The emergence of the novel in India and competing modes of realism

During the second half of the nineteenth century, people across India began to write books they called “novels,” sometimes using traditional terms for ‘story’ or ‘prose narrative’ in their respective language, sometimes simply using the English term “novel.” Only recently critics have acknowledged that this ‘emergence of the novel’ in India was not simply the importation of a Western form or a borrowed genre, but rather a set of complex sociocultural processes that varied significantly from one linguistic region and literary tradition to another. This chapter examines the question of realism in the early novels written in Indian languages, i.e., the question of how precisely the earliest Indian novels related to the societies from which they originated.