Assignment Contemporary Literature

Name: Hirva Pandya

Roll No.: 10

Enrollment No.: 4069206420210022

Paper no: 207

Paper code: 22414

Paper name: Contemporary Literature 

Sem.: 4 (Batch 2021- 2023)

Submitted to: Smt S.B. Gardi Department of English, M.K. Bhavnagar University

About Author

Chetan Bhagat

Chetan Baghat, a rising star in the contemporary modern Indian literature, is a multitalented personality. He is a novelist, columnist, public speaker and a screenplay writer. His notable works include Five Point Someone, The 3 Mistakes of My Life and 2 States.Most of his literary works address the issues related to Indian youth and their aspirations which earned Baghat status of the youth icon.

Works of Chetan Bhagat

Five Point Someone instantly became both literary and commercial success. Baghat reached at the zenith of his popularity with his debut that was later turned into a critically acclaimed film titled, 3 Idiots (2009). It was followed by his second equally successful novel, One Night At A Call Center. In fact, it was adapted for big-screen as Hello and Baghat himself wrote the screenplay. However, the adaptation failed to capture audience’s attention and called a flop. In 2008, he penned The 3 Mistakes of My Life, which is based on the all-time favorite Indian sports, cricket. The novel garnered positive reviews and the film adaptation released in 2013, Kai Po Che!, became a hit.

, 2 States: The Story of My Marriage, is a autobiographical novel that focuses on the prevailing issue of interstate marriage in India. It is based on Baghat’s and his wife’s own experience, who like the protagonist of the novel relentlessly tried to convince their respective families of different casts to approve of their marriage. The book highlights the conservative mindset shared by several sects in Indian states which prohibit marriage outside their cast. The book and its film adaptation was a major success. Baghat wrote two more books; Revolution 2020 (2011), and What Young India Wants (2012). Additionally, he received Society Young Achiever’ award, Publisher’s Recognition award and Filmfare Award for Best Screenplay.

About Novel

Revolution 2020 is a gripping and fast paced novel about love, corruption and ambition. The story delves into the underbelly of a small town, Varanasi, and explores the various hues in the characters of the protagonists in it. Bhagat unearths the darker side of the education system, and for that matter, love too.

In the small and historic town of Varanasi in India, two boys Raghav and Gopal fall in love with the same girl, Aarti. Both of them are intelligent, ambitious and are the best of friends, but destiny has something else in store for them. One of them wants to use his intelligence to make a lot of money and the other wants to create a revolution; but again, their plans are disrupted by their love.

Gopal hails from a poor family and fails to get an admission to the best engineering colleges in the country. Heartbroken, he moves to Kota for a year to prepare for the exams. Raghav comes from a well-to-do family and achieves a good rank in JEE. Delighted, he joins IIT-BHU, one of the premier institutes of India, and embarks on his ambition to become a journalist. Aarti hails from a powerful bureaucratic family, and her aim is to become an airhostess. Aarti falls in love with Raghav while Gopal is at Kota.

The story starts when Gopal rises as the director of a new engineering college opened in Varanasi, with the power of MLA Shukla, a corrupt politician. He uses the legally strangled land of his uncle to manipulate and build the college. Raghav, on the other hand, completes his engineering and joins the largest selling newspaper Dainik as an intern. He starts shedding light on all the wrongdoings of Shukla and exposes him in public.

Things take a different turn when Aarti starts developing a soft corner for Gopal.

Who will win her love towards the end?

Will Raghav’s crusade against the corrupt system fail?

Revolution 2020 is a gripping story of love, the corrupt educational system and clashing ambitions.

Revolution 2020 got mixed reviews from critics and readers. The book turned out to be yet another bestseller from the Chetan Bhagat stable.

Narrative Technique  in Novel

Chetan Bhagat used Gerald  Gentte  technique to describe the novel plot, climax and many other things.it is starts with prologue  and end with epilogue. 

Story time: Order

Genette divides the temporal relationships between fabula and story into three types:

we will study relations between the time of the story and the (pseudo-) time of the narrative

according to what seem to me to be three essential determinations: connections between the temporal order of succession of the events in the story and the pseudo-temporal order of their

arrangement in the narrative . . . ; connections between the variable duration of these events

orstory sections and the pseudo-duration (in fact, length of text) of their telling in the

narrative--connections, thus, of speed . . . ; finally, connections of frequency, that is . . . relations between the repetitive capacities of the story and those of the narrative

In the novel Revolution  2020 the order is like

protagonist is already rich person when he narrates his life events – flashback to childhood, struggle to clear AIEEE & JEE, life at Kota, poverty, father’s ill-health & death, nexus with MLA Shukla-ji, starting Ganga Tech College, ups-downs in relations with Aarti and Raghav.

Story Time: Duration

Narrative duration or speed is defined by Genette as "the connections between the

variable duration of these events or story sections and the pseudo-duration (in fact, length of their telling in the narrative"  This definition disregards, as Genette's

model does as a rule, the complexity of discourse structures. At textual level, time maybe fictionalised; the telling of the story may be a story in itself, and the time of the fabulamay be measured with respect to this fictional time which surrounds the act of narration.

Genette's "narrative time" is ambiguous: it may refer both to the idealised reading time or

to the represented time in which the narrative discourse unfolds. As this fictional time

may have its variations of order, duration and aspect, the formula for story duration may

be extremely complex. This only means that time can be subjected in narrative to aninfinite modulation. But while a small amount of experimental narratives seek to explore

the complexities which underlie the representation of time, most narratives yield

themselves to analysis using Genette's system of story durations. 

In the novel Revolution 2020 Bhagat used the Duration time Narrative time: One Single Day – around 24 hours

Discourse time: Approximately from the age of 10 years to the age to 26 years of Gopal: 16 years of discourse time

Frequency

Genette defines frequency as the relationship between the repetitive capacities of the

fabula and those of the story. As we noted in our first section, the notion of repetition

depends on identity, and this is an operative concept. Repeated elements are being

considered insofar as they are alike; this does not mean that there are no differences

between them  Genette speaks of three types of frequency:

singulative, which involves a one-to one relationship between fabula events and their

rendering in the story; repetitive, when the same event in the fabula is narrated a number

of times (for instance, from a variety of perspectives), and iterative, when the story

gathers into a common mention a number of similar occurrences in the story. Proustian

narrative, according to Genette, is dominated by iterativity. Bal (Narratologie 129f)

notes the possibility of yet another movement, half-way between the singulative and the

iterative, when the story narrates a number of times an event which is itself repetitive 

In the novel Revolution  2020 Bhagat uses The separation between an event and its narration allows several possibilities.

An event can occur once and be narrated once (singular).

An event can occur n times and be narrated once (iterative).

An event can occur once and be narrated n times (repetitive).

An event can occur n times and be narrated times 

[Events: JEE/AIEEE, father’s death, poor life, starting a private college etc]

Work cited:

“Book Summary of Revolution 2020.” Awadhplaza, 18 Aug. 2012, https://awadhplaza.wordpress.com/2012/08/18/book-summary-of-revolution-2020/.

“Chetan Bhagat.” Chetan Bhagat | Biography, Books and Facts, https://www.famousauthors.org/chetan-bhagat.

Time structure in the story: Gérard Genette, 'narrative discourse ... (n.d.). Retrieved March 29, 2023, from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318041820_Time_Structure_in_the_Story_Gerard_Genette_'Narrative_Discourse'_Narrative_Theory_3