Abstract
As in many colonized or formerly colonized contexts, the call for realism in India has always been politically motivated. However, Indian realism is never simplistically mimetic or propagandistic. Focusing on three seminal moments in the history of Indian realism, this chapter argues that Indian realism’s political project to represent the subaltern has always also been an epistemological question about how literature can contribute to political change. While many Indian writers since the foundation of the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association in 1936 have been politically committed to representing marginalized or oppressed characters in their literature, their writings have simultaneously registered the difficulty of such representation through metatextual techniques such as narrative estrangement, frame narratives, and bifurcated texts, among others. Indian realism, then (and postcolonial realism more broadly), can be understood as a set of questions about what it means for literature to do political work.