Abstract
While Rajan’s fame as a critic and scholar has been well established, the debate about his vision and art as a novelist is still going on, both in India and abroad.1 The Dark Dancer, his first novel, is a bright and sensitive work; it is much too deep and subtly allusive for a commoner’s zeal to categorize and label it only as a portrayal of a sociological confrontation between two cultures, in which convenient and facetious judgments are made of winners and losers. It is no doubt true that after Kipling, E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India is the pioneer work that dramatizes with the greatest intrepidity the East-West conflict, and in a sense the Forsterian theme is present in Rajan’s work and in the works of other contemporaries of Rajan.2 But The Dark Dancer, it appears to me, is a much more comprehensive, illuminating and ripe work, both in breadth and scope: it portrays the quest of the Cambridge-educated Krishnan for identity and enlightenment; and it deals with the myth of the dark dancer, Shiva, the central symbol of the story. In his review of the book Monroe Spears remarks: “The Dark Dancer is an extremely ambitious work, in that it deals explicitly with the greatest issues, political, moral, and religious; it presents a wide range of characters and shows them in crucial years of recent Indian history; it takes the greatest risks possible.”3
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Notes
For a convenient summary of some of the critical opinions see Uma Parameswaran’s A Study of Representative Indo-English Novelists (New Delhi: Vikas, 1976);
A. N. Dwivedi, “The Dark Dancer: A Critique,” Studies in Indian Fiction in English, ed. G. S. Balarama Gupta (Gulbarga: JIWE, 1987) 68–76.
See S. C. Harrex, “Dancing in the Dark: Balachandra Rajan and T. S. Eliot,” World Literature Written in English 14. 2 (1975): 310–21;
George Woodcock, “Paradise Lost and Regained in the Novels of Bal[a]chandra Rajan,” Canadian Literature 132 (Spring 1992): 136–44.
Also see Woodcock’s earlier essay ‘Balachandra Rajan: The Critic as Novelist,’ World Literature Written in English 23.2 (1984): 442–51.
For Yeats’s search for identity and the general discussion of identity see George Bornstein, “Romancing the (Native) Stone:Yeats, Stevens, and the Anglocentric Canon,” The Romantics and Us: Essays in Literature and Culture, ed. Gene W. Ruoff (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1990) 108–29.
Several important studies to which I am indebted are F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford UP, 1969);
Baruch A. Brody, Identity and Essence (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980);
Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper, 1969);
Jeremy Hawthorn, Identity and Relationship: A Contribution to Marxist Theory of Literary Criticism (London: Lawrence, 1973);
Robert Langbaum, The Mysteries of Identity (New York: Oxford UP, 1977);
Manfred Putz, The Story of Ident~: American Fiction of the Sixties (Stuttgart: Verlagbuchhandung, 1979).
See D. H. Lawrence, “Morality and the Novel,” Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Anthony Beal (New York: Viking 1966).
Balachandra Rajan, The Dark Dancer (Westport: Greenwood, 1970) 1–2.
See Gauri Viswanathan’s enlightened discussion of the system of educa-tion in British India in her The Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia UP, 1989).
For a discussion of Macaulay’s famous Minute on Education (1835) see Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963) 45–47.
Meenakshi Mukherjee, in The Twice Born Fiction 2nd ed. (New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1974) notes Naipaul’s disillusionment with writers who have ignored the commoner and the reality of life (123).
See Lionel Trilling’s discussion in his “Art and Neurosis,” Art and Psycho-analysis ed. William Phillips (New York: World, 1963) 502–20.
Cited in Brewster Ghislen, The Creative Process: A Symposium (Toronto: Mentor, 1967) 13.
Lionel Trilling, “Manners, Morals, and the Novel,” Approaches to the Novel, rev. ed., ed. Robert Scholes (San Francisco: Chancller, 1961) 127.
See Mrs. Bennett’s portrayal in chapter 1 of Jane Austen’s Pride and Preju-dice, Norton critical ed., ed. Donald J. Gray (New York: Norton, 1966).
See Lewis Gannett’s rev. “Novel of New India’s Conflicts,” The New York Tribune 27 July 1958.
See Anand Lall’s rev. of the novel in “Dilemma of an In-Betweener,” Sat-urday Review 41 (1958): 14.
See, for example, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, India Wins Freedom (New York: Longmans, 1960), especially the introduction;
S. R. Mehrotra, “The Congress and the Partition of India,” The Partition of India: Policies and Perspectives 1935–47, eds. C. H. Philips and Mary Doreen Wainwright (London: Allen, 1970).
On the general background of India’s struggle for independence see Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India, ed. Robert L. Crane (New York: Doubleday, 1960); and Rupert Emerson, From Empire to Nation (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1962).
Also see K. K. Sharma and B. K. Johri, The Partition in Indian-English Novels (Ghazibad: Vimal, 1984);
See Rajat K. Ray, “Three Interpretations of Indian Nationalism,” Essays in Modern Indian History, ed. B. R. Nanda (Delhi: Oxford UP, 1980) 36.
For an interesting discussion of Gandhi’s thought see Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World:A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed, 1986) 85–130.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, Shelly: Poetical Works ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford UP, 1967) 1.305.
See Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, The Dance of Shiva, rev. ed. (New York: Noonday, 1969) 66–78.
For other interpretations of this commonly used Indian myth see C. G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation, 1, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Harper, 1956);
Heinrich Zimmer, Philosophies of India, ed. Joseph Campbell (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1969);
Stella Kramrisch, The Presence of Siva (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981).
Hermann Hesse, it should be noted, uses the image in Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game), trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Bantam, 1986) 291–92.
For Keats’s treatment of the Grecian Urn see Geraldine Friedman, “The Erotics of Interpretation in Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’: Pursuing the Feminine,” Studies in Romantism 32 (Summer 1993): 225–43.
See Herbert Read, “The Notion of Organic Form: Coleridge,” The True Voice of Feeling: Studies in English Romantic Poetry (London: Faber, 1968) 15–37.
Also M. H. Abrams’s discussion in his Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971) 190–91.
See Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper, 1968) 89.
E. M. Forster, Abinger Harvest (New York: Harvest, 1964) 137.
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© 2000 K. D. Verma
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Verma, K.D. (2000). Balachandra Rajan’s The Dark Dancer: A Critical Reading. In: The Indian Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-61823-1_7
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