72 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Kirpal's paper starts with a compilation of what she considers misguided and inaccurate remarks about the Third World novel. These remarks she attributes not just to 'literary imperialism* or 'colonialist criticism' but to a genuine lack of 'a relevant critical framework for discussing the Third World novel' (145). She ends the paper by reiterating the demand for 'specific full length studies of the novel and its characteristics in each Third World country' (153). The other source that I want to use as a point of departure is Meenakshi Mukherjee's Realism and Reality (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985). Mukherjee's book, published about three years before Viney Kirpal's paper, attempted just the kind of study that Kirpal is calling for. Mukherjee explores the origin and development of the Indian novel as a pan-Indian, trans-linguistic and trans-regional phenomena. She also provides a typology for Indian novels written in the nineteenth century, dividing them into three basic groups: the didactic novel, the historical fantasy, and only lastly, the 'realistic' novel in the Western sense. Then she goes on to illustrate these groups with analysis of specific novels. However, for the purposes of this paper, I am interested only in her methodological presuppositions, which she outlines in her Preface and in Chapter I, 'From Purana to Nutana'. Mukherjee tries to examine why realism, unlike in the Western novel, is not really the dominant mode in the Indian novel: I found for example that the conventions of realism—the dominant mode of nineteenth century British fiction and the immediate model for the first generation of the Indian novelists—could not be transferred to the Indian situation, where the nature of social reality was substantially different, without causing certain inadvertent mutations in the mode itself. The fundamental problem of the early novelists of India was how to reconcile the demands of realism with the intransigence of reality, (vii) The clever opposition of the last sentence suggests that the Indian 'reality' was not really suited to Western 'realism'. Such views are by no means new or uncommon. Almost all accounts of the birth of the Indian novel give a similar explanation of its genesis and difference from its Western counterpart.3 In fact, one could enlarge the scope of the discussion to include the problem of modernity itself in India. What happened to the Indian mind under the impact of British colonisation? Was there an epistemological rupture or a reassertion of Indian tradition in a different form? Such issues lie at the heart of any discussion of the so called 'Indian renaissance', which resulted in the creation of modern India. The issues at stake concern the totality of Indian culture and its transformations during the last two hundred years or so, with criss-crossing coordinates in politics, economics, history, sociology, and literature.4 Mukherjee herself is well aware of the complexity of the determinants 'of the Indian novel: