It is perhaps easy enough to understand why anglophone Indian novels of the 1930s and 1940s are called Gandhian novels. Aside from the long shadow that Gandhi casts on all aspects of late-colonial India, the literature of the period also bears heavy traces of the Mahatma. Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable not only includes a long speech by Gandhi as its climax, the entire novel was rewritten after a conversation with Gandhi. Moorthy the main character in Raja Rao's Kanthapura, is affectionately called the “Little Mountain,” a reference to the fact that he is the local lieutenant of the Mahatma, whom the villagers have dubbed the “Big Mountain.” The other novels of the period, like Bhabhani Bhattacharya's So Many Hungers (1947) and R. K. Narayan's Swami and Friends (1935), involved Gandhian-style agitations and Congress rallies. The cumulative effect has been to see the literary period in the era immediately preceding independence, as one critic has described it, as the “Gandhian whirlwind.”

But there is a problem with this historiographical procedure: none of the novelists in question would have called themselves Gandhian. Anand was a social democrat, uncomfortable with Gandhian ideas about religion; Rao disagreed with many of Gandhi's ideas about women and politics, joining up with Trotskyist groups in the early 1930s; and Ali, probably the closest politically to Gandhi of all of the writers of the period, was never involved in nationalist politics but is left out of the canon altogether, partly because he is a Muslim and partly because he ended up in Pakistan after partition.