Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Literary Pasts, Presents, and Futures
- 1 Beginnings: Rajmohan's Wife and the Novel in India
- 2 The Epistemic Work of Literary Realism: Two Novels from Colonial India
- 3 “Because Novels Are True, and Histories Are False”: Indian Women Writing Fiction in English, 1860–1918
- 4 When the Pen Was a Sword: The Radical Career of the Progressive Novel in India
- 5 The Road Less Traveled: Modernity and Gandhianism in the Indian English Novel
- 6 The Modernist Novel in India: Paradigms and Practices
- 7 “Handcuffed to History”: Partition and the Indian Novel in English
- 8 Women, Reform, and Nationalism in Three Novels of Muslim Life
- 9 Found in Translation: Self, Caste, and Other in Three Modern Texts
- 10 Emergency Fictions
- 11 Cosmopolitanism and the Sonic Imaginary in Salman Rushdie
- 12 Postcolonial Realism in the Novels of Rohinton Mistry
- 13 Far from the Nation, Closer to Home: Privacy, Domesticity, and Regionalism in Indian English Fiction
- 14 Ecologies of Intimacy: Gender, Sexuality, and Environment in Indian Fiction
- 15 Some Uses of History: Historiography, Politics, and the Indian Novel
- 16 Virtue, Virtuosity, and the Virtual: Experiments in the Contemporary Indian English Novel
- 17 Of Dystopias and Deliriums: The Millennial Novel in India
- 18 “Which Colony? Which Block?”: Violence, (Post-)Colonial Urban Planning, and the Indian Novel
- 19 Post-Humanitarianism and the Indian Novel in English
- 20 Chetan Bhagat: Remaking the Novel in India
- 21 “New India/n Woman”: Agency and Identity in Post-Millennial Chick Lit
- 22 The Politics and Art of Indian English Fantasy Fiction
- 23 The Indian Graphic Novel
- 24 “Coming to a Multiplex Near You”: Indian Fiction in English and New Bollywood Cinema
- 25 Caste, Complicity, and the Contemporary
- Works Cited
- Index
16 - Virtue, Virtuosity, and the Virtual: Experiments in the Contemporary Indian English Novel
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Literary Pasts, Presents, and Futures
- 1 Beginnings: Rajmohan's Wife and the Novel in India
- 2 The Epistemic Work of Literary Realism: Two Novels from Colonial India
- 3 “Because Novels Are True, and Histories Are False”: Indian Women Writing Fiction in English, 1860–1918
- 4 When the Pen Was a Sword: The Radical Career of the Progressive Novel in India
- 5 The Road Less Traveled: Modernity and Gandhianism in the Indian English Novel
- 6 The Modernist Novel in India: Paradigms and Practices
- 7 “Handcuffed to History”: Partition and the Indian Novel in English
- 8 Women, Reform, and Nationalism in Three Novels of Muslim Life
- 9 Found in Translation: Self, Caste, and Other in Three Modern Texts
- 10 Emergency Fictions
- 11 Cosmopolitanism and the Sonic Imaginary in Salman Rushdie
- 12 Postcolonial Realism in the Novels of Rohinton Mistry
- 13 Far from the Nation, Closer to Home: Privacy, Domesticity, and Regionalism in Indian English Fiction
- 14 Ecologies of Intimacy: Gender, Sexuality, and Environment in Indian Fiction
- 15 Some Uses of History: Historiography, Politics, and the Indian Novel
- 16 Virtue, Virtuosity, and the Virtual: Experiments in the Contemporary Indian English Novel
- 17 Of Dystopias and Deliriums: The Millennial Novel in India
- 18 “Which Colony? Which Block?”: Violence, (Post-)Colonial Urban Planning, and the Indian Novel
- 19 Post-Humanitarianism and the Indian Novel in English
- 20 Chetan Bhagat: Remaking the Novel in India
- 21 “New India/n Woman”: Agency and Identity in Post-Millennial Chick Lit
- 22 The Politics and Art of Indian English Fantasy Fiction
- 23 The Indian Graphic Novel
- 24 “Coming to a Multiplex Near You”: Indian Fiction in English and New Bollywood Cinema
- 25 Caste, Complicity, and the Contemporary
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
All fiction, arguably, is thought experiment. Fiction, that is, may be held to perform certain crucial tasks that have conventionally been assigned to the domain of the sciences (see Mach 1897 on the Gendankenexperimente). By offering us characters, histories, and geographies that, by definition, do not exist in – or alter in subtle and significant ways – the observable scenarios around us, fictional texts invite us to imaginatively theorize crises or problems in the world so that we “re-cognize” them anew.
A central raison d'être of fiction, in short, is that it is an experiment with the conventions and constructs of truth-telling. Genres such as the novel typically require us to consider counterfactual universes and present us with hypotheses that seek to “explain” the phenomena around us. It is in this sense that fictions have trained us in theory down the ages. For example, when the Indian epic Ramayana tells us that the three distinctive stripes on the back of the Indian palm squirrel (species Funambulus palmarum) owe their origin to the grateful Rama stroking the back of this creature in a gesture of gratitude because squirrels helped him build a bridge between India and Sri Lanka, it not only offers us an explanation of these markings but also affords us glimpses into a possible ecological worldview that is culturally grounded. Kipling might be said to make a similar move when he asks how the leopard got his spots. These may be prototype “just so” stories, but in their search for causal explanations, they exemplify attempts at theory-building of a novel sort. The present chapter argues that the sophisticated experiments with storytelling conducted by Indian English novelists in the past three decades (namely, the 1980s to the present) extend further a long and distinguished lineage of “experiments with truth” – to use a phrase that Mahatma Gandhi made famous. They seem, however, to possess a generic advantage over Gandhi's autobiographical methods in that they are out-and-out fictions. Thus, their play with history – self-reflexively and artfully using the colonizers' own tongue to construct alternative accounts of recent colonial and postcolonial history – possesses a sort of “wicked freedom” that was perhaps not available to Gandhi. How that freedom is used to meet certain authorial ends will be a central question addressed in this chapter.
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- A History of the Indian Novel in English , pp. 251 - 266Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015
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