Rural Novel in India: Reading Village through Shrilal Shukla’s Raag Darbari


Keywords:
Politics, Religion, Orthodoxy, Caste, Community Life, Habitation, TraditionAbstract
India has been a nation of villages that make the basic construct of our civilization. Over a period of time the villages or their clusters have evolved into towns, and further into cities. Even today more than eighty percent of Indians live in villages. Novel, being the ‘slice of life’, has over a period of time, touched upon the life of the rural India in different shades. From Munshi PremChand, Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan down to Shrilal Shukla the Indian novelists have potently brought in the panorama of life on the literary canvas in the best of patterns. Shrilal Shukla’s Raag Darbari (1968) is one of the best literary records of real power politics, which shows the traces and trajectories of administration and politics in rural U.P. villages somewhere around the late 1950’s. Raag Darbari presents a fictional story of a village Shivpalganj, which symbolizes a typical Indian village. Shivpal Ganj is situated in Rae Bareli District, South East of Lucknow. It depicts the struggle for power in the key village institutions viz. Co-operative Unions, the Village Council and in the College, as well it portrays the perverted caste system, distorted social values, corruption in administration and politics, use of muscle power, etc, the picture of which is still not much different even after fifty years of the publication of this novel. The proposed paper is an analytical study of the village lives both from the angle of its simplicity and complexity with special reference to Shrilal Shukla’s Raag Darbari.
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