Nagaratna Parande
Associate Professor, Dept of English, Rani Channamma University, Belagavi, Karnataka, India
Shri. Dattu K. Waghmode
Research Scholar, Dept of English, Rani Channamma University, Belagavi, Karnataka, India
Abstract: Bhabani Bhattacharya is one of the most well-known Indian English novelists of the older generation. His novels reflect his humanistic outlook on life. His novels have a genuine perspective to human circumstances. The purpose of this paper is to examine the social realism in the novels of Bhabani Bhattacharya.
The first five of Bhabani Bhattacharya's six novels are set against the Indian social scene in the context of world-shaking historical events, while the sixth is set both in India and on America's Hawaii Island. Bhattacharya gives a realistic portrait of Indian life as a result of his extensive involvement in life as a creative artist and critic. He condemns the antisocial and anti-democratic forces in democratic India for their brutal and callous activities.
His outlook on life is highly optimistic. As a novelist, he is deeply worried by the situation of poor peasants and destitute people, landless labourers, and other outcastes of the society who suffer much just because they are powerless and their fate is locked in the hands of the wealthy and powerful. He draws our attention to the poor people's plight and suffering, as well as the rich and affluent class’ cruel and uncaring attitude towards the defenseless and unfortunate poor peasants' possibilities for a happy life.
His themes are all about contemporary life and happenings in India, and he writes about the issues, trials, and sufferings that Indians confront with utmost realism. His fundamental goal is, without a doubt, to show the Indian social, economic, and political situation via the lens of symbolic reality.
Key Words: Realism, Contemporary, Plight, Democratic.
Introduction:
Bhabani Bhattacharya is known as one of the early English novelists in India who attempted to modify the direction of fiction writing with his unique subject matters that are different from the traditional themes. Bhabani Bhattacharya, instead, targeted on different problems like rural-urban divide, east-west divide and problems associated with the life of the common people.
Development of Social Realism in Bhattacharya’s Novels:
Bhabani Bhattacharya can be taken into consideration as a realist and as even the one who combines each realism and romanticism in his writings. It is proudly said about him that the due grade of strain that Bhattacharya’s fictional writings have has its very own authenticity, its very own credibility from the social or sociological factor. Bhattacharya isn't a pessimist. Despite all evils and corruptions, India appears to be, for Bhattacharya, a land of promise and achievement. He is of the view that the novels ought to have a social cause and he presents all images of poverty and squalor, superstition and dogma, materialism and spiritualism in his novels. (Sharma 17) Gandhi’s humanism, his care for the oppressed and struggling phase of humanity, his dedication to reality and peacefulness, his important competition to superstitions and dogmas, his position for the actual sufferings of the human gets projected in the fictional writings of Bhabani Bhattacharya..
Bhabani Bhattacharya could be a writer with an extremely developed social awareness. His novels gift high idealism, social purpose and affirmative vision of life. With the exception of Mulk Raj Anand, he is the sole Indian novelist writing in English who has created a conscious effort to form it artistically beautiful. The novel He Who Rides a Tiger highlights the issues of the poor in eradicating superstitions, blind beliefs, taboo and different gruesome aspects of rural society. Bhattacharya has written novels like So Many Hungers! (1947), Music for Mohini (1952), He Who Rides a Tiger (1954), A Goddess Named Gold (1960) Shadow from Ladakh (1966) and A Dream in Hawaii (1978). These novels present a real image of the Republic of India and its citizens trembling with life and substance. He refers to numerous customs, conventions, superstitions and oddities present within the Indian society while not directly commenting on their merits. He has won the Sahitya Academy Award in 1967 for his novel Shadow from Ladakh. Being a writer with a social purpose, he has addressed the social, economic and political changes in India. His themes typically revolve on all sides of poverty, hunger, traditionalism, freedom and industrialization. All the writing for him has a social purpose. In normal sense, tradition could be a continuous method of handling down from generation to generation, conventions, beliefs, habits and even superstitions through oral and written practice. Within the literary context, tradition becomes a body of customs, beliefs, skills or sayings, furnished down from generation to generation. Society, that is the basic to tradition, is dynamic and it undergoes an alteration in the course of time. As a result, tradition as well gets modified. The spirit of reform and revolt provides a new manner to modernity. The Indian English novel has been a vivid portrayal of various attitudes which pleaded for the balance of tradition and novelty. Such a mix of tradition and modernity is additionally seen in the novels of Raja Rao (Kanthapura and The Serpent and the Rope). Bhabani Bhattacharya could be a representative author of the modern period. He has treated the theme of tradition and modernity very effectively in his novels. He also analyses the impact of each tradition and modernity on human society in a wider perspective. In He Who Rides a Tiger Bhattacharya presents the mixing of the normal and the modern values through the story of Kalo and his girl Lekha. He employs a lie to expose the reality regarding caste and religion as they are seen in the society. He Who Rides a Tiger is predicated on an ancient saying – ‘He who rides a tiger cannot dismount’. This novel is a lot involved with the history of a person named Kalo and also the final liberation of spirit that he achieves. The novel brings home the truth that a person who rebels against the society cannot change himself. Then he should reconcile to it. Thus, modernity becomes all the more necessary in the current times. Modernity has a vast, giant scope; each facet of human civilization falls under its range. Our field of thought and action has swollen with the advancement of recent knowledge base than the scope of modernity. The protagonist of the novel, Kalo, could be a dark-skinned smith who lives in a village. He’s hard-working, formidable and competent in his trade. The most important theme of the novel is regarding his sufferings that make in him a form of thirst for revenge on the society. The social theme is developed in terms of irony so as to dramatize the immoralities and ethical code of the caste system. Kalo’s stunning daughter, Chandra Lekha seems to be pleasantly intelligent. Kalo has firm confidence in the ancient cultural values. The caste hierarchy is deeply frozen in his spirit. He makes up his injustice by touching back to those who are the reason behind his sufferings. Through the life history of Kalo, Bhattacharya expresses his conviction in a very positive and brighter outlook of life. Kalo could be a low-caste blacksmith. He upsets the social order by mingling himself with Brahminhood and rising to the top. He doesn't undermine the society. He uses its power by accepting its rules and by totally understanding its purpose.
The novel is an epitome of a man against society. It relates how Kalo masquerades himself to inflict his vengeance at the society. However, ultimately, he realizes the futility of his disguise. He additionally desires to rehabilitate himself and plenty of other lives. The malevolent society nevertheless rejects his sincere and humble efforts. He who Rides a Tiger gathers its intention in opposition to orthodoxy and superstition of the human beings. It has for its 3-dimensional view – the political, financial and social background. As the denunciation of the caste-based society is one of the functions of the novelist, he alludes to it in numerous times into the fiction. The system is so properly established. Chandra Lekha’s attending school meets with condemnation each from the high caste and the low caste society of the village Jharna. Her role is consistent and her attitudes and moves display a truthful degree of consistency. In spite of her education and refinement she keeps authentic simplicity and contentment with her a lot. When father and daughter start ‘riding the tiger’, it's the daughter who suggests terrific soreness and much less inclination for the adventure.
Bhattacharya’s subject matters revolve through day today life incidents and matters. The characters of Bhattacharya stand at the cross-sections of the society. He has an intense eye for circumstances and characters. He takes up numerous elements and subject matters. The novelist has attempted his exceptional art to reveal that the people of working class now no longer bend before people for his or her poverty and difficulty. The novel has depicted sure dramatic modifications which cope with the lifestyles of an individual. It belongs to an oppressed and depressed phase of the society. It is a society wherein honour and ethical values be triumphant over frivolous and hypocritical emotions. It brings approximately the final triumph over evil and reality over falsehood. The novel correctly files the significance of conventional in addition to contemporary values with the behavioural elegance of diverse characters.
Bhattacharya is described as belonging to the social realism school of Indo-Anglian literature. His writings exhibit the influence of Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi. Unlike other social realists like Premchand, Bhattacharya adopted a pedagogical approach to making novels out of ideas, utilizing satire and making his ideas more tangible through situational examples.
In the range of South Indian writers who seem to dominate the scene of 'Gandhian Fiction' Bhabani Bhtatacharya deserves to be mentioned for his first novel So Many Hungers (1947). Published few months after Independence and set in a context of the 1942-43 Bengal famine and Quit India Movement, this complicated and didactic novel takes its characters through a rigorously Gandhian education. It is at one level, the story of Kajoli, a village girl who righteously rejects the prostitution forced on her by the destitution of her family, to sell newspapers and so also to assume the persona of the Gandhian 'New Woman.' At another level, it deals with the spiritual and political growing up of Rahoul, a Cambridge educated astrophysicist who simultaneously discovers the limits of intellectualism and Western civilization and renounces both in favour of nationalism and village-based economy. Much of his instruction comes by way of his grandfather, Devata, a saintly Gandhian figure with a penchant for the hunger strike, who is responsible for bringing satyagraha to the village of Baruni, where he lives like one of the peasants. It is estimated that three million people died as a result of the Bengal famine of 1943, an event that was characterized by the British Empire as the result of Malthusian population fluxes, local hoarding, and the incompetence of Indian officials, unready for autonomy. In past decades, economic historians have countered that the famine was caused by the “Denial Policy” which confiscated crops and boats in anticipation of a Japanese invasion, by policies that prohibited the distribution of grain from outside the state, and by a failure to curb inflation. The colonial state refused to acknowledge food shortages and mass starvation until late in 1943 and forcibly dislocated famine victims arriving in Calcutta from the provinces in search of food back to destitute rural locations.
Bhabani Bhattacharya was encouraged by his friend Francis Yeats-Brown and by Rabindranath Tagore to use English to reach an elite Bengali, Indian, and international audience. Working as a journalist in Calcutta in the early 1940s, he was interested in the institutions that were complicit and responsible for the famine, the impact on families, the role of sexual violence, the vulnerability of children, and the role of the state in displacing the victims. In translating the famine to an Anglophone readership, Bhattacharya imagined a more inclusive sense of community than was the case in government rhetoric using realist and non-realist representations. His work provides an epistemological alternative to imperial narratives about the famine that aligns with the concept of the minor as a cultural counter-discourse. in Bhattacharya’s first novel, So Many Hungers! (1947), the author lays emphasis on the political policies that produced the famine in contrast to the imperial emphasis on natural disaster and war. As such, Bhattacharya counters bureaucratic representations of a passive, humble population accustomed to poverty by featuring his characters with a realist aesthetic. Within this, he focalizes multiple registers of language including what Ashis Nandy (2015: 598) refers to as the mnemonic (silence, screams, ellipsis) to create a deterritorialized sense of language at odds with the language of the imperial bureaucracy. In He Who Rides a Tiger, Bhattacharya (1954) links the Bengal famine and caste, exploring the system of signification that transformed people of low caste into non-persons vulnerable to death by starvation in an expression of biopower. He shifts the protagonist from an experience of caste as marked on the body to a performative notion of caste identity and finally to an engagement in anti-imperial nationalism. In the novel, resistance to exploitative systems of signification is found not only in anti-imperial nationalism led by elite but also in craft, empathy, and storytelling. Amid widespread shirking of responsibility by authorities, Bhattacharya invests the reader with a sense of engagement with famine victims, and responsibility for community rehabilitation.
Bhabani Bhattracharya is a rare genius in the firmament of Indian English fiction of post Independent India. As a novelist, what Bhattacharya has earned in the realms of Indian English fiction is really enduring. Besides, a novelist he was a good translator, prose writer, press attaché, visiting professor and a short story writer etc.- a multifaceted personality. Bhattacharya has attained a distinct place as a short story writer. Bhattacharya shows himself as an all-round artist touching upon all aspects of life right from rope dancing to the heights of Hindu philosophy. Like the other Indian English short story writers, Bhattacharya has also shown equal brilliance with Indian characters and Indian atmosphere. His short stories are thoroughly Indian with a spicy language. Bhattacharya’s anthology of short stories entitled,” Steel Hawk and other Stories” (1968) contains a delightful collection of fifteen short stories, all written with subtlety and skill. They are the stories of psychological interest and social reality. They reveal considerable variety in theme and the mood varying from light-hearted comedy to realities, from flight of imagination to keen observation of realities, from a study of the mind of animals to an exploration of depths of human soul. His stories reflect the situation in the post independent India.
Conclusion:
Bhattacharya also refers pointedly to the customs and ideas of the old people. He gives a fine summing up of life, “Life is a great wheel! It spins slowly in the stream of time, a finger’s width in a hundred years! Things on top get lost to the view with the wheels turning but, as time flows on and they rise again!” The innocence of the child and the ticklish questions it poses are also neatly sketched. Babla questions what happens if birds attack the flying wonder. Then the mother replies,” Birds have no malice, darling. They have clean thoughts”. Thus, reaction and inspiration of the flying characters to the “flying wonder” are described here.
Works cited:
- Gupta, Monika (2002), The Novels of Bhabani Bhattacharya, Atlantic Publishers and Distributors
- Reddy, Poli (2015), Bhabani Bhattacharya and Societal Concerns, Manglam Publications
- Singh, Kh. Kunjo (2002), The Fiction of Bhabani Bhattacharya, Atlantic Publishers & Distributors
- Sharma, Kaushal Kishore (1979), Bhabani Bhattacharya, His Vision and Themes (1 ed.), New Delhi, India: Abhinav Publications
- Swigh, Jitendra Prasad (2012) The Novels of Bhabani Battacharya: A Historical and Sociological Study, Sarup Book Publishers
(The paper was received on June 12th, 2022. It was sent for blind peer review on 15th June and after review it was received back from the reviewer/s on 30th June 2022.)
