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Novels, Society and History Class 10 Questions and Answers History Chapter 8
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Novels, Society and History NCERT Intext Questions and Answers
Question 1.
Explain what is meant by the following types of novels:
Epistolary novel
Serialised novel
For each type, name one writer who wrote in that style.
Answer:
Epistolary novel: An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of documents. The usual form is letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used. Samuel Richardson wrote in that style. The novel is Pamela.
Serialised novel: A serialised novel is a format in which the story is published in installments, each part in a new issue of a journal. Charles Dickens wrote in that style. The novel is Pickwick Papers.
Question 2.
Write about two important characteristics of the early Hindi novel.
Answer:
Two characteristics of the early Hindi novels are:
(i) They give much importance to traditional values of the middle-class household. They try to teach the reader to remain rooted in the values of their own tradition and culture, and to live with dignity and honour.
(ii) Early novels told interesting stories in simple language. Devaki Nandan Khatri’s Chandrakanta became very popular because it was written purely for the pleasure of reading.
History Class 10 Chapter 8 NCERT Textbook Questions and Answers
Write in Brief
Question 1.
Explain the following:
(a) Social changes in Britain which led to an increase in women readers.
(b) What actions of Robinson Crusoe make us see him as a typical coloniser.
(c) After 1740, the readership of novels began to include poorer people.
(d) Novelists in colonial India wrote for a political cause.
Answer:
(a) The eighteenth century Britain saw the middle classes become more prosperous. As a result, women got more leisure time to read as well as write novels. Besides, novels began exploring the world of women – their emotions and identities, their experiences and problems. Many novels were written about domestic life- a field women had an authority to speak out.
(b) Robinson Crusoe’s actions that make us see him as a typical coloniser are many-
- Shipwrecked on an island inhabited by coloured people. Crusoe treats them not as human beings equal to him, but as inferior creatures.
- In the novel, he rescues a native and makes him his slave. He does not ask for his name but starts calling him by the name Friday.
- Most writers of the time saw colonialism as natural and depicted colonised people as primitive and barbaric, less than human. They considered colonial rule necessary to civilise them and to make them fully human. Crusoe represents his ideology of colonisers.
(c) After 1740, the readership of novels began to include power people because of the following reasons:
- Circulating libraries were introduced in 1740.
- Technological innovations in printing brought down the price of books, allowing poor people to buy them.
- Publishers in France started the system of hiring out novels by the hour to earn profits. This made books easily available to the poor people. They could now afford books which was earlier difficult due to high costs.
(d)
- Novelists in colonial India used the novel as a powerful medium to criticise what they considered defects in their society and to suggest remedies.
- Novels also helped in establishing a relationship with the past. Many of them told thrilling stories of adventures and intrigues set in the past. Through glorified accounts of the past, these novels helped in creating a sense of national pride among their readers.
- People from all walks of life could read novels so long as they shared a common language. This helped in creating a sense of national unity among them. Through novels, it was also easy to arouse nationalist sentiments among the common mass.
Question 2.
Outline the changes in technology and society which led to an increase in readers of the novel in eighteenth-century Europe.
Answer:
(i) As novels began to be printed, they were widely read and became popular very quickly.
(ii) At this time big cities like London were growing rapidly and getting connected to small towns and rural areas through print and improved communications.
(iii) Novels produced a number of common interests among their scattered and varied readers.
(iv) As readers were drawn into the story and identified with the lives of fictitious characters, they could think about issues such as the relationship between love and marriage and the proper conduct for men and women.
(v) As a result of industrialisation, people’s affordability got enhanced. Hence, new groups of lower- middle-class people such as shopkeepers and clerks, along with the traditional aristocratic and gentlemanly classes joined the new readership for novels.
(vi) The increase in readership expanded the market for books. This resulted in the increase in the earnings of authors who now began to experiment with different literary styles. The epistolary novel, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela was first of its kind.
(vii) Books became cheap and could be bought by the poor as well. The introduction of circulating libraries in 1740, made access to books easier.
(viii) Publishers in France began to hire out novels by the hour. This also helped the poor to read novels. Serialisation of novels allowed readers to relish the suspense, discuss the characters of a novel and live for weeks with their stories. All these changes increased the readership in eighteenth century Europe.
Question 3.
Write a note on:
(a) The Oriya novel
(b) Jane Austen’s portrayal of women
(c) The picture of the new middle class which the novel Pariksha Guru portrays.
Answer:
(a) The Oriya Novel: The first Oriya novel was Saudamani which began to be serialised in 1877-78 by Ramashankar Ray, a dramatist. But it remained incomplete. However, the first major novelist of Orissa was Fakir Mohon Senapati (1843 — 1918). He wrote Chaa Mana Atha Guntha in 1902 which translates as six acres and thirty-two decimals of land. It announces a new kind of novel that will deal with the question of land and its possession. This novel shows that rural issues could be an important part of urban preoccupations.
(b) Jane Austen’s portrayal of women: The novels of Jane Austen give us a glimpse of the world of women in genteel rural society in early-nineteenth century Britain. They make us think about a society which encouraged women to look for good marriages and find wealthy husbands. The very first sentence of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice states, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” This observation allows us to see the behaviour of the main characters, who are preoccupied with marriage and money.
(c) The picture of the new middle-class which the novel Pariksha-Guru portrays: Pariksha- Guru, of Srinivas Das, reflects the inner and outer world of the newly emerging middle class. The characters in this novel are shown facing the difficulties of adapting to colonised society and at the same time preserving their own cultural identities. The world of colonial modernity seems to be both frightening and irresistible to the characters.
The novel tries to teach the readers to remain rooted in the values of their own traditions and culture, and to live with dignity and honour. The characters are seen attempting to bridge two different worlds through their actions – they take to new agricultural technology, modernise trading practices, change the use of Indian languages, making them capable of transmitting both Western sciences and Indian wisdom. But the novel emphasises that all this must be achieved without sacrificing the traditional values of the middle-class household.
Discuss
Question 1.
Discuss some of the social changes in nineteenth-century Britain which Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens wrote about.
Answer:
Social changes in nineteenth-century Britain highlighted by Thomas Hardy:
(i) With industrialisation, traditional rural communities of England began to be disappearing. This was actually a time when large farmers fenced off land, bought machines and employed labourers to produce for the market.
(ii) The old rural culture with its independent farmers is shown dying out. We get a sense of this change in Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge.
(iii) In this novel, the novelist mourns at the loss of the more personalised world that is disappearing, although he is aware of its problems and the advantages of the new order.
Social changes in nineteenth-century Britain highlighted by Charles Dickens:
(i) Charles Dickens wrote about the terrible effects of industrialisation on people’s lives and characters.
(ii) In the nineteenth century, Europe entered the industrial age. Factories came up, business profits increased and the economy grew. Capitalists got benefited by all these developments, but workers faced problems.
(iii) Cities expanded in an unregulated manner and were flooded with overworked and underpaid workers. The unemployed poor roamed the streets and the homeless were forced to seek shelter in workhouses.
(iv) His novel Hard Times highlights the side effects of industrialisation. People are shown facing pollution of air, water and noise. The workers are facing the problem of identity. They are known as hands, as if they had no identity other than as operators of machines.
(v) In this novel, Dickens criticised not just the greed for profits but also the ideas that reduced human beings into instruments of production.
Question 2.
Summarise the concern in both nineteenth-century Europe and India about women reading novels. What does this suggest about how women were viewed?
Answer:
(i) The concern in both nineteenth-century Europe and India about women reading novels bore more or less similar fears. Conservative people in both the places got worried about the effects of the novel on women who were taken away from their real surroundings into an imaginary world where anything could happen.
(ii) In Europe, when women started reading and writing novels many people feared that they would now neglect their traditional roles as wives and mothers and homes would be in disorder.
Similar fears could be sensed in Indian air too. Women were advised to stay away from the immoral influence of novels. They were seen as easily corruptible.
(iii) It was felt in both Europe and India that if women read novels, they would go astray. They would lose interest in home and hearth and would find ways to go outside.
Now we can easily infer that women were viewed as incapable of being independent. They were not expected to go against the wills of their male partners. The domestic sphere was seen as the proper place for women. Once they got married, they were expected to take care of the household chores.
(iv) Thus, their status in this male-dominated society was not of much importance. They could neither take their own decisions, nor could they do as per their wishes. In short, they were completely helpless.
Question 3.
In what ways was the novel in colonial India useful for both the colonisers as well as the nationalists?
Answer:
Colonial administrators found ‘vernacular’ novels a valuable source of information on native life and customs. Such information was useful for them in governing Indian society, with its large varieties of communities and castes. As outsiders, the British knew little about life inside Indian households. The new novels in Indian languages often had descriptions of domestic life. Indian nationalists used the novel as a powerful medium to criticise what they considered defects in their society and to suggest remedies. They also used the novel to criticise colonial rule and instill a sense of national pride among the people.
Question 4.
Describe how the issue of caste was included in novels in India. By referring to any two novels, discuss the ways in which they tried to make readers think about existing social issues.
Answer:
Many Indians wrote novels to criticise what they considered defects in their society and to suggest remedies. Since the issue of caste was a major defect, so it was included in Indian novels for the same purpose.
Novels like Indirabai and Indulekha were written by the upper-castes, and were primarily about upper- caste characters. But all novels were not of this kind. The two novels that make readers think about existing social issues are:
(i) Unlike Indirabai and Indulekha, Saraswativijayam was written by a lower-caste writer from north Kerala named Potheri Kunjambu. He wrote this novel in 1892 to make an attack on caste oppression. This novel shows a young man from an ‘untouchable’ caste, leaving his village to escape the cruelty of his Brahmin landlord. He converts to Christianity, gets modern education and returns to his village as a judge in the local court. In the meantime, the villagers, thinking that the landlord’s men had killed him, file a case. At the end of the trial, the judge reveals his identity and the Nambuthiri repents and gets ready to reform his ways. The novel Saraswativijayam highlights education as a means to uplift the lower caste people.
(ii) In Bengal too a new kind of novel emerged from the 1920s that depicted the lives of peasants and low castes. Advaita Malla Burman’s Titash Ekti Nadir Naam is an epic about the Mallas, a community of fisher folk who live off fishing in the river Titash. The novel is about three generations of the Mallas and describes the oppression of the upper castes. The lives of the Mallas is tied with the river. Their end comes together. As the river dries up, the community also dies too. The novel is special because the author is himself from a low caste, fisher folk community describing the bitter experiences of the low-caste people.
Question 5.
Describe the ways in which the novel in India attempted to create a sense of pan-Indian belonging.
Answer:
The ways in which the novel in India attempted to create a sense of pan-Indian belonging were-
(i) In Bengal, historical novels were written about Marathas and Rajputs. These novels produced a sense of pan-Indian belonging. They imagined the nation to be full of adventure, heroism, romance and sacrifice-qualities that could not be found in the offices and streets of the nineteenth-century world. The novel allowed the colonised to give shape to their desires.
(ii) Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay’s Anguriya Binimoy was the first historical novel written in Bengal. Its hero Shivaji engages in many battles against a clever and treacherous Aurangzeb. What gives him courage is his belief that he is a nationalist fighting for the freedom of Hindus.
(iii) Bankim’s Anandamath is a novel about a secret Hindu militia that fights Muslims to establish a Hindu Kingdom. It was a novel that inspired many kinds of freedom fighters.
(iv) Imagining a heroic past was one way in which the novel helped in popularising the sense of belonging to a common nation. Another way was to include various classes in the novel so that they could be seen to belong to a shared world. Premchand’s novels, for instance, are filled with all kinds of characters drawn from all stratas of society. In his novels, one can meet aristocrats and landloards, middle-level peasants and landless labourers, middle-class professionals and people from the margins of society.
Project
Imagine that you are a historian in 3035 AD. You have just located two novels which were written in the twentieth century. What do they tell you about society and customs of the time?
Answer:
The novels written in the twentieth century tell us about the ways in which the Indian upper classes used whatever little opportunities they got from colonial authorities to govern themselves. Many novels dealt with the poor condition of women in society. Issues like child marriage, child labour and dowry were also described. Many of the twentieth-century novels describe the partition of India and the tragedy that it brought with it.
Class 10 History Chapter 8 NCERT Intext Activity Questions and Answers
Question 1.
Read Godan Write briefly on:
How Premchand depicts the life of peasants in the novel.
What the novel tells us about the life of peasants during the Great Depression.
Answer:
The novel Godan by Premchand was first published in 1936. It is an epic of the Indian peasantry.
The novel tells us about the moving story of Hori and his wife Dhania, a peasant couple. For them, their cows mean everything. They have a small plot of land and work hard to earn their living. In due course of time, landlords, moneylenders, priests and colonial bureaucrats – all those who hold power in society – form a network of oppression, rob their land and make them into landless labourers. Yet Hori and Dhania retain their dignity to the end.
Peasants and farmers suffered a lot during the Great Depression. Though agricultural prices fell sharply, the colonial government refused to reduce revenue demands. As a result, peasants’ indebtedness increased. They used up their savings and mortgaged their lands to meet their expenses.
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