Life & Background
Malgonkar was born in 1913 into a family connected with the princely state of Dewas, and took a degree in Sanskrit and English from Bombay University. His working life was unusually various even by the standards of his generation: he worked as a professional big-game hunter, served in the Maratha Light Infantry through the Second World War and rose to lieutenant colonel, was employed in army intelligence, and afterwards ran a manganese mine. He stood unsuccessfully for the Lok Sabha. He turned to writing in his forties, and his fiction draws directly on the army, the princely states, the hunt, and the violence of 1947. He lived for most of his later life at his ancestral home in Jagalbet in the Western Ghats, and continued writing history and journalism until shortly before his death in 2010.
A Bend in the Ganges
The novel opens in 1937 with Gian Talwar, who believes in Gandhian non-violence, and Debi Dayal, son of a wealthy industrialist, who belongs to a revolutionary group committed to armed struggle. Gian is drawn into a family blood feud and kills a man; both men end up in the penal settlement in the Andaman Islands, where Gian's non-violence has already collapsed and where the prisoners' hierarchy and the arrival of the Japanese complete their disillusion. Released, they return to a subcontinent moving towards Partition. Debi Dayal's sister Sundari is at the centre of the later sections. The novel closes in the communal killing of 1947, in which the abstractions both men lived by are destroyed by actual violence, and in which the non-violent and the revolutionary alike are reduced to survival.
The novel's structure sets Gandhian ahimsa and revolutionary violence against each other as intellectual positions and then subjects both to what happened, and the epigraph from the Ramayana about a bend in the river signals the shape: the movement is not from ignorance to enlightenment but from ideology to a bloodier realism. Malgonkar's method is plain, fast, and plotted — he was a professional storyteller rather than a stylist, and his critics say so — but the treatment of Partition violence is unusually unflinching for its date and refuses to allocate blame communally. Distant Drum, drawn from his own service, is the first serious Indian English novel of army life, and The Princes examines the extinction of the princely states from inside.
Why Malgonkar Matters
Malgonkar is the major Indian English novelist of Partition alongside Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan, and A Bend in the Ganges is a standard set text on Partition literature, where its refusal of both the Gandhian and the revolutionary consolations distinguishes it. He is also the only significant Indian English novelist to write the army and the princely states from direct experience, which makes him useful on questions about the social range of the tradition.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Distant Drum1960
- Combat of Shadows1962
- The Princes1963
- A Bend in the Ganges1964
- The Devil's Wind1972
- The Men Who Killed Gandhi1978