Mainak Gupta
Academic Content Researcher and Writer, Inventive Gentech Solutions, LLP: Kolkata, India
Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 15, Issue 3, 2023. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v15n3.07
[Article History: Received: 05 January 2023. Revised: 10 August 2023. Accepted: 15 August 2023. Published: 20 August 2023.]
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Abstract
The 1930s saw the rise of Mahatma Gandhi as the frontline leader of India’s struggle against the British imperialists, and it was also a decade when the Indian novel in English came of age, with the publication of Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, R.K. Narayan’s Swami and Friends and Raja Rao’s Kanthapura within a few years of each other. The English novel in India grew as a consequence of the English education introduced by the British, and it was used as a weapon against the imperialists by a bunch of young men who were primarily educated abroad, with an aim to use a universal language that addressed all Indians all over the world. Gandhi, unsurprisingly, became a great source of inspiration for these writers. Gandhi has been a subject of literature and other forms of art to this day, but the portrayal of the ‘Great-soul’ (as Tagore called Gandhi) has gone through a change since the pre-independence days. This essay analyses the change in the portrayal of Gandhi by close-reading four novels, Untouchable (1935) and Kanthapura (1938) from the colonised period, and Waiting for the Mahatma (1955) and Dhorai Charit Manas (1950) from the post-independence era. The essay shows how the portrayal of Gandhi and Gandhism went through a change in the novels from the colonial period to post-colonial times, as the reverence and deification of Gandhi that was so prevalent in the novels of the colonial time gave way to a more humane portrayal of the most influential leader of India’s freedom struggle.
Keywords: Mahatma Gandhi; Indian fiction in English; Mulk Raj Anand; Raja Rao; R.K. Narayan; Satinath Bhaduri; Indian freedom struggle
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Citation: Gupta, Mainak. 2023. Representing Gandhi: A Study of Mahatma Gandhi as a Character in Selected Novels from Colonial and Post-Colonial Times. Rupkatha Journal 15:3. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v15n3.07