Interrogating Indian nationalism: A subaltern perspective

Abstract In this article, the ubiquitous visibility of Indian nationalist authors in the public sphere and academic scholarship is contrasted to the conspicuous invisibilization of authors in those domains who took critical and contrary stances on the Indian nationalist movement and ideology. S. Natarajan, also known as ‘Sarada’, was a Tamil migrant hotel worker who fashioned himself into a prodigious fiction writer in the Telugu public sphere during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Even in a brutally exploitative condition, he managed to engage in literary activity. His singularly important realist novel was Manchi-Chedu (literal English translation Good-Evil , serialized in 1954). Written in Telugu, it narrates the entangled life journeys of three ordinary individuals. It also engages with the immensely violent and tragic dimensions of problematic aspects of modern societies, such as destitution and prostitution. The tragedy of the protagonists indicates the exploitative conditions under which Sarada wrote and his disillusionment with the newly independent India. The novel articulates a brutally exploited worker’s perspective of a triumphant Indian nationalism at ‘the moment of arrival’ and its meaning for the dispossessed. While realist aesthetics is always associated with the concerns and anxieties of Indian nationalism in post-colonial critical discourse, Sarada’s realism proposes an ideological critique of Indian nationalist discourse. Manchi-Chedu is a 1950s novel that belongs to a period in which India was transitioning from a colony of the British empire to an independent nation-state. By portraying the aspirations, struggles, and travails of ordinary individuals, Manchi-Chedu interrogates the dominant representation of women in the Indian nationalist novel and discourse. The novel, which achieved spectacular success and reception in the Telugu public sphere, shows the different kinds of imagination (about the nation) in regional literature.