Background

The late nineteenth century was a period of tremendous change aspolitical empires broke up, nationalism arose, the power of themiddle class replaced that of the aristocracy, and colonialismflourished.The Industrial Revolution greatly changed the socialand economic structure as steam engines increased the speed oftransportation and manufacturing drew the population to urbanareas.Despite tendencies toward liberty, growing middle-classvalues, and industrial progress, opposition emerged thatchallenged the assumptions of the new social and political orderand revolted against the material consequences of the IndustrialRevolution.Although there were efforts to revive religiousinterest, generally institutional religion diminished ininfluence in the late nineteenth century and was replaced bypersonal spiritual, moral, or philosophical beliefs.By the latenineteenth century, colonialism had expanded so that 67 percentof the earth fell under European rule, with the most concentratedimperial efforts directed at Africa.Literature emerged as theartistic medium that best expressed the social, economic, andphilosophical concerns of the day, moving away from the issuesand styles associated with Romanticism earlier in the century.

Late-nineteenth-century writers moved toward a new style called “realism”

Introduction: Artists and writers strove for detailedrealistic and factual description. They tried to represent eventsand social conditions as they actually are, without idealization.This form of literature believes in fidelity to actuality in itsrepresentation. Realism is about recreating life in literature.Realism arose as an opposing idea to Idealism and Nominalism. Idealismis the approach to literature of writing about everything in its idealfrom. Nominalism believes that ideas are only names and have nopractical application. Realism focused on the truthful treatmentof the common, average, everyday life. Realism focuses on theimmediate, the here and now, the specific actions and their

verifiable consequences. Realism seeks a one-to-one relationshipbetween representation and the subject. This form is also knownas mimesis. Realists are concerned with the effect of the work ontheir reader and the reader's life, a pragmatic view. Pragmatismrequires the reading of a work to have some verifiable outcomefor the reader that will lead to a better life for the reader.This lends an ethical tendency to Realism while focusing oncommon actions and minor catastrophes of middle class society.

Realism aims to interpret the actualities of any aspect of life,free from subjective prejudice, idealism, or romantic color. Itis in direct opposition to concerns of the unusual, the basis ofRomanticism. Stresses the real over the fantastic. Seeks to treatthe commonplace truthfully and used characters from everydaylife. This emphasis was brought on by societal changes such asthe aftermath of the Civil War in the United States and theemergence of Darwin's Theory of Evolution and its effect uponbiblical interpretation.Hence,according to differentwriters,realism is,

Where romanticists transcend the immediate to find the ideal, and naturalistsplumb the actual or superficial to find the scientific laws that control its actions,realists center their attention to a remarkable degree on the immediate, the hereand now, the specific action, and the verifiable consequence. William Harmonand Hugh Holman

Amy Kaplan has called realism a "strategy for imagining and managing the threats of social change"

As a result,the faithful representation of reality" it also denotes a particular kindof subject matter, especially the representation of middle-class life.

Realism in other field:

Paintings:

Courbet was strongly opposed to idealization in his art, and heurged other artists to instead make the commonplace andcontemporary the focus of their art. He viewed the frankportrayal of scenes from everyday life as a truly democraticart..

Literature: Realism’s emphasis on detachment, objectivity, andaccurate observation, its lucid but restrained criticism ofsocial environment and mores, and the humane understanding thatunderlay its moral judgments became an integral part of thefabric of the modern novel during the height of that form’sdevelopment. Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and George Eliotin England, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky inRussia, William Dean Howells in the United States, and GottfriedKeller and the early Thomas Mann in Germany all incorporatedrealist elements in their novels. A significant offshoot ofliterary realism was Naturalism, a late 19th- and early 20th-century movement that aimed at an even more faithful andunselective representation of reality. The French novelistÉmileZola was the leading exponent of Naturalism.

Theatre was a general movement in the later 19th century thatsteered theatrical texts and performances toward greater fidelityto real life. The realist dramatists Henrik Ibsen and AugustStrindberg in Scandinavia and Anton Chekhov and Maksim Gorky inRussia, among others, rejected the complex and artificialplotting of the well-made play and instead treated themes andconflicts belonging to a real, contemporary society. Theydispensed with poetic language and extravagant diction, insteadusing action and dialogue that looked and sounded like everydaybehaviour and speech. Realism had no use for the declamatorydelivery and the overblown virtuosity of past acting and replacedthis style with one demanding natural movements, gestures, andspeech. Realist drama also used stage settings that accuratelyreproduced ordinary surroundings.

Motion pictures:  The nature of film, however, has lent itself toa kind of realism halfway between life and fiction. Such films,called Neorealism in Italy and sometimes cinéma vérité in France,tried to achieve a documentary-like objectivity by using non-actors in leading roles and incorporating segments of actualdocumentary footage into the story.

Kinds Of Realism

Presentational Realism: A book can be realistic in one sense, andequally unrealistic in another sense. Lewis explains that realism ofpresentation depends on how things are presented to us. If they’re presented ordescribed in detail, if we get a vivid sense of how they look, orfeel, or taste, or smell, he says, we’re dealing with somesort of “presentational realism.”

Content Realism:If realism of presentation is expressed through physicaldescription, then realism of content is expressed through the plot. If the events ofthe plot seem true to life, the sort of thing that might actually happen to peoplelike you, people you knowthen, Lewis says, the work is “realistic in content.”

Psychological Realism:which is closely tied to the treatmentand development of the characters.A psychological realist tries to giveus a persuasive account of how the characters think and feel. Psychologicalrealists often trace feelings back to past experiences, suggesting that the humanpersonality is formed in childhood and early adolescence.In thinking aboutpsychological realism, then, you should probably be looking for the sort of thingyou get from authors like Faulkner and Woolf: internal conflicts, an interest intracing such conflicts back to their origins, and an obsession with the innerworkings of the mind.

Moral Realism:In works fitting this description, characterswho appear to be selfish usually turn out to be motivated byinsecurity or fear. In the end, it may be impossible tolabel any of the characters as a hero or a villain, a good

guy or a bad guy. Works of moral realism do not ask us to dispense withmorality; they just want us to move beyond snap judgments. How do you knowthat people don’t have good reasons for doing bad things? What makes you sosure that you’re incapable of doing those same things yourself? These are thesorts of questions raised by works of moral realism.

Magic Realism: These magical elements are explained likenormal occurrences that are presented in a straightforwardmanner which allows the "real" and the "fantastic" to beaccepted in the same stream of thought. It has been widelyconsidered a literary and visual art genre; creative fieldsthat exhibit less significant signs of magic realism includefilm and music.

Social Realism: Social Realism, an international artmovement, refers to the work of painters, printmakers,photographers and filmmakers who draw attention to theeveryday conditions of the working classes and the poor, andwho are critical of the social structures that maintainthese conditions. 

Characteristics of Realism

Renders reality closely and in comprehensive detail.Selective presentation of reality with an emphasis onverisimilitude, even at the expense of a well-made plot

Character is more important than action and plot; complexethical choices are often the subject.

Characters appear in their real complexity of temperamentand motive; they are in explicable relation to nature, toeach other, to their social class, to their own past.

Class is important; the novel has traditionally served theinterests and aspirations of an insurgent middle class.

Events will usually be plausible. Realistic novels avoid thesensational, dramatic elements of naturalistic novels andromances.

Diction is natural vernacular, not heightened or poetic;tone may be comic, satiric, or matter-of-fact.

Objectivity in presentation becomes increasingly important:overt authorial comments or intrusions diminish as thecentury progresses.

Interior or psychological realism a variant form. Empirically verifiable Time marches inevitably on; small things build up. Climax is

not a crisis, but just one more unimportant fact. Causality built into text (why something happens

foreshadowed). Foreshadowing in everyday events. Representative people doing representative things Insistence on experience of the commonplace Emphasis on morality, usually intrinsic, relativistic

between people and society The subject matter of Realism is drawn from "our

experience," - it treated the common, the average, the non-extreme, the representative, the probable.

The Realists generally reject the kind of symbolismsuggested by Emerson when he said "Every natural fact is a symbol ofsome spiritual fact." Their use of symbolism is controlled andlimited; they depend more on the use of images.

Realistic Techniques

Settings thoroughly familiar to the writer Plots emphasizing the norm of daily experience Ordinary characters, studied in depth Complete authorial objectivity Responsible morality; a world truly reported

Comparison of characteristic of Romanticism andrealism

Attention todetail

Romanticism

generic,typical,symbolic

Realism

specific detailof time andplace in history

Settingsrural,pastoral,domestic;oftenidealized

urban, time-specific

Speech, diction

elevated,florid,archaic, bookish, abstract references(e.g. honor)

common vernacular, dialects, concrete references (e.g., money, food, shelter, decor)

Human figure heroicindividualism

limiting socialrelations

Characterization heroes mixed

villains, oppressors underdogs

characterizations, shared guilt or responsibility

Criticism On Realism

Advantages:  Realism is faithful to our experience of lifelived in a physical and social environment, and governed bycauses and effects. The most powerful argument for realismis that it represents life as we live it -- sequential,contextualized, rooted in the concrete. It can be arguedthat realism is to be found everywhere in literature,especially when the high mimetic forms such as the epic giveway to a feel for the life of the common person -- inScripture, in comedy, in historical texts, in fabliaux.

Realism brings us close to the physical, to our materialexistence, and so is less likely than other forms ofrepresentation to be distorted by ideology or mystification.It is responsible directly to the life we recognize that welive.

The language we speak in our ordinary life -- ourexplanations, our accounts, our vocabulary -- is the samekind of language-use that one finds in realism.

Problems to Realism:

M. Zola sits down to give us a picture of the Second Empire. Who cares for the Second Empire now? It is out of date. Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism is always

in front of Life.”  Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying

Representation in language is often tropic -- we use metonyms, metaphors, irony. These all lead away from, ratherthan toward, any sense that one can say that the writing is a transparent, reliable representation of what actually is.

The argument is made that the 'reality-effect' of realism,its apparent objectivity, concretion and neutral view-point, make realism a dangerous form: better to have a wayof representation, the thinking goes, which eitherforegrounds the problems of representation, or at leastdoes not pretend that it is objective. The 'objective,'distanced voice of the realist narrator, it is argued, is aultimately a dishonesty which masks the ideologicalcommitments of the text.

Realism forms and enforces a world without a genuinespiritual dimension, a world of place and time, and so hasinherent limitations as a form; it has for instance seriouslimitations in its capacity to represent the spiritualbeing of humankind. This argument seems opposed to theprevious one, as 'the spiritual in man' may be amystification, but it is a dimension that humans have oftenlonged to express and live in, and realism, with itsdevotion to a world of physicality and the everyday, haslittle room for it.

Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not takeinto account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death,astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is inour dreams, in the imagination.” Eugène Ionesco

Application of Realism On God’s Own Land(Khuda kiBasti) – Shaukat Saddiqi,Translated by:David JMatthews

Shaukat Siddiqi,one of the most talented modern urduwriters,chose to live in Pakistan after the partition ofsubcontinent.The newly created society,which he observed inminute detail,provided him with an abundance of material for hiswork.His most famous novel,Khuda Ki Basti,here translated underthe title of God’s own Land,concentrates on the poorer,seamierside of life as he saw it after his arrival in the promisedcountry.Unemployment,corruption,brutuality and degradation arethe themes which dominate his history.Sadly these are very realfacts of life which can be witnessed by any visitor to Pakistanin the stress of its teeming cities.

As some characteristics of realistic writing have been discussed in thispaper.Thus,the following questions will help us to analyse the realistic aspects ofthis novel.All the questions are derived from the features of realism.

Q1: Are the characters true to life? Is there an accurate reflection of the human condition and contemporary life without stereotyping?

Ans:The life of ordinary people in the aftermath ofpartition,the large number of real people who suffered and whoare always on the brink-trying their best upon their misfortunebut whose efforts is thwarted.The dreams of teenage boys andstreet kids and their language,their life style resemble to thoseof really existing style of those people.The story ofyoung,teenage Sultana whose dreams die young and poverty forcesher mother to let her elope with her suitor but even he doesn’tturn up and her mother has to marry her to that person who hasbad eye on her.Sultana’s brother,Nausha,who works at a mechanic’s

workshop is fired.He runs away but lands up in juvenile home fromwhere he goes to a pick pocket’s school.One of hisfriend,Raja,who pushes a cart for beggar meets with a tragicfate.Though raja was the one who motivates nausha to leave theLahore for Karachi to embitter their future but circumstancescrushhisfate.Rather,eunuchs,thieves(raja,nausha),sodomites,catamites,pickpockets,beggars,streetchildren,activists,junk dealer(niyaz)and so many other move along,thye’re all true to life.We feelthem walking along ourside.

Q2: Does the plot appeal to young adults; address the challenges, hopes, and fears as well as the problems faced by contemporary adolescents?Ans:All the situation is depicted accurately.It is accordancewith the contemporary situation.When the novel was written thesociety was such miserable.The society was the victim ofcorruption and declination of ethical values,hence,we see suchelements’as it is’in the novel.The whole plot revolves aroundmajor characters;raja,who after being trapped by doctor’strick(selling his leg and making him handicapped),longs for deathand force to beg.Nausha,who kills his innocence and murdersvillainous character Niyaz for the sake of honor.Nausha runs awayfrom the house since childhood and caught by entrepreneurs whoexploited his childhood.Nausha’s adolescent and Raja’s passionateyouth both are murdered by harsh realities..Salman’s hope forbetter society turns into dismal after the ruining of Skylark atthe hand of khan bahadur-authorotative figure.The novel scarcelydeals with the plot it is as if depicting the life as it ispresented in those days

Q3: Does the plot ask readers to consider or reconsidertheir own values and beliefs?

Ans:The tragic death of Raja,Sulatana’s fate,Nausha’s murderingNiyaz and the conspired murder of Sulatan’s mother,Annu’s

throwing form the house at such little age,the Nausha’s yearningfor hanging as’Hang me,Hang me,I’ve had enough of this life!’Salman’s plea’Whata society!’Children’s involving in labour at young age and the urgeto survive and live luxuriously which turn out a failure andcause a tragedy.These all factors force to think us that oursociety and our beliefs are so morally devoided that we arenourishing the doomed nation.We move with plight of everycharacter’s tragedy.We feel depression after reading such heavynovel that describe the direct reality with no glamorizedelements.Nayaz who is a junk dealer take support of his corruptnature and becomes the favourite of nasty Bahadur khan and livesin big house and keeps Sultana as his concubine-after even beinghis step-father.Our values are questioned because cruel Niyaz andsexually abused Sultana and these Raja and Nausha are the samecharacters we see around us.

Q4: Is the setting believable?

Ans:Slums of Karachi and Lahore are perfectly described.Thelittle wretched house is aptly described with the miserablecharacters.They don’t live in palace while having poor life.Thepoor characters like those of raja,shami,Nausha live inlittle.old,worn-out houses.Where as Salman lives in normalflat.They’re described as having a tough life.So,settings andarrangements are like wise.But when we are introduced to Bahadurkhan,we see his glamorized life style.We see those mafias whokidnap children and compel them to beg in a hut.Hence,everycharacter’s house,dressing,dialogue is accurately suit him.

Q5:The language of Novel is real?

Ans:The language is very real.Writer pays closely attention tothe minute gesture of characters so that they may seem real.Forexample,Salman’s boss,Jafri calls him Solomon,because of hisinability to speak urdu with proper accent.Even in this

translated work,we see some specific expression to keep alive theenthusiasm of real feeling.Some words are:amma,apa,mauzin,khudahafiz,Jinnah cap(refrence to Quaid’shat),burqa,qazi,zindabad,etc.These and so many urdu words in thistranslated version inspires a new soul to the novel and proves itto be real.The language used by beggar is coarse and rough.Andthe language used by upper strata is refined.Niyaz,who speaksslang words at start tries to use fine words and vocabulary.Thisis a true phenomenon used by people who transforms into newclass.

Q6:What kinds of realism has been used in the novel?

Ans:We see the social realism, psychological realism in major.The wholesociety is shattering by days and its influence can be seenclearly on the lives of characters.They endure thetragedy.Society has been divided into two classes:upper class andlower class with no middle class.This creates the climax when wesee the upper strata exploiting lower class and lower class beingthe target of sufferings.The one character,Annu,for example,whentries to survive,he:

And this was true.The night Annu had run away from the tonga-driver,he fellStraight into the arms of eunuch,Banno,who in his old age has given up theprofession and now acted as a procurer.He was now preferred to catch youngboys….sold them off to gentleman of taste.

The society where thses characters live was morallytainted.Sexual abuses is too the theme of novel,from which bothAnnu and Sulatana suffer.This portrays the society truly.And theSky Lark’s future become inpredectible when the villanious KhanBahadur wins the elections cunningly.

That wretched man had become chairman of the municipality and,havingacquired the directorship of several companies,now had aspirations to become aminister in the government….The Sky Lark society had become a thorn in Khan

Bahadur’s side,and he was now threatening to have the whole lot of them jailedunder the security act.

This truly happens!SkyLark is a sign of struggle against thecorruption which,at last,breathes its last when he wins theelections.In the Pakistan’s society this phenomenon can be easilyobserved when the good one’s destiny is exploited by the bad onethrough authority.Hence,these are a few aspects of socialrealism.

The next is Psychological realism.Nausha,under thisinfluence,kills the Niyaz.He murders him and when his sisterstops him from surrendering he goes forward to police station tohurt her more.Raja when becomes hampered starts thinking abouthis death.The psychology of people were portrayedpesimistically.They expect the worst because they see thatsociety has nothing to give them.So we feel the same pessimism inthe character of Raja when he says:

When human beings turn their back on you,atleast you can make friends with ananimal

I am afraid I get rid of this rotten life oneday!

Rakshanda cheats salman and it rises various conflicts in him.Hegoes back to the Sky Lark but it’s no longer is the same Sky Larkas it used to be.In the end,he feels tired of his life,too andsimultaneously,disappointed with the society.Sultana sees thedeath of her mother which is actually the death of hershelter,she sees the rejection by Salman to whom she loves,so shehands over herself to Niyaz and psychologically,she spends goodday with him.But right after his death,she again suffers fromsexual abuse by the hired men of Bahadur Khan.The other minorkinds as content realism and presentational realism is obviouswhen writer describes the setting and places through hiswords,e.g:slum.All characters are from the real life,they think

what a real a real person can think in such situations.So theelement of probability is there which makes God’s Own Land arealistic fiction.

Q7:What are major themes of novel that makes it real?

Ans:Themes are true to life.They are chosen by Shaukat Sidiqirationaly.The novel is written in 1950 but the abservant can seethose realities uptill now.Major theme is poverty.Every characterstruggles to earn and live.The circumstances are so rough thatpeople inclines towards the immorality.Mother marries herdaughter to the person who has no match with her but because heearns well,she agree for marriage.Other theme is of childlabour.Three children runs from their houses in the search ofmoney.They work hard when their ages are ranged to 13 and 14.Thisis the age of their study not of doing labour.But they’rehelpless.And in this search of money they get trapped tosmugglers who manipulate them.The other is sexual abuse.Sulatanaand Annu both sees it.Corruption is the theme on which the wholenovel is based.Bahadur khan destroys the Sky Lark and it’spurpose.He wins elections by deceiving people.Corruption dividesthe society into unequal classes that creates the wholeclimax.Immorality is shown in the novel realistically.Unfaithfulrakshanda is they symbol of immmoraity when she deceivesSalman.Niyaz is immoral when he keeps Sultana as hismistress.Raja when asks a man how to be rich,the man’s leering winkis immoral.Fayyaz when flirts with Sulatana and tells falsly tomarry her is immoral.Annu when being sexually harrased by tongadriver,is immoral.There are so many minute things described bywriter that raise the question on the immorality ofnation.Injustice was,too,prevailing in the society.It was the maincrux of all issues.Corruption and injustice are interwined hencecan be easily observed.These all themes make the novel

realistic.We feel as if all the characters are walking aroundus.Our imagination doesn’t feel any hinderance while reflectingon characters because they’re so true to contemporary life.

Conclusion

Hence,all characters are empirically verifiable,the deeply movingtragedy is invetiable.The story includes all those elements ofrealistic writings that we have discussed above.All inall,Shaukat Sidiqi has aptly drawn the picture of realisticsociety in his novel.We can sum up this discussion by theseverses:

Khuda ki basti mein khuda k bando pe kiya guzri

Khuda par yakin hai lekin khuda ki basti per nahi….

‘God gave us our country;we toil and we plod

We can’t trust our land;but we trust in our God…

Refrences

Realisticevolution.com

Wikipedia.com

Google.com

Handbook of realism(ebook)

Jstor.com

Goodreads.com

Webopedia.com

Brittenica.com

Realismphilosophy.com

Khuda ki basti/God’s Own Land-Shaukat Sidiqitranslated by David J Mathew.

Assignment-Realism and it’s Application

Submitted to:Ma’m Madha

Submitted by:Syeda Zainab Kubra

Roll no:11021502-012

B.s(hons):English

Semester:6th

Date:4/25/2014

Govt.College for Women University,Sialkot.

Contents

Background

Introduction

Realism in other art’s fields

Kinds of Realism

Characteristics of Realism

Application of Realism on God’s Own Land

Summary of the Novel

Questions-analyzing it as a realistic piece of work

Conclusion

References

Summary

Shaukat Siddiqi's best known work is the epic novel God's Own Land (Khuda KiBasti) which has been translated into 26 languages. In God's Own Land, theyoung women Sultana and her hapless brother Annu survive one calamityafter another, including the medically facilated murder of their mother byher second husband. The vulnerability of a family with no protectivefather at the head is shown as it falls apart with the children exploitedin every way by characters who are always lurking around thecorner.Raja,Shami and Nausha left their houses with the hope of betterfuture.Shami gets scared and turn back but the raja and nausha leaves forKarachi where they are kidnapped by a smuggler who used them for thepurpose of decoite.However,raja proves to be a traitor as he couldn’tsteal the things from peopls’e house so the master beats him well,as aresult he loses his leg and lives the rest of his life begging.Nausha,onthe other hand,turn out to be a great thief,He faces hard times-fraudingpeople and his jailing.When he turns to his house,he comes to know thefact that his sister has married to his step-father,Niyaz.He came to knowthis fact by shami,who is now a rikshaw driver.But he tells him a rumorthat his sister,sultana supported Niyaz to kill his mother and now she isa concubine to niyaz.This urges nausha to murder the niyaz.Salman,a youthwho too like other characters fall a prey of realistic harsh realities.Hefirst face unemployment and loves sultana but rejects her for the care ofsociety’s doubts and blames.He supported Sky Lark,an NGO,which afterwardsgets spoilt by political figures.Salman’s wife proves to be unfaithful tohim and cheat on him.Salman at the end leaves the skylark and go to hismaster,Ahmed Ali,where he realizes that he has married the wretched andpoor Sultana,who is now the mother of a baby.Nausha in the charge ofNiyaz’s murder was given a life sentence.Raja dies at the end as he ishandicapped.Thus,all the characters suffer from the very start of thenovel till the end.Their characters develop throughout the novel.They werenaïve at the start but at the end they were miserable and tragic.As it issaid:

One of the bestsellers of the 60s, God's Own Land (Khuda Ki Basti) needs nointroduction for the true readership of classic Urdu literature. According to thelife portrayed, the characterization is very appropriately manoeuvred. Focus on

injustice and evil and other vices of the society has been made with immense

clarity" Dawn, Karachi