The Interpretation of Social Realism in Chinnappa Bharati's Novel "The Miners"

This article examines the artistic representation of the lives of miners, the poetics of social realism, and the features of artistic psychologism in the novel “The Miners.” The novel portrays the miners’ harsh working conditions, socio-economic dependence, poverty, occupational hazards, labour exploitation, and restrictions on human dignity through precise artistic details. The analysis reveals the artistic and psychological functions of the mine as a compositional and semantic space, as well as those of everyday detail, portraiture, landscape, metaphor, contrast, interior speech, and rhetorical questions. The changes in the miners’ consciousness—from accepting their fate to understanding their own situation and striving for collective solidarity—are analysed in terms of the psychological possibilities of social realism. The article substantiates the idea that the relationship between individual fate and the social environment constitutes one of the novel’s principal artistic problems.