Realism

Abstract

Abstract This chapter attends to the ways that the political and cultural disintegration of the 1970s was figured and explored in the English novel of the period (here Nayantara Sahgal’s 1978 A Situation in New Delhi), and by those returning to it later (Rohinton Mistry’s 1996 A Fine Balance). More precisely, this chapter is dedicated to the period’s dominant, realistic mode, by then in a decades-long slump. Indeed, among novel genres criticized for their political and formal derivativeness, realism might be the most maligned. The postcolonial realist novel tends to be regarded as complicit with imperialist discourse, as hegemonic, elitist, anachronistic, and perhaps most of all, as a reified, stale form. Reading precisely for and with its ostensibly stale reification, I follow Meenakshi Mukherjee’s call to think of realism as a mode of exploration, addressing realism as reification. The lack of formal and thematic innovation that characterizes the anglophone novel of the 1970s becomes an important correlate of the sense of cultural and political impasse of a class, a nation, and a culture, foregrounding the ongoing malaise undergirding Emergency, rather than the singular crisis, by which it was known.