Reframing the Question of Realism in Contemporary India
Varieties of Realism: Hearing, Seeing, Connecting
Aurora Lecture Winter 2025 by Prof. Francesca Orsini, FBA
January 24th, 2025
Discussant Comments
G.S. Sahota
The “varieties of realism” presented in this paper provoke the question as to whether there is an adequate diversity of theoretical takes on the question of realism writ so large. The fact that Professor Orsini has developed the cultural logic and concept of realism from the rich terrain of a long century of experiments within the modern Hindi novel and short story means that we have an internally derived criterion for exploring the reach of these experiments and do not have to resort to models and standards of another distant cultural zone such as the modern West. We can thus avoid imposing external criteria for assessing the validity of Hindi articulations of realism, even if, say, Victorian literatures played a role as catalysts for fashioning these experiments. A whole variety of questions arise of their own accord in relation to Orsini’s exploration of the senses, forms, modalities, and affects that forge a realism that has purchase and even transformative effects on everyday experience and open horizons of futurity. I take some of these on in the reflections that follow.
In retracing Meenaskshi Mukherjee’s seminal and still very relevant work on Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India (1985), it is worth noting how a general historical movement is reflected in shifts of genre and expansion of secular horizons of possibility. This is noticeable in the cultural evolution from the tale to the everyday. That is, the tale, the fantastic scion of myth and legend and the traditional abode of the supernatural, gives way eventually to the everyday realm pregnant with new representational possibilities. Whereas the tale was the effective negation of quotidian existence, too mundane to have any literary value, the new short story and novel resuscitated all that which was denied representation. The turn to the everyday as a zone of experience integrated with history, with the here and now, necessitates in turn the dissolution of the traditional narrative conventions that prevented the grasp of the mundane in earlier times. Mukherjee’s appendices illustrate the shift and its potential. Mirza Muhammad Hadi Ruswa, for instance, writes in his preface to Zat-i Sharif (c. 1903): “I aim simply at the faithful portrayal of actual happenings and am not concerned with recording the conclusions to be drawn from them . . .” (Mukherjee, 188, my italics) This move marks a concerted departure from the fable with its “moral of the story” in the direction of the grey zone of ethical ambiguity and perhaps epistemic uncertainty, hallmarks of modern realism the world over. We see as well, in Ruswa’s comments in Umrao Jan Ada (1899), an orientation toward the immediacy of the everyday world: “We should not give ourselves unnecessary trouble by trying to base our novels upon the lives of persons about whom we cannot know anything in detail. In our own circle of friends and relations there are bound to be many whose experiences are truly strange and fascinating.” (Ibid.) The point here is clear: the real may be stranger than fiction, have more dimensions than legend, and raise more quandaries than the moral tale could ever possibly afford.
Like Orsini today, Mukherjee in her time noted that the entire question of realism had political repercussions far and wide. Realism produced new subjects in opposition to old ways. In her chapter on “Women in a New Genre,” Mukherjee captures a fundamental antagonism unfolding in literature and society all at once: “Creating real people in a recognizable historical setting – people who are not mere archetypes or representatives of a caste or a class or a social role (priest, landlord, mother-in-law, etc.) – necessitates an acceptance of subjective individualism and a specific awareness of history. The latter had never been a component of traditional narrative in India, and the former was not easy in a tradition-bound society, even though writers themselves had begun to be restive.” (69) This signifies that realism in the Indian context – and surely elsewhere as well – was the medium for the assertion of social presences – such as the Dalits whose predicaments are illuminated in Orsini’s comments – whose recognition has been deferred for too long, or effectively denied. The psychological reality of “the everyday violence of caste and neurosis of passing” (Orsini) that is internalized finds its outward expression in the mode of a claim to reality for such subjects. The claim to reality in this instance results in the production of a pervasive affect, which Fredric Jameson in The Antinomies of Realism (2013) considers to be one of the major impulses underlying this mode (the other, following Lukács, being the drive to narrate). The aesthetic force of the marginalized mode of existence attains an intensity that demands that others feel what she feels, not as an emotion already named, but as an affect that that hits reality like a hammer, giving it a more livable shape. Orsini captures in a profound way this role of affect in her invocation of synesthesia. Realism here is not about the transparency of the medium vis-à-vis reality, but rather its solidity as an expedient means for reconfiguring it. Whatever can perform that task has some purchase on the real and thus a claim to realism. By working in tandem with different historical moments, this notion of realism as telos does not bear any necessarily consistent form, but rather, as Brecht ventured against Lukács, should remain protean.
I have several queries to put forth for our conversation. For instance, with respect to the looming figure of Premchand and the role of his oeuvre in shaping an ongoing engagement with historical reality, should we not think about the imperatives of his moment – to produce a language that is consistent and cohesive with a range wide enough to encompass nationalist aspirations – and not judge him as producing artificially monoglossic works unwittingly? Did his single-register way with language not produce the challenge for later writers like Krishna Sobti, who worked against it to produce a heteroglossia that captures the granular details and striated social distinctions of tone, accent, dialect, and language in a multilingual roz marra ki zindagi? One generation may thus have produced the conditions of possibility for realism for the next. And when we look at Premchand’s entire oeuvre and not merely one short story or novel, do we not see diglossia at play, given that he is a writer of both Hindi and Urdu?
But a more compelling question must be posed in closing. This has to do with medium and realism. We see that the slow proliferation of the varieties of realism means that the question regarding its ultimate shape and form has not come to an end in contemporary India, and tremendous social stakes are involved in its evolution (or devolution). If Mukherjee saw in realism the struggle of new subjectivities in tension with the given realities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we may ask what is at stake today? Other media such as film with their capacities for representing the polyglot worlds of India may outstrip the potentiality of the written word. Or perhaps I am being too rash in this assessment, for I recall M. Madhav Prasad doubting whether the typical Bollywood film today, bound by so many political constraints, can ever really depict reality in any recognizable way. In that case, the short story and the novel may still have potentialities, such as those of heteroglossia, which are only now being tapped.
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