ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the cultural and ideological understanding of the achievements of revolutionary violence, a violence that the revolutionary claimed to undertake as the minimum required in a quest for justice, community and freedom. Symmetric to political freedom, the sexual too is rehabilitated from the adulteration of repressive convention, and the strangeness of abruptly liberated desire takes the subject into new realms of sexual and social self-making. A modified and expanded version of Premchand's large-canvas social realism stays on in one of the novelists discussed, Yashpal but even in Yashpal, this realism is infused with new themes of love and ever more militant characters trying to outdo each other in their self-perceived radicalism. The literary-epistemological force of the most influential of narrative genres such as that of the Puranas and their commentaries helped articulate a hybrid moral literary epistemology that carries weight in India. The costly disentanglement of Hindi from Urdu and eloquently mourned, in the scholarly literature.
