Arun Joshi is quite an exceptional novelist who stands apart from the rest of the novelists, who has taken up the themes of human predicament in almost all his novels. The overall and outstanding quest in all his novels is for a concrete direction and meaning in one’s life. Joshi has been influenced by existential thinkers like Camus, Sartre and this can be observed in his novels. Existentialism is a modern philosophic movement that deals with ‘man’s’ disillusionment and despair which originated in the philosophical and literary writings of Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Joshi has elaborately handled the struggles of a sensitive soul inching its way facing formidable odds within him and within the social situations around, towards self realization.
According to Lionel Trilling, novel is a perpetual quest for reality and one of the most effective agents of our imagination. The Indian novel in English has now become an integral part of Indian English. In between 1920 and 1950’s the themes in Indian English Novels were mostly depicted on national movements for political independence. After Independence most of the Indian English Novelists shifted their focus from nationalistic zeal to find new themes and portray them. They began to delineate from their works and set about for the individual’s quest for the ‘self’.
One such significant contemporary Indian English novelist is Arun Joshi. Arun Joshi has paved the way to explore and implement new themes in his novels. He takes the readers to unknown and unexplored regions through his novels. He has focused mostly on the deeper layers of man’s being. His novels explore more on the protagonist’s suffering from the same disease, dilemma, discontent and frustrations. ...
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Major study and analysis of ‘Interpreter of Maladies’. Read first 4 short stories. The first four stories are ‘A Temporary Matter’ ,’When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine’ ,’Interpreter of Maladies’ ,’A Real Durwan’. The first story is about a couple who during temporary power cut in their house exchange secrets. The couple is trying to cope up with each other since the death of their first newly born child. The female protagonist is very upset with this incident and the worst part is after such tragedy she has lost her ability to conceive. In the end Shukumar shares the biggest secret when he gets to know that Shobha is planning to leave him. The next story is about a man living miles ap...
An existentialist believes an individual’s existence is absurd unless he adds meaning to it through his own actions. In the novels The Stranger and The Metamorphosis, the authors, Albert Camus and Franz Kafka, tell their stories from different perspectives. Using points of view, the authors show their characters’, Mersault and Gregor, alienation to convey the existential concept of authenticity. One becomes authentic when he or she lives their life according to how they define themselves.
Indian English writers have always been responsive to the changes in material reality and theoretical perspectives that have influenced and governed its study from the very beginning. At the earlier stage the fictional works of Mulk Raj Anand, R.K.Narayan and Raja Rao were mainly concerned with the down-trodden of the society, the middle class life and the expression of traditional cultural ethos of India. The writings of Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Anita Desai, Kavita Dasvani, M.G. Vassanjee, V.S.Naipaul and Hari Kunjru, to name a few, provide an insight of the problems faced by the dislocated people in their adopted homes in a way that questions the traditional understanding of the concepts like home, nation, native and alien. Contemporary writers hailing from the previously colonized nations, particularly India, explore the forms of life that existed during the British rule and expose the subtle strategies employed to make the colonized
As in representations of the other British colonies, India was used by colonial novelists as a tool of displacement of the individual and re-affirmation of the metropolitan whole. There are three methods by which this effect is achieved. The first method displays an unqualified reliance on a culture too remote to be approached except physically: a hero or protagonist in a pre-mutiny novel is at liberty to escape to India at a moment of crisis, rearrange his life to his advantage and return to a happy ending and the establishment of a newly defined metropolitan life. Dobbin of Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1848) and Peter Jenkins of Gaskell's Cranford (1853) exemplify this well. Even the child Bitherstone of Dickens' Dombey and Son (1848) regards India as his salvation.
Rabindranath Tagore , although primarily a poet, had written many short stories that are simple yet powerful in delivering the philosophy that Tagore himself holds firm to. Tagore’s short stories usually begins suddenly, and develops around some trivial and ordinary incident or situation that ends with a twist when the readers’ interest about the story is almost heightened, or simply ends, as it should end, leaving readers provoked. The way Tagore presents life as vignettes and not in its totality or as a whole is enough to show the humanity in the characters. Tagore believes in humanity and champions this beyond race, colour, caste or gender in his short stories. In this essay, three of his short stories will be used to dissect how Tagore champions humanity beyond race, colour, caste or gender and the short stories are Kabuliwala, The Postmaster and Ruined Nest.
Having focused on E.M Forster’s ‘A Passage to India’ and Paul Scott’s ‘The Jewel in the Crown’ it is evident that both novels share the central theme of contrasting views of Indian culture to reflect society from the time periods of which their novels are set. The form of ‘A Passage to India’ is a retrospective diary account dictated by an omniscient third person narrator who has multiple viewpoints which endeavours into the psychological mind set of the characters.
Iyengar, K R Srinivas. Indian Writing in English. Sterling Publishers Private Ltd. New Delhi: 1987.
There are people bustling, merchants selling, Anglo-Indians watching, and birds flying overhead. How many perspectives are there in this one snippet of life? They are uncountable, and that is the reality. Modernist writers strive to emulate this type of reality into their own work as well. In such novels, there is a tendency to lack a chronological or even logical narrative and there are also frequent breaks in narratives where the perspectives jump from one to another without warning. Because there are many points of view and not all of them are explained, therefore, modernist novels often tend to have narrative perspectives that suddenly shift or cause confusion. This is because modernism has always been an experimental form of literature that lacks a traditional narrative or a set, rigid structure. Therefore, E. M. Forster, author of A Passage to India, uses such techniques to portray the true nature of reality. The conflict between Adela, a young British girl, and Aziz, an Indian doctor, at the Marabar Caves is one that implements multiple modernist ideals and is placed in British-India. In this novel, Forster shows the relations and tension between the British and the Indians through a series of events that were all caused by the confusing effects of modernism. E.M. Forster implements such literary techniques to express the importance or insignificance of a situation and to emphasize an impression of realism and enigma in Chandrapore, India, in which Forster’s novel, A Passage to India, takes place.
Dr. M.K.Bhatnagar, Head, Department of English, M.D. University, Rohtak in his article, ”Comparative English Literature-Limits and Prospects” says “Comparative study of Literature involves in lumping together of two or more tests which are perceived by the critic, to have a significant, similar or dissimilar theme or style. It also gives ways to assume a number of dual awareness studies inter-genre or intra-genre, inter-cultural or intra cultural, inter authorial or intra-authorial or a specific permutation and combination of these” (1). Many Indian writers have tried their hands in writing autobiographies. This paper distinguishes the similarities and the dissimilarities established in Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s ‘My Search for Truth’ and
And once the mediums are pried apart and banished to separate corners, a novel like A Passage to India stands alone and can be admired for its complex study of people who interact in an unfamiliar landscape, a landscape that ignores humans entirely. This text is not about good breeding, dowries, or happy endings. With its multiple perspectives, fragile personal connections, and symbolic caves that house an echo of nothingness not every character can hear, A Passage to India is Forster's own quiet rendition of Modernism. He does not try, as do Woolf, Joyce, and Eliot, to break free from standard English fictive forms. Instead, Forster's text contains an innovative, urgent assertion that the core of things like love, friendship, and self-knowledge are perpetually capable of collapsing, yet are valuable in spite of their fragility. His work demonstrates the individual's need to connec...
Arun Joshi one of the foremost novelists in India published his first novel in the year 1971. The Foreigner (1971) is the story of a young man, Surinder Oberoi who is depressed and almost alienated, a man who sees himself as a stranger wherever he lives or goes to Kenya where he is born, in England where he is a student and in India where he finally resolves. The strange case of Billy Biswas (1971) is a novel about she struggles of a woman who is through the emotional shock of a divorce plus a cruel divorce settlement imposed on her.
The protagonist in this novel is very simple man who comes to the city with lots of hope to get a good and respected job. Contrary to his expectations, in reality he has to face number of hardships to survive in the city .He is disillusioned in this course of job search. Gradually all his ideals, morals and enthusiasm wane and he started a life full of compromises. Ratan Rathore is a young man whose soul has two distinct aspects- the higher self and the lower self. All through the course of novel, his soul is torn by these conflicting pulls of lower and higher self, between idealism and realism. In fact he is the child of double inheritance. He has taken the patriotic and idealistic values from his father and worldly wisdom from his mother. H...
Writing by women has given a new dimension to the Indian literature. In the 20th century, women’s writing has been considered a powerful medium of modernism and feminist statements. The last two decades have witnessed phenomenal success in feminist writings of Indian English literature. Women writers comprise a sizeable segment of Indo-English writers. They present the age-old problems of Indian womanhood. As Indo-English literature has absorbed the new trends from the western literature, its theoretical foundation ranges between Greco-Roman theories of literature and Marxist, existentialist, psycho-analytic and other avant-garde movements in the world literature. The English language
The measured dialogue between Reader and Editor serves as the framework through which Gandhi seeks to discredit accepted terms of civilization and denounce the English. These principle characters amply assist in the development o...
This total idea of challenging and creating a new identity may seem quite a utopian concept but it is not so impossible. The present paper will illustrate the writings of Mridula Garg and Arundhati Roy. The characters in their work are not extraordinary and utopian but common people like us whom we can come across in our day today life. Here for the purpose of analysis Garg’s three short stories have been chosen. They are: Hari Bindi, Sath Saal Ki Aurat and Wo Dusri.