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Summary

In “Realism and the South Asian Novel,” Pranav Jani examines three Anglophone South Asian novels from the turn of the twenty-first century to reveal the complicated relationship between realism and postcoloniality. Often, Anglophone novels after Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children are read as if their postcoloniality implies a postmodernist distancing from realism. But Jani finds that despite their metafictional playfulness and disruption of linear narration, Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography, Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy, and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things offer realist practices that illuminate historical truths about postcolonial South Asia. Rather than being anti-realist, Jani contends, these novels expand the real to include epistemological and self-reflexive processes while they criticize social oppression, elite complicity, sectarian and ethnic violence, caste apartheid, and patriarchy. Like the classic social realist novels of the past, recent Anglophone novels are attentive to questions of power and inequality – even as they experiment with form.

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Chapter 26 - Realism and the South Asian Novel

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Chapter 26 - Realism and the South Asian Novel

Summary