46 SOCIAL SCIENTIST readership in mind. Many of the Indo-Anglians are better known outside than in the country of their birth. We cannot assume that many of their novels find enthusiastic readers not because of their intrinsic merits but for the picture of India the western reading public gets from these novels. The India of their knowledge and imagination is a land of contradictions: a land ofSadhus, abject poverty, political chaos, socio-economic disparities, untouchability communal disharmony, magnificent temples, mysterious caves, frightening forests, and snak^ charmers. The western reader will be generous enough to hail a work of art 'as the most satisfying and magnificent piece of writing in the contury9 if it is crowded with all these. Barring a few, most of the Indo-Anglian novels were first published abroad and even the Indian editions have appeared only much later. A book is sure to catch the eye of many readers and critics if it is lauded in the west* This explains why many of our writers are eager to get opinions from western critics and scholars. One of the glaring anomalies in the Indian character is that we recognize merit only after it has been lauded in the west. The producers and the directors of Indian movies have also learned this trick. At least half a dozen Indian movies were first released in recent imes in cities like London, New York or Paris and our newspapers were full of what the public of these cities said of these movies* And these movies were released in India only at a later period after winning laurels from the westerners. (Who knows that the sensitive westerners are not laughing at the craze seen m Indians to get recognition?) The contemporary Indo-A^W fiction shows the presence of different streams accommodating a wide range of concerns. As Meenakshi Mukherjee, a critic of Indo-Anglian fiction has put it, the Indo-Anglian novelist is not sure of his ground. He is in a dilemma. He is also an individual in the society, not a ^p^rate entity. However hard he tries, he is caught up in the currents and crosscurrents of the social life around him. The very same faculty that makes him a writer will compel him to react in one way or other to these developments. He develops different approaches to this tricky situation. The pen becomes his instrument. He can blow it hot and cold. Even then he will have a doubt as tp which side he should support. What is the defect—lack of ^yirp03e or ^edication? The reason is that most of our writers are tp^ s^jrx^itive to criticism. The academic critics who have learnt to assess a work of art only on the principles laid down by Aristotle, Eliot, Richards or any other critic for that matter, forgetting that the soul of literary criticism is sahridayatvam will see the true picture of society only as propaganda. Of course this doe^s not mean a work of art should be reduced to the level of a political tract. A writer is not a pamphleteer or an historian. But does this mean that only fantastic and impossible-to-swallow stories should find a place in literature and it should be assessed with worn-out and insufficient yardsticks? It is time that we stopped assessing our literatures with western standards. This does not mean that we need not go in for universal standards. We should integrate