Views from above and below: George Eliot and Fakir Mohan Senapati

By reading a novel by George Eliot alongside a novel by her Indian contemporary Fakir Mohan Senapati, this essay offers a cross-cultural comparison of fictional realisms. In The Mill on the Floss (1860), Eliot used a learned narrator and extended forms of free indirect discourse to examine humble life with unprecedented sympathy and complexity, but the formal dissonance between the authoritative narrative voice and class-marked forms of represented speech construct a view of the lower classes from “above”—that is, from the vantage point of the educated middle-class readers whom Eliot implicitly constructs as the agents of history. By contrast, Senapati’s Six Acres and a Third (1897–99), written in the demotic Indian language of Oriya, achieves a view from “below” through an ironic narrator who parodies the very type of learned discourse that Eliot (at the opposite end of the British empire) deploys as the instrument of liberal humanism. By thus evacuating a discursive cultural authority, Senapati produces a dialogic interplay of voices that brings the reader into the lives of his impoverished villagers without sentimentality or condescension—an achievement that in some ways resembles later European modernism as much as the realism of Eliot.