery business.
However, his heart lies in writing scripts for Hindi movies and he derives - immense
satisfaction from the success of the movies made from his scripts. So against the advice of his
friends, who keep asking him to stop writing and concentrate more on the jewellery
business as that is the source of his income and affluence, Maganlal continues to devote
most of his time to writing. It is easy to understand for the reader why this is so. The feeling
of achievement that writing provides to Maganlal cannot come from making money alone.
However, the scripts that he writes are copies of the plots of Hollywood movies although he
does not see anything wrong in this. He believes that he is bringing the East and the West
closer by doing so and that his works are worthy pieces of art.
Maganlal has been married for three years but the husband and wife have fi differences on
several issues. Maganlal is a mild man who has a fanciful image of what a wife should be
like until he gets married to Vimla. He had thought that a wife would be a docile partner
who would minister to his needs * and bring up his children but Vimla is an educated,
intelligent woman who expresses her opinions and demands her due. Maganlal is somewhat
in awe of his beautiful wife and wishes to please her. So when Vimla expresses her utter
disdain for the character Jit Bharati, the stereotypical hero he has created for the screen, he
decides to write something of which his wife would be proud.
Maganlal's physical description is also quite important in sketching his character. He has
given Jit Bharati all those physical charms that he lacks himself. Fat and balding, he is aware
that he does not fit the standards of a good looking man set by our society. He wishes to
compensate for this lack of good looks through the brilliance of his writing.
We can see that Maganlal's ideas. have been influenced more by watching commercial Hindi
cinema than by reading books. This explains his image of a wife and the kind of stories that
he writes. But he is essentially a simple straightforward man who is much closer to
understanding his social reality than Vimla. He recognizes the significance of money as well
as of art and cannot think of art as something that is completely divorced from all monetary
considerations even though it is not he who mints the profits of his writing but the
producers, directors and actors. His decision to write something different after the argument
with Vimla shows that he wishes to be respected by his wife and also that he genuinely
wants to improve as an artist, however limited his understanding of the subject might be.
'The, climax of the story is reached when, in a state of extreme anger, Maganlal falsely
"confesses" that he has a relationship with another woman and then refuses to be parted
from her at any cost. Why does Maganlal say such a thing? He wishes to assert that he will
not be ordered about by the insolent Sunil and that he will do as he pleases. He realizes that
"...by the mere fact of betraying his wife he had stolen a march over her.. " in Sunil's eyes. He
uses this fact to get rid of Sunil by making a false confession.
In short, Maganlal represents those people of the rich urban business class who wish to
make a contribution to art and culture in order to join the group of the educated elite. He is a
mild straightforward man who loves his wife and wishes to be loved in turn by her. He is
not satisfied by making money alone through the jewellery business and chooses to write in
order to feel that he has achieved something in life. His idea of art is one that is successful
and popular. By the end of the story he realizes that despite all her high-fangled ideas and a
modem literary education, his wife is not very different from the kind of women he writes
about.
Vimla Vimla is a young, beautiful and intelligent woman who has a degree in English
Literature from Bombay University. While people suggest that she has married Maganlal
simply because he is a rich man, it is quite clear in the story that Vimla has a warm regard
for her husband, yet also enjoys the glamour and the comfort of the life that her husband
provides. However, her notions of art and aesthetics have been nurtured by a western
literary education and her brother Sunil from whom she has high hopes of achieving
something great. She is unable to reflect on her own ground reality and is unable to realize
that all Sunil's claims of talent are self-centered and false. While she is right in pointing out
that Maganlal's stories revolve around hackneyed clichks, her own understanding of art is
completely detached from reality. We must remember however, that she does not criticize
Maganlal to win a point over him but because she wishes the best for him.
When her husband starts spending his time secretively in writing a new kind of script, her
insecurity comes to the surface. She cannot think of any other explanation except the most
hackneyed one - that her husband must be cheating on her. This suspicion consumes her day
by day and all Maganlal's explanations only add to her conviction that there is some other
woman. Her vanity suffers a blow; she feels that "...she is making poor use of her youth and
beauty.'' Her suspicions reach a climax when Maganlal shouts out in anger at Sunil that he
will not be parted from the (imaginary) other woman. She, who has spent the preceding
days demanding the name of her rival and threatening her husband with wild descriptions
of what she would do to this other woman, now breaks down into tears at the feet of
Maganlal pleading with him not to desert her for someone else. In doing so, she behaves
exactly like those cliched heroines Maganlal writes about. The author expertly demonstrates
that Vimla's reality is much closer to Maganlal's popular 'The Other Woman' fictional world
than to the elite literary fictional world which she so admires. Vimla represents those people
of the privileged educated middle-class who take pride in their high aesthetic tastes and
modern outlook but in doing so, refuse to accept their real fears and needs in everyday life.
Sunil Sunil is an irresponsible, self-centered man who is in love with himself. He squanders
away all his family's money within a year of his father's death and then conveniently
disappears till he hears of his sister's impending marriage to Maganlal. However, what
makes Sunil unbearable is his arrogance. He is completely convinced about his own
brilliance and looks down upon others. He is neither grateful for Maganlal's generosity nor
for his sister's little sacrifices of her girlhood jewellery to support him financially. He drops
out of college on the pretext that a college degree is "...not conducive to the growth of one's
originality and talents" and declares that he does not "believe in money." Sunil's role in the
story is that of a catalyst in making Maganlal lose his temper, which in turn paves the way
for a resolution of the ongoing conflict between Maganlal and Vimla. Sunil typifies
hypocritical people who proclaim their own greatness to the world but live the life of
parasites, subsisting on the mercy of others.
Q. Comment on the circumstances in which English was introduced in nineteenth century
India.
Ans. The twentieth century India saw an entirely different kind of resistance by natives to
the foreign rule, unlike what was witnessed in the nineteenth century. The former had
honed their political skills to such an extent (they had imbibed the spirit of enlightenment
and rationality of the west and tended to use new concepts of freedom, equality and
individual dignity against their political masters) that the tussle between the two went far
beyond the economic - it became more and more hegemonic. Our purpose in this course is to
connect the nineteenth century social struggle against the English Studies in India British
with the twentieth century 'hegemonic' tussle, a tussle aimed at transforming attitudes and
winning minds. The temporary that we mainly explore in this course is that of language. A
language, even a totally alien language, is not a simple, one-sided item of use. Instead, a
language is a whole system of knowledge-constructing activity in which participation. of
diverse elements is the key factor. This takes us straight into the area of literature. As we
notice, English began to be used increasingly by writers and thinkers in India. Such a
phenomenon of use necessitated a deep understanding of western works and trends and
mastery over a language to the level that one experiments and struggles within it to describe
and put across one's intent. All this requires a fair degree of acquaintance with the cultural
ethos of that language. Thus it is that those who face the question of coming to tenns with an
alien tongue read its authors and thinkers with exemplary seriousness and view the
represented or referred reality from a different angle. This enables them to widen their
mental horizon and equips them ideologically to evolve an appropriate stance. The criss-
cross of such a path would be discernible when we see the process of English in India
unfolding in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What do we make of the growth of
English as a medium in the post-Independence India? This is the period in which a
nationalist response to an 'alien' tongue was expected, when the newly-emerged nation
could take deeper interest in the unveiling of new life-patterns in the native tongues. In the
next section we shall examine what happens to a language when it is introduced from a
powerful hegemonic position, like in the case of the introduction of the English language in
India.

Q. What are the 5 elements of a novel?

Ans. Elements: Plot: The novel is propelled through its hundred or thousand pages by a
device known as the story or plot. This is frequently conceived by the novelist in very simple
terms, a mere nucleus, a jotting on an old envelope: for example, Charles Dickens’ Christmas
Carol (1843) might have been conceived as “a misanthrope is reformed through certain
magical visitations on Christmas Eve,” or Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) as “a
young couple destined to be married have first to overcome the barriers of pride and
prejudice,” or Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) as “a young man
commits a crime and is slowly pursued in the direction of his punishment.” The detailed
working out of the nuclear idea requires much ingenuity, since the plot of one novel is
expected to be somewhat different from that of another, and there are very few basic human
situations for the novelist to draw upon. The dramatist may take his plot ready-made from
fiction or biography—a form of theft sanctioned by Shakespeare—but the novelist has to
produce what look like novelties.
The example of Shakespeare is a reminder that the ability to create an interesting plot, or
even any plot at all, is not a prerequisite of the imaginative writer’s craft. At the lowest level
of fiction, plot need be no more than a string of stock devices for arousing stock responses of
concern and excitement in the reader. The reader’s interest may be captured at the outset by
the promise of conflicts or mysteries or frustrations that will eventually be resolved, and he
will gladly—so strong is his desire to be moved or entertained—suspend criticism of even
the most trite modes of resolution. In the least sophisticated fiction, the knots to be untied
are stringently physical, and the denouement often comes in a sort of triumphant violence.
Serious fiction prefers its plots to be based on psychological situations, and its climaxes
come in new states of awareness—chiefly self-knowledge—on the parts of the major
characters.
Melodramatic plots, plots dependent on coincidence or improbability, are sometimes found
in even the most elevated fiction; E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) is an example of a
classic British novel with such a plot. But the novelist is always faced with the problem of
whether it is more important to represent the formlessness of real life (in which there are no
beginnings and no ends and very few simple motives for action) or to construct an artifact as
well balanced and economical as a table or chair; since he is an artist, the claims of art,
or artifice, frequently prevail.
There are, however, ways of constructing novels in which plot may play a desultory part or
no part at all. The traditional picaresque novel—a novel with a rogue as its central
character—like Alain Lesage’s Gil Blas (1715) or Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), depends
for movement on a succession of chance incidents. In the works of Virginia Woolf,
the consciousness of the characters, bounded by some poetic or symbolic device, sometimes
provides all the fictional material. Marcel Proust’s great roman-fleuve, À la recherche du
temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past), has a metaphysical framework
derived from the time theories of the philosopher Henri Bergson, and it moves toward a
moment of truth that is intended to be literally a revelation of the nature of reality. Strictly,
any scheme will do to hold a novel together—raw action, the hidden syllogism of
the mystery story, prolonged solipsist contemplation—so long as the actualities or
potentialities of human life are credibly expressed, with a consequent sense of illumination,
or some lesser mode of artistic satisfaction, on the part of the reader.
Character: The inferior novelist tends to be preoccupied with plot; to the superior novelist
the convolutions of the human personality, under the stress of artfully selected experience,
are the chief fascination. Without character it was once accepted that there could be
no fiction. In the period since World War II, the creators of what has come to be called the
French nouveau roman (i.e., new novel) have deliberately demoted the human element,
claiming the right of objects and processes to the writer’s and reader’s prior attention. Thus,
in books termed chosiste (literally “thing-ist”), they make the furniture of a room more
important than its human incumbents. This may be seen as a transitory protest against the
long predominance of character in the novel, but, even on the popular level, there have been
indications that readers can be held by things as much as by characters. Henry James could
be vague in The Ambassadors (1903) about the provenance of his chief character’s wealth; if
he wrote today he would have to give his readers a tour around the factory or estate. The
popularity of much undistinguished but popular fiction has nothing to do with its wooden
characters; it is machines, procedures, organizations that draw the reader. The success of Ian
Fleming’s British spy stories in the 1960s had much to do with their hero, James Bond’s car,
gun, and preferred way of mixing a martini.
But the true novelists remain creators of characters—prehuman, such as those in William
Golding’s Inheritors (1955); animal, as in Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter (1927) or Jack
London’s Call of the Wild (1903); caricatures, as in much of Dickens; or complex and
unpredictable entities, as in Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, or Henry James. The reader may be
prepared to tolerate the most wanton-seeming stylistic tricks and formal difficulties because
of the intense interest of the central characters in novels as diverse as James
Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939) and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram
Shandy (1760–67).
It is the task of literary critics to create a value hierarchy of fictional character, placing the
complexity of the Shakespearean view of man—as found in the novels of Tolstoy and Joseph
Conrad—above creations that may be no more than simple personifications of some single
characteristic, like some of those by Dickens. It frequently happens, however, that the
common reader prefers surface simplicity—easily memorable cartoon figures like Dickens’
never-despairing Mr. Micawber and devious Uriah Heep—to that wider view of personality,
in which character seems to engulf the reader, subscribed to by the great novelists of France
and Russia. The whole nature of human identity remains in doubt, and writers who voice
that doubt—like the French exponents of the nouveau roman Alain Robbe-
Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, as well as many others—are in effect rejecting a
purely romantic view of character. This view imposed the author’s image of himself—the
only human image he properly possessed—on the rest of the human world. For the
unsophisticated reader of fiction, any created personage with a firm position in time–space
and the most superficial parcel of behavioral (or even sartorial) attributes will be taken for a
character. Though the critics may regard it as heretical, this tendency to accept a character is
in conformity with the usages of real life. The average person has at least a suspicion of his
own complexity and inconsistency of makeup, but he sees the rest of the world as composed
of much simpler entities. The result is that novels whose characters are created out of the
author’s own introspection are frequently rejected as not “true to life.” But both the higher
and the lower orders of novel readers might agree in condemning a lack of memorability in
the personages of a work of fiction, a failure on the part of the author to seem to add to the
reader’s stock of remembered friends and acquaintances. Characters that seem, on
recollection, to have a life outside the bounds of the books that contain them are usually the
ones that earn their creators the most regard. Depth of psychological penetration, the ability
to make a character real as oneself, seems to be no primary criterion of fictional talent.
Scene, or setting: The makeup and behaviour of fictional characters depend on their enviro
nment quite as much as on the personal dynamic with which their author endows them:
indeed, in Émile Zola, environment is of overriding importance, since he believed it
determined character. The entire action of a novel is frequently determined by the locale in
which it is set. Thus, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) could hardly have been
placed in Paris, because the tragic life and death of the heroine have a great deal to do with
the circumscriptions of her provincial milieu. But it sometimes happens that the main locale
of a novel assumes an importance in the reader’s imagination comparable to that of the
characters and yet somehow separable from them. Wessex is a giant brooding presence
in Thomas Hardy’s novels, whose human characters would probably not behave much
differently if they were set in some other rural locality of England. The popularity of Sir
Walter Scott’s “Waverley” novels is due in part to their evocation of a romantic Scotland.
Setting may be the prime consideration of some readers, who can be drawn to Conrad
because he depicts life at sea or in the East Indies; they may be less interested in the
complexity of human relationships that he presents.
The regional novel is a recognized species. The sequence of four novels that Hugh
Walpole began with Rogue Herries (1930) was the result of his desire to do homage to the
part of Cumberland, in England, where he had elected to live. The great Yoknapatawpha
cycle of William Faulkner, a classic of 20th-century American literature set in an imaginary
county in Mississippi, belongs to the category as much as the once-popular confections
about Sussex that were written about the same time by the English novelist Sheila Kaye-
Smith. Many novelists, however, gain a creative impetus from avoiding the same setting in
book after book and deliberately seeking new locales. The English novelist Graham
Greene apparently needed to visit a fresh scene in order to write a fresh novel. His ability
to encapsulate the essence of an exotic setting in a single book is exemplified in The Heart of
the Matter (1948); his contemporary Evelyn Waugh stated that the West Africa of that book
replaced the true remembered West Africa of his own experience. Such power is not
uncommon: the Yorkshire moors have been romanticized because Emily Brontë wrote of
them in Wuthering Heights (1847), and literary tourists have visited Stoke-on-Trent, in
northern England, because it comprises the “Five Towns” of Arnold Bennett’s novels of the
early 20th century. Others go to the Monterey, California, of John Steinbeck’s novels in the
expectation of experiencing a frisson added to the locality by an act of creative imagination.
James Joyce, who remained inexhaustibly stimulated by Dublin, has exalted that city in a
manner that even the guidebooks recognize.
The setting of a novel is not always drawn from a real-life locale. The literary artist
sometimes prides himself on his ability to create the totality of his fiction—the setting as well
as the characters and their actions. In the Russian expatriate Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada (1969)
there is an entirely new space–time continuum, and the English scholar J.R.R. Tolkien in
his Lord of the Rings (1954–55) created an “alternative world” that appeals greatly to many
who are dissatisfied with the existing one. The world of interplanetary travel was
imaginatively created long before the first moon landing. The properties of the
future envisaged by H.G. Wells’s novels or by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World (1932)
are still recognized in an age that those authors did not live to see. The composition of place
can be a magical fictional gift.
Whatever the locale of his work, every true novelist is concerned with making a credible
environment for his characters, and this really means a close attention to sense data—the
immediacies of food and drink and colour—far more than abstractions like “nature” and
“city.” The London of Charles Dickens is as much incarnated in the smell of wood in
lawyers’ chambers as in the skyline and vistas of streets.
Narrative method and point of view: Where there is a story, there is a storyteller.
Traditionally, the narrator of the epic and mock-epic alike acted as an intermediary between
the characters and the reader; the method of Fielding is not very different from the method
of Homer. Sometimes the narrator boldly imposed his own attitudes; always he assumed an
omniscience that tended to reduce the characters to puppets and the action to a
predetermined course with an end implicit in the beginning. Many novelists have been
unhappy about a narrative method that seems to limit the free will of the characters,
and innovations in fictional technique have mostly sought the objectivity of the drama, in
which the characters appear to work out their own destinies without prompting from
the author.
The epistolary method, most notably used by Samuel Richardson in Pamela (1740) and
by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in La nouvelle Héloïse (1761), has the advantage of allowing the
characters to tell the story in their own words, but it is hard to resist the uneasy feeling that a
kind of divine editor is sorting and ordering the letters into his own pattern. The device of
making the narrator also a character in the story has the disadvantage of limiting the
material available for the narration, since the narrator-character can know only those events
in which he participates. There can, of course, be a number of secondary narratives enclosed
in the main narrative, and this device—though it sometimes looks artificial—has been used
triumphantly by Conrad and, on a lesser scale, by W. Somerset Maugham. A, the main
narrator, tells what he knows directly of the story and introduces what B and C and D have
told him about the parts that he does not know.
Seeking the most objective narrative method of all, Ford Madox Ford used, in The Good
Soldier (1915), the device of the storyteller who does not understand the story he is telling.
This is the technique of the “unreliable observer.” The reader, understanding better than the
narrator, has the illusion of receiving the story directly. Joyce, in both his major novels, uses
different narrators for the various chapters. Most of them are unreliable, and some of them
approach the impersonality of a sort of disembodied parody. In Ulysses, for example, an
episode set in a maternity hospital is told through the medium of a parodic history of
English prose style. But, more often than not, the sheer ingenuity of Joyce’s techniques
draws attention to the manipulator in the shadows. The reader is aware of the author’s
cleverness where he should be aware only of the characters and their actions. The author is
least noticeable when he is employing the stream of consciousness device, by which the
inchoate thoughts and feelings of a character are presented in interior monologue—
apparently unedited and sometimes deliberately near-unintelligible. It is because this
technique seems to draw fiction into the psychoanalyst’s consulting room (presenting the
raw material of either art or science, but certainly not art itself), however, that Joyce felt
impelled to impose the shaping devices referred to above. Joyce, more than any novelist,
sought total objectivity of narration technique but ended as the most subjective
and idiosyncratic of stylists.
The problem of a satisfactory narrative point of view is, in fact, nearly insoluble. The careful
exclusion of comment, the limitation of vocabulary to a sort of reader’s lowest common
denominator, the paring of style to the absolute minimum—these puritanical devices work
well for an Ernest Hemingway (who, like Joyce, remains, nevertheless, a highly idiosyncratic
stylist) but not for a novelist who believes that, like poetry, his art should be able to draw on
the richness of word play, allusion, and symbol. For even the most experienced novelist,
each new work represents a struggle with the unconquerable task of reconciling all-
inclusion with self-exclusion. It is noteworthy that Cervantes, in Don Quixote, and Nabokov,
in Lolita (1955), join hands across four centuries in finding most satisfactory the device of the
fictitious editor who presents a manuscript story for which he disclaims responsibility. But
this highly useful method presupposes in the true author a scholarly, or pedantic, faculty
not usually associated with novelists.
Scope, or dimension: No novel can theoretically be too long, but if it is too short it ceases to
be a novel. It may or may not be accidental that the novels most highly regarded by the
world are of considerable length—Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Dostoyevsky’s Brothers
Karamazov, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Dickens’ David Copperfield, Proust’s À la recherche
du temps perdu, and so on. On the other hand, since World War II, brevity has been
regarded as a virtue in works like the later novels of the Irish absurdist author Samuel
Beckett and the ficciones of the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, and it is only an aesthetic based
on bulk that would diminish the achievement of Ronald Firbank’s short novels of the post-
World War I era or the Evelyn Waugh who wrote The Loved One (1948). It would seem that
there are two ways of presenting human character—one, the brief way, through a significant
episode in the life of a personage or group of personages; the other, which admits of
limitless length, through the presentation of a large section of a life or lives, sometimes
beginning with birth and ending in old age. The plays of Shakespeare show that a full
delineation of character can be effected in a very brief compass, so that, for this aspect of the
novel, length confers no special advantage. Length, however, is essential when the novelist
attempts to present something bigger than character—when, in fact, he aims at the
representation of a whole society or period of history.
No other cognate art form—neither the epic poem nor the drama nor the film—can match
the resources of the novel when the artistic task is to bring to immediate, sensuous,
passionate life the somewhat impersonal materials of the historian. War and Peace is the
great triumphant example of the panoramic study of a whole society—that of early 19th-
century Russia—which enlightens as the historian enlightens and yet also conveys directly
the sensations and emotions of living through a period of cataclysmic change. In the 20th
century, another Russian, Boris Pasternak, in his Doctor Zhivago (1957), expressed—though
on a less than Tolstoyan scale—the personal immediacies of life during the Russian
Revolution. Though of much less literary distinction than either of these two
books, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936) showed how the American Civil
War could assume the distanced pathos, horror, and grandeur of any of the classic struggles
of the Old World.
Needless to say, length and weighty subject matter are no guarantee in themselves of
fictional greatness. Among American writers, for example, James Jones’s celebration of the
U.S. Army on the eve of World War II in From Here to Eternity (1951), though a very
ambitious project, repels through indifferent writing and sentimental
characterization; Norman Mailer’s Naked and the Dead (1948), an equally ambitious
military novel, succeeds much more because of a tautness, a concern with compression, and
an astringent objectivity that Jones was unable to match. Frequently the size of a novel is too
great for its subject matter—as with Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965),
reputedly the longest single-volume novel of the 20th century, John Barth’s Giles Goat-
Boy (1966), and John Fowles’s Magus (1965). Diffuseness is the great danger in the long
novel, and diffuseness can mean slack writing, emotional self-indulgence, sentimentality.
Even the long picaresque novel—which, in the hands of a Fielding or his
contemporary Tobias Smollett, can rarely be accused of sentimentality—easily betrays itself
into such acts of self-indulgence as the multiplication of incident for its own sake, the
coy digression, the easygoing jogtrot pace that subdues the sense of urgency that should lie
in all fiction. If Tolstoy’s War and Peace is a greater novel than Fielding’s Tom Jones or
Dickens’ David Copperfield, it is not because its theme is nobler, or more pathetic, or more
significant historically; it is because Tolstoy brings to his panoramic drama the compression
and urgency usually regarded as the monopolies of briefer fiction.
Sometimes the scope of a fictional concept demands a technical approach analogous to that
of the symphony in music—the creation of a work in separate books, like symphonic
movements, each of which is intelligible alone but whose greater intelligibility depends on
the theme and characters that unify them. The French author Romain Rolland’s Jean-
Christophe (1904–12) sequence is, very appropriately since the hero is a musical composer, a
work in four movements. Among works of English literature, Lawrence
Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet (1957–60) insists in its very title that it is a tetralogy rather than
a single large entity divided into four volumes; the concept is “relativist” and attempts to
look at the same events and characters from four different viewpoints. Anthony
Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, a multivolume series of novels that began in 1951
(collected 1962), may be seen as a study of a segment of British society in which the
chronological approach is eschewed, and events are brought together in one volume or
another because of a kind of parachronic homogeneity. C.P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers,
a comparable series that began in 1940 and continued to appear throughout the ’50s and into
the ’60s, shows how a fictional concept can be realized only in the act of writing, since the
publication of the earlier volumes antedates the historical events portrayed in later ones. In
other words, the author could not know what the subject matter of the sequence would be
until he was in sight of its end. Behind all these works lies the giant example of
Proust’s roman-fleuve, whose length and scope were properly coterminous with the
author’s own life and emergent understanding of its pattern.
Myth, symbolism, significance: The novelist’s conscious day-to-day preoccupation is
the setting down of incident, the delineation of personality, the regulation of
exposition, climax, and denouement. The aesthetic value of the work is frequently
determined by subliminal forces that seem to operate independently of the writer, investing
the properties of the surface story with a deeper significance. A novel will then come close
to myth, its characters turning into symbols of permanent human states or impulses,
particular incarnations of general truths perhaps only realized for the first time in the act of
reading. The ability to perform a quixotic act anteceded Don Quixote, just
as bovarysme existed before Flaubert found a name for it.
But the desire to give a work of fiction a significance beyond that of the mere story is
frequently conscious and deliberate, indeed sometimes the primary aim. When a novel—like
Joyce’s Ulysses or John Updike’s Centaur (1963) or Anthony Burgess’ Vision of
Battlements (1965)—is based on an existing classical myth, there is an intention of either
ennobling a lowly subject matter, satirizing a debased set of values by referring them to a
heroic age, or merely providing a basic structure to hold down a complex and, as it were,
centrifugal picture of real life. Of Ulysses Joyce said that his Homeric parallel (which is
worked out in great and subtle detail) was a bridge across which to march his 18 episodes;
after the march the bridge could be “blown skyhigh.” But there is no doubt that, through the
classical parallel, the account of an ordinary summer day in Dublin is given a
richness, irony, and universality unattainable by any other means.
The mythic or symbolic intention of a novel may manifest itself less in structure than in
details which, though they appear naturalistic, are really something more. The shattering of
the eponymous golden bowl in Henry James’s 1904 novel makes palpable, and hence truly
symbolic, the collapse of a relationship. Even the choice of a character’s name may be
symbolic. Sammy Mountjoy, in William Golding’s Free Fall (1959), has fallen from the grace
of heaven, the mount of joy, by an act of volition that the title makes clear. The eponym
of Doctor Zhivago is so called because his name, meaning “The Living,” carries powerful
religious overtones. In the Russian version of the Gospel According to St. Luke, the angels
ask the women who come to Christ’s tomb: “Chto vy ischyote zhivago mezhdu
myortvykh?”—“Why do you seek the living among the dead?” And his first name, Yuri, the
Russian equivalent of George, has dragon-slaying connotations.
The symbol, the special significance at a subnarrative level, works best when it can fit
without obtrusion into a context of naturalism. The optician’s trade sign of a huge pair of
spectacles in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby (1925) is acceptable as a piece of scenic detail,
but an extra dimension is added to the tragedy of Gatsby, which is the tragedy of a whole
epoch in American life, when it is taken also as a symbol of divine myopia. Similarly, a
cinema poster in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947), advertising a horror film, can
be read as naturalistic background, but it is evident that the author expects the illustrated
fiend—a concert pianist whose grafted hands are those of a murderer—to be seen also as a
symbol of Nazi infamy; the novel is set at the beginning of World War II, and the last
desperate day of the hero, Geoffrey Firmin, stands also for the collapse of Western
civilization.
There are symbolic novels whose infranarrative meaning cannot easily be stated, since it
appears to subsist on an unconscious level. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) is such a
work, as is D.H. Lawrence’s novella St. Mawr (1925), in which the significance of the horse is
powerful and mysterious.
 BEGC-103: Indian Writing in English

Guess Paper-III
Q. Critically analyze the poem 'Enterprise'. What are the religious implications in the
poem?
Ans. Introduction: Enterprise by Nissim Ezekiel is a satiric poem with a moral. It deals with
pilgrimages which serve no useful purpose. The poet suggests that religious pilgrimages are
a waste and snobbish. In ‘Enterprise’ which contains the two central metaphors of his poetry
– pilgrimage and home – Ezekiel reveals his attitude of commitment. Besides, according to
him, to please God one need not go on pilgrimages as He is within.
A Pilgrimage: Without Getting the Call: The poem is in the form of a narrative. The
narrator, the poet explains how he and some others started on a pilgrimage. The aim of the
pilgrimage was to ennoble the minds and to make the burdens light. The pilgrimage had no
hitch, to start with. While, at the second stage, they did not know whether they got a call at
all. Obviously, they had started casually, and impulsively. It was very hot and they were
unable to beat the heat. Thus they were physically unfit for the pilgrimage.
Mission Misunderstood by the Pilgrims: The pilgrims visited various places of interest on
the way and took down notes on the very humdrum aspects of life and on curiosities. Thus,
ironically, the pilgrimage had started with a distraction. Obviously, the pilgrims had
misunderstood their mission. Soon, differences arose among the members of the team over
silly matters. The best intellectual among them left the team egotistically. This made the
team gloomy.
Division Among the Pilgrims: After the best intellectual left the team, the division in the
team grew day by day. Obviously a religious man must be humble. Egotism cannot exalt the
mind. On another day, the group was attacked twice and they lost their way. One section of
the pilgrims lost faith in the leadership and tried to form a separate group. The leader was
helpless and he said that he was ‘smelling a sea of problems’. The narrator could only pray.
A Scattered Group Without Hope: The group of pilgrims had now become listless. They
could see nothing. They were a scattered crowd with no hope. They had also exhausted all
their essential provisions like soap. Some had lost their hope and others were merely bent by
the problems.
Charity Begins at Home: Atlast, the pilgrims reached the place of pilgrimage. They did not
know why they went there. They had lost face in the trip. They discovered that their deeds
were ordinary and common placed. The narrator discovered that we can get God’s grace at
home. Serving one’s own family by practising virtues at home is the way to please God.
After all, charity begins at home.
Conclusion: The poem is full of irony. People who wanted to exalt their minds became
mean. The pilgrims wanted the pilgrimage to lighten their burden. But the pilgrimage itself
became a burden. Ironically the leader was helpless. The anti-climax was reached when the
pilgrims did not know why they arrived ‘there’. Obviously, without faith and unity of
purpose, God can never be reached.
Q. What are the basic elements of the short story?
Ans. Having grappled and remaining cross - purposes over how to define the short story as
a literary form we wish to lead you away from abstract generic debates and move towards
discreet principles of writing a short story. Even though there can be no rules for the good
story, for any story for that matter, there can only be certain general principles - to establish
a sense of the relation of the story to life. About The Short Story The storywriter tries to give
a definite form to the inchoate world. A story has to have a formal plot or structure and the
skill of the author lies in making it appear as natural, as lifelike, as spontaneous as possible.
The artist wants to make incidents or situations appear natural rather than contrived. A well
thought out plot is one in which nothing is superfluous or superficial. A story has to have a
beginning and should convey a constant sense of movement. Therefore, an ideal structure
would make the story interesting and true to life as also build up suspense and arouse the
readers curiosity to know what happens next or how the situation gets resolved at the end. It
should also give meaning to the narrative
. A good short story should strive for a unity of effect - a "single effect", to use Edgar Allan
Poe's phrase. That is, a story should be compressed and economical the way a poem is, free
from digressions and irrelevancies, and marked by its intensity. It should be complete in
itself and must have unity, wholeness. A story is meant to be read at one sitting; a novel may
take days to read. So the story's effect must be sudden, powerful, revealing: whereas a novel
can involve readers at a more leisurely pace, slowly illuminating complexities and nuances.
But then stories also convey psychological reality. Much of what happens in the modem
story happens in the character's minds, in the interior world. Therefore, in attempting to
reveal the drama of human consciousness, many modern writers have stopped stressing the
orderly progression of plots, have played down external action, and have often abandoned
photographic realism in favor of a more complex psychological realism.
Do not also forget that the stories require focused attention. In a novel we may skip over the
descriptions, especially descriptions of setting. No such skipping is possible in a short story
without losing some part of its meaning.
Also, you should know that there is a difference between the events and episodes in a novel
and those in a short story. In the novels of Dicknes and Thackeray for example, there was a
strong element of episode - each part of the serialized publication had to be complete in
itself and also prepare the ground for what was to follow. In a short story, on the other hand,
there is nothing to follow, nothing to look forward to. The end of the short story is the end. It
is marked by a sense of finality, of definiteness, of tautness from beginning to end. It is self -
contained. Its compression induces a feeling of expanding into life, an awareness of life
expanding into our consciousness, enlarging our consciousness. In this sense a short story
imparts the sense of a discovery. We shall continue in greater detail our discussion on the
elements of a short story in the subsections to follow:
Plot: Whereas a simple narrative account is sequential, open and truthful account - a
rendering of external events as they happen in time, a plot is not a simple narrative account.
A plot is constructed. A plot is composed. The author of a story has in his mind, a simple
narrative account but he does things with it. He may rearrange the events in time, he may
tell the end first and then relate how events led up to it, he may withhold some information
to arouse and sustain our curiosity and interest, he may be biased in favor of or against some
of the characters and overplay or underplay certain facts to reinforce his stand. A plot is
what an author does to the simple narrative account to make it a story, to give it a meaning,
a purpose. E.M.Forster made the distinction between a simple narrative account and plot
very clear when he said, "The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died,
and then the queen died of grief is a plot." The author has in mind causality, a hypothesis, a
point of view. He has a vision of the occasion. The simple sequence of events has been given
a meaning. "A plot, then, is a narrative account, artfully manipulated for artistic purpose. To
give pleasure and to signify meaning, according to Jack Carpenter and Peter Neumeyer. Plot
implies the idea of unity - various individual events hang together, jell of together. To begin
with, there is the matter of cause and effect - we expect to find logic, a reasonable connection
between the parts. This logic is not a mechanical thing. Many human responses and
nonhuman things may enter into the logic of a story - in the end the central logic we are
concerned with is the logic of human motivation. How do human needs and passions work
themselves out? Plot then, is character in action. The various stages in terms of plot are 1)
exposition 2) complication 3) climax and 4) denouement.
Characterization: Not all short stories, however, have or need to have perfectly worked out
plots. As the writers Wallace and Mary Stegner have stated, "The short story as a distinctive
form has turned away from plot, and has tended to become less a complication resolved
than what Henry James was to call 'a situation revealed'."' Aesthetic pleasure can be evoked
in ways other than the manipulated narrative imitation of a conflict. The highest aesthetic
satisfaction may come from the reader's growing recognition and understanding of the
characters and their situations The presentation of human beings or of human situations,
and the revelation of the truth inherent in that human being or in that human situation leads
to a "gradual, slow illumination", of facts which is more satisfying than a manipulated plot
with a neat beginning, a middle and an end. Insights emerge from the encounter between
two very different characters representing two points of view. E.M.Forster classified the
characters as "flat" and "round". Flat characters stand for an idea, an attitude, a point of
view. They don't grow at all in the course of the ston. They become static or stereotypes.
Round characters, on the other hand, go through many inconsistencies, anxieties,
contradictions, etc. revealing new facets of their personality each time they deal with a new
situation. They are dynamic. Flat or stock characters are often used to act as a contrast, or foil
to the round characters. Not all characters are treated equally - a clear understanding of their
relative importance in the story will help us develop a proper perspective. In keeping with
the central idea of the story we have to distinguish between minor and major characters. So
important is character to fiction that one may approach the story by asking, "Whose story is
this?" The domain of fiction is the world of credible human beings, though an amazingly
diverse and varied world. All abstractions must be made credible and significant for the
reader to identify himself with. They have to be made believable. A writer can present his
characters in two ways - by telling or by showing. If lie tells us about a character directly, his
method of characterization is expository. If he allows his characters to be revealed indirectly
through thought, dialogue and action it is dramatic. Most writers use a combination of the
two to bring their characters to life. "
Atmosphere: Atmosphere establishes lifelikeness and wins the reader's willingness to accept
the world created by the storyteller. It creates the mood as well as the psychological and
physical effects essential to the theme of the story. By providing an apt locale and local color,
the author ensures verisimilitude and authenticity. A short-story writer cannot delineate in a
leisurely manner or at length. His word pictures or strokes have to be economical and yet
evocative. The information given has to be to the point and yet revealing. Notice the way the
place setting in An Astrologer 's Day is evoked. "He sat under the boughs of a spreading
tamarind tree which flanked a path running through the Town Hall Park. It was a
remarkable place in many ways. “A perfect setting for an astrologer a bewildering criss-
cross of light rays and moving shadows”. The period stories and ghost stories, in particular,
depend for their interest mainly on atmosphere-exotic lands, moss covered castles and
abbeys, pointed arches, haunted alleys, wild torrents, thick forests, etc. Notice how Arun
Joshi has created an atmosphere of pain and deprivation with the minimum use of words by
highlighting the thwarted expectations of the father and the resultant tension and trauma.
Nothing dissipates the feeling of depression. Atmosphere thus controls the overall effect of
the story. It is created by setting, description and dialogue.
Narrative Techniques: Narration is one of the most important elements of a short story.
Have you noticed that the most obvious ways to make the story appear lifelike is to tell in
the first person. This ensures intimacy and immediacy - making it easier for the reader to
identify with the characters. The third person narrative, on the other hand, gives the author
greater freedom to move back and forth, and act as an omniscient presence. A story in the
first person is supposed to emphasize subjective reality at the expense of objective reality
much more than a story in the third person. In the third person narrative the author can
draw back from the main character at any time and tell us things that the character cannot
know or does not understand.
So, "the first person point of view adds credibility, immediacy and life likeness to the story.
The author seems to disappear, leaving the reader in the hands of the narrator. The effect is
that the reader comes so close to the action that he begins to share the character's perception
of the world. The reader begins to so completely identify with the narrator's vision that he
abandons his own critical intelligence and escapes into the character's life."
Some readers assume that the first person narrator and the author always share similar
moral perspectives, when in fact the narrator's may be radically different from his creator. A
narrator's perception of an experience may be limited, one-sided even biased. The reader
may know much more about the significance of the narrator's actions and thoughts than
does the narrator himself. A first person narrator is only a character in the story, not
necessarily a spokesman for the author;
Some stories have trick-ending to take the reader by surprise. We are not talking of
mysteries and thrillers but stories like An Astrologer's Day that build up a certain suspense
in the mind of the reader regarding the circumstances that had compelled the protagonist to
leave his village all of a sudden without any plan or preparation and take to astrology to eke
out a living in the town. The revelation at the end comes as a surprise. It goes to the credit of
the author though that this sudden revelation unties many knots merely hinted at earlier
and weaves the parts into a unified whole. It is a logical climax reached dramatically. Then
we have stories, which may be termed comedies of manners. The author shows us what the
characters are doing in such a way that we can understand why they are doing it. Out of the
details of what they do and say the authors build up the conflict About The Short Story and
tension. It would weaken A Trip into the Jungle, for example, if the author tried to describe
directly the feelings that lie beneath the utterances and actions of his characters. or if he
intruded into his story with explanatory comments of his own. Stories written from a
particular point of view to denounce a practice or bias are more concerned with ideas than
characters. Stock or stereotypical characters reinforce the point they are attempting to make.
While analyzing a story we need, therefore, to ask: who is telling the story? What is his/her
angle of vision and relationship to the events? Is he/she detached or involved? Is his/her
view of the experience trustworthy? Is the narrator's view of the experience complete, or is it
limited? Is the narrator presented ironically? How does the point of view help the writer
organize his materials? Dialect or slang is used to place a character in a particular setting.
The ashtamp farosh in Arun Joslzi is closer to the heart of the matter than any other
character in the story and is assigned the role of shaking Dr. Khanna out of his cruel apathy
towards his father. In keeping with our world crammed with strange, uncanny and fantastic
events, the form of narrative underwent radical changes. The chronological sequence is no
longer necessary. The unity of time is no longer necessary. A story does not necessarily have
to have a beginning, a middle and an end. Resolution of the complications is also not
necessary. After all, life offers no solutions, nor does it follow any system or sequence.
Experimental stories of today raise questions and leave the answers to the imagination of the
reader. Time is no longer linear to be measured by the clock. Ever increasing complexity of
human motives and actions, myriad levels of psychological and objective reality have
necessitated exploration of new narrative techniques and devices.
Point of View: Happenings in stories may look lifelike and historically accurate, at the same
time they are strongly marked by the authors' feelings about what happens, by their
conviction that the essential reality of things is created by what people feel about them. The
significant reality is in the hearts of people, hence the emphasis in these stories is on how
and what the authors feel about what happens because what ultimately counts is not the
events themselves but what we feel about them. Thus The Only American. .. is not really
about the brilliant Dr.Khanna settling down in the USA but about the devastating effect of
this event on his father. The range and subtlety of + the normal dilemmas so effectively
dramatized by both Arun Joshi and Manoj Das highlight the intricate codes and mores of
our time and the authors' point of view in this regard. Similarly Subhadra Sengupta and Raji
Narsimhan expose our deep-rooted prejudices and preferences causing irreparable damage
to filial relationships. The point of view is thus the interpretation of persons and events, the
pervasive and unifying view of life embodied in the narrative. It is what we are to make of
the human experience rendered in the story - says involving directly or indirectly, some
comment on values in human nature and conduct. The question most of us invariably ask
about life is "What does it mean"? We like the story to work itself out into a unity - just as we
feel a need to have our own lives make sense. We all work out our own scale of values and
live by it. Different points of view enlarge our vision and help us gain a new perspective. We
can and do make, even in disagreement, the imaginative effort to realize what underlies the
logic of another's point of view, the logic by which a theme unfolds. Given below is a
detailed glossary of terms you will encounter in your critical readings of short stories.

Q. What was the nature of the influence of Raja Ram Mohan Roy's English writings on
the English writings of other Indians (who wrote in English) in the early nineteenth
century?
Ans. By the year of Raja Ram Mohan Roy's death, a group of students educated at Hindu
College, Calcutta, had emerged on the scene of Indian English writing. Known as the Young
Bengal group, these students started an English magazine Pantheon, in the pages of which
they discussed controversial and contentious social issues such as superstitions in Hindu
society, the status of women and class disparities in India. In the context of the nineteenth
century, this went far beyond what could be termed "reform". The youth of the day wished
that their country could come as close to modem attitudes as possible. This would pave the
way for a vibrant resurgent India in the days to come. Indeed, the Indian National
Movement owed a great deal to the efforts of figures such as Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Derozio
and KashiprasadGhosh (1 809-1 873). Some of them appreciated the potential of English as a
language for creative expression as well. The common mentor of this radical group of
students was, more often than not, the highly charismatic English teacher of Hindu College,
Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809-1831). Derozio, a Calcutta Eurasian of Portuguese -
Indian ancestry, wrote in English since that was the only language he knew, but the issues
that he wrote about were far removed from the concerns of English literature of the
contemporary era. He too, like Ram Mohan Roy, took up social themes in his writings, but
his favored mode of self-expression was verse rather than prose. Thus Derozio innovated a
new model of English poetry through his Indian English writings, as did his peer
KashiprasadGhosh (1809-1873) and some ' of his pupils of Hindu College after him. Though
largely derivative from British models in terms of stylistics, these texts represented thematic
that were undeniably IndianSisir Kumar Das has summed up the fundamental problematic
raised by the emergence of these early Indian English writers: The Context of the Earliest
Indian English Writings:
Why did they write in English at all? Was it a curious exercise by the young men with the
language of the new rulers of the country, or was it a serious attempt towards a search for a
new medium suitable for a new literary perception.

Q. Explain the role of the minor characters in the novel.

Ans. A minor character is a character who, has a name and does stuff that contributes to the
plot, but they aren't the main characters. A Tiger for Malgudi is interspersed with various
incidents and characters that depict the conflict between tradition and unconventionality.
The lively descriptions of villagers with their characteristic terror of the primitive man and
of the tiger as “a cave-dweller and jungle beast” carry the reader back to the savage times
when man’s foremost preoccupation was to save his race from utter annihilation at the
hands of wild beasts. The village and the sheep are symbols of innocence and unalloyed
simplicity of our culture. A Tiger for Malgudi is a remarkable book which gives a realistic
picture of the casual and cavalier concern of the government functionaries for the redressal
of genuine grievances of common people. Even after four decades of independence the
administration of the country has yet to shed its red-tapism, inefficiency and delaying
tactics. The village representations to the District Collector about the tiger-menace fall flat on
deaf ears.
Minor Characters in the Novel: Let us now turn our attention to the minor characters in the
novel. Even though their role may be limited within the scheme of things yet Narayan has
made them come alive.
Rita: Rita also a minor character in the novel is the head of the trapeze team in her husband's
Grand Malgudi Circus. She is very skillful in doing the trapeze act. But at home, she is a
nagging wife. She often indulges in altercations with her husband and teases him for
treating the animals better than his family. The following piece serves as sample:
"She-muttered, 'He has lost all sense of humor ... only animals seem to befit for his company.
He told himself, 'Women are impossible worse than twenty untamed jungle creatures on
one's hand at a time.'
If we judge merely by these conversations, we are likely to conclude that Rita and her
husband do not love each other. At a deeper level, Rita is a devoted wife who feels uneasy
about her husband's
safety whenever he is out with the tiger. Finally .when her husband dies, she commits
suicide. Thus her death reveals her intense love for her husband.
Madan: Madan is a typical representation of his tribe of greedy, unscrupulous, pragmatic
film producers. Having been impressed by the tiger's performance in the circus feat, Madan
the film producer, entertains the idea of making a film on the tiger and a giant. He behaves
obsequiously till he gets the permission from the Captain to use the tiger in his film. Having
bought the Captain with his money, he dictates to the Captain. He does not bother about the
dignity of the tiger nor does he hesitate to ask the Captain to use the electric shock on the
tiger, to make him perform the act of standing on his hind legs. His unscrupulousness is
responsible for the untoward situation in which the Captain gets killed.

Q. Analyze the major characters in the novel?

Ans. A novel's success lies in part in the extent to which the writer has been able to make
his/ her characters come alive. Let us now discuss some of major characters in A Tiger for
Malgudi.
Raja, The Tiger The title of the novel, as you know, refers to the tiger. The narrator of the
story is the tiger; and the novel is based on the story of the tiger's life. So we can say that
Raja, the tiger is the, protagonist of the novel. If you have read the novel carefully, you must
have noticed that there are four - distinct stages in the life of Raja. Let us analyze the growth
of Raja's character through a discussion of these four stages:
Stage 1: During this period, Raja has a fear of none, strikes terror in others, and considers
him-self “the lord of the jungle”. He always expects the other animals to show differences to
him and to withdraw from his path. He uses the earliest opportunity to punish the
recalcitrant. Thus, the youthful vigor, pride, and carefree behavior of Raja are described in
the first stage of his life.
Stage 2: Youthful Raja comes across a tigress one day; he fiercely fights with her first, loves
her later and begets a litter of four cubs. Raja lives happily with his family making a cave his
home till the day the tigress and the cubs are shot dead by human being. After losing his
family, Raja strays into human habitation and carries out regular raids for cattle till the day
he is captured by the Captain, the proprietor of the Grand Malgudi, Circus. The intelligent
tiger learns the tricks of the circus and becomes its main attraction. The tiger, thus, wins the
admiration of the Captain.
Later, Madan, a film producer plans to make a film on Raja and the Captain agrees to lend
the tiger for the shooting of the film. On the film set when the pain inflicted by the electric
metal gadget becomes unbearable, the loyal tiger warns the captain to keep himself away
from his. But, as the greedy Captain persists in subduing the tiger with the dreadful weapon
to perform the act of standing on his hind legs, the tiger kills him in an act of defence, while
trying to knock the metal out of his hand.
Thus the major events in the life of the tiger during Stage-2 are: the happiness of family life,
the pangs of separation from his family, the trials and travails of day-to- day existence for
making a living, etc. This phase also highlights the intelligence, the dignity, and the loyalty
of Raja.
Stage-3: It is during this period that the spiritual transformation of Raja Takes place:
Unaware of the spiritual powers of the Yogi, the ferocious tiger tires to resist his influence
but later surrenders himself completely and follows him like a disciple. The Yogi, in his turn,
does not allow the people to call the tiger "a brute", trats him as an equal and takes him out
of Malgudi. The Yogi (or the Master, as Raja calls him and the disciple (Raja) make the forest
at the foot of Memoi ranee their home.
Having recognized a kindred soul in Raja, the Master discusses difficult concepts like God,
Karmka, etc. with him and gives discourses on the Bhagavad Gita. The presence of the
Master and the discourses on philosophical matters transform the tiger slowly. The
transformation is described by Narayan convincingly:
"Nowadays the keenness of my hunger was all gone, and I slipped away into the jungle, not
too often, only when I felt I could not stand hunger anymore"
Further, "I tried to attain some kind of purification by reducing the frequency of seeking
food. Nor did I kill ruthlessly as I used to in my jungle days....
I suffered hunger for consecutive days before seeking food again, but felt nobler for it. I felt I
had attained merit through penance, making myself worthy of my Master's grace."
Thus the main events in the life of the tiger during stage-3 are: to be in the company of a
noble person; to listen to philosophical discourses; and to meditate on supramundane
matters. This phase also highlights the discipline, the receptiveness, and the concentration of
Raja.

The Captain: The Captain hails from Abu Lane in Malgudi town. By dint of hard work he
rises to the ownership of the Grand Malgudi Circus. The Captain is diligent, persevering
and innovative. We is meticulous in attending to the needs of every animal and is efficient in
managing the circus troupe consisting of hundreds of men, women, and animals. Though he
is strict during the training period, he has deep concern for his animals and regulates the
hours of work and rest for them.
The captain has special consideration for Raja as the latter is the main attraction of the
Grand Malgudi Circus. The Captain's consideration for the tiger's dignity is so great that he
first refuses to pull out-Raja's claws or to use the electric shock to subdue Raja while the film
shooting is on. But, overpowered by greed for money, the Captain finally uses the electric
weapon on the tiger and gets killed by the tiger. It is not that the Captain is entirely devoid
of feelings but his feelings are subordinated to his business interests. To recapitulate: the
Captain is diligent and innovative. He is meticulous in handling his circus troupe. He has
special consideration for the dignity of Raja. His greed for money finally brings him death.
The Master: The Master is another fascinating character in this novel. In his early life, the
Master, like any ordinary man, studies in a college, gets a job, marries, begets children,
prospers, and The Master The Master is another fascinating character in this novel. In his
early life, the Master; like any ordinary man, studies in a college, gets a job, marries, begets
children, prospers, and becomes respectable. But, one day, like the Buddha, he leaves A
Tiger for Malgudi everything behind, and renounces the world because of 'an inner
compulsion'. He attains the spiritual level of a Sanyasi. He attains serenity and wisdom
through Yoga and meditation. The Master recognizes a kindred soul in Raja, the tiger and
helps the latter to transform himself-from the subhuman level to the supramundane level.
Further, the Master, despite his attainments, does not allow people to take "dust from his
feet". He declares:
"You must prostrate only before God. You should seek only God's darshan the ... same god
resides within all of us."
The Master's words are always full of wisdom. Before handing over Raja to the zoo
authorities, he tells him: "No relationship, human or other, or association of any kind could
last forever. Separation is the law of life right from the mother's womb. One has to accept it
if one has to live in God's plans."