Development of Novel in the Pre-Independence Period

 Development of Novel in the Pre-Independence Period:

The novel written in the pre-Independence period was in search of tradition. It was well made realistic novel. It was a novel of social realism. It also consisted of Indianness, Indian sensibility, the spirit of patriotism, and a sense of brotherhood. The earliest fictional efforts were tales rather than novels proper appeared in journals. Kailash Chunder Dutt’s ‘A Journal of 48 Hours of the Year 1945’ was published in the Calcutta Literary Gazette on 6 June 1935. In this period S. C. Dutt’s ‘Republic of Orissa’, Annals from the pages of the 20th century appeared in the Saturday evening Hurkara on 25 May 1845. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s first and only novel in English, Rajmohan’s Wife was serialized in the Calcutta weekly, ‘The Indian Field’ in 1864.

From 1860 up to the end of the 19th century, stray novels continued to appear mostly by writers from the Bengal and Madras region. Some of these novels were, however, published in London and these are no novelists with a sizeable output to their credit. A majority of these novels are social and a few historical, and their models are obviously eighteenth and nineteenth-century British fiction, particularly Defoe, Fielding, and Scott. An interesting development is the surprisingly early appearance of women novelists, though female education took a long time to spread. Novels by three women novelists appeared before the turn of the century, Toru Dutt’s unfinished novel Bianca or The Young Spanish Maiden, Krupabai Satthianadhan’s Kamala: A Story of Hindu Life, and Shevantibai Nikambe’s ‘Ratnabai’: A Sketch of a Bombay High Caste Hindu Young life.

Among other novels published during this period were Ram Krishna Pant’s The Boy of Bengal (1866), Tarachand Mookerjee’s The Scorpians or Eastern Thoughts (1868), Lal Behari Day’s Govinda Samanta Ananda Prasad Dutt’s The Young Zamindar (1863), Mirza Beg’s The Battle of Panipat, M. Dutt’s Bijay Chand: An Indian Tale, (1888), Suresh Biswas’s His Wife and Adventures (1900).

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