The Dhorai-Ramiya relationship is echoed in the second part of the novel by the Dhorai-Sagiya encounter. On the basis of the inter-relationship between these two, Dhorai becomes aware of mutually contradictory images of women and love. The confrontation with Babusaheb at Biskandha recalls Dhorafs conflict with the Tatmatuli panchayat—Dhorai acquires a deeper understanding of the individual in society once again through his perception of difference in similarity. Finally, when in the midst of a life of public activity Dhorai discovers it to be a shield against and a refuge from bleak loneliness, he is reminded of the renunciation ofBouka Bawa. But his resulting sense of alienation from political life is not clothed in religious garb. As I have tried to argue, Satinath does not aim at an unreal objectivity, a static verisimilitude to an unfamiliar milieu that tickles idle curiosity. On the contrary, he allows the multiple consciousnesses of the inhabitants to build up a composite inner reality. Of course, the attempt at objectivity, to depict things as they are in themselves quite apart from what the mind makes of them, has been long discredited in European realism. The resulting movement towards inferiority in fiction was nevertheless held in firm balance with the substantial and solid presence of ambient reality in nineteenth-century fiction. But at times, an exclusive devotion to the shadowy emanations of the mind brooding upon its own processes led to a sense of vacuity; the world too became an evanescent phenomenon. Both inJagari and Dhorai Chant Manas, Satinath employs a modified version of the interior monologue, and yet the various .consciousnesses come alive against a vast backdrop that is warmly lit and densely woven. Dhorai himself is torn between public service in the Mahatma's cause and a hunger for personal love and affection. For instance, Sagiya's solicitude or even a kind word from her mother pleases him much more than his success as a leader of the Koweris. This is the reason why he clings on to Anthony and leaves the 'KrantF party along with the boy. The breach between public life and private world makes Dhorai a modern protagonist. The more he becomes involved with public issues and events, the more he withdraws into himself. Satinath has referred to Dhorafs 'inner isolation from which even love cannot lift him'6, but although this isolation places him in a modem, somewhat antagonistic relationship with society, the novel gives us a compelling sense of the world that nurtures him. The movement towards differentiation matches the movement towards expansion. Irreconcilable as they are, the public and the private, the outer and the inner arc interrelated in the manner of the foreground and the background of a painting. Following the epistemological revolution that transferred primacy in the act of cognition from object to subject, cognition provides us not with a copy of reality, but rather, with a transformed and perhaps distorted picture of what may be really at hand. This picture may be said to constitute ideology in the domain of political-historical reality. In so far as Dhorai and the Koweris in Biskandha are engaged in a political struggle that gives them a collective identity, their Journal of Arts and Ideas 55