62 SOCIAL SCIENTIST on the one hand, and being most directly connected (via translations and works in English) with international thought and representations, on the other. It has had to pay a price of course: it is relatively less rooted, since its script needs to be mastered to achieve any degree of fluency in speech. The result is a polysemic range defined by the problems and strengths of consmopolitanism. In our country English has had to always bear the burden of heterogeneity. The dilemma emerges fully when we consider the mode of narration in the novelists mentioned. Derived from Realism, their stories are situated in highly culture specific contexts. Realism—especially its English incarnation—assumes a single linguistic spatial culture (with regional dialects, as in Hardy and Lawrence, being ensconced within the direct speech marks of the characters), for it to lay claims on our sympathy and understanding of the characters and their predicaments. On the other hand, the realism of life in Malgudi (Narayan) or the Haveli (Mehta) or that of the Untouchable (Anand) acts as the other of the cosmopolitanism represented by Indian-English. It is the other in two senses. Firstly in the culture of these stories, which is the obverse of those fluent in English, the upper classes. But, equally, its otherness is embedded in the fact that while the objects of these realistic narratives require articulation through a single linguistic/spatial culture, its language of representation is one which always suggests other landscapes, and resists being contracted into the idea of a culture which is singular and monochromatic. It is then not a coincidence that the Indian-English Novel (beginning with Rushdie and continuing in the novels under review) leaves one with the sense of immense possibility in and through novels that coalesce cultures, spaces and histories. The result, especially with The Trotter Nama is an amazing cross-fertilisation. The things that the English language in our country is able to do and mean increases in the same measure as the novels explore and explode the boundaries that fragment human concern. Clearly, this is not the result of an autonomous initiative alone. The key concerns of Modernism and Post-Modemism in problematising reality with an accompanying preoccupation with its representations, have given the required push. What is however equally, if not more, important is that these noyels have been able to harness an international body of thought and give it a distinctive form, by placing their object of address in the pain and desires of our sub-continent. There are no points being proved. The Trotter Nama by focussing on the problems of heterogeneity and identity, and The Shadow Lines in its meditation on difference itself, do not merely seek to demonstrate the importance of international thought or the resourcefulness of Indian-English; on the contrary, they use both as starting points to enquire into the divisions which our sub-continent has yet to learn and unlearn.