Novel in India:

PART-I

                        India was basically supportive of Verse than Prose. It used to write everything in the verse form – including Mathematics, Medicine and History. The narrative form, Novel, entered Indian soil through the reign of the British.

                        In the beginning, the novel form was used for the highlighting the ills of the rigid orthodox Indian society and advertising the hope of the Christianity. They were, to the most extent, didactic in nature. The reader could see the prototypes of the society, not the individual human souls.

                        “Yamuna Paryatan”, one of the early novels in Marathi, tries to present the sub-human lives of widows in Hindu society. It was rather episodic and loosely connected in the fashion of Jeffrey Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales”. Its main purpose is to present the various problems faced by Hindu widows in colonial India. It does not present any inner conflict and choices one can make in his life which good literature should do. It was only social document of particular period.

                        Though some novelists in this period converted themselves into Christianity and preached the colonizer’s religion in their novels, their novels do not present the conflict in the society between the Hindu and the Christian religions. Nevertheless, this didactic and publicizing novels gave way to sensible novels in the hands of Prem Chand (Hindi) and Sharath Chandra (Bengali) and many others.

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