Realism in the colony

Initially, realism in India was a result of colonial import, a means to modernize India’s literary culture, which was thought by the British and European colonizers to be excessive and irrational. Yet, in the early twentieth century, realism was claimed by Indian writers themselves as an apt mode in which to imagine their own national future beyond colonial constraints. This malleability of realism suggests that at any given moment the significance of realism, in India and elsewhere, must be historically situated rather than assumed. This is clear throughout India’s postcolonial history as well. While novels in the manner of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) rejected realism and its assumed epistemological and cultural transparency to unravel the complexity of the period of postcolonial transition, newer Indian writers have embraced realism as a means of rethinking the nature of politics in the twenty-first century.