The novel is a relatively new form in Hindi literature. While our tradition is rich in poetry—from the epics to the bhakti saints to the riti poets—prose narrative is a recent arrival.
This gives us both disadvantages and opportunities. We lack the centuries of experimentation that have shaped the European novel. But we also lack their conventions, their tired formulas. We can borrow what works and discard what doesn't. We can create something new.
What is a Novel?
What is a novel? At its simplest, it is a long prose narrative about imagined characters and events. But this definition captures neither the form's potential nor its challenges.
A novel is a world. The novelist creates not just characters but an entire universe in which those characters live. The landscape, the weather, the social customs, the political situation—all these must be rendered with enough detail to make the world feel real, but not so much that the story drowns in description.
The Art of Character
The novelist's primary tool is not plot but character. Plot is merely what happens; character is why it matters. A thousand stories can be constructed from the same basic events—a man loves a woman, a crime is committed, a journey is undertaken—but each story will be different depending on who is doing the loving, committing, or traveling.
How do we create living characters? Not by describing them from outside, but by inhabiting them from within. The novelist must become his characters—must know their thoughts, their fears, their desires, their secrets. He must know things about them that never appear in the story, because this hidden knowledge shapes everything that does appear.
The Hindi Novel's Responsibility
The Hindi novel has a particular responsibility. Our society is in flux—old orders dying, new ones struggling to be born. The novelist must capture this transformation, must show both what is being lost and what might be gained. He must give voice to the voiceless—the peasant, the woman, the untouchable—who have no other way of telling their stories.
This does not mean the novel should be sociology. The novel is art, and art has its own demands. But when done well, a novel can illuminate social reality more powerfully than any scholarly treatise, because it engages the emotions as well as the intellect.
Advice to Writers
Write, then, about what you know. Write about the people around you—their struggles, their joys, their ordinary heroisms. Don't try to imitate the Europeans; they write about their world, you must write about yours. But learn from them the techniques they have developed over centuries—the handling of time, the use of perspective, the art of suggestion and implication.
The Hindi novel is young, but its future is bright. We have stories to tell that no one else can tell. Let us tell them well.