Vision of the Affirmation of Life in the Novels of Bhabani Bhattacharya

Pages:100-101
Reetu Sardana (Department English, DN PG College, Hisar, Haryana)

Bhabani Bhattacharya occupies a prominent position among the Indian-English novelists. Bhattacharya believes that the novel should have a social purpose, hence his stories abound in social and historical realities, quite often bitter and gruesome, the tragedies of the freedom-struggle and partition and the evils of poverty, corruption, ignorance, superstition, exploitation, greed, sexual perversion etc. But beneath them there is almost always present the novelist’s unflinching faith in life and its invincibility, indestructibility and worthiness. What emerges prominently in almost every chapter of his novel and finally at the end of it as the pith of the world is the affirmation of life. Even in the midst of ghastly and heart-rending scenes of human sufferings and tortures, life asserts itself sparking amid ashes. From his assertion of ethical values and the synthesis of the old and the new and of opposite extremes emerges Bhabani Bhattacharya’s final vision of the affirmation of life.