Show or Tell? Instruction and Representation in Govardhanram's Saraswatichandra

Govardhanram Tripathi wrote the four-volume novel Saraswatichandra as an 'instruction manual' for a people facing fundamental social and political change during colonial rule. This article examines a shift in the conception of instruction as the text progressed through its instalments - from a notion of learning as a process of deliberation about, and experimentation with, imitable actions, to the idea of education through the representation of action - a transformation that is made conspicuous by the discordance between the widely debated and highly influential initial volumes and the largely ignored final volume. It situates this shift in broader changes in the idea of instruction in Indian society, and investigates it in order to better understand the strains involved in attempting to codify or theorize certain types of domains.