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Postcolonial Disconsolation, and After

Despite the somewhat unrealistic scope of its title, A History of the Indian Novel in English comprises an exemplary survey of works, authors, periods, and literary forms relevant to the topic. In its critical scope, the collection makes a significant contribution to the field, providing representation of emerging scholarship at the overlap of South-Asian literature, postcolonial and novel studies. Taken together, the essays are oriented by Ulka Anjaria’s wide-ranging knowledge of the field and incisive editorial insight. A substantial introductory essay establishes Anjaria’s theoretical lead, which convincingly informs the volume’s choice of texts and critics. While suggestive comparative possibilities are produced between chapters, Anjaria’s editorial direction is evident, above all, in the organization of this extensive collection of twenty-five entries, which stretches to both confirm and complicate an established literary history of the Indian novel in English. Inducting the reader into a familiar chronology of the Anglophonic novel, the Introduction provides a useful historical framework for both beginners and specialists in the field. We might begin by reviewing a recognizable, if somewhat monolithic “history of the Indian novel in English,” which goes something like this. Originating in colonial modernity, the form was consolidated in the nineteen-twenties and thirties through the experimental efforts of the Leninist-oriented All-India Progressive Writers Association. Active in other Indian languages such as Urdu and Kannada, or, indeed, in the PWA’s attempt to standardize Hindi into a popular literary language, canonical English authors drew upon and also interrogated narratives of modernization associated with a pan-national freedom movement. Subsequently, the decades after independence would witness the Anglophonic novel’s involvement in a contested, if fundamentally unquestioned “Nehruvian” modernity. In this phase, the novel in English is marked by the remembered depredations of Partition, but also by the promissory sense of a singular national modernity (characterized by a constitutional consensus on secularism, a pluralistic public culture, and a strong socialist state). While participating within fiercely polarized public contests over the meaning of the Gandhian-Nehruvian legacy, the mid-century novel in English advances a competing claim—as literature, especially through contending modes of literary realism—upon an authentic national reality. After this mid-century juncture, with the watershed publication