Digital Age, Modernity, and the Persistence of Humanist Values in Sudha Murty's Literary Works

Journal of Research and Development Peer Reviewed International, Open Access Journal. ISSN : 2230-9578 | Website: https://jrdrvb.org Volume-17, Issue-9(III) | Sept. - 2025 148 Digital Age, Modernity, and the Persistence of Humanist Values in Sudha Murty's Literary Works Vilas Kashinath Karvande Research Scholar, Department of English and Research Centre, Waghire College of Arts, Commerce and Science, Saswad, Pune. Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune (Maharashtra State). Manuscript ID: JRD -2025(I)-170925 ISSN: 2230-9578 Volume 17 Issue 9(III)| Pp 148-151 Sept. 2025 Submitted: 12 Aug. 2025 Revised: 22 Aug. 2025 Accepted: 20 Sept. 2025 Published: 30 Sept. 2025 Abstract: Sudha Murty occupies a peculiar and powerful space in contemporary Indian letters. She is an engineer, philanthropist, corporate matron, supremely readable storyteller and Member of Parliament. As India has surged into the digital age, propelled by IT, neoliberal reforms, and mass migration to urban centres, Murty's fiction and short narratives have continued to champion a recognisably humane ethics: dignity for the ordinary, empathy as a practice, and education as emancipation. This paper examines Sudha Murty's works (post-2000), situating them within India's social and technological transformations, to explore how her humanist commitments adapt, persist, or strain under the pressures of modernity. Using close readings of representative novels and story-collections alongside contextual socio-cultural analysis, I argue that Murty's writing performs two linked moves: first it updates a moral repertoire for a digitally connected India - teaching readers how to remain humane when lives are mediated by screens, slippages of class mobility, and corporate logics and second it sometimes flattens structural critique into moral example, raising critical questions about the limits of literary humanism in addressing systemic injustice. The paper contends that Sudha Murty's work is vital not because it dissolves the tensions of modernity, but because it insists, often stubbornly, that human values remain necessary guides for everyday life in India's techno-modern present. Keywords: Digital age, Modernity, Human values. Introduction: The digital age refers to the time period in which personal computers and other subsequent technologies were introduced to users. This helped to increase work ability and simplify work, use of the digital technology, such as computers, the internet, and mobile devices, and the consequent shift from an industrial to an information-based economy. The age signifies a profound transformation in how people work, communicate, access information, and interact with the world, leading to changes in society, business, and culture. But, in this digital and modern age, people are losing human values, treating each other inhumanely, and becoming alienated day by day. As John Green states, people forget to love each other and use technology: “People were created to be loved. Technology is created to be used. The reason why the world is in chaos is because technology is being loved and people are being used.” - John Green Sudha Murty, a prominent writer, a woman trained in engineering and computer science, and a philanthropist, a key public figure through her philanthropy with the Infosys Foundation, and now she is a member of parliament. She has described all her experiences in her novels, short stories, children's tales, and memoiristic essays. Her corpus, prolific and varied, includes novels such as Mahashweta, Gently Falls the Bakula, House of Cards, Dollar Bahu, and a wide constellation of children's books and essays that have reached millions across languages. Quick Response Code: Website: https://jrdrvb.org/ DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.16885235 Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) This is an open access journal, and articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License, which allows others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work noncommercially, as long as appropriate credit is given and the new creations ae licensed under the idential terms. Address for correspondence: Vilas Kashinath Karvande , Research Scholar, Department of English and Research Centre, Waghire College of Arts, Commerce and Science, Saswad, Pune. How to cite this article: V. K. Karvande. (2025).Digital Age, Modernity, and the Persistence of Humanist Values in Sudha Murty's Literary Works. Journal of Research & Development, 17(9(III),148-151 Original Article Journal of Research and Development Peer Reviewed International, Open Access Journal. ISSN : 2230-9578 | Website: https://jrdrvb.org Volume-17, Issue-9(III) | Sept. - 2025 149 Her public lifetied to the growth of India's information-technology sector and to large-scale philanthropic projects informs the ethical scaffolding of her fiction. She writes as someone who believes institutions, education, and individual acts of compassion produce social uplift. Critics and readers alike often describe Sudha Murty's prose as deceptively simple. Her sentences are plain, plots unadorned, and characters unpretentious, yet this simplicity is strategic. In an age when narrative attention is divided by smartphones, social media, and the cacophony of marketdriven culture, her style performs pedagogical work. It becomes an accessible ethical primer, how to act decently when social life is increasingly mediated by technology, market incentives, and often precarious mobility. This paper examines how Sudha Murty's later writings translate humanist values into a modern idiom and where this translation falters by under-theorizing structural conditions. Sudha Murty and Humanism: In Indian writing and Indian Humanism, Sudha Murty’s role is as a moral storyteller, a writer who foregrounds ordinary ethical dilemmas, often against domestic backdrops. Critics have noted her didactic tendencies, especially in children's books, and praised her capacity to make moral reflection available to broad audiences. Recently, reviewers and readers have discussed Murty as a comfort reader, an author who reaffirms a stable ethical universe at a time of social churn. Such assessments, however, have not fully interrogated how her work responds to the specific technologies and socioeconomic shifts of the digital age: the rise of the IT elite alongside persistent rural precarity, the displacements caused by urbanization, and the proliferation of digital culture that reshapes social relations. This paper fills that gap by linking textual readings to a contextual understanding of India's techno-social transformations. Research Methodology: This study examines a selection of Murty's English-language novels and shorter works published or reissued in the twenty-first century alongside her collections of essays and children's narratives. Representative texts include House of Cards (2013), Dollar Bahu (reissued and read afresh in contemporary contexts), The Day I Stopped Drinking Milk (a collection of essays that offers autobiographical and ethical reflections), and The Gopi Diaries (a later children's series that engages urban worlds). The methodological approach is twofold: close textual analysis focusing on scenes of technological mediation and mobility, and socio-historical contextualization that relates the texts to India's IT-driven modernity, corporate culture, and philanthropic economy. Where relevant, I draw on Murty's public persona and institutional role (Infosys Foundation) to read her storytelling as aligned with larger institutional narratives of development and uplift. Modernity's Staging: Technology, Mobility, and Moral Economy Sudha Murty's writing often stages modernity through everyday artifacts: a new job in the city, an arranged marriage complicated by aspirations, a school that promises a better future. Modern Technology appears frequently, but rarely as a mere prop. In House of Cards, corporate logic, ambition, and urban anonymity form the crucible where private ethics are tested and, occasionally, reasserted. Characters who move from small towns to cities for jobs in offices and institutions encounter new moral temptations: consumerism, status anxiety, and the corrosive glamour of upward mobility. Murty's narrative response is character-driven: she shows how ordinary people can either be undone by modernity or claim agency through learning, humility, and compassion. In this sense, Sudha Murty treats technology and corporate modernity as a double-edged sword - an engine of social mobility and a site of ethical risk. Her protagonists are often uplifted by schooling or by job opportunities tethered to India's IT economy; yet these same structures can isolate individuals from community care. For Murty, the remedy is often personal: mentorship in the workplace, responsible management, or the ethical acts of individual benefactors. This emphasis on individualized solutions echoes her public philanthropic commitments and is visible in essays and non-fiction pieces where institutional philanthropy, charitable acts, and education are presented as the linchpins of moral modernity. Humanist Values Rearticulated for the Digital Age Murty's humanism is a repertoire of values, respect for dignity, empathy across the boundaries, faith in education, and a practical ethic of service. The digital age complicates these values in several ways: the erosion of faceto-face neighbourliness, the commodification of relationships through aspirational consumption, and the surveillanceinclined rationalizations of managerial culture. She addresses such complications by transforming humanist values into concrete practices. In her narratives, where schooling or mentoring transforms a life, education is not abstract human capital but relational: a teacher's attention, a mentor's encouragement, an aunt who insists on school fees despite household strain. In the digital era, where education is increasingly linked to employability in tech sectors, Sudha Murty emphasis on moral pedagogy is an attempt to humanize a technocratic discourse: the aim is not only to produce competent workers but morally attentive citizens. This insistence aligns with the real-world work in founding and supporting educational projects. Sudha Murty's stories teach readers to practice empathy as an ordinary, habitual ethicnoticing the cook, befriending a lonely neighbour, refusing to gossip. The digital age's attention economy encourages fleeting engagements and performative compassion, a charitable social-media gesture, a viral outrage. Murty pushes back with narratives that reward sustained, embodied acts of care. Her children's stories inculcate these habits early; her adult fiction illustrates the long-term benefits of sustained empathy, mended relationships, ethical workplaces, and communities that absorb shocks. Across texts, Murty refuses the sentimentalization of poverty; she insists on the Journal of Research and Development Peer Reviewed International, Open Access Journal. ISSN : 2230-9578 | Website: https://jrdrvb.org Volume-17, Issue-9(III) | Sept. - 2025 150 dignity of the poor and modestly successful. In a market-driven modernity that often reduces persons to consumers or producers, Murty's insistence on dignity functions as a critique; policies and profit models that ignore human worth are implicitly condemned. But again, Murty's solutions - dignity restored by a benefactor, dignity earned through educationsometimes elide state responsibility and structural reform, an ambivalence discussed below. Case Studies: House of Cards, A corporate culture and the ethics of care: The novel dramatizes managerial worlds, family tensions, and the precarious balancing act between individual ambition and moral accountability. The novel's corporate settings are vivid sites of ethical negotiation; office politics, layoffs, and reputation culture become arenas where Sudha Murty stages moral choices. Unlike literary critics who treat corporate modernity as solely alienating, Murty locates possibilities for moral repair within workplaces: a manager's ethical stand, a colleague's quiet support, or the human scale of everyday teamwork. Here, the digital-age setting emails, deadlines, metricsforegrounds how modern bureaucracies can dehumanize, but also how individuals can practice humanism within them. In this novel, Murty's focus is on individual moral agency in corporate settings, both a virtue and a limitation. It is necessary to teach ethical conduct in fast-paced organizations; yet by foregrounding personal ethics while underplaying labour structures, power asymmetries, and policy failures, the text risks naturalizing neoliberal institutions rather than interrogating their logic. Another novel, Dollar Bahu, presents Aspirations, Media, and the Global Imaginary. The novel addresses the currency of desire in a globalized India: the dollar as a symbol of success, migration as a route to status, and media images that remake middle-class dreams. Murty's critique of aspiration is humane: she shows how families fracture under the pressure to "appear" successful. The modern world's digital media amplifies these pressures-social media updates, aspirational lifestyles, and comparisons across borders. Sudha Murty's remedy is again moral pedagogy-valuing contentment, emphasizing family ties, and recommending modesty. While powerful as moral counsel, this response can be read as conservative, urging individuals to temper desire rather than foregrounding systemic inequalities that produce uneven access to opportunity. Sudha Murty's Children's Narratives, like The Gopi Diaries, and children's books, increasingly set in urban and digitally saturated environments, provide a model for humane upbringing in the digital age. The Gopi Diaries, for instance, narrate a child's experiences of city life, schooling, and encountering strangers; such stories teach children to navigate public spaces ethically, to resist bullying, and to keep curiosity anchored by compassion. These texts are pedagogically astute; shaping young readers' moral imaginations for a world that includes apps, screens, and dispersed communities. But they also bear the burden of being didactic: teaching children to be moral while not fully engaging with structural forces (digital privacy, unequal schooling, and algorithmic bias) that will shape their futures. Limits of Literary Humanism in a Digital India: Murty's humanism is persistent and, in many ways, necessary. Yet it can be critiqued on two grounds. First, tendency toward moral individualism: A recurring critique of Murty is her tendency to favour moral individualism, the belief that social problems can be substantially ameliorated by ethical individuals, charitable acts, and moral pedagogy. In the context of the digital age, where platforms, algorithms, and market logics shape access and determine outcomes at scale, individual acts of kindness are necessary but not always sufficient. When Murty's narratives make philanthropy the main vehicle for social change, they risk endorsing a model where private benevolence substitutes for public policy. Second, Under-theorized Structural Complexity: Murty's fiction often simplifies complex socio-economic dynamics into ethical parables. While this makes her work widely accessible, a deliberate and defensible aesthetic choice, it can occlude analysis of systemic issues: labour precarity in IT supply chains, caste-based inequalities that endure despite digital inclusion, and the gendered impacts of precarious employment. Literature that aims for moral instruction must also reckon with the institutional actors that shape moral possibility. The value of Sudha Murty's work is enormous; it reflects accessible moral education, narratives that restore empathy's centrality and portrayals of dignity across classes. But a fuller humanism for the digital age might require narratives that combine Sudha Murty's moral clarity with more sustained institutional critique. Conclusion: Sudha Murty's literary work in the digital age performs valuable cultural labor. It reminds readers that humanist values - empathy, dignity, and the moral worth of education are not nostalgic leftovers but active resources for negotiating modern life. Her narratives, with their plain prose and ethical clarity, function as an ethics of attention: they teach readers to notice, to care, and to act. Yet the age of algorithms, platform architectures, and complex economic entanglements requires a humanism that is both personal and structural. Her stories are often stronger on the personal side; they could gain greater cultural purchase if paired with narratives that interrogate institutional responsibility and systemic unfairness. A next wave of socially engaged Indian literature might keep her ethical pedagogy while adding sharper critiques of policy, technology, and corporate power. The critical value of her work lies in its contradictions. Her writing is at once comforting and provocative: comforting because it reaffirms the possibility of decency, provocative because it forces us to ask whether decency alone suffices when massive institutions govern daily life. In the digital age, both moral habits and institutional imagination are required. Works Cited: 1. Murty, Sudha. Mahashweta. Penguin Books India, 2007. Journal of Research and Development Peer Reviewed International, Open Access Journal. ISSN : 2230-9578 | Website: https://jrdrvb.org Volume-17, Issue-9(III) | Sept. - 2025 151 2. Dollar Bahu. Penguin Books India, 2007. 3. Gently Falls the Bakula. Penguin Books India, 2008. 4. House of Cards. Penguin Books India, 2013. 5. Chandra, N. D. R. "Humanism in Indian English Fiction."Critical Spectrum: Essays in Literary Culture, Sarup & Sons, 2003, pp. 112-126. 6. Das, Bijay Kumar. Postmodern Indian English Literature. Atlantic Publishers, 2003. 7. Gupta, R. K. "Tradition and Modernity in Indian English Novels." Indian Literature, vol. 52, no. 4, 2008, pp. 144155. 8. Raghuram, Ramya. "Sudha Murty's Fiction: Social Realism and Ethical Concerns." The Indian Review of World Literature in English, vol. 9, no. 2, 2013, pp. 1-9. 9. Singh, Amritjit. Modernity and Its Discontents in India. terature. Oxford UP, 2010. 10. PWC, Human Value in the Digital Age, https://www.pwc.nl/nl/assets/documents/pwc-human-value-in-the-digitalage.pdf