upheaval, was a critical period in the history of India: the stmggle for Independence spearheaded by the mass-movements of Gandhi.4 These turbulent mass-movements involved the entire life of the nation and disrupted the timeless rhythm of rural society. In the very beginning of the novel we are introduced to the town ofJiraniya as being more or less in the same condition as Jimaranya of Rama-charitamanasa. The Tatmas, inhabitants ofTatmatuli, which is on the outskirts of this town have little sense of the passage of time. On the west is the Bakarhatta meadow, on the south the silted-up river, the pakki, that is, the Kosi-Siliguri Road cuts through this meadow. Musing about the past, the Tatmas can only s^y that the Bakarhatta meadow has many times become all green, while the river has had a fresh flow of water, the berries have ripened and the cotton trees are ablaze with flowers, but they cannot calculate the time that has elapsed. In this sort of a world we witness, as it were, the birth of time, as Tatmatuli, and indeed all rural society is swept into the surge of history. Actively engaged in the Gandhi-led Independence movement, Satinath grappled with his chaotic times in an effort to discern the underlying pattern of the new order that was being hammered out However, this search for meaning in a world of shifting alignments and crumbling values was for him primarily an aesthetic imperative, which is as much at work inJagari as in Dhorai although the latter is perhaps a more inclusive formal expression. In order to understand the present, Satinath had to look back, at the three decades or so leading up to Independence. This understanding was founded on his own experience, and was hence simultaneous with self-exploration. The urge to examine the whole living matrix out of which the present moment is born is essentially historical, andDhorai CharitManas presents the closely-packed, concrete reality of history as perceived by the rural masses. The Tatma community has gone through changes in the past (the coming of the railway, for example), but it is only in this moment of crisis, when the entire consciousness of the nation is thrown into the melting-pot, that their perception undergoes a qualitative change. History is no longer obscured by the unusually static rhythm of their lives, but becomes a part of their active and immediate experience, and in fact has a direct impact on the life of the individual protagonist The common people are seen as gradually developing into the agents of social transformation. As Satinath himself observes in the essay mentioned above, the spirit of Rama in the modem age finds expression among the common people.5 At the centre of this copious and varied novel, Dhorai progresses from the state of an uncomprehending, passive victim of forces to an active and increasingly conscious agent of history. History coalesces here with the novelist's self-examination as well as the haltingly reflective self-transformation of Dhorai. It is thus particularly significant that the novel begins with the birth of Dhorai in 1912, at the time of the Delhi Durbar, on the eve of the First World War. But there is no awareness of this among the characters of the novel: Journal of Arts and Ideas 51