Though contemporaries—born in 1905, 1906, 1908 and 1906 respectively—Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan, Raja Rao and Bhabani Bhattacharya are conspicuously different from one another, and every one of them is a class by himself. They immediately bring to our mind the four great English novelists of the eighteenth century—i.e., Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne. Like their illustrious British predecessors, they can appropriately be called ‘the four wheels’, ‘the four mighty limbs’, of the Indian English novel. They have written indefatigably, and even in old age their fecundity has not evinced any mark of exhaustion or deterioration. There is a rich galaxy of Indian English fictionists, but none of them can emulate any of these four who are truly great because of their profundity of vision and fertility. No wonder they have been placed among the foremost writers of the world to-day. Hence the perpetual need for fresh studies of their art and ideas. The present book is one more addition to the numerous perceptive studies that have come out on them during the past three decades or so. I believe this modest attempt will help the reader in gaining a better understanding of these fictionists of perennial interest and importance.
There are no reviews yet.