Rethinking the Regional Novel

In the previous chapters, I have discussed the polemics of the regional novel during the course of its evolution as a special category. An attempt was made there to trace their development in the British, Indian, and Telugu literary traditions. The British regional novel is a different phenomenon from that of the regional novel in India. Yet, there have been some important continuities in the genre. Preoccupations with landscape as also with identity conflicts have continued as distinctive components of the regional novel. As the introduction discusses, such developments are partly products of the socioeconomic milieu of the writers. In this concluding section, I return to that assertion and draw together some observations, discussions and arguments to offer my views on what might actually have gone into the making of the regional novel.

Firstly, I review the major queries regarding the nature of the "region" and the "regional novel" that have cropped up during the course of the thesis and consider how they might be explained. "There is no universally accepted definition of the region," observes Norton Ginsberg, (qtd. in Cohn 101) The study comes out with the hypothesis that the "region" cannot be given one particular identity and definition. When we come across labels like Regional College of Education, Regional Engineering College, etc, we are bound to associate the region with something local and inferior as opposed to the National and the superior. The renaming of institutes like Regional Engineering College as National Institute of Technology gives us an idea of the common assumptions

142 associated with the terms "region" and "nation". In these appellations, the region is

measured as inferior to the nation and therefore renaming it enables it to shed its smaller, provincial, local identity in favour of a broader,