Family Matters: Domesticity and Gender in the Novel

Abstract

Abstract This book has argued that since its inception, the anglophone novel in India was markedly preoccupied with questions of nation and history, events necessarily played out in the public sphere even as they infected domestic spaces and personal relations. Critical observations to the effect that ‘all Third World texts’ are ‘national allegories’ are, to some extent, underpinned by readings of such texts, more widely available and read, certainly in the Anglo-American literary establishment, than works in Hindi or Bengali. Aijaz Ahmad (1991: 118) claims that modern literature in indigenous languages such as Urdu is far less concerned with the ‘nation’ as a category or ‘primary ideological problematic’ and much more with ‘our class structures, our familial ideologies, our management of our bodies and sexualities, our idealisms, our silences’. While it is certainly true that epic narratives of nation and history are particularly salient in anglophone Indian fiction, transformations of the public sphere made their presence felt in private lives and fiction inevitably engaged with these. As Tagore suggested almost a century ago, the world and the home can impact each other in strong, often unexpected ways, and out of this emerge unique stories. It is also true that as the anglophone novel diversifies across readerships and writers its concerns have also proliferated.