My paper seeks to throw some light on the historical and social significance of Bankim Chandra’s Rajmohan’s Wife
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Rajmohan’s Wife: Voice of the Long Silenced
My
paper seeks to throw some light on the historical and social significance of
Bankim Chandra’s Rajmohan’s Wife. In the mid-19th century, in
India, novel as a genre was at its infancy and while romance was accepted as a
narrative mode, there was no precedent as yet of mimetic rendering of domestic
life in fiction or of weaving a plot out of contemporary social and familiar
situations. However, Rajmohan’s Wife is very much realistic in its
presentation of the life issues-caste system, domestic violence, colonial intrusion,
victimization of women and evils of patriarchy. Another significant theme in
the text is the idea of morality. The 18th century India was a society of
serious and complicated nature. It was a society dominated by strict codes and
social taboos, and Much of Bankim’s fictional movement arises from this central
conflict between the inevitability of moral orders and inevitability of their
transgressions and with this novel Chatterjee goes to paint a protagonist that
transgresses the societal norms, yet has a didactic epilogue. Through this
paper I also aspire to celebrate Chatterjee’s courage for composing a novel
based on the theme of social reformation with a female character at its centre.
Bankim
Chandra Chatterjee started writing his first novel Rajmohan’s
Wife in the year 1864.the novel was written in English and appeared
serially in the magazine ‘Indian Field’. Rajmohan’s Wife is regarded the
first Indian novel in English literature but may be due to the less popularity
of the novel at the time of its appearance, Bankim abandoned his creative in
English altogether and went on to write novels and discursive prose in Bangla.
His Bangla novels like Durgesnandini, Anandamath, Devi
Chaudhurani, Kapalkundala
and so on, gathered immense popularity and were also critically
acclaimed, but his first novel left behind no such wake. Critics often dismiss
it as a false start but it would be grossly inappropriate to deny that Rajmohan’s
Wife contains all the seeds of style developed by Chatterjee in his later
novels.
