‘Genre fiction, particularly but not only in English, has been growing

in popularity in India. This anthology is significant and necessary . . .

It maps overlaps and contrasts between genre fiction in seven major
Indian languages, and well combines literary exegesis with theoretical
and historical readings . . . Drawing upon both Indian and non-Indian
theoretical texts, the book does not just test Western definitions of
genre fiction against the hard reality to genre texts from India, it also
opens up space for a re-definition of such Western perceptions . . .
A pioneering study that is interesting and well-timed’.
Tabish Khair, author and Associate Professor,
Department of English, University of Aarhus, Denmark
 STUDIES IN GLOBAL GENRE FICTION
Series Editors: Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, University
of Oslo, Norway and Taryne Jade Taylor, Embry-
Riddle Aeronautical University, USA

Studies in Global Genre Fiction offers original insights into the history
of genre literature while contesting two hierarchies that constrain
global genre fiction studies: (1) Anglophone literature and other
global language literatures and (2) literary fiction and genre fiction.
The series explores the exchanges between different literary cultures
that form aesthetic concerns and the specific literary, sociopolitical,
geographical, economic, and historical forces that shape genre fiction
globally. A key focus is understudied genre fictions from the ‘global
South’ – where geographical location or language often confines
works to the margins of the global publishing industry, international
circulation, and academic scrutiny, even if they may be widely read in
their own specific contexts.
Contributions to this series investigate the points of disruption,
intersection and flows between literary and genre fiction. The series
analyses cross-cultural influences in literary classifications, translation,
transcreation, localization, production, and distribution while
capturing the rich history of world and global literatures.

Editorial Advisory Board

Takayuki Tatsumi (Keio University, Japan)
Dale Knickerbocker (East Carolina University, USA)
Pawel Frelik (University of Warsaw, Poland)
Joan Gordon (Nassau Community College/Science Fiction Studies, USA)
Amy J. Ransom (Central Michigan University, USA)
Farah Mendlesohn (Anglia Ruskin Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy, UK)
Rana Issa (American University of Beirut, Lebanon)
Alexis Brooks de Vita (Texas Southern University, USA)
M. Elizabeth Ginway (University of Florida, USA)
Aino-Kaisa Koistinen (University of Jyväskylä, Finland)
Helge Jordheim (University of Oslo, Norway)
Abhijit Gupta (Jadavpur University, India)
Suparno Banerjee (Texas State University, USA)
Isiah Lavender III (Louisiana State University, USA)

Book in this series

INDIAN GENRE FICTION
Pasts and Future Histories
Edited by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti
Mandhwani and Anwesha Maity

For more information about this series, please visit:

https://www.routledge.com/Studies-in-Global-Genre-Fiction/book-
series/SGGF
 INDIAN GENRE FICTION

This volume maps the breadth and domain of genre literature in India
across seven languages (Tamil, Urdu, Bangla, Hindi, Odia, Marathi
and English) and nine genres for the first time. Over the last few
decades, detective/crime fiction and especially science fiction/fantasy
have slowly made their way into university curricula and consideration
by literary critics in India and the West. However, there has been no
substantial study of genre fiction in the Indian languages, least of all
from a comparative perspective. This volume, with contributions from
leading national and international scholars, addresses this lacuna in
critical scholarship and provides an overview of diverse genre fictions.
Using methods from literary analysis, book history and Indian
aesthetic theories, the volume throws light on the variety of contexts
in which genre literature is read, activated and used, from political
debates surrounding national and regional identities to caste and class
conflicts. It shows that Indian genre fiction (including pulp fiction,
comics and graphic novels) transmutes across languages, time periods,
in translation and through publication processes. While the book
focuses on contemporary postcolonial genre literature production, it
also draws connections to individual, centuries-long literary traditions
of genre literature in the Indian subcontinent. Further, it traces
contested hierarchies within these languages as well as current trends
in genre fiction criticism.
Lucid and comprehensive, this book will be of great interest to
academics, students, practitioners, literary critics and historians in
the fields of postcolonialism, genre studies, global genre fiction, media
and popular culture, South Asian literature, Indian literature, detective
fiction, science fiction, romance, crime fiction, horror, mythology,
graphic novels, comparative literature and South Asian studies. It will
also appeal to the informed general reader.
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay is a researcher at the Department of Culture
Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo, Norway. He
is the Editor-in-Chief of Fafnir: Nordic Journal of Science Fiction
and Fantasy Research (Finfar, Finland) and Editor at the Museum
of Science Fiction’s Journal of Science Fiction (MOSF, Washington,
D.C.). He has formerly taught at the Universities of Oslo and Delhi,
and has been visiting researcher at the Science Fiction Foundation at
the University of Liverpool and the Evoke Lab (Calit2)/Department of
Informatics at the University of California-Irvine.

Aakriti Mandhwani is a researcher at the Department of South Asia,

Faculty of Languages and Cultures, SOAS, University of London, UK.
She works on North Indian middle-class reading practices through
the archive of the post-1947 commercial magazine and paperback in
Hindi. Her areas of interest include book history, popular literature,
intellectual history and urban studies. Her works include articles in
Modern Asian Studies and a volume on Hinglish edited by Francesca
Orsini and Ravikant Sharma (both forthcoming in 2018).

Anwesha Maity is a researcher at the Department of Comparative

Literature and Folklore Studies (CLFS), University of Wisconsin-
Madison, USA, from where she also obtained her doctoral degree.
Her research interests include science fiction and genre fiction,
postcolonial criticism, translation studies, and Sanskrit aesthetics.
She has published in Science Fiction Studies, Studies in the Fantastic
and Jadavpur University Essays and Studies.
INDIAN GENRE FICTION
Pasts and Future Histories

Edited by
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay,
Aakriti Mandhwani and
Anwesha Maity
First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
informa business
© 2019 selection and editorial matter, Bodhisattva
Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani and Anwesha Maity;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani
and Anwesha Maity to be identified as the authors of the
editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and
78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-55998-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-45616-9 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
 CONTENTS

List of contributorsxi

Introduction: Indian genre fiction – languages,

literatures, classifications 1
BODHISATTVA CHATTOPADHYAY, AAKRITI MANDHWANI
AND ANWESHA MAITY

PART I
Emergence of distinctions 15

1 Literary and popular fiction in late colonial Tamil Nadu 17

PREETHA MANI

2 Homage to a ‘Magic-Writer’: the Mistrīz and Asrār

novels of Urdu 38
C.M. NAIM

3 A series of unfortunate events: natural calamities in

19th-century Bengali chapbooks 57
ARITRA CHAKRABORTI

4 Explorers of subversive knowledge: the science

fantasy of Leela Majumdar and Sukumar Ray 73
DEBJANI SENGUPTA

ix
 C ontents

PART II
Postcolonial reassertions 87

5 Hearts and homes: a perspective on women

writers in Hindi 89
IRA PANDE

6 Genre fiction and aesthetic relish: reading rasa in

contemporary times 103
ANWESHA MAITY

7 Community fiction: Mamang Dai’s The Legends of

Pensam and Temsula Ao’s These Hills Called Home:
Stories from a War Zone121
JEETUMONI BASUMATARY

PART III
Genres in the 21st century 139

8 Post-millennial ‘mythology-inspired fiction’ in

English: the market, the genre, and the (global) reader 141
E. DAWSON VARUGHESE

9 Expanding world of Indian English fiction:

The Mahabharata retold in Krishna Udayasankar’s
The Aryavarta Chronicles and Amruta Patil’s Adi Parva159
CHINMAY SHARMA

10 When Bhimayana enters the classroom. . .  175

ARATRIKA DAS

11 From the colloquial to the ‘Literary’: Hindi pulp’s

journey from the streets to the bookshelves 189
AAKRITI MANDHWANI

Index203

x
 CONTRIBUTORS

Jeetumoni Basumatary teaches English at Cotton University, Guwa-

hati, India. She specializes in Bodo literature and has translated
Bodo works into English as well as scripted two plays in Bodo.
Aritra Chakraborti is Editor at Cambridge University Press, India. His
research interests include the history of mass media, the social his-
tory of pornography and science fiction and fantasy literature.
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay is a researcher at the Department of Cul-
ture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo, Norway.
Aratrika Das is Assistant Professor at Ramjas College, University of
Delhi, India. Her doctoral thesis was on monstrosity and gothic
bodies of 19th-century British literature.
Anwesha Maity is a researcher at the Department of Comparative
Literature and Folklore Studies (CLFS), University of Wisconsin-
Madison, USA, from where she also obtained her doctoral degree.
Aakriti Mandhwani is a researcher at the Department of South Asia,
Faculty of Languages and Cultures, SOAS, University of London,
UK.
Preetha Mani is Assistant Professor in the Department of African,
Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures and
Core Faculty Member in the Program in Comparative Literature
at Rutgers University, USA. She specializes in modern Hindi and
Tamil literature, South Asian feminisms, women’s writing, world
literature and translation studies.
C.M. Naim is Professor Emeritus in the Department of South Asian
Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago, USA.

xi
 C ontributors

Ira Pande is a writer and translator and was awarded the Sahitya Aka-
demi Award in 2010 for translation. She formerly taught at the
Panjab University, Chandigarh.
Debjani Sengupta is the author of The Partition of Bengal: Fragile
Borders and New Identities (2016). Her essays on Bangla science
fiction have been published in The Sarai Reader and Extrapolation.
Chinmay Sharma is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre national
de la recherche scientifique, Paris, France.
E. Dawson Varughese is an independent, global cultural studies
scholar, specialising in post-millennial Indian visual and literary
cultures. Her most recent book is Visuality and Identity in Post-
Millennial Indian Graphic Narratives (2017).

xii
 INTRODUCTION
Indian genre fiction – languages,
literatures, classifications

Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti

Mandhwani and Anwesha Maity

This book was first conceived from reconfigurations advanced by

the non-Anglocentrism manifesto, which sought to extend critical
scholarship on science fiction and fantasy to texts produced in non-
Anglophone contexts.1 The manifesto proposed new approaches
to understanding the translations industry and the distribution and
reception of genres, along with alternative ways of conceptualising
genre themes and motifs, while reconstructing the historical matrix
to analyse differences and similarities between genres. The manifesto
went on to receive favourable popular support, generating significant
conversation in the blogosphere, forums, and on Twitter, crowned by
winning the Strange Horizons Readers’ Poll Award for best non-fiction
article in 2013. This success alerted the editors of the current volume
that perhaps it was necessary not only to propose such steps, but also
to undertake a project that could realise some of the ambitions of the
manifesto. Subsequent discussions between the editors regarding other
genres, such as detective fiction and romance, led us to conceive of a
more comprehensive approach to the study of genre fiction in Indian
publishing spaces. This would involve compiling genre fiction criti-
cism across Indian languages and genres, something which had not
been attempted before. So what exactly is genre fiction in the Indian
context, and what makes describing it problematic?
Genre as a term generally has two distinct yet intertwined uses.
The first of these refers to the formal choice of aesthetic presentation
or genre as description of narrative form: novel, short story, poem,
drama, and so on. This use is to describe how things are presented.

1
 B odhisattva C hattopadhyay et al .

The second use of genre is to describe a collection of motifs (within

any of these narrative forms) whose co-occurrence determines inter-
textual relations or genre as an interpretative label. This latter use is
favoured when referring to the term ‘genre fiction’, and it applies to
several constellations of such motifs: science fiction, fantasy, detective
fiction, romance, horror, thriller, and so on.
In this volume, we explore relations and slippages between these
two different uses. A noticeable slippage occurs when terms such as
‘popular fiction’, ‘popular literature’, or ‘pulp’ are employed inter-
changeably with ‘genre fiction’. This is because some genres such as
science fiction or fantasy are seen to be inherently ‘popular’, but so
are certain forms that seem to be a natural home to these genres, such
as the graphic novel. Some of these labels are also often based on
criteria that have to do with neither the form nor the motifs but with
presentation, where cheap publishing quality itself is deemed to be a
marker of genre literature. Further, these labels often reflect deeper
biases towards genre literature itself as being fundamentally trivial,
concerned with cheap thrills, and offering escapist fantasies and gra-
tuitous titillation – a literature consumed by an undiscerning reader
belonging to the nameless masses.
A case in point where such a reading may not only produce bias
but distort an argument entirely is offered by Amitav Ghosh’s recent
book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
(2016).2 Ghosh, an author of historical novels and literary fiction,
argues that literature discussing climate change and its impact on the
human condition is absent in the literary landscape. But he ignores
science fiction altogether, a genre that has notably been grappling with
the theme in multiple iterations such as eco-fiction, apocalyptic/disas-
ter fiction, and most recently climate fiction or cli-fi, with renowned
adherents such as Margaret Atwood and Kim Stanley Robinson.
Because Ghosh himself is no stranger to science fiction, having won the
prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award for his early science fiction novel
The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), one can argue that he deliberately
chooses to ignore science fiction in framing his argument because of
a fundamental bias against genre literature. This disingenuous move
not only makes Ghosh’s argument suspect, but it also detracts from
the value of the enquiry undertaken by him, because the question is
not whether such a literature dealing with climate change exists, but,
rather, what purpose does such an already existing literature serve?
Such biases are further cemented in the hierarchy between English-
language production and its elite or upwardly mobile readership
and bhasha3 genre literatures with their ostensibly less cosmopolitan

2
 I ntroduction

readership. The juxtaposition of Anglocentrism with Anglophonism, a

problematic identified in the aforementioned manifesto, is thus appar-
ent both while discussing Indian genre fiction in relation to its global
counterparts and within Indian literatures themselves. This is also
related to portability, as literature in English finds a broad pan-Indian
readership, while bhasha literatures generally remain untranslated and
unread outside their linguistic – geographical spheres, even if the latter
may have the advantage in numbers.
This volume addresses this challenge for the first time by mapping
overlaps between genre fiction in several different languages: Tamil,
Urdu, Bangla, Hindi, Odia, and Marathi, in addition to English. It
highlights examples of different genre classifications that are used for
different kinds of literature; classifications that are based at times on
form, sometimes on the theme, sometimes geography, and sometimes
on the place and manner of production. While this seems to be too
remarkably varied to hold any real meaning for the term genre, our
contention is that the term ‘genre’ itself functions as a container.4 The
container exists irrespective of what is put into it, but it is relevant only
to the extent that something is put into it, and its identity depends on
what this something is. Drawing upon the work of Alexander Klose,
this ‘container principle’ determines how we classify what we see and
see what we classify. 5
An alternative is provided by John Rieder in his 2017 work Science
Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System, which builds upon his
earlier work on genre.6 Rieder argues that genre fiction, including sci-
ence fiction, fantasy, detective fiction, and horror, describes an entirely
new phenomenon, which the ‘genre as narrative form’ usage/category
does not capture. These new genres are part of a ‘mass cultural genre
system’, produced by new ways of publication and distribution, and
appealing to a different readership, which also engages with the text
in different and new ways. Rieder argues for a historical interpreta-
tion rather than a formal one, which would also explain the similari-
ties between the production and distribution methods between these
genres, as well as overlaps in readership and audience. Considering the
emergence of new technologies of visualisation and a shift towards a
culture of mass reproduction, such a historical interpretation would
also explain the formulaic ways in which many of these genres recycle
and share plots, tropes, and motifs. For instance, plot generators such
as William Wallace Cook’s Plotto (1928), or genre formula descrip-
tors such as S.S. Van Dine’s ‘20 Rules for Writing Detective Stories’
(1928) provided early genre writers guidelines on what to write and
how, and what to avoid in constructing narratives in a particular

3
 B odhisattva C hattopadhyay et al .

genre, thus forwarding real or imagined surface similarities in genre

fiction – hence also the use of ‘popular’ or ‘mass cultural’ as a suffi-
cient alternate label for genre fiction. Printed on pulp paper with often
lurid covers, appealing to the sense of the comfortable and the familiar
rather than to highbrow literary values, offering a vision of – often
illicit – possibilities of vicarious pleasure: that is the image of the mass
cultural genre system projected by Rieder’s analysis.
Notwithstanding the general correctness of Rieder’s analysis of
early genre fiction production in the Anglo-American context, its
limited applicability to and significant divergences within the Indian
context must also be recognised. Reading science fiction in India, for
instance, under the rubric of the ‘popular’ and the ‘mass cultural’,
may not always yield the patterns Rieder observes. Unlike the appeal
of, for example, soft-pornographic literature, which resonates with
much genre fiction and which is likely to have a universal appeal, sci-
ence fiction emerged from the practices of a highly select, even exclu-
sive, authorial and readerly network, whose members were generally
well educated, often with advanced science and technology degrees.
As Fredrick Pohl describes in his autobiography The Way the Future
Was (1978), in their worldview, technology and science offered ways
to think through global problems differently from what had been
thought before.7 It was not seen as continuity of the past as in fantasy,
but as a breach, as something inherently new. This trend is particu-
larly noticeable in the work of the American Futurians, the society
that played a leading role in establishing the genre of science fiction.
Genres such as detective fiction were ostensibly perceived as yearn-
ings for restoration of lost innocence and return to a possible idyll,
while fantasy offered a nostalgic return of magical possibilities in a
world that was overrun with science and technology, culminating in
the world wars. In contrast, emergence phase science fiction writers
offered a vision of possible utopias forged through the intervention of
scientific ideologies rather than theological ones, opening up the future
as a dimension overriding the present, rather than any nostalgic return
to a past, however idyllic.
However, in Indian science fiction broadly, generic markers/tropes
such as forays into distant future or alternate/alien-space are relatively
rare; the utopian vision of a better possible future is realised first by
negotiating with history and the present. Thus, science fiction was
never ‘popular’ in the same way as other genres in India, even though
it emerged from the same crucible of the mass cultural genre system
and its periodicals and pulps. Neither was it ‘mass cultural’ in the
way that detective fiction or fantasy could be, because of the limited

4
 I ntroduction

nature of its production, distribution and readership network. Science

fiction’s appeal was to a supra-educational project that was not shared
uniformly by pulp production in other genres, and neither did it share
the same project even where the readership overlapped. Science fic-
tion in Bengal emerged predominantly in young adult magazines and
literature in the late 19th century, whose goals were a combination
of ‘sentence and solas’, i.e., aimed to offer instruction as much as
entertainment. While detective fiction was primarily read by an adult
audience due to its adult (read: sexual relationships) themes, science
fiction, or kalpavigyan, was a subset of young adult and children’s lit-
erature from the beginning. Part of a nationalist exercise and positivist
to the core, it intensified the European dream of progress through the
adoption of new knowledge, aimed at a pliable, younger audience.8
This not only changed the future possibilities of the genre – science
fiction is now considered predominantly children’s and young adult
literature in India, as opposed to the more mature genre it is in the
Anglo-American world – but it also changed what could be written,
and how.
What further complicates the ‘mass cultural genre’ proposition and
other such frameworks in genre studies framed predominantly by
European and American literary production is that a purely historical
framework cannot work satisfactorily outside its conditions of pro-
duction. The emergence of genre fiction in India shared the exigen-
cies of production processes described by Rieder, which were in many
cases similar, and led to similar outcomes vis-à-vis Anglo-American
contexts; but Indian production processes also had divergent formal
characteristics. For instance, it drew upon different traditions of sto-
rytelling, such as popular and performative/oral traditions, aesthetic
traditions with classical roots such as rasa that created a concordance
between teller and audience in terms of emotion, or even in the various
traditions of folklore that would determine what made sense within
a specific genre. The impact of these indigenous roots and traditions
have, from the beginning, also engendered different expectations
from specific genres that are divergent from their Anglo-American
counterparts.
One such expectational outcome in the intersection of the histori-
cal and the formal is offered by the ubiquitous use of myth in genre
fiction from India. Several essays in this volume show the presence of
myth from 19th-century chapbooks to 21st-century mythological fic-
tion. This tendency, dubbed ‘mythologerm’ by Chattopadhyay, may be
read as a constraint on Indian genre fiction, making at least some of
its meaning less (globally) portable, but it also accounts for a unique

5
 B odhisattva C hattopadhyay et al .

flavour that may be found in texts across languages and genres.9 The
use of myth is rarely uncritical or unmediated. There are three main
ways in which myths are generally activated in genre fiction in India:
to draw parallels and continuities between the present and a mythi-
cal past, to satirise or critically appraise the mythic as a repository of
cultural values, which in turn can be used to satirise the culture itself,
or to bolster cultural/national pride by turning myth into pseudo-
history or reading myth as history.10 In terms of genre fiction, myth,
specifically drawn from the entire body of religio-cultural literary texts
identified as ‘Hindu’ and less commonly from Islamic lore, provides a
formal convergence for literary themes and motifs across genres, and
serves as culturally and politically inflected reference points, differen-
tiating these genres from their counterparts elsewhere.11
Myth thus serves as a means to initiate both formal and thematic
shifts across the genre system, but also serves as a point of inception
for genre itself, as noted by Emma Dawson Varughese’s contribution
to this volume, which traces the activation of myth in 21st-century
English-language texts. In bhasha literatures, too, mythological fic-
tion may be found at the moment of inception of the genre system, in
classic works such as Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay’s Damarucharita
(1910–17) in Bangla (Bengali), a hybrid text that moves between sci-
ence fiction, fantasy, science fantasy, tall tale, and mythology fiction. In
terms of narrative form, it is a collection of short stories loosely con-
nected by the eponymous Damarudhar’s deeds, and an early landmark
of the short story form in Indian genre fiction; simultaneously, as a
charita, it also references the epic tradition of Tulsidas’s Ramcharitma-
nas and delineates a trajectory of heroic action, continuity and growth
through epic tales. A mock epic drawing upon the Indic epics only
to caricaturise them in a tongue-and-cheek manner, Damarucharita
explodes the itihasa-purana tradition by positing a ‘pseudo-history’
laced with real historical events. It is also, unsurprisingly, a parody
and critique of realism itself, but the parody is not directed outwards
beyond India (for the most part), but is channelled inwards, to an
intense questioning of nationalism.
Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay, as a pioneer of genre fiction in India,
was a staunch critic of nationalism, even though he was arguably one
of the foremost social reformers of the colonial period. Aiming for the
upliftment of craftsmen communities by championing traditional arts
and crafts, he fought for their economic development and inclusion
into the colonial network of commercial exchange. Patriotic yet criti-
cal of nationalism, Mukhopadhyay was well aware of the problems of
appealing to the popular, and in choosing to write genre fiction, he was

6
 I ntroduction

signalling to his elite readership the contemptible ways in which the

masses were exploited by political demagogues and rich landowners.
Mukhopadhyay’s genre fiction is unique in its cultural referents, plac-
ing folk deities and mythology right beside high Puranic and epic lore,
juxtaposed with a scathing indictment of the use and abuse of power
by Hindu godmen and the toxicity of pseudo-nationalism. If his peer,
the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, represented ‘high’ literature
through his realist critique of swadeshi ideology and religio-cultural
divides, then Mukhopadhyay represented its popular face. Deliber-
ately adopting a popular idiom and a blend of realism and fantasy to
communicate with his audience, his fiction alerted them to the plight
of the lower classes, making the text relevant even a century after it
was composed.
This brings us to some of the central methodological principles
behind this volume. We use the term ‘genre fiction’ in this volume in
a critical sense. We hold, as the essays in this volume demonstrate,
that genre fiction is not simply a literature fostering escapism. It is
not something that is read purely for entertainment or as a means to
escape from the strictures of reality. While genre fiction does invoke
certain clusters of tropes, they are also often critical of the same. Pleas-
ure in genre fiction comes from the dialectic of similarities and differ-
ences between texts belonging to the same genre, and sometimes these
differences also become transgeneric as tropes are shared; for instance,
when mythology fiction, folklore, and fantasy slip into each other or
when detective fiction and romance become aligned.
The volume also questions the gendered category of genres.
Romance is not fiction for women alone, just as detective fiction is not
for men alone and science fiction is not only for scientists. Genres also
continuously reshape the boundaries of the real and the fantastical,
especially in the genres that ostensibly appear most divorced from any
realist purpose such as fantasy or science fiction. Indeed, genre fiction
is directly political: it politicises what is taken for granted, bringing
the unquestionable such as the sanctity of myth into a space where it
can be questioned for relevance and critiqued for social, ethical, and
moral values. Genre fiction maintains its political relevance through a
healthy use of satire and other comedic devices, challenging authority
accorded to figures of power and influence. Far from reading the popu-
larity of genre fiction as a drawback, we argue that it is this popularity
itself that can make genre fiction a fecund site for articulation of mass
resistance and disillusionment with the status quo. Yet its popularity
may just as easily be a political tool for distributing problematic ideas
of 'nation', even creating new myths to replace the old ones. These

7
 B odhisattva C hattopadhyay et al .

myths may be myths of science (national science or ‘Vedic science’),

of progress (how English may serve as a facilitator in the upwardly
mobile aspirations of poorer classes), and of new national identities
built on mythical pasts (the idea of a great, rejuvenated Indian nation).
The study of Indian genre fiction across different languages and genres
reveals a vibrant site where one may locate multiple contestations of
politics, including identity politics, revealing patterns unavailable to
someone who consumes literature in English alone, or in only one of
the bhasha literatures.
And yet, Indian genre fiction is varied enough for one to argue that
in spite of thematic continuities, such as the mythologerm, there are
also significant divergences that make any strict association between
genre fiction and other conceptual categories such as the 'popular' or
the 'lowbrow' impossible to sustain. For instance, in terms of book
history, other conceptual categories such as ‘middlebrow’ might argu-
ably become more useful. Histories of Indian literatures, especially
single-language bhasha literatures, have often disavowed genres
such as detective fiction and the romance as 'lowbrow', whereas a
more nuanced reading based on circulation and distribution methods
reveals that a markedly middle-class, 'middlebrow' readership was
avidly consuming them.12
A nuanced reading also reveals that apparently similar networks and
patterns of distribution and consumption have wide variance across
genres, languages, and regions. For instance, while science fiction may
appeal to an audience so small as to remove it from the category of
the popular, mythological fiction, which often blends elements of sci-
ence fiction, fantasy, folklore, and epic, it may allow science fictional
tropes and themes to travel to audiences who are not otherwise keen
on the genre. Further, this also throws into relief new publication net-
works and strategies and the emergence of new audiences. While any
number of works may be designated as mythology fiction owing to the
presence of similar tropes across more than a century of genre fiction
writing in bhasha and English, its contemporary usage to refer to a
narrow band of widely-consumed English language texts in the last
two or three decades shows how genre labels come into existence for
marketing purposes, allowing people to work with new containers,
finding new things to see, to classify, and to say.
The essays in this volume engage with the above questions from
several perspectives. If there is an incredibly expanding genre in the
genre fiction market today, it is Indian Writing in English (IWE)
mythological fiction. Writer Amish Tripathi’s success with The Shiva
Trilogy is often cited as the high-water-mark of the coming-of-age

8
 I ntroduction

of the IWE mythological: the publishing house Westland paid an

advance of 5 crore rupees or 1 million dollars to Tripathi in order
to secure rights to his future series of novels, which he later decided
was to be focused on the Hindu God Ram. Sita: Warrior of Mithila
is the second of the series, published in 2017. Chinmay Sharma’s
essay in the volume is a much-needed intervention in understanding
this sway towards the mythological. He compares two retellings of
the Mahabharata, Krishna Udayasankar’s science fantasy Aryavarta
Chronicles (2012–14) and Amruta Patil’s graphic novel Adi Parva
(2012), and discusses how they capture what he calls the ‘mythologi-
cal wave’ in IWE.
While Sharma’s essay discusses Adi Parva, a graphic novel, this is
only one of the many kinds of graphic novels that have overtaken the
publishing and reading landscape in recent decades. Corridor, Sarnath
Banerjee’s first graphic novel, was excitedly and somewhat errone-
ously hailed as the first graphic novel in India when it was published in
2004. Some critics, however, prefer to cite Orijit Sen’s River of Stories,
published in 1994, as the first graphic novel. However, not many criti-
cal interventions have been made regarding what definitionally consti-
tutes the graphic novel in India per se. One such intervention in this
volume emerges from the point of view of institutionalisation of genre
fiction. Indeed, academic histories and syllabi in India have recently
come to recognise genre fiction as a dynamic category that deserves
attention, and detective and crime fiction are now often included in
the syllabi of central universities. The fiction that has gained entry
can be termed the ‘international canonised popular’; for instance, an
undergraduate course at Delhi University’s Department of English
now includes Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. How-
ever, one finds bhasha detective fiction entirely absent as a category
of consideration. In this volume, Aratrika Das engages with that rare
Indian graphic novel in the classroom, writing about the difficulties of
teaching Bhimayana at Delhi University.
The volume also problematises IWE and how a language can unlock
one’s understanding of regional worlds. Jeetumoni Basumatary’s essay
revisits our understanding of ‘North-East Literature’ or ‘Literatures
from North-East India’. She focuses on Mamang Dai’s The Legends
of Pensam (2006) and Temsula Ao’s These Hills Called Home: Stories
from a War Zone (2006), arguing that the worlds we see in English
writings from the ‘North-East’ are tribal worlds rooted in their tra-
ditional cultures, instead of a pan-Indian, sanitised representation of
elite metropolitan culture, as found in IWE novels such as those by
Chetan Bhagat. The origins of theory on genre fiction also emerge

9
 B odhisattva C hattopadhyay et al .

from folk, and Basumatary’s articulations undercut any ubiquitous

relationship between language, region, and folk culture.13
This volume also engages with another perennially successful genre
of writing, i.e., romance, which has yet to find its way into institutional
reckoning. Historically, commercially successful romance writers have
been dismissed by both academic and mainstream reviewers. Indeed,
this dismissal is not merely directed at the writer of romance; the
reader of romance too has been an oft-rejected category. Ethnographic
research on American readers, such as Janice Radway’s groundbreaking
Reading the Romance (1984), has paved the way for book-historical
studies of romance as genre, and Francesca Orsini’s edited volume
Love in South Asia (2006) has recently sought to address that lacuna
in the Indian context.14 In this volume, Ira Pande’s essay focuses on
Gaura Pant, more popularly known as Shivani, who wrote in Hindi
about the intricacies of living in mofussil provincial towns. Shivani's
literary career is an apt example of how a renowned and well-loved
writer of the 1960s–70s was dismissed in academic reckoning as a
‘female writer of romances’.
In terms of the market itself at large, detective and crime fiction
have always managed to make a name for itself. C.M. Naim’s essay
on Urdu translations of little-remembered G.W.M. Reynolds’ novels in
the early 20th century is a good example of how certain authors and
kinds of fiction found strange and fascinating afterlives in the Indian
subcontinent. Reynolds was not only well known in his Urdu avatar
but, as A.R. Venkatachalapathy15 (2012) and Sucheta Bhattacharya16
(2008) argue, gained immense popularity in Tamil and Bangla, respec-
tively. C.M. Naim’s essay, then, adds another dimension to a hugely
successful phenomenon of ‘mistriz’ or ‘mystery’ novels in India.
It is also imperative to understand how market and publishing con-
cerns acutely intersect with changes in readership profiles and their
subsequent needs which, in turn, dictate crucial questions such as
paper quality, pricing, and branding strategies. Aakriti Mandhwani’s
essay on Hindi crime fiction king Surender Mohan Pathak, for instance,
illustrates how a change in paper quality, publisher, and pricing of the
pulp novelist’s offerings transformed his previously ‘cheap’ novels to
respectable collectible objects. While she discusses the shift in Pathak’s
image through publication by Raja Pocket Books, the broader mar-
ket effect of such image shifts has ultimately resulted in Pathak being
signed to Harper Hindi, the Hindi division of Harper Collins, thereby
finding a firm footing in ‘respectable’ mainstream imagination.
While Mandhwani deploys the methodological principles of book
history, Preetha Mani’s essay in the volume contributes to a nuanced

10
 I ntroduction

understanding of the significant intersection of magazine history and

literary history. Mani focuses on Maṇikkoṭi and Aṉanta Vikaṭaṉ, Tamil
magazines launched in the 1930s, that carried differing viewpoints of
what she calls ‘high-quality’ literary writing and ‘comedic writing’
that, she argues, laid the foundation for the divide between modernist
and ‘entertainment-oriented’ literature, creating distinctions between
‘literary’ and ‘popular’, that continue to this day.
Even as this volume focuses mostly on genre fiction in the 20th
century, it has sought to provide a wide overview of genres across
time, as well. For instance, Aritra Chakraborti’s essay on ‘calamity
chapbooks’ issued in 19th-century Bengal is an example of a hugely
successful genre, i.e., the chapbook, and how natural calamity, rather
than being viewed in terms of objective, linear time, was represented
in the chapbooks in terms of the ‘Hindu’ time of ‘Kaliyug’, inflected
with the decadent morals of the then-contemporary milieu. Scholarly
work on almanacs and chapbooks by Sumanta Banerjee17 and Anin-
dita Ghosh,18among others, situate these genres at the centre of public
sphere debates on colonialism and the manifestation of anti-colonial
sentiments. Debjani Sengupta’s essay on Bangla kalpavigyan also
engages partly with an early context, providing further insights into
colonial processes of construction of a ‘scientific temparament’ and its
impact on genre fiction.
Bridging the old and the new is Anwesha Maity’s contribution on
how an ancient aesthetic theory remains relevant in reading contempo-
rary genre texts, revealing, on analysis, also how it shapes fundamental
expectations of plot and emotion even today. Forwarding a somewhat
polemical proposal that Indian genre fiction must be contextualised
and read vis-à-vis not only western but also indigenous aesthetic criti-
cism, she employs classical Sanskrit rasa theory to analyse how dif-
ferent aesthetic states arise, are subsumed or led towards fruition, in
three genre examples with widely different flavour profiles: Marathi
science fiction, Bangla horror/weird, and Odia detective fiction.
The volume, even as it covers a span of languages, realised its short-
coming with regard to genre fiction in other major languages such as
Malayalam, Bhojpuri, Marathi, Gujarati, and Punjabi, where vibrant
print cultures exist and have done so since the late 19th century. The
volume only partially addresses the divide between languages and
genre fiction in marginalised languages, particularly in the context
of the colonial and postcolonial linguistic hegemony of Hindi and
Bangla.19 Hindi’s hegemony is also being challenged by genre fiction
in Hinglish, a dynamically developing area, and is thus ripe for inves-
tigation.20 Similarly, genre fiction in marginalised languages around

11
 B odhisattva C hattopadhyay et al .

Bangla, such as Ahomiya and Odia, requires further investigation. In

addition, while the essays in the volume problematise IWE’s position in
the hierarchy of Indian languages, it cannot be denied that IWE offers
many avenues of exploration. For instance, Jerry Pinto’s 2016 novel
Murder in Mahim follows the murder investigation of a homosexual
man who was found dead in a toilet near a Mumbai local railway sta-
tion. The story is then not merely one of a murder investigation. It also
seeks to unravel the underbelly of the spaces where men seek pleasure
with other men, what constitutes homosexuality, and how it is socially
and legally defined. Genre fiction arguably comes of age through just
this kind of narrative unravelling in a whodunit form.
A second shortcoming of this volume is, perhaps, not representing
contemporary romances in IWE, possibly the most ‘visible’ genre to
the reader of this volume; these quick reads catering to a pan-Indian
audience are best exemplified in the work of Chetan Bhagat. Since
his overwhelming success with Five Point Someone, Bhagat branched
out into writing for films as well as taking to Twitter and speaking
for Hindutva. Other writers, such as Anuja Chauhan and Sakshama
Puri Dhariwal, cater to the well-heeled reader of romances and are
published by mainstream giants such as Random House and Penguin,
respectively. There is also a large cross-section of romances availa-
ble at Wheeler stores and from pavement sellers, by authors such as
Ravindra Singh, whose novels have amassed a huge fan following,
prompting Penguin to launch ‘Metro Reads’ in 2012 with a nifty sub-
genre titled ‘Romance@Work’. These new subgenres also await fur-
ther investigation. In addition to written genre, the volume hopes to
create more curiosity around visual cultures. While the volume does
cast new light on the graphic novel form, comics and cartoons in bha-
sha literatures in particular are another important genre that has not
been amply represented here.
Indian Genre Fiction: Past and Future Histories is the one of the
first academic engagements on a field that deserves deeper investiga-
tion and, in doing so, brings many languages, genres, and perspec-
tives together. The volume maps the domain of Indian genre literature
across seven Indian languages and nine genres, serving a three-fold
purpose. It contests academic criticism’s continued denigration of
Indian genre fiction as a reductive, normative, pleasure-seeking, and/
or escapist category. It shows that Indian genre fiction, far from being
a monolith, transmutes across languages, time periods, in transla-
tion and through publication processes. Within the Indian subcon-
tinent, a multitude of languages and their individual, centuries-long
literary traditions co-exist in contested hierarchies; contemporary

12
 I ntroduction

postcolonial genre literature too partakes of these tensions. This vol-

ume hopes to provide an equitable platform for discussion of diverse
single-language genre fictions and come to terms with these manifold
tensions.

Notes
1 Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, ‘Recentering Science Fiction and Fantasy:
What Would a Non-Anglocentric Understanding of Science Fiction
and Fantasy Look Like?’ Speculative Fiction 2013: The Best of Online
Reviews, Essays and Commentary, eds. Ana Grilo and Thea James. Lon-
don: Jurassic, 2014, pp. 213–229.
2 Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the
Unthinkable. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2016.
3 Bhasha (‘language’ from Sanskrit) is a term for the indigenous languages
of the Indian subcontinent, coined by GN Devy in After Amnesia (1992)
and popularised by translation-focused publishers like Katha India.
4 Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, ‘Is Science Fiction Still Science Fiction
When It Is Written on Saturn? (or aliens, alienation, and science fiction),’
Momentum 9. 6 July 2017. Online.
5 Alexander Klose, The Container Principle: How a Box Changes the Way
We Think. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015.
6 John Rieder, Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System. Mid-
dletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2017.
7 Fredrick Pohl, The Way the Future Was: A Memoir. New York: Ballantine
Del Rey, 1979.
8 Satadru Sen, ‘A Juvenile Periphery: The Geographies of Literary Child-
hood in Colonial Bengal,’ Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History,
vol. 5, no. 1, Spring 2004. Online.
9 Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, ‘On the Mythologerm: Kalpavigyan and
the Question of Imperial Science,’ Science Fiction Studies, vol. 43, no. 3,
2016, pp. 435–458.
10 Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, ‘Kalpavigyan and Imperial Technoscience:
Three Nodes of an Argument,’ Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol.28,
no.1, 2018, pp. 102–122.
11 Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, ‘Speculative Utopianism in Kalpavigyan:
Mythologerm and Women’s Science Fiction,’ Foundation: International
Review of Science Fiction, no.127, Spring/Summer 2017, pp. 6–19.
12 Aakriti Mandhwani, ‘Saritā and the 1950s Hindi Middlebrow Reader,’
Modern Asian Studies, 2018. Forthcoming.
13 Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale. Trans. Laurence Scott. Sec-
ond edition. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2009 [1968].
14 Francesca Orsini, Ed. Love in South Asia: A Cultural History. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006.
15 A.R. Venkatachalapathy, The Province of the Book: Scholars, Scribes, and
Scribblers in Colonial Tamil Nadu. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2012.
16 Sucheta Bhattacharya, ‘GWM Reynolds Rewritten in 19 Century Bengal,’
GWM Reynolds: 19th Century Fiction, Politics and the Press, ed. Anne
Humphreys and Louis James. Surrey: Ashgate Publications, 2008.

13
 B odhisattva C hattopadhyay et al .

17 Sumanta Banerjee, The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture
in Nineteenth century Calcutta. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1989.
18 Anindita Ghosh, The Power in Print: Popular Publishing and the Politics
of Language and Culture in a Colonial Society, 1778–1905. Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2006; Claiming the City: Protest, Crime and Scandals in
Colonial Calcutta, c.1860–1920. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016.
19 For instance, Francesca Orsini has amply documented Urdu genre fiction’s
tenuous relationship with Hindi literature. Print and Pleasure: Popular
and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India, Ranikhet: Permanent
Black, 2010.
20 Rita Kothari and Snell Rupert, eds., Chutnefying English – The Phenome-
non of Hinglish. Delhi: Penguin, 2011; Aakriti Mandhwani, ‘Dubey Is No
Tolstoy and That’s That: The Contemporary Popular in Hindi,’ Humani-
ties Underground, June 2014.

14
 Part I

EMERGENCE OF
DISTINCTIONS
 1
LITERARY AND POPULAR
FICTION IN LATE COLONIAL
TAMIL NADU

Preetha Mani

The literary and the popular

An unprecedented distinction between literary and popular writ-
ing emerged in debates published in Maṇikkoṭi and Āṉanta Vikaṭaṉ,
two well-known Tamil magazines that were launched in the 1930s.
Through short stories and critical essays, the writers who contributed
to these magazines attempted to create new lenses through which to
view the purpose of literature in society. Maṇikkoṭi writers champi-
oned ‘high-quality’ literary writing (taramāṉa ilakkiyam), which they
considered necessary for examining everyday reality and creating
social change. Conversely, Vikaṭaṉ writers – particularly writer and
editor R. Krishnamurthy ‘Kalki’ – promoted ‘comedic writing’ (nakai-
ccuvai ilakkiyam or hāsiya ilakkiyam) as the most appropriate medium
for addressing Tamil readers’ contemporary needs. These differing
viewpoints created a steadfast divide between high modernist and
entertainment-oriented literature in the late colonial literary sphere
that continues to impact writing trends in Tamil Nadu to this day.
The Maṇikkoṭi-Vikaṭaṉ literary debates took shape in the context
of significant developments in the Indian independence movement as
well as a moment of heightened contention over regional language and
caste politics. Gandhi’s Salt March (1930) had incited unprecedented
nationalist fervour in a young generation of Tamil writers, but his
retraction of satyagraha in 1933 left many of them disillusioned and
in search of political alternatives. The Pure Tamil Movement (Taṉi
Tamiḻ Iyakkam) and the Self-Respect Movement (Cuya Mariyātai
Iyakkam) – which had already gained traction in the Tamil-speaking
region in the 1920s – advanced staunchly anti-nationalist positions in

17
 P reetha M ani

opposition to Gandhi and the growing influence of the Indian National

Congress (INC). These movements pitted Dravidian ethnicity against
the dominance of Brahminism and North Indian Sanskritic culture,
which they regarded as foreign and imperialistic.1 When the INC came
to power in the Madras presidency in 1937, its pro-Hindi position fur-
ther incited Dravidian activists, who advocated for a pure Tamil lan-
guage and culture unadulterated by Sanskrit and English influences.
Unsettled by such political divisiveness, Maṇikkoṭi and Vikaṭaṉ
writers – most of whom were Brahmins – turned to literature as a
means for cultivating new forms of Tamil community on the basis of
shared humanistic values.
This essay explores critical writings and short stories from
Maṇikkoṭi and Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ to illustrate how Tamil writers
created new genres of ‘literary’ and ‘popular’ modern fiction dur-
ing the 1930s. Scholarship on Indian modernism has outlined its
chronological development in relation to international modernist
movements, social changes wrought by colonialism and nationalism
and other pan-Indian literary trends such as realism and progressiv-
ism. Recently, Supriya Chaudhuri has marked 1922 – when the first
Bauhaus exhibition was held in Calcutta – as a formative moment
for Indian modernism. She argues that the inclusion of Bengali art-
ists’ works in the exhibit, and not the Bauhaus paintings themselves,
‘ini­tiate a modernist idiom’, which ‘must be seen as a radical libera-
tion of narrative art from naturalistic representation’ in the Indian
context.2 Similarly, Vinay Dharwardker has described 1922 to 1945
as a modernist phase of ‘nationalism and experimentation’, during
which Indian writers – most of whom were familiar with European
modernist trends – explored urban-rural relations and the place of
the individual in the future nation.3 While Chaudhuri and Dharwad-
ker note that ‘local and communitarian’ aesthetic and socio-political
concerns fundamentally shaped modernist trends in various Indian
languages, they sideline these concerns to present a more general
‘panoramic survey’ of Indian modernism.4 The Maṇikkoṭi-Vikaṭaṉ
debates demonstrate, however, that extremely localised, intimate con-
versations profoundly influenced the trajectory of Tamil modernism.
The literary/popular distinction that these debates established situ-
ates Tamil modernism at a tangent to Chaudhuri’s and Dharwadker’s
characterisations of late colonial Indian modernism as preoccupied
with anticolonialism and nation building. The politics of modernism
in Tamil Nadu centered instead on inculcating readers with new aes-
thetic sensibilities that were aimed at diffusing regional contentions
regarding linguistic and caste affiliations.

18
 F iction in late colonial T amil N adu

The national-modern dialectic

Geeta Kapur’s 1991 theorisation of Indian modernism, still the most
widely accepted model in contemporary scholarship, informs Chaud-
huri’s and Dharwardker’s nod to the role of local social landscapes
in the development of Indian modernisms.5 Responding in the early
1990s to scholarly representations of Third World modernism as
peripheral to European modernism, Kapur argued that the discourse
of modernism in India is marked by a dialectic between the national
and the modern. In her view, the national, represented in art through
references to local landscapes and ‘folk’ (indigenous, tribal, or village)
issues and motifs, draws from and celebrates Indian ‘tradition’. The
modern, which references Euro-American modernist trends, stands, in
contrast, for an international style that is transnational and universal
in scope. Constantly shifting between the two, Kapur’s understanding
of Indian modernism manifests as a paradoxical ‘double-take’, which
sometimes ‘serves to make indigenous issues and motifs progressive’
and other times ‘seems to subvert . . . nationalism’.6
Seemingly at odds, the national and the modern converge, according
to Kapur, ‘on the question of self-determination’.7 Indian modernist
works imagine the subject through an intricate confluence of refer-
ences to Indian tradition and international style, through which they
‘answer an emergent [postcolonial] society’s need for renewed self-
description and radical assessment’.8 The contradictory ways in which
these convergences manifest – for example, by anachronistically posi-
tioning an ‘indigenous preindustrial realm’ as a contemporary possi-
bility – integrate the specific social and economic circumstances of the
Indian context with the globally recognisable ‘rebel figure’, the privi-
leged subject of international modernism.9 In doing so, Indian mod-
ernism offers, in Kapur’s view, a structurally distinct counter-practice
to the elitism of Anglo-European modernism.
Kapur valourises the national – as opposed to the local or regional –
because she wishes to challenge the centre-periphery model of inter-
national modernism, which subordinates regional aesthetic criteria to
Western artistic ideals. She contends that ‘from the point of view of
cultural resistance to global pressures . . . the discourse of national
culture is preferable to that of regional culture for the reason that
nationalism is not a devolving concept – though indeed it can be a
bigoted one’. Unlike regions, nations ‘cannot easily be swallowed
whole, only tribe by tribe – which leaves the question begging how
nations themselves swallow their own peoples tribe by tribe’.10 Thus,
while Kapur acknowledges the drawbacks of nationalism as well as

19
 P reetha M ani

the persistent presence of the region in Indian modernist practices,

she situates local ‘folk’ issues and motifs under the broad category
of ‘Indian tradition’, which presents a complex whole that counters
international style. Chaudhuri and Dharwadker similarly conceive of
Indian modernism as national style, which they view as taking shape
under uniquely Indian social and historical conditions and as a cri-
tique of colonial domination.
Like the Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, and Indian-English modern-
ists that Kapur, Chaudhuri, and Dharwadker all describe, Maṇikkoṭi
and Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ writers were also driven by the question of self-
determination. Yet, their writings did not focus on drawing connec-
tions between selfhood and nationhood – the primary relationship
undergirding Indian modernism in Kapur’s national-modern frame-
work. Rather than developing national style, these writers used rep-
resentations of the maverick individual to consider the relationship
between ‘literary’ and ‘popular’ Tamil fiction. Through their depic-
tions of individual desire and will, Maṇikkoṭi and Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ
writers explored how fiction and criticism might align readers with
their respective literary worldviews. At issue in their disagreement
over the literary and the popular was the possibility of wielding litera-
ture to construct new types of Tamil readers and communities. In the
highly-charged political atmosphere of late colonial Tamil Nadu, their
modernist experiments must be understood, I believe, as a response
to regional caste and linguistic dissension – rather than as focused on
developing and advancing pan-Indian nationalism per se.

The emergence of Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ and Maṇikkoṭi

By the 1920s, Pure Tamil and Self-Respect Movement activists had
effectively tapped into the power of journals to build new constitu-
encies around their Dravidianist agendas. Maraimalai Adigal, Saivite
reformer and leader of the Pure Tamil Movement, worked closely with
the South India Saiva Siddhanta Works Publishing Society (established
in 1920) and wrote prolifically in recently established Saiva Siddhanta
magazines of the period to propagate his vision of Tamil language, his-
tory, and culture.11 Similarly, Periyar ran several Dravidian magazines
connected with the Self-Respect Movement as well as the Justice Party,
which he led from 1938 to 1944. He also wrote about the impor-
tance of establishing Dravidian magazines to counter Brahmin hegem-
ony of the Tamil press, supporting all non-Brahmin magazines that
emerged during the 1930s and 1940s – even those not affiliated with
his movement.12 According to Periyar, Brahmin publishers, magazines,

20
 F iction in late colonial T amil N adu

and newspapers ignored non-Brahmin concerns and skewed the read-

ing public towards Hinduism and Brahmin patriarchy and politics.
Creating a Dravidian-run press was necessary, he believed, for cul-
tivating and politicising a counter non-Brahmin identity. As greater
alliances developed between Pure Tamil activists and Self-Respecters
in the 1930s – especially regarding language politics – Saivite and Self-
Respect journals combined their efforts to promote essays on their
shared anti-Hindi and anti-Brahmin viewpoints and to support each
other’s cultural and political activities.13
Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ and Maṇikkoṭi emerged in this atmosphere of
shifting power dynamics within the Tamil publishing sphere towards
non-Brahmin social and political interests. When S.S. Vasan bought
Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ in 1928, it was a fairly new and rather unsuccessful
magazine that featured comedic writings about mother-in-law/daugh-
ter-in-law relationships, minors visiting courtesans and devadasis,
domestic mishaps in Brahmin households, and humourous incidents
that poked fun at various caste and religious communities. These largely
stereotypical scenarios were paradigmatic of comedic writing that was
published in specialised magazines from the 1880s onwards and gar-
nered a relatively small audience. Vasan’s cardinal accomplishment was
the creation of new columns and sections, such as ‘Vikaṭaṉ Talk (vika-
tan pēccu)’, ‘Small Amusements (ciṉṉañciṛi tamāṣ)’, ‘Women’s Talk
(peṇ moḻikaḷ)’, and a column for readers to send in their own experi-
ences entitled ‘Readers’ Comedies (nēyarkaḷ vikatam)’. These features
enabled Vasan to appeal to a wider audience, transforming Vikaṭaṉ
into the most popular magazine of the period. In 1930, Vasan hired
R. Krishnamurthy ‘Kalki’ (1899–1954), whose short stories and essays
brought even greater renown to the magazine.14
Vasan’s business savvy and openness to new genres enabled Vikaṭaṉ
to gain popularity. However, it was Kalki’s witty approach to and deep
investment in the journal medium that established hāsiya ilakkiyam, or
humourous literature, as a major genre of contemporary Tamil writing.
Several of his essays used comedy to explain how magazines operate.
For example, in ‘Poṭu Pattirikai! (Go Ahead, Start a Magazine!)’, pub-
lished in Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ in 1934, Kalki offered advice to an imaginary
inquirer wishing to start a magazine of his own. Ironically suggesting
that the inquirer’s circumstances made him a less-than-ideal magazine
editor in the journal world, Kalki impressed upon readers how prolific
and effective for amassing readers the journal medium was:

You wrote and sent a hundred essays to magazines, and all of

them were returned without being published . . . Brother! At a

21
 P reetha M ani

time when a new era of journals pervades Tamil Nadu, I have

to say that you’ve achieved something rare . . . Usually some
editor or other publishes the essay, whatever it might be. In
such an age, it’s no small feat that you’ve received rejections
from a hundred editors. No wonder you feel it’s necessary and
appropriate to run your own magazine.15

In his typical tongue-and-cheek manner, Kalki conveyed that any-

one possessing the right resources and a handful of essays and stories
ready for publication could launch a magazine. At a more fundamental
level, however, he implied that most editors approached language and
literature without possessing the discerning eye necessary for shaping
a successful magazine. Offering an absurd list of possible topics for
publication, such as ‘The Secrets of Tripping and Falling’, ‘Is Death
Necessary?’, ‘Is Blood Red? Or White?’, ‘Don’t Sleep!’, ‘Churchill Has
Been Hit on the Head’, and ‘Rabindranath and the Cat’, Kalki joked
that ‘the topics on which the essays are written aren’t important . . .
it’s the writing style (eḻutum muṛai) that matters’.16 He advised that
an editor should include some essays that are written in ner naṭai, or
a straightforward style, which, according to Kalki, any idiot (mūḷai
illātavar) can understand. Other essays should follow a marma (con-
fusing) and uyartara (high-quality) naṭai (style), one so intellectual and
philosophical that it makes readers’ heads spin. Kalki also sarcastically
insisted that a magazine should always include short stories that are
selected solely on the basis of whether they are interesting, rather than
on the basis of their content or form.17
Through such quips, Kalki obliquely ridiculed existing magazines.
He intimated that literary magazines that used a ‘high-quality’ style,
such as Maṇikkoṭi, took themselves far too seriously to address read-
ers’ needs and interests, while religious and political ones, such as Self-
Respect and Saivite journals, failed readers by abandoning literary
standards altogether. Subtly critiquing these existing approaches with
humour, Kalki highlighted his own expertise and artistry in writing
and editing for Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ. Running a magazine for the general
public was, in his view, an important and highly skilled endeavour.
Like Kalki, the founding editors of Maṇikkoṭi – T.S. Chokalingam
(1899–1963), K. Srinivasan (1904–2001), and V. Ramaswamy Iyen-
gar (1889–1951) – also perceived a lacuna in the Tamil journal world,
and they launched their magazine in 1933 to address it. Whereas Kalki
viewed comedy as a means for readers to escape their everyday lives,
the Maṇikkoṭi editors believed literary discernment could transform
readers’ perspectives on life altogether. As B.S. Ramaiah, who was

22
 F iction in late colonial T amil N adu

involved with the magazine from its inception and later became its
most well-known editor, recounted in his memoir, Maṇikkoṭi was
more than just a magazine. It was a movement (iyakkam) ‘launched
with the intention of inciting a new awakening . . . within the hearts
of the people and elevating their literary taste [ilakkiya cuvai]’.18 In
an environment in which classical Tamil was the only literature that
politicians and activists celebrated, and in which magazines presented
comedy as the only alternative to writing about social reform, reli-
gion and politics, Maṇikkoṭi focused on developing modern prose
through a more philosophical and aesthetic lens:

[Maṇikkoṭi] published ‘high literary’ [ilakkiya taramāna]

writing in new genres. . . . To some extent, Kalki first dem-
onstrated that it’s possible to express anything in Tamil. But,
he believed that developing people’s taste and ideas required
saying things humourously through ridicule and mockery.
Maṇikkoṭi was the very first to show that humour wasn’t the
only way that it was possible to say anything in Tamil and to
express ideas firmly with depth and significance [āḻum kaṉam
keṭṭiyākavum].19

Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ, and Kalki in particular, provided a counterpoint

against which Maṇikkoṭi writers defined their literary project. They
maintained that ‘in Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ, Kalki advanced merely triv-
ial, pass-time literature’.20 Focusing mainly on the short story, they
directed their literary energies towards experimentation with language
and style and the exploration of individual desire and emotion. The
reason why serious-minded Tamil writers had previously experienced
difficulty getting their stories published, these writers pointed out,
was that no appropriate literary venue existed for their work until
Maṇikkoṭi.21 Refusing to send their work to popular (potujaṉa)
magazines such as Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ, the Maṇikkoṭi kuḻu (clan), as
they came to be called, loftily maintained that ‘if life is the earth . . .
literature is the blossom that grows out of and stands above it’, rising
up like a lotus out of the mud.22
Maṇikkoṭi writers argued that Kalki and other Vikaṭaṉ editors
published writing based on what they believed the general masses
desired to read. For this reason, they exercised little, if any, discrimi-
nation in selecting essays and stories or in improving them editorially.
Ramaiah, by contrast, purposefully shaped Maṇikkoṭi submissions
with a firm hand after he took over the magazine in 1935. Ramaiah’s
editorial modifications were so influential that, as P.G. Sundararajan

23
 P reetha M ani

and Sivapathasundaram contend in their now authoritative history of

the Tamil short story, they were primarily responsible for establish-
ing Maṇikkoṭi as the preeminent literary (taramāṉa) magazine of
its time.23
Kalki’s development of the genre of comedy notwithstanding,
Maṇikkoṭi writers furthermore critiqued him and other Vikaṭaṉ
editors for privileging classical over modern Tamil literature. For
instance, in his memoir, Ramaiah described Kalki’s involvement with
a circle of literary enthusiasts organised by the Tamil scholar T.K.
Chidambaranatha Mudaliar ‘T.K.C.’ (1882–1954). He pointed out
that the group did not consider modern Tamil novels as literature
or view the poet Subramania Bharati’s (1882–1921) free verse as
innovative and inspiring.24 Maṇikkoṭi writers, by contrast, lionised
Bharati’s work, viewing it as exemplary of the type of literary inno-
vation they sought to produce.25 In the Maṇikkoṭi writers’ view,
Ananta Vikaṭaṉ writers turned to comedy under Vasan’s guidance
because they were interested solely in increasing the magazine’s cir-
culation numbers.26
Despite their differences, however, Maṇikkoṭi and Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ
writers also acknowledged each other’s contributions to the field of
modern Tamil literature. For example, Maṇikkoṭi writers recognised
that the periodic short story contests that Kalki held for Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ
helped to build an interest in modern Tamil literature, even if he imple-
mented them as a money-making scheme.27 Likewise, Kalki expressed
great enthusiasm for Maṇikkoṭi writers’ more ‘literary’ endeavours,
going so far as to drop by the Maṇikkoṭi office to discuss every new
issue that appeared.28 The mutual respect that these writers expressed
for one another stemmed from their shared interest in expanding the
Tamil publishing sphere beyond its focus on politics, as well as their
keen awareness of the power of literature to shape new readerly inter-
ests and desires. By playing off each other’s literary perspectives and
generic and linguistic experiments, Maṇikkoṭi and Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ
established and marked the polar frontiers of a new literary–popular
spectrum of fiction writing within modern Tamil literature.

The purpose of literature

One reason that Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ and Maṇikkoṭi writers were so
successful in constructing such a firm distinction between literary and
popular fiction is that they explicitly and deliberately expressed their
views on the purpose of literature. Through essays and short stories,
Vikaṭaṉ and Maṇikkoṭi writers critiqued and parodied one another,

24
 F iction in late colonial T amil N adu

while also defining the meaning of literature and its significance in eve-
ryday life. Doing so enabled them to instruct readers on how to read
their work and appreciate their novel approaches to writing.
Kalki impressed on his readers that humour offered them respite
from the stress and disillusionment induced by the independence
movement and related events. He perceived that the political writings
that dominated most periodicals disheartened readers, leading them to
angrily ‘rebuke editors and toss down their magazines’ in frustration.29
According to Kalki, Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ used humour to divert readers’
attention from their anxieties and burdens. In the tumultuous political
environment of the 1930s, comedy allowed them to cull simple lessons
about life, while also providing the escape necessary for revitalising
themselves to endure their everyday struggles.
Kalki also elaborated on the inner workings of comedy. For exam-
ple, in an essay titled ‘Hāsiya Vipattukaḷ (The Dangers of Comedy)’,
published in Vikaṭaṉ in 1932, he responded to critics who alleged that
humour was dangerous because, too often, readers took jokes as truth
instead of fiction. Demonstrating through various examples that a
sense of humour is crucial for overcoming troubling circumstances, he
ironically concluded:

Of course, there’s a danger in taking something humourous

as truth. But it’s even more distressing to consider a situation
in which there’s no humour at all. The name ‘vikaṭaṉ’ [which
means ‘jest’] is an aid against this kind of mistake. Other mag-
azines have a separate ‘comedy section’. . . . [But] we don’t
use such headings in Vikaṭaṉ. We also don’t separate things
into a ‘tragedy section’, an ‘entertainment section’, and a ‘hor-
ror section’ [etc.]. Therefore, is it possible, when you see the
name Vikaṭaṉ, to take everything humourously and to laugh
at those moments when you want to cry? You might consider
that this is the most formidable danger of all.30

Kalki distinguished Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ from most magazines, which

directed readers to understand humour as exceptional, rather than
integral, to the human condition. This, in Kalki’s opinion, was the
most harmful of all approaches to daily life. He furthermore contended
that those who took life too seriously perceived humour as threatening
because it unsettled their established norms and modes of existence.
Through this critique, he implicitly suggested that comedic literature
enabled individuals to consider their circumstances from fresh, more
advantageous perspectives.

25
 P reetha M ani

Kalki brought this point to the fore in his short story ‘Cirañcīvik
Katai! (A Timeless Story)’, which appeared in the 19 April 1936 issue
of Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ. Although the story contains no mention of
Maṇikkoṭi, Kalki clearly aimed it as a taunt towards Maṇikkoṭi
writers for investing too much literary significance in use of language
and form and the depiction of individual desire and intention. Accord-
ing to Ramaiah, Kalki’s story poked fun specifically at his column ‘The
First Chapter (Mutal Attiyāyam)’, which Ramaiah inaugurated when
he became editor of Maṇikkoṭi in 1935. The column introduced
those stories appearing in each issue that Ramaiah felt were timeless
(cirañcīvi) and noted their unique features such as unusual plot lines,
descriptive details, character development, and formal or linguistic
innovation. Kalki’s critique of the column, writes Ramaiah, was that it
immortalised the stories that it featured before time could prove their
literary worth.31 Mocking Ramaiah’s overbearing editorial direction,
the narrator of Kalki’s ‘A Timeless Story’ began:

I’m not going to ask you not to be alarmed when you read this
title because you will do the opposite of what I ask. There-
fore, I request that you please be afraid when you hear this
title. Yes, the story I’m about to write is not a timeless story.
In truth, it’s not even a long-lived story. For those who read
quickly, its lifespan is three minutes. Even if you read the story
letter by letter, it would last only five minutes.
Actually, the title ‘A Timeless Story’ appeared in another
humourous magazine. In that story, how a woman took revenge
on her sister-in-law by killing her three children and then her-
self, and how her husband shut down after these events and was
run over by a tram were described in a surprising manner and
wondrous style. The title of the story was ‘A Drink of Immortal
Nectar’. Above the title, the magazine editor had expressed his
particular thoughts on the story in a highlighted box. The first
mistake my protagonist Mister Markanda Mudaliar made was
to read the first sentence in that highlighted section. . . [which
read] ‘This is a timeless story. . . ’.32

Toying with the story’s title, the narrator cleverly highlights his delib-
erate orchestration of the narrative to guide his readers’ reception of
the story. No story, he suggests, is truly ‘timeless’, as it endures only as
long as the time it takes to read, regardless of editorial intervention.
Appropriating the title from another magazine, the narrator points
sarcastically to the undue emphasis that ‘A Drink of Immortal Nectar’

26
 F iction in late colonial T amil N adu

gives to developing a ‘surprising’ and ‘wonderous’ literary style rather

than to the mechanism of humour. This was Kalki’s way of alluding to
Maṇikkoṭi, which was clearly not a ‘humourous magazine’, as evi-
denced by the overly dramatic plot of the imaginary ‘timeless story’ to
which Kalki’s story refers. The narrator of ‘A Timeless Story’ thus cri-
tiques the Maṇikkoṭi writers’ efforts, while also calling attention to
his own equally laughable experimentation with the idea of a ‘timeless
story’. ‘What, indeed, makes a story timeless, and what are its merits?’
he prods readers to ask. And more importantly, ‘Is there a place for
humour in a so-called timeless literary work?’
Contrary to the narrator’s view, the story’s protagonist Markanda
Mudaliar finds the idea of a timeless story irresistible. The magazine
editor’s comment leads Markanda to wonder, ‘Is it possible to be
everlasting (cirañcīvi) in this world? . . . Must a man die?’33 Mar-
kanda immediately decides to change his daily habits to ensure his
own immortality in some way or another. He makes a plan to eat
better, exercise more, challenge himself intellectually and philosophi-
cally, and even to explore the idea of remarriage after having been
widowed several years earlier. After trying his hand at several physical
tasks unsuccessfully, he finally resolves to take a walk on the beach to
benefit from the fresh sea breeze.
Unbeknownst to Markanda, however, crowds have gathered at the
seashore to support Gandhi’s Salt March and protest the arrest of sev-
eral enthusiasts who had set up portable stoves to make their own
salt. As Markanda approaches the beach, the crowd begins to pelt
the police with stones, and the police open fire in return. Determined
to follow through on his new plan and oblivious to his surroundings,
Markanda pushes through the crowd only to be shot dead instantly.
The narrator dispassionately steps back into the narrative to conclude:

To commemorate Mister Markanda Mudaliar, who gave his

life in the shootout at the beach, the Municipal Corporation
decided to replace the name of Abdullah Jamvanth Lala Lane
in Pudupettai – where Markanda lived most of his life – with
the name Markanda Mudaliar Street. The decision was unani-
mously supported. This is the life history of my protagonist
Mister Markanda Mudaliar, who by the age of fifty acquired
the title of being an immortal [cirañcīvi], just like the ancient
rishi Markandeya.34

Ironically, the Municipal Corporation views Markanda’s walk on the

beach as a great act of nationalist bravado, while Markanda’s will to

27
 P reetha M ani

change his life and desire for self-improvement – which he himself had
held most dear – perish along with him. The narrator wittily references
the protagonist’s namesake, the mythic Hindu sage Markandeya who
defeated death by performing extensive penance to Lord Siva. The
comparison accentuates Markanda Mudaliar’s rather inconsequen-
tial existence and highlights the self-serving nature and triviality of
his actions. The story’s message is both poignant and cynical: seem-
ingly extraordinary political sacrifices are, in fact, driven by mundane
motivations, while seemingly powerful personal ambitions become
impotent in the face of broader social circumstances. Long-lasting lit-
erary renown, furthermore, is fundamentally meaningless. Markanda
Mudaliar’s death is an absurdly comical twist to an otherwise ordinary
story. The narrator uses it to inspire readers to consider the nature of
human mortality and the value of literary fiction. A humourous per-
spective, he suggests, offers much more fodder for thought than any
rhetorical turn of language or philosophical exploration of aesthetics.35
The Maṇikkoṭi writers, however, understood literature altogether
differently. The casual, almost disrespectful, manner in which Kalki
wrote, the ‘pass time’ content of his fiction, and the polemical life les-
sons he often expounded were, in their view, antithetical to the primary
function of literature. They argued instead that literature provided a
more intuitive and evenhanded perspective on life than could other-
wise be obtained – a perspective that was rooted in yet also elevated
above everyday experience. According to Maṇikkoṭi writers, comedy
distracted readers from understanding the underlying enigmatic nature
of life, which literature illuminated, and which enabled readers to find
solace and meaning where there otherwise seemed to be none.
For example, in the 28 October 1934 issue of Maṇikkoṭi, Pudu-
maippittan – perhaps the most widely read of the Maṇikkoṭi writers –
elaborated on the unique function of literature in an essay titled ‘The
Secret of Literature (Ilakkiyattiṉ Irakaciyam)’. For Pudumappittan,
the secret of literature was no different than the secret of life:

What is the place of literature in life [vaḻkkai]? . . . There is no

opinion more wrong than thinking that literature is a ‘means
for accumulating desirable things.’ Literature is the elabora-
tion [virivu] of the self [uḷḷam], the awakening [eḻucci] of the
self, its blossoming [malarcci]. A writer examines life with
all of its complexities and problems [cikkalkaḷ], subtleties
[nuṇukkam] and twists [piṉṉalkaḷ]. On their behalf, he begets
a feeling [uṇarcci] deep within us. Literature is the very thing
that governs over that stream of emotion [uṇarcci]. It could

28
 F iction in late colonial T amil N adu

be the name of a flower that he [the writer] doesn’t know,

a detested political scheme, or the severity of human cruelty
that catches his attention. Regardless, as soon as he notices a
particular feature, his heart and mind grow weary. Literature
is the representation of this arousal of emotion [calaṉam]. . . .
The pulse of literature is emotion [uṇarcci]. . . . The sheer
truth [uṇmai] of emotion leads to a new state of consciousness
[viḻippu]. Truth is the very secret [rakaciyam] of life.36

For Pudumaippittan and other Maṇikkoṭi writers, uṇarcci (feeling,

emotion, sentiment, or sensibility), which arose out of the writer’s
everyday life and inspired his creative production, formed the essence
of literature. It was what the writer transferred to readers through
his fiction, kindling a transformation of selfhood within them. In
the Maṇikkoṭi writers’ view, experiencing uṇarcci enabled readers to
develop heightened aesthetic sensibilities for encountering the world
in new, unconventional ways. Pudumaippittan thus suggested that lit-
erature is the very truth (uṇmai) of life, the primary basis of human
knowledge and community belonging.
He expanded this idea in his short story ‘Ciṟpiyiṉ Narakam (The
Sculptor’s Hell)’, published in Maṇikkoṭi in the 25 August 1935 issue.
The setting of this unusual story is an unspecified moment in the ancient
past when Tamilians, Northern Aryans, Greeks, and Africans lived
together in the coastal region of Tamil Nadu. As the story opens, Phy-
larkkas, a young Greek man, watches the sun set upon a bustling har-
bor town while sitting on the steps of a bathing ghat. A Tamil religious
pilgrim whom Phylarkkas knows well interrupts Phylarkkas’s contem-
plative mood to explain the scene before him: ‘Everything is the sacred
game of original divine power, [everything is] its manifestation!’37
Phylarkkas good-humouredly responds that religion and philosophy
are nonsensical and would be better replaced by hedonism, wine, and
women. The two agree to present their debate to Sathan, who best
‘understands the secret of creative production (ciruṣṭi rakaciyam)’.38
An old and humble sculptor, Sathan invites the two men to his home
to see his latest and greatest work, which he has prepared for the
king’s temple. Versed in sacred scriptures and teeming with life experi-
ences due to his travels, Sathan tells Phylarkkas and the pilgrim that
he has put all that he has learned – particularly about the existence
of the divine – into making his new sculpture. It is a statue of the god
Siva with one leg raised in an artistic dance pose, locks flowing, and
hands held in a gesture of grace. Phylarkkas is stunned by the statue’s
beauty, exclaiming, ‘This is real art! This is true creativity!’39 He begs

29
 P reetha M ani

Sathan not to install the statue in a religious setting, where its artistic
significance would be diminished, and dismayed by Sathan’s refusal,
he angrily walks away.
‘The Sculptor’s Hell’ then abruptly shifts to a second scene, when
Phylarkkas is no longer alive and Sathan’s sculpture has been installed
in the king’s temple and consecrated. Sathan has slipped into a bewil-
dering dream-filled sleep, in which he sees his statue lit up before him
and then completely enveloped in darkness. As Sathan makes his way
into the depths of the temple, he finds the statue no longer has any
life. ‘Everything is a delusion [maruḷ] . . . a delusion!’ he cries. He
watches a stream of devotees – mere shadows in his dream – beg-
ging God for salvation without ever glancing at the statue: ‘Give me
release [mōṭcam] . . . this was the chorus, the song, everything!’40 In a
rage, Sathan breaks the statue to pieces, cursing it for losing all mean-
ing in the eyes of its beholders. Covered in the statue’s blood, Sathan
suddenly wakes, and here, the story concludes: ‘ “Oh, what a terri-
ble dream . . . if only poor Phylarkkas were here”, [thought Sathan].
Sathan’s mind could find no peace’.41
Initially, ‘The Sculptor’s Hell’ sets up a dichotomy between Phylark-
kas’s valourisation of individual desire and the pilgrim’s and Sathan’s
reverence for the divine, through which it investigates the meaning
of art. Despite the story’s historical setting, Phylarkkas represents a
more ‘modern’ outlook – one that elevates individual pleasure and
rationality above religion, culture, and tradition. The pilgrim and
Sathan embody an opposing ‘Tamil Saivite’ outlook, which considers
all worldly aspects to be materialisations of inexplicable divine power.
In their conversations, Phylarkkas holds that ‘true’ art gives form to
the universal nature of beauty, whereas the pilgrim and Sathan con-
sider it to be a revelation of divine essence. However, Sathan’s dream
gives him a different view of the relationship between life and art by
allowing him to glimpse the way in which rote religious beliefs and
customs overshadow artistic meaning. When he wakes, the uneasiness
and confusion that Sathan experiences evoke similar feelings (uṇarcci)
in readers. These emotions offer readers insight into the nature of art
and its place in daily life, suggesting that Phylarkkas’s individualistic
approach might be more appropriate to the modern human condition
than they may have believed. ‘The Sculptor’s Hell’ awakens a new
artistic sensibility within readers by asking them to reflect upon Phy-
larkkas’s foreign perspective, thereby drawing them together within a
shared, creative-minded community.
While ‘The Sculptor’s Hell’ focuses specifically on the meaning of
art and takes no heed of Kalki’s more popular style of writing, other

30
 F iction in late colonial T amil N adu

Maṇikkoṭi stories blatantly critique it. For instance, in the 25 April 1937
issue of Maṇikkoṭi, Ki. Rajanarayanan ‘Ki. Ra.’ (1922 –) published the
story ‘The Comedy Magazine Editor (Hāsya Pattirikāciriyaṉ)’, which
sought to demonstrate comedy writing’s lack of originality and depth.
The first-person narrator of the story, an editor for a comedy maga-
zine just like Kalki, struggles to produce a short story to fill the last
seven pages of the upcoming issue before it goes to print that evening.
Unable to brainstorm ideas, he sits glued to his desk, considering his
profession: ‘Who better serves humankind than a comedy magazine
editor? What greater service is there in the world than taking away
the sadness of humanity? In those days, I used to think all kinds of
things’.42 After a year at his job, the editor tells readers, he began pla-
giarising stories from other (particularly English) magazines to come
up with new material.43 On this day, however, his life takes a drastic
turn, and he has an even greater change of heart about the purpose of
comedy. He suddenly receives a telegram announcing the death of his
ailing wife, who had been visiting her parents. He thinks to himself,
‘To have to write comedy at a time like this! What cruelty! Fate looks
at a man and laughs!’44 He tries to hand over his responsibility to
produce a humourous story by the print deadline to his superior so
that he might catch a train to his wife’s parents’ home. When his supe-
rior denies his request, the editor simply steals the plot of a story he
recently read somewhere else, publishing it as his own so that he can
now focus on the more important aspects of his life. Comedy, the story
implies, is trivial, derivative, and distracting. Its objective to entertain
hardly meets life’s more serious demands. Readers would be better
served, the story furthermore contends, by fiction that examines life’s
hardships and individuals’ personal struggles.

Repercussions of the new literary–popular

continuum
Through such short stories and essays, Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ and Maṇikkoṭi
writers formulated their distinct literary projects by responding to
and critiquing one another’s aesthetic worldviews. Doing so enabled
them to train readers to recognise the differences between ‘popular’
and ‘literary’ fiction, both of which were relatively new genres in the
1930s Tamil publishing sphere. Yet, what led Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ and
Maṇikkoṭi writers to focus so intently on fashioning these new genres
and developing readerly interest in them? In their work, these writers
often explained their views on the meaning and purpose of literature,
but they much less frequently (if at all) discussed why they felt these

31
 P reetha M ani

views mattered. In the opening passages of this essay, I suggested that

understanding what was at stake in the Maṇikkoṭi and Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ
debates about literary and popular fiction requires viewing their
endeavours in relation to contentions surrounding language and caste
identity in late colonial Tamil Nadu. Let me conclude by briefly elabo-
rating this argument to consider how these writers’ establishment of a
literary–popular continuum of modern fiction helped to consolidate a
uniquely Tamil modernist tradition in the face of growing Dravidianist
dissension.
It was no secret that Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ and Maṇikkoṭi were aligned
with Gandhian civil disobedience and the anticolonial objectives of
the INC – both of which Self-Respecters and Pure Tamil activists
considered to be dominated by Brahminism and therefore rigorously
opposed. Nonetheless, Vikaṭaṉ and Maṇikkoṭi writers were discreet
and diplomatic in those few instances when they articulated their
political views.45 As I demonstrated above, they eschewed politics in
their fiction, contending that it misled readers, increased their daily
troubles, and impeded the development of literary taste. In principle,
Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ and Maṇikkoṭi writers agreed that readers needed less
political discourse and more literary appreciation at a moment when
politics pervaded their lives.
Despite this perspective, however, Vikaṭaṉ and Maṇikkoṭi writ-
ers did not refrain from discussing their perspectives on Tamil lan-
guage and literature – two issues that lay at the heart of Dravidianist
politics. By limiting their discussion to language and literature rather
than the broader politics of caste and ethnicity to which these ele-
ments were linked, Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ and Maṇikkoṭi writers fash-
ioned a ‘pure’ literary sphere in which literature, seemingly freed from
the confining shackles of politics, became the preeminent concern. For
example, Kalki and Pudumaippittan mourned the backward state of
modern Tamil literature due to the grip that purists held on the use
of Tamil language. Both writers contended that because scholars and
activists cared solely about classical Tamil, no properly modern Tamil
literature existed compared to other Indian languages. They pointed
out that the majority of new publications in Tamil consisted of pre-
modern cultural histories, that the drive to rid Tamil of English and
Sanskrit influences was misdirected and detrimental to literary pro-
duction, and that the paramount duty of Tamil writers was to develop
Tamil prose in a flexible and modern style.46 Kalki and Pudumaippit-
tan formulated these arguments without overtly discussing the Dra-
vidianist agendas driving the scholars and activists they critiqued, but
the political implication of their outwardly ‘literary’ message remains

32
 F iction in late colonial T amil N adu

clear: in their view, the hold of anti-Brahmin politics on contemporary

Tamil culture prevented Tamilians from modernising and adapting to
the rapidly changing conditions of the late colonial period.47
Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ and Maṇikkoṭi writers therefore used litera-
ture to highlight individuals’ shared values, as opposed to their caste
and religious differences. They argued that literature brought readers
together on the basis of their common experiences of pleasure and light-
hearted entertainment (in the case of Kalki and other Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ
writers) and artistic inspiration and emotional suffering (in the case
of Maṇikkoṭi writers). Despite these writers’ intention of building
greater inclusivity, however, the unfortunate consequence of fashioning
such an exclusively literary sphere – which, as I demonstrated above,
ranged from high literary writing to purely popular entertainment –
was that modernist experimentation became largely the province of
Brahmin and upper-caste writers. Until the interventions of Tamil Dalit
writers in the 1990s, not just Dravidian literature, but rather all lit-
erature expressing a political slant, has been considered outside the
realm of respectable literary production. In this sense, the caste dynam-
ics of the Tamil literary sphere reflects the scholarly characterisation of
Indian literature more generally, that it is shaped by ideas of literariness
that cohere around ‘a High Textuality of the Brahminical kind’.48
Still, I want to underscore that in spite of the pan-Indian resonances
between these writers’ humanistic themes and those of modernists
in other Indian literatures, the establishment of the literary/popular
distinction in modern Tamil literature emerged in response to local
circumstances as much as (if not more so than) pan-Indian discourses
of nationalism, tradition, and anticolonialism. While Markanda
Mudaliar and Sathan are certainly modern individuals who push back
against social norms in the ‘rebellious’ sense that Geeta Kapur elabo-
rates, these characters’ engagements with Indian nationalism and tra-
dition are ultimately ambivalent and debauched. Neither ‘A Timeless
Story’ nor ‘The Sculptor’s Hell’ takes a clear position on these issues.
Read in light of the late colonial disputes surrounding ethnic identity
and caste oppression in Tamil Nadu, Kalki’s and Pudumaippittan’s
stories illustrate instead how Ananta Vikaṭaṉ and Maṇikkoṭi writ-
ers targeted their efforts towards developing modern Tamil literature
into a medium with which all Tamilians could identify and in which all
Tamilians could take pleasure. Local disputes surrounding the author-
ity of the pan-Indian nationalist agenda, the role of Tamil Saivism, the
place of Tamil literature, and the use of Tamil language preoccupied
Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ and Maṇikkoṭi writers, just as much as their Pure
Tamil and Self-Respect contemporaries, and these were the issues that

33
 P reetha M ani

they addressed through their fiction and criticism. For this reason,
rather than understanding the literary/popular debate in Tamil Nadu
as, to use Kapur’s language, a paradoxical ‘double-take’ that some-
times ‘seems to subvert . . . nationalism’, I view it as subordinating
themes of Indian selfhood and anticolonial resistance to Tamil debates
regarding language and caste. Indianness was just one component of
the broader modernist conversation that late colonial Tamil writers
had about how literature should fit into daily life.

Notes
1 Swami Vedachalam ‘Maraimalai Adigal’ launched the Pure Tamil Move-
ment in 1916, which ‘proposed that Brahmin power in Tamilnadu
would be subverted if Tamilians stopped using Sanskrit words in Tamil
writing and speech’. See Sumathi Ramaswamy. Passions of the Tongue:
Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891–1970. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997, p. 147. E.V. Ramasami Naicker ‘Periyar’ began
the Self-Respect Movement in 1925 to eradicate the entrenched caste,
gender, and religious norms associated with Brahminical Hinduism. Adi-
gal’s neo-Saivite glorification of Tamil history departed significantly from
E.V.R.’s atheistic and rationalist vision of Dravidian solidarity. Still, the
two movements converged insofar as they resisted Sanskritic (Brahmin,
Aryan) culture. For discussion of Adigal and the development of Tamil
linguistic nationalism, see ibid. For more on the relationship between the
Pure Tamil and Self-Respect Movements, see M.S.S. Pandian. Brahmin
and Non-Brahmin: Genealogies of the Tamil Political Present. Delhi: Per-
manent Black, 2007; ‘Notes on the Transformation of “Dravidian” Ideol-
ogy: Tamilnadu, C. 1900–1940,’ Social Scientist, vol. 22, no. 5/6, 1994;
A.R. Venkatachalapathy, In Those Days There Was No Coffee: Writings
in Cultural History. New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2006. For more on Periyar,
see K. Nambi Arooran, Tamil Renaissance and Dravidian Nationalism,
1905–1940. Madurai: Koodal Publishers, 1980; V. Geetha and S.V. Raja-
durai, Towards a Non-Brahmin Millenium: From Iyothee Thass to Peri-
yar. Calcutta: Samya, 1998.
2 Supriya Chaudhuri, ‘Modernisms in India,’ in The Oxford Handbook of
Modernisms, ed. Peter Brooker, et al. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2010, p. 944.
3 Vinay Dharwadker, ‘The Modernist Novel in India: Paradigms and Prac-
tices,’ in A History of the Indian Novel in English, ed. Ulka Anjaria. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 106.
4 Chaudhuri, ‘Modernisms,’ 946; Dharwadker, ‘The Modernist Novel,’
pp. 108–109.
5 Chaudhuri draws on Kapur to highlight the contradictory tendencies of
Bengali modernist painters to combine European avant-garde techniques
with indigenous ones to produce a critique of colonial urban culture. See
Chaudhuri, ‘Modernisms,’ pp. 943–946. Dharwadker does not directly
reference Kapur, but his view of Indian modernism aligns with her national-
modern framework. For example, Dharwadker argues that understanding

34
 F iction in late colonial T amil N adu

Mulk Raj Anand’s English-language novel Untouchable (1935) requires

placing it in conversation with Premchand’s Hindi-language theorisation
of idealistic realism (ādarśonmukhī yathārthvād). The comparison ena-
bles Dharwadker to explain how Anand’s novel moves between (typically
European) modernist experimentation with style and form and (charac-
teristically Indian) realistic description of the protagonist’s casteised life
experience. See Dharwadker, ‘The Modernist Novel,’ pp. 112–118.
6 Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural
Practice in India. New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2000, p. 292.
7 Ibid., p. 294.
8 Kumkum Sangari, ‘The Politics of the Possible,’ Cultural Critique, vol. 7,
Autumn 1987, p. 162., quoted in Kapur, When Was Modernism, p. 295.
9 Kapur, When Was Modernism, pp. 293–294.
10 Ibid., p. 291 (emphasis in original).
11 The main Saiva Siddhanta journals in which Maraimaial Adigal published
were were Navacakti, Cittāntam, Civanēcaṉ, Centamiḻ, and Centamiḻ
Celvi. See Venkatachalapathy, In Those Days There Was No Coffee,
p. 123 n. 40.
12 The magazines Periyar ran were Kuṭi Aracu, Revolt, Puraṭci, Pakuttaṛivu,
and Viṭutalai. In addition, he regularly provided introductions to newly
arising non-Brahmin magazines in Kuṭi Aracu, promoting their endeavors
and discussing their importance for giving voice to non-Brahmin perspec-
tives and raising awareness about non-Brahmin issues. See, for exam-
ple, Periyar’s writings in the section ‘Ceytikaḷ (News and Information)’
in E.V. Periyar Ramasami, Periyār Ī. Ve. Rā. Cintaṉnaikaḷ [Thoughts of
Periyar E.V.R.] ed. V. Anaimuthu, vol. 3. Tiruchirappalli: Cintanaiyalar
Kazhagam, 1974, pp. 1889–1981.
13 See Venkatachalapathy, In Those Days There Was No Coffee, pp. 128–136.
14 R.A. Padmanabhan, who was a sub-editor at Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ in the early
1930s, describes some of Vasan’s and Kalki’s accomplishments at Ānaṉta
Vikaṭaṉ. See R.A. Padmanabhan, Tamiḷ Itaḷkal, 1915–1966 [Tamil Jour-
nals, 1915–1966]. Chennai: Kalachuvadu, 2003, pp. 77–90.
15 R. Krishanmurthy Kalki, ‘Poṭu Pattirikai! [Go Ahead, Start a Magazine!],’
in Kalki Vaḷarttta Tamiḻ [the Tamil That Kalki Developed]. Chennai:
Vikatan Prachuram, 2007 [1934], pp. 131–132.
16 Ibid., pp. 133–134.
17 Ibid., pp. 134–137.
18 B.S. Ramaiah, Maṇikkōṭi Kālam [the Era of Manikkoti]. Chennai: Mey-
yappan Pathipakam, 1980 [1969–1971], n.p.
19 Ibid., p. 64.
20 Padmanabhan, Tamiḷ Itaḷkal, p. 93.
21 See, for instance, the editorial in the 29 April 1934 issue of Maṇikkoṭi,
quoted in P.G. Sundararajan and Cho. Sivapathasundaram, Tamiḻil
Ciṛukatai: Varalāṛum Vaḷarcciyum [the Tamil Short Story: History and
Development]. Chennai: Crea, 1989, p. 99.
22 Ku. Pa. Rajagopalan, ‘Maṛumalarcci [Renaissance],’ in Maṇikkoti Itaḻ
Tokuppu [Collected Writings from the Journal Maṇikkoṭi], ed. P.G. Sund-
arajan, Ashokamitran, and Pa. Muttukumarasami. Chennai: Kalaiñan
Patippakam, 2001 [1934], p. 153. Although many writers published in
Maṇikkoṭi, the key figures that most literary histories consider part of the

35
 P reetha M ani

Maṇikkoṭi kuḻu (clan) include B.S. Ramaiah, C.S. Chellappa (1912–1988),

C. Viruthachalam ‘Pudumaippittan’ (1906–1948), Ku. Pa. Rajagopalan
(1902–1944), Na. Piccamurti (1900–1976), and P.G. Sundararajan ‘Chitti’
(1910–2006).
23 Sundararajan and Sivapathasundaram, Tamiḻil Ciṛukatai, pp. 104–105;
Ramaiah, Maṇikkōṭi Kālam, p. 159. Sundararajan was part of the
Maṇikkoṭi clan.
24 Ramaiah, Maṇikkōṭi Kālam, p. 61. Kennedy notes that T.K.C.’s discussion
group – of which Kalki was an active member – was involved in revital-
izing classical Tamil literature, something that Maṇikkoṭi writers resisted.
Kennedy also describes a dispute that broke out in the pages of Maṇikkoṭi
and the Tamil newspaper Tiṉa Maṇi between Kalki and Maṇikkoṭi writ-
ers over Bharati’s literary merit. Maṇikkoṭi writers argued that Bharati
should be considered a world literary figure, whereas Kalki viewed his
work as pedestrian. See Richard Kennedy, ‘Public Voices, Private Voices:
Manikkoti, Nationalism, and the Development of the Tamil Short Story,
1914–1947.’ unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California,
1980, pp. 137–139.
25 In the first issue of Maṇikkoṭi – published on 17 September 1933 – the
founding editors noted that they named the magazine after a verse in
Bharati’s poem, which praised the jeweled banner (maṇikkoṭi) represent-
ing the strength and glory of the Indian nation. See Sundararajan and Siva-
pathasundaram, Tamiḻil Ciṛukatai, pp. 95–96; Kennedy, ‘Public Voices,’
p. 123.
26 Ramaiah, Maṇikkōṭi Kālam, pp. 158–159.
27 Sundararajan and Sivapathasundaram, Tamiḻil Ciṛukatai, p. 86.
28 Ibid., pp. 96–97; Ramaiah, Maṇikkōṭi Kālam, p. 37.
29 Kalki’s editorial in the 19 November 1933 issue of Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ, quoted
in Sundararajan and Sivapathasundaram, Tamiḻil Ciṛukatai, p. 95.
30 R. Krishanmurthy Kalki, ‘Hāsiya Vipattukkaḷ [the Dangers of Comedy],’
in Kalki Vaḷarttta Tamiḻ [the Tamil That Kalki Developed] (Chennai:
Vikatan Prachuram, 2007 [1932]), p. 59.
31 Ramaiah, Maṇikkōṭi Kālam, pp. 182–183.
32 R. Krishanmurthy Kalki, ‘Cirañcīvik Katai [a Timeless Story],’ in Kalki
Vaḷarttta Tamiḻ [the Tamil That Kalki Developed] (Chennai: Vikatan Pra-
churam, 2007 [1936]), pp. 358–359.
33 Ibid., p. 360.
34 Ibid., p. 366.
35 Kennedy argues that ‘Kalki’s message [in “A Timeless Story”] is that action
is the only true “immortal story”.’ I view the story, conversely, as an illus-
tration of how individual action is often futile and how ‘timeless’ literary
narratives are based in misconception, falsehood, and undue acclaim. See
Kennedy, ‘Public Voices,’ p. 105.
36 Pudumaippittan, ‘Ilakkiyattiṉ Irakaciyam [the Secret of Literature],’ in
Putumaippittaṉ Kaṭṭuraikaḷ [Pudumaippittan’s Essays], ed. A.R. Venka-
tachalapathy (Chennai: Kalachuvadu, 2002 [1934]), pp. 118–119.
37 ‘Ciṟpiyiṉ Narakam [the Sculptor’s Hell],’ in Pudumaippittaṉ Kataikaḷ [the
Short Stories of Pudumaippittan], ed. A.R. Venkatachalapathy. Chennai:
Kalachuvadu Pathippakam, 2000 [1935], p. 326.
38 Ibid.

36
 F iction in late colonial T amil N adu

39 Ibid., p. 329.
40 Ibid., p. 330.
41 Ibid.
42 Ki. Rajanarayanan, ‘Hāsya Pattirikāciriyaṉ [the Comedy Magazine Edi-
tor],’ in Maṇikkoti Itaḻ Tokuppu [Collected Writings from the Journal
Maṇikkoṭi], ed. P.G. Sundarajan, Ashokamitran, and Pa. Muttukumar-
asami. Chennai: Kalaiñan Patippakam, 2001 [1937], p. 429.
43 Maṇikkoṭi writers accused Kalki of plagiarising English magazines in
order to produce new material for Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ. See Sundararajan and
Sivapathasundaram, Tamiḻil Ciṛukatai, pp. 151–153.
44 Rajanarayanan, ‘Hāsya Pattirikāciriyaṉ,’ p. 435.
45 See Sundararajan and Sivapathasundaram, Tamiḻil Ciṛukatai, p. 69;
Ramaiah, Maṇikkōṭi Kālam, pp. 68–69; Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai,
Madras Studios: Narrative, Genre, and Ideology in Tamil Cinema. New
Delhi: Sage Publications, 2015, p. 156. Vasan, Kalki, and the founding
Maṇikkoṭi editors all mentioned their support for Gandhi and the INC in
various essays and editorials, although they generally dwelt little on this
position.
46 See, for example, R. Krishanmurthy Kalki, ‘Eṅkaḷ Tamiḻ Moḻi [Our Tamil
Language],’ in Kalki Vaḷarttta Tamiḻ [the Tamil That Kalki Developed].
Chennai: Vikatan Prachuram, 2007 [1933]; Pudumaippittan, ‘Tamiḻaip
Paṛṛi [About Tamil],’ in Putumaippittan Kaṭṭuraikal, ed. A.R. Venkatacha-
lapathy. Chennai: Kalachuvadu, 2002 [1934].
47 Kalki was far more sympathetic to Tamil purists’ position on language
and literature than Maṇikkoṭi writers, however. Influenced greatly by the
Tamil journalist and littérateur T.V. Kalyanasundaram ‘Thiru. Vi. Ka.’
(1883–1953), who developed a classical Tamil oratorical style, Kalki
stressed the greatness of classical Tamil language literature. He went on, in
the 1940s, to write a number of popular historical novels based on Tamil
mythology as well as to support the Tamiḻ Icai Iyakkam (Tamil Music
Movement), which contested the domination of Carnatic music by Brah-
mins. Maṇikkoṭi writers had disbanded by this period and continued to
refrain from taking overt political positions in their writing. See Kennedy,
‘Public Voices,’ pp. 107–108; Amanda Weidman, Singing the Classical,
Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2006, pp. 180–182.
48 Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures. New York: Verso,
1992, p. 244.

37
 2
HOMAGE TO A ‘MAGIC-
WRITER’
The Mistrīz and Asrār novels of Urdu

C.M. Naim

Between 1893 and 1923, the most popular novelist in Urdu across
India was none other than George William MacArthur Reynolds
(1814–1879), the now forgotten Chartist rabble-rouser, gargantuan
journalist and novelist, and at one time the most popular author in
English. In 1918, there were available in Urdu at least 24 of Reynolds’s
novels, including the two sagas, The Mysteries of London (1848) and
The Mysteries of the Court of London (1856). Also by then, many of
the earliest translations had received two or more printings, while some
novels had been translated more than once. Among his enthusiastic
translators were such notables of Urdu letters as Sajjad Husain, Abdul
Halim Sharar, Riyaz Khairabadi, and Naubat Rai Nazar. Urdu transla-
tors and publishers consistently referred to him as the ‘Magic-Writer
Mr. Reynolds’ (Jādū-nigār Mistar Rinālds), and one bookseller/pub-
lisher in Lahore in 1914 not only proudly offered to supply all his trans-
lated books to the connoisseurs but also commissioned new and more
complete translations of his two ‘mysteries’ and three other novels.1
Reynolds’s historical romances and ‘mysteries’ equally attracted
Urdu translators across North India around the same time – i.e. the
early 1890s – but curiously only his historical romances, appealed to
the translators in Avadh – i.e. Lucknow, and the nearby districts. His
‘mysteries’, on the other hand, were translated into Urdu only by peo-
ple from the Punjab. Was it because the admirer/translator in Lucknow
or Delhi was still more traditional in his literary taste, and markedly
preferred romantic and martial adventures that appeared closer to his
own Urdu heritage of the dāstān, whereas his counterpart in Lahore,
exposed to direct colonial influence for just a few more years – Lahore

38
 H omage to a ‘ M agic - W riter ’

was taken by the East Indian Company in 1850; Lucknow in 1856 –

had more rapidly accommodated a new taste in fiction? Or was it
related to the popularisation of notions of ‘realism’ or ‘naturalism’
among the literati under the direct tutelage of certain colonial officers
of the Department of Public Instruction, as happened in the emergence
of a taste for ‘natural poetry’, in Urdu exemplified by Muhammad
Hasan Azad and Altaf Husain Hali?2 These tempting questions can-
not be answered here. What we do know for sure is that Reynolds’s
The Mysteries of the Court of London made its appearance in Urdu
in 1893, translated by Ghulam Qadir Fasih of Sialkot, while his The
Mysteries of London found translators some twenty years later, one
from Lahore and the other from Firozpur. To Fasih also goes the credit
for introducing the word mistrīz in Urdu.

Ghulam Qadir Fasih was born in Sialkot in 1860.3 After matriculating

from the city’s Scotch Mission High School, he started a printing busi-
ness, ‘The Punjab Press’, and launched a successful career as a writer,
editor, translator, and publisher. His civic activities also made him a
notable person across Punjab. Though he died in 1912, when only 52,
Fasih’s name remains significant in the history of Urdu literature due
to his many translations. The authors he introduced to Urdu read-
ers include, among others, G.W.M. Reynolds, Alexandre Dumas, Jules
Verne, and Jonathan Swift.
Fasih launched his literary career by translating Reynolds’s The
Mysteries of the Court of London, serialising it in the monthly
Nāvilist (‘The Novelist’) that he edited and also published. The seri-
alised installments were eventually collated into a set of four volumes
that came out in 1893. Two similar sets followed some years later.
Together, the three are now commonly referred to as Darbār-e Landan
ke Asrār (‘The Secrets of the Court of London’). The same year he also
published two other translations, both from Reynolds: The Bronze
Statue; or, the Virgin’s Kiss under the title Brā’un Istechu (‘The Brown
Statue’), and Omar, a Tale of the War as Umar Pāshā (‘Umar Pasha’).
Fasih translated and published nearly a dozen more titles from Eng-
lish, including three novels by Alexandre Dumas – Chicot the Jester,
The Forty-five Guardsmen, and The Three Musketeers – put together
into one volume, now called Darbār-e Pairis ke Asrār (‘The Secrets
of the Court of Paris’), and the same author’s The Fencing Master
as Darbār-e Rūs ke Asrār (‘The Secrets of the Court of Russia’), and

39
 C . M . N aim

a two-volume Urdu version of Eugène Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris

under the title Shahr Pairis ke Asrār (‘The Secrets of the City of Paris’).
I was not able to gain access to any of the above, and know them only
as entries in old catalogues and advertisements, but it is safe to assume
that, like all Urdu translations of English novels from that time, they
too were freely abridged versions and not full translations.
An entry in the WorldCat and an ad of the book in a later publication
indicate that the book now referred to as Darbār-e Pairis ke Asrār origi-
nally had a longer title whose first part was in English, though written out
in Urdu script: Mistrīz āf di Kort āf Pairis ya’nī Darbār-e Pairis ke Asrār
(‘Mysteries of the Court of Paris, i.e. The Secrets of the Paris Court’). It
suggests that the original title of Fasih’s first book could also have been a
very matter of fact, Mistrīz āf di Kort āf Landan ya’nī Darbār-e Landan
ke Asrār, and that its success urged him to similarly fashion the titles of
his subsequent books, even if the original titles were quite different.
Meanwhile, Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London had long been
gaining its own countless admirers across India, including among the
rapidly increasing Urdu-speaking readers of popular English fiction.
Even ‘Deputy’ Nazir Ahmad (1831–1912), the famous reformer and
novelist, was well aware of it, as is evident from an authorial remark
in his 1891 novel, Ayāmā (‘The Widows’). Hadi Begum, the staunchly
orthodox mother of the book’s heroine, unremittingly rejects all social
changes that colonial public education and public health policies were
instigating, while her husband, Azad, is exactly the opposite. The two
argue all the time concerning their daughter, her education, and her
future marital life. On one such occasion, Nazir Ahmad writes, ‘Hadi
Begum tore into the mores of the English society as if she had memo-
rised Mistrīz āf Landan word for word.’4
By 1899, Fasih’s translations had reached a wide and enthusiastic
audience and made the word mistrīz (‘mysteries’) a marker of a cer-
tain kind of good read for many Urdu readers. Their popularity, and
the popularity of Reynolds’s Mysteries, encouraged quite a few imita-
tions. In the beginning years of the new century, several short novels
came out that had titles modeled on Fasih’s bestsellers. Vastly meagre
in ambition compared to what they sought to imitate, these books,
nevertheless, deserve some consideration – they were also some of the
earliest attempts in Urdu to write original crime fiction.

I have so far come across at least fourteen books with titles mod-
eled on Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London. These are: Mistrīz āf

40
 H omage to a ‘ M agic - W riter ’

Rāvalpindī (1901?); Mistrīz āf Pishāvar (pre-1904); Mistrīz āf Multān

(pre-1904); Mistrīz āf Kābul (pre-1904); Mistrīz āf Kohāt (pre-1904);
Mistrīz āf Amritsar; Mistrīz āf Fīrozpūr (pre-1904); Mistrīz āf Dehlī
(pre-1904); Mistrīz āf Lakhna’ū (1918); Mistrīz āf Shimla; Mistrīz āf
Panjāb; Mistrīz āf Āsām; Mistrīz āf Lāhor; and Mistrīz āf Ludhiyāna.5
Before discussing some of the above, it may be useful to take notice
of the manner they were described to prospective readers in an adver-
tisement in one of the books, for the blurbs strongly suggest that for
contemporary readers, mistrīz was almost a specific literary genre that
employed a mixture of fact and fiction to create its contents and car-
ried a moral purpose. The author of Mistrīz āf Rāvalpindī, therefore,
is commended for narrating

the strange and frightening secrets of Rawalpindi in an ele-

gant manner without sullying the actual events with falsity
and gossip, despite making the true events and real facts a
deal more interesting by using colorful imaginary names right
from the beginning.

The recommendation for Mistrīz āf Pishāvar includes: ‘If you have

ever read any mistrīz then we would like you to know that no bet-
ter mistrīz exists than this book.’ Mistrīz āf Kohāt is described as ‘a
mistrīz in name, but in fact a strange and interesting tale, chock-full
of moral advice. Every chapter leads to a fresh moral conclusion.’ The
iteration that every mistrīz contained some implied moral purpose
was, no doubt, a nod to the then prevalent ‘reformist’ trends in all
aspects of life, including literary preferences.

Bihari Lal Shafaq’s Mistrīz āf Rāvalpindī (‘The Mysteries of Rawal-

pindi’) has a short preface in which the author states that he makes
‘no claim for his book of being interesting, even though it is so from
the beginning due to [my] presenting true contemporary facts with
imaginary names and additional flourishes.’6 However, he was happy
‘to take pride in the fact that the book’s contents [were] edifying
(natā’ij-khez).’
It is a short book, only 77 pages long, curiously structured, but
with a promising opening. An English police officer rides out into the
countryside of Rawalpindi and quietly gives instructions to several
plainclothesmen, led by a man named Jaimal, and sets in motion an
undisclosed plan against certain criminals. The man, Jaimal, then finds

41
 C . M . N aim

little mention in the book except at the very end, where we are told
that the preceding narrative contained only what the author had found
in Jaimal’s confidential diary.
We next meet the three criminals: two are low-level government
employees in the ‘Commissariat’, while the third is the priest of a tem-
ple in Lahore. The former two, Azam Beg and Babu Lal, enriched
themselves by taking bribes and cheating the government, while the
pundit of the temple engaged in kidnapping and selling young girls.
One of the latter, Jumna, is now a partner-in-crime with him. Soon
after meeting these sinister characters, we watch the three being
arrested by the police. They are then tried and sent to jail, but we
never learn how the police discovered their criminal activities or what
role Jaimal played in that effort. Instead, the author launches into the
story of Halima, Azam Beg’s now destitute wife, who takes shelter
with Jumna. But not for long, for Jumna presses her to satisfy the lust
of one of Jumna’s patrons, and when Halima refuses, Jumna throws
her back into the streets. Halima then kills herself by jumping into a
well, holding her baby in her arms.
Another, secondary tale is told in two chapters that are randomly
inserted within the main narrative; it tells of what happened between
Arjun, the handsome young son of a rich Hindu, and Firoz, a lustful
Pathan, who is obsessed with Arjun – the two were once apparently
quite close until Arjun drifted away. When Firoz kidnaps Arjun and
tries to kill him in a fit of jealous rage, Arjun tricks him and man-
ages to stab him with the ‘poison-dipped’ dagger that Firoz had used
to threaten him. He then quietly walks away, never to be mentioned
again.
The attempt to narrate three separate tales within one encompassing
narrative – the literary device so successfully employed in Reynolds’s
Mysteries – does not quite come off, for nothing binds them together
except the author’s belated claim that he had narrated only what was
found in Jaimal’s diary. Though the eponymous, newly emerging can-
tonment town of Rawalpindi does not ever come alive to our sight,
Reynolds’s influence is apparent in a few short ‘atmospheric’ passages.
For example, at the beginning of the second chapter:

It is about ten in the night, and the glamour of the bazaars

has almost faded away. The shops of the milk-sellers, how-
ever, are still open, and here and there one can find a betel-
seller nodding over his wares. The only other people are the
police constables strolling in their assigned chowks to pass
away the hours of their duty. Otherwise, an utter silence

42
 H omage to a ‘ M agic - W riter ’

grips everything. The night is dark – if we move away from

the bazaar lights we would see nothing but darkness itself.
The stars are out, and, yes, they shine brightly, but their
meager light is ineffective against the overwhelming dark
menace.7

While the physical reality of Rawalpindi is mostly ignored, the author

makes sure to tell us his views on the city’s moral character. In describ-
ing Arjun, for example, the author adds: ‘He was a handsome boy,
possessing superlative beauty, but it was impossible for him to remain
immaculate in a city like Pindi, where the ‘good people’ of the city
readily killed themselves even to touch his shadow.’ The author appar-
ently had little love for either the place or its people. When the author
first introduces us to Jumna, he describes her as a hasīn ‘aurat (‘beau-
tiful woman’), but as he proceeds to describe her physical charms he
is hardly complimentary. And this is how he concludes: ‘Now some
might ask, amazed, “How was it that the people of Pindi, who are
inherently connoisseurs of Love and Beauty, fell head over heel in love
with such a woman?” ’ He then advises ‘Jumna’s lovers’ to venture out
of Rawalpindi and travel – to Kashmir if not across India – and dis-
cover what true female beauty looks like. Shafaq wrote at least three
other novels, but not another mistrīz.
Sirdar Ghulam Haidar Khan, on the other hand, wrote three: mistrīz
of Kabul, Kohat, and Ludhiana. He is described on the cover of his
books as the son of Sirdar Nur Muhammad Khan, a notable person
(ra’īs) of the three above-named places. The books show that he had
a flair for quoting ghazal poetry in both Urdu and Persian, describ-
ing musical soirees and making his characters use an ornate language.
His characters, however, are more stereotypical than individualised,
despite a deliberate attempt to make the events historically ‘real’.
In his preface to Mistrīz āf Kābul (‘The Mysteries of Kabul’), Khan
asserts that the events in the book occurred in 1859, ‘a time when the
blessed hands of Amir Sher Ali Khan held the reins of the state, and
every man considered himself equal to, if not better than, the Amir
of Afghanistan.’8 According to him, things changed for the better in
1880, in the reign of Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, when ‘all crimes
stopped in Afghanistan.’
Khan builds his narrative with the help of three ‘mysteries’: the
appearance of a ‘Son of the Prime Minister of Iran’ in Kabul; an
unnamed woman who goes to any length to satisfy her lust; and the
romance between a young nobleman named Mirza Ashraf and a
young noblewoman named Sharafunnisa. The ostensible resolver of

43
 C . M . N aim

these mysteries is Ishrat Beg, the chief of Afghanistan’s secret service,

who excels in disguises – as do the fake Iranian and Nazir Husain, a
bosom friend of both Ashraf and Ishrat. The three flimsily-linked tales
are told in just 63 pages, with most of those pages actually devoted to
Persian and Urdu verses exchanged between lovers and friends or sung
by assorted courtesans.
The mysteries are resolved easily. Ishrat Beg, heavily disguised,
sneaks into the fake prince’s residence to eavesdrop on him. On dis-
covering that the man was behind several major crimes in the city, he
informs the Amir. A query sent to Teheran brings the news that the real
son of the prime minister was elsewhere. As the police surround the
residence of the fake prince, he tries to escape but fails. Swift justice
follows – the man is tied to the mouth of a canon and blown to bits.
Meanwhile, the unnamed lustful woman kidnaps Ashraf, holds him
prisoner in a cellar, and eventually getting her way with him before
a friend of Ashraf rescues him. In the third story, Sharafunnisa, kept
at home under close guard, disappears on the day of her marriage
with the man chosen by her family. The would-be groom dies from
the shock. But Mirza Ashraf always appears very happy in public; he
is also often seen, the author coyly writes, ‘holding a baby boy in his
arms who happens to have great resemblance with Sharafunnisa, and
whom he calls Mirza Sharaf-al-Ashraf.’
Despite the presence of clever disguises and a scene in a cellar
equipped with trick doors and windows, the story offers little suspense
or mystery. The author instead seeks to entertain his readers mostly
with artful verbal exchanges laced with Persian and Urdu verses. There
is even a touch of salaciousness in two episodes, one depicting boy
waiters in Kabul’s coffee shops and the other detailing how the myste-
rious woman overcame Ashraf’s resistance by feeding him sweets laced
with aphrodisiacs! The book, however, must have found its readers,
for my copy is a second printing.
Muhammad Nisar Ali Shuhrat’s Mistrīz āf Dehlī (‘The Mysteries
of Delhi’) not only employs multiple stories but even takes a pecu-
liar stab at delineating a particular place where certain things happen
that, according to him, do not happen elsewhere.9 Of the book’s five
chapters, the first three narrate the adventures of three young men
who separately come to Delhi because they felt jaded in their lives at
home. All three are Muslim, and not more than 18 in age; they are also
well heeled and well educated. In each chapter, the particular story is
deliberately left unfinished, leaving the reader with a nice sense of sus-
pense. The final two chapters bring the three narratives to their con-
clusions. While no attempt is made to bring the three stories together,

44
 H omage to a ‘ M agic - W riter ’

the author asks the reader to draw some lessons that, to his mind, the
three stories offer in common.
In the opening story, Buland Akhtar – his name literally means ‘Ris-
ing Star’ – comes to Delhi from Kashmir, together with a servant, aptly
named Wafadar (‘Faithful’). Their journey is described with some real-
istic details: Buland Akhtar starts out on a mule, which he sells off
once he reaches Punjab, from where he takes a train to Delhi. Duly
impressed, he tells Wafadar: ‘Prophet Solomon had the great good for-
tune of owning a flying throne of his own. But thanks to the wise men
of England (dānāyān-e inglistān) this new transport is available to all,
high and low alike.’ Reaching Delhi, he takes up residence in an inn
and starts roaming the streets to enjoy what the city offers. Noticeably,
he shows no interest in the ancient city’s history and monuments; his
fascination is with the newly emerging urban sprawl, both within and
outside the walled city.
One evening, as he strolls in Delhi’s ‘charming’ Malka kā Bāgh
(‘The Victoria Park’), a burqa-clad beggar accosts him. Moved by the
beauty of her voice, Buland Akhtar wishes to know the woman’s story.
She tells him that earlier she earned her living doing gold and silver
lacework at home, but then her eyesight deteriorated from the strain
of the intricate work. ‘I had no wish to become a housemaid,’ the
woman said, ‘So now I come here as dusk sets in, and live on the alms
I receive.’ Buland Akhtar gives her a silver rupee and asks her to meet
him again the following day. He then returns to his inn, smitten by her
elegant language and manners.
When Wafadar learns what had transpired, he cautions his master
to be more careful. Nevertheless, the following day, Buland Akhtar
moves out of the inn and takes up a private suite of rooms in the main
bazaar. When he meets the veiled woman again, the two converse at
length, exchanging fine verses. He declares her to be a Mughal prin-
cess now fallen into dire straits, which the woman firmly denies. She
accepts, however, the gold sovereign he offers and promises to come
to his rooms the following evening. That night, Wafadar again begs
him to be careful, telling him that Delhi was full of such sweet-talking
women. To prove his point, he brings a woman who talks to Buland
Akhtar from behind a curtain, and even corrects his Urdu a few times.
Buland Akhtar, a Kashmiri, becomes convinced of the woman’s high
pedigree, but when Wafadar pulls the curtain aside, she turns out to be
none other than the sweeper who cleaned their rooms. Buland Akhtar
is abashed, but his passion for the veiled woman does not diminish.
Eventually Buland Akhtar and Wafadar are taken by the mysterious
woman to a feast in a mansion, where they find a hundred or so young

45
 C . M . N aim

women, already enjoying themselves. Alcoholic drinks are offered

and – after some slight hesitation – enjoyed. A dance performance
begins, and Buland Akhtar lavishly rewards the performers. Then the
two sisters go away – to perform the night prayers, no less – leaving
the two men with the other women. As more drinking follows, Buland
Akhtar flirts with another woman; soon both the master and the serv-
ant collapse on the floor in a drunken stupor.
In the morning, Buland Akhtar wakes up to the sound of someone
being thrashed. The victim is the woman with whom he had flirted at
night, who is then cast out of the house. Next, the two men are also
ordered to leave and never return. Thus ends the first chapter, reminis-
cent of several stories in The Arabian Nights, and similarly leaving us
eager to know what happened next.
The following chapter brings us the story of Danishmand (‘Wise’),
who comes from Lahore to Delhi with some friends. The young men
are fond of music, and believe that Delhi was ‘the city where one
only needed money, since every luxury and pleasure of the world was
already available there.’ When his friends return to Lahore, Danish-
mand stays behind in Delhi with his personal servant named Hamdard
(‘Compassionate’).
Danishmand had come to Delhi with 1500 rupees in his pocket;
now he finds he had only 500 left. But he does not wish to leave Delhi,
for he believes that in Delhi, ‘at the end of the day, even a two-penny
labourer dresses up like a prince and goes out to enjoy the evening.’
In a long soliloquy, he enumerates the qualities the people of Delhi
possess: they are not only excellent in their own ways but also pos-
sess a rare talent to imitate, and even improve on, anything crafted
elsewhere.

Lanterns and steel trunks used to come from Europe to be sold

here at high prices. Now the same are made locally, equally
excellent, and cheaper in price . . . the rich and the noble of
England send their photographs to the craftsmen of Delhi to
have them accurately reproduced in colour on ivory.10

The thought of leaving such a wonderful place brings tears to his eyes,
and as he weeps, he falls asleep. When he wakes up, he knows what
he must do.

If there are 100,000 adult people living in Delhi, then half of

them must be men, and the other half women. Of the latter,
48,000 must be married, and the remaining 2,000 must be

46
 H omage to a ‘ M agic - W riter ’

widows. Of the latter, 1,000 must be without any desire for a

new husband, while the remaining 1,000 must be looking for
one, though restrained by modesty to communicate the desire
to their elders. And of those one thousand, a hundred or so
must also be quite rich.11

Having concluded that in order to enjoy Delhi permanently, he

needed to marry a rich widow, Danishmand pursues his goal methodi-
cally. He gets himself a fine suite of private rooms; next, he talks to his
sweeper, Champa, since she and her friends freely enter people’s homes
and have the opportunity to observe the ladies of the households.
A combination of flattery and bribe brings quick results: Champa
informs him of a rich ‘Begum Sahiba’, who, widowed at 11 and now
barely 18, was eager to take a husband. Danishmand promptly pros-
trates before God in gratitude – he never fails to do the same at every
success in his plan.
Champa tells the Begum about the rich man from Lahore who was
looking for a ‘Delhi wife’. The Begum asks her to bring him for a meet-
ing, and when the two meet, separated by a curtain, they exchange
photographs. The effect is overwhelming: utterly silent, they adore
each other’s beauty. When they recover, they exchange costly gifts. The
following evening, the Begum visits Danishmand in his suite of rooms.
Again they sit with a curtain between them, but Hamdard takes mat-
ters in his hands and tears the curtain down. The two lovers come face
to face and collapse in a faint.
Leaving us in suspense, Chapter 3 tells the story of Azad, who comes
from Agra to Delhi to enjoy a good life – in particular ‘to hear the great
courtesans of the city and find out how good they really were.’ Azad
is also an eloquent speaker; he gives public talks and makes many
friends, then proceeds to establish a society of like-minded young men.
It is called Jalsa-e Ahbāb (‘The Assembly of Friends’) and has a build-
ing of its own – like a British club – where members gather every
evening to smoke a hookah and chat, reclining against pillows on fine
carpets. Alternatively, they enjoy fine dinners cooked by various chefs
of the city or watch performances by the city’s finest courtesans.
One evening, as Azad converses with a young courtesan, the dis-
cussion turns to a Persian classic and the feminine wiles it describes.
The young woman declares that now a new book needs to be written,
for the tricks that contemporary courtesans played on their customers
are different and not known to any outsider. She then takes Azad to
observe how in one courtesan’s house, two customers are simultane-
ously cheated through an elaborate scheme.

47
 C . M . N aim

The three stories, left dangling at the end of their respective chap-
ters, are then serially, but hastily, concluded in the final pages of the
book. Buland Akhtar discovers that the sweet-voiced veiled woman
‘was not only 40, but also had a very dark complexion and a broken
front tooth.’ He hastily returns home to Kashmir and swears never to
visit Delhi again. Danishmand and the Begum get married, have a son,
and prosper, with Danishmand manfully managing his wife’s proper-
ties. Lastly, Azad, his eyes opened after witnessing the elaborate decep-
tion, closes his club, and starts a different life. As the author brings the
three stories to their separate ends, he offers much moral advice, along
with ‘insights’ into the habits and manners of women, particularly of
the women of Delhi, underscoring his alleged reformative aspirations.
The book must have met quite a few expectations of contemporary
aficionados of mistrīz and other crime fiction. Though it does not con-
tain a reference to any historical event, sensational or otherwise, its
readers, particularly in the mofussil, must have found very exciting the
use made in the narrative’s progress of such ‘wonders’ of the modern
world as express trains, urgent telegrams, photographs, artificial gems
‘imported from Europe’, and chloroform. (The latter is used as a sopo-
rific!) As against all other mistrīz, Shuhrat’s book is notable for mak-
ing an attempt to tell its readers something about its eponymous city.
Delhi, Shuhrat would have us believe, is a place where strange things
happen once the sun goes down. It is also a place to which people
come from far and away, and many conveniently find temporary wives
or mistresses. The women of Delhi, the author tells us, are different
from other women. They work to support themselves; consequently,
they are more independent, and hence, there are many more divorces
in Delhi! Delhi women can be cunning too, and they are clearly not
much afraid of men. Further, though they might speak elegant Urdu,
out-of-towners should not let the elegance of their speech fool them.
One can easily imagine a satisfied reader in some mofussil town closing
the book and saying to himself: ‘That Delhi – it must be quite a place!’
The final mistrīz considered here, Mistrīz āf Fīrozpūr (‘The Myster-
ies of Ferozepur’), is something special, for its author was none other
than Tirath Ram Ferozepuri (1885–1950), the most prominent name
in Urdu crime fiction in the first half of the last century.12 Ferozepuri
wrote very little original fiction, but over a span of some 36 years, he
produced extremely readable and widely popular translations of crime
fiction from the English – close to 150 in number. He also translated
seven of Reynolds’s novels, including the two Mysteries sagas. Though
the year of publication of Ferozepuri’s mistrīz is not known, it could
have been the last book in Urdu to denote itself in that manner.

48
 H omage to a ‘ M agic - W riter ’

The youthful author – he was probably in his early twenties at

the time – prefaced the book with a short note that included the
following:

God forbid! How people have given ‘Mysteries’ a bad name!

Anyone, who knows even a tiny tale related to some place,
quickly turns that molehill into a mountain and becomes the
author of a ‘Mysteries’ of that place – even when his tale has
nothing that could be a mystery.
The word ‘Mysteries’ does not mean that the author should
place before his readers ‘the Springtime of Love and Beauty’,
mixed with ‘the honeyed charms of a richly sweetened lan-
guage.’ No, no! We should never call that a ‘Mystery.’ Only
that story is a ‘Mystery’ that appears, from its beginning to its
end, as a deep secret, and the truth of that secret is revealed
only at some appropriate moment.13

Despite the young author’s brash mocking of his predecessors, his

own book turns out to be only slightly different from theirs. It has
plenty of ‘Love’ and ‘Beauty’, and also its patches of a ‘rich language’,
though they are not much ‘honeyed’ with verses. The story involves
two Muslim Pathan robbers, their friends, wives, and mistresses; one
lustful Hindu ‘Banker & Jeweler’, his son, his assistant, and the lat-
ter’s younger sister; and a young Hindu lawyer. It has two villains: the
robber Haidar Khan – he is caught and then hanged – and Vaishnav
Das, the ‘Banker & Jeweler’, who kills himself in shame when his
son finds out that he had harassed Lilavati, the assistant’s sister. The
romantic element is provided by Lilavati and Dunichand, the lawyer,
whose marriage concludes the book. There is hardly any mystery, and
much of the suspense is created by telling two simultaneous stories in
alternating chapters. They come together at the end, but only thanks
to remarkable coincidences and authorial asides. The eponymous city
of Ferozepur hardly makes any appearance; most of the action takes
place far away from it, in the nearby woods and countryside, or in
distant Lahore.
Nevertheless, compared to the previously discussed authors,
Ferozepuri is noticeably more successful in imitating Reynolds in cer-
tain areas. The device to open the book with incidents and charac-
ters that suggest two separate stories, only to have them form a single
whole at the end, has been much better employed by him. More to
the point are the passages where he describes the natural surround-
ings within which an incident takes place; these are as indulgent as

49
 C . M . N aim

anything in Reynolds. Consider this excerpt from the book’s opening

two-page-long description of a foreboding night in the woods.

Oh, this night, so terribly frightful! Darkness is entrenched

all around. A man’s right hand is invisible to his left. Black
clouds engulf the firmament. Towering trees of the woods
appear like a line of giants. Only the rustling of the leaves
can be heard – except when the sudden howl of some jackal,
or the harsh screech of an owl or a bat, crashes on a listen-
er’s ears, and his heart sinks as the hair on his body stands
up. The clouds covering the sky are dark like some wretched
man’s fortune; the moon and the stars have fled into hiding in
sheer fear. Some poor bird asleep in its nest is attacked by an
accursed owl, and its shrieks send a tremor of terror through
one’s body. A bat flies by overhead, flapping its big wings, and
one begins to believe in devils and ghosts streaking through
the air. The flames of a funeral far away makes one wonder if
it could be a fire around which the ghouls of the forest have
gathered to bask.14

Ferozepuri also imitates Reynolds in interspersing a few short, but

explicitly didactic, asides. The virtues and vices of women seem to be
a favorite topic, and Ferozepuri, despite making some feeble attempts
to praise the ‘feminine’ traits of chastity and fidelity, eventually comes
down heavily against the ‘fair’ sex. He also makes a curious assertion
concerning ‘the feminine nature’, putting it in the mouth of Khanam
Jan, a woman victimised by several men. This is how Khanam Jan
explains to Haidar Khan why she set free Dunichand:

Modesty does not allow me to be explicit but let me give you a

hint. A woman – any woman – when she shares her bed with
a man and satisfies her sexual passion for the first time, a deep
love for that particular man becomes a permanent part of her
being – like a line scratched into a stone . . . It was Dunichand
who first planted ‘the seed of love’ in me. Thousands came
after him and told me how they loved me, but I now find no
trace of any affection for them inside me. However, the spe-
cial love I feel for Dunichand will remain with me till death
comes.15

All in all, Ferozepuri’s youthful work is clearly superior to the other

mistrīz considered above.16 It is plotted much better, contains more

50
 H omage to a ‘ M agic - W riter ’

suspenseful moments, does away with long exchanges of verses

between protagonists, and for the most part uses a language that is not
extraneously burdened with colourful idioms or proverbs. And every
once in a while, some trite rhetorical flourish takes on a ‘social realist’
edge – à la Reynolds – as in this version of sic transit gloria mundi near
the end of the tale:

It has been three months since the above events. Amazing

inversions of fortune have taken place in that time. Hundreds
of the rich are now indigent, while thousands of the poor
have gained in riches. Hundreds of expatriates have come
back home, while thousands of ‘dear ones’ have left us sad.
Hundreds of beauties, too haughty to speak to the not so for-
tunate, now lie silent under dust, and thousands of children
have replaced them to beguile us with their lisp and chatter.
Hundreds of the sick and diseased have recovered, while thou-
sands of the healthy ones are dead and gone. Hundreds of
ill-fated lovers, wounded to the heart by their cruel beloveds,
have perished, while thousands of lovelies have fallen prey to
Death even as they indulged their tyrannical ways. Hundreds
of men, gainfully employed, got divorced from their jobs and
turned into pensioners, while thousands of new ‘hopefuls’
replaced them. Hundreds of students successfully passed out
of schools and colleges and entered Life’s ‘field of struggle’,
while thousands of fools shut themselves up in the ‘chicken
coops’ of colleges merely to satisfy an urge to become a clerk
(bābū).17

The above books, like those that will be discussed next, are obviously
puny, in both size and ambition, compared to what lay behind Reyn-
olds’s The Mysteries of London, whose subtitle described it as ‘con-
taining stories of life in the modern Babylon.’ More disappointingly,
none offers even a vignette or two that is palpable and distinctive and
gives us a glimpse into the physical and social reality of the urban
entity it is named after.

Just as Fasih owns the credit for introducing mistrīz into Urdu, so
should he also be credited for highlighting in a distinctive manner an
already existing Urdu word, asrār (‘secrets’), in the subtitles of his
books – vide Mistrīz āf di Kort āf Pairis ya’nī Darbār-e Pairis ke Asrār

51
 C . M . N aim

(‘Mysteries of the Court of Paris, i.e. The Secrets of the Paris Court’).
It too set off a short-lived literary trend in Urdu fiction.
Asrār, a word of Arabic origin, is the plural form of sirr, ‘secret’. But
in Urdu, the singular, sirr, would be hard to find except in poetry and
some Sufi texts, where it evokes the sense of mystery one associates with
matters of the spirit.18 When, in the final decades of the 19th century,
Syed Ahmad Dihlawi prepared his great Urdu dictionary, Farhang-e
Āsafiya, he did not include the singular form, and he listed only the
plural, asrār, illustrating it with just one example, asrār-e ilāhī (‘Divine
Mysteries’). Significantly, the now so common, pur-asrār (‘mysterious’,
lit. ‘full of secrets’) finds no mention in Dihlavi’s dictionary. It would
be fair, therefore, to aver that Fasih’s use of the word in the titles of his
books made a significant difference in the word’s usage in Urdu. It also
led to the appearance of another small set of books that employed the
word asrār in their titles and possibly a shared literary ambition.
A catalogue of books available for purchase in 1936 from the Siddiq
Book Depot of Lucknow contains five titles that have asrār linked to
a place name: Asrār-e Afrīqa (‘The Secrets of Africa’), Asrār-e Amrīka
(‘The Secrets of America’), Asrār-e Angora (‘The Secrets of Ankara’),
Asrār-e Misr (‘The Secrets of Egypt’) and Asrār-e Hind (‘The Secrets
of India’).19 The catalogue describes them all as historical (tārīkhī)
novels; however, the one I was able to find was anything but histori-
cal. Asrār-e Hind turned out to be an amusing book of crime fiction,
with an English lady solving crimes in India, in a manner reminiscent
of Sherlock Holmes. Be that as it may, if one or two of the above
were similar in significant details to the two titles that were no longer
available in 1936, but which shall be discussed below, then there was
indeed, in the first and second decades of the 20th century, a brief liter-
ary fad in Urdu for asrār novels: that is to say, a piece of fiction that
aimed to expose to the public’s sight – in the spirit of Reynolds’s The
Mysteries of the Court of London – the depravity and hypocrisy of the
high and the mighty.
Our first book, Asrār-e Ma’ābid (‘The Mysteries of Places of Wor-
ship’), was also the first attempt at long fiction by Premchand (1880–
1936), the fiction writer now justly honoured in both Urdu and Hindi.
He was still a budding author when in 1903, using his real name,
Dhanpat Rai, he began to serialise in the Urdu weekly Āvāz-e Khalq
(‘The Voice of the People’), published from Varanasi, a tale about the
criminal ways of temple priests in an unnamed pilgrimage town. He
was simultaneously working on two other novels, and when he suc-
ceeded getting one of them published, he abandoned Asrār-e Ma’ābid.
It has survived only in its unfinished form.20

52
 H omage to a ‘ M agic - W riter ’

Premchand had been an avid reader of the translations of Reyn-

olds’s novels; he once wrote about his reading habits as a 13-year-old:
‘In those days everyone talked of Reynolds’s novels. Urdu transla-
tions were coming out right and left and handily sold. I too was in
love with those books.’21 He was apparently enthused by the streak of
iconoclasm that permeates several of Reynolds’s books, for in his first
attempt at long fiction, Premchand, somewhat gleefully, attempted to
expose to public sight the sordid happenings at a pilgrimage centre.
Otherwise, however, the extant incomplete text shows much greater
influence – e.g. in episodic narration, interspersion of comic relief, and
snappy exchanges between characters – of Ratan Nath Sarshar (1846–
1902), who launched his illustrious literary career with the serialised
picaresque, Fasāna-e Āzād (‘Azad’s Tale’), initially modeled on Charles
Dickens’s Sketches by Boz.
The other writer who was similarly inspired to expose in fiction the
private devilries – the asrār – of the rich and the powerful was Abdul
Halim Sharar (1860–1926), better known in Urdu for his historical
romances. Unlike Premchand, Sharar had not only read Reynolds
directly in English but also translated one of his many tales of turning
fortunes into Urdu.22 Sharar did not use asrār in the title of his first
exposé; he named it Husn kā Dākū (‘The Plunderer of Beauty’).23 But
the book became a big hit when it came out in 1913, and when Sharar
published a sequel a few months later, he titled it Asrār-e Darbār-e
Harāmpūr (‘The Mysteries of the Court of Harampur’).24
The two books are about the debauched Nawab of Harampur, a
fictional princely state in North India. People despise him so much
that they change the name of his city from Ahmadābād (‘The City of
Ahmad’) to Harāmpūr (‘The City of the Religiously Proscribed’), in
contrast to Halālnagar (‘The City of the Religiously Allowed’), the
neighbouring city in British India.
The plot of the two interlinked novels is too complicated to abridge;
only a broad outline must suffice here. In Husn kā Dākū, the unnamed
Nawab is hell-bent to bed every young woman he comes to know
of. Towards that end, he has agents, both male and female, who find
victims for his lust locally as well as in other cities. A second villain
is Maulana Sa’dullah, a religious dignitary; he abets the Nawab but
is also one of his victims – his wife and daughter were both forci-
bly abused by the Nawab. The Nawab’s latest target is Mah-Laqa, a
young woman from a prominent family in Halalnagar, who is already
betrothed to Munir, her cousin. Despite knowing that she could be
abducted on the day of her wedding, like so many brides before her,
Mah-Laqa asks Munir to hurry the date – she has a plan to end the

53
 C . M . N aim

Nawab’s tyranny but does not disclose it to Munir. She only tells him
that she wished to wage ‘a terrible and delicate jihad’ on behalf of all
the terrorised women of the two cities.25
As expected, Mah-Laqa is abducted from her wedding procession;
her elaborate and perilous scheme, however, eventually succeeds,
with active participation not only from Munir but also from another
young woman, Sukaina, who is disguised as a young Sikh man. The
first book ends with the Nawab, and his agents, including Maulana
Sa’dullah, being tried in a ‘court of Djinns’ and found guilty. While the
Nawab’s abettors, male and female, are ostensibly sentenced to death,
the Nawab himself is spared to live and suffer – he is forcibly made
impotent. The sequel carries the story only a little forward. Sa’dullah
miraculously returns to Halalnagar and takes revenge on the Nawab
through his own elaborate scheme – it too involves ‘djinns’ and their
court of justice.
Husn kā Dākū is well plotted, fast-paced, and always suspenseful.
The manly disguise and actions of Sukaina, the good-heartedness of a
courtesan, the wickedness of the Maulana, and a bold mix of ‘sex and
violence’ were sure to please the mostly male readership of Sharar’s
novels.26 Sharar’s exposé of the Nawab’s depravity and the Maulana’s
villainy was very much in the spirit of Reynolds’s attacks on similar
pillars of the English society. Equally Reynoldsian was his disguising
of a woman in a man’s garb and then showing her to be an equal to
any man in purposeful action. Both books remained in print for many
years, and the notoriety the two books gained in 1914 still remains
alive among the aficionados of Urdu popular fiction.27

To conclude: what do we have here? A score of books, some presented

as mistrīz, the others as asrār. Did they come to form, together or sepa-
rately, a new genre in Urdu? The answer must be in the negative. Not
only was their number too meager, their formal attributes were not
distinctive or exclusive enough. They, however, do deserve our notice
as a particular cohort in Urdu literary history. They are noteworthy
examples of what was considered popular in Urdu at the beginning of
the 20th century. More significantly, they are among the first attempts
in Urdu to write original tales of crime and suspense. From our vantage
point, they no doubt fail, despite being identified with specific cities,
to offer, even briefly, the experience of a space and time-specific urban
‘romance’ that Reynolds’s novels did, yet they clearly reflect the influ-
ence that Reynolds’s works had on many budding Urdu writers of the

54
 H omage to a ‘ M agic - W riter ’

time. Their authors eagerly use the ‘sensational’ to grab and hold the
attention of the reader, attempt to create atmospheric settings for sig-
nificant incidents in their narratives, and express outrage, both moral
and political, at the debasing behaviour of the pillars of their soci-
ety. And, of course, in naming their books the way they do, they con-
sciously identify themselves with him. The authors of mistrīz and asrār
were consciously presenting to the public something that they felt was
new and very different from what was then available as entertaining
fiction. That they found plenty of satisfied readers for at least a couple
of decades tells us that they were not entirely wrong or unsuccessful.

Notes
1 C.M. Naim, ‘The ‘Magic-Making’ Mr. Reynolds,’ Dawn (Karachi), 18
July 2015. A longer study is in progress.
2 For a cogent discussion of Urdu’s ‘Natural Poetry,’ see Frances W. Pritch-
ett, Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and Its Critics. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1994, pp. 127–183.
3 Azmat Rubab, Ghulām Qādir Fasīh: Ahvāl va Āsār. Lahore: Maghribi
Pakistan Urdu Academy, 2007. She depends mostly on the unpublished
M. Phil. paper of Muhammad Sadiq (1972) cited in her book. Additional
information was gleaned from booksellers’ advertisements in various old
journals.
4 Nazir Ahmad, Ayāmā. Delhi: Munzir Ahmad, n.d., p. 25. A footnote by
the author explains: ‘An English language book that copiously describes
the evils of the English society.’
5 The books I found do not carry a date of publication. But some were
received in December 1904 at the Raza Library, Rampur, where I found
them; one may safely assume, therefore, that they, and others advertised in
them, were published not after that year.
6 Bihari Lal Shafaq, Mistrīz āf Rāvalpindī. Lahore: Munshi Ram Agarwal
Booksellers, n.d. The preface is dated April 1901. The title page carries the
book’s ‘first’ name – Natā’ij-e A’māl (‘The Consequences of Actions’) – in
small letters at the top, while the ‘second’ name stands out in large letters,
indicating what was actually expected to sell the book. The blurbs appear
on the back of the title page.
7 Shafaq, Mistrīz āf Rāvalpindī, p. 4.
8 Sirdar Ghulam Haidar Khan, Mistrīz āf Kābul. Lahore: Munshi Ram
Agarwal Booksellers, n.d.
9 Muhammad Nisar Ali Shuhrat, Mistrīz āf Dehlī. Meerut: Nami Press, n.d.
The cover describes the author as ‘the former Director of Education in the
State of Jammu and Kashmir, and presently the manager of [two journals],
the Rozāna Panjāb and the Dihlī Gazat.’
10 Shuhrat, Mistrīz āf Dehlī, pp. 26–27.
11 Ibid.
12 Tirath Ram Ferozepuri, Mistrīz āf Fīrozpūr. Lahore: Munshi Ram
Agarwal Booksellers, n.d. For more on Ferozepuri, see my article, ‘An

55
 C . M . N aim

Extraordinary Translator: Tirath Ram Ferozepuri (1885–1954),’ The

Annual of Urdu Studies, vol. 28, 2013, pp. 1–37.
13 Ferozepuri, Mistrīz āf Fīrozpūr, p. 1. I translate hairat-afzā – lit. amazement-
increasing – as ‘suspenseful’ because, I am convinced, that was the word
Ferozepuri had in mind. Urdu still does not have a precise equivalent for
‘suspenseful.’
14 Ibid., p. 2.
15 Ibid., p. 50.
16 The title page refers to only one previous book by the author, Jafā-e Pidar
(‘The Father’s Tyranny’). So far it has not surfaced in any library.
17 Ferozepuri, Mistrīz āf Fīrozpūr, pp. 122–123.
18 In Sufi texts, the word is used to refer to the innermost center of the human
heart, its subtlest spiritual node.
19 A long story entitled ‘Asrār-e Lakhna’ū’ (‘Secrets of Lucknow’) was seri-
alised in the weekly Intikhāb-e Lājavāb (Lahore) from January 1914
onward. Its author was Munshi Hamid Husain. Judging from what
I could find, it was very much like the mistrīz above, and well written.
20 Asrār-e Ma’ābid in Madan Gopal, ed., Kulliyāt-e Premchand, vol. 1. New
Delhi: National Council for the Promotion of Urdu Language, 2000,
pp. 1–86. The serialization lasted from 1903 to 1905.
21 Manaktala, Premchand, Hayāt-e Nau. New Delhi: Modern Publishing
House, 1993, p. 54.
22 May Middleton; or, The History of a Fortune; Sharar translated it as
Khūbī-e Qismat. His son, Muhammad Siddiq Hasan, translated Reyn-
olds’s Kenneth, a Tale of the Highlands as Pādāsh-e ‘Amal.
23 Abdul Halim Sharar, Husn Kā Dākū. Lucknow: Dilgudaz Press, 1913.
24 Abdul Halim Sharar, Asrār-e Darbār-e Harāmpūr, Lucknow: Dilgudaz
Press, 1925, 6th printing.
25 Sharar, Husn kā Dākū, p. 71.
26 It is doubtful if the two books were ever popular with female readers
or even reached their hands. The male heads of the households, for one,
would not have allowed it.
27 In popular literary memory, the two novels were declared ‘obscene’ by
the colonial government and then banned, expressly at the request of the
actual Nawab of Rampur, a small princely state in U.P., whose other name
was Mustafabad. I failed to find any firm evidence to support either claim.

56
 3
A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE
EVENTS
Natural calamities in 19th-century
Bengali chapbooks

Aritra Chakraborti

During the middle of the 19th century, a large section of the native
Bengali society found itself facing a tremendous catastrophe. For the
majority of the natives, the world as they knew it – the quotidian life
that they had come to accept as eternally and immutably true – was
facing an impasse like never before. The crisis was a ‘monster’ named
nabya – or ‘the new’, specifically in this case, the ‘new things and
customs’ that arrived in the wake of colonial modernity, which threw
centuries-old traditions off-balance.1 While the caste system was very
much functional in all its dubious glory, the new rulers of the nation
were not the savarna (upper caste) Hindus, not even the yavanic (for-
eigner) Muslims, but mlechcha (unclean) British. The natives were
soon to realise that the new rulers had little respect for the customs and
beliefs of the people they governed. They brought strange machines
that built bridges over their sacred rivers and dug tunnels under their
cities to create modern drainage systems.2 Introduction of English edu-
cation created a major disruption in the caste-based professions; now
even shudras (the fourth of the social categories found in the Hindu
scriptures, traditionally berated by the upper castes as untouchable)3
could, theoretically, have a chance of progressing in life. As Western
education and modern ideas permeated through the society, the so-
called ‘lower castes’ started breaking away from their traditional,
caste-defined professions and took up chakuris, or salaried jobs, in
Calcutta; they no longer needed to serve their caste-superiors. John
McGuire, in his ‘quantitative study’ of the bhadralok (urban gentry)
class of 19th-century Calcutta, has shown that the reach of the English

57
 A ritra C hakraborti

education system often transcended the boundaries of the caste hier-

archies in Bengal, enabling the lower castes to move upwards in the
economic scale.4 According to his analysis, the bhadralok community
of 19th-century Calcutta comprised as many as 18 different castes.5
Moreover, an influential section of the upper-caste native elite gleefully
accepted the fruits of this new education system. They even started
imitating the British: they wore the same attire, craved the same jobs
and, worst of all, ate the same akhadya (traditionally forbidden food,
mostly beef and foreign liquor) and prattled away in the same alien
language. This, the conservative Hindus thought, were confirmed sig-
nals of the moral deterioration of the society.
Modernity, among other things, shattered the notion of cyclical,
mythological time governed largely by the Vedic notion of the cycle
of ages and replaced it with a notion of linear, progressive time. As
Moishe Postone explains, this was a distinctive quality of any capitalist
society where the nature of time changed from abstract to quantifiable
and definite: instead of a succession of constant temporal units, it was
now based on events.6 Time was no longer measured according to the
Brahminical rituals, it moved according to the strictures set by the fac-
tories or markets or offices where the ordinary Bengali went to work.7
Noted journalist Bhabanicharan Bandyopadhyay in Kalikata Kamala-
laya (Calcutta, the abode of goddess Lakshmi, 1823), had urged the
pragmatic Hindu gentlemen to render unto the rulers the respect they
deserved, while pursuing the ways of the quotidian life in private.8
However, it was not always possible. Under the burden of British rule,
the conservative Hindus felt that they were being forced to let go of
some of their centuries-old beliefs and customs. Ramakrishna Para-
mhamsa, the popular Bengali sage and mystic, regularly complained
that the respectable middle-class Bengali gentleman was now oblivious
to his heritage, and was ensnared by the trappings of chakuri. They
were doing this merely to covet the physical pleasure they got from
their wives (kamini or physically alluring women), and were trying
to placate them with kanchan (literally gold; here it stands for mate-
rial wealth, in general).9 In addition, the gradual spread of education
among women severely rattled the Hindus. While the Brahmin fami-
lies resisted sending their women to the schools run by the mlechchas
and their native accomplices, non-Brahmin families responded more
positively to this change. From 95 schools for girls with an attendance
of 2500 in 1863, the numbers went up to 2238 schools, with about
78,835 students in 1890.10 The upper-caste Hindus seemed convinced
that this would ensure wanton behaviour amongst women of their

58
 A  series of unfortunate events

communities, who would overthrow the ‘natural’ order of things and

stop demurely listening to their husbands.
Overmighty shudras, educated women who refused to mutely sub-
mit to the men of the house, and Brahmins who forgot the traditional
ways all became symbols of a decaying society. Out of this was born
a thriving millenarian culture where the present time was seen as the
‘Kaliyuga’, the last and most corrupt epoch in the cycle ages found in
the Hindu scriptures. The demon presiding over this apocalyptic age
was Koli, the root of all evil and the corruptor of all creation.11 As
the populace despairingly awaited the arrival of Kalki, the final ava-
tar of Vishnu who was supposed to slay Koli, the millenarian culture
spread rapidly through the society, a lasting impression of which can
be observed in the popular print as well. A vast number of satires,
plays and skits were published, ridiculing the decadent attitude of the
nabya Bengali men and women who were spreading the corruption
of Kaliyuga. These books, however, have received extensive critical
attention.12 There were other tracts published, too, which dealt with
everyday events. For a large section of the native society that could
scarcely afford the expensive newspapers which were brought out by
elite native humanists, these books served as the principal source of
topical information.13 The tracts, though, did not simply convey the
details of the regular events: they sensationalised everything and used
every possible opportunity to decry the modern society which, they
felt, was getting out of control. The chimaera of Kaliyuga was used
to describe everything: storms, earthquakes and outbreak of deadly
diseases were all seen as divine retribution for moral transgressions.
Stories of natural disasters were woven into mythological narratives
to give supernatural explanations of climatic events. Most of these
tracts – pamphlets and chapbooks – were published from Battala, an
area in North Calcutta where the lowbrow publishing houses were
located. These pamphleteers made a roaring trade, cashing in on this
culture of paranoia. This paper attempts to study this largely over-
looked genre of ‘disaster-tracts’.
Most of these tracts were written in verse composed in the simple
payar metre.14 Printed on poor-quality paper, using broken types and
with a usual length of 8 to 16 pages, they were quite vulnerable to the
elements. Also, since the chief appeal of these tracts was their topical-
ity, they quickly went out of circulation once the event on which they
were based was no longer relevant. Only a handful of them would
ever make it to the official deposit libraries, and none apart from a
few eccentric individuals would care to preserve them. As a result, a

59
 A ritra C hakraborti

fairly small number of these ephemeral print-objects have survived.

The remaining ones, however, present an extremely crucial picture of
how the ‘lowbrow’ literary culture responded to the ‘present moment’.
At times, the link between Kaliyuga and the natural disaster pro-
claimed as the theme of the tract was quite tenuous. Munshi Namdar’s
Kashite Hoy Bhumikapma, Narider e ki Dambha (‘Kashi is rocked by
an earthquake. Oh! What arrogance of women’, 1863), bypasses the
titular earthquake entirely. Instead, Namdar talks only about the pains
of the Bengali people who were now ruled by their wives, as well as
a female monarch. This is merely a collection of rather stale caveats
about catastrophes that may befall the Hindus in this terrible Kaliyuga
if the women are not properly commandeered by the well-meaning and
authoritative men of the society. Namdar says that the submissive Ben-
gali men prostrating at the feet of their wives are an assured sign of social
decay in an age when the entire nation is ruled by a female monarch:

Women who have put their husbands under their spell, will go
a long way.
They can bend these men as they wish and make them do any-
thing they want.
Their husbands become slavish, and thus society is surely going
to Hell!
We are in enough trouble already; being a part of the British
Empire,
Indians are now ruled by a female Monarch. And on top of
this,
If Bengali women try to find their freedom, then all will come
crashing down.15

Namdar’s umbrage is not merely directed at the housewives who

have mastered the art of manipulating their husbands, but at the pros-
titutes who lure the ‘innocent upper-class men’ away from the path of
righteousness:

Shame on women, for I’ve understood now what sinners they

are!
Look at all the women at Mechhuabazaar, who stand on their
balconies
Trying to prey on the men who pass by . . . These whores dance
for the men,
Without shame or remorse. The women think they are clothed,
but they are

60
 A  series of unfortunate events

Naked in their shameless display. They sleep with their custom-

ers for
Mere pennies and quarters. Why, then, are they so arrogant?16

Other authors, however, focused more on the actual natural disas-

ters and incorporated substantial factual information in their tracts.
Kailashchandra Bandyopadhyay’s Baapre ki bhayanak Ashwiney
jhar (‘Oh! What a terrible storm in the month of Ashwin’) was pub-
lished immediately after the disastrous hurricane that laid waste to
Calcutta and its surrounding areas during the festival of Durga Puja
(a five-day-long Hindu festival organised every year in the month
of September-October to celebrate goddess Durga’s victory over the
demon Mahishasura; this festival is the main yearly festival for Ben-
gali Hindus) in October 1864. The magnitude of the storm attracted
the attention of the international press: The New York Times gave a
detailed description of the carnage and said that it would be difficult
to give an accurate or connected account of the loss anytime soon.17
Various official reports, including one written by James Gastrell and
Henry Blanford, were commissioned by the government.18 Bandyo-
padhyay’s tract gives a fairly detailed account of the damages caused
by the storm. In a poem titled ‘Diamond Harbour’, he describes how
James Atkins, an inspector of the river police assigned to a police
station near a lighthouse at Diamond Harbour, was killed along with
his family; how a large steamer called Bentinck was swept away by
a tidal wave, with about 500 coolies still on board; and how the
inmates of the Diamond Harbour prison managed to save themselves
as the rising water washed away most of the buildings, et cetera.19 He
describes everything in minute detail – the uprooted telegraph poles,
the broken houses and the trees that fell on a train travelling from
Kushtia to Sibadaha (now the Sealdah terminus in North Calcutta).20
This journalistic adherence to details, however, is offset by his con-
clusion that the storm was nothing but divine retribution. In another
untitled poem, Bandyopadhyay reveals the real reasons behind the
storm. Parvati, another name of Goddess Durga, goes to seek per-
mission from her husband, the God Shiva, to go and visit her folks
during the Durga Puja.21 Shiva, though, is unwilling to give his wife
permission to go, as he feels that the immoral men of Earth have lost
the rights to worship the goddess, and admonishes her for wishing to
go there:

“They spoil everything, and obey no laws;

Don’t you feel ashamed to go there?”22

61
 A ritra C hakraborti

Unwilling to accept Shiva’s injunction, Parvati grabs her children

Lakshmi, Saraswati, Karttik and Ganesha and goes to Earth to enjoy
the annual hospitality of men. Infuriated by her disobedience, Shiva
unfurls his jata (dreadlocks) and from the coils of his hair a couple
of monstrous beings are born. Shiva orders them to go and devastate
Earth and rid it of the vermin-like humankind that pollute it. Kailas-
hchandra, in the guise of the story of a domestic quarrel between two
gods, clearly issues a caveat for disobedient housewives and reminds
them of the terrible consequences of defying the orders of their
husbands.
While Kailaschandra presents a unique mixture of both evidentiary
and mythological paradigms to tell the story of a natural disaster,
other authors often glossed over journalistic details and concentrated
more on fables. In Maheshchandra De’s Hai re ashwine jhar (‘The
lamentable storm in the month of Ashwin’, 1864), Narada, the Vedic
sage and companion to the gods, tells Brahma, the Hindu god of crea-
tion, about the plight of the inhabitants of Calcutta in the aftermath
of a terrible cyclone. They disguise themselves as a couple of poor
Brahmins and come down to Earth to inspect. Soon, they understand
that the wicked humans have not learnt any lesson. They witness the
terrible ignominy in which the Brahmins live in Kaliyuga. The boat-
men at Hooghly’s ghat refused to take them aboard, thinking that
they would not be able to afford the fare. Maheshchandra briefly
mentions the boats at Chandpal’s ghat23 which were destroyed by the
storm before explaining why such terrible incidents are occurring so
frequently:

Now Kaliyuga is at a very advanced stage, there is no end to the

sinful practices.
Nobody respects the Brahmins.
They do not care for their parents and stay under their wives’
spell
Who poison their minds with their vile ideas!
They think their women are all-powerful and worship them as
if they were gurus.
They follow their every command.
Men consume meat and alcohol and frequent the whorehouses.
...
Given how Earth is now overpopulated with sinners,
How much shall the gods endure?24

62
 A  series of unfortunate events

Similar stories of bellicose gods and goddesses sending natural dis-

asters to teach humans their ill-earned lessons make repeated appear-
ances in other chapbooks. The principal enemies of the righteous ways
of life were the educated people who considered themselves superior to
those who followed more traditional lifestyles and the babus (respect-
able wealthy men; in this context, 19th-century Bengali aristocrats
with decadent lifestyles) who frequented brothels and spent their days
in inordinate luxuries. In Maheshchandra’s Eki asambhab Karttike
jhar (‘Oh what unbelievable storm in the month of Karttik’, 1864),
Parvati starts crying after seeing the disgraceful state human beings
have come down to:

They do not obey respect their elders, harbour unholy ideas

And no one remembers the path of righteousness.
They drink alcohol every day; have no regard for the holy
texts,
As if everyone has become a Young Bengal!25
...
The babu puts on a dhoti from Dhaka, and silken kurta.
He puts stockings on his feet and takes the fashionable walking-
stick in hand.
...
After adorning his finely waxed moustache with fragrance,
Babu goes to meet his mistress in a whorehouse.26

Maheshchandra laments how the gods were punishing the entire

human race for the sins of only a small number of wicked people:

কেহ বলে ল�োকের হইল বহু পাপ।

তে কারণে সকলেতে পাই মনস্তাপ।।
একের পাপেতে যায় সবার জীবন।
রাবণ নিধনে যেন সিন্ধু র বন্ধন।।
(Some say that there are a few who have committed grave sins,
And for their wickedness all of us suffer!
Many get punished for the sins of a few,
As though Rama was punishing the ocean in order to get to
Ravana).27

Ishwarchandra Sarar in Karttike jharer pnachali (‘Song of the storm

that came in the month of Karttik’, 1867) declares that the storm was

63
 A ritra C hakraborti

sent because people of the lower castes tried to usurp the roles of the
‘social superiors’:

The Brahmins are now neglected as the Chandals28 have stolen

the idols.
Negligent sons now no longer perform the last rites of their
parents.
The tasks of the Dwija (Brahmins) are now performed by
Shudras,
The babus are controlled by their mistresses.
The children of Haris and Bagdis29 now speak in Sanskrit;
The king has given up his kingdom, and the lower castes wear
the finest clothes.30

Though the mythological stories were given precedence, writers of the

‘disaster-tracts’ did not overlook the plights of the victims of these
natural disasters. Descriptions of survivors trying to negotiate with
the aftermath of these terrible incidents can be found in various tracts.
Haribandhu Chakraborti’s Baapre ki bisham jhar (‘Oh what a terrible
cyclone’), published in the wake of a devastating cyclone that hit parts
of Eastern Bengal on 29 October 1876, tells such a story. This storm
lasted for almost three days.31 The resultant loss of life and property
was massive. Haribandhu gives a chilling account of the depth to
which human nature can go:

After the storm, the rotting dead bodies of men and animals
were spread
Across the fields for as far as people could see. The putrid smell
Was strong enough to make people’s eyes water and nostrils
burn.
Senseless, remorseless and greedy men were walking amongst
those
Dead bodies, robbing them of their earthly belongings.32

Often, catastrophic storms were followed by months of sparse rain.

The loss of cattle meant that agriculture suffered in a major way.
Corpses floating in water bodies became breeding grounds for various
diseases which often turned into epidemics. Those who managed to
escape from the fury of the storms had to deal with spells of hunger,
starvation and the risk of infection by various waterborne maladies.
In Karttike jhar khandapralay (‘The apocalyptic storm in the month of

64
 A  series of unfortunate events

Karttik’), Gopalchandra Das gives an account of what people ate after

during those months of shortage:

মূলা আদি মুল আর মন�োহর মান।

ইহাই আহার মাত্র যাক থাক প্রাণ।।
ভ�োজনে ভরসা মাত্র রহিল কলাই।
বালাই বিষম ঝড়ে ক�োথা বা পালাই।।
(We could only afford radishes and taros,
And we consumed them in order to stay alive.
After they were finished, we only had a handful of beans left!
Oh, how shall we escape this terrible storm?)33

These survivors, however, were the chosen ones: they were spared
from the divine fury because they largely adhered to the path of right-
eousness. While the gods tried to eradicate the sinners by sending these
terrifying storms, which resembled the Biblical scourges, the pious
people who got caught in the crossfire tried their best to stay afloat.
Through their voices, the writers of these tracts created their own
‘cyclone memoirs’: intimate stories of people trying to find their way
through a world full of sinners and unfeeling, enraged gods and god-
desses who were determined to re-establish their superiority over them.
Like the storms, stories of virulent epidemics were also woven into
the mythos of the Kaliyuga. Some of the diseases had pre-existing
myths of their own. Although most of these disease-related mythologi-
cal narratives originated with the indigenous people of Bengal, hack
writers of Battala appropriated these myths to align them with their
critique of human folly during the Kaliyuga.
Calcutta in the 19th century was considered a hotbed of infectious dis-
eases. British authorities repeatedly blamed the squalid living quarters of
the native citizens of Calcutta for the uncontrollable spread of ailments.34
The depiction of the second most important city of the British Empire
often swayed between that of a gorgeous city of palaces and a veritable
cauldron of pestilence.35 The terrifying cholera epidemic of 1817 was
one of the first major outbreaks of infectious diseases in 19th-century
Bengal. English scientists placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of
the natives, who they considered to be superstitious imbeciles without
any modern medical knowledge and who tried to find a cure by offer-
ing sacrifices at altars of their indigenous deities.36 The pamphleteers,
though, had other explanations to offer for these outbreaks.
In the early 1870s, as dengue spread through a large section of
the city’s population, the writers of chapbooks and pamphlets came

65
 A ritra C hakraborti

out with a number of slender volumes to cash in on the hysteria.

Though dengue had become a fairly well-known disease by the late
19th century, its mythology was unformed, and the ways in which
the pamphleteers describe the workings of the fever betray the vague
nature of the dengue-mythos.37 Maheshchandra Das’s Dengue jwarer
pnachali (‘Songs of the Dengue fever’, written after a dengue out-
break in 1872) depicts Calcutta as a dystopic city ruled by the evil
demon Koli, who has been hunting the remaining pious people of
the city and punishing them for not participating in his sinful orgies.
The wayward and mischievous people of Calcutta are using this as
an excuse to commit all the sins that are normally associated with
Kaliyuga:

A few of them often go to Wilson’s Hotel to eat beef, compro-

mising their religious identities.
In the kingdom of Koli, the ‘Young Bengal’38 do not care for
anyone;
They spend their days eating kukhadyo (inedible or forbidden
food, in this context beef),
Drinking alcohol and thinking that they can take any woman
to bed.
They speak in an alien language, fuelled by the conviction
That the few pages of English literature that they have studied
in school
Have enabled them to become more erudite than people who
can memorise Hindu scriptures.39

By the 19th century, most diseases had attendant deities in the popu-
lar Hindu pantheon. Dengue was an exception, being a relatively new
addition to the people’s vocabulary. Confounded by the alien nature
of the disease, the pamphleteers often declared that this was a ‘Bilati
jwar (foreign fever)’. Nabakumar Nath in Dengue jwar o daktar saheb
(‘The dengue fever and the doctor’) describes it as a foreign demon
sent by Koli himself, to torment the people of Bengal:

From America I’ve come to Calcutta, the capital, a beautiful

town. . .
Though there is a fort here with lot of soldiers in it, along with
the Viceroy and his deputies,
I’ve given up all my fears. I capture the Bengali, English, Khotta40
Jew and the Mughal and spread fear in the town.41

66
 A  series of unfortunate events

Similar myths were woven around new or unidentified diseases which

did not have deities ascribed to them. During the outbreak of a mysteri-
ous disease in 1876, a few tracts came out, speculating if it was being
spread by ‘a new kind of insect’ created by the demon Koli. Aminchan-
dra Dutta in Nutan Roga (‘A new disease’) describes how stories spread
through the city after the doctors failed to make a proper diagnosis:

Some are saying that a man in Orissa had devised a cure.

He has dried a goat’s stomach in the sun and turned it into
powder.
Those who drink infusions prepared with this powder are
instantly cured of this mysterious disease.42

Eventually, though, Aminchandra deduces that the strange disease

is spreading because the younger generation is no longer respectful to
the older order of life.
One deity who had a very established disease-related mythology
was Sitala, a mercurial pre-Vedic goddess originally worshipped by
the members of the Savara community. She was the attendant deity
of infectious diseases such as smallpox. Her role in the entire mythol-
ogy related to smallpox has been extensively researched, and I shall
not get into that here. She also makes frequent appearances in vari-
ous tracts published after outbreaks of unidentified infectious diseases.
In Dwijabar Sharma’s Machher basanta (‘Pox of fishes’, 1875), Sitala
comes across a river while taking a stroll in the countryside. She sees
a few fishermen working in their boats, and she asks them to take her
across. The fishermen mistake her for a promiscuous housewife going
for a secret meeting with her lover. They flatly refuse to take her on
board and, to their misfortune, insult her in the vilest manner pos-
sible, referring to her as magi hatobhagi (inauspicious woman). The
goddess, naturally, becomes furious. She assumes a deadly form and
curses them at that very spot.

Let the land of Bengal be covered with poxy diseases.

Let men and their cattle die. Let the disease also infect
All the fishes that swim in the river Padma.
Those who will eat this fish will also get infected in the same
way.43

The crisis is resolved by a ‘poor, elderly Brahmin’ who chastises the

lower castes and nabya youth for insulting the gods and goddesses.

67
 A ritra C hakraborti

Similar stories of poor Brahmins placating angry gods who had been
insulted by ignorant lower classes can be found in other tracts pub-
lished during this period, too. Chintamoni Bandyopadhyay’s Machh
khabo ki poka khabo (‘What shall we eat, the fish or the insects’,
1875) is a good example.44 They blame the actions of ‘ignorant men
of lower castes’ for inviting the lethal disease as retribution. Thus,
through Brahminical appropriations, the goddess of the lower castes
now persecuted them, as the Brahmins tried to find a way to appease
the deity and save the world from her wrath.
So, how terrible exactly were these incidents that prompted the pam-
phleteers to dream up such over-the-top fables? It is entirely possible
that not every storm that made landfall in Calcutta or the surrounding
areas possessed such ferocity. In most cases, the pamphleteers would
exaggerate the effects of the events to make the stories more attrac-
tive to the readers. This is what Barbara Tuchman, in a moment of
ironic narcissism, called Tuchman’s Law: ‘[t]he fact of being reported
multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five-
to-tenfold’.45 These books were largely reactions to fate: cynical explo-
rations of the mythos of Kaliyuga. The texts discussed here cater to the
same popular imagination that saw the present moment as an age that
was falling apart, an age where the older order was decisively brought
under the chains of the foreigners, an age of Koli triumphant. One
could suggest that, politically, almost all the authors of these tracts
were unequivocally conservative. They were harsh in their criticism of
social change and any form of cultural reform. At every opportunity,
they made it a point to attack the nabya intellectuals who were trying
to break the hegemonic dominance of the sanatan dharma (conserva-
tive Brahminical Hinduism). Yet, it must also be acknowledged that
these authors were equally critical of the general decline of traditional
values amongst the conservatives as well. They regularly denounced
the corruption of the Brahmins who took advantage of their social
position and the profligacy of the babus who squandered away their
inherited wealth. All this criticism, though, was encased within sen-
sationalised narratives based on devastating storms or violent earth-
quakes, or scandals involving lecherous priests of local temples. The
urge to overplay the impact of these events, at times garnishing it with
invented, lurid details and mythological stories, almost always tri-
umphed over the authors’ declared agenda of social criticism. Though
the dominant critical and historical perception of this lowbrow print
culture has almost always posited them as renegade antagonists to
the hegemonic dominance of the sophisticated, elite print culture of

68
 A  series of unfortunate events

19th-century Bengal, I would argue that the hack writers of Battala

were not really crusaders for the economically disenfranchised whose
main purpose was to chastise upper classes for their wayward behav-
ior. The pamphleteers were simply trying to make most of the contem-
porary issues by weaving sensational narratives around them.
These books are also significant for a different reason: while the
authors blame ‘sinfulness’ or ‘amorality’ as the reason behind natural
disasters, it is undeniable that these tracts equivocally blame human
actions behind climatic events. Standing at the closure of the Holo-
cene and the beginning of the Anthropocene epoch, we could argue
that these tracts were some of the earliest examples of Bengali fiction
that discussed, though in flawed and unscientific fashion, how human
malpractice brought about change in weather patterns, and caused the
outbreak of lethal infectious diseases.
While 19th-century Bengal is often remembered as the time of the
Bengal Renaissance, of great progress in in almost every walk of life,
the metaphor of Kaliyuga became the underbelly to the utopic vision
that the reform movements tried to promote. It was part of a continu-
ous dystopia that reminded the religious and the believers of the sins
that they have committed by allowing the colonisers to take control of
every walk of life. In 19th-century Bengal, Kaliyuga provided the basis
for an unhistory of modernity: the story of a community of sinners who
were pushing themselves towards a moment of complete anarchy and
overthrow of the older order. And various poets, prophets and minstrels
of the print market gathered around to sing the song of the final days.

Notes
1 In his essay ‘Our Modernity,’ Partha Chatterjee has pointed out that the
common Bengali in the 19th century did not conceptualise ‘modernity’
quite in the same way as it is done today. The word adhunik, the literal
Bengali translation for ‘modern,’ was not in currency. Instead, the word
that was more commonly used was nabya or new. See Partha Chatter-
jee, ‘Our Modernity,’ in Empire and Nation: Selected Essays. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2010, p. 137.
2 Colonial architecture was effective beyond its purely functional purpose.
More often than not, the structures built by the British in India, or by
colonisers in any colony, for that matter, were a part of the performance
of domination: they inspired awe in the mind of the natives and gave
them the heightened impression of the technological achievements of their
rulers. For a detailed discussion on this, see Pramod K. Nayar, Colonial
Voices: The Discourses of the Empire. London: Wiley Blackwell, 2012,
pp. 140–144.

69
 A ritra C hakraborti

3 For a detailed study of the philosophical construction of the caste system

in rural Bengal, see M. Davis, ‘A Philosophy of Hindu Rank from Rural
West Bengal,’ The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 36, no. 1, 1976, pp. 5–24,
doi:10.2307/2053839. Also see Sekhar Bandopadhyay, Caste, Culture,
and Hegemony: Social Domination in Colonial Bengal. New Delhi: Sage
Publications, 2004.
4 It is necessary to clarify that this upward mobility could not encompass
the entire lower-caste population. Women, for example, remain outside its
ambit. The rate of literacy amongst the lower-caste women rose steadily as
opposed to the same in Brahmin women (acocrding to the 1901 Cenesus
of India, 25.9% Baidya women were literate as opposed to only 5.6%
Brahmin women. See Census of India 1901, Vol VI A, pt II, Calcutta: Ben-
gal Secretariat Press, 1902, pp 60–61, 100–104 & 106–111). However,
women were still under explicit control of the men of their family in every
aspect of life.
5 John McGuire, The Making of a Colonial Mind: Quantitative Study of the
Bhadralok in Calcutta, 1857–1885. Canberra: ANU, 1983.
6 Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation
of Marx’s Critical Theory. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
7 Sumit Sarkar, ‘Colonial Time: Clocks and Kaliyuga,’ in Beyond National-
ist Frames: Relocating Postmodernism, Hindutva, History. New Delhi:
Permanent Black, 2002. Also see Aaron J. Gurevich, ‘Time as a Problem
of Cultural History,’ in Cultures and Time, ed. L. Gardet et al. Paris: Ber-
nan Associates, 1976; and G.J. Whitrow, What is Time. London: Oxford
University Press, 2003.
8 Bhabanicharan Bandopadhyay, Kalikata Kamalalaya. Calcutta: Samacha-
rchandrika Press, 1823, pp. 35–42.
9 For a detailed study of Ramakrishna’s critique of the dismal state of the
contemporary Hindu middle class and his methods of dealing with the
burgeoning influence of Western culture, see Sumit Sarkar, ‘Kaliyuga,
Chakri and Bhakti: Ramakrishna and His Times,’ in Writing Social His-
tory. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 282–357.
10 Ghulam Murshid, Reluctant Debutante: Response of Bengali Women to
Modernization, 1849–1905. Rajshahi: Sahitya Samsad and Rajshahi Uni-
versity, 1983, p. 43.
11 A more traditional transliteration of the name of this mythical demon
should be Kali. However, that would risk confusion with the name of the
goddess Kali. Hence, I have transliterated the name as Koli.
12 For the most exhaustive study of these texts, see Anindita Ghosh, Power
in Print: Popular Publishing and the Politics of Language and Culture in a
Colonial Society, 1778–1905. London and New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2006.
13 Though a comparative study of newspapers and news pamphlets in 19th-
century Bengal is yet to be attempted, a parallel to this may be found in
Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, and Sabrina Alcorn Baron
and Brandon Dooley, eds., The Politics of Information in Early Modern
Europe. London and New York: Routledge, 2005.
14 Payar is the most commonly used metre of medieval Bengali literature.
The measures of payar were not explicit, making it suitable for use in

70
 A  series of unfortunate events

various genres of literature. First Bengali translations of Ramayana and

Mahabharata were done in payar. It was also used for literary creations of
lesser pedigree.
15 Munshi Namdar, Kashita hoy bhumikampa, narider e-ki dambha. Cal-
cutta: Kaji Shafiuddin, 1863, p. 1. These tracts were written in verse,
either in the payar or in tripadi, which was yet another commonly used
metre in medieval Bengali literature. The verses are almost untranslatable,
and English translations of these texts have not been published. I have
provided working translations here. All the translations are mine.
16 Ibid., p. 3.
17 The New York Times, 24 November 1864. www.nytimes.com/1864/11/24/
news/generalnewsindiathecycloneatcalcutta. html?pagewanted=2&pagew
anted=all. Accessed 17 March 2015.
18 Gastrell and Blanford were among the foremost meteorologists in 19th-
century India. Their report on the storm of 1864 is one of the most detailed
documents about natural disasters and their impacts in colonial India. See
James Gastrell and Henry Blanford, Report on the Calcutta Cyclone of the
5th October 1864. Calcutta: Military Orphan Press, 1866.
19 Kailashchandra Bandyopadhyay, Baapre ki bhayanak Ashwine jhar. Cal-
cutta: Nrityalal Shil, 1271 BS, 1864 CE, p. 8.
20 Ibid., p. 7.
21 According to popular belief among Bengali Hindus, Durga Puja is also a
celebration of Parvati’s arrival on Earth, which is the home of her father
(Himalaya).
22 Bandyopadhya, Baapre ki bhayanak Ashwine Jhar, p. 4.
23 Here, ghat refers to a port or a jetty on the bank of a river from which
people board steamers and launches. Alternatively, ghat also refers to a set
of steps leading down to a pond.
24 Maheshchandra De, Hai re Ashwine jhar. Calcutta, 1864, pp. 5–6.
25 Maheshchandra Das De, Eki asambhab Karttike jhar. Calcutta, 1867, p. 1.
26 Ibid., p. 13.
27 Ibid., p. 8.
28 Chandals are members of the lower castes, normally employed in dispos-
ing corpses in burning ghats. It was considered by many as a grave insult
to call a Brahmin a Chandal because it was commonly believed that only
the most sinful of men were cursed to be reborn as a Chandal. See Upinder
Singh, A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the Stone
Age to the 12th Century. New Delhi: Dorling Kindersley, 2008, p. 294;
and Aloka Parashera-Sen, Subordinate and Marginalized Groups in Early
India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 235–327.
29 Haris and Bagdis are indigenous people considered to be members of
lower castes.
30 Ishwarchandra Sarar, Karttike jharer pnachali. Calcutta: Gouricharan Pal,
1867, p. 15.
31 See John Elliot, Report of the Vizagapatam and Backergunge Cyclones of
October 1876. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1877.
32 Haribondhu Chakraborti, Baapre ki bisham jhar. Barishal: 28 Poush
1283. 11 January 1877, CE, p. 12.
33 Gopalchandra Das, Karttike jhar khandapralay. Calcutta: Kashinath Shil,
1877, p. 13.

71
 A ritra C hakraborti

34 See James Ranald Martin, Notes on the Medical Topography of Calcutta.

Calcutta, 1837 and Report of the Committee Appointed by the Right Hon-
ourable the Governor of Bengal for the Establishment of a Fever Hospital,
and for Inquiring into Local Management and Taxation in Calcutta. Cal-
cutta: G. H. Huttmann, 1839. Also see Martin Beattie, ‘Colonial Spaces:
Health and Modernity in Barabazaar, Kolkata,’ Traditional Dwelling and
Settlements Review, vol. XIV, no. II, 2003, p. 10.
35 See by Partho Datta, ‘Ranald Martin’s Medical Topography (1837): The
Emergence of Public Health in Calcutta,’ in The Social History of Health
and Medicine in Colonial India, ed. Biswamoy Pati and Mark Harrison.
New York: Routledge, 2009.
36 See Srabani Sen, ‘Indian Cholera: A Myth,’ Indian Journal of History of
Science, vol. 47, no. 3, pp. 345–374. Also see Kelley Lee, ‘The Global
Dimensions of Cholera,’ Global Change & Human Health, vol. 2, no. 1,
pp. 6–17.
37 José Gerson Dacunha, a Goan physician and polymath who studied den-
gue in the late 19th century, conjectured that the disease arrived from
America via merchant vessels. European sailors brought this disease to
Rangoon in the early 1820s, where it broke out with unprecedented vio-
lence and severity. From there it was conveyed to Calcutta, Baharampur,
Patna, Benares and many other towns. Dengue was often described by the
native Bengalis as bilati jwor, or foreign fever. See José Gerson Dacunha,
Dengue: Its History, Symptoms and Treatment with Observations on the
Epidemic Which Prevailed in Bombay During the Years 1871–72. Bom-
bay, Calcutta and London: Thacker and Spink & Associates, 1872, p. 11.
38 The Young Bengals were radical Bengali free thinkers emerging from Hindu
College, Calcutta. They were also known as Derozians, after their fire-
brand teacher at Hindu College, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio. One of their
chief modes of protesting against the ‘older order’ was to consume for-
bidden food, including beef. Some of these young men later went on to
become leading figures in the cultural movement known as ‘The Bengal
Renaissance’.
39 Maheshchandra Das De, Dengue jwarer pnachali, Calcutta: I C Chandra,
1872, 4
40 Common Bengali slang for someone from Bihar.
41 Nabakumar Nath, Dengue jwar o daktar saheb. Calcutta: Nabakumar
Nath, 1875, p. 10. Though the book was published in 1875, the author
mentions on the title page of the book that it was based on the events of
‘Ingraji 1872–73 saal,’ i.e. 1872–1873, CE.
42 Aminchandra Dutta, Nutan Roga. Calcutta: Rasiklal Chandra, 1283, BS.
1876, CE, p. 7.
43 Dwijabar Sharma, Machher basanta. Calcutta: Rasiklal Chandra, 1282,
BS. 1875, CE, pp. 5–6.
44 Chintamani Bandyopadhyay, Machh khabo ki poka khabo. Calcutta:
Chintamoni Bandyopadhyay, 1282, BS. 1875, CE.
45 Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. New
York: Ballantine, 1978, p. xviii.

72
 4
EXPLORERS OF SUBVERSIVE
KNOWLEDGE
The science fantasy of Leela Majumdar
and Sukumar Ray

Debjani Sengupta

The introduction of science education and dissemination of science

in colonial Bengal was fraught with ambiguities and much has been
written on the way science education was received by the colonised
subject marked by diffusion, subversion and contradictions. In this
essay, I will look at the originary moments of one of the cultural by-
products of the spread and sway of science among the educated elite
of Calcutta: the literary genre of kalpavigyan.1 I will try to explore the
complex re-workings of the idioms of colonial sciences (like geogra-
phy and cartography) to the kalpavigyan writings of Leela Majumdar
(1908–2007) and Sukumar Ray (1887–1923) through their use of the
intrepid figure of the explorer, a common speculative fiction trope in
Bengal and in the West. Both Ray and Majumdar were products of
an Anglicised colonial education and epitomised some of the ways in
which the colonial subject, irrespective of gender but belonging to the
elite, educated middle and upper classes, the bhadralok, assimilated,
absorbed and reorganised the ideology of the techno-sciences of the
empire. Neo-Enlightenment sciences, particularly maps, surveys and
geographical measuring standards went a long way to territorially
define British India, a land that was at once uniform in administrative
arrangements and governed laws. The systematic geographical surveys
that the British undertook from 1750s onwards went on to create a
sense of the colonial territorial self as well as the borders that defined
such a self. Sukumar Ray’s fragmented and playful narrative, Hesho-
ram Hushiyarer Diary (1922), contends with all these ideas. Colonial
science’s emphasis on the comprehensive archive and the experiential

73
 D ebjani S engupta

physical world is subverted by the fragmentary nature of this text where

the explorer, Professor Hushiyar undertakes an adventurous journey
to the Bandakush mountains, a pun on the Hindukush, a frontier of
British territories. Similarly, in Leela Majumdar, a cousin of Sukumar
Ray who wrote kalpavigyan stories for children, we see a question-
ing of the paradigms of Neo-Enlightenment scientific principles and a
critical understanding of humanism and science through the figure of
the protean explorer/scientist that she recurrently uses. Through their
narratives, both Ray and Majumdar deepen our understanding of the
notion of marginality in the colonial context. The scientists and inven-
tors populating these stories come knocking at our doors to deliver
a message. The unexpected that we encounter in them is both a part
of the world, as we know it, as well as a pointer to what that world
can be. In these science-based fantasty fictions, the explorer/scientist
undertakes a number of onerous tasks for the sake of knowledge or
for saving humanity from disaster. In the very act of exploration, he
also underlines the boundaries of scientific epistemology. The figure
thus represents a subversion of the values of techno-sciences that the
colonial world stood for. In many of the early Bangla science fantasies,
the explorer is both a critic and a partaker of imperial sciences.

Science education and the imperatives of the empire

In nineteenth-century Bengal, Western science and the ideology of
science went a long way towards the ‘institutionalisation of ‘mod-
ern’ education’ in the newly established colonial schools that in turn
impacted the mentality of the emerging educated elites who played
a critical role in developing and articulating ideas of citizenship and
the nation-state. The firm consolidation of Western science had been
taken in the nineteenth century in the colonial and capital city of
Calcutta with the founding of the Hindu College in 1817 and the
teaching of mathematics, including trigonometry. Earlier the Fort
William College (established in 1800) taught the newly arrived, cov-
enanted officers of the East India Company, but the Hindu College
was meant to exclusively educate the sons of ‘respectable Hindoo
families . . . to be taught, though not fed, together’ and whose curric-
ulum would include ‘instruction . . . in history, geography, chronol-
ogy, astronomy, mathematics, chemistry and other sciences.’2 Science
education received another boost when the Calcutta School Book
Society was established the same year and began publishing books
on mathematics, chemistry, anatomy and geography. The earlier con-
tribution of the Asiatic Society, established in 1784, cannot be denied

74
 E xplorers of subversive knowledge

in developing a scientific spirit among the people, though most of its

members were Europeans.3 In its early years, the East India Com-
pany had an ambivalent attitude towards the uses of science and
technology in the dominion, although many of its officials were keen
amateur surveyors, geologists and botanists. The sporadic influx of
missionaries, men of fortune and merchants who undertook the voy-
age to India in the 16th century became a veritable deluge in the
19th century. The new arrivals were employed by the Company and
consisted mostly of army engineers, botanists, surveyors and medical
men trained in European scientific establishments unlike their ear-
lier counterparts. The imperatives of colonial rule meant that British
men of science were also prompted by commercial and economic
considerations, so much so that the study of a particular region and
its geography was geared towards its commercial exploitation. For
example, the appointment of William Roxburgh to the post of a
naturalist in the Madras presidency was done on the basis of his
discovery of indigenous pepper in Samulcotta in the Godavari dis-
trict. To ensure the economic and military control of India, the East
India Company undertook extensive trigonometrical, topographical,
hydrographic, geodetic and geological surveys throughout the coun-
try.4 For the greater part of the 18th and 19th centuries, the Court
of Directors of the East India Company ‘insisted on the secrecy of
maps and surveys and restricted the art of surveying to their own
covenanted or military servants.’5 Indians, sometimes employed as
guides in rough terrain, in turn learnt the art of surveying from their
foreign employers. However, the Company frowned upon such prac-
tices. On one occasion the directive was simple and forceful as in
1784, when the Surveyor General wrote to his officers that ‘the Gov-
ernment have notified me that they wish to throw cold water on all
natives being taught, or employed in making Geographical discover-
ies.’6 However, with the increase of colonial commercial activities,
science and scientific research had to be accommodated into practi-
cal policy especially in the agricultural sector. Such a shift in the East
India Company’s tolerance of scientific activities could be discerned
from the late eighteenth century with sponsored research in cotton,
tea and spice cultivations. A similar thrust was also manifest in the
sphere of education. Sporadically backed by utilitarians, evangelists
or conservatives, science education increasingly came to be seen as
an integral part of education policies in India. Within a hundred
years, the Company’s commercial interests had altered under the
logic of empire building and proportionately, colonial activities in
the natural and physical sciences increased, mainly for military and

75
 D ebjani S engupta

political purposes. European surveyors, plant collectors, minerolo-

gists, doctors and engineers were an important part of the Company
personnel, who carried out surveys, created maps, established print-
ing presses and steam railways, used the telegraph and the steam ves-
sel. In all these activities they needed the help of Indian assistants and
technicians, who eagerly responded to these new challenges and who
in turn, popularised the reading and practice of scientific subjects
like physics and chemistry in Calcutta schools and colleges. Charles
Grant, director in the East India Company and a member of the
evangelical Clapham sect, argued in 1797 that ‘perhaps no acquisi-
tion in natural philosophy would as effectively enlighten the mass of
the people, as the principles of mechanics, and their application to
agriculture and the useful arts.’7 For Grant, and other policymakers
like him, science was of value because it was a means of intellectual,
commercial and political control with the added benefit of elevating
the natives from torpor to civilisation.

The interface between literature and science

Two men who were responsible for advancement of the scientific tem-
perament in Bengal were Mahendralal Sircar (1833–1904) and Satish
Chandra Mukherjee (1868–1945). Sircar, a product of the best Angli-
cised colonial education, was responsible for the establishment of the
Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science in 1876, the first
centre of modern scientific research in India that was fully funded by
Indians and ‘entirely under native management and control.’ Mukher-
jee founded an important journal called The Dawn Society Magazine
in 1897. Influenced by Comtean positivist values, the journal had a
strong nationalist impetus through discussions on science, technical
education and industrialisation of the colony8 Despite the pedagogical
deficiencies in teaching and research in schools and colleges, science
increasingly gained popularity among the educated elite in Calcutta
from the last decades of the 19th century. Largely perceived as a rem-
edy against superstitious practices, it was a way in which colonial
modernity could be mastered and deployed. The economic impera-
tives of imperialism and technological progresses interacted and inter-
penetrated in a variety of ways, especially in the book publishing and
printing presses that began doing a brisk business in and around the
city of Calcutta. The interface between science, technology and culture
would soon be reflected in literature.
Science fiction in Bengal has primarily been fiction written for chil-
dren and young adults, not necessarily addressing their concerns but

76
 E xplorers of subversive knowledge

with a strong element of fantasy that would appeal to young readers.

The pulp category of SF in the 1920s and 30s in the West, with its vul-
garity of titles, covers and blurbs is absent in Bangla, probably because
of the colonised Bengalis’ respect for Western science and technology.
For many of the early practitioners of the genre, science fiction was
‘implicated in the rise and supercession of technical-industrial modes
of production.’9 The first science fiction was written in Bengal in the
last decades of the nineteenth century when the effects of the Industrial
Revolution were beginning to be felt in the speedy rate of mechanisa-
tion of businesses and homes.10 Many writers of that period noticed in
their lifetime the effects of the rapid urbanisation of Calcutta. For the
urban elite of Calcutta, science stories became a kind of myth forma-
tion of this new industrial age. A number of children’s journals, like
Mukul (first published in 1895 by Nagendranath Chakraborty), Sand-
esh (first published in 1913 by Upendrakishore Ray) and Monoranjan
Bhattacharya’s Ramdhenu (1928), were full of essays and stories to
inculcate a rational and scientific temper commensurate with the age.
Similarly, scientist Satyendranath Bose’s Bangiya Bigyan Parishad’s
journal Gyan O Bigyan (first published in 1948) brought the new mar-
vels of science to the doorstep of its readers, young and old.
Connected to the illustrious Raychaudhuri family of Calcutta,
Leela Majumdar showed considerable talent in writing fantasy sto-
ries with underlying scientific ideas. These kalpavigyan (a term she
uses herself) stories express a certain worldview that critiqued western
Neo-Enlightenment notions of science prevalent in the Bengali public
sphere. Many of her science fantasy stories use science in a double-
bind: science is both a narrative of progress, a sign of modernity, but
also a signifier of a space in which a critique of modernity can be
articulated. In Majumdar’s fiction, science must always serve human-
ity. Western science, which has been a part of the colonial encoun-
ter and often an instrument of oppression, can then be a glorious
opportunity for freedom and a means to understand an adult world of
complexity and violence. The association between scientific progress
and individual/collective human freedom is very close in Majumdar’s
work. In many ways, this ideology is a distinguishing feature of SF
writing in Bengal, making it essentially the literature of progress. Yet
Leela Majumdar’s stories also retain an element of radical subversion
embedded within them as they encompass the possibilities of science as
the power to critique and change the wounded and disfigured world.
Her stories deal with hunger, marginality, unhappiness, selfishness
and stupidity – characteristics of the real world that many critics feel
‘children’s literature’ cannot and should not deal with. It is actually

77
 D ebjani S engupta

this combination of the ideal and real that makes Majumdar’s works
so alive. Unlike a sanitised world without unhappiness, class distinc-
tions and injustices, Majumdar’s stories carry an authentic flavour of
the tangible world outside. Alongside, there is also a sense of wonder
at the variety of the natural world, an appreciation of the delicious
and the terrifying, and the writer’s wonderfully quizzical and joyous
humor that is perhaps the best response to the inexplicability that is
life. Majumdar’s kalpavigyan stories, like Akash Ghati (The Space
Station, 1982), using ideas of automation in a space shelter, can be
read as bridge texts between narratives that use formulaic SF tropes
like explorations of other modes of civilisations (Premendra Mitra’s
Piprey Puran (The Annals of Ants, 1931) and Professor Shonku’s
interstellar journey in Byomjatrir Diary (The Diary of a Space Travel-
ler, 1961) by Satyajit Ray.11
Majumdar’s story ‘Shortcut’ (the English word is also the Bangla
title) first came out in her kalpavigyan collection Aajgubi that was
published in 1983.12 In the story, the surveyor/explorer Haricharan
Shamonto (allegorical in the sense that the word ‘shamonto’ means
an underling or a subject), ‘an ideal student, an ideal son, not so ideal
a husband but nonetheless an ideal householder’ (311), is the cen-
tral figure through whom Majumdar explores the configurations of
a landscape at once known and measured but still capable of yield-
ing mysterious encounters. Haricharan was exceptionally good at his
work that involved

climbing, descending, weighing, measuring . . . photograph-

ing. He didn’t mind all that: he liked doing his job a hundred
times better than many others. . . . If the diagrams and meas-
urements were right, so were the conclusions. Not like mar-
ried life where the sum never equaled the parts.
(312)

In the story, we are told that Haricharanbabu knew twenty-one tribal

languages but often failed to understand the ‘tortuous paths of matri-
monial life’ (311). An intrepid surveyor, he goes off to the north-eastern
part of India, ‘where some bits of unknown forests still remained’
(311). He has all modern equipment necessary with him but he also
knows that surveying demands exceptional skill and concentration;
it entails careful observations, and even more careful enumeration
of ‘how many kinds of trees, how many rivers, their directions, their
contours, the kinds of stones in the river beds, their lengths and their

78
 E xplorers of subversive knowledge

depths’(312). The scope and structure of Haricharanbabu’s survey

however contains within it its own marvel for he knew

There was nothing impossible in this world. The wise men

knew that whatever happened belonged to the realm of the
possible; if they were supernatural then they would never ever
happen. The boundaries of our knowledge were not the same
that restricted the possible because in the world of Nature
there can be nothing called supernatural. Whatever happened
was governed by natural laws. If it was beyond our knowl-
edge, we simply gave it the name supernatural.
(314)

During this survey deep into the jungles, Haricharan comes across a
notice that said ‘Shortcut’ stuck on a tree. Curious, he keeps walking
when he comes across an old man, ‘dressed in khaki shorts’ (remi-
niscent of colonial explorers) who seems to resemble ‘all the best sci-
entists that the world has ever known’ (315). Haricharan thinks the
old man’s face is like V.G. Mathai, who disappeared on a scientific
exploration, or maybe like Mr. Standish, who was presumed dead at
the North Pole. As he walks towards the stranger, Haricharan feels
a trembling in his limbs; the man then turns to him to say that he is
walking on time’s shortcut. From him Haricharan learns that:

Nothing ever comes to an end, you know, signs remain strewn

everywhere. To come here, you have crossed many cities, riv-
ers, fields and mountains and they are behind you now, no
longer visible. Does that mean they don’t exist? When you go
back, you will see, they are exactly where you have left them.
Time is also like that. People don’t know or understand Time.
(316)

Haricharan requests the man to take him back in time to a particular

day when he had lost the last testament and will of his wife’s grandfa-
ther and for which he had never been forgiven by his family. The story
ends with Haricharan finding the place where he had hidden the paper
and his relief that from now on he would make his family happy and
‘keep exploring in deep forests each and every year’ (317).
Haricharan Shamonto is an explorer who is part and parcel of
an illustrious tradition in Bengali science fiction. Premendra Mitra’s
Ghanada and later the character of Professor Shonku created by

79
 D ebjani S engupta

Satyajit Ray make up the other notable examples. The explorer fig-
ure is both driven by ethics and a love for science although there are
substantial differences in treatment between these writers. It may also
be fruitful to explore the richness of cultural differences that this fig-
ure has in Bengali science fiction as compared to its Western counter-
part. If Western SF is often critiqued as a ‘quintessentially masculine
genre . . . filled with muscle bound macho heroes swaggering and bul-
lying their way through the galaxy,’13 Bengali science fiction/science
fantasy heroes/explorers/scientists, although all men, are less aggres-
sive in their love for food and compassion for the underdog. Ghana-
da’s tall tales are never complete without adequate nourishments and
concern for humanity, while Professor Shonku is deeply attached to
his cat Newton and to his servant Prahlad. Leela Majumdar’s explor-
ers are mostly tenderhearted children-loving adventurers (like Akash
Ghati’s Borokaka) or the old Lama in her novel Batash Bari (The
House of Winds, 1974).
Majumdar’s ‘Shortcut’ indicates the end of the surveyor’s knowl-
edge but also a new beginning. Even if there are no more forests to
survey, Haricharan’s encounter with the time machine indicates that
the human quest for knowledge and happiness can never end. The
known world can still yield the mysterious, and the forests that have
already been surveyed can still hold secret possibilities. Classifications
and enumerations, paradigmatic tools of colonial science and colonial
subjugation, can never diminish the wonder of the natural world even
though that world is tainted by human greed. ‘Shortcut’ then is a story
that indicates a limitation of Western science without undermining its
value. The figure of the Indian surveyor, so unlike his colonial coun-
terpart, is on a quest not to subjugate the world but to learn about
himself and his past.
Sukumar Ray, Bengal’s first nonsense poet, was a prolific writer on
scientific and technological subjects, contributing articles to Sand-
esh (in Bangla sandesh means both a sweetmeat and a message), a
magazine first published by his father, Upendrakishore Ray Chaud-
huri (1863–1915), a notable member of the Brahmo Samaj and a
writer himself. Upendrakishore belonged to a family that was known
for their scientific curiosity and open-minded intellectual and social
interventions. Upendrakishore’s interest in printing technology and
in children’s literature made him a pioneer of sorts in nineteenth-
century Calcutta. His four-part article Akasher Katha (All About the
Sky, 1900) in the children’s magazine Mukul reveals the writer’s wide-
spread interest in all things scientific. Upendrakishore’s son Sukumar
inherited his interest and contributed many articles to Sandesh on a

80
 E xplorers of subversive knowledge

variety of scientific and technological subjects like ‘Railgarir Katha’

(All About Railways, 1916), ‘Chloroform’ (1917), ‘Pyramids’ (1918),
‘Bioscope’ (1920), etc.14
Sukumar’s short narrative Heshoram Hushiyarer Diary, influenced
by Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost Worlds, is a spoof on the science fic-
tion genre through its explorer figure Heshoram. Neo-Enlightenment
science’s emphasis on the comprehensive archive and the experiential
physical world is subverted by the fragmentary nature of Ray’s text.
Professor Heshoram has been undertaking an expedition in remote
regions and has kept a diary of his adventures. However only a frag-
ment of that diary can be published as much of the longer text is now
lost. Heshoram’s nephew, Chandrakhai, a companion in his adven-
tures, gives an explanation as to why it is so:

US (the publishers/printers): Can we see all the samples of plants and

animals that you have collected?
CHANDRA: They are all lost.
US: What? All lost? How could you lose such things?
CHANDRA: Yes, I am thankful my life was not lost too. You have not
seen the storms I came across in those regions: in one blast all our
instruments, large tents and sample boxes were blown away like
paper. I was blown away too, a number of times. Once I was close
to death. God knows where my dog was blown away; I never
found him again. It was such a terrible danger: compasses and
needles, maps and plans, papers and books were all blown away.
If I tell you how I managed to return, all your hair will stand up
on end like a porcupine’s spines. (492)

Ray pokes fun at the paraphernalia of science and geographical

surveys that is used to order a new colonial territoriality. Heshoram
and his surveyors, unlike the earlier kinds, are all Indians, including
the two hunter brothers Chhakkar and Lakkar Singh and the coolies.
They travel ten miles north of the Bandakush mountains, (a wordplay
on banda: servant and kush: kurnish, to salute), whose nomenclature
brings to mind the colonised status of the group. Professor Heshoram
Hushiyar has traveled to the borders of the known territory of British
India, beyond the Karakoram, where he encounters fabulous animals
and plants:

After travelling for two hours we came to a place where every-

thing seemed strange. There were large trees, all unknown to
us. In one of them large red fruits, a little in size like our bel,

81
 D ebjani S engupta

were hanging down; we saw a flowering plant with white and

yellow flowers, each the length of an arm and half. In another
tree, gourd like fruits hung whose sharp smell assailed our
nostrils from twenty-five feet away.
(491)

This is the edge of the known world, where fantastic plants and ani-
mals challenge the extents and borders of colonial knowledge. Turning
the colonial trope of exotic India on its head, Ray shows us the limita-
tions of modern geography: nothing in this earth can be fully known
and colonial scientific efforts to collect, specify and create an archive
of flora and fauna are doomed to incompleteness and failure. The pos-
sibilities of knowledge then remain both fabulously tantalising and
ephemeral. None of the creatures that Professor Heshoram finds are
to be found in the annals of geography or physical sciences, including
the two hundred kinds of butterflies and insects and five hundred new
species of plants, fruits and trees. The team measures the Bandakush
Mountain with their ‘survey instruments’. However, they come up
with varying heights, so the measurements have to be done again and
again because ‘maybe our instruments were faulty.’ The expedition
team is certain that nobody has ever measured or climbed that par-
ticular mountain because ‘this was a completely new and strange land
(desh), with no signs of human beings anywhere and where we had to
make our own maps to determine and go our way’ (491).
Heshoram Hushiyarer Diary pokes fun at Enlightenment sciences
for naming things in long-winded Latin. Ray critiques the fact that
scientists give names arbitrarily to objects for convenience and sug-
gests that the name of a thing is intrinsically connected to its nature.
So the first creature that Professor Heshoram meets in the course of
his journey through the Bandakush Mountain is a ‘Gomratharium’
(gomra in Bangla means someone of irritable temperament), a creature
that sported a woebegone face with an extremely cross expression.
They also encounter a ‘Hanglatherium’ (hangla: greedy), a creature
who devours a loaf of bread and jaggery and polishes off the explorer’s
breakfast eggs.15 Soon the company stumbles upon a strange creature,
a cross between a ‘number of kites and owls’ and find an animal ‘that
was neither an alligator, nor a snake, nor a fish but resembled to a cer-
tain extent all three.’ Heshoram names him ‘Chillanosaurus’ (chillano:
to shout), who is incapable of hunting even for his food.16 The list of
fantastic animals keeps growing when one of Heshoram’s surveyors
comes upon another strange creature whom they name ‘Langrathar-
ium’ (langra in Bangla means someone who is lame) because it walks

82
 E xplorers of subversive knowledge

with a limp. In a subversive act of linguistic flagging, Ray inserts Bangla

words into Latin ones to create portmanteau words made famous by
another writer whom he admired, Lewis Carroll. And like Carroll,
Ray too plays with words to poke fun at the hegemonic contemporary
scientific and cultural doctrines of the day.
Sukumar Ray’s short text is remarkable for many reasons. Ray is
famous in Bengal for his nonsense verses as well as his satirical plays,
but few literary historians have taken cognizance of this text except
in perfunctory ways.17 This fragment creates a new geography that
counters the spatial geography that colonial cartographers created
especially through the trigonometric surveys that tried to measure
and scale the Indian landscape. Ray demonstrates that technology and
knowledge are not unproblematic phenomena and the colonised sub-
jects did not adopt them as a matter of course. Ray’s cultural concep-
tions of space and the politics of manipulating spatial representations
create a cartography that is subversive, ambiguous and complex. He
demonstrates a broad yet critical understanding of colonial science,
particularly geography, to comment on the practices of surveys, maps
and scientific practices where he gives racial stereotyping a satirical
edge. So Chakkar and Lakkar Singh, who are from Punjab, are brave
and courageous hunters while Chandrakhai is a lover of food and a
teller of tall tales (a Bengali characteristic?). As he recounts his adven-
tures in the Bandakush Mountain, one of the young men of the print-
ing press asks him: ‘What -tharium are you?’ while another jokingly
answers: ‘Oh he is a Goppotharium: he sits down to tell tall tales’
(goppo/golpo: tales/stories, also tall tales) (493).
Majumdar and Ray exhibit a rare form of sardonic modernity
that is both self-reflexive and ironic: by questioning the certainties of
Neo-Enlightenment epistemology, they allow their young readers to
chart new maps or new territories that would enable them to critically
examine their self-identities based on alternate modes of viewing and
chronicling. Using the form of the kalpavigyan where the explorer is
the saviour and not an exploiter of the world, they create a distinct
genre different to Western SF yet with some familar tropes. At once
local and global, their writings display, as Chattopadhyay writes, how
‘a sensitivity to local context determines, rather than undermines, the
concreteness of our planetary imaginings.’18 Although emerging from
a dissemination of imperial sciences, the Bangla kalpavigyan stories of
Ray and Majumdar produce ‘rich imaginative possibilities for empire’s
anti-thesis.’19 Through parody and ironic humour, the narratives radi-
cally challenge the legitimising conception of the empire, its linguis-
tic and territorial hegemony. The figure of Haricharan or Professor

83
 D ebjani S engupta

Heshoram (a pun on hashi: laughter) can negotiate, manipulate and

re-formulate the values of imperial sciences to create a new subversive
empire of knowledge, both liberating and unique, full of unknown
possibilities. It is also part admonition: Heshoram Hushiyar (hushiyar:
beware) warns us not to take ourselves too seriously!

Notes
1 For a discussion and definition of kalpavigyan, see Bodhisattva Chatto-
padhyay, ‘Bengal,’ The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ed. John Clute,
David Langford, Peter Nicholls and Graham Sleight. London: Gollancz,
updated 2 April 2015 (link: www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/bengal.
Accessed 12 February 2018). As well as Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, ‘On
the Mythologerm: Kalpavigyan and the Question of Imperial Science,’ Sci-
ence Fiction Studies, vol. 43, no. 3, November 2016, pp. 435–458. Chat-
topadhyay considers the term kalpavigyan a ‘rough analogue’ to SF in
Bangla. Kalpavigyan (kalpana: imagination/fantasy, vigyan: science) nar-
ratives are large in scope and range and may contain elements of mystery
or adventure. Characterized by strong intermingling of fantasy and sci-
ence, they are resolutely based on the local and the familiar, creating an
alternative to the imperial imaginary through subversion and parody.
2 Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and Construction of
Scientific Knowledge in South Asia and Europe: Seventeenth to Nine-
teenth Century. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2006, p. 160.
3 The lone exception was Radhanath Sikdar (1813–1870), a Derozian and
a mathematician. William Jones founded the Asiatic Society on 15 Janu-
ary 1784 along with thirty other officers of the East India Company.
4 S.N. Sen, ‘The Character of the Introduction of Western Science in India
During the Eighteenth and the Nineteenth Centuries,’ in Social History
of Science in Colonial India, ed. S. Irfan Habib and Dhruv Raina. Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 69–73. The Great Trigonometrical
Survey (1799–1800) tried to scientifically map parts of the subcontinent
and was sufficient ‘to bring all the British map-making activities into a sin-
gle, coherent whole.’ See Matthew H. Hedney, ‘The Ideologies and Prac-
tices of Mapping and Imperialism’ in the same volume, p. 39.
5 Sen, ‘The Character of the Introduction,’ p. 75.
6 Ibid., p. 75.
7 Quoted in Russell Dionne and Ray MacLeod, ‘Science and Policy in Brit-
ish India, 1858–1914: Perspectives on a Persisting Belief,’ in Social History
of Science in Colonial India, p. 169.
8 Dhruv Raina and S. Irfan Habib, Domesticating Modern Science: A Social
History of Science and Culture in Colonial India. Delhi: Tulika Books,
2006, pp. 84–85.
9 Damien Broderick, Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction.
London: Routledge, 1995, p. 55.
10 Hemlal Dutta’s story Rahashya (1882) uses the marvels of a new techno-
logical age when the protagonist of the story Nagendra visits a home in
London that uses automation in all domestic work. His awe and wonder

84
 E xplorers of subversive knowledge

are transformed to embarrassment when he is caught while fleeing by an

intruder-catching device. See Robin Bal, Banglay Bigyan Chorcha. Kol-
kata: Shomila Press and Publication, 1996, pp. 40–41.
11 Premendra Mitra’s first SF novel was Piprey Puran (The Annals of Ants,
1931) and his first story featuring the lovable Ghanada was Mosha (The
Mosquito, 1945). Satyajit Ray, son of Sukumar Ray, carried on the family
tradition of an interest in science and science-based stories. His Professor
Shonku was created in the pages of the magazine Sandesh that he revived
after his father’s death with help from his aunt Leela Majumdar. For a his-
tory of the genre, see Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, ‘Bengal,’ The Encyclo-
pedia of Science Fiction, ed. John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls
and Graham Sleight. Gollancz, 2 April 2015. (link: www.sf-encyclopedia.
com/entry/bengal. Accessed 12 February 2018).
12 Leela Majumdar, ‘Shortcut,’ in Shera Kishor Kalpavigyan, ed. Anish
Deb, Kolkata: Ananda Publishers, 1997, pp. 29–36. The story can also
be found in Leela Majumdar Rochonashomogro, vol 3, ed. Shoma Muk-
hopadhyay. Kolkata: Lalmati Prokashon, 2011, pp. 311–317. All quota-
tions are from this volume. Translations mine. See also Debjani Sengupta,
‘The Wondrous Traveller: Leela Majumdar and Science Fiction in Bengal,’
Extrapolation. Brownsville, Texas: The University of Texas at Brownsville
and Texas Southmost College, 2010 (51:1).
13 Quoted in ‘Introduction,’ Science Fiction, Imperialism and the Third
World: Essays on Postcolonial Literature and Film, ed. Ericka Hoagland
and Reema Sarwal. London: McFarland &Company Publishers, 2010,
p. 6.
14 A list of Upendrakishore and Sukumar Ray’s writings can be found in
Upendrakishore O Sukumar Rachanasangroho, ed. Satya Chakraborty.
Kolkata: Bidyamandir, 1983. Translations from Heshoram Hushiyarer
Diary are mine. Page numbers of Heshoram from this volume are given in
parentheses. See also Debjani Sengupta, ‘An Empire of Subversive Knowl-
edge: Colonial Geography and Sukumar Ray’s Heshoram Hushiyarer
Diary,’ The Awakening: A Collection of Essays on Bengal Renaissance,
ed. Sandipan Sen. Kolkata: Anustup, 2016, pp. 328–344.
15 Readers of Sukumar Ray’s nonsense verse will recall the ‘pauruti and jhola
gur’, a culinary combination from the poem ‘Bhalo re bhalo’ (from his col-
lection Aboltabol, 1923). The mixing up of two disparate signature foods
from two civilisations, bread and jaggery, seems a wonderful example of
Ray’s satiric and unorthodox subversions.
16 See Debjani Sengupta, ‘Sadhanbabu’s Friends: Science Fiction in Bengal
from 1882 to 1974,’ in Science Fiction, Imperialism and the Third World:
Essays on Postcolonial Literature and Film, ibid., pp. 115–126.
17 For a brief discussion on this piece see Biman Basu, ‘Shukumar Sahitye
Bigyan’ in Shatayu Shukumar, ed. Sisir Kumar Das. Delhi: Bengal Associa-
tion, 1988, p. 61. Also Robin Bal, ibid., p. 46, has nine lines on this piece.
18 Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, ‘Re-centering Science Fiction and The Fan-
tastic: What Would a Non-Anglocentric Understanding of Science Fic-
tion and Fantasy Look Like?’ Strange Horizons, September 2013. http://
strangehorizons.com/2013. Accessed 6 August 2017.
19 Ibid.

85
 Part II

POSTCOLONIAL
REASSERTIONS
 5
HEARTS AND HOMES
A perspective on women writers in Hindi

Ira Pande

‘Fun,’ says Bill Bryson recalling his childhood in Iowa, ‘was a differ-
ent kind of thing in the 1950s, mostly because there wasn’t so much
of it . . . You learnt to wait for your pleasures and to appreciate them
when they came.’ Life was somewhat similar in the rest of the world
as well, certainly in the small towns of mofussil India in the first two
decades after Independence, when it had an unhurried, placid rhythm
that bred in people a calm acceptance of the fact that not all pleasures
were instantly available.
My worldview to date is essentially confined within this globe of
memories, of life in provincial India and its mofussil towns during the
’50s and ’60s. What is more, I grew up with a mother who was a writer
and so quite a different breed from the other mothers of that time.
I have written about this in a memoir.1 However, where that book was
a sort of homage to an extraordinary mother I learned to love even
more after she died, this article will be an enquiry into why women
writers of her generation were often dismissed as mere producers of
popular romantic fiction. Few women writers of her generation were
given a place in the big boys’ club of serious writers or honoured by
the Sahitya Akademi. National honours, such as the Padma awards,
were rarely bestowed upon writers anyway and Shivani received a
Padma Sri in 1982, almost towards the end of her life. Yet, even today,
I meet fans who have read her books countless times and can quote
reams from her novels to me to prove their undying love for her work.
I have also encountered young girls who say they have been named
after her because their mothers were diehard fans of Shivani. What
I take this to mean is that popular women writers still continue to
enjoy a readership that many ‘important’ male writers of that time no
longer do. So to understand this strange dichotomy between Shivani’s

89
 I ra P ande

enormous popularity and the place she and most women writers of her
generation were awarded in the pantheon of Hindi literature, we have
to go back a little in time.
Lucknow in the 1950s or Allahabad in the ’60s seems so far back
in time, yet the life we had there often comes back to me now in my
dreams, but only in black and white. I am constantly taken aback by
how much I remember from that time and how a stray taste, smell or
melody can set off the train of thoughts, accompanied by the plain-
tive notes of Raga Piloo played by Pannalal Ghosh. Perhaps it is
because it was the signature tune that always accompanied the Films’
Division Newsreel screened before the Sunday morning show of the
children’s film at Lucknow’s Mayfair Theatre before the film actually
started. The sonorous voice of Melville d’Mello or Romesh Thapar
that accompanied film footage of drought or villages marooned by
flood waters in Assam rings clearly in my ears even now after almost
five decades. For me and perhaps several others of my age, the Indian
Newsreel (produced by the Directorate of Advertising and Visual Pub-
licity as a round-up of recent events) and the unforgettable advertise-
ments of products like Vicks Vaporub (that magically decongested
clogged air passages after a mother applied it on a child’s chest and
back) have a far greater recall than all the new (and clever) ads that
we see today.
We suffered these delaying tactics because they made the whole
experience of watching a film on a Sunday a treat that would last us
for the next two months. Seeing films at reduced rates, as at special
children’s shows, was the only indulgence we were allowed by our fru-
gal parents. We were also allowed either a packet of chips or a small
bar of chocolate, not both together. So my brother and I shared our
chips, down to the last one broken in two neat halves, and a small bar
of Cadbury’s measured and carefully cut into two. To date, I feel guilty
about eating a packet of potato chips or a whole bar of chocolate all
by myself.
Life in the ’50s and ’60s where I grew up was never meant to be
enjoyed: it had to be endured. You had to read three soul-enhancing
books before you were allowed the luxury of an Agatha Christie.
Novels, in any case, were never to be read in the forenoon: winter
holidays were for watching others have fun in the plains while your
family stayed back in freezing Nainital because we could not afford to
travel to exciting destinations such as Bombay or Calcutta, ‘like them’.
I hated ‘them’: they had access to an Eastman Colour world that was
denied to us. We lived in black-and-white and our lives had all the

90
 H earts and homes

pathos – or so it seemed to us at the time – of Bimal Roy’s Parineeta,

not allowed to play cards with the Chaudhrys next door. Of course,
it did not help that our neighbours in Nainital were actually called
Chaudhry. They were a rich, landed family of Partition refugees from
Multan and had been given farmland in the Terai after they arrived in
India. Mr Chaudhry lived on the ‘pharrum’, as Mrs Chaudhry said,
while she lived in Nainital to educate her children. Each summer, their
Punjabi relatives – unutterably glamourous creatures from exotic
Delhi and prosperous Panipat who wore (haw!) lipstick – would come
for the summer ‘hols’ and play Cliff Richards and Pat Boone EPs on
their radiogram. They also played ‘Bluff’ and ‘Kote piece’ (I do not
know how to spell that because it is a game I’ve never seen spelt out,
only played). On the dot of 4.30 pm, our servant would come to fetch
us home because my father would return from office at five and expect
all of us to be home. ‘Wait till I tell your mother you were playing
cards,’ he would threaten us, investing such disapproval in the last
two words that we’d quake with fear. It was like your parents finding
out that you had been slyly snogging an unsuitable boy behind a bush.
Did we never have fun then? Of course, we did, but it was always
tinged with the exciting fear of being caught having it. A daring act
was reading dirty books in toilets, not porn mind you, but banned
books, such as Lolita and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. (Today, I would
reward any child who wanted to read Nabokov and DH Lawrence).
The dangerous game of Russian Roulette played as we three sisters
bunked to see a film in the afternoon at Naaz Cinema in Allahabad’s
Chowk area and return home before my father came back from his
office, often without staying for the end of the film: these were the
thrills that lit up our lives.
Listening to film songs on Vividh Bharati in the afternoons was
another act of defiance against parents who considered all music that
was not classical frivolous and a waste of time. My father called it
lara-lappa music because that is what it sounded to him. So, at 2.30
during summer vacation afternoons, when he was safely away at work,
we coaxed our ancient radio to the frequency that brought Vividh
Bharati and sang along with all the farmaishi (request) songs. I can still
remember the words of all the ‘hit’ songs of the ’50s and ’60s, partly
because they are so beautiful and mostly because they are branded on
my mind like arithmetic tables. So delightful was this interlude that
we often stayed tuned to listen to the following programme, called
‘Madhur Geetam’, devoted to South Indian film music, a completely
unfamiliar genre. I remember names such as the vocalist P. Susheela

91
 I ra P ande

and a music director, called (I think) Ghantasala, whose name used to

have us convulsed with mirth and songs that sounded to us like:

Andirittam chamaghadh,
Chundi muttadi mutta gudh, chundi muttadi mutta ghud

God knows what the original words were, but they have stayed with
us to this day. If, by some happy chance, our parents were out on a
walk or something, we ran to switch on the radio at 7.30 pm to hear
‘Fauji bhaiyon ke liye’ (for our brother soldiers), a programme broad-
cast specially for the Armed Forces. Once we even sent a request under
our cook’s name and he joined us every afternoon until one day he
finally heard his name on the radio and collapsed in ecstasy. No doubt
this same desire prompted that paanwala from Jhumritalaiya to send
requests every day, so that he was known all over the country.
We went to English-medium schools but led Hindi-medium lives
at home. Then, this was a fact that we hid from our posh, Anglicised
school mates: today it is something that I am profoundly grateful for.
We read Chandamama and Parag while ‘they’ read Schoolfriend and
Girl’s Weekly. ‘Their’ mothers read Woman and Home and Woman’s
Weekly: ours read Dharmyug and Sarika. It was considered stylish
to know only English and pretend that you could not spell or speak
grammatically correct Hindi, perhaps because we still carried the bur-
den of the Raj then. Pride in our heritage, our languages and customs
and in our simple but spartan lives was hidden from the taunts of our
missionary teachers and fellow students. My brother and I were given
private lessons at home in Sanskrit by an old Panditji, who came
largely for the tea and snacks he was served every day by our mother.
As he slurped his tea, he would place a greasy finger on the book in
front of us and say, ‘Explain this.’ Naturally, we never could, so with
another noisy slurp, he would start the explanation with, ‘To hum
batlavain?’ (Shall I explain then?). We hated those lessons because
we felt that exposure to Hum Batlavain (our cruel nickname for him)
would – like prolonged exposure to deadly UV rays – dim the pat-
ina of the English education we were receiving in our schools. My
brother discovered that if you learnt the rupa (scansion) of Sanskrit
verbs in vertical lines, instead of horizontal ones, then the last line
only had ‘bhyam, bhyam, bhya, bhya’. I am sure today such a cross-
cultural experiment would result in some kind of bipolar disorder,
but we bore the schizophrenia this created in our childhood cheer-
fully oblivious of those mental conditions that then had no name and
so did not exist.

92
 H earts and homes

Naturally, nostalgia makes me look back at these memories fondly,

erasing the unhappiness and the misery that was also so much a part
of growing up in mofussil India. Our lives were light years from what
happened in the Big Bad City. For instance, we only heard of the Bea-
tles and flower children: to us in our provincial towns, these were a
large generic lot called ‘the Hippie’. For years after – perhaps even
now – the word ‘hippie’ denoted an evolutionary stage of being that is
just above that of a cockroach.
If I have faithfully conveyed to the reader the languid and unhur-
ried pace of life in those days, then we can proceed to understand how
hard-won, even simple pleasures seemed and how reading romantic
serials became a rage all over India when a clutch of magazines in a
variety of regional languages were published in the first decade after
Independence. Remember that we were ferocious readers of print and
bilingual to a degree that our reading speeds in both Hindi and English
were roughly the same. I wonder how many bilingual readers there are
living today: even among those who speak impeccable Hindi. A crucial
fact was that Hindi magazines and books were freely available because
they were far less expensive than English magazines and books. In an
age of modest incomes, few households were able to buy their children
books and magazines for entertainment.
There was another unseen factor and one often overlooked by the
people who bemoan the dying readership of Hindi publications. Up
to the ’60s, there were three kinds of options in every field of crea-
tive endeavour so that every segment of the Indian population was
offered a choice of films, music and reading matter. Thus there were
the Satyajit Ray kind of films for the truly sophisticated and evolved
minds, Bimal Roy and Guru Dutt for the literary-minded middle class
and Dara Singh films of action for the hoi polloi. In music one could
choose classical music, film music or a semi-classical genre that a few
may remember as sugam sangeet. This was a genre that had some won-
derful thumris and ghazals or lyrics by well-known poets by singers
such as Lata Mangeshkar, Manna De or Pankaj Mullick for those who
savoured good music and poetry. Similarly, there were Premchand and
Hajari Prasad Dwivedi for the upper intellectual stratosphere; Shivani,
Mannu Bhandari, Krishan Chander and other popular writers for the
middlebrow; and Colonel Ranjit and Gulshan Nanda for readers of
pulp fiction. At some point – largely I think under the influence of the
socialist gangsters and the self-styled literary critic with an unswerv-
ing ideological loyalty to anything that came out of Soviet Russia and
its satellite culture – state awards and renown were bestowed only on
those whose work met with the approval and sanction of these red

93
 I ra P ande

hearts. Popularity became suspect, a mark of low intellectual content

that had to be rubbished at all academic fora. Today, when the same
red hearts that bleed eternally for the aam aadmi moan about the van-
ishing readership in Hindi and the lack of any fresh bhasha writing,
perhaps they should look into the smelly confines of the Sahitya Aka-
demi and the National Book Trust, controlled by their clones since
they were first set up, to find the answers they seek.
Allahabad in the ’60s was home to some of the greatest writers of
those times. Harivansh Rai Bachchan had left Allahabad for Delhi by
then, but there were other more famous chhayavad poets still around
(Sumitranandan Pant, Mahadevi Verma and Nirala), Firaq Gorakh-
puri, Amrit and Sripat Rai (Premchand’s sons, both writers and pub-
lishers), Ilachandra Joshi, VDN Sahi and Usha Priyamvada, to name
just a few. And of course, there was Shivani. However, along with
others of her tribe, such as Salma Siddiqi and Mannu Bhandari, her
kind of writing was passed off as romantic fluff or domestic sagas that
housewives ordered by mail as part of a gharelu (domestic) library
scheme. The very popularity of these women writers became a weapon
to use against their literary output. To the supercilious self-styled crit-
ics who pronounced judgment on what was to be considered accept-
able as literature, this space was only meant for those who wrote for
a different audience, one that had a sophisticated palate developed on
the ‘modern’ fare of European and contemporary American fiction.
Certain subjects were taboo in this high-minded world: romance and
bourgeois lives headed this list.
Somewhere by the ’70s, then, the small town became an object of
ridicule: it was valourised in romantic literature and cinema but actu-
ally hated and mocked at in the real. Small wonder then, that its inhab-
itants (who suffered from a crippling form of low self-esteem since
birth) ran into hiding and tried to ape the big-city culture by writing,
speaking and dressing like the metropolitan sophisticates they yearned
to become. When this happened, the country lost all those delightful
rivulets that fed the creative river of the Grand National Dream. The
homogenisation of culture took over: slogans replaced feelings. The
joy went out of fun as its definition changed into something wrought
by high-minded nationalist agendas. Political correctness has a lot to
answer for.
Upon reflection, it appears to me that Shivani’s most prolific literary
output and some of her most memorable and popular novels date to
the years when Hindi magazines were avidly read across North India.
Among these, Dharmyug (edited then by the formidable Dharmvir
Bharati, a widely respected novelist and dramatist) occupied pride

94
 H earts and homes

of place. Published by Bennett and Coleman (referred to henceforth

as B&C), its owners (Sahu Jain and Rama Jain) promoted creative
writing and later endowed the Gyanpeeth Award, the first privately
endowed prestigious literary award for writers in various Indian lan-
guages. The Bennett and Coleman Group (later known as the Times
of India group) also brought out a clutch of other magazines. Among
these were Sarika (contemporary Hindi writing, edited by Kamlesh-
war) and Dinaman (a political and economic weekly, edited by Agy-
eya), both respected for their content and editorial gravitas. Filmfare, a
film magazine, and the Illustrated Weekly of India were their popular
English-language publications. The Hindustan Times group, owned
by the Birlas, published Saptahik Hindustan (as a rival to Dharm-
yug), Kadambari (as an alternative to Sarika) and vied with each other
to publish serials by the most popular Hindi writers of those days.
Throughout the ’50s and ’60s, there was not a single library or reader
in North India that did not subscribe to these magazines.
Almost all of Shivani’s novels – certainly her most popular ones –
were first published as serials in one or the other magazines mentioned
above. Her most well-known novel, Krishnakali, published as a serial
in Dharmyug in the ’60s, was later published as a novel by Gyanpeeth
(the publishing house run by the B&C group). In addition to these
magazines, two others (Navneet and Gyanoday) I can recall from then
were modelled on the popular American publication, Reader’s Digest.
Shivani’s travelogues, essays and memorial tributes were regularly
published in these Hindi digests.
Today, when we have lost the patience to wait for the instalment
of a weekly serial and prefer reading our books in one gulp or binge-
watch our favourite television serials, it seems incredible that readers
would follow Shivani’s serials for months and savour them by reading
them over and over again. Later, when they were published as novels,
they were given a fresh lease of life and her publishers vied to get
rights to publication even as it was still being serialised in a magazine.
Although such publishing is now a part of literary lore and the sub-
ject of research papers, we must never forget the enormous role these
serialised novels played in popularising quality literature. Just as our
early television serials are now re-run on Doordarshan to recall and
emphasise the depth of their narratives against the trivial pursuits of
the eternal saas-bahu bilge that spawned a whole industry of hysterical
emotional dramas enacted by over-dressed actors, the simple dignity
of women in our small towns and their small world was the spine of
those literary serials. Written by authors who had a firm grip on local
languages with a strong sense of social responsibility, they gave rise

95
 I ra P ande

to a genre that has since vanished. Vulgarity – whether in speech or

character – was completely absent and whether this indicates a prud-
ery or an acknowledgement of what constitutes ‘good and wholesome’
literature is for others to say. As a daughter who was brought up on
whatever Shivani preached in her novels, I am no longer capable of
giving an unbiased opinion.
Naturally, the serialised novel had its own effect on the writing it
spawned. Fans wrote furious letters to Shivani when she betrayed their
hopes (such as by killing off a character) or when she did not spend
enough time on a particular strand of the narrative. This close bond
between writer and reader was perhaps what contributed to the inti-
macy that readers developed over the years with their favourite writ-
ers. My sister Mrinal Pande (who edited Saptahik Hindustan in the
’90s) recalls how typists vied with each other to type out Shivani’s
(always) handwritten manuscript when she sent in a fresh instalment
so that he/she would be the first to read it! The circulation of maga-
zines jumped by as much as 55 per cent when her novels were being
serialised and siblings fought with each other to grab the magazine to
read it first when it was delivered to private homes. Often they tore the
pages out so that they could share it among themselves.
What gave this genre its enormous reach and popularity was that
these stories were significant documentaries. I would say that that
it was reality fiction based on real-life characters and episodes and
invisible to the writers based in our up-and-coming metros who con-
sciously distanced themselves from these provincial lives to become
more acceptable to a wider, international literary world. This is a fact
often overlooked when tracing the evolution of Hindi writing. As Vas-
udha Dalmia’s book on fiction and history reveals, novels located in
Allahabad, Agra, Aligarh, Banaras or Lucknow give us an insight into
the social landscapes that were shaping middle-class lives in the ’50s
and ’60s.2 Beneath the romantic tales of young women and men were
rich subplots that reveal the gradual breakup of orthodox joint fami-
lies, the effect of education on the emancipation of women in provin-
cial India and the effect of migration from small towns to industrial
cities. The language of everyday conversation in middle-class homes
and amongst families, the social terms of exchange between men and
women, workers and employers are important markers of a world
we seek today and cannot find because it no longer exists. What are
often dismissed as kitchen tales and romantic fiction stood firm on a
foundation because it was supported by religion and ritual, food and
taboos, folk remedies and aphorisms that nourished clans and villages.
In the tightly packed houses of our old shahars that were separated by

96
 H earts and homes

narrow lanes, the smells and sounds that travelled across neighbours
became rich lodes of narratives that had the authenticity of real lives.
The bonds between Hindu and Muslim homes, or between upper- and
lower-caste settlements were strong threads that wove the fabric of
our social communities. A deep suspicion of the other community was
balanced by an equally strong love for individual men and women.
Look for these common narrative strains and you will find them in all
writers who lived and thrived in little India.
Of Shivani’s portraits, two remain my favourites: ‘Mera Bhai’, her
loving tribute to her Muslim ‘brother’ Hamid Bhai, and ‘Ek Thi Ram-
rati’, a homage to her companion-maid, Ramrati. Short sketches they
may be and often forgotten as a part of her literary legacy, to me
they are moving accounts of how culturally liberal the Ganga-Jamuni
culture of Lucknow – and indeed most of the Gangetic plain once
was. Today, when we like to dismiss it as the cow belt, it may help to
understand how its rich social history was distorted by vested political
interests that manipulated its weaknesses.
However, many self-styled critics were so busy raising the bar high
that they forgot the earth they stood on. One by one, the magazines
that transported an outer world to readers trapped in small towns
were discontinued. Gradually, English was adopted as the language
of trend-setting academic discourse and the ‘real’ debates shifted from
cosy sahityik goshtis (literary soirees) in modest sitting rooms, where
young and aspiring writers read out their work to senior writers. The
new critical jousting spaces were now the seminar rooms of universi-
ties whose audiences had little interest in small towns and who viewed
mofussil India as a petri dish in which to develop complex theories in
meta-criticism. Such writers and critics wrote and spoke in coteries
taking care not to pollute their pristine modern world with the smelly
odours of spices that came from the kitchens of women writers who
wrote of ordinary middle-class longings and desires. It was the ‘Hum
Batlavain’ syndrome all over again.
What such scholars were unable to register were the deepening
social fault lines that would eventually separate little India from
urban, metropolitan India. These imperceptible shifts in the cultural
tectonic plates taking place all over North India were raising a gen-
eration that had aspirations beyond domesticity and a circumscribed
social world. This restlessness is what later developed into the clear
divide between Bharat and India, a phenomenon that has now become
an insurmountable chasm. The social unrest of the last decades – our
caste wars, our political and social activism, our unquiet educational
institutes or the widespread anger against the entitlement of hereditary

97
 I ra P ande

dynasts – all these were somewhere documented in the world that

made popular writing so appealing. Shivani’s fascination for the social
outcasts – orphans, lepers, whores, wandering sadhvis – these weren’t
just romantic tales of love and loss. They were the early precursors
of a social churning and a warning that women who were held back
because of social propriety would one day turn upon the very families
that had held them back.
Readers familiar with Shivani’s work will recall that her novels
invariably foregrounded strong female characters. In fact, it is note-
worthy that the men appear effete and listless in comparison to these
feisty female protagonists. Krishnakali (from the novel of the same
name), Ahalya (Chaudah Phere) and Shobha (Mayapuri) are the early
prototypes of women who defy families, clans and communities to
chart an independent life for themselves. Even more important were
the characters that society had cast to the margins: orphans (Shobha in
Mayapuri), lunatics (Pagaliya in Apradhini), whores (Rajula in Kariye
Chhima), the courtesan in a moving short story (Dhuan) or the col-
ourful Tope, who runs a hospice and regularly falls in love with her
patients.
Significantly, some of the most searing portraits of ordinary lives
and homes were being written then by other contemporary women
storytellers: Ismat Chughtai’s brilliant short story Lihaf (about lesbian-
ism, which was banned for its bold theme); her semi-autobiographical
work Tehri Lakir (the Crooked Line) had as its protagonist a Muslim
girl who defied her family’s code of purdah to study. There were, of
course, women writers who were grudgingly accorded respect for their
bold and fearless writing – writers such as Qurratulain Haider (Aag
ka Dariya) and Krishna Sobti (Mitro Marjani and Ai Ladki); but by
and large, most women writers were dismissed as popular romantic
novelists.
In the early 70s, Shivani wrote a serial for Dharmyug called Ja re
Ekaki, based on real-life encounters with lost souls. Later, these were
gathered into a fine collection known as Apradhini, mainly about
women prisoners she met in Lucknow’s jail thanks to a fan who was
posted there as a doctor. Fifty years ago, long before Arundhati Roy’s
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness presented a cast of broken lives,
Shivani dared to write about precisely those women whom society had
locked away because it did not know how to deal with their presence
in the new India that was being created to replace a colonial state.
When I translated Apradhini, I added some more of her writings
from other sources and gave it a subtitle, ‘Women without Men’. This

98
 H earts and homes

was to gather together the kind of writing that often nourished her fic-
tion. As she herself mentioned in the preface she wrote to Apradhini:

I saw, heard and experienced the pain of these characters in

an environment that is impossible to convey in words and
images. And what experiences they were! Among them was the
pathetic request of a Kumaoni girl, whose story absorbed me
so completely that I forgot where I was. For a brief moment,
both of us became oblivious of the hot loo that raged out-
side and were transported from the cell to a land where cool
breezes blew down mountainsides. It is one of the ironies of
life that we are unable to accept the truth unless we can see,
feel or hear it. And yet, whether we accept it or not, nothing
can ever change the truth. However, there is another kind of
truth: the sort that we accept simply because it is there. For a
brief moment, I was back with Chanuli in her village and it
was the hour when the cows come home – what we call god-
huli in Hindi. The prison, its walls and the searing afternoon
heat, all vanished before the truth of Chanuli’s story.3

In the same collection is an account of a small Kumaoni temple, dedi-

cated to a local deity, Gwaladevta, where thousands of appeals written
to the Gwaladevta flutter along the outer parikrama. Gwaladevta is
the last court of justice for people who have lost all hope and come
to beseech him, confident that he will give them the justice that the
laws of the state have denied them. This is a letter Shivani quotes from
there:

The third letter was the most amazing of all. It was written in
a childish, schoolgirl’s hand and on a page torn from a school
notebook. I stiffened as I read the opening line: ‘Gwaladev,
if there is any truth in your power, then make my daughter a
widow!’
What mother was this, I thought, to ask for such a boon?
Plead for her own daughter to be turned a widow?
But as I read her impassioned appeal, I felt this was a boon
that Gwaladevta would be forced to grant. Her only daughter,
the mother wrote, was like a tender flower but the monster
who had married her did not give her a day’s happiness. Along
with his mother, he had tortured her, burning her with live
coals. When she asked to go and visit her mother’s home, he

99
 I ra P ande

had burnt her tongue so that her mouth was a mess of sores.
Finally, he broke her legs. Her parents brought their half-dead
daughter home and maddened with grief, the mother came
with her appeal to the only true dispenser of justice she could
think of: Gwala Devta. ‘I brought her home yesterday,’ she
wrote and implored her Gwala Devta to do something. ‘I
want justice, Gwaladev, Let the bastard suffer the same fate
as my daughter. Don’t grant him an easy death, Gollu, let him
inch towards his end in misery. The day my daughter becomes
a widow, Gollu,’ she promised, ‘I’ll come and sacrifice a goat
at your doorstep. Rather than have a husband like hers, I wish
her widowhood my Lord!’
That childish scrawl contained the sorrow of countless
mothers in Kumaon. That such women should have to seek
justice at the court of Gwala Devta, rather than at a court of
law, I thought to myself, was enough for all of us to lower our
heads in shame.4

I find it strange that such a powerful cast of characters can be dis-

missed as romantic, escapist literature. Yet Shivani was not the only
writer of her generation who faced this resistance from literary pun-
dits. Writers who chose to write without a covert ideological agenda or
those whose characters were outside the stereotyped peasant or Dalit
lives that could be easily mined to evoke social guilt and pathos were
not considered important enough to be taught in university courses
or given any academic attention. However, as long as they had a huge
readership attached to the magazines that published popular fiction
and writing, they flourished.
The death blow came with the rise of the television and the seri-
als that the state-owned television, Doordarshan, beamed in its early
years. Manohar Shyam Joshi (who straddled both literary and popular
planes with consummate ease) was commissioned to create the enor-
mously popular serial Hum Log, which presented the lives of ordinary
middle-class families who lived in small towns or in the government
colonies of metropolitan India. These were heady years for Doordar-
shan, as cable television had not yet captured the market and the Min-
istry of Information and Broadcasting was run by civil servants with
a taste for educating India’s rising middle class with socially uplifting
messages and themes (such as family planning or the perils of alcohol-
ism and gambling). Reading was no longer the passion that it was even
a few years ago and more and more people turned to the television for
their daily fix of entertainment.

100
 H earts and homes

As advertising revenues dried up, small magazines began to fold

and up and, eventually, even the pioneers Dharmyug and Saptahik
Hindustan were closed down by their owners. English newspapers
and magazines became the new reading matter of the rising middle
class and rock star editors were paid huge salaries to add glamour
and glitz to weeklies and fortnightly magazines. Ironically, the disease
that killed off several venerable Hindi magazines also choked many
old literary English magazines (such as Encounter) while new gossip
magazines (Stardust, Cine Blitz, etc.) that gave dull lives a vicarious
peep into the hijinks of our film stars and high society became popular
reading matter. Eventually, they chased away the little players. Till
today, niche magazines that try to publish literary fiction or reports
that highlight the social and cultural problems of our times can find
few financial backers.
As the decades rolled on, the small towns of North India were
rapidly depleted of their thinkers, poets, writers and musicians. Old
havelis and mohallas crumbled as their owners left one by one, either
for the blue yonder or for the greener pastures of Bombay and Delhi.
Many writers changed their persona as they became scriptwriters for
films and television serials while poets were forced to write film lyr-
ics in order to survive. Universities, such as Allahabad and Lucknow,
which had once boasted of faculty members like Firaq Gorakhpuri and
Harivansh Rai Bachchan, became the citadels of gangsters and bred
the small town neta who would one day become a minister and spread
his brand of Munnabhai toporidom across the region. Eventually, the
Lucknowness of a Lucknow or the Allahabadi personality became
defined by Muslim socials, with titles such as Mere Huzoor and Mere
Mehboob, with imaginary cityscapes that were a cross between Shah
Jahan’s Red Fort and the Taj Mahal. Filmi historical romances and
nostalgia became our way of preserving an imagined culture that had
died a long, long time ago at the hands of the very people who now
extolled the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb and other such impossible dreams.
I left my native state almost forty years ago. Today when I visit Luc-
know or Allahabad, there is no landmark or person I can relate to.
Something terrible happened when we abandoned our natal homes
and towns. For some time, these waited for the exiles to return but
when that did not happen, they gave up and quietly died.
Hindi, Bhojpuri, Maithili, Purabiya, Bundelkhandi – to say nothing
of Urdu – were denied the space they needed to grow and flourish. As
‘babuspeak’ and ‘Akashvani Hindi’ replaced the native sweetness of
these tongues, they withdrew into the confines of homes and hearths.
The easy exchange of words and phrases that enriched our local

101
 I ra P ande

languages and fired the imagination and gave a sense of rootedness to

locations and characters became blurred and then vanished altogether.
Writers who wrote in the ‘domestic’ patois of middle-class homes
became unfashionable and were callously dubbed as mediocre. The
rupture that this has caused in the world of fiction is now unbridgeable
and with the passing away of a whole generation of women writers
who brought the life of North India into our lives, it has almost ceased
to exist.

Notes
1 Ira Pande, Diddi: My Mother’s Voice. Delhi: Penguin, 2006.
2 Vasudha Dalmia, Fiction as History: The Novel and the City in Modern
North India. Ranikhet: Orient Blackswan, 2017.
3 Shivani, Apradhini – Women Without Men. Trans. Ira Pande. Delhi: Harper
Collins, 2011.
4 Ibid.

102
 6
GENRE FICTION AND
AESTHETIC RELISH
Reading rasa in contemporary times

Anwesha Maity1

Readers and scholars today will readily concur that bhasha (Indian-
language2) genre fiction (encompassing, for the purposes this essay,
detective stories, horror/weird fiction, science fiction [henceforth SF]
and fantasy) is greatly indebted to colonial and postcolonial discourses
and more-or-less influenced by western models. Critical analysis of
Indian-language genres, while recognising the cultural peculiarities of
Indian contexts/settings and characters, has, with rare exceptions, also
utilised western models to analyse them. This essay takes a different
approach and employs rasa theory to investigate how genre is an inte-
gral part of Indian-language literature – not merely an offshoot of
western imitation/influence.
Rasa, variously translated as ‘juice, taste, emotion, pleasure,
essence’3 etc. – following Chari, I prefer ‘aesthetic relish’ – is the very
soul of poetry – the end-goal and aspiration of any literary text. In
this essay I have only considered precepts from the classical Sanskrit
tradition, mainly those forwarded by Bharata (early centuries CE)
and Abhinavagupta (c. 900 CE). Bharata’s Nāṭyaśāstra (Treatise on
Drama, 200 BCE–200 CE), which considers rasa as the core compo-
nent of theatrical performance, enumerates the characteristics of eight
rasas. By the 4th century CE, rasa was accepted as the guiding prin-
ciple of Sanskrit works also in meter and prose, leading, over nearly
two millennia, to a proliferation of the number of rasas and com-
mentaries and debates on its nature, location and processes whereby
it may be made manifest. While rasa theorisation in the Sanskrit tradi-
tion declined after the Bhakti movement, rasa principles continued to
inform courtly and folk poetry and performance, not to mention the

103
 A nwesha M aity

other arts like architecture and sculpture, up until the colonial era. In
the 19th century, print culture radically altered not only expectations
of spectatorship versus readership but also what was to be expected
from poetry/literature in the first place. In terms of content, the major
shift from primarily mythological stories to the travails of the com-
mon person in new literary forms like the novel and the short story
also meant that old literary parameters were no longer directly appli-
cable. Even though colonisation created a fracture in the overt modes
of colonial and postcolonial Indian-language storytelling, I argue that
the old emotive structures continue to shape literary expectations even
in contemporary examples.4
Rasa, configured in a formal and descriptive structure, allows for
not only an unambiguous identification of discrete emotive elements
in a text, but also an assessment of their greater or lesser impact within
a framework or the failure thereof. Moreover, in my reading, these
emotions are not primarily subjective, i.e. are not geared towards psy-
chological character analysis of inner thoughts of fictional characters.
Rather, Bharata’s Nāṭyaśāstra emphasises typological, even formu-
laic combinations of elements. Contemporary criticism has certainly
emphasised the relevance and wide applicability of the rasa theory and
explored rasa vis-à-vis western poetics/critical theories and literatures,
stressing that the rasas and permanent states (bhāvas) discussed by
Bharata may be applicable to the literary production of all human cul-
tures.5 Scholars like Patnaik, Hiryanna and Chari apply rasa principles
to examples from western literature, but Pollock in particular appears
to be unconvinced by this trend and studies like ‘Rasa in Shakespeare’.
Irrespective of which side of this debate one chooses to stand on, rasa,
as I demonstrate below, remains useful for analyses of contemporary
Indian genre fiction, perhaps much more than for highbrow, realistic
literary fiction.6
However, no attention has hitherto been paid to Indian genre fiction
vis-à-vis rasa theory (barring my own work on SF and rasa). This is
surprising, because genre fiction (at least in Bangla, with which I am
more familiar than the other languages) has invented categories like
‘adventure rasa’ and refers to ‘rasa’ and ‘rasika’ (i.e. ‘one who can
savour rasa’) as frequently or more often than highbrow, canonical or
mainstream fiction. Admittedly, this usage is casual; it is rarely critical
or referring back to the classical Sanskrit tradition itself. However, the
very retention of these old terms indicates a cognizance on part of both
authors and readers of a shared set of cultural-aesthetic values, setting
Indian-language genre apart from whatever processes of translation,
adaptation or ‘borrowing’ from western sources that also shape it.

104
 G enre fiction and aesthetic relish

In the first section of this essay, I argue that three core principles
of ‘how rasa works’ lend the theory a wide applicability beyond its
immediate context and make it a useful lens to read contemporary
genre, particularly detective stories, crime thrillers, horror/weird fic-
tion, SF and fantasy. In the second section, I explore Bharata’s formu-
lations on ‘what rasa is’ by outlining building blocks and combinatory
schemes. I argue that adbhuta (wonderful) rasa is typically central to
the emotive response of these genres, along with bhayānaka (terrify-
ing) and bībhatsa (disgusting). Thereafter, focusing on the specific use
of these rasas, I analyse contemporary genre fiction in Marathi, Bangla
and Odia to show, on the one hand, how old emotive formulations
and schema are retained in contemporary genre, and on the other, how
reading indigenous genre through an indigenous critical lens allows us
to effectively analyse context-specific variations.

How rasa works: three principles

The sahridaya7 audience/spectator

(and later pāthak /reader)
This is one of the central premises of the rasa experience and has
retained some critical weight over the millennia. From Bharata’s evo-
cation of the sumanā,8 one who has a pure/cultivated mind as the ideal
spectator, it is obvious that not all spectators are possessed of this pure
mind. Abhinavagupta links this older idea to the concept of sahridaya,
i.e. ‘possessed of the same heart’ thus: ‘The faculty of self-identification
with the events represented [the determinants, etc.] demands that the
mirror of the mind should be made completely clear, by means of
repeated acquaintance with and practice of poetry . . . ready to receive
all the images which are reflected’.9 The reference to the ‘clear mind-
mirror’ necessitates that the ideal spectator should possess the mental
fortitude to disassociate from his own current concerns or emotions,
even as the performance stimulates the latent and stable emotional
states/determinants innate in every person (sthāyi bhāvas), leading to
the rasa experience.
Thus, rasa experience does not only exist in the poet’s pratibhā
(genius) but is directly experienced by the sahridaya spectator through
the text, joining all three elements in a continuum.10 Being possessed
of sanskāra (all cognitive or emotional experience) and vasana (ten-
dencies of past lives), only a sahridaya can fully appreciate the vision
of the poet and the text. As such the sahridaya, often also called
the samājika, is simultaneously the ideal critic or bhāvaka who has

105
 A nwesha M aity

successfully contemplated the poet’s vision; if he fails to do so, he is

no more than a bhāvuka or unproductive thinker with no independent
judgment.11 Of course, context-specific and material considerations of
who could become a sahridaya remain largely unarticulated in terms
of gender, caste and class, defaulting to the upper-caste (and/or) upper-
class male in the classical tradition.
In contemporary texts, genre or otherwise, the term ‘sahridaya’,
retained from earlier usage, is usually combined with pāthak or reader,
often in an authorial or narratorial appeal of sympathy towards con-
troversial content. The term bhavuka, too, retains some of its old
meanings as characterising unproductive thinkers and daydreamers in
current usage. A related term drawn from later Bhakti terminology,
‘rasika’, or ‘one who can savour rasa’, also circulates in current usage,
with particular reference to persons who are capable of appreciating
wit or the comic rasa and in iterations like ‘rasika nāgara’, indicating
a proclivity towards the erotic or śṛṅgāra rasa with or without Bhakti
connotations.12

Sādhāranikarana
Variously translated as ‘generalisation’, ‘transpersonalisation’, ‘com-
munisation’ and ‘universalisation’, it is the process of the rasa experi-
ence. It is, for the sahridaya, ‘a self-identification with the imagined
situation, devoid of any practical interest and . . . of any relation what-
soever with the limited Self, and as it were impersonal’.13 Without this
generalising principle, a poetic treatment of the love between Shiva and
Parvati, for instance, could be embarrassing/offensive on account of
witnessing sexual escapades of revered gods, or generate indifference,
as it has nothing whatsoever to do with the spectator, or make him
jealous if he himself were sexually or romantically frustrated. None of
these vighnas or obstacles would lead to the rasa experience. Instead
the sahridaya must recognise the action/description to be subsumed
under a ‘poetic universal’, as applying to characters like Shiva and Par-
vati and providing grounds for communication and commonality on
the basis of universal human emotion, here love-in-union (sambhoga
śṛṅgāra) between a married couple. The sahridaya not only appre-
hends this universal human emotion but also reproduces or actualises
the emotion on his own, leading to the rasa experience, by transcend-
ing (temporarily) his own ego.14 Moreover, the contextual or temporal
distance from events depicted, along with a lack of any direct impact
of such events on our own lives, also aids this generalising process.15
Thus, sādhāranikarana can be interpreted as a two-way street – from

106
 G enre fiction and aesthetic relish

the particular to the universal and back to the particular, where the
first and second particular are not the same.16
Many of these observations hold theoretically true for contempo-
rary literature. Despite the great degree of individualisation of charac-
ter, reader-identification depends greatly on universal human emotions
as shared ground for communication. In any case, as Chari argues,
‘Generic attributes cannot be apprehended unless they are exhibited
in individuals’.17 For genre fiction specifically, much of the thrill arises
from reader-identification with characters only superficially like us (the
common man); their exceptional qualities, along with whatever pecu-
liarities of setting or circumstance, arouse a mixed feeling of simulta-
neously wanting to be and not be in that particular character’s shoes.
This is achieved by an evocative tone of narration; for instance, in a
crime novel, dry details of court proceedings are narrated in a way that
arouses responses of wonder, suspense, disgust, etc., even if it purports
to be ‘objective’ and ‘empirical’.18 Moreover, the frisson between the
general and the particular is another of the pleasures of many types of
genre fiction: We know that typically the detective will not suffer death
and the crime will be solved, but are thrilled to watch the mystery
unfold. Universalisation also implies that the readership/audience has
a certain level of familiarity with similar texts, the above-mentioned
‘repeated acquaintance with and practice of poetry’. For instance, in
SF, the existence of an ever-expanding body of tropes and ideas, the
‘megatext’, can be likened to this common ground as circumscribing a
‘horizon of expectations’, whereas the specific innovations of particu-
lar ‘novums’ exist in a dialectical tension with it.

Camatkāra
This concept, argued strongly by Abhinavagupta and resonating
with Advaita Shaiva philosophy, is the mode of the rasa experience;
all rasas are inherently pleasurable and arouse a feeling of marvelous
enjoyment (adbhutabhoga). Raghavan observes:

originally the word camatkara was an onomatopoeic word

referring to the clicking sound we make with our tongue when
we taste something snappy, and in the course of its semantic
enlargements . . . came to mean a sudden fillip relating to any
feeling of a pleasurable type.19

Since the rasa experience is transpersonalised, this sense of marvelous

enjoyment is also less of a subjective matter and more of a transcendent

107
 A nwesha M aity

and sublime delight shorn of personal ego.20 This is unlike either every-
day experience/ordinary sense of perception or the experience of the yogi,
implying the ‘cessation of the . . . ordinary, historical world . . . and its
sudden replacement by a new dimension of reality’ possible only through
the artwork.21 As such, the rasa experience is also supramundane or
alukika, and is at a similar but not an identical level to the experience of
the Absolute (Brahman) in yogic spiritual trance (nirvikalpa samādhi).22
The matter of all rasas functioning in this mode of pleasurable, mar-
velous enjoyment remains a debated topic; bībhatsa or the disgusting
rasa in particular has come under fire for proposing that ugly, blood-
ied, worm-infested, deformed or decomposing bodies could possibly
arouse any pleasurable sensation. However, the mere description of
unsightly/decomposing bodies is usually not the end-goal of such com-
position; rather, it emphasises recognition of a deeper universal truth,
the ephemerality of life. In Abhinavagupta’s view, this leads to a transi-
tory state of nirveda (detachment/ alienation/ world-weariness) and/or
karuṇa (compassion/pity) and finally to the controversial ninth rasa,
sānta or a relishing of peace that comes with cessation of all egoistic
desires. In his reading of the ‘Disgust and Ugly’ in contemporary texts,
Arindam Chakrabarty presents six modes thereof, and emphasises
the ‘absorption of the [“pure”] hideous for the sake of the sheer thrill
of sensing every fold of embodied existence’, a ‘Romantic sensibility’
which is also shared across genre fiction categories.23 While it would
be too simplistic to propose that genre fiction typically employs this
configuration and ends at sānta rasa, Subodh Jawadekar’s Marathi SF
short story ‘A Journey into Darkness’, discussed below, is somewhat
exceptional in that follows this configuration closely, indicating a reten-
tion/recognition of old structures of storytelling with new content.
These three linked theoretical concepts also allow for a broader
portability of rasa aesthetics beyond the Sanskrit tradition. Scholars
like Patnaik, Hiryanna and Chari apply rasa principles to examples
from western literature and poetry, but Pollock in particular appears
to be unconvinced by this trend and studies like ‘Rasa in Shakespeare’.
Irrespective of which side of this debate one chooses to stand on, these
key concepts, along with the formal schema below, are especially use-
ful for analyses of contemporary genre fiction, perhaps much more
than for highbrow, realistic literary fiction.

Building blocks and combinatory schemes

Bharata, in the sixth and seventh chapters of the Nāṭyaśāstra (Trea-
tise on Drama) asserts that rasa arises from a combination of bhāvas.

108
 G enre fiction and aesthetic relish

The eight rasas, namely erotic (śṛṅgāra), comic (hāsya), compas-

sionate/pathetic (karuṇa), furious (raudra), heroic (vīra), terrifying
(bhayānaka), disgusting (bībhatsa) and awesome/wonderful (adbhuta)
are paired with their sthāyi bhāvas, the latent and stable emotional
states innate in every person, enduring ‘in everyday life for an extended
period, ranging from days to decades’.24 Insofar as the rasa experi-
ence is concerned, the sthāyi bhāvas are accompanied by 33 transitory
states (vyabhicāri or sancāri bhāvas) and eight involuntary psychoso-
matic states (sattvika bhāvas).25 Included in the category of bhāva are
also vivbhāvas and anubhāvas, which are descriptive of causes and
results/responses, respectively, with some overlaps between them for
particular rasas. However, without a fine-tuning of the sthāyi bhāvas’
potential within the processes/modes discussed above, there would be
no rasa or aesthetic response.
The erotic (śṛṅgāra), comic (hāsya), heroic (vīra) and wonder-
ful (adbhuta) are concordant rasas, while the remaining four – the
compassionate/pathetic (karuṇa), the furious (raudra), the terrifying
(bhayānaka), and the disgusting (bībhatsa) – are discordant rasas. Fur-
ther, a text can have a combination of rasas, but that does not produce
a new compound or a ‘cocktail of emotions’;26 the stronger element
(angi rasa) always asserts itself and the text in totality has a single
dominant rasa.27 Rasas are also friendly or inimical to each other; for
instance, with rare exceptions in Sanskrit poetry, śṛṅgāra and karuṇa
are inimical, while śṛṅgāra and hāsya are friendly rasas. When com-
bined without respect to propriety, the discordant rasas usually over-
power the concordant. In the later Sanskrit tradition, we find lists of
proper/desirable rasa combinations as poetry became increasingly for-
mulaic28 and form was privileged over content.29
Genre in general utilises the positive associations of adbhuta rasa
(wonderful/ awesome) as the dominant/enduring rasa in combina-
tion primarily with vīra, bhayānaka, bībhatsa and sometimes hāsya.
Within the Sanskrit tradition, adbhuta was largely neglected as a
primary rasa, perhaps because an overuse of the element of surprise
was likely to alienate the audience and make the composition overtly
unrealistic/non-verisimilar, which Abhinavagupta warned stridently
against as a major dosa or impediment to the relishing of rasa.30 From
Visvanatha’s 14th-century Sāhityadarpana, we find mention of his
grandfather Narayana’s work on adbhuta rasa synthesis; i.e. that the
end-result of all rasas is adbhuta. Unfortunately, that work is now lost
and Visvanatha has only three lines about it.31 Beyond these, the few
elaborations on the topic in the classical tradition are limited to its
camatkāra aspect.

109
 A nwesha M aity

Bharata lists the vibhāvas or causes of adbhuta rasa as ‘seeing heav-

enly beings, gaining one’s desired object, going to a temple, a garden
or a meeting place, or (seeing) a flying chariot, a magic show (maya)
or a juggler’s show (indrajāl)’.32 This description does not distinguish
between divine prowess, magic or science, but from a contemporary
standpoint can be interpreted as encompassing both material (in SF
or detective fiction) and supernatural (fantasy, weird/horror) causes;
for instance, ‘going to a temple, a garden or a meeting place’ is easily
spotted in romance/erotic fiction with its predominant rasa as śṛṅgāra;
‘gaining one’s desired object’ in the solving of whodunits or treasure-
hunts; or the spirit of ‘heavenly beings’ in aliens and ‘flying chariots’
in spaceships. This allows us also to draw connections between these
genres and analyse how even small changes in combinatory schemas
of the same vibhāvas and vyabhicāri bhāvas can radically alter the
dominant emotive valences of the text.33
Adbhuta was usually found in a subordinate relationship to vīra
or the heroic rasa, where ‘[t]he result of the heroic (rasa) is known as
the awesome’.34 This particular relationship between vīra and adb-
huta is readily discerned today in serialised SF with scientist-heroes,
who arouse wonder through their inventions and discoveries, or
serialised detectives who arouse wonder by solving complicated
mysteries and crimes. Bhayānaka and bībhatsa were similarly under-
explored in traditional compositions but have arguably become the
most explored rasas in modern literature, especially in thrillers and
horror/weird fiction.35 These two rasas are also paired: ‘the sight
of the disgusting (gives rise to) the terrifying’.36 In the examples37
below, I focus on specific analyses of their treatment in contempo-
rary genre.

Marathi SF: ‘A Journey into Darkness’

Subodh Jawadekar’s short story ‘A Journey into Darkness’ (It Hap-
pened Tomorrow, 1993) is rather atypical of SF in that its governing
rasa is not adbhuta, largely as its dominant novum remains unarticu-
lated, relying on the reader to piece together scattered references to
‘Russia, America, war’, ‘bombs’, ‘dust haze’, ‘poisoned stream’, ‘cold
outside’ etc.38 Further, none of the common tropes associated with
the SF megatext, like technological innovations, futuristic/alternate
storyworlds or extraterrestrial entities appear here. It is also atypical
in narrative style, presented as a series of undelivered, one-sided cor-
respondence from a young girl, Sanjyot, to her friend/classmate. While
the epistolary style and embedding letters within longer narratives was

110
 G enre fiction and aesthetic relish

common practice in early SF like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, such

instances are relatively rare in SF today.
The story opens with descriptions of a lush forest and sprawling
colonial bungalow in the Andaman Islands, where Sanjyot and her
parents have gone for a ‘holiday’ – evoking the positive associations
of adbhuta rasa in the child’s wonder at an unfamiliar/exotic place
and the opportunity to interact with strangers; here, a Bengali family
(Kittu and his parents) cohabiting with them. The appearance of nor-
malcy is underscored by the transitory state of smrti or remembrance/
nostalgia in such mundane matters as enquiring about school sched-
ules and examination ranks.
However, normalcy soon shatters when the radio stops broadcast-
ing and they must relocate to the basement, drink stinking water from
a well and subsist on a diet of curry and rice, shifting to another transi-
tory state, dainya (misery, wretchedness). In the midst of this, Sanjyot’s
mother informs her that she is pregnant, introducing two additional
transitory states, cintā (worry) for the future and śaṅkā (apprehen-
sion) towards having a mentally disabled sibling. The stage is now set
for bhayānaka and bībhatsa, in vivid descriptions of what the reader
can only deduce is radiation poisoning – Kittu’s fever, rashes, stomach-
ache, vomiting, bleeding and death, Sanjyot’s brother’s stillborn,
deformed corpse and the Bengali lady’s hysterical suffering and death.
Karuṇa rasa is then evoked in the fragmented grasp of the situation
from the child’s perspective, in pleas like ‘Nobody talks to me . . . I
feel terribly lonely’ or ‘Can you send me a telegram? If it is a telegram,
the postman has to come even in the thick of the night to deliver it’.39
Finally, Sanjyot sneaks out of the basement into the (implied) nuclear
winter and falls terminally ill. The transitory state of nirveda is then
introduced by her confession that she knew what was happening all
along and the dissociation from the recurring motif of the stinking
well water: ‘So there is no getting away from [it], at least for a year.
Of course, in my case it does not really matter either way’.40 While she
holds out tenuous hope for the future of humankind, the realisation
of her impending death finally brings the story to sānta rasa, here a
peaceful acceptance of that fate: ‘I’m not at all scared of death. Com-
ing to join you up there’.41
This story closely parallels ‘traditional’ emotive schemas/expecta-
tions in the configuration of supportive transitory states (vyabhicāri
bhāvas) and rasas discussed earlier; it also illustrates how discordant
rasas like bhayānaka, bībhatsa and karuṇa upend the positive associa-
tions of adbhuta with which the text opens. Even Sturgeon’s definition
of SF favoured by the editor of this collection, ‘a story . . . with a

111
 A nwesha M aity

human problem and a human solution which would not have hap-
pened at all without its scientific content’,42 falls short as there is little
‘human solution’ in sight for these characters, not to mention that the
plot is equally plausible in non-SF settings like civil war or genocide.
SF survival stories typically favour adventurous hero-narratives; the
formulaic plot of characters being picked off one-by-one is much more
frequent in horror genres like zombie films. Even dystopic SF usu-
ally privileges human courage and fortitude over suffering, propelled
forward by vīra and adbhuta rasa and their supportive transitory
states like autsukya (enthusiasm) and dhṛti (confidence). Moreover,
nuclear war as an SF trope has become so familiar that it belongs
more squarely within the megatext than as an independent innova-
tion or novum. Overall, ‘A Journey into Darkness’ remains at its core
a depiction of human suffering, aimed at ‘the sheer thrill of sensing
every fold of embodied existence’43 and challenging genre boundaries
in the process.

Bangla weird/horror: ‘Khagam’

Satyajit Ray’s much anthologised short story ‘Khagam’44 (Sandesh,
1968), in its emotive valences privileges adbhuta and bhayānaka to
evoke a ‘marvelous flavour of sinister understatement . . . buttressed
with prosaic detail’.45 The story opens with the first-person unnamed
narrator having just completed dinner with a companion at a small
forest bungalow, and being encouraged by the cook/caretaker to visit
a migrant miracle-man, Imli-baba, who keeps a ferocious snake as
his pet and feeds it milk every evening. The narrator’s companion, a
chance acquaintance, is then introduced as Dhurjotibabu, a widely-
travelled and well-read gentleman with a virulent ‘scientific mindset’
and noticeable peculiarities like green eyes and a hatred for snakes.
Dhurjotibabu, on hearing about Imli-baba, proceeds to decimate
widely-circulating superstitions and stories of irrational miracles per-
formed by godmen. However, curiosity having gotten the better of
them, the very next evening they visit Imli-baba. Imli-baba appears to
be like any other sadhu-baba but something in his eyes makes the nar-
rator curious and uncomfortable. He informs them that his pet snake
Balkishen is ill and would not come to drink milk that day. Numerous
popular narratives/superstitions of the ‘milk-drinking snake’ inform
the framing of the story; that snakes do not drink milk is a credited
scientific fact, but it goes unmentioned even by Dhurjotibabu (and
likely functions as an estranging reference to western readers). This
juxtaposition between the mundane details of a weekend trip and the

112
 G enre fiction and aesthetic relish

points of surprise surrounding the mysterious Imli-baba structures the

first third of the story; here, adbhuta rasa becomes prominent in con-
trast with realistic detail.
Bhayānaka is then gradually introduced with its classic vibhāvas
or causes like ‘hearing ghastly noises’ and ‘going to a forest’ when
Dhurjotibabu insists on visiting the snake’s hole. In a show of perverse
violence and cruelty, he throws clods of earth to annoy the snake,
making it emerge, and crushes its skull with a stone. The description in
this section moves between bhayānaka and bībhatsa, following closely
Bharata’s paired formulation in the venomous kaal-keute (common
krait) snake’s hiss and divided tongue, its annoyed but non-ferocious
behaviour and later its crushed, bloody skull and extraordinarily long
body, along with the many long snake-skins hanging in Imli-baba’s
hovel. In quick succession, a classic vibhāva of adbhuta rasa is sug-
gested in the trope of the ‘curse’.46 On viewing Balkishen’s murder,
Imli-baba raises his arm and points his index finger at Dhurjotibabu,
reminding the narrator of ‘[a] figure in a painting by Ravi Varma . . .
It was the sage Durbasha cursing the hapless Shakuntala’.47 The words
he speaks are however of malevolent understatement: ‘One Balkishen
is gone; another will come to take his place. Balkishen is deathless’.48
Soon after returning from the snake’s hole, Dhurjotibabu starts
exhibiting strange symptoms like losing his appetite, enquiring about
the mythological sage Khagam,49 asking for milk and speaking with a
hissing lisp. Diamond-shaped rashes blister his skin, his tongue shows a
red line right down the middle and his body feels cold to the (narrator’s)
touch, before he crawls under the bed. These details again foreground
bhayānaka, this time in an anticipatory irrational fear, so that the narra-
tor refuses to open his door when Dhurjotibabu knocks a second time.
The next morning, Dhurjotibabu has disappeared and a neighbour’s
dog has been killed by a poisonous bite. Thereafter, the story shifts
again from bhayānaka to adbhuta with the intermediation of mundane
detail. The narrator visits Imli-baba again to enquire and is pointed to a

freshly sloughed-off skin marked all over with a pattern of

diamonds . . . A snake was never that broad, and a snake
didn’t have arms and legs sticking out of its body. It was actu-
ally the sloughed-off skin of a man.50

The tone of weird strangeness continues to the last lines, with Imli-
baba calling out: ‘Balkishen . . . Balkishen . . . Balkishen. . . ’.51
While within traditional schema, bhayānaka would trump over adb-
huta, the movement here is reversed as the narrator, with whom the

113
 A nwesha M aity

reader identifies, remains at a physical and emotional distance from

the events surrounding Dhurjotibabu, and after the latter’s disappear-
ance, is no longer in fear for his own life or safety. Moreover, the
circumstances being an explicit rendering of poetic justice, adbhuta
is privileged in the dominant reading,52 where the metamorphosis of
the man to the snake is fit punishment for his cruelty and hatred. This
transformation/metamorphosis also intersects with the classical cat-
egory of ‘supernatural events’ as a primary cause of adbhuta rasa and
is enacted by a familiar agent for Indian readers, the sadhu or sage.53
Sages with miraculous powers, including powers to curse and bring
misfortune on those who dare displease them, are dime-a-dozen in San-
skrit poetry and drama. In contemporary narratives, too, the sadhu-
baba or tantrik, literary descendant of the sages of old, are often seen
practicing esoteric knowledges54 beyond the comprehension of every-
day/common man protagonists. Insofar as the opposition with science
is concerned, in colonial and postcolonial mainstream/realist fiction,
the stereotypical figure of the sadhu or tantrik is usually exposed to be
fraudulent and preying on gullible believers by scientific-minded men,
and Dhurjotibabu is clearly depicted in that mould. The western sci-
entific mindset is here pitted against esoteric, indigenous knowledges,
not so much to demonstrate the superiority of one over the other, but
to encourage the reader to keep an open mind to the wonders of the
world, as science has yet to discover them all. This ‘message’ is also
found in Ray’s SF, like the Professor Shonku series, and forms the bed-
rock of a childlike sense of wonder or adbhuta found also in his films
like The Apu Trilogy.55

Odia detective: Rokto Golap o Rongin Sura

Kanduri Charan Das’s detective novel, Rokto Golap o Rongin Sura
(Blood Rose and Coloured Wine, 1973), a tale of appropriated inher-
itance, moral downfall and murder, is likely to be familiar to Indian
readers in both sentiment and plot.56 A wealthy landowner, Madan
Roy, is murdered in his home, Uday Mahal, just before the famed ‘crim-
inologist’ Satyabrata Mahapatra can come to his rescue. Satyabrata
then proceeds to unravel the mystery through chance encounters and
random clues. His investigation reveals that Satyasekhar Mahapatra,
a friend, had appointed Madan Ray custodian of the Uday Mahal
estate, along with his wife, the paralysed Damayanti and his children
Malina and Manohar. Madan Ray however appropriated the will and
the estate, drove away Manohar and coerced Malina into alcohol and

114
 G enre fiction and aesthetic relish

sex addiction from a young age so that she grew prone to fits of mad-
ness and suffered from memory loss.
While Malina’s ‘degradation’ was a well-kept secret outside the
household, greater secrets were yet to be revealed, when another
opportunist, Alokesh Pattanaik, is also murdered. Satyabrata then
manages to capture Manohar fleeing with his father’s original will,
which conferred the estate to him and his sister on coming of age,
and incorrectly identifies him as the murderer. Just as he’s about to
be arrested, Damayanti Devi (literally) steps up and confesses, while
Satyabrata is dumbfounded. Damayanti explains that her paralysis
was cured miraculously but she pretended otherwise to exact revenge
for her daughter’s downfall, first on Madan Ray and then on Alokesh,
for attempting to manipulate Malina to hand over the estate to him.
The novel ends with the evocative image of Malina, supine in a stupor,
searching for another bottle of alcohol to quench her unquenchable
thirst.
Interestingly, bhayānaka rasa, specifically in its invocation of fear-
some, supernatural forces recurs in the text to heighten suspense. The
novel opens with the sound of a horse’s hooves shattering the silent
night and iterations of this sound imagery recur in both the (third-
person) narration as well as the characters’ dialogues. Suspenseful in
itself, the sound signifies also that a mysterious someone or something
regularly visits Uday Mahal. According to Mastaram, an all-errands-
man at a local hotel, the rider is none other than a ‘soytan’ (devil),
the ‘bhoot’ (ghost) of the long-dead king Uday Singh, prowling the
night.57 Amir Ali, the coachman of the horse-drawn cart, also agrees
that an ungodly creature knocks at his door in the middle of the night
after tethering the horses to the cart.58 Descriptions in these two sec-
tions, both in the causes and the responses as experienced by Masta-
ram and Amir Ali, closely parallel Bharata’s descriptions of bhayānaka
rasa, especially in its sense of anticipatory fear; for instance, whenever
Mastaram hears that sound, he shuts his doors and hides under the
covers (as expected from adham or base characters by classical San-
skrit standards). Even though the rational exposition of supernatural
events is often an integral part of mystery-solving, the usual scien-
tific explanation is lacking. Satyabrata merely apprehends the fleeing
‘ghost’ (Manohar) without dispelling any superstitions or even dis-
coursing about it with the police or the fearful local population.
Overall, the many surprises in the central storyline, contrasting
with prosaic, mundane details of the lifestyle of the wealthy but dys-
functional family, foreground adbhuta rasa as the dominant emotive

115
 A nwesha M aity

response in this novel. For instance, the narrative evokes suspense

through generic tropes like the sound of footsteps, distant screams in
a woman’s voice or fleeing shadows disappearing around corners.59
Moreover, the literary device of ‘paralysis cured miraculously’ as the
turning point of the mystery makes for a weak denouement by generic
standards, as it depends on a mysterious ‘something’ beyond scientific
reasoning or deduction. The introduction of a medical miracle, how-
ever, aligns quite well with classical formulations of adbhuta rasa as
produced by unexpected but wonderful events. With the major revela-
tions occurring in the last pages, one is reminded also of Bharata’s
description that a story should be like a cow’s tail, bushy and full of
surprises at the end.60

Conclusion
The preceding analysis of these disparate examples from three differ-
ent genres has, I hope, illustrated the usefulness of rasa in reading
contemporary instances of non-mainstream/‘lowbrow’ bhasha fic-
tion. Not only does rasa help identify the core emotive responses of
these texts, but it also provides an analytical framework wherein their
greater or lesser impact can be assessed. Identifying adbhuta as the
dominant rasa in genres like detective stories, horror/weird fiction, SF
and fantasy facilitates comparisons and family resemblances between
them, helping us examine also other emotive states like bhayānaka and
bībhatsa that accentuate or dampen the aesthetic response of wonder.
In each of these texts, adbhuta is channeled differently, resulting in
a different trajectory for the overall text; but it is this specific sense
of wonder that keeps the reader engaged while also demarcating a
(fuzzy) ‘horizon of expectations’ which circumscribes particular gen-
res. Adbhuta rasa, in its specific sense of ‘surprise’, is however, bound
to become lackluster on overuse, so the inclusion of other supportive
or conflicting rasas helps the text retain repeated readability. In ‘A
Journey into Darkness’, we see how the ‘negative’/‘discordant’ rasas
overpower the ‘positive’/‘concordant’ valances of adbhuta, reflecting
a reliance on classical Sanskrit emotive schema, while simultaneously
challenging SF generic stereotypes and signalling new ways of read-
ing dystopic fiction in particular. We also see how even small changes
in combinatory elements (vibhāvas and anubhāvas specifically) can
drastically alter the overall thrust of the text and its broad generic
grouping: the supernatural, for instance, is evoked, channelled and
explained/resolved differently in ‘Khagam’ and Rakta Golap, by small
alterations in the combinatory schemas of adbhuta and bhayānaka.

116
 G enre fiction and aesthetic relish

While genre can be prescriptive and formulaic, individual instances

succeed, in my reading, precisely because they are able to affect small
changes within expected combinatory schemas, so that while the des-
tination may be known, the journey becomes all the more engaging.

Notes
1 I am deeply indebted to Ms. Susmita Rao Rath for translating Kan-
duri Charan Das’s previously untranslated detective novel from Odia to
Bangla. I also wish to thank Professor Mary Layoun and Professor Vinay
Dharwadker for their thoughtful comments.
2 By ‘Indian language,’ I refer to bhasha (‘language’ from Sanskrit) as a
term for the indigenous languages of the Indian subcontinent and I prefer
it over the terms ‘regional’ or ‘vernacular’ languages. The term was coined
by GN Devy in After Amnesia (1992) and popularised by translation-
focused publishers like Katha India.
3 G. Prasad, I.A. Richards and the Theory of Rasa. New Delhi: Sarup and
Sons, 1994, p. 2.
4 The choice of rasa theory as a lens through which to read genre might
appear to be regressive and feeding into the Hindu-Hindi cultural domina-
tion and pandering of ‘Vedic science’ so prevalent in our current historical
moment. My intention could not be more different. Even a cursory glance
at the philosophical traditions of ancient India shows a distinct separation
between the religious and the literary, not to mention other schools like
Nyaya or Mimansa as ‘objective “methodologies” of knowledge, univer-
sal, and so secular’ (Gerow, ‘The Persistence of Classical Aesthetic Cat-
egories,’ p. 214). For instance, Abhinavagupta’s theorisations draw from
Advaita Shaiva philosophy as well as Tantra, but that did not necessitate
that aesthetics become a religious matter.
5 Contemporary rasa scholarship in English has taken mainly three
approaches: standalone evaluations/translations (Sheldon Pollock, Mas-
son and Patwardhan, Ranerio Gnoli, Patankar, WS Yalimbe); compari-
sons with western theories of poetry, psychology, religion, etc. (S.K. Dey,
V.K. Chari, V. Dharwadker, M. Voss-Roberts); and applications of rasa
theory to western ‘highbrow’ literature (Priyadarshi Patnaik, Arindam
Chakrabarty). The application of rasa aesthetics to contemporary ‘high-
brow’ Indian literature is rarer; Chakrabarty, Edwin Gerow and Darius
Cooper’s studies were the few available.
6 Some notable similarities between the old Sanskrit genres, which the rasa
theory analysed, and contemporary genre fiction may be brought to bear
here, the full exposition of which is regrettably beyond the scope of this
essay. First and most striking of these is the use of mythology. Except for a
few dramatic categories like prahasana (farce/satire) or dima (heroic plays
with an element of deceit), most classical Sanskrit literature used mytho-
logical sources and retold tales of godly, aristocratic and/or priestly heroes.
In contemporary Indian SF in particular, mythology is reconfigured vis-à-
vis science for the modern age, and I would point the interested reader
to Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay’s ‘On the Mythologerm’ and ‘Kalpavigyan
and Imperial Technoscience’ for a more complete view. Secondly, a great

117
 A nwesha M aity

deal of both classical Sanskrit literature and genre is formulaic on the

levels of plot and character, and functions within a more-or-less circum-
scribed ‘horizon of expectations,’ which may be radically different from
western conceptions of the same. Gerow and Cooper’s analyses elaborate
that view. And finally, the question of realistic verisimilitude, the lack of
which impedes rasa, is perhaps a retained aesthetic rationale behind why
Indian SF and fantasy are still largely set in verisimilar, not alternative
universes, though there are more immediate historical reasons for this
configuration. Two lesser points need also be mentioned on the question
of retention of old aesthetic values; the ‘education through entrainment’
axiom and an eschewal of excessive descriptions of gore and/or sex found
in Nāṭyaśāstra, Abhinavabhārati, Dhyanvaloka and Locana.
7 Some notes on pronunciation: a as in u in cut-short and only necessary
for pronouncing the final consonant, Rama= Ram; ā as in father; c always
soft as in church. For complete list, see www.theosociety.org/pasadena/
sk-pron/skpro_01.pdf. Accessed on 29 August 2017.
8 J.L. Masson and M.V. Patwardhan. Aesthetic Rapture: The Rasādhyāya
of the Nāṭyaśāstra. Poona: Deccan College Postgraduate and Research
Institute, 1970, p. 47: ‘(It is called rasa) because it can be savoured . . . as
gourmets (sumanas) are able to savour the flavour of food prepared with
many spices . . . so sensitive spectators (sumanas) savour the primary emo-
tions suggested by the acting out of the various bhāvas’. I have referred to
the original Sanskrit text and two other translations for the Nāṭyaśāstra,
but use Masson and Patwardhan’s translation here.
9 R. Gnoli, The Aesthetic Experience According to Abhinavagupta. Second
edition. Chowkhamba Sanskrit Studies 62. Varanasi: Chowkhamba San-
skrit Series Office, 1968, pp. xliii–iv. Insert in the original.
10 Priyadarshi Patnaik, Rasa in Aesthetics: An Application of Rasa Theory to
Modern Western Literature. New Delhi: D.K. Printworld, 1997, p. 46.
11 Prasad, I.A. Richards, p. 143.
12 Sheldon Pollock, A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2016, p. 22.
13 Gnoli, The Aesthetic Experience, p. xxii.
14 Pollock, A Rasa Reader, p. 18.
15 V.K. Chari, Sanskrit Criticism. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1990,
p. 200.
16 R.B. Patankar, ‘Does the ‘Rasa’ Theory Have Any Modern Relevance?,’
Philosophy East and West, vol. 30, no. 3, 1980, pp. 293–303, 294.
17 Chari, Sanskrit Criticism, p. 201.
18 Ibid., p. 200.
19 Venkataraman Raghavan, Studies on Some Concepts of the Alaṃkāra
Śāstra. Adyar, Madras: Adyar Library and Research Centre, 1973.
pp. 268–269.
20 Patnaik, Rasa in Aesthetics, pp. 42–43.
21 Gnoli, The Aesthetic Experience, p. xlvi.
22 Patnaik, Rasa in Aesthetics, p. 52.
23 Arindam Chakrabarti, ‘Disgust and the Ugly in Indian Aesthetics,’ La
pluralità estetica : lasciti e irradiazioni oltre il Novecento. Torino: Trau-
ben, 2001, pp. 347–363, 361. Insert mine.

118
 G enre fiction and aesthetic relish

24 V. Dharwadker, ‘Emotion in Motion: The Nāṭyaśāstra, Darwin, and

Affect Theory,’ PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association
of America, vol. 130, no. 5, 2015, pp. 1381–1404, 1384.
25 For complete translated list see Dharwadker, ‘Emotion in Motion,’
pp. 1398–1399.
26 Chari, Sanskrit Criticism, p. 68.
27 Prasad, I.A. Richards, p. 262.
28 For lists of combinations, see Prasad, I.A. Richards, pp. 255–257.
29 A. Dutta, ed., Encyclopaedia of Indian Literature, 2:1109. Googlebooks.
Accessed 13 August 2017.
30 Gnoli, The Aesthetic Experience, p. 63.
31 A.V. Subramanian, The Aesthetics of Wonder: New Findings in Sanskrit
Alaṅkāraśāstra. Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass, 1988, p. 3; Raghavan, The
Number of Rasa-s, p. 205.
32 Masson and Patwardhan, Aesthetic Rapture, p. 56.
33 See A. Maity, ‘Estrangement, History, and Aesthetic Relish’ for a more
detailed discussion on vira, adbhuta and bhayānaka rasas in SF. See Dhar-
wadker’s ‘Emotion in Motion’ for a more detailed discussion on ‘combina-
tory schemes.’
34 Masson and Patwardhan, Aesthetic Rapture, p. 56.
35 Patnaik, Rasa in Aesthetics, p. 175.
36 Masson and Patwardhan, Aesthetic Rapture, p. 48. Insert in the original.
37 The dismal state of bhasha translation, especially of ‘lowbrow’ genres like
those considered here, remains a challenge for readers and critics alike.
My selection has therefore been severely limited by a lack of translations
to Bangla, English or Hindi.
38 Subodh Jawadekar, ‘A Journey into Darkness’ in It Happened Tomorrow,
ed. Bal Phondke. New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1993. pp. 53–63. This
collection of translated bhasha SF does not provide bibliographical infor-
mation on the Marathi original.
39 Jawadekar, ‘A Journey,’ pp. 59, 61.
40 Ibid., p. 63. Insert mine.
41 Ibid., p. 63.
42 Phondke, It Happened Tomorrow, p. xi.
43 A. Chakrabarti, ‘Disgust and the Ugly,’ p. 361.
44 S. Ray, Stories. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1987, pp. 1–16.
45 A. Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye. Berkeley: California University
Press, 1989, p. 303.
46 Subramanian, The Aesthetics of Wonder, pp. 10–11.
47 Ray, Stories, p. 7.
48 Ibid., p. 8.
49 The name of the story comes from this mythological sage, who cursed and
transformed his friend into a non-poisonous snake. The narrator remem-
bers this detail later in the story.
50 Ray, Stories, p. 16.
51 Ibid., p. 16.
52 However, another, less fantastic chain of events is hinted at in the curi-
ous incident of the dog in the night-time – the narrator never learns of
Dhurjotibabu’s profession or intentions and the two foreigners who had

119
 A nwesha M aity

arrived late and left early, and to whom the dog belonged, may well have
had a hand in Dhurjotibabu’s disappearance. The skin rashes could well
have been allergies as first suspected, the sloughed-off skins misidentified
as human by the anxious narrator and so on.
53 Subramanian, The Aesthetics of Wonder, pp. 8–9.
54 Maya, the still pervasive philosophical concept that all sensory experience
is but an illusion, far from being synonymous with western magic, actu-
ally undercuts it as an esoteric power to modify the world at will. Bharata
and Abhinavagupta’s formulations of adbhuta rasa mention indrajāl (the
performance of magic tricks) and maya, i.e. things only appear to become/
behave like something else, but their essence remains unmodified, if not
in this life, then in the interlinked chain of worldly creation and cycles of
reincarnation. For a book-length study on ‘Hindu magic,’ see Goudriaan,
Māyā Divine and Human.
55 D. Cooper, The Cinema of Satyajit Ray: Between Tradition and Moder-
nity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 15–75, 24–26.
56 For similar storylines in colonial-era detective fiction, see F. Orsini, ‘Detec-
tive Novels: A Commercial Genre in Nineteenth Century North India,’
in India’s Literary History: Essays on the Nineteenth Century, ed. Stuart
Blackburn and Vasudha Dalmia. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004, pp. 435–
482, 476.
57 K. C. Das, Rokto Golap o Rongin Sura in Kanduri Charan Das Roman-
cha Panch [Five mystery novels of Kanduri Charan Das]. Second edition.
Cuttack: Kahani publications, 2014, pp. 133–224, 137–138. While the
Odia and Bangla scripts are quite different, spoken Bangla and Odia are
mutually comprehensible to a great degree and some Bangla ‘dialects’ in
the southern regions (such as in my native home Medinipur) use many
Odia words and pronunciation patterns. As such, I was able to listen to
the Odia text and appreciate the literary nuances of the original.
58 Das, Rokto Golap, p. 159.
59 Das, Rokto Golap, pp. 196, 216.
60 Ragahvan, The Number of Rasas, p. 203.

120
 7
COMMUNITY FICTION
Mamang Dai’s The Legends of Pensam
and Temsula Ao’s These Hills Called
Home: Stories from a War Zone

Jeetumoni Basumatary

Recent years have seen a growing interest, especially among scholars

and academicians from the North-East of India (residing within the
region and outside it), in literatures from the region. Apart from work-
shops, seminars and conferences organised by various institutes in
Delhi and other parts of India, North-East India itself has seen a grow-
ing discourse on the region in its various universities and colleges.1
While writers from the region, like Robin S. Ngangom, Desmond
Kharmawphlang, Mamang Dai, Temsula Ao and Indira Goswami (in
English translation) have been made part of the English literature cur-
riculum in certain universities outside the region from time to time;
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, set up a North-East India
Studies Programme in 2006. Within the region, Gauhati University,
Assam, set up the Gauhati University Institute of North-East India
Studies in 2010, while the English Department of Cotton University,
Assam, has been offering a paper on North-East Indian literature for
the past few years.
With such growth of interest in the region and its literatures, one
can safely say that ‘North-East Literature’ or ‘Literatures from North-
East India’ has come to be widely accepted and studied in India as a
separate genre in itself. However, just as the diversity of the region
defies the term ‘North-East India’ as a colonial construct, the above
terms used for literatures of the region defy any uniform definition
that could be used to describe the ‘genre’. Many writers like Temsula
Ao, Harekrishna Deka, Mitra Phukan and others have expressed their
reservations about the term, as it tends to homogenise an extremely

121
 J eetumoni B asumatary

heterogeneous cluster of people and their writings under one umbrella.

The diverse people from the region have diverse histories and herit-
ages and each writer writes from his or her own unique world.2 For
lack of any other term, ‘Literatures from North-East India’ has been
used to define the works of writers belonging to the eight states that
are together called North-East India. If ‘Literatures from North-East
India’ has to be defined as a genre, it would refer to writings from
the region, especially in the English language, which mainly highlight
major concerns of the region such as insurgency, the perceived or oth-
erwise distance from the centre or ‘mainland India’3 and the resultant
general sense of alienation and isolation, the various and diverse cul-
tures and traditions as well as folklore of the region and concern for
their erosion,4 and the scenic landscape of the region.
Much of the major writings from the region that are categorised as
‘Literatures from the North-East’ are recent, and as mentioned earlier,
in the English language. This is not to say that there has been no liter-
ary work produced in the region before this, or about the concerns
mentioned above. Literatures in Assamese, Meitei (from Manipur)
and Bengali (from Tripura) as well as works in Khasi and Bodo lan-
guages have a long history. English poetry had begun to be written in
the North-East by the 1970s and ’80s. But then, the poets writing in
English, namely Desmond Kharmawphlang, Robin S. Ngangom and
Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih were recognised as the ‘Shillong poets’
primarily because they were all based in Shillong, the capital town of
Meghalaya. Incidentally, despite writing in English, these early poets
from the North-East have often been excluded from anthologies of
Indian English poetry such as Reasons for Belonging (2002) edited by
Ranjit Hoskote and 60 Indian Poets (2008) edited by Jeet Thayil or
earlier anthologies such as A.K. Mehrotra’s The Oxford India Anthol-
ogy of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (1992).5 Sumanyu Satpathy has
pointed out this neglect in his ‘Locating Cultures: A Semi-Academic
Essay on the English Poetry of the North-East’6 and says that the rea-
son is because ‘it is not poetry but ethnic strife which comes readily to
the mind of a ‘mainstream’ Indian whenever the North-East is men-
tioned’. Prasanta Das dwells on this exclusion elaborately in his essay,
‘Waiting to Be Taken Onboard: The Poetry of Robin Ngangom, Des-
mond Kharmawphlang, and Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih’7 and attrib-
utes it to the political and ‘regional’ nature of their works. According
to Ananya S. Guha, ‘These poets brought a veritable revolution in the
world of Indo-English poetry by breaking away from the mainstream
tradition of city-based cultures and urbanised images which marked
poets from Mumbai, or Calcutta’ (‘The Shillong Poets and the Poetry

122
 C ommunity fiction

Society’).8 It comes as no surprise that the three Shillong poets were

first championed by Jayanta Mahapatra, a poet who loved to be recog-
nised as an Oriya poet first before being called an Indian English poet.9
In their ‘Editor’s Note’ in Anthology of Contemporary Poetry from
the Northeast,10 Ngangom and Nongkynrih have highlighted the dif-
ference between North-East Indian English poets and the poets from
the rest of India by saying,

The writer from the Northeast differs from his counterpart in

the mainland in a significant way. While it may not make him
a better writer, living with the menace of the gun, he cannot
merely indulge in verbal wizardry and woolly aesthetics but
perforce master the art of witness.11

Much of the recent literature from the region (poetry and prose),
despite catering to a wider and varied range of audience, are rather
regional in character, and as some would like to call it, ‘ethnic’. It
may be apt to point out that, it is probably and precisely because of
the access to a wider and more diverse audience that the recent lit-
eratures in English from the North-East, are ‘ethnic’ and regional in
character so as to provide a glimpse into the world, which, according
to the general opinion of the people of North-East India, is highly
under-represented.
Unlike their counterparts from the rest of India, many of the North-
Eastern writers in English do not write about the modern individual
of the urban landscape dealing with the individual’s crises of iden-
tity, space or his struggles with his surroundings. Instead, they write
from the spaces of the folk and the community where the characters
are deeply rooted, or rather enmeshed, in their societies and their ups
and downs. The worlds that we see in most English writings from
the North-East are tribal worlds rooted in their traditional culture.12
Mamang Dai’s The Legends of Pensam13 and Temsula Ao’s These Hills
Called Home: Stories from a War Zone14 are two examples of works
written from such spaces.
In The Legends of Pensam, Mamang Dai portrays a world ‘where
the life of a man can be measured in the span of a song’. Her ‘novel’,
as she likes to call it, is a series of folk stories and the history of the Adi
people of Arunachal Pradesh,15 linked into one narrative through the
life of Hoxo, who had arrived in the community from the world out-
side and grew up to be an important member of the community. While
Mamang Dai’s work provides a window to the rich folk culture of the
Adis, Temsula Ao’s These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone

123
 J eetumoni B asumatary

is more an act of ‘bearing witness’ and finding newer methods and

language to narrate the story of the new Nagaland shaped by years
of political turmoil.16 In her epigraph to These Hills Called Home, Ao
aptly dedicates the work to ‘those who know/ what we have done/ To
ourselves’. Hers is a collection of short stories exploring questions of
ethnicity and identity, concerning ordinary men and women and their
lives shaped by politics. This paper will look at the way the above-
mentioned works use folklore, history and the politics of everyday
reality in order to write a narrative of their respective communities.
Analysing the manner in which communities and their lived lives are
presented in these stories, this essay attempts to enquire the possibility
of using the term ‘community fiction’ for works like The Legends of
Pensam and These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone by
Mamang Dai and Temsula Ao respectively. This is not to homogenise
the two disparate works under one general category, but an attempt to
see how the two, their differences notwithstanding, narrate the stories
of their communities through their folklore, as well as through bearing
witness to the consequences of the political upheavals of the region in
the language of ordinary men and women.
Much of the literary discourse of the North-East revolves around
the political issues of insurgency, counter-insurgency, marginalisation
and alienation from the centre, thus, creating a kind of a stereotype
around the genre and making the term ‘Literatures from the North-
East’ almost synonymous with ‘insurgency literature’ or ‘literature of
violence’. While it is important for the writers of the region to high-
light the above issues, and for the audience to understand the North-
East in the light of its political turmoil, it is also pertinent to look
at what lies beyond the political turmoil, struggle and the sense of
alienation. One cannot forget the fact that the North-East is a region
rich in folk culture and tradition, whose vibrancy only highlights the
fact that there lies an entirely different world amidst, or beyond the
popularly represented picture of the region. With the growing literary
discourse on the North-East region, it is high time to look at some of
the literary works of the region in a new light, by shifting the focus
from the highly political and conflict-ridden content to the day-to-
day lived realities of the characters where life, rooted in the folk and
traditional cultures, persists. Of course, political conflict and folk cul-
ture in the North-East are not exclusive of each other, and works like
Mamang Dai’s The Legends of Pensam, Aruni Kashyap’s A House
With a Thousand Stories17 and Janice Pariat’s Boats on Land18 very
well highlight this fact by interweaving the two elements in beautiful
narratives. However, it may be possible to move away from enquiries

124
 C ommunity fiction

that verge on the stereotypically political, towards the dynamics of

community life and folk culture and look at some of the works as sto-
ries or narratives about the communities concerned and therefore use
the term ‘community fiction’ to describe them.
The term ‘community fiction’ is related to the term ‘narrative of
community’ used by Sandra Zagarell in her essay titled ‘Narrative of
Community: The Identification of a Genre’,19 where she identifies a
category of story sequences or short story collections written mostly
by women, but not entirely women-centred, and which belongs to
a tradition focussing on society or community more than the self.20
Zagarell defines narrative of community as ‘a coherent response to the
social, economic, cultural and demographic changes caused by indus-
trialism, urbanisation, and the spread of capitalism’,21 and which is
often inspired by ‘women’s culture’ of negotiations between different
relations and spaces. Apart from the above-mentioned characteristics
of narrative of community, community fiction also has the special
quality of constantly moving in and out of myths, legends and other
cultural folkloristic idiom that define a community.
Both The Legends of Pensam and These Hills Called Home are
short story sequences that record the respective authors’ responses to
the social, cultural and political changes taking place around them.
It must be pointed out right in the beginning, that, while this essay
attempts to identify the two above-mentioned texts as community fic-
tions, it does not exclude the possibility of these texts being catego-
rised as, for example, ethnographic or folkloristic writing (in the case
of The Legends), or political literature (in the case of These Hills).
Mamang Dai’s collection of stories The Legends of Pensam are linked
by the story of Hoxo, who is introduced to the readers in the first
story as ‘the boy who fell from the sky’,22 and keeps appearing in
the stories (which are actually episodes and not separate and discon-
nected stories) that follow till the last story ‘On Stage’ where, an old
Hoxo waves his arm and asks the unnamed narrator to look at the
beauty of the landscape that they call home. The stories or episodes
in The Legends unravel several traditional beliefs and folklore, evok-
ing the history and memory of the Adi community of Arunachal
Pradesh, while using the lyrical softness of an Adi rhapsodist singing
his song. In These Hills Called Home, it is the political history of post-
independent Nagaland that links the individual stories into one great
narrative of the people. Despite their individual nature, the stories
appear to be episodic like the ones in The Legends, because, together,
they represent the post-independent life of the Naga people. The nar-
rative voice in the stories of These Hills may be attributed to one

125
 J eetumoni B asumatary

unnamed narrator who takes on the task of bearing witness and nar-
rating to the world about ‘what we have done/ To ourselves’. While
Mamang Dai unravels age-old Adi traditions and folklore in her text,
Temsula Ao attempts to create new narratives with the repertoire
available to her in the new Nagaland. Yet, the two texts are similar in
being deeply rooted in the local and domestic lives of their respective
communities.
The folklore of a community is a storehouse of ancient and tradi-
tional wisdom, knowledge, beliefs and customs, and therefore provides
one with a sense of rootedness. These stories remain in the collective
memory of the community and are passed down from one generation
to another to ensure that a connection and continuity is maintained
with the past and social unity and cohesion is preserved. The Legends
of Pensam, as told by the author to Ananya Guha in an interview, is
based on stories she had heard from various people during her jour-
neys to her ancestral village. Speaking about her aim in writing the
text, Dai says that, ‘At the back of my mind I wanted to write about
life in the bowl of the hills and record all its hidden histories, the beau-
tiful landscape and way of life, even if only for myself’.23
The unnamed narrator in The Legends is both, an insider and an
outsider, carefully mediating between her positions of a participant
and an observer. The ‘Prologue’ tell us that the narrator is returning
to her village after a period of absence and as the helicopter carrying
her flies over the hills, streams and deep ravines she is filled with child-
hood memories of the home she had left. In the stories that follow,
we see the narrator’s attempt to feel at home in her land, with all the
knowledge and wisdom of her community, as she observes the people
and their lives unfolding in front of her through stories, memories or
her interactions with them. However, when her friend Mona ‘of Arab-
Greek extraction’ and a ‘proprietor of a glossy magazine, Diary of the
World’, comes visiting, the narrator is transformed into an active par-
ticipant of her community as she unravels her world to her observer
friend.24
The world of The Legends of Pensam is one of myths, rituals, leg-
ends and beliefs central to the Adi way of life, and serves as a docu-
ment of the rich oral tradition of the community. The lives portrayed
in the stories have a timeless and eternal characteristic in which the
politics of modernity and change are but momentary intrusions. Life
moves on, no matter who comes and goes, and stories of men and
women intertwined with the magical and fantastic are passed on from
one generation to another for, as the epigraph to the first part of the
book says, ‘We have long journeys in our blood’.25 Dai speaks about

126
 C ommunity fiction

the ‘spirit of the place’ that had ‘this quality of absorbing visitors
into a forgotten newness of things’.26 Despite the sense of timeless-
ness, Mamang Dai does highlight the changes brought to her region
by time. The narrator speaks about how the place gave one ‘a feeling
of how things might have been, and a sudden revelation of why it was
not so anymore’.27 It was not so anymore, because of the changes that
came to the region. The author is quick to point out those changes,
both old and new, brought by the colonisers, white priests as well as
people from the rest of the country after Indian Independence. The
arrivals and departures of these outsiders are not to be found in any
recorded or written history, but in the stories of the community as
part of its collective memory expressed through narratives and songs.
The section titled ‘Songs of the Rhapsodist’, which includes stories
like ‘Travel the Road’,28 ‘The Heart of the Insect’ and others, highlight
the method of storytelling among many traditional societies. Among
the Adis, the rhapsodist is the shaman who leads a group of dancers
known as the ponung. In the above-mentioned section, the ponung
dancers and the rhapsodist together, bring alive ‘myth and memory’
for the benefit of the narrator’s friends Mona and Jules, both observers
as well as outsiders.29
The Legends of Pensam follows the lives of the Adis in the Duyang
village from the early days of settlement to the post-Independence era,
from the days of giant serpents and spirits to concrete buildings, pucca
roads and English medium schools run by the missionaries. Such a
text that narrates the changes coming into a region, contrary to claims
by certain commentators who believe that The Legends is purely a
folkloristic account of the Adi community, cannot of course be free of
politics. The politics in Dai’s story are the politics of negotiation, of
how the younger generation is constantly trying to negotiate between
two different worlds, as they feel attracted towards the new and the
modern life of city lights, sound of traffic and television sets, while
being unable to sever their ties with their traditions and age-old prac-
tices that define their identity and belongingness.
Unlike Mamang Dai’s Arunachal Pradesh, in Temsula Ao’s world,
there is no rhapsodist to sing about the memories of the community.
In a place like Nagaland, given its history of political turmoil and
violence, it is not enough to recall ancient lore in order to feel the
kind of rootedness to one’s soil seen in Mamang Dai’s narrator. The
long struggle with powerful outside forces and for political independ-
ence, the ensuing conflict, the resultant permanent scars on land and
man has probably rendered the ancient lore of Naga tribal warfare
and glory redundant. It is pertinent that one must weave the act of

127
 J eetumoni B asumatary

bearing witness into the community’s narrative or folklore. Probably,

it is with this aim that Temsula Ao follows the narratives of the new
categories of people and class rising out of the ashes of the secessionist
movements. The protagonists of her narratives in These Hills Called
Home are not the legendary ancient head hunters and valiant tribal
heroes. Rather, they are the young men who are drawn into the jun-
gle with dreams of freedom, the informers and middlemen catering
to the requirements of both the Indian Army and the underground
militant groups, the contractors supplying rations to the Indian Army
and sometimes the underground rebels, and the new breed of lead-
ers and politicians. Her stories are about old men who carry a heavy
burden in their hearts, pregnant with memories of atrocities faced and
committed by them. They are also about old women hearing in the air
on certain nights the last songs sung by girls as they were raped and
burnt alive by agencies of the state and sometimes by militants of a
rival faction. They wish they could tell folktales of ancient tribal glory
to their grandsons sitting by the family hearth. But they cannot, for
there seems to be a great disconnect between the era before the begin-
ning of the Naga movement30 and the era after it. This disconnect with
the traditional Naga way of life can be, in fact, traced even beyond
the beginning of the movement, to the advent of the British colonisers
and Christianity. The introduction of Christianity, followed by English
education among the Naga tribes brought about tremendous changes
in the Naga way of life and belief systems, resulting in a drastic shift in
the socio-cultural system. The very nature of Naga folklore had been
altered much before the beginning of the movement that gave rise to
new ways of life and altered narratives. If the Naga men and women of
the new circumstances have to pass down the memory of the commu-
nity and traditional wisdom to their progeny, it will have to be stories
of ambushes; burnt down villages; of young girls and women raped,
mutilated and murdered; of men being maimed for life or killed; and
of atrocities of the state as well as the underground revolutionaries.
Set in the initial turbulent decades of the Naga insurgency, the sto-
ries in Temsula Ao’s These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War
Zone are inextricably fraught with the historicity of the Naga sepa-
ratist question and the strategies of domination used by the state to
suppress the uprising. Yet, despite the political crisis being the back-
drop of the stories, what Ao attempts to capture is the voices and lives
of the ordinary Naga men and women who are trapped and tossed
around by the forces of the state and the Naga insurgency groups. As
Ao shows us, no one in the Naga Hills, no matter how ordinary an
individual is, is left untouched by the conflict. In ‘The Curfew Man’,

128
 C ommunity fiction

Ao describes how ordinary men are caught between the state and the
insurgent outfits. While the state looks at the insurgents as rebels fight-
ing against the legitimate state, the insurgents look at the state agencies
as illegal occupants of the region. ‘Young people spoke of the exploits
of their peers in encounters with government forces and were eager
to join the new band of patriotic warriors to liberate their homeland
from “foreign rule” ’.31 Satemba is caught between these two forces
as he is torn between his enforced duty of a spy for the state and his
love for his Naga brothers who were fighting for the cause of freedom:
‘The real trouble was in his heart. For the first time in two and half
years, he was beginning to question himself and his so-called “job” ’.32
Satemba couldn’t sustain his ‘job’. One night, on his way to the Sub
Divisional Officer’s (S.D.O.) house with a piece of crucial informa-
tion, he is accosted by a masked man in the dark who warns him, ‘Go
back home curfew man, and if you value your life, never again carry
tales’.33 Satemba reaches home in the early hours of the morning, his
other good knee smashed and the crucial information not given to the
S.D.O. His wife Jemtila nurses his wound, but feels extremely light-
hearted now that Satemba will be of no use to the officer and won’t
be betraying his Naga brethren anymore. But the narrator is quick to
observe that ‘A new curfew man would be in place by evening and
the man with two smashed knee-caps had already become history’.34
However, not everyone in the Naga Hills is seen torn between the two
forces of state and militants like Satemba. While a man like Satemba
had a troubled conscience because of what he is forced to do, there
were yet others like Nungsang, the protagonist of ‘A New Chapter’,
who managed to adapt and change his skin according to the demands
of the times. The story alludes to the first assembly election held in
Nagaland in the 1960s.The much-coveted assembly election did not
just imply that Nagaland was to be an integral part of India, but more
significantly, it brought Naga identity into the mainstream political
scenario of the country. The narrator says,

It was the mid-sixties in Nagaland and an uneasy surface calm

prevailed. People were beginning to take stock of what had so
suddenly overturned their quiet lives and changed every sin-
gle man or woman in the land forever. Slowly and painfully
Nagas were beginning to look at themselves through new
prisms, some self-created and some thrust upon them. Those
who survived learnt to adapt to the new trends and new life
styles. Old loyalties became suspect as new players emerged
and forged makeshift alliances in unfamiliar political spaces.35

129
 J eetumoni B asumatary

Nungsang, out to forge a new identity for himself in the changed

socio-political space, moves from becoming a contractor supplying
food and other items for the army to a local member of the legislative
assembly. While successfully forging a new identity for himself, Nung-
sang forgets his cousin Merenla, who had begun to cultivate pumpkins
after entering into an agreement with him. After his victory in the
election, Nungsang had no use for the pumpkins, and Merenla did not
know what to do with the large produce of pumpkins rotting away
in her fields and house. She goes through an identity crisis, as her fel-
low villagers had begun to call her ‘Pumpkin Merenla’, replacing her
old identity with a new one. This new identity had also shown her a
promise of prosperity by entering into the pumpkin business. But ‘far
greater than the financial loss was the ‘loss of face’ suffered by the
widow in her community because of her cousin’s heartlessness and it
was this which hurt her the most’.36 In order to regain her lost identity,
she would have to go through a ceremony of cleansing by throwing
away all the pumpkins in her house, which is symbolic of discarding
the new identity that had been imposed upon her.
Merenla’s or Nungsang’s identity crises are not the only kind seen
in These Hills. In the story ‘Soaba’, Ao presents to her readers another
kind of crisis stemming from the state’s grouping system.37

The word grouping had a much more sinister implication;

it meant that whole villages would be dislodged from their
ancestral sites and herded into new ones, making it more con-
venient for the security forces to guard them day and night.38

The result of such dislocation is the birth of people like Soaba who
wander around the town, homeless and with no memory of where he
belonged. The townspeople called him Soaba, meaning ‘idiot’ and he
acclimatised himself to that identity, the only one available to him in
his state of dislocation. As the likes of Soaba begin to put on the iden-
tity made available to them by the state, ‘a new vocabulary also began
to creep into everyday language of the people. Words like ‘convoy’,
‘grouping’, ‘curfew’ and ‘situation’ began to acquire sinister dimen-
sions as a result of the conflict taking place between the government
and underground armies’.39 In such a world of redefined discourses,
new vocabulary with sinister implications creeping into everyday lan-
guage and acclimatised identities, it is imperative that new narratives
are born, albeit in the told form of storytelling.
In The Legends, we see a strong negotiation going on between spaces,
of the kind which Elaine Showalter identifies as part of ‘women’s

130
 C ommunity fiction

culture’.40 This kind of negotiation between spaces can be seen in the

structure of The Legends of Pensam, which is styled as a collection
of short stories but called a novel by the author, and therefore, lying
in a place between the two genres. Apart from its genre there are sev-
eral aspects within the book that show negotiations between spheres,
and lie in such an ‘in-between place’. This is only apt; for the word
‘pensam’ in Adi language means an ‘in-between place’, suggesting the
middle ground. The text not only highlights the liminal space that
the narrator occupies vis-à-vis her community, but also the entire
community that is caught in the transitional phase between progress
and underdevelopment, between modernity and a traditional way of
life, between the timeless continuity of tradition and a new uncertain
future of modernity and progress. Tilottoma Misra, in her introduc-
tion to The Oxford Anthology of Writings from the North-East India:
Poetry and Essays, says Mamang Dai’s The Legends of Pensam

represents the predicaments of the sensitive young minds in

contemporary Arunachal Pradesh, who too are at crossroads
and find it difficult to come to terms with the inevitable break
with the enchantment of the past and to re-model their lives
according to the demands of the changing times.41

In the story titled ‘The Words of Women’, the narrator reveals her
uneasy relation with her village and its ways when she lived there for
a while after her mother’s death. As she participates in the day-to-day
ordinary and routine chores of the Adi women of her village, she feels
a certain sense of disconnect resulting from her years of absence. She
‘chafed under the weight of daily routine. I decided it was a mistake
to cling on to my past in a village I had outgrown years ago. I decided
I should be practical; I should leave’.42 But standing on the threshold
of her ancestral village, desirous of leaving it for the outside world,
she also feels the pull from within; for, she soon qualifies, that ‘the pull
of old stones would not ease’.43 It is probably her concern about the
dilemma of being caught in the crossroads of two worlds that makes
the narrator say about Nenem, the girl who fell in love with Captain
David Ferguson, in the chapter titled ‘River Woman’, that after know-
ing Ferguson, Nenem goes through an incredible desire for change.
‘It threw her into a panic and she questioned herself desperately . . .
Why the longing to change everything, from the way she lived to the
words she spoke to the thoughts that bound her?’44 She was ready to
cross the threshold of her home and walk out into the open world
where women like Arsi (from the ‘The Words of Women’) would like

131
 J eetumoni B asumatary

to be born in the next birth, and where she would have the liberty to
‘sing, fly’, ‘live properly’ and ‘speak English’.45 Nenem was courageous
enough to speak to a miglun (a foreigner), fall in love with him, and
give herself up to him. The desire for change in her was so strong that
she could easily have gone away with her lover. But when the time
came, like the pull felt by the narrator, Nenem too might have felt the
pull of her old life, her village and her community. She remained in
her village, married a man from her community, and lived with the
memory of the man she had given herself up to.
With India’s independence came newer developments to the region.
The Duyang cluster of villages that appeared ‘mysterious and remote’
to the world till the coming of the road began to experience incidents
like the theft of grain and precious beads and jewellery, that had never
happened in living memory of the community. ‘The village had moved
to its own quiet rhythm for centuries, with old certainties and beliefs,
but the road was changing all that’.46 ‘The Road’ narrates the story of
development and construction of a road, running through the moun-
tains like a ‘red gash’ which had no use for the locals. They hardly
took the road. But ‘progress’ was given to them nevertheless. Dai hints
at how the road and its construction brought outsiders to the region
and unheard-of incidents took place. ‘After the theft in the granary
buildings, it was evident to Isaam that her fears were not unfounded.
The road was bad news’.47 With the arrival of the road and promise of
electricity, doubt and disgruntlement creep in among the young men
of the community. They see their elders ‘fading’ away ‘sipping rice
beer and wasting away’.48 ‘They had surrendered ancestral lands to the
government and now the road and the things that came with it seemed
to be strangling them and threatening to steal their identity like a thief
creeping into their villages and fields’.49 While the elders waited for
progress and development,

a stubborn pride wrapped around the young men like a dark

cloak that kept them screened from the rest of the world.
They did not welcome strangers. They did not want to join
hands with the government . . . We are not seekers of a new
identity. Leave us alone.50

These are the thoughts of the Adi youth like Larik in ‘The Road’,
who are filled with suspicion and doubt about the Indian state’s
development projects in the region,51 while at the same time hoping
for positive changes. This is the space from which Dai is writing her
community’s narrative. It is a middle ground between adaptation and

132
 C ommunity fiction

rejection, of forgetting and remembering, of desire for newness and

love for the ancient. Trapped in this liminal space or ‘pensam’, the Adi
people in Dai’s narrative move one step ahead and two steps back-
ward, living their lives amidst the impenetrable mountains.
There seems to be no such middle space for the Nagas who inhabit
These Hills Called Home. From a precolonial existence of head-
hunting and tribal warfare, the Nagas are hurled first into the world
of Christianity and ‘civilisation’ and a second time into a world where
they are forced to deal with questions of identity, ethnicity and lib-
erty, as well as the resultant conflict and its aftermath. For the Nagas,
India’s independence in 1947 meant a shift from being reluctant colo-
nial subjects of the British to reluctant postcolonial Indian subjects.
Temsula Ao highlights this predicament of the Nagas in one of her
poems titled ‘Blood of Others’ by talking about the ‘advent of the
WORD’ when ‘strange intruders/Began scripting a new history’ in
the minds of the Nagas. Towards the concluding stanzas, she refers to
the ‘new breed of cultural heroes’ who ‘(a)rticulate a different dis-
course/And re-designate new enemies’. The poem ends with:

In the agony of the re-birth

Our hills and valleys reverberate
With death-dealing shrieks of unfamiliar arms
As the throw-back generation resurrects
‘Blood of Others’52

These Hills Called Home is about this very resurrection of the

‘throw-back generation’ and the outcome of their conflict with the
‘new enemy’. Just as the youth in Dai’s narrative are reluctant to be
a part of the development project of the Indian state, similarly, the
Naga youth were reluctant to be part of the new postcolonial India.
The outcome is an incredibly long battle of armed rebellion against
the Indian state. This rebellion is, unlike the perception of govern-
ment machinery, not led by a few westernised Christian Nagas, but
is ‘drawn from the traditional village councils’.53 This is a battle that
has carved out the peculiar trajectory of Naga nationalism, touching
each and every Naga life and changing the very hills that the Nagas
call home.
Community fiction then is built around the modes and procedures
by which a community survives, and in doing so, moves seamlessly
in and out of folkloristic idiom and repertoire. Both Mamang Dai
and Temsula Ao tend to look into the interdependence and survival
of their respective communities amidst a turbulent and capricious

133
 J eetumoni B asumatary

environment. While Mamang Dai weaves in history and contempo-

rary narratives of modernity, identity crisis and disgruntlement in her
collection of Adi folktales narrated in the traditional mode, Temsula
Ao adopts the traditional mode of storytelling to illustrate the new
narratives rising out of modern conflicts and dilemmas. By adopting
various modes of oral narrative to talk about the contemporary, both
Dai and Ao ‘re-interpret’ ‘the ‘pastness’ of tradition . . . in a sym-
biosis with the present in contemporary terms to create an altogether
new ‘literature’ rich with indigenous flavour’.54 Both The Legends of
Pensam and These Hills Called Home focus on the day-to-day nego-
tiations of individuals firmly rooted in their communities. Both the
works represent coherent responses to a changing social and cultural
landscape that intercede between individual stories and the history of
a community ‘to create spaces of ethnic solidarity, communal belong-
ing, and individual freedom’.55 By virtue of the presence of the idea of
a shared history and the details of community life presented through
folklore, myths, legends and folksongs as well as a new idiom for new
folklore, both The Legends of Pensam and These Hills Called Home
may, in a sense, be read as community fictions.

Notes
1 Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, has had a few pro-
grammes on the North-East of India and its literature. The workshop on
‘Writing India’s North East: The Poetics and Politics of Representation’
(30 September 2013) and the conference on ‘Figurations of India’s North-
east: Cultures, Histories, Worldviews’ (19–20 February 2015) are two
examples.
2 However, in the introduction to Dancing Earth (Robin S. Ngangom and
Kynpham S. Nongkynrih, ‘Dancing Earth: An Anthology of Poetry from
North-East India. India: Penguin Books, 2009), Ngangom points out that
despite the ‘confusion of tribes and sub-tribes, cultures and languages, the
literatures of the region are not as tangled as may be imagined’. Except
from the Assamese, the Manipuris and Bengalis of Tripura, Ngangom says
that the literary history of most other communities in the North-East is
‘fairly new’, owing their origin to the advent of the Christian missionar-
ies. Ngangom says, ‘Given this background (of Christian missionary influ-
ence), it was only natural that the majority of the tribes would take to the
same kind of literature and influence’ (p. x).
3 The term ‘mainland’ India is often used by the Shillong poets Robin S.
Ngangom and Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih to refer to the rest of that India
beyond the North-East. In the ‘Editor’s Note’ to Anthology of Contem-
porary Poetry from the North-East (Shillong: NEHU Publications, 2003),
Ngangom says, ‘The writer from the Northeast differs from his counter-
part in the mainland in a significant way’.

134
 C ommunity fiction

4 In her essay ‘Identity and Globalization: A Naga Perspective’ (Indian Folk-

lore, Serial No. 22, July 2006), Temsula Ao highlights her concerns about
the erosion of traditional cultures in the North-East by saying, ‘The cul-
tures of North-East India are already facing tremendous challenges from
education and modernization. In the evolution of such cultures and the
identities that they embody, the loss of distinctive identity markers does
not bode well for the tribes of the region’ (p. 7).
5 Ranjit Hoskote, ed., Reasons for Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary
Indian Poets. New Delhi: Viking, 2002; Jeet Thayil, ed. 60 Indian Poets.
London: Penguin, 2008; A.K. Mehrotra, ed., The Oxford India Anthol-
ogy of Twelve Modern Indian Poets. New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1992.
6 Sumanyu Satpathy, ‘Locating Cultures: A Semi-Academic Essay on the
English Poetry of the North-East.’ Muse India. www. museindia.com.
Accessed September 2016.
7 Prasanta Das, ‘Waiting to Be Taken On Board: The Poetry of Robin
Ngangom, Desmond Kharmawphlang, and Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih.’
Academia. www.academia.edu/2467910/WAITING_TO_BE_TAKEN_
ONBOARD_THE_POETRY_OF_ROBIN_NGANGOM_DESMOND_
KHARMAWPLANG_AND_KYNPHAM_SING_NONGKYNRIH.
Accessed September 2016.
8 Ananya S. Guha, ‘The Shillong Poets and The Poetry Society,’ E-Pao.
www.e-pao.net. Accessed June 2017.
9 In his interview with Sumanyu Satpathy, Mahapatra says, ‘I’m comfort-
able with English so I began writing in English. I didn’t write with a west-
ern audience in mind or to make a name for myself. I wrote because it was
easy for me to write in English. But I still consider myself to be an Oriya
poet’ (Panja 26). The interview was published in the Shormishtha Panja
edited book Many Indians Many Literatures: New Critical Essays (1999)
as Large Words, a Small Silence. (Sumanyu, Satpathy, Large Words, a
Small Silence. New Delhi: Worldview, 1999.
10 Ngangom and Nongkynrih, ‘Editor’s Note,’ p. ix.
11 Ibid., pp. ix–x.
12 ‘Within the tribe a Naga’s identity is deeply rooted in the village of his birth
and residence. Being a citizen of a particular village is the most important
aspect of a Naga’s existence because this identity is marked within a speci-
fied ethnic and linguistic space. The identity affiliated to a village draws
attention to clan affinity, possession of ancestral and other properties in
the form of land holdings, and underlines one’s responsibility to the com-
munity in the form of participating in community rituals, celebrations,
and in the governance of the village polity. A Naga who is banished from
his ancestral village for political, social or criminal offenses is like a person
without a country’. What Ao says about the Naga’s identity in her essay
‘Identity and Globalization: A Naga Perspective’ (Indian Folklife. Sl. No.
22 [July 2006]: 6–7) is true of most other tribes of the North-East.
13 Mamang Dai, The Legends of Pensam. New Delhi: Penguin, 2006.
14 Temsula Ao, These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone. New
Delhi: Zubaan, 2006.
15 Arunachal Pradesh is one of the states in the North-East of India con-
sisting of 26 major tribes and more than a hundred sub tribes. The Adi

135
 J eetumoni B asumatary

community is a conglomeration of various sub-groups of the Tani peo-

ple living in the districts of East Siang, Upper Siang, West Siang, Lower
Dibang Valley and Lohit Namsai within Arunachal Pradesh. They live in
hill villages governed by a selected chief called the Gaon Bura, following
the Donyi-Polo religion and speaking the Adi language.
16 Nagaland’s political history can be traced to the 19th century, when the
then British government organised the hills occupied by various Naga
tribes as Naga Hills District of Assam. After initial protests and resistance
from the Nagas, the British found their place in the hills. In 1918, a few
British officers and Naga men formed the Naga Club in order to main-
tain unity among the diverse ethnic groups of the district. The Naga peo-
ples’ desire for self-determination and autonomy was expressed as early
as 1929, when the Naga Club submitted a memorandum to the Simon
Commission stating the same. By 1946, the Naga Club was replaced by
the Naga National Council that reiterated the Naga peoples’ desire for
self-determination and autonomy after the departure of the British. When
India gained independence in 1947, the Naga National Council under
Angami Zapu Phizo adopted a secessionist outlook and campaigned for a
sovereign Naga state. When, even after numerous dialogues and delibera-
tions with New Delhi, the demand for autonomy went unheard, a plebi-
scite was held on 16 May 1951, whose result, it was declared, was that
99.9 percent of the Nagas wanted independence from India. Since then,
Nagaland (which gained statehood in 1963) has seen years of insurgency
and counter-insurgency, factional conflicts of the Naga insurgents, vio-
lence and protests as well as diplomatic and peace talks.
17 Aruni Kashyap, A House with a Thousand Stories. London: Penguin,
2013. The story is set in a traditional Assamese village with insurgency
and counter-insurgency as the backdrop. Though the violence of insur-
gency is absent, fear of the insurgents and the state agencies is poignantly
and beautifully intertwined with the lived experiences of the characters in
the novel. Without completely neglecting the presence of conflict, Kashyap
invites us to look at a traditional Assam.
18 Janice Pariat, Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories. India: Ran-
dom House, 2012. This is a collection of short stories spanning hundreds
of years from the 1800s to the present time and looking at the various
changes that swept across the Northeast region beginning from the advent
of the British rule, the world wars and the coming of the Christian mis-
sionaries. Pariat presents a world where the everyday reality of political
struggles and social unrest are infused with folklore, the mythic and the
supernatural.
19 Sandra A. Zagarell, ‘Narrative of Community: The Identification of
a Genre,’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 13, n. 3,
Spring 1988, pp. 498–527. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/
10.1086/494430. Accessed December 2016.
20 Zagarell believes that this tradition existed in the midst of post-
Enlightenment fiction, which is predominantly about the individualised
self and his interaction/conflict with his society and continues to flourish
in the 20th century where traditional life is endangered by capitalism and
urbanisation.
21 Zagarell, ‘Narrative of Community,’ p. 499.

136
 C ommunity fiction

22 The first story in Mamang Dai’s The Legends of Pensam is titled “The Boy
Who fell from the Sky”.
23 Ananya Guha, ‘The Phenomenal Woman – An Interview of Mamang Dai,’
Read Leaf Poetry – India, 3 March 2013.
24 Dai, Legends of Pensam, p. 17.
25 Ibid., p. 5.
26 Ibid., p. 37.
27 Ibid.
28 Dai, Legends of Pensam, pp. 47–48. ‘Travel the Road’ begins by narrating
the story of Noel Williamson, a British political officer whose journey into
the Adi region ends in a tragedy when he and his retinue are massacred by
Adi men in a village called Komsing. No one in the region is sure about
what triggered the massacre that resulted in the punitive expedition of
1912, known as the Abor Expeditionary Field Force.
29 Ibid., p. 50.
30 The Naga struggle for autonomy is often referred to as the Naga move-
ment or the Naga national movement.
31 Ao, These Hills, p. 3.
32 Ibid., pp. 40–41.
33 Ibid., p. 41.
34 Ibid., p. 43.
35 Ibid., p. 122.
36 Ibid., p. 144.
37 One of the counter-insurgency tactics used by the Indian state in Naga-
land was the grouping of villages, which began in 1956. Populations were
uprooted from their native habitat and villages were shifted from their
remote areas to areas where the villagers were placed under the constant
surveillance of the army. This tactic was used in order to isolate the insur-
gents and cut off their access to the villagers.
38 Ibid., p. 11.
39 Ibid., p. 10.
40 Elaine Showalter, ‘Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,’ Critical Inquiry,
vol. 8, no. 2, Winter 1981, pp. 179–205.
41 Tilottama Misra, ‘Introduction,’ in The Oxford Anthology of Writings
from North-East India: Poetry and Essays. New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2011, p. xx.
42 Dai, Legends of Pensam, pp. 79.
43 Ibid., p. 70.
44 Ibid., p. 101.
45 Ibid., p. 75.
46 Ibid., p. 148.
47 Ibid., p. 151.
48 Ibid., p. 156.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid., p. 158.
51 The Indian government’s development projects of building roads and
bridges in the region is often seen by the locals as an effort to strengthen
the war preparedness of the Indian armed forces against Chinese forces.
This general feeling of scepticism has existed since the Indo-China war
of 1967. Because of their small numbers, the various ethnic groups and

137
 J eetumoni B asumatary

sub-groups fear a demographic change as infrastructure work brings in

labourers and engineers who usually hail from different parts of India.
This fear is reflected in Larik’s rejection of progress and development in
‘The Road.’
52 Misra, ‘Introduction,’ pp. 81–83.
53 Udayon Misra, The Periphery Strikes Back: Challenges to the Nation-state
in Assam and Nagaland. Shimla: Indian Institue of Advanced Study, 2000,
p. 44.
54 Temsula Ao, ’Writing Orality,’ in Orality and Beyond: A North-East
Indian Perspective, ed. Soumen Sen and Desmond L. Kharmawphlang.
New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2007, pp. 108–109.
55 Roxanne Harde, ‘Introduction,’ in Narratives of Community: Women’s
Short Story Sequences. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2007,
pp. 1–11.

138
 Part III

GENRES IN THE 21ST

CENTURY
 8
POST-MILLENNIAL
‘MYTHOLOGY-INSPIRED
FICTION’ IN ENGLISH
The market, the genre, and
the (global) reader

E. Dawson Varughese

This chapter focuses on fiction in English, written within and pub-

lished from India since 2000, in the genre of ‘mythology-inspired fic-
tion.’ In doing so it discusses the socioeconomic context out of which
this continually expanding body of fiction has emerged. I am inter-
ested in what we might term as ‘genre’ fiction, its parameters and
audiences, and thus what such a term means within the context of
post-millennial India. After examining how mythology-inspired fiction
is defined within the Indian marketplace, we look at aspects of three
mythology-inspired novels from India: Pradyumna: Son of Krishna by
Usha Narayanan,1 Scion of Ikshvaku by Amish Tripathi,2 and The
Missing Queen by Samhita Arni.3 In examining the key motifs of these
novels, I highlight how science, itihasa,4 and Hinduism underpin this
particular genre through which narratives of ‘Indianness’ are crafted.
In order to think further about mythology-inspired fiction in English
as genre fiction in its own right, I consider Indian and non-Indian
reader reception of these novels and in doing so, I concentrate on three
core themes (science, itihasa, and Hinduism). Anchoring this enquiry
in the spirit of Stuart Hall’s (1980) ‘Encoding/decoding’ model,5 I am
interested in how a reader’s cultural background (broadly defined)
might play a role in categorising and ‘reading’ mythology-inspired fic-
tion in English from India. As a reader of fiction in English, access-
ing mythology-inspired fiction in English linguistically is reasonably
straightforward – names of places, people, and specific cultural terms

141
 E . D awson V arughese

aside – however, engaging with mythology-inspired novels beyond

the linguistic, narratively, demands from a non-Indian reader the con-
struction of textual worlds, drawing on the reader’s knowledge of
India, its history, religion, and cultures. Where aspects of this knowl-
edge base are absent, I suggest that an enhanced ‘to-and-fro spiral’ is
constructed between text and reader to help make the text ‘mean’.6 In
considering reader reception in this manner specifically with regard to
‘mythology-inspired’ fiction, a complex relationship between Indian
and non-Indian readerships of mythology-inspired fiction is revealed,
a relationship that brings into question ideas of speculative fiction
alongside culturally based ideas of science and faith. Given this spec-
trum of response to India’s post-millennial mythology-inspired fic-
tion in English, the chapter closes in consideration of how we might
approach the reading of this body of writing from non-Indian socio-
cultural contexts and how we might think of its association with the
field of global genre fiction more broadly.

Introduction: genre fiction in English in post-

millennial India
As the focus of the essay is Indian mythology-inspired fiction in Eng-
lish, to be clear, I broadly define this body of post-millennial writing
as ‘genre fiction’. Just as the Indian fiction market in English includes
Indian crime writing in English, Indian chick lit in English or what
I coined as Indian crick lit in English,7 so we might think of Indian
mythology-inspired fiction in English as a genre in its own right.8 The
Indian domestic literary scene in English in terms of writing activ-
ity, publishing prospects, and importantly, domestic readership, has
proved most latterly that India is no longer substantially beholden
to the Western academy for publishing opportunity, endorsement, or
canon formation. I have suggested elsewhere9 that India grows, pub-
lishes, celebrates, and awards its English-medium authors independent
of Western intervention, and although much combined literary activity
continues to take place between India and Western academies, it is no
longer emphatically necessary for India to curate such relationships for
its literary (market) survival, given that plenty is happening ‘at home.’
It is out of this context that mythology-inspired fiction in English was
born and has subsequently flourished. Typically retailing at Indian
rupees 299 or 350, paperback, and published by Westland, Penguin
India, Hachette India, HarperCollins India, Jaico, and many smaller,
independent presses, mythology-inspired fiction in India sells across

142
 P ost - millennial

various outlets, including ‘bookstores’ (typically located in malls), air-

ports (domestic and international), train stations, and through digital
platforms such as Flipkart, Infibeam, and Amazon India. As I outline
in detail in Genre Fiction of New India,10 we might import Western-
oriented genre terms to understand and categorise ideas of ‘post-
millennial Indian genre fiction in English’ but in doing so we are at
risk of importing Western ideas of genre fiction only to impose them
on the fiction that is being produced domestically. Hence, I refer to the
term ‘mythology-inspired’ (or ‘mythology’) fiction as per the Indian
market’s established use.
It was during the mid-2000s that mythology-inspired fiction in Eng-
lish began to appear.11 Ashwin Sanghi (The Rozabal Line)12 Amish
Tripathi (The Immortals of Meluha)13 and Ashok Banker (Slayer of
Kamsa)14 are generally recognised as the authors who first published
in this genre. Since then there has been a surge of mythology-inspired
fiction in English hitting the bookshelves, all of which draws predomi-
nantly on narrative aspects and the protagonists of the Indian epics,
namely the Mahabharata and the Ramayana as well as the Puranas
and Indian folk traditions. These retellings and re-imaginings (the dis-
tinction is made below) have emerged not only from a fiscally empow-
ered, post-millennial India but also from an India that is increasingly
looking inward at ideas of Indianness while also looking outward
at the global and the transnational. For academic and novelist Vam-
see Juluri, the post-millennial moment is framing the production of
mythology-inspired novels when he writes:

They mark the beginning of a new journey in the modern

Hindu imagination. They are rooted in the present, in the
experiences of a new generation responding in the form of
creativity and entertainment to very real, global, national,
postcolonial concerns.15

Indian genre fiction in English might be described as popular fiction

or according to academic Suman Gupta, as ‘commercial fiction.’ He
writes:

What is produced and consumed as Indian commercial fiction

in English is generally regarded as a matter of internal inter-
est. It is consumed primarily within India, seen to display a
kind of ‘Indianness’ that Indians appreciate, and is not meant
to be taken ‘seriously’ or regarded as ‘literary’.

143
 E . D awson V arughese

He goes on to say that

[L]iterary fiction is the respectable public face of Indian litera-

ture in English abroad and at home, while commercial fiction
is the gossipy café of Indian writing in English at home.16

Commercial or popular fiction has often been defined by thinking of

what it is not in comparison with literary fiction. Gupta, however,
reminds us that ‘[D]espite numerous efforts to describe these terms
according to content – as if texts have immanent qualities of commer-
cialness and literariness – both are plausibly understood as market-led
categories.’17
Rather than defining popular fiction against the tenets of literary
fiction, it is more helpful for our discussion here, I suggest, to con-
sider the reach of commercial or popular fiction in terms of sales and
distribution. The sales performance of mythology-inspired fiction in
post-millennial India is significant through the advent of new cultures
of consumerism and ‘leisure’ spending; therefore ‘sales performance’
offers a further avenue for the defining of this body of new writing.
Joshi writes: ‘The previous ‘Hindu’ print run of 500 copies has now
been replaced by 30,000 to 1 million-plus first printings for writers
such as Chetan Bhagat and Anuja Chauhan.’18 Print runs testify to the
‘popularity’ of genre fiction in India and are often boosted by the hype,
marketing, book trailers, and launches that accompany the release of
the books.19 Mythology-inspired fiction in English has proven explo-
sive in terms of sales and reception, with some books appearing with
backing from popular film stars, music composers, and inventive mar-
keting strategies. Amish Tripathi’s ‘Shiva Trilogy’ is an example of
such and is reported to have been one of the fastest-selling book series
in the history of Indian publishing.
Genre fiction might be better understood in terms of its sales figures
and distribution circuits, but we might also think about genre fiction
in terms of its non-literariness following Gupta,20 and additionally for
our interests here, its interface with the contemporary moment. Not-
withstanding the anchoring of Scott McCracken’s critique in Western-
orientated enquiry, I suggest it is helpful to consider McCracken’s
insights into the interface between popular narratives and ‘now-time’
for our interests in the proliferation of Indian mythology-inspired fic-
tion in English in the post-millennial moment. McCracken writes:

Popular narratives play a vital role in mediating social change,

informing their audience of new currents and allowing the

144
 P ost - millennial

reader to insert him or herself into new scenarios in a way that

can be related to her or his own experience. Its engagement
in the present, in now-time, means that the political nature of
popular fiction is never in doubt.21

As India has undergone significant economic and social change since

2000, the idea of India, notions of Indianness, and India’s own phi-
losophies of modernity have emerged as urgent and contentious top-
ics of debate. McCracken suggests that popular fiction ‘can supply us
with the narratives we need to resituate ourselves in relation to the
world.’22 Many of the storylines of post-millennial Indian mythology-
inspired fiction in English revise ideas of India and Indianness through
narratives of both globalisation and older, more ancient eras of Indian
civilisation, something I explore in the discussion of Tripathi’s and
Arni’s novels below. McCracken suggests that popular fiction can offer
a space for such ‘remaking’ to take place, stating that ‘[T]he reader of
popular fiction is actively engaged in the remaking of him or herself
and this act of remaking has a utopian potential.’23
The terms ‘commercial’ and ‘popular’ fiction are therefore employed
here with the following understandings: ‘commercial’ is understood
as pertaining to large print runs of paperback books with large sales
and complementary marketing campaigns; ‘popular’ fiction is under-
stood to mean fiction that is largely consumed by blue- and grey-collar
workers, interfacing with the contemporary moment and ‘commercial’
in terms of its sales figures.

Defining Indian ‘mythology-inspired’ fiction

The growing body of contemporary commercial fiction within India –
whether crime fiction, crick lit or chick lit in English, asserts anew the
identity of the Indian novel in English. It does this by a re-orientation
of sorts, a move away from the ‘traditional’ postcolonial Indian novel
in English and subsequently, a re-anchoring of the novel in an Indian
readership (not a predominantly non-Indian one as has often been the
case with postcolonial Indian fiction in English to date). Moreover, the
mythology-inspired novel in English (and its subsequent translations
into other Indian languages) has fostered an enhanced appeal to the
domestic, mass market, and consequently, a reliance on the Indian or
regional markets over more global ones.24 Mythology-inspired fiction
in English is specifically yet variously anchored in the Hindu Indian
epics of the Mahabharata or the Ramayana (as well as drawing on
aspects of the Puranas and some folk traditions, although this is less

145
 E . D awson V arughese

compared with how the epics inspire the narratives in general). It is

not, however, a homogeneous body of fiction; rather, I suggest, it differs
through a set of modes of telling. These modes of telling include different
kinds of historical or cultural contextualising, varied linguistic expres-
sions, and the employment of the speculative, detective/crime thriller
subgenres as examples. I propose that the body of post-millennial,
mythology-inspired fiction in English to date is characterised by four
distinct approaches of telling, which, in turn, find themselves on a
spectrum of sorts; at one end lies a sentiment of ‘retelling’ while at the
other end lies a sentiment of ‘re-imagining.’ These four approaches
might be described thus:

(1) Narratives that are faithful in their retelling of the ‘original’25 epic,
with little or no author embellishment of plot or characterisation
and minimal (or no) change of story arc. Examples include Naray-
anan’s Pradyumna: Son of Krishna.
(2) Narratives that are recognisable by the ‘original’ epic inspira-
tion, but where plot, characterisation, and story arc are developed
anew by the author. Examples include Tripathi’s ‘Shiva Trilogy’
and his ‘Ram Chandra’ series.
(3) Narratives that are recognisable by the ‘original’ epic inspiration
usually through their characters and sometimes by the plot or story
arc (or an aspect of it); they re-imagine the original epic (inspira-
tion) often through the employment of contemporary subgenres
or settings/locations. Examples include Pervin Saket’s Urmila and
Samhita Arni’s The Missing Queen.
(4) Narratives that take only a character or an aspect of plot from
the epics through which they considerably develop the story
away from the ‘original’ epic inspiration, moving further into
the realm of re-imagining the epic (inspiration). These narratives
usually employ contemporary subgenres such as detective/crime
fiction or speculative fiction and devices such as the conspirato-
rial. Examples include the novels of Ashwin Sanghi, Shatrujeet
Nath’s The Guardians of the Halahala, and Doyle’s The Mahab-
harata Secret.

Through these four approaches of telling, various aspects of Indianness

are expressed, challenged, and revised, but as ‘Indian’ as these novels
are in terms of their content and expression, they are not exempt from
global readings, especially as the publishers open these novels up to
more global distribution opportunities. The reader reception to these
novels – Indian and non-Indian – varies substantially. The discussion

146
 P ost - millennial

of certain motifs found in the three mythology-inspired novels below

demonstrate how such varied and nuanced reader receptions are pro-
duced through the themes underpinning these novels, namely science,
itihasa, and Hinduism.
Focusing on the core themes of science, itihasa, and Hinduism,
I consider how reader receptions to such motifs in the fiction invari-
ably create very different reader receptions. This discussion in turn
helps us consider what we might mean by a ‘global’ reader of post-
millennial Indian genre fiction, a point I return to in the concluding
section of this chapter.
Usha Narayanan’s Pradyumna: Son of Krishna charts the life of
Pradyumna, a son born to Lord Krishna and Rukmini. The novel is
significantly faithful in the retelling of the life of Pradyumna, detailing
his genealogy, his early years, and his own marriages and children.
The style of the novel invokes an atmosphere of the epic through its
depiction of many distinct characters, through its description of heroic
battles, and thus through the struggle of good (dharma) over evil. The
inclusion of battles of such epic proportions means the narrative might
easily be read as fantastical. The use of celestial weapons in particular
creates a sense of apocalyptic doom. These weapons range from mind-
altering ones to more traditional weaponry of swords and arrows that
take on fantastical capabilities. Describing these extraordinary weap-
ons, Narayanan writes:

Sandilya employed the Twastarastra that enveloped the asura

army in delusions, causing them to attack one another; thou-
sands died before Kaalasura could counter with his own sor-
cery. He invoked the Parvataastra that made mountains rise
from the earth and rain down on the enemies, crushing them
like ants under an elephant’s foot.26

And she writes of Pradyumna:

It was now or never. Pradyumna invoked the divine parasu. It

flew into his hand, its head glinting like a ferocious planet, its
radiance swamping the occult forces. The young warrior let
the axe fly towards the asura.27

Narayanan’s faithfulness in recounting the epic battles of the ancient

Indian texts does not exclude readers with little or no knowledge of
the texts, as the novel can easily be read outside of its dharmic context.
Narayanan contextualises the story through careful paraphrasing or

147
 E . D awson V arughese

by offering direct translations of some of the more culturally specific

terms such as the names of the various weapons (an example of this
is given above). It thus transpires that the naming of the weapons, as
with the naming of the protagonists, remains of little consequence to
a reader with little or no knowledge of the original texts. Narayanan’s
inclusion and foregrounding of other aspects of the Puranas (and of the
epic texts) follow the same principle; thus her novel liberally includes:
vimana and other ‘vehicles’ with the ability to fly,28 shapeshifters,29
and magical arts or occult skills.30 These facets of the novel all appear
as fantastical tropes to the reader who has no (or little) knowledge of
the original texts of inspiration. Such a position of reader reception is
not only applicable to non-Indian readers, of course. It is important to
remember that not all Indian readers – or those well-read in the Indian
epics and Puranas – would read Narayanan’s novel as a retelling of
Pradyumna’s life and consequently would not consider the story as
‘truth.’ There is a broad spectrum of responses to mythology-inspired
fiction and such a spectrum exists in the responses to the more tradi-
tional ‘retellings’ as much as it does in the more liberal ‘re-imaginings’
of the Indian epics (see above for discussion on these different ‘types’
of mythology-inspired fiction). Narayanan’s novel differs greatly from
those by Tripathi or Sanghi, and is different again from Arni’s re-
imagining of the story of Ram and Sita (see below), and this differ-
ence is manifest through the more fantastical motifs and tropes of her
work. In the example below, the propensity for fantastical readings is
demonstrated as occult magic summoned by the demon, to be coun-
tered by Lord Krishna.

The monster seized the princesses and the offerings and van-
ished before the king’s troops could be summoned. The sol-
diers chased after them but could not keep up with the demon,
who could turn invisible and fly at will.
The king choked with fear and prayed to the Dark One for
succour.
‘Go now, my son, to aid the king,’ Krishna said to his
trusted Pradyumna. The prince used his sorcery to trace the
princesses and whisked them away from the asura, creating
lookalikes with his maya to take their place.31

For the reader who is acquainted with the fantasy genre, the tropes
of ‘monster,’ ‘invisibility,’ ‘ability to fly,’ ‘a Dark One (or Lord),’ ‘sor-
cery,’ and the creation of ‘lookalikes’ are familiar ones. Narayanan
writes in a way that keeps the original protagonists and events at the

148
 P ost - millennial

heart of the narrative, departing very little from the original text of
inspiration; yet, in the foregrounding of the more speculative aspects
of the text, by which I mean ‘speculative aspects’ in a Western sense
of a fantasy/sci-fi/weird megatext, the opportunity for a wealth of
reader response is created. Another example from Pradyumna: Son of
Krishna exemplifies this:

In another corner of the universe, the mighty asura Vajranabha

was performing severe penances on Mount Sumeru to propiti-
ate Brahma. The golden Sumeru was 84,000 yojanas tall and
was the sacred centre of a gigantic complex of seas and moun-
tains. A huge ocean formed a moat around the square base of
Sumeru, and seven mountains and seven seas in turn encircled
it. Beyond these was the outer sea, on which the continents
formed small islands.32

Unlike some mythology-inspired fiction that operates on a more lib-

eral re-imagining of the epics, I suggest that Narayanan’s work allows
for a broad reader reception and one that permits (Western) specula-
tive readings. Narayanan’s novel (potentially) engages a wide reader-
ship, indeed, a global one, despite the novel’s acute cultural anchoring
in Indian history and Hinduism.
Scion of Ikshvaku by Amish Tripathi starts from the birth of Lord
Ram, and, charting his training with Guru Vishwamitra, explores his
relationship with his brother Lakshman, how Ram evolves as a leader,
and how he comes to meet Sita and the people of Mithila. The novel
also presents the socio-political backdrop of Ayodhya and Lanka and,
from this presentation, the narrative develops a backstory to how Ram
came to know the Lankans and his relationship with Raavan. This
novel is Book One in the ‘Ram Chandra Series’ by Tripathi and it
ends with the abduction of Sita as per the Ramayana. Unlike Naray-
anan’s novel, where fantastical beasts, epic battles, and extraordinary
abilities are aplenty, Tripathi’s novel works more keenly on the re-
imagining of the characters of Ram, Lakshman, and Sita (the story
arc remains in keeping with the original). Tripathi continues in the
Ramayana tradition to depict Lakshman as the brave younger brother
of Ram and includes several incidents in the narrative where Laksh-
man saves Ram’s life; however, he gives Lakshman a lisp and develops
him as an adviser to Ram, counseling him against his unconditional
trust of people. As for Ram, Tripathi develops the idea of him as a
leader, questions his blind trust in the people he does not know, and
foregrounds the challenges of leading a nation in times of war. In the

149
 E . D awson V arughese

case of Sita, Tripathi draws on her famed archery skills, portraying

her as a strong warrior princess, which departs from some of the tra-
ditional depictions of Sita that subdue that aspect of her character. By
all accounts, Tripathi’s Sita is a strong woman, a leader in her own
right, and the first time that Ram meets Sita, he witnesses her fight and
is astonished at her ability and skills.
Although Tripathi focuses on the re-imagination of the Ramayana
characters in his novel, there are several moments in the storyline
where extraordinary science plays out. Following Raavan’s attack on
Sita’s homeland of Mithila, it is decided that a celestial weapon, a
daivi astra, is to be used on Raavan and his forces since they are pre-
paring to attack the city once again. We learn that Guru Vishwami-
tra has ‘some important material that was mined at [my] ashram by
the Ganga.’33 It is from this mysterious ‘material,’ used in what Vish-
wamitra calls ‘science experiments,’34 that a specific celestial weapon
has been crafted: the Asuraastra. Ram is immediately concerned at
the prospect of deploying this weapon and asks Vishwamitra: ‘Isn’t
that a biological weapon?’35 Vishwamitra tries to convince Ram to
use the weapon, saying, ‘it is not a weapon of mass destruction, just
mass incapacitation.’36 The ethical dilemma is made more difficult for
Ram when he learns how Sita is fiercely opposed to the use of such
a weapon. Here Tripathi weaves in a storyline of his own. Tripathi
writes that in deploying the Asuraastra, Ram must enter into 14 years
of self-imposed exile since ‘Lord Rudra, the previous Mahadev who
was the Destroyer of Evil’37 banned the unauthorised use of daivi astra
many centuries ago. Traditionally in the Ramayana, the reason for
Ram’s exile is Kaikeyi’s request of King Dashrath (Ram’s father) that
Ram be banished to the forest, putting her own son, Bharat, on the
throne instead. Tripathi, however, layers the narrative with a new sto-
ryline; here Ram instigates the exile, telling his father that he must
pay penance for deploying the celestial weapon that stunned Raavan’s
forces. The addition of a new storyline challenges ideas of itihasa
whereby established narratives of the Ramayana are usurped in order
to accommodate contemporary ideas of ‘weaponry’ (in this case) and
leadership decision-making. For readers with little or no knowledge
of the Ramayana, this embellishment on the traditional tale would go
unnoticed. A more lasting impression might be the combining of ideas
of science and religion in such an ancient epoch – fantastical by these
very motifs, if nothing else.
The narrative structure attempts to culturally translate aspects of
life in ancient India so that a reader’s understanding of the storyline
is not compromised. He often includes translations of key terms and

150
 P ost - millennial

ideas through short paraphrasing or contextualisation, such as the

following:

‘She’ll make a great bhabhi!’

Ram frowned, refusing to accept his brother’s unbridled
enthusiasm in referring to the princess as his sister-in-law.38

* * *

Let me get to the point straight away. The king of Mithila has
organised a swayamvar for his eldest daughter, Sita.
A swayamvar was an ancient tradition in India. The father of the
bride organised a gathering of prospective bridegrooms, from
whom his daughter was free to either select her husband or man-
date a competition.39

* * *

. . . turned him into not just a Brahmin, but a rishi. A rishi was the
highest status, below Godhood, that any person could achieve.40

There are also instances in the novel that resonate with current
events and debates in Indian society. Tripathi raises questions around
religion and tolerance,41 about caste,42 the ethics of biological weap-
ons,43 urban planning,44 marriage,45 leadership and reform,46 and,
most sensitive of all, he recounts the gang rape of Roshni, Ram’s rakhi
sister. In a major departure from established Ramayana narratives, the
description of the scene wherein Roshni’s body is found is gruesome,
and the rape contains some of the hallmark characteristics of the Nirb-
haya case (otherwise known as the Delhi gang rape of 2012). Tripathi
writes how Roshni had been gang-raped and ‘had been beaten with a
blunt object all over her body, probably a stick, a sadistic ritual.’47 He
goes on to say how, out of the three rapists, the perpetrator, Dhenuka,
‘had been exempted from maximum punishment on a legal techni-
cality: he was underage,’48 a frustrating outcome for Ram ‘the Law
Giver’49 as he could not avenge Roshni’s death. Readers of this scene,
Indian or otherwise, will make easy connections with current debates
on gender violence and the infamous Nirbhaya case that received sig-
nificant global media coverage. Tripathi’s decision to highlight such
contemporary debate against a backdrop of ancient India under-
scores his commitment to re-imagining the epics in more nuanced
ways. Although Tripathi’s Ram Chandra series to date remains fairly

151
 E . D awson V arughese

traditional in its story arc, his exploration of characters and situations

offers new ways of reading both the epic texts and the Puranas, as well
as the post-millennial moment.
The Missing Queen by Samhita Arni is as anchored in the re-
imagining of the Ramayana as Narayanan’s Pradyumna: Son of
Krishna is anchored in the retelling of Lord Krishna and his son’s lives.
Beginning in the Ramayana where Sita has already been captured by
Raavan, Arni questions where the ‘missing queen’ could be: what has
happened to her, and what is the ‘truth’ around her abduction? The
story is told by a journalist who is keen to uncover the truth but who
struggles with censorship (on many levels), as a result of which her life
is endangered at several points in the story. The novel is written in a
speculative style, not least because of the dystopian society in which
it is set. It is this particular setting that I suggest propels the novel
into the debates of ‘truth-telling’ and into the realm of the ‘grand nar-
rative’ and, thus, itihasa. The novel is clearly anchored in the story
of the Ramayana, with the characters of Lord Ram, Sita, Lakshman,
Hanuman, Kaikeyi, Raavan, Urmila, and others being familiar names,
at least to those readers for whom the Ramayana is a cultural corner-
stone; however, the epoch in which Arni crafts The Missing Queen is
both familiar while being concurrently strange. Set in an undisclosed
era, it feels near-future or somewhat speculative and through indirect
references to New India, the post-millennium television and satellite
boom, its relentless news reporting and its surging economy, Arni
crafts a recognisable India whilst rendering it strange through motifs
of utopia and fantasy worlds. This destabilisation of the narrative is of
little consequence to those who are not familiar with the Ramayana;
however, it is still possible to read The Missing Queen and understand
its anchoring in India. Arni writes:

television is the mouthpiece of the New Ayodhya. Ayodhya is

booming, Ayodhya is shining. Images flash on screens in every
household, speaking of progress and development. Ayodhya
is poised to take the world by storm.50

A ‘global reader’ would have little difficulty in connecting Arni’s refer-

ences of ‘shining Ayodhya’ to New India. Moreover, Arni helps the
non-Indian reader by suggesting that the tale of Lord Ram and Sita is a
fairy tale in its own right, which in turn conjures up ideas of good over
bad – a princess, a king (or lord), and difficulty or battle – as part of
the story arc. But Arni plays with this idea of the canonical ‘fairy tale,’

152
 P ost - millennial

writing: ‘It’s the greatest tale ever told, and better still, it’s true. Real.’51
Furthermore, she says: ‘It has crossed over the boundaries of the merely
real and been spun into fantasy. It is a fairy tale now.’52 Here, Arni sug-
gests that the Ramayana is projected as ‘real’ and that it can only have
ventured into the realm of fantasy by virtue of being real in the first
place. The challenge here is thinking about itihasa as fantasy per se
due to the years, authors, and versions by which this literary (and cul-
tural) monolith has been shaped. Consequently, through all this vari-
ous shaping and moulding, the suggestion is that the Ramayana, in a
certain sense, is no longer itihasa. The fact that The Missing Queen is
written in a speculative style further problematises the idea of the real
and the unreal. In her search for information about Sita, the journalist
is standing outside a sari shop. The shop’s proprietor steps out onto the
pavement and, somewhat bewildered, tells the journalist that there is a
phone call for her. She steps inside, takes the call, and arranges to meet
‘someone’ in a basement parking lot nearby. Arni writes:

The parking lot is dark and empty. I imagine assailants in every

car, the Washerman’s crew waiting to mow me down. There’s
a black unmarked sedan in the parking space the woman told
me to be at. It’s empty but unlocked. I get into the back door
as she instructed. A moment later, a woman dressed in black,
her face covered by a veil, cautiously emerges from a van up
ahead. She walks to the car and gets into the front seat. She
slips off her veil and adjusts the rear-view mirror, so I can see
her face. A familiar pair of eyes, a familiar moon-shaped face.
My heart starts to beat wildly. Just like Sita’s.53

As Arni builds suspense in this passage, the idea of trust becomes as

important as truth-telling. With the journalist’s life threatened (there
have been attempts on her life already), she is very vulnerable meet-
ing with this unknown woman. The woman in the car turns out to be
Sita’s sister, Urmila. In the Ramayana, the traditional understanding is
that Urmila and Sita were not blood sisters; rather Sita was adopted
by King Janaka. Here Arni usurps the traditional ‘telling’ when she
goes on to say:

But not quite. She is not Sita. But there is an undeniable

resemblance between her and her elder sister – which makes
the field-and-furrow story suspect, unless King Janaka found
this daughter, too, in a field.54

153
 E . D awson V arughese

The journalist views the story of King Janaka’s daughters with suspi-
cion and thus the story that has become widely accepted is suddenly
brought into question, suggesting that it may be only one (possible) ver-
sion of events. It is because of the journalist that the reader is brought
into such new ways of thinking – it is, after all, her job to interrogate
and critique the status quo – and thus, through this protagonist, the
reader is led to question the tradition. This position of questioning a
‘received truth’ runs throughout the novel. Arni explores what has
been posited as real (the story of Lord Ram, Sita, and Raavan) but by
doing this through the lens of the speculative, she further mystifies the
idea of ‘truth-telling,’ resulting in more questions than answers. It is
therefore the speculative style of the novel that facilitates questioning
even when the reader has little or no knowledge of the Ramayana.
The novel does not rely on established cultural knowledge as the ques-
tioning of grand narratives, of truth-telling, and the documentation of
history are all achieved outside of the itihasa rubric. This questioning
is achieved namely by employing a speculative style of writing, the
crafting of a female journalist as the protagonist, and the inclusion of
threats of various sorts of censorship.

Conclusions: ‘mythology-inspired fiction’ and the

global reader
Throughout the examination of reader reception of ‘mythology-
inspired fiction’ here, I have made reference to Indian and non-Indian
readerships. This distinction has implied that the non-Indian reader-
ships are ‘global’ in their reception of these texts in the sense that they
do not necessarily have significant knowledge about dharmic practice
and the Indian epics (and the Puranas), although they may well have
some knowledge about India culturally and socio-politically. Clearly,
a notion of the ‘global reader’ is a multi-layered and complex one
that cannot be defined accurately through this paper.55 What is possi-
ble, however, is to understand more deeply how non-Indian readers or
those readers with little or no knowledge of the Indian epics approach
mythology-inspired novels in terms of them being genre fiction.
The range of ‘receptions’ to this body of fiction, however, begins
within an ‘Indian’ readership. Given the multitude of Hindu responses
to the epic narratives of Valmiki and Vyasa, it is not surprising that the
reception of mythology-inspired fiction is a complex one. As we read
in the discussions above, in cases where the author moves consider-
ably away from the ‘original’ epic (or inspiration) or where contem-
porary sensibilities are stretched, then certain Indian readerships may

154
 P ost - millennial

well consider the narrative as fantasy. A fine line exists in this debate,
not simply in terms of cultural reception but also in terms of genre
classification in how these narratives are crafted. Therefore, for some
Indian readers, the references to the Hindu epics will mean references
to spiritual beliefs, denoting that such texts are believed to be retellings
or re-imaginings of itihasa and thus manifestly not part of a fantasy
genre, but mythology-inspired fiction. Consequently, this suggests that
non-Indian readers will most likely respond to mythology-inspired fic-
tion in English outside of the itihasa rubric. Indeed, for non-Indian
readers or readers with little or no knowledge of dharmic thought
more broadly, mythology-inspired fiction is, as the genre name sug-
gests, ‘myth’, and thus, in a Western, Anglophone sense, ‘untrue’ or
a fiction. Malhotra says that the term ‘myth’ in the West is often seen
‘as the opposite of truth’56 and he details how the popular semantic of
‘myth’ is often expressed as being ‘imaginary, fantastical, fictional, or
even superstitious, primitive or false.’57
We might surmise that readers of mythology-inspired fiction with
little or no knowledge of the epics, ancient Indian history, or dharmic
culture more broadly will almost certainly respond to this writing as
‘fantasy’ (or ‘speculative’ at least). This assumption helps shape how
we might define the non-Indian or ‘global’ readers (see endnote 52)
in terms of their knowledge of (Anglophone) genre fiction and thus
their definitions of speculative fiction per se. The discussion above also
suggests that the ‘global reader’ might approach mythology-inspired
fiction through the contemporary lens of media coverage. Given that
Tripathi’s and Arni’s novels presented above make connections with
contemporary, indeed post-millennial, India and some of the defining
events of the last 15 years (the Nirbhaya case, the election of a BJP
government as examples), the ‘global reader’ will presumably make
such connections through their knowledge of these events via the
media, the Internet, and social media platforms.
Indian mythology-inspired fiction, by the nature of its source mate-
rial and inspirations, offers the field of global genre fiction an acutely
culturally anchored body of writing as well as a body of writing that
‘travels’ due to its propensity for speculative reader reception. On the
one hand, this is keenly evident in works like Narayanan’s Prady-
umna: Son of Krishna, given their epic-style narrative arc and charac-
terisation, while on the other hand, it is as evident, albeit differently,
in those novels that more liberally re-imagine the Indian epics crafting
a fresh storyline. It is clear that the opening up of distribution cir-
cuits and publishing opportunities will mean that Indian mythology-
inspired fiction will continue to travel and, in turn, meet with new

155
 E . D awson V arughese

audiences. These future encounters will reveal yet more detailed and
interesting readings of mythology-inspired fiction, resulting in a more
nuanced understanding of the ‘global reader’ and their reading trends
and mores.

Notes
1 Usha Narayanan, Pradyumna: Son of Krishna. Gurgaon, Haryana, India:
Penguin Books India, 2015.
2 Amish Tripathi, Scion of Ikshvaku. Chennai: Westland, 2015.
3 Samhita Arni, The Missing Queen. New Delhi: Zubaan, 2013.
4 Itihasa is often literally translated as ‘thus it happened’. As ‘itihasa’, the
epic, poetic texts of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana represent “true”
accounts of history. See Dawson Varughese, 2016 for a detailed discussion
of this: Genre Fiction of New India: Post-Millennial Receptions of ‘Weird’
Narratives. New York: Routledge, 2016
5 Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding/decoding,’ in Culture, Media, Language, ed. Stuart
Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis. London: Rout-
ledge, pp. 128–137, print.
6 Louise, Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration. New York: Modern Lan-
guage Association, 1976 [1933].
7 E. Dawson Varughese, Reading New India: Post-Millennial Indian Fiction
in English. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
8 In India, this body of writing is marketed as ‘mythology fiction,’ or simply
‘mythology.’
9 E. Dawson Varughese, Genre Fiction of New India: Post-Millennial
Receptions of ‘Weird’ Narratives. New York: Routledge, 2016; E. Daw-
son Varughese, ‘Genre Fiction of New India: Post-Millennial Configura-
tions of Crick Lit, Chick Lit and Crime Writing,’ in South-Asian fiction
in English: Contemporary Transformations, ed. A. Tickell. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2016; E. Dawson Varughese, ‘Celebrate at Home’:
Post-Millennial Indian fiction in English and the Reception of ‘Bharati
Fantasy,’ Global and Domestic Markets, Contemporary South Asia, vol.
22, no. 4, December 2014, pp. 350–361, print.
10 Varughese, Genre Fiction of New India.
11 In the case of Tripathi’s first book, The Immortals of Meluha, translations
of the 2010 English-language edition followed soon after: Hindi (in 2011);
Gujarati, Marathi, Telugu, and Assamese (all in 2012); Bengali, Kannada,
Malayalam, and Tamil (all in 2013). In the case of Sanghi, it was some
years before his early works were translated into Hindi or Marathi (as
examples) although his later books are seeing a much quicker translation
process, see: http://sanghi.in/store.html.
12 Ashwin Sanghi, The Rozabal Line. Chennai: Westland, 2008. Sanghi con-
siders his writing as conspiracy-inspired rather than mythology-inspired;
however, his novels to date do explore theological, mythical, and/or his-
torical themes (see Dawson Varughese, ‘Genre Fiction of New India,’
pp. 122–124).
13 Amish Tripathi, The Immortals of Meluha. Chennai: Westland, 2010.
14 Ashok Banker, Slayer of Kamsa. New Delhi: HarperCollins India, 2010.

156
 P ost - millennial

15 Vamsee Juluri, Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia, and the

Return of Indian Intelligence. Chennai, India: Westland, 2015, p. 119.
16 Suman Gupta, ‘Indian ‘Commercial’ Fiction in English, the Publishing
Industry, and Youth Culture,’ Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 46, no.
5, 2012, pp. 46–53, 47.
17 Ibid., p. 46.
18 Priya Joshi, ‘Chetan Bhagat: Remaking the Novel in India,’ in A History
of the Indian Novel in English, ed. Ulka Anjaria. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2015, pp. 310–323, 314.
19 For the launch of Scion of Ikshvaku, Kotak bank released debit cards
imprinted with the novel’s front cover image (see www.kotak.com/sites/
default/files/press_release/dr_card_soi_tweet_to_order_30june15.pdf).
20 Gupta, ‘Indian “Commercial” Fiction in English.’
21 Scott McCracken, Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction. Manchester: Manches-
ter University Press, 1998, p. 185.
22 Ibid., p. 17 (original emphasis).
23 Ibid., p. 17.
24 Although this is beginning to change as Indian publishers seek more global
distribution for their catalogues or partner with distributors in the UK or
US, as examples.
25 I'm using the term ‘original’ here to keep the discussion more managable
as it is outside the scope of this chapter to discuss the many iterations of
the Ramayana, for example, see instead: A.K. Ramanujan's essays on the
same.
26 Narayanan, Pradyumna, p. 146.
27 Ibid., p. 148.
28 Ibid., pp. 10, 120, 126, 213, 311 (as examples).
29 Ibid., pp. 6, 7, 98 (as examples).
30 Ibid., pp. 35, 61, 81, 178, 209 (as examples).
31 Ibid., p. 192.
32 Ibid., p. 280.
33 Tripathi, Scion of Ikshvaku, p. 265.
34 Ibid., p. 266.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid., p. 267.
37 Ibid., p. 266.
38 Ibid., p. 234.
39 Ibid., p. 225.
40 Ibid., p. 290.
41 Ibid., pp. 92, 207.
42 Ibid., p. 290.
43 Ibid., p. 276.
44 Ibid., p. 220.
45 Ibid., p. 215.
46 Ibid., p. 115, 116, 118.
47 Ibid., pp. 142–143.
48 Ibid., p. 144.
49 Ibid., p. 42.
50 Arni, The Missing Queen, p. 11.
51 Ibid., pp. 21, 22.

157
 E . D awson V arughese

52 Ibid., p. 22.
53 Ibid., pp. 119–120.
54 Ibid., p. 120.
55 I am careful here not to suggest that Indian readers are not global read-
ers themselves; rather I am trying to separate out, for the purposes of this
essay, ideas of non-Indian readers (or readers with little/no knowledge of
the Indian epics) and Indian readers as consumers of ‘mythology-inspired’
fiction in English.
56 Rajiv Malhotra, Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Univer-
salism. New Delhi, HarperCollins Publishers India, 2013, p. 63.
57 Ibid.

158
 9
EXPANDING WORLD OF
INDIAN ENGLISH FICTION
The Mahabharata retold in Krishna
Udayasankar’s The Aryavarta Chronicles
and Amruta Patil’s Adi Parva

Chinmay Sharma

The Indian English publishing industry has seen a huge boom in read-
ership and book production, driven largely by genre fiction. A signifi-
cant portion of cultural production in genre fiction and graphic novels
draws on Hindu mythology as readily accessible source stories for an
English-educated, middle-class, Indian and/or Hindu audience. This
is an important development in the field of Indian English publishing.
Not only does this signify an expansion in the repertoire of genres
published in Indian English, but also shows how Indian authors and
artists retell Hindu mythology in new and innovative ways, creating
story-worlds removed from the already established visual and aesthetic
regimes of Hindu devotionality. This essay delves into and unpacks
both the expanding worlds of and in Indian English publishing.
To better understand how Hindu mythology is adapted in post-
millennial Indian English literature, I compare and contrast two works
that retell the Mahabharata – Krishna Udayasankar’s science fiction
fantasy Aryavarta Chronicles1 and Amruta Patil’s graphic novel Adi
Parva: Churning of the Ocean.2 While the two are from different genres,
they are a part of the mythological wave in Indian English publishing.
Liberalisation in the 1990s had a huge impact on the Indian English
publishing industry, expanding the infrastructure of Indian English pub-
lishing, as well as the horizons of possibilities for new genres in the field.
The first wave of Indian English science fiction and fantasy (SFF) started
appearing around 2003, with Hindu myths being utilised to different

159
 C hinmay S harma

effects and varying degrees in the works of Ashok Banker and Samit
Basu.3 Despite their initial success, Banker and Basu moved away from
mythological fantasy and the trope seemed to have fizzled out.4 It would
be Amish Tripathi, a finance sector professional from Mumbai, who
would force English publishers to reconsider mythological genre fiction
as a profitable commercial fiction genre in the Indian book market, set-
ting off a bigger second wave of mythological genre fiction in Indian
English. A graduate of one of the top business schools in India, Amish
self-published the first volume in his Meluha trilogy, The Immortals of
Meluha, centred on the figure of the Hindu renunciate god, Shiva.5 In
the initial run, distributed by Chennai-based Westland books, Immor-
tals of Meluha sold 30,000 copies. By 2013, Amish had sold 350,000
copies – a number unheard of in the Indian English publishing industry.6
Intersections and overlaps between mythological retellings and genres
like fantasy, science fiction (SF) and speculative fiction (spec-fic) have
led to questions about how to define the genres themselves. Debates
range over whether SF and fantasy are Western genres transplanted into
India or can be recovered in South Asian traditions.7 Publishers’ clas-
sifications add a further layer of complication to this debate. Given the
lack of comprehensible data about the publishing industry or its reader-
ship, classifying books into genres can be arbitrary. For instance, while
Chronicles is classified as ‘General & Literary Fiction’ by Hachette
India, separate from their SFF list, the Goodreads page lists the books
under ‘Mythology, Fantasy and Historical Fiction.’8
To clarify these debates, it is important to note that both Emma
D. Varughese and Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay argue for contextual-
ising genres when analysing Indian science fiction (SF) and fantasy.
Chattopadhyay argues that by situating these texts within the histori-
cal matrices of influences and production, opening the conversation
to include both non-Anglocentric traditions and a dialectic between
the local and universal.9 Varughese coins the term ‘Bharati fantasy’
to define Indian SF and fantasy that uses Hindu myths as their source
stories. She argues that what is called ‘fantasy’ in the West, in the sense
of otherworldliness – like the avatar cycle of the Hindu god Vishnu –
would be ‘real’ for an Indian audience.10 Not only does the oeuvre
tread the line between SF and fantasy but, according to her, could
also be categorised as historical fiction.11 However, as Chattopadhyay
points out, ‘one could also talk about how a term such as “Bharati,”
meaning “Indian,” but which has its own genealogy . . . is now norma-
tively tied to Hindu nationalism.’12 My concern with the term ‘Bharati
fantasy’ is that it uncritically accepts the appropriation of Hindu
mythology as Indian history, and locates the origin of these myths

160
 E xpanding world of I ndian E nglish fiction

in Sanskrit texts. Varughese rightly points out that the categories of

mythology and history are often blurred in South Asian literary tradi-
tions, suggesting that mythology is received as history presumes that
readers respond to the text as such. Varughese’s assumption is based
on the fact that the ‘astonishing’ aspects of myths – like a four-armed
blue-skinned god – will be ‘historical’ for Hindu believers. However,
it is possible to argue that in fact the figure of the four-armed blue-
skinned god, even if it is a part of the Hindu belief system, is meant
to be seen with a sense of astonishment and wonder within the visual
regime of darshan.13 Furthermore, in her more recent work, Varughese
seems to locate the source of Hindu myths within the Sanskrit corpus.
However, as A.K. Ramanujan observes with regards to the ramkatha
tradition (narrative traditions centred around the Hindu god Rama),
Hindu myths rarely travel from Sanskrit.14 This does not however pre-
clude the possibility (and often reality) of an author seeking to link
their text to a supposed Sanskrit original without having necessarily
used or even read the Sanskrit text.
I argue in this chapter that Krishna Udayasankar’s Chronicles and
Amruta Patil’s Adi Parva show how authors within the mythological
wave retell Hindu myths by strategically appropriating and using genre
motifs, in line with their specific project. I argue that Chronicles seeks
to re-frame the supernatural aspects of the Mahabharata narrative
within a recreated fantasy world as Udayasankar tries to re-imagine
mythological figures in a contemporary consensus reality, exploiting
the overlaps between the inclination to astound in SF, fantasy, spe-
cific and Hindu mythology. Adi Parva, on the other hand, seeks to
strategically recover stories and characters marginalised by norma-
tive Mahabharata retellings in popular culture. In doing so, as with
Udayasankar, Patil actively breaks from the visual regime popularised
by comic books, screen mythologicals et al. which in its turn drew on
darshan, creating a work full of densely intertextual palimpsests.

The Aryavarta Chronicles

Krishna Udayasankar’s Aryavarta Chronicles trilogy retells the cen-
tral Pandava narrative of the Mahabharata by re-creating the super-
natural elements of the narrative within a speculative world utilizing
tropes and motifs from science fiction (SF) and fantasy genres. Such
a re-creation is in marked contrast with popular retellings in televi-
sion, calendar art and popular comic books which utilise devotional
aesthetics to create the religious spectacle, as well as Hindi literature
which seeks to rationalise the supernatural. Chronicles instead utilises

161
 C hinmay S harma

the common impulse in these genres to astound along with the some-
times blurry and overlapping genre boundaries between SF, fantasy
and speculative fiction (spec-fic) genres to frame the retelling.
Genre definition of and boundaries between SF, fantasy and spec-fic
are subject to continuous debates and dilemmas. A prescriptive defini-
tion runs the risk of becoming too restrictive, while an open-ended
description opens up spaces for confusing overlaps between the differ-
ent genres. As a result Farah Mendelsohn has argued with regards to
SF that it ‘is less a genre – a body of writing from which one can expect
certain plot elements and specific tropes – than an ongoing discussion,’
proposing that SF is a mode rather than a genre.15 Paul Kincaid simi-
larly suggests that this ongoing discussion be seen within the frame-
work of Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘family resemblances’, arguing that
the process of delimiting SF is an ongoing process that goes through
several iterations.16 Drawing from these suggestions, I would suggest
that looking at retellings of Hindu mythology as an ongoing discus-
sion between the source story and SF, fantasy and speculative fiction
genres.
As I mention above, one overlapping element of the three genres
is the intention to astound, although this takes different forms. For
instance, Darko Suvin, defines SF as

a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are

the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition,
and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework
alternative to the author’s empirical environment.17

Suvin makes the point that estrangement is ‘both . . . underlying atti-

tude and dominant formal device’ for SF and myths, but unlike myths
(and fantasy), SF is aware of the norms of the age as mutable and
contingent, and therefore is cognitive. Thus while SF and fantasy both
work through estrangement, fantasy and myths do not include cogni-
tion. Furthermore, Suvin argues that SF shares the temporal horizons
of naturalistic literature, while myth and folklore are located out-
side time. While the above typology might suggest rigid boundaries
between the two, this might not always the case. The entry for ‘Fan-
tasy’ on the online The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, begins by stat-
ing that, ‘There is no definition of SF that excludes fantasy, other than
prescriptive definitions.’18 Instead, they define fantasy as

First . . . all SF is fantasy . . . but not all fantasy is SF. . .

[S]econd is that, because natural law is something we come

162
 E xpanding world of I ndian E nglish fiction

to understand only gradually, over centuries, and which we

continue to rewrite, the SF of one period regularly becomes
the fantasy of the next. What we regard as natural or possible
depends upon the consensus reality of a given culture; but the
idea of consensus reality itself is an ideal, not an absolute: in
practice there are as many realities as there are human con-
sciousnesses. A reader who believes in astrology will allow
certain fictions to be SF that an astronomer would exclude.
Although the point is seldom made, it could be said that the
particular consensus reality to which SF aspires is that of the
scientific community.19

However, as the above definition from the Encyclopedia hints, even

within the age, consensus reality is rarely objective in its totality. Con-
sensus reality can differ not just temporally, but from context to con-
text within the same temporal point.
If the boundaries between SF and fantasy can blur, spec-fic was even
closer to SF, originally used in referring to fiction that ‘extrapolate[ed]
from known science and technology “to produce a new situation, a
new framework for human action.” ’20 However, since then spec-fic
has de-emphasised the role of extrapolation of science and technol-
ogy.21 Consequently Margaret Atwood writes that speculative fiction
‘invents nothing we haven’t already invented or started to invent.
Every novel begins with a what if and then sets forth its axioms.’22
The Chronicles trilogy seeks to frame the Mahabharata in a con-
temporary sensibility, using that to speculate not about the future (like
SF or specific), but about an alternative past. Udayasankar builds the
consensus reality for Chronicles through research, by taking a step
back in history. She imagines an alternative point in time when the
events of the Mahabharata could have taken place and populates it
with contexts extrapolated from known science, technology, history,
culture and politics from her own contemporary consensus reality.
Consciously blurring myth and history, Udaysankar calls this mytho-
history. Expanding upon the concept, Udayasankar writes

To the gathered scholars at Naimisha, that story [Jaya or

Mahabharata] was neither ancient nor mythological. It was
itihasa, or history. Jaya was undeniably a tale of its time, and
just as posterity elevated the great men of that time and saw
them as gods, so too was the story’s context adapted and
its reality turned into metaphor. In order to go behind the
metaphor, and to tell the tale as mytho-history rather than

163
 C hinmay S harma

mythology, the essential question that came to my mind was:

If Govinda and all the other characters of this grand narrative
had walked the world as we know it today, bound by our lan-
guage and constructions, our common perception of physics,
psychology and politics, what might their story really have
been? Surprisingly, at its core it may not have been very dif-
ferent from the one that took form millennia ago during the
conclave of Naimisha.23

Udayasankar further clarifies in personal correspondence:

My intent is to challenge the dominant view, not by setting

up antithetical counter-stories, but by reconstructing plausi-
ble narratives. The difference is important to me: the former
serves to deconstruct the beliefs and mores around us, it also
helps argue that these mores may be outdated or inapplicable
in today’s times but does not challenge the premise in its own
time.24

Blurring mythology and history is not new to South Asian literary

traditions. South Asian literary traditions in different languages and
eras have tended to liberally blur genre distinctions between aitihasik
(historic) and pauranik (mythological).25 Moreover, in colonial India,
the act of blurring these genre distinctions was an intentionally politi-
cal act. Sudipta Kaviraj notes that Indian nationalists saw ‘ancient’
Indic texts and corpora as historical and cultural archive of the Indian
nation. For Indian nationalists in the colonial period,

The history of India [was] inscribed in archives of a different

kind, the archives of its intellectual history, the Ramayana, the
Mahabharata and the Buddhist scriptures, for these reveal[ed]
the basic trends of Indian history: they [were] less factual
records, as dominant and popularly accepted interpretations
of what happened. They operate[d] not at the level of ‘mere
fact’, but of historical ‘truth’.26

By blurring the lines between myth and history, Udayasankar seems to

be paralleling genre conventions commonly found in Indian language
literatures. Her intention in ‘rationalising’ narrative contexts also
parallels modern pauranik literature in Indian languages. However,
pauranik literature tends to delve into the psyche of the mythological
characters, fleshing them out as realistic characters. Udayasankar does

164
 E xpanding world of I ndian E nglish fiction

the same but only to an extent. Instead her rationalising approach

rejects ‘supernatural events, interpolations and “events that can be
proved to be untrue in any other way”,’ emphasising instead socio-
economic contexts, especially technoculture.27
Chronicles ‘extrapolates from known science and technology “to
produce a new situation, a new framework for human action” ’ and
construct its consensus reality.28 Technology and technoculture are the
fulcrums of her text. An important crux of the plot is the hoarding of
technical and technological expertise amongst the Firewrights. The first
novel begins after an unspecified apocalyptic event caused by the Fire-
wrights leaves the Matsya kingdom barren and divested of its former
power. Since then smaller empires rise up, driven by exploiting fugitive
Firewrights. Thus, the Firewright sect, bestowed with scientific knowl-
edge, become the source of power. The first book, Govinda, focuses on
Govinda Shauri’s machinations to break the control of emperors over
the Firewrights and force the secretive sect itself to share their techni-
cal knowledge and its fruits. The iconic burning of the Khandav forest
to clear the ground for the Pandava capital Indraprastha is reworked
in Govinda to become an act of creative destruction. The forest burn-
ing is a statement of military prowess and innovation:

Panchali noticed that these were not the usual arrows archers
used – these were flint-tipped. The shaft of the arrow, too, was
larger than usual, no doubt to give it greater thrust to reach its
target. Her eyes narrowed as she realised that the metal itself
looked different; it was a lot lighter and shinier than the dull
iron that was mostly used.29

The focus of the narrative is not so much on the actual burning of the
forest, but on the technology that made it possible and the political
machinations that necessitated such an action. The burning of the for-
est is disclosed as Govinda’s ploy to establish a power-base for Dharma,
while at the same time forcing the Nagas to migrate and barter their
knowledge for livelihood. A similar exercise takes place with doctors
in Kashi – razing Kashi to the ground leads to the doctors migrating
and furthering the dissemination of medical knowledge. Technology,
technological change and the desire to disseminate knowledge widely
provide motivations to drive the narrative, while also grounding the
more spectacular parts of the narrative within a consensus reality.
At the heart of Udayasankar’s retelling is a speculative element:
what if mythological figures were bound by the logic of our contempo-
rary consensus reality, be it politics, economy or technology? Blurring

165
 C hinmay S harma

history and mythology is not uncommon in South Asian literary tradi-

tions, especially if it is in the service of making ‘traditional’ stories rel-
evant to new contexts and audiences. Udayasankar turns this around
by using a ‘new’ context to contextualise the actual story itself.
Breaking from ‘traditional’ stories means breaking from ‘traditional’
norms of re-presenting Hindu mythologicals, especially in screen cul-
tures in calendar art, Parsi theatre, films, television and comic books.
Breaking from these norms, Udayasankar uses the fantasy motif of
basing her story in a time alternative to the real-world timeline, while
also using the SF convention of cognition selectively to delve into
imagined socio-political contexts and technoculture.

Adi Parva
Published by HarperCollins India, Amruta Patil’s graphic novel Adi
Parva seeks to recover ‘marginal’ stories against the ‘dominant’ nar-
rative of the Mahabharata. As an independent artist publishing with
a large multinational publishing company, Patil experiments with
creating story-worlds in retellings of the Mahabharata, with dense
inter-textual, palimpsestic visuals which break with the popular ico-
nographies of gods prevalent in commercial books. I should note
before I begin, that in this essay I refer to commercial comic art as
comic books, and to independent comic art as graphic novels.
Comic books, an intermittently successful commercial enterprise in
India, are no strangers to the business of retelling Indian mythology
and history. The Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) comic book series, espe-
cially, was a dominant publisher of stories from Indian history and
Hindu myths.30 It played a significant role in determining the domi-
nant and popular iconography of gods, drawing on iconography that
had already been circulating in calendar art, Parsi theatre and Hindu
mythological films.31 Nandini Chandra, charting ACK’s historical and
aesthetic journey, argues that while different artistes brought their
regional and professional aesthetics into the making of the ACK com-
ics, the in-house aesthetic style was homogenised into the ‘Raja Ravi
Verma aesthetic’ under Anant Pai’s editorial leadership.32
While ACK’s slow demise in the 1990s left a gap in the Indian comic
book market, it continues to exert a huge influence on the aesthetics
and marketing of Indian comic books. Publishers like Campfire comics
have undertaken a similar project of introducing myths and history to
an Indian audience.33 In contrast, Liquid Comics, established as Virgin
Comics by Sir Richard Branson, Deepak Chopra and Shekhar Kapur,
was set up to create a collaborative system of production that focused

166
 E xpanding world of I ndian E nglish fiction

on retelling Asian mythic narratives to a ‘global’ (read: American)

audience. While both sell comics at slightly higher prices than ACK
comics, the production value is much higher than ACK. The quality
of art is more in line with the modern age of comic books published
by Marvel, DC and Dark Horse, but the iconography of gods and
mythological characters remains in line with the ACK aesthetic. Liq-
uid Comics overlays the iconography of gods (and the narrative itself)
with SF and fantasy motifs: series like Devi (2006), Ramayana 3392
AD (2006–07) and the aborted Grant Morrison’s 18 Days. Devi was
a story about the Hindu female divine power/goddess and her mod-
ern mortal re-incarnation, Tara Mehta, written by Samit Basu, among
others. Ramayana 3392 AD and its sequel Ramayana Reloaded re-
told the Ramayana in a post-apocalyptic world with futuristic weap-
ons. However, neither Campfire nor Liquid Comics have succeeded in
replicating the success and impact of the ACK comic books.
The market for comic books and graphic novels in India thus
remains niche and small. However, the entry of established publish-
ing houses like Penguin India and HarperCollins India, along with
newly established, ideologically driven publishing houses and institu-
tionally funded projects, has led to the rise of a new kind of author:
the independent graphic novelist. The economic security afforded to
an established publishing house with profitable back and front lists
allows them relative freedom to experiment with authors and gen-
res they choose to publish. Ideologically driven publishing houses are
less concerned about the commercial cost and more so with articulat-
ing specific social messages instead. Institutionally funded works are
similarly unconcerned with revenue, and often distribute texts free of
cost.34 As a result, graphic novels have a certain amount of freedom to
be critical in their intervention and experimental in their art. Though
often priced much higher than comic books, they focus on social issues
and lived realities of India, often seeking to question established hier-
archies and discourses of power, while also creating space for experi-
menting with author-artist collaborations as well as panel formats and
narrative styles.
Published by HarperCollins India, Amruta Patil’s Adi Parva is a
276-page-long book in hardcover with glossy paper inside, and sig-
nificantly more expensive than commercial comic books and thus out
of the commercial market. It sells at a before-discount price of around
Rs. 800, more than four times the price of a single issue by Campfire
(assuming a price of Rs. 195, though it varies with retailer discounts)
and roughly sixteen times the price of an ACK single issue (priced at
Rs. 45–50).

167
 C hinmay S harma

Rather than a linear storyline, Adi Parva has two diegetic levels.
There is the narrative retelling of episodes from the Mahabharata in
no particular chronological or teleological order, and then there is the
meta-narrative framing the Mahabharata narrative, as a woman, later
revealed to be the divine Ganga, narrates the Mahabharata to a vil-
lage audience. The Adi Parva moves back and forth between these
two levels, progressing thematically rather than on the basis of action.
The levels are visually distinguished by the use of lines and colours,
emphasising the difference in tone and spatio-temporality of the story
and the storytelling space. Adi Parva uses the first two chapters of the
book to establish both diegetic spaces and levels – one, alive, internal,
intertextual palimpsest filled with deep colours story-world, and the
other, external, smudged, mundane and charcoal grey.
The first chapter, entitled ‘Sutradhar,’ begins from the end of the
Kurukshetra war (and thus the Mahabharata narrative), even though
the narrative will then shift back to cosmic origins later. The first panel
opens on a vulture, following it for four more panels before panning
out to show white figures with ultramarine outlines (as opposed to
solid black outlines) as corpses and mourners. Various shades of blood
red fill the background. Page five especially resembles blood cells in a
blood vessel. The white figures and the red background transform into
blood platelets before we reach the last page of the chapter, a full-page
panel. On the top left corner is the head and torso of a dead man,
bleeding from his head. Patil visually establishes blood at the centre of
her narrative. Throughout the rest of the chapter we see anchoring text
bubbles from an unknown narrator, handwritten, with no emphasis.
The chapter is influenced by Patil’s ‘reading’ of Paul Gaugin’s Vision
after the Sermon, which inspired her to experiment with different
shades of red and contrast them with ultramarine blues.35
The next chapter, titled ‘Ferry-point,’ shown above, introduces the
narrator and her spatial setting – the temporal setting remains indis-
tinct, it could be a thousand years ago, or conversely, it could be now,
but it is night in an Indian village. The establishing panel is a full-page
illustration of a man standing in front of the cow. In the background,
we see a tree with figures around it and the moon shining in the sky.
A friend in the second panel, contemplating stealing the cow, stops
when a woman joins them in the next panel. The woman tells the men
to listen to her instead as she sits beneath the tree and tells a story.
The next panel is again full-page, showing us that this scene is set
on a shore with beached boats, and the narrative speech bubble tells
us that King Janamejaya’s snake sacrifice (where the Mahabharata is
narrated) is underway in the distant horizon. The lines on both these

168
 E xpanding world of I ndian E nglish fiction

levels are never strong black outlines common in American superhero

comic books. Thick lines in the coloured panels are usually different
shades of blue, ranging from the blue that verges on black to ultrama-
rine.36 Shortly into the text the woman narrating the story is revealed
to be Ganga, the divine mother of the Kuru patriarch Bhishma. A silent
and marginal presence in the Mahabharata, Ganga’s re-working as the
narrator in Adi Parva establishes the graphic novel as an alternative
to the male-dominated recital for a royal elite in Janamejaya’s sacri-
fice. Ganga becomes, quite literally, the Sutradhara – the holder of
threads – as she recovers stories and moments from the margins of the
Mahabharata and reads them in tandem with and in contrast to the
‘big’ stories.
The external world is grey, smudged, out of focus, but also at the
same time, more irreverent. The irreverence establishes the subversive
tone of narration as the narrative is set in contrast to the epic narration
taking place at Janamejaya’s sacrifice. The inner world of the Mahab-
harata retelling, on the other hand, is a lush, intertextual palimpsest
that breaks from the visual regime established by ACK and the calen-
dar art for retelling Hindu myth. Patil’s experimentation with colour-
ing and comic panels draws from different aesthetic traditions, mostly
Western fine art, with a few Indian fine arts and folk art influences too.
In her acknowledgements, Patil writes,

Dead men taught me to paint . . . Odilon Redon, Paul Gau-

guin, Paul Cezanne, those anonymous hands at work in
Rajasthani miniature painting workshops. Dead women flow
in my veins as creative mothers: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky,
Frida Kahlo, Amrita Sher-Gil.37

In her podcasts Gauguin, Matisse, Pierre Bonnard and Paul Sérusier

are highlighted as major influences.
However, these influences are not meant as works of simple imita-
tion. Patil plays with her influences and materials in different ways,
but most notably by creating palimpsest illustrations creating a dense
intertextual play between her illustrations, original materials and/or
visual allusions. For instance, she paints over magazine pages with
the contents of the page still visible. Elsewhere in her novel, magazine
pages are cut up and joined together before being painted over selec-
tively. She also creates pastiche panels with allusion ranging from Boti-
celli’s Birth of Venus and Henri Matisse’s Dance, to the works of Vogue
India photographer Prabuddha Dasgupta.38 The central motif of her
work, the churning of the ocean, also known as the amrit-manthan,

169
 C hinmay S harma

is a palimpsest of visual motifs from Taschen’s collection of Chinese

propaganda posters and Egyptian iconography. In the image, Lak-
shmi emerges from the churning with Hathoric horns over her and
the mythical snake Ananta transformed into a Chinese dragon.39 The
surface in a sense is flat in that there is no deeper significance to the
palimpsest than visual intertextuality. On the other hand, the surface
itself comes alive with hitherto unseen combinations of visual images
and allusions coming together in representing a mythological narra-
tive. Patil thus seems to be visually enacting breaking from the ACK,
calendar art and screen mythological visual regimes to come up with a
visual regime organic to her own narrative.
Patil’s break from the ACK visual regime is mirrored by and bolsters
her narrative intent. Her Adi Parva is not meant to be an exhaus-
tive retelling of the Mahabharata. It is, instead, a strategic recovery of
marginal and marginalised characters from Mahabharata retellings in
comic art and television serials. As Patil writes,

All too often, the Mahabharat is reduced to the sum total of

two things – the fratricidal battle between the Kuru princes
and the battlefield dialogue between the avatar, Krishna, and
his protégé Arjun . . . The real scope of the Mahabharat, how-
ever, extends a good distance either side of these events.40

Patil seeks to recover Mahabharata stories from a different focal point,

and with a different aesthetic than what has become the norm in popu-
lar mythological retellings. She specifically seeks to zoom in on the
‘mahabharatan equivalent of “huh?” and “why me?” and “who is
she?” ’ moments.41 Using both narrative and visual elements in tan-
dem, she creates a vibrant internal story-world, set against a mundane
and irreverent external world.

Conclusion
The mythological wave in Indian English publishing seems to have
subsided to the extent that it is no longer a wave to be remarked upon,
but an integral part of the field of Indian English publishing. The sur-
est sign of this is perhaps Amish’s continued dominance in book sales
in the Indian English book market, this time with the latest iteration of
his Ram Chandra series (retelling the Ramayana). As of June, Amish’s
Sita: Warrior of Mithila (2017) tops the Amazon India bestseller book
list, with Arundhati Roy’s second novel, Ministry of Utmost Happiness
(2017) coming in at second.42 There are other signs too – apart from

170
 E xpanding world of I ndian E nglish fiction

Amish, works on Hindu mythology and mythologicals by authors

like Devdutt Pattanaik and Anand Neelakanthan feature in the best-
seller book list. Amruta Patil too has published the second novel in
her Mahabharata and recently announced a collaborative project with
Devdutt Pattanaik.
The story-worlds that Udayasankar and Patil create show the dif-
ferent ways in which Indian authors seek to retell Hindu mythology.
While the two authors are appropriating Hindu myths, they also tend
to critically engage with not just their source material, but also their
respective genre conventions, even if it is to reject them. In doing so,
they create and add to the available alternatives to the devotional
darshan aesthetic that has been an integral part of popular and com-
mercial Hindu mythological retellings. Their readers are in no dan-
ger of mistaking their source stories as historical fact or fiction, let
alone devotional representation. This also shows that Indian English
authors tend to work with a vast range of influences even if they seem
to explicitly mention only English-language textual sources. Further-
more, not only are they working with broad frames of reference that
include Western fine art, Indian fine and folk arts, historical studies
et al., but in pursuing projects that seek to retell Hindu mythology in
new contexts, their inclinations and projects show remarkable conti-
nuities and discontinuities, knowingly or unknowingly, with similar
projects in Indian languages and literatures.

Notes
1 Krishna Udayasankar, The Aryavarta Chronicles. New Delhi: Hachette
India, 2012–2014.
2 Patil, Amruta, Adi Parva: Churning of the Ocean. Noida: HarperCollins
Publishers India a joint venture by The India Today Group, 2012.
3 While Banker’s adaptation is about taking the central spine of the story
and utilising different genre tropes, Basu comes up with a unique storyline
for his narrative and then layers it with different literary allusions, includ-
ing ones to Mahabharata and Harry Potter. For a list see, Ankur Baner-
jee, ‘References in Samit Basu’s ‘The Simoquin Prophecies’ | Needlessly
Messianic.’ www.ankurb.info/2008/07/18/references-in-samit-basus-the-
simoquin-prophecies/. Accessed 1 March 2016.
4 Banker has branched into other genres and started working with other
publishers and/or self-publishing. Only recently has he returned to the
mythology with his MBA series (re-telling the Mahabharata) published by
Westland publishers.
5 Amish Tripathi, The Immortals of Meluha, ed. Shiva Trilogy. Chennai:
Westland Press, 2010.
6 Kumar 2013 in Emma Dawson Varughese, ‘Celebrate at Home: Post-
Millennial Indian Fiction in English and the Reception of “Bharati

171
 C hinmay S harma

Fantasy” in Global and Domestic Literary Markets,’ Contemporary South

Asia, 7 October 2014, p. 4, doi:10.1080/09584935.2014.963513.
7 Sami Ahmad, Khan, ‘Science Fiction Feature Editorial: Sami Ahmad Khan.’
www.museindia.com/viewarticle.asp?myr=2015&issid=61&id=5757.
Accessed 29 August 2016.
8 ‘HACHETTE.’ www.hachetteindia.com/TitleDetails.aspx?titleId=44915.
Accessed 19 July 2015. ‘Goodreads | Govinda (The Aryavarta Chroni-
cles, #1) by Krishna Udayasankar – Reviews, Discussion, Bookclubs,
Lists.’ www.goodreads.com/book/show/15823163-govinda. Accessed 18
March 2016.
9 Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, ‘Recentering Science Fiction and the Fan-
tastic: What Would a Non-Anglocentric Understanding of Science Fic-
tion and Fantasy Look Like?’ Section 4, para 12. www.strangehorizons.
com/2013/20130923/1chattopadhyay-a.shtml. Accessed 15 August 2015.
10 Emma Dawson Varughese, Reading New India. London and New Delhi:
Bloomsbury, 2013, pp. 124–125.
11 Emma Dawson Varughese, ‘Celebrate at Home: Post-Millennial Indian
Fiction in English and the Reception of “Bharati Fantasy” in Global and
Domestic Literary Markets,’ pp. 2–3; Varughese, Reading New India,
pp. 123–136.
12 Chattopadhyay, ‘Strange Horizons Articles,’ Section 4, para 9.
13 Chris Pinney argues that darshan – specifically the act of seeing and being
seen by the deity – is integral in the way gods are presented in calendar
art. He argues that ‘[d]arshan’s mode of interaction . . . mobilises vision
as part of a unified human sensorium, and visual interaction can be trans-
formative.’ Christopher Pinney, Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image
and Political Struggle in India. London: Reaktion Books, 2004, p. 9.
14 A.K. Ramanujan, The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan, ed. Vinay
Dharwadker. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 134.
15 Farah Mendlesohn, ‘Introduction,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Sci-
ence Fiction, ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2003, p. 1.
16 Paul Kincaid, ‘On the Origins of Genre,’ in Speculations on Speculation,
ed. James Gunn and Matthew Candelaria. Oxford: Scarecrow Press, 2005,
pp. 47–48.
17 Darko Suvin, ‘Estrangement and Cognition,’ in Speculations on Specula-
tion, ed. James Gunn and Matthew Candelaria. Oxford: Scarecrow Press,
2005, p. 27.
18 ‘Themes: Fantasy: SFE: Science Fiction Encyclopedia,’ Para 1. www.sf-
encyclopedia.com/entry/fantasy. Accessed 17 March 2016.
19 Ibid., Para 4.
20 Eshbach and Heinlein 1947 in ‘Themes: Speculative Fiction: SFE : Science
Fiction Encyclopedia,’ Para 1. http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/speculative_
fiction. Accessed 17 March 2016.
21 ‘Themes : Speculative Fiction : SFE : Science Fiction Encyclopedia,’ Para
2.
22 P.L. Thomas, ed., Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction: Challenging
Genres, vol. 3, Critical Literacy Teaching Series: Challenging Authors and
Genre. Rotterdam, Boston and Taipei: Sense Publishers, 2013, p. 3.

172
 E xpanding world of I ndian E nglish fiction

23 Krishna Udayasankar, Govinda, The Aryavarta Chronicles, Book 1. New

Delhi: Hachette India, 2012, pp. v–vi.
24 Krishna Udayasankar, ‘Intros- Personal Correspondence,’ 18 March 2016.
25 See for instance Pamela Lothspeich, Epic Nation: Reimagining the Mahab-
harata in the Age of the Empire. New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2009, p. 28; Kathryn Hansen, ‘Ritual Enactments in a Hindi “Mytho-
logical” Betab’s Mahabharat in Parsi Theatre,’ Economic and Political
Weekly, vol. 41, no. 48, 2006, 4985–4991.
26 Sudipta Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chat-
topadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India. Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 122.
27 Udayasankar, Govinda, pp. 450–451.
28 Eshbach and Heinlein 1947 in ‘Themes: Speculative Fiction: SFE: Science
Fiction Encyclopedia,’ Para 1.
29 Udayasankar, Govinda, p. 213.
30 One million copies were sold in 1981. Sales figures grew for a while, reach-
ing a peak in 1986–1987, before declining drastically to 28,000 copies by
September 1992. Nandini Chandra, The Classic Popular: Amar Chitra
Katha, 1967–2007. New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2008, p. 222. Apart from
ACK, there were also popular comic publishers like Diamond Comics and
Raj Comics that published the immensely popular Chacha Chaudhary
series by Pran and Anupam Sinha’s Super Commando Dhruv. Rimi B.
Chatterjee, ‘Frame/Works: How India Tells Stories in Comics and Graphic
Novels,’ in Writing India Anew, ed. Krishna Sen and Rituparna Roy, vol.
17, ICAS Publication Series. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,
2013, p. 208. See Debroy, ‘The Graphic Novel in India: East Transforms
West,’ 35–6 for a list of comic series by Indian publishers.
31 See for instance, Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian
Calendar Art. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007; Pinney,
Photos of the Gods; Rachel Dwyer, Filming the Gods: Religion and Indian
Cinema. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.
32 Chandra, The Classic Popular: Amar Chitra Katha, 1967–2007, pp. 4,5,87.
33 These include titles like Krishna: Defender of Dharma, The Offering: The
Story of Ekalavya and Dronacharya et al. Chatterjee, ‘Frame/Works: How
India Tells Stories in Comics and Graphic Novels,’ p. 212; ‘Campfire.’
www.campfire.co.in/. Accessed 29 February 2016.
34 Thus ‘the first recognised Indian graphic novel is The River of Sto-
ries (1994) by Orijit Sen’ is about ‘the Narmada Bachao Andolan, the
decade-long protest against the Sardar Sarovar Dam Project’ published
by Kalpavriksh, an environment action group. The first self-professed
Indian graphic novel, Sarnath Bannerjee’s Corridor (2005) was published
by Penguin India. Varughese, Reading New India, p. 138; Chatterjee,
‘Frame/Works: How India Tells Stories in Comics and Graphic Novels,’
p. 209; Kalpavriksh, ‘Books Out of Print Environment & Development.’
http://kalpavriksh.org/index.php/list-of-books/126-home/publications/
list-of-books/books-out-of-print/156-books-out-of-print-environment-
development. Accessed 29 February 2016.
35 Amruta Patil, Adi Parva | Kurukshetra, Jacob Wrestling with an Angel.
https://soundcloud.com/hathoric/adi-parva-kurukshetra-jacob. Accessed
8 June 2017.

173
 C hinmay S harma

36 Amruta Patil, Amruta Patil | Popping Blue Outline. https://soundcloud.

com/hathoric. Accessed 27 March 2016. Patil says in a podcast that she is
interested in popping blue outlines of different French painters like Aude
Samama, Paul Gauguin, Paul Serusier, and Pierre Bonnard.
37 Patil, Adi Parva: Churning of the Ocean, p. 270. In contrast she only cites
one cartoonist as an artistic influence, and her textual references are con-
strained to abridged translations of the Mahabharata in English.
38 Patil, pp. 160, 78, 92. Patil highlights this reference in an interview; see
Chandigarh Literature Festival 2013 Amruta Patil in Conversation with
Deepanjana Pal (Part 2) and Amruta Patil, Amruta Patil | Prabuddha Das-
gupta. https://soundcloud.com/hathoric. Accessed 27 March 2016.
39 Amruta Patil, Amruta Patil | Chinese Propaganda Posters. https://sound-
cloud.com/hathoric. Accessed 27 March 2016.
40 Patil, Adi Parva: Churning of the Ocean, p. 260.
41 Amruta Patil, ‘Umbilical: Questioning the Lord.’ http://amrutapatil.blogs
pot.co.uk/2009/03/format-is-definitely-q.html. Accessed 23 July 2015.
42 Amish Tripathi, Sita: Warrior of Mithila. Chennai: Westland Press, 2017;
Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Delhi: Hamish Ham-
ilton, 2017.

174
 10
WHEN BHIMAYANA ENTERS
THE CLASSROOM. . .

Aratrika Das

In Indian universities, most departments of English literary studies

teach works of William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen,
William Wordsworth, and S.T. Coleridge alongside those of Kalidasa,
Rabindranath Tagore, Kabir, Salman Rushdie, and Om Prakash Val-
miki. The English literature curriculum in most Indian universities
attempts to open itself to those genres of writing that critique the canon-
ical Western ‘classics’.1 This shift in pedagogy, with an emphasis on the
marginal, the subaltern, and the silenced voices, has been instrumental
in incorporating a range of thematic, methodological, and aesthetic pre-
occupations within the English literary studies in contemporary India.
Theoretically, this shift should destabilise the hegemony of colonial
educational practices. However, within an Indian classroom, the rel-
evance of Wordsworth’s poems is seldom dislodged by Kabir’s poems.
This is because the critical tools and methods deployed are invariably
Western. The prescription of texts and the interpretative and reading
practices with which the universities function lend a canonical status to
Wordsworth and consign an ‘otherness’ to Kabir. As Graham Huggan
explains about African literature, the introduction of it is

recuperative insofar as it conscripts the literary text into the

service of a continually refashioned cultural identity: decon-
structive insofar as it plays on and challenges Western read-
erly expectation, and in doing so works towards dismantling
self privileging Western modes of vision and thought.2

For Huggan, the African texts fail to dismantle the dominance of west-
ern preoccupations because they tend to work with and appropriate
western anthropological metaphors. In an Indian classroom, Kabir’s

175
 A ratrika D as

poems evoke an Indian-ness that does not dislodge Wordsworth

because of a similar internalisation of colonial educational processes.
Huggan’s reading, though on African texts, is important for purposes
of this essay because it recognises the unique conjunction of textual
reading practices and the ‘otherness’ that emanates from the regional
location of the reader. This essay looks into the overt and embedded
materiality of a text, in its specific location in an Indian classroom, to
understand its influence in the formation of a curriculum.
I teach courses in English at Ramjas College, University of Delhi.
Since 2015, undergraduates student pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in
English studies (Honours) in University of Delhi reads Durgabai Vyam
and Subhash Vyam’s Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability3 as
part of a compulsory course called ‘Popular Literature’. In the end-
semester examinations, students are often asked to answer questions
based on the nature of Bhimayana as a graphic novel, on the uses
of Gond art to look into Bhim Rao Ambedkar’s life-story, and how
effective graphic art is as a tool to address social and cultural issues.
For students and teachers then, Bhimayana has two concerns: first, as
a literary text that deploys Gond art and comic speech-balloons, and
second, as a retelling of Ambedkar’s autobiography that introduces in
an ‘authentic’ experience of caste atrocities into the classroom. Most
teachers introduce Bhimayana to their students by referencing and
chronicling the history of Gond art, the native tradition of storytelling
by drawing on walls, and the entry of Gond artists into global market.
The choice of a tribal medium of narrativisation (Gond art) within a
global style of composition (graphic novel) to depict the caste-based
atrocities on a Dalit (Ambedkar) becomes the lens through which to
read and teach Bhimayana.4
But Bhimayana is part of a syllabus on ‘popular’ and not part of
units such as ‘Dalit Discourse’ or ‘Dalit Voices’ – courses that look
into the humiliation, indignity, economic and social exclusion caused
by the caste-system in the Indian sub-continent.5 As part of ‘Popular
Literature’, Bhimayana is taught alongside Lewis Carroll’s Through
the Looking Glass,6 Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,7
and Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy8 – novels with no pictorial and
visual element. The rationale to prescribe these novels together, it may
be assumed, is that these novels are ‘popular’ and provide counter-
narratives to the canonical English literary courses taught to the
undergraduates. The institutional assumption is that courses on Brit-
ish poetry and drama, Victorian fiction, nineteenth century, Shake-
speare, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European classical,
modern European drama are traditional English programs. A course

176
 W H E N B H I M AYA N A E N T E R S T H E C L A S S R O O M . . .

with children’s literature, a crime fiction, a Sri Lankan queer narrative,

and a graphic novel will challenge the cultural authority, philosophy,
and ideology of the canonical imperial texts and serve as an alternative
‘popular’ course to the former.
Within this institutional framework, Bhimayana, stylistically and
structurally, ought to embody a rupture through the narrative of
Ambedkar. This is at the heart of what I hope to understand here: what
is ‘popular’ in curriculums of ‘popular literature’? Located at the inter-
sections of art, commercial success, cannon formation, and reading
habits of young adults, is Bhimayana read differently once it becomes
a pedagogical tool? If ‘popular’ denotes a destabilising agent in literary
studies, how do we understand the layers of genre-making that Bhima-
yana participates in once it enters the classroom as ‘popular fiction’?

Bhimayana – the graphic novel

Co-authored by Srividya Natarajan and S. Anand and illustrated
by Pardhan Gond artists Durgabai and Subhash Vyam from eastern
Madhya Pradesh, Bhimayana traces the life of Bhim Rao Ambedkar
in three books titled ‘Water’, ‘Shelter’, and ‘Travel’. The three books
correspond to three distinct phases of Ambedkar’s life and are bor-
rowed from the section ‘Waiting for a Visa’ of Autobiographical
Notes (1990). These three books are framed within a conversation
between two young girls debating on the need for caste-based reserva-
tion. Following the Articles 340, 341, and 342 of the Constitution of
India, caste-based reservation is an affirmative action programme to
protect the oppressed castes against prejudices and social, economic,
and educational discriminatory practices. This policy of reservation
provides people belonging to Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes
(ST), and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) a representation in public
education and employment. Because people belonging to these sec-
tions have been historically denied access to equal opportunity, this
reservation policy seeks to provide social justice to the marginalised
by allocating a specific number of ‘reserved’ seats for the SC, ST, and
OBCs. This affirmative action, however, is vehemently critiqued and
opposed by people belonging to the General category (Brahmins, Ksh-
triyas, and Vaishyas), who comprise about 31% of the population but
represent 70% of higher educated workforce in the public sector.9 This
discrepancy is a result of social, economic, and cultural capital tradi-
tionally bestowed upon people of the General category. Caste-based

177
 A ratrika D as

reservation is often perceived as a tool to perpetuate the system of

caste for vote-bank politics, and as a threat to meritocracy. Bhimayana
tells Ambedkar’s life-story in this context of debate for the need of
caste-based reservation.
The first book, ‘Water’, describes Ambedkar’s experiences as an
‘untouchable’ child in his school. The second book, ‘Shelter’, traces
how despite a doctoral degree in economics from Columbia Univer-
sity and with a job, Ambedkar was denied shelter by Hindus, Parsis,
and Christians in Baroda. The third book, ‘Travel’ looks into Mahad-
Satyagraha, Ambedkar’s differences with Gandhi, and the evolving
political demands of the Depressed Classes (the official term for the
‘untouchables’ during colonial rule).10 Details from Ambedkar’s life
are interspersed with snippets of present-day newspaper reports on
caste discrimination, and his speeches and letters. The framing nar-
rative of the two girls’ debate on reservation ends with a realisation
of the existence of the present-day reality of caste discrimination, vio-
lence, and social exclusion. The final section is an essay ‘A digna for
Bhim’, where Anand discusses the need to use the Gond art.11
Bhimayana requires the teacher to be acquainted with graphic nar-
ratives such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus,12 Alan Moore’s Watchmen,13
Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986),14 and Mar-
jane Satrapi’s Persepolis,15 and that the teacher teaches Bhimayana
as a graphic narrative and not as traditional text-only narrative. The
drawings are central to the words in every page. For example, in the
first story ‘Water’, Ambedkar as a child is denied water in his school.
His body merges with a fish yearning for water (Fig. 1).16 On the very
next page, we see animals are allowed to drink till they ‘burst open’,
but the village becomes a desert when a Dalit seeks water (Fig. 2).17 In
both these drawings, thirst appears through animal imagery – a gap-
ing fish and animals drinking water. Ambedkar’s corporeal frame is
fish-like with scales, and the speech-balloons take on different shapes
depending on the position of the speaker: those in favour of the system
of caste have speech-balloons in the shape of a tail of a scorpion, and
those who question the caste-system speak in a bird or cloud shaped
speech-balloon.
The brief moment when the familiar school compound becomes a
site of oppression to a ten-year-old Ambedkar is an unsettling scene
for most students in my classroom. School ought to be a safe space
but is a constant source of pain for Ambedkar. Rather than a panel
and sequential visual retelling, the blue colour in the second draw-
ing (as opposed to a white page in the former) highlights Ambedkar’s
thirst and subsequent denial. Colours, rather than words, embody the

178
 W H E N B H I M AYA N A E N T E R S T H E C L A S S R O O M . . .

trauma of the ten-year-old Ambedkar. This productive representational

strategy Bhimayana borrows from Gond art (it does not use rectilinear
panels or boxes, and has the narrative dispersed over a whole page).
Inhabiting the more diffused and open narrative mode of the forests,
rivers, and animals that are painted across pages, Ambedkar’s pain
flows – diagonally and horizontally. Gond art becomes an apt form to
represent his pain (rather than rectangular panels) because caste as a
discriminatory practise has obliterated logic, empathy, and rationale.
Only a fragmented, half-fish, half-human frame can accommodate the
thirsty Ambedkar’s body because the very structure of caste has cre-
ated a dislocated subjectivity.
This kind of contrapuntal reading (the blue colour and a fluid draw-
ing spread across several pages as an embodiment of thirsty Ambed-
kar’s pain) is baffling and bewildering to most students because often
they are not acquainted with the Gond art form. Bhimayana there-
fore repeats this expressive strategy as a recognisable trope. During
the Mahad Satyagraha (Fig. 3),18 Ambedkar’s words are like sprinkles
of water. The colour blue is a clue following which the reader traces
continuity from the school compound to the Mahad Satyagraha – a
site of denial that yields protest and reclamation. Further, the political
event of protest is humanised by merging Ambedkar’s face with water-
sprinklers, his speeches and newspaper reports with fishes and water
bodies. The private and personal history of trauma of a ten-year-old
Ambedkar merges with the national struggle for access to water and
Mahad Satyagraha through this merging of the visual and the verbal.
Ambedkar, as the dalit who was denied water, food, and shelter, and
Ambedkar, the Dalit who rewrites the national history by inserting
caste dynamics into the colonial struggle are both embodied within the
oozing blue colour spread across the pages. In this way, Ambedkar’s
individual dalit-ness (a non-negotiable mark imprinted by the system
of caste) and the political history of Dalit existence (systemic prejudice
and injustice that perpetuates a vicious circuit of denial and violence)
is represented through figures that surround Ambedkar – fish, beasts,
water. These images (rather than the text) become the primary means
of telling the life history of an individual and the history of caste.
The frenzied movement of Ambedkar across these pages, from a
ten-year-old who is denied water to an adult who becomes the spokes-
person for the Dalits, reaches the readers through displaced blue colour
that flows across the pages. The readers’ eyes are not drawn to any sin-
gle figure to record this history of pain and denial, but at one glance, to
a series of crowded figures: thirsty boy, an angry looking fish-shaped
hand pump, a school compound like a desert, a man merged into a

179
 A ratrika D as

fish-like body, birds and beasts, a man who is both the pond and the
drafter of the Constitution. The reader’s vision expands – the animate
and inanimate objects in the pages are far more intricately drawn and
integral to the story than the character of Ambedkar. In place of a real-
istic depiction, Gond art deliberately alters the scope of a biographical
retelling. Instead of a pictorial analogue, the birds, fishes, animals,
humans, and ponds coexist and speak in a vocabulary to presents the
caste-system as a human affliction.
There is nothing natural about caste. An unborn child and a dead
man both have caste because caste is always predetermined and is non-
biodegradable. Nature (forests, rivers, plants, and animals) do not
embody this discriminatory practise. Gond art that depicts nature and
humans in a continuum does not have a vocabulary to represent the
experience of caste except as an aberration. When Ambedkar is denied
water, the water-pump has an angry face. Unlike the sharp-pointed
human faces, the birds have benign faces. The lower half of Ambed-
kar’s body merges with fish, pump, and water-body to show a continu-
ity of life-forces. Gond art relies more on the visual and the reader has
to arrive at this social commentary through the detailing on the pages.
This visuality is disruptive as it punctures a neat linear viewing
gaze. Lurking in the corner of every speech balloon are images of
fishes, trees, trains, animals, trains, and birds – animate and inani-
mate objects – that bear traces of the story and the reader ought to
follow these images to comprehend the meaning of what is being nar-
rated. It embodies simultaneity because human, sky, animals, trains,
and trees coexist with the human. This specific graphic narrative in
Gond art form functions as different languages within the same text
and deploys what Pramod Nayar refers to as the ‘critical literacy’ of a
graphic narrative.19
The non-sequential arrangement of drawings, images, text-boxes,
speech-balloons, and Gond artwork does not present a gradual unfold-
ing of a progression of events. Rather, the visual and the text coalesce
to create perspectives in the readers’ minds. These perspectives are on
and about the different aspects of being a dalit. We do not encounter
a frail, dying, fragile, abject human as a dalit. Instead, Ambedkar as
the dalit is far from being fragile. Laura Breuck asserts that ‘Dalit lit-
erature relies on the idea of Dalit chetna (consciousness) as the ideal
for all Dalit literature . . . It is a principle of Dalit consciousness that
writings are made authentic only through real-life experience of Dalit
identity’.20 Dalit writing stresses the need for equal access and oppor-
tunity, and draws on actual life-histories to narrate episodes of pain.
Ironically then, the utopian realm of equality of most Dalit literature is

180
 W H E N B H I M AYA N A E N T E R S T H E C L A S S R O O M . . .

premised on the ‘real’ itself. In Bhimayana the readers are drawn into
an affective history of Ambedkar’s struggles (how caste has histori-
cally been experienced and affected the food, shelter, and employment
of dalits rather than a factual detailing of Ambedkar’s life). Here the
reality of caste is its arbitrariness, non-rationality, and violence. This
reality is of far greater importance than the actual number of people
who protested with Ambedkar. The uncoordinated, fluid, picturesque,
and flowing Gond art provide a space for reflection and representation
of this violent history.
My contention is that Bhimayana articulates a specific ‘kind’ of
Ambedkar – a political, moral, intellectual figure who suffers from
caste atrocities in spite of his educational background. This is an
Ambedkar who responds to historical events in ways that affect the
Indian freedom movement and creates alternative subjects of that
history. Bhimayana achieves this expansion of historical retelling, by
constantly referring to the popular understanding of Ambedkar’s life,
his speeches, contemporary newspaper reports, extracts of the Con-
stitution of India, and visuals that remind the readers of the statues
with Ambedkar holding the Constitution. The readers see Bhimayana
through the common and popular knowledge about Ambedkar, and in
the process, reconfigure the genre of the ‘popular’.

Bhimayana and caste

Charles Hatfield in Teaching the Graphic Novel argues that ‘comics
shouldn’t be easy to define, as they are an interdisciplinary, indeed
antidisciplinary, phenomenon, nudging us usefully out of accustomed
habits of thought’.21 As a graphic novel, Bhimayana belongs to the
trajectory of Marvel Comics and graphic novels such as Persepolis.
Students reading Bhimayana then need to be acquainted with the tra-
jectory of graphic writing as a popular form. Like most English under-
graduate courses that focus on the evolution of the textual practice, a
course on popular fiction necessitates a contextualisation. When stu-
dents read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, for example, they are
introduced to the ways in which modernist fiction shifts from Victo-
rian literature and responds to the emerging experience of the colo-
nial encounter. Students know this because of the other courses that
they are doing concurrently while reading Conrad’s novel. To provide
a similar historical context to the emergence of graphic novel, students
ought to be acquainted with the canon of comic and graphic narratives,

181
 A ratrika D as

understand the nuances of a superhero comic, and read Bhimayana in

juxtaposition with a similar graphic representation of Ambedkar such
as Amar Chitra Katha. While this is a desired model of teaching, time
constraints often prevent an in-depth analysis of the historical evolu-
tion of the graphic novel as a form. Rather than selecting and defend-
ing a particular definition of ‘graphic’, the more productive route in my
class has been to look into the historical embeddedness of Bhimayana.
The historical context of Bhimayana is, for me, debates on caste-
based reservation. The temporal and the spatial environment in which
the words of the framing narrative of the two girls are delivered is
important because we realise that Ambedkar, Gond art, and the form
of the graphic novel are part of an appeal to highlight the need for
reservation. And this appeal in a classroom with students from vary-
ing social and economic backgrounds makes it a discomforting site of
contestations. Bhimayana presupposes the responses (that caste-based
violence occurs only in underdeveloped small towns or that these are
rare events) and presents factual details in the form of present-day
newspaper clippings. Ambedkar’s individual experience is placed
alongside present-day retellings so that the students recognise the
ubiquity of caste-based violence.
The framing of the words within the images makes it inevitable that
the students ‘see’ the thirsty Ambedkar as the victim. In Figures 1 and
2, the fishes, beasts, and water bodies are arranged to fix the readers’
eyes firmly on the young Ambedkar, who appears with fish-like scales
asking for water, hands stretched in demand. The relative absence
of text here indicates that Ambedkar’s voice and speech are already
silenced. Text boxes and speech-balloons appear abundantly in Fig-
ure 3 where Ambedkar is speaking for the Depressed Classes, demand-
ing water, arguing with Gandhi, and eventually becoming the drafter
of the Constitution of India. Here Ambedkar’s face does not dissolve
into fish-like scales. His is a thoughtful, towering, full-page portrait-
sized face that is deciding the fate of all dalits. The diminishing size
of other speakers, and later in the graphic novel the identical faces of
Muslims, Parsis, Christians, and Dalits, remind the readers that this
graphic novel gradually will be about Ambedkar and his role in shap-
ing the national struggle.
This gradual shift (from an insignificant common dalit boy to a man
who has a doctorate from Columbia University but still sleeping in the
park because of his caste) is important. In a panel-less and border-less
graphic representation, this latter kind of Ambedkar provides a tempo-
rality, a historicity, unto which other narratives of displacement, pain,
and death can be framed, and the newspaper clippings do precisely

182
 W H E N B H I M AYA N A E N T E R S T H E C L A S S R O O M . . .

that. The students can no longer see caste-based reservation in terms

of meritocracy, but as a violent historical tale of denial. History does
not enter the classroom in terms of events (though Mahad Satyagraha
and other nationalist struggles are marked prominently in the novel),
but how it affects personal memories and lives. The objective history
of caste and its subsequent debate on topicality and relevance are now
reframed into a lived experience.
As a text in the course ‘Popular Fiction’, Bhimayana deploys graphic
and Gond art form to provide a fictive re-presentation of Ambedkar’s
life, and tries to enter into conversations about nation, art, caste, and
public education in urbanised English-speaking global setting. The
text is responsive to contemporary signs that mark a dalit in urban
India – educated, with a job, yet denied shelter and access to basic civic
rights. Within its immediate literary landscape, Bhimayana carves out
a new language for the ‘popular’.

Bhimayana as the ‘popular’

Bhimayana functions through the visible and visual, personal and
historical, and creates a space of contact between these different reg-
isters of representations. The graphic novel seeks to represent Ambed-
kar’s vision for a caste-less society. This vision, however, reaches the
readers though the visuality of Gond art and modern graphic novel-
writing. The book Bhimayana calls attention to itself through its intri-
cate drawings. These drawings are labyrinth of memories, time, space,
dreams, and as Anand explains in the last section, a repository of tra-
dition.22 The individual history of Ambedkar is drawn into patterns
(specific colours and animal-imageries). These patterns become recog-
nisable shapes to haunt and remind readers about caste atrocities. The
reader is drawn to these elaborate patterns so that she can now school
herself and learn about caste within urban existence. What the reader
‘feels’ on seeing Bhimayana is transposed onto what she thinks about
caste-based reservation.
Nandini Chandra sees this as an enabling strategy and argues that
Gond art is ‘a tribal ecology of subsistence and communal life’ that
provides the narrative with ‘a healing touch, since the tribal is (theo-
retically at least) totally removed from the Hindu anxiety of pollution
and purity’.23 Nayar is wary of this importation of the local to the
global and calls it ‘global-popular’:

‘Cultural legitimacy’, as I have defined it, is the popular

acceptance of the norms, values and belief systems through

183
 A ratrika D as

the consumption of particular narrative. . . Bhimayana offers

the human rights ethos this essential cultural legitimacy pre-
cisely because its register is the popular . . . The popular inter-
sects very clearly with the commercial here. . . [Using Gond]
an ethnic art form, they also shift it out of the realm of the
ethnic – rooted in an ethnos or ethos – and into what can be
termed the global-popular, with its own market share.24

The global connectedness that Nayar describes is a dialogic approach

to texts – the familiar Western canonical format is made to bear upon
the non-familiar text so that the latter is legitimised. Bhimayana, for
Nayar, follows this route by inhabiting the domain of popular – the
non-canon, peripheral, a cultural other. I agree that literary texts are
not beyond the marketplace. The physical manifestation of a text is
not a mere incidental but a crucial aspect of the experience of reading
and interpretation. This is especially true for a book like Bhimayana
that is sold in coloured format and good-quality paperback editions.
At the same time, Bhimayana presupposes a target-audience – urban,
literate, conscious of the caste-based reservation policy, and aware of
the graphic form of storytelling. The target-reader then is not a passive
recipient, but one who has both the tastes of reflection and of sense.
Following Pierre Bourdieu, the ‘taste of reflection’ is an educated,
objective, and detached form of reading, while the ‘taste of sense’ is an
uneducated, subjective, wholly seduced by the pleasures of the text.25
Bhimayana seeks to appeal to the educated and discerning mind, argu-
ing for caste-based reservation, but making the case within seductively
beautiful pages. The torturous narrative of violence is composed in
elaborate drawings with, as Chandra puts it, ‘a healing touch’ – this
healing touch offers a catharsis, a peaceful dissolution, in represen-
tation, of inhuman social injustices, and motivates the reader to be
attentive to the past.
Bhimayana presents a past that fractures the ‘natural’ act of oppress-
ing the dalit. The caste-based atrocities have a history. This history is
in close nexus with the internalised and naturalised assumption that
Wordsworth or A Heart of Darkness is knowable and readable, while
Kabir or Bhimayana has to be interpreted. The situatedness of Bhi-
mayana within a Delhi University classroom means that neither the
teacher nor the students are reading to learn about an unknown figure.
Rather the use of Gond art and the debates on the caste-based reserva-
tion function as means to open up pedagogical limitations. By situat-
ing Bhimayana within ‘Popular Literature’ (in place of ‘Dalit Voices’
and ‘Dalit Discourse’), the pedagogical aim is to inculcate in a student

184
 W H E N B H I M AYA N A E N T E R S T H E C L A S S R O O M . . .

an understanding of what is literary in different kinds of literatures.

Bhimayana pushes a student to acknowledge her intersectional posi-
tion. The context-driven reading provides a critical potential whereby
the category of the ‘popular’ fiction Bhimayana (as an ‘other’ to the
English canon) may be both highlighted and saved from reification.
Bhimayana is not a bestseller like the Harry Potter series, is beyond
the reach of most readers because of its language and price; is not a
mass-produced product that relies on an afterlife of sequels or mov-
ies; does not have easily reproducible stock characters and plots; does
not rely on exaggeration, fantasy or melodrama; and is not written to
entertain an audience. It cannot be accommodated within the defini-
tions of ‘popular fiction’.26 Bhimayana is a popular text because of its
self-reflexive nature – the logistics of the production and consumption
of the text are inserted as part of its visual retelling. This visual retelling
deploys the ‘commonsensical’ knowledge of Ambedkar and reworks
the historical narrative into a populist graphic novel on Ambedkar.
As a textbook, Bhimayana participates in creating a new language of
the ‘popular’. It is a graphic novel with images and drawings and cel-
ebrates and re-creates the cultural memory of the figure of Ambedkar.
It records, consciously, a moment of Indian nationalist struggle that
shares a contentious relationship with caste-based politics. The debate
on the caste-based reservation is arranged within beautiful frames of
Gond art. It is popular because it balances memory and forgetting
through its mechanisms of literary production – what is remembered,
by whom, for what, in what form.

Teaching Bhimayana
The specific construction of Ambedkar within a past and a contem-
porary debate makes teaching Bhimayana into a site of contesta-
tion – contestation over who is a dalit; what it means to be a dalit; can
an educated Mahad underpin dalitness when hundreds of dalits still
continue to be hungry and homeless; should the experience of caste
become a globalised condition of seeing India; is there any possibility
of accommodating the rage against caste hierarchy without recourse
to reservation rights. The classroom translates the ‘popular’ into the
political. The populist and common understanding of caste rights is
questioned. This enables a cultural legibility of otherness, and students
often recognise the rationale for reservation policy. By reading Bhi-
mayana with texts of Christie, Carroll, and Selvadurai, students also
understand the necessity to be political in a historical continuum. If
questioning imperial, colonial, modernist, and gendered narratives are

185
 A ratrika D as

legitimate tools in the epistemology of popular genre, the contesting

terrain of caste-based reservation can be equally within the disciplinary
mould. As a pedagogical tool, Bhimayana rethinks the historicity and
contextualisation of a text. In place of the aesthetic and formal conven-
tions of graphic writing, Bhimayana poses unsettling methodological
and sociohistorical questions to both the teacher and the students.

Notes
1 Since 1990s, the undergraduate syllabi of University of Delhi, Jawaha-
rlal Nehru University, Central University of Hyderabad, and Jadavpur
University have sought to include courses in gender studies, Dalit studies,
and translation writing. For recent works on curriculum revisions in the
departments of English literature, see Meena Pillai’s essay on the Eng-
lish and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, and Nandana Dutta’s
essay on Guahati University.
2 Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. New
York: Routledge, 2001, p. 40.
3 Durgabai Vyam, Subhash Vyam, Srividya Natarajan, and S Anand, Bhi-
mayana: Incidents in the Life of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. New Delhi:
Navayana Publishers, 2011. Henceforth referred to as Bhimayana.
4 The Pradhan clan of the Gond tribe from Central India, erstwhile oral
historians and keepers of collective memory as singers and storytellers,
are now dispossessed of their land and work as wage labourers or work-
ers. Their artwork, as art historian Vajpayee describes in Jangadh Kalam,
is painted songs in which spoken songs, sung words, and prayers are all
translated onto the canvas. Quoted in Rashmi Verma’s ‘Primitive Accu-
mulation: The Political Economy of Indigenous Art in Postcolonial India’
(2013). The paintings of Gond artists adorn the walls of several legisla-
tive buildings in Madhya Pradesh and have been carefully curated in the
Roopankar museum and art gallery of Bhopal’s Bharat Bhavan, the Adi-
vasi Lok Kala Parishad (Tribal People Art’s Council), and the National
Museum of Mankind. For a detailed discussion on the emergence of Gond
art, see Mark Tully’s No Full Stops in India. London: Penguin, 1991 and
John H Bowles’s Painted Songs and Stories: The Hybrid Flowerings of
Contemporary Pardhan Gond Art. Bhopal: Manohar, 2009.
5 As part of a generic elective course called ‘Contemporary India: Women
and Empowerment’, ‘Dalit Discourse’ is a separate unit that includes the
following: Baby Kondiba Kamble’s Jinne Amuche (pp. 194–225), Vimal
Dadasaheb More’s Teen Dagdachi Chul (pp. 344–386), Sharmila Rege.
Against the Madness of Manu, B.R Ambedkar’s Writings on Brahmani-
cal Patriarchy. Another course called ‘Readings on Indian Diversities and
Literary Movements’ has a unit called ‘Dalit Voices’ that includes: Gopal
Guru’s ‘Dalits in Pursuit of Modernity’.
6 Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass. London: Palgrave Macmillan,
1871.
7 Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. London: William Collins,
Sons, 1926.

186
 W H E N B H I M AYA N A E N T E R S T H E C L A S S R O O M . . .

8 Shyam Selvadurai, Funny Boy. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1994.

9 See 2011 Census Data of India. http://censusindia.gov.in/.
10 Mahad-Satyagraha or Chavdar Tale Satyagraha was led by Ambedkar
on 20 March 1927 to allow untouchables to use water from the Mahad
tank, Maharashtra. The untouchables were not allowed to use water from
the same tank used by upper castes. The Municipal Board of Mahad in
1926 allowed the water to be used by all communities. When the upper-
caste Hindus opposed this order, Ambedkar organised the Satyagraha
and burned Manusmriti as a mark to end slavery and oppression of the
untouchables. Every year March 20 is observed as Social Empowerment
Day in India to commemorate Mahad-Satyagraha and its message of the
collective protest.
11 Dignas or wall paintings are an inextricable aspect of Gond artwork. All
beings of the natural world, from humans to plants and animals, figure as
characters in Gond paintings. For a Gond artist, the larger social narrative
of wealth, education, and employment coexist with the world of forests,
peacocks, and gods. Anand in the last section explains that this reper-
toire of Gond art is an enabling device and allows Ambedkar’s struggle
for social justice to be integrated with and recuperated within the tribal
culture. This vocabulary of transforming Ambedkar from a dalit into a
redeeming force through Gond art (figured as a heroic spirit that opposes
both the global capitalism and state mechanisms of oppression) is conten-
tious and will be looked into in the later section of the essay.
12 Art Spiegelman, Maus. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980–1991.
13 Allan Moore, Dave Gibbons and John Higgins, Watchmen. New York:
DC Comics, 1986–1987.
14 Frank Miller, Batman – The Dark Knight Returns. New York: DC Com-
ics, 1986.
15 Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis, Paris: L’Association, 2000.
16 Bhimayana, p. 20.
17 Ibid., p. 23. A dalit is the lowest member in the caste hierarchy based
on ritual and occupational purity, is mostly identified with the Scheduled
Castes, and is considered an ‘untouchable’ by the upper castes. Tradition-
ally, a dalit was expected to perform ‘polluting’ occupations such as scav-
enging, sweeping, and leatherwork, and had to follow prohibitions such
as denial of entry to temple or access to common tank, or even to cast a
shadow in the path of an upper caste. They were seen as polluting subjects
and were often subjected to harsh inhumane forms of existence. Though
‘untouchability’ has been legally abolished, it continues to oppress and
victimise dalits and deny them basic civic rights.
18 Bhimayana, p. 48.
19 Nayar explains in The Indian Graphic Novel, ‘Critical literacy embodied
in the graphic narrative enables us to see texts as situated within unequal
social fields of caste, patriarchy, capitalism and demands that the reader
becomes alert to the position he or she takes vis-à-vis not just the text, but
the social domains represented by it’ (p. 8).
20 Laura Brueck, Writing Resistance: The Rhetorical Imagination of Hindi
Dalit Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014, p. 65.
21 Charles Hatfield, Teaching the Graphic Novel. Jackson: University Press
of Mississippi, 2005, p. 23.

187
 A ratrika D as

22 Bhimayana, p. 102.
23 Nandini Chandra, ‘Ambedkar Out of the Frame,’ Biblio: A Review of
Books, vol. 16, no. 3, 2011, pp. 22–23.
24 Pramod K. Nayar, ‘Towards a Postcolonial Critical Literacy: Bhimayana
and the Indian Graphic Novel,’ Studies in South Asian Film and Media,
vol. 3, no. 1, 2011, pp. 3–21, 17–18.
25 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste,
Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984, p. 4.
26 For an excellent discussion on the field of ‘popular’ fiction, see Clive
Bloom’s Bestsellers: Popular Fiction Since 1900 (2002) and John Suther-
land’s Reading the Decades: Fifty Years of the Nation’s Bestselling Books
(2002).

188
 11
FROM THE COLLOQUIAL TO
THE ‘LITERARY’
Hindi pulp’s journey from the streets to
the bookshelves

Aakriti Mandhwani

In an interview, Surender Mohan Pathak, the bestselling author of

crime fiction in Hindi, unapologetically accepts the charge that is ordi-
narily made against the Hindi pulp novel. In a matter-of-fact manner,
Pathak defines ‘pulp’, stating, ‘It is the job of mass production, like
assembly line, factory production . . . and profit per book may be
little but overall profit is enormous’.1 Pathak explains pulp as mass-
produced novels that are made available to the readers at a cheap
price. However, a third attribute of ‘pulp’ – as well as the source of its
name – comes from pulp-quality paper, the paper that the novels are
traditionally printed on (lugdi in Hindi). The term ‘pulp’ itself carries
several moral and aesthetic connotations in Hindi. Since pulp novels
are cheap, they are instantly consumable and just as instantly disposa-
ble. As quick reads, these novels are not just seen as sites of leisure, but
because of their presumably racy, melodramatic, semi-pornographic
and ‘illicit’ content, they are also judged morally as giving way to the
readers’ suppressed ‘excesses’.2 In terms of language, too, the language
of pulp has been deemed the language of the colloquial.3 As such,
Hindi pulp particularly has also been articulated as a space where, in
contrast to ‘literary’ Hindi publishing, the question of literariness in
language has never arisen. Indeed, the charge against Hindi pulp fic-
tion seems to be so well-established that it has needed little investiga-
tion thus far.4
In this essay, I do not use ‘pulp’ derogatorily but rather to refer to
a genre of literature that is printed on lugṛi paper. I seek to question a
discourse that condemns ‘pulp’ as a category before it is analysed.5 In

189
 A akriti M andhwani

other words, I argue that the Hindi ‘pulp’ novel is not a homogenous
genre that is automatically indicative of cheap lowbrow fiction. In the
essay, I provide two case studies of post-2000 Hindi pulp publishing,
showing that a narrow definition of Hindi pulp cannot serve to explain
the multiplicity of genres and reading publics that are contained within
its contours. First, I shall analyse two examples of contemporary Hindi
pulp fiction published in the post-2000 period by small publishers in
North India, showing how these examples incorporate and respond to
narrative repetitions, melodrama as well as language politics. I shall
then turn to the second case study, the striking phenomenon of the
change in the production quality of contemporary master-crime writer
Surender Mohan Pathak published by Raja Pocket Books and, con-
sequently, Harper Hindi.6 Through these two distinct case studies,
I seek to comment on the complexity of the cultures of belonging of
the Hindi-speaking middle classes of North India through the lens of
the popular. What interests me is how, despite the establishment and
strengthening of divisions between literary and lowbrow Hindi fiction
based on the use of standardised or colloquial forms of the language,
these distinctions are based more on the consumption and distribution
patterns of literature and, specific to the purposes of this essay, on
publishing decisions and marketing strategies.

Hindi pulp fiction today: a reading of

the small presses
Whereas the Hindi pulp market in its golden age in the 1960s and ’70s
teemed with writers from diverse backgrounds and even had authors
publishing under several pseudonyms from different presses, a limited
number of writers is published from small publishers today.7 Hindi
pulp fiction in the post-2000 period is published by small presses like
Dheeraj Pocket Books, Ravi Pocket Books and Tulsi Pocket Books,
predominantly based in Meerut,8 which appear to prefer detective,
crime and science fiction over genres like historical romance and family
melodrama. The number of authors published seems to have shrunk as
well. The popular authors from this group include Amit Khan, Reema
Bharti, Anil Mohan and Ved Prakash Sharma. In this group of writ-
ers, Ved Prakash Sharma is the most renowned, widely remembered
as having created benchmarks for experimentations in pulp writing in
the ’90s. In the established style of entrepreneurship where the writer
himself takes on the role of publisher, Sharma also owned Tulsi Pocket
Books until his death in February 2017.9

190
 F rom the colloquial to the ‘ L iterary ’

The average pulp Hindi novel today is, in a sense, timeless, in that
the smaller presses often do not record the novel’s date of publication
at the beginning of the book.10 In terms of content itself, in the cases
of its most-read authors Reema Bharti and Anil Mohan, pulp writing
has been unable to break with the landmark pulp fiction of the 1980s
and ’90s. The shift in genres – of favouring detective, crime and sci-
ence fiction – had already occurred in the time that pulp writing first
flourished, already focusing on action dramas against organised crime
in the country and spy thrillers against international terrorism.11 The
average pulp read from the smaller presses today only serves to rein-
force these themes and writing style, often recycling its past experi-
mentations in genre.12 In order to understand this, let us now examine
two novels.
The first is a novel from a series called Reema Bharti, named after
the main protagonist of the series, an Indian secret agent called Reema
Bharti. Reema Bharti is also listed as the author of the bestselling
novel series, which is, in fact, the pseudonym of author Veena Sharma.
A cross between a spy thriller and science fiction novel, the novel
Jaṅgalrāj, or The Rule of the Jungle, narrates the story of the secret
agent and her predicament when she finds herself under attack from
the novel’s villain, a mysterious human-lizard hybrid called Lizaara.
Always a step ahead of Bharti, Lizaara sends threatening taped mes-
sages declaring her superiority to police chiefs and the underworld
alike. Lizaara’s language is assured and menacing. The first pages of
the novel also declare that the six-foot human lizard is not a freak of
nature but rather the product of a scientific experiment.13
However, patterns of pulp writing from the 1980s and ’90s still
appear in Bharti’s novel, such as in the villain’s melodramatic self-
presentation. For instance, every time Lizaara commits a crime, she
proudly re-affirms her identity, verbatim, just as she has done many
times before. The villain constructs a cult of the villainous personal-
ity. Also, Lizaara does not speak any language other than Hindi, and
the agent Bharti herself eschews English words. For instance, when
she tenders her resignation, her boss says in alarm, ‘Tum achchī tarah
se jāntī ho ki tumhāre aur ISC ke bīca jo anubandh huā hai . . . ’, or,
‘You know very well that the contract between you and the ISC. . . .’
Bharti replies, ‘Sir, main swechchā se us anubandh ko toṛ rahī hūn’,
or, ‘Sir, I’m breaking that contract of my own volition’.14 At the same
time, however, the monolinguality of the novel does not indicate an
automatic case for institutional or even chaste Hindi. This is obvious
because of the crude expletives used throughout the text.

191
 A akriti M andhwani

It is later revealed that Lizaara is no ordinary villain. She plans to

destroy India through her well-established drug distribution mafia.
The nation is in crisis, new technologies of destruction are at play,
and the nation must be saved. The super spy will ultimately step up
to the challenge and destroy Lizaara. Reema Bharti re-visits the estab-
lished, heroic narrative of the super spy and the iconography of the
nation-in-peril.
Another contemporary example, in an entirely different vein, can
be found in Anil Mohan’s fiction. Raja Pocket Books and Ravi Pocket
Books publish different titles from Mohan’s science fiction ‘Devraj
Chauhan’ series. Babūsā kā Chakravyūh, or Baboosa’s Labyrinth
(March 2013) tells the story of Devraj Chauhan, a king who has been
expelled from his planet called Sudoor. He is currently undertaking to
return to Sudoor with his subjects and two wives, one of whom, called
Rani Tasha, he is besotted with. Incidentally, she is also the one who,
as we learn through a flashback in the novel, got him expelled him in
the first place. Baboosa, the character after whom the novel is named,
is Chauhan’s trusted confidante who is waiting for the time when he
can expose the queen’s machinations.
The reading of this text reveals the author’s immense attention to
detail. The spaceship that will transport the group back to Sudoor, as
well as the functions of its control room, are described vividly. The
mythic weapon of Sudoor and its many uses too are similarly detailed.
The dramatic tension in the novel is provided by Rani Tasha’s efforts
to cover up, which is juxtaposed against Baboosa’s intricate counter-
plot to expose her.
Mohan too favours the use of only one language, that is, Hindi.
The novel is devoid of the subtext of language politics. Significantly,
though, the episodes in this novel too carry a melodramatic quality.
For instance, Rani Tasha and Chauhan’s love is intensified because of
the intrigue: as it turns out, Rani Tasha had been under an evil spirit’s
control. Moreover, a significant part of the novel is dedicated to a
largely superfluous sub-plot concerning three vacationing couples and
their sexual encounters, which seemingly serves to titillate the readers.
It could be argued that this borrowing itself is a function of all pulp
fiction. Heightened melodrama, repetition and titillation are a range of
pleasures that the pulp novel is expected to provide. Scott McCracken
argues, ‘Popular fiction, from folk tales and fairy tales to popular bal-
lads to modern best-sellers, has always provided a structure within
which our lives can be understood’.15 ‘The liberal subject’, D.A. Miller
suggests, ‘seems to recognize himself most fully only when he for-
gets or disavows his functional implication in a system of carceral

192
 F rom the colloquial to the ‘ L iterary ’

restraints or disciplinary injunctions’.16 Additionally, Miller argues for

a re-evaluation of reading pleasure in the novel:

The enterprise of the novel would no longer (or not just) be

the doomed attempt to produce a stable subject in a stable
world, but would instead (or in addition) be the more success-
ful task of forming – by means of that very ‘failure’ – a subject
habituated to psychic displacements, evacuations, reinvest-
ments, in a social order whose totalising power circulates all
the more easily for being pulverised.17

This section has attempted not to censure, but rather to explicate the
range of pleasures available in the pulp novel today. The average con-
temporary pulp novel needs to comprehended not as a ‘failure’, but
an expression of a different kind. One writer in the group, however,
seems to be actively re-formulating his novels, and is being received
by the new re-formulated readers. That writer is Surender Mohan
Pathak, who is discussed in the next section.

On the making of a pulp collectible

The uncharacteristically good production quality of bestselling author
Surender Mohan Pathak’s novels published by Raja Pocket Books
since 2009 can be rightfully considered an unprecedented event in the
history of Hindi pulp. This section focuses on its implications in the
context of the Hindi publishing market in the 21st century.
The first thing to note about Pathak is the scale of his success:
Pathak has written around 280 books to date and has sold around
25 million copies.18 By the author’s own admission, his original fic-
tion in the 1950s and ’60s was ill received.19 Instead, he found an
easier market for his Hindi translations of James Hadley Chase novels,
published by small pulp presses. At the peak of his career, an average
Pathak novel had a first print run of 100,000 copies and ran into mul-
tiple editions.20 This, however, compared to popular romance writer
Gulshan Nanda and Ved Prakash Sharma at their own peaks of first
print runs, is miniscule.21 Today, however, Pathak is the frontrunner in
Hindi pulp sales.
As discussed before, a study of the average pulp novel in Hindi
today reveals little difference, both in the kind of writing, in produc-
tion quality and the style of book covers from what was produced in
the 1980s. The production quality of these novels is indistinguishable
from before. In terms of the covers, a similar ‘type’ of cover with its

193
 A akriti M andhwani

classic images of the guns, the glamourous sirens and the suave hero-
protagonists appears indiscriminately on almost every other novel,
across different authors and years. The post-2009 uncharacteristically
high production quality of Pathak’s novels by Raja Pocket Books,
therefore, stands out. The typesetting itself has undergone a significant
improvement, making the reading experience easier on the eyes. In
addition to this, Raja Pocket Books has also started releasing special
‘collector’s editions’ of Pathak, such as the comprising sets of three
novels from his celebrated ‘Vimal’ series in hardback editions. Such
production improvements meant that the average Pathak novel began
to cost almost double of what it used to. With Pathak’s novels priced
at sixty rupees and upwards, in comparison to the novels by other
Hindi pulp writers that cost around forty rupees, the post-2009 edi-
tions of Pathak novels introduced a noticeable gradation in the pulp
fiction reading market.
From these observations, we can see that through these newer pro-
ductions, Raja Pocket Books transformed Pathak into a respectable
middlebrow writer. The Hindi pulp fiction novel is no longer merely
a product that was understood to be instantly consumable and, there-
after, instantly disposable. While pulp novels have a history of dedi-
cated readers who often become collectors of the novels, with Pathak’s
newer novels, it seems that the Hindi pulp fiction novel has amassed
a new middlebrow readership. This shall be discussed in the sections
below.

The post-2009 Pathak novel and the rise

of a new readership
The readership that this market differentiation has created for Pathak’s
‘non-pulp’ pulp novels deserves attention. Mr Sanjay Gupta, the dis-
tribution office manager for Raja Pocket Books, revealed that even
as they deemed it difficult to quantify the readership gradation at the
distributor level, the overall market for Hindi pulp is shrinking, and
that, even as the older readers are still reading these novels – and per-
haps, newer pulp markets are being opened to retain those very read-
ers – new readers of Hindi pulp are not forthcoming.22 The first half
of Gupta’s statement finds support in figures: even as the average con-
temporary Pathak novel sells four times more than the average Hindi
contemporary pulp novel, the average first print run of his novel today
has been reduced to only 30–40,000 copies.23 Sudarshan Purohit, who
provides these figures and is also the translator of Pathak’s only two
novels available in English, explains Raja Pocket Books’ production

194
 F rom the colloquial to the ‘ L iterary ’

and pricing strategy through another logic.24 He notes that the rise in
production quality and price ensures that the profits resulting from the
sales of the novels remain the same, since seasoned fans are evidently
willing to pay even double the amount for a Pathak novel.
However, though it could be one of the reasons, it is perhaps not
quite as simple as this, where loyal fan cultures are solely responsible
for the sales of the post-2009 Pathak books. Writing in contemporary
times is increasingly governed by market considerations, and while
Hindi pulp’s swaying to market mechanisms is in itself not new, the
trajectory that Raja Pocket Books has taken with the newer Pathak
novels requires new ways of theorising Hindi pulp. My findings sug-
gest that, even as the market for pulp has undoubtedly shrunk, there
indeed seems to be a new kind of Hindi reader who is willing to pay
double or more for these newer novels on offer. This may indeed mean
that there is an entirely new class of readers who invest in the new
Pathak novel; however, that, again, like the seasoned fans, is not the
focus of the essay. The next section centres, instead, on the pre-2009
readers of Pathak and their re-configuration of imagination of them-
selves as the ‘new’ post-2009 readers of Pathak. In other words, the
next section turns to the old readers of pulp who imagine themselves
as ‘new’, in the sense that perhaps they can think of the newer form
of the already familiar book as a validation of their tastes. I term this
subset of readers of Pathak – who appreciate the distinctiveness of the
post-2009 Pathak book and are willing to pay more for it and who
may or may not include the loyal fans of Pathak – as the middlebrow
consumers of pulp.
The people I interviewed unanimously agreed that this market gra-
dation was brought about at the author’s own insistence.25 Pathak has
himself indicated that he wanted to differentiate himself from other
pulp writing because of a certain ‘literariness’ that he purports to
bring to his audience’s reading experience. In the preface to Dhokhā,
or Deception (2009), the fourth in the ‘Crime Club’ series of nov-
els, Pathak wrote that he kept receiving letters from the readers of
Midnight Club, the second novel in the series, even after the third
novel Jāl, or Web, had been published.26 Usually, Pathak noted, he
only received letters about a novel until the next novel was published:

I cannot understand any other reason for this new trend –

except that the new, improved, spruced-up trend of produc-
tion that started in pocket books from Midnight Club affected
readers very deeply and impressed even those readers who had
started turning away from pocket books . . . The letters from

195
 A akriti M andhwani

new readers form hardly 5% of my fan mail, but the letters

I received regarding Midnight Club – and am still receiving –
almost half of them are from new readers. It is a very satisfy-
ing and encouraging thing for both the author and publisher
that the new ‘beautification’ of Midnight Club succeeded in
attracting new readers.27

One of the letters directly quoted by Pathak came from Narayan

Singh, a reader from Shahdara in Delhi, who gushed:

By publishing novels on high-grade paper, your publisher has

taken a revolutionary step in the publishing world. Now this
trend should continue so that, after I die, my son can read
them, and after him his son – and this is possible only on high-
grade paper, not on any other paper.28

Vishnuprasad Mehta, a reader from Bainswara, tellingly declared

Midnight Club the ‘first vintage or quality paperback’ in the history
of pocket books in Hindi.29 Rajkumar Pandav, a reader from Panipat,
congratulated Pathak on publishing Midnight Club for as ‘little’ as
sixty rupees but worried over the fact that the publisher might not
be making any profits from the book, because that such an ‘umdā’ or
‘excellent’ book must have been produced at a cost higher than what
it is being sold for.30
In other words, the change from lugṛi to non-lugṛi seems to
embody a transformation in the value of the book itself: excellent,
worth keeping. The book has shed the negative connotations of ‘pulp’
and has become respectable. What stands out most pertinently from
this preface is Pathak’s own admission that the transformation from
lugṛi to non-lugṛi carries its own particular value judgements. How-
ever, this formal transformation in value is celebrated by the writer
and readers alike. In another preface, Pathak dramatically exclaims,
‘and that lucky day is not far when we all – writers, publishers and
readers – will find that pulp fiction has been relegated to the pages of
history of Hindi pocket book publishing’.31 According to Pathak, the
word ‘pulp’ with its negative connotations itself needs to disappear.
If we compare the above preface with the one that Pathak wrote
for Mavālī in 1995, we can perhaps begin to understand the subtleties
of shifts in the way Pathak’s books are consumed in comparison to
twenty years ago. Mavālī’s preface sees Pathak being extremely apolo-
getic about the future increase in his book’s price from fifteen rupees

196
 F rom the colloquial to the ‘ L iterary ’

to twenty rupees. In response to the negative reactions of Pathak’s

readers to the price of Stop Press, the novel that preceded Mavālī,
Pathak wrote:

I’d like to inform you that despite the fact that the dearness
and scarcity of paper remain unchanged, the publisher has
ensured that there is only a minimal difference in the quality
of this novel and Stop Press, although it seems unlikely that
they might be able to keep this up in the future. What I am
getting at is that in the near future it is inevitable that the new
novels will be priced at twenty rupees, which is a development
that you should be ready for.32

Two things become apparent: first, that Pathak has always been
aware of the reactions of his reading public who actively make their
thoughts known to him particularly with respect to the pricing of the
novels and, second, he has negotiated actively with these expecta-
tions in the past. What has changed is that, unlike the 1990s, when
the writer offered justification to his readers, the post-2009 readers
themselves are apologetic about contributing too little to the pub-
lisher’s profits.
In terms of language of the post-2009 Pathak novels, all the people
I interviewed in the course of this study stressed the ‘formal’, ‘seri-
ous’ and ‘literary’ usage of language by Pathak.33 One interviewee,
an employee of Raja Pocket Books, said that the lexicon of Pathak
‘is beyond the reach of say, Ved Prakash Sharma’s readership of
rickshaw pullers and lower classes’.34 In comparison to other con-
temporary writers, the readers of Pathak celebrate his investment in
language.
Yet another point of differentiation between Pathak and other
Hindi ‘pulp’ novelists lies in Pathak’s plot constructions: the nature
of his plots is described as ‘complicated’ and, significantly, ‘real’.
If depicting and experiencing contemporaneity lies at the sensual
heart of crime fiction, Pathak’s claim is that he makes his reader
experience contemporaneity, technology and modernity in ‘real’
and, ‘believable’ ways. Indeed, crime fiction as a genre particularly
functions on the basis of circumstances rooted in reality as experi-
enced in everyday life, mysteries that people can engage with and
find palatable, even as they cannot solve them in the way that the
protagonists can. The idea of ‘believability’ in a Pathak novel, by
contrast, is conveyed in terms of a highly exaggerated aim towards

197
 A akriti M andhwani

a truth-effect so that the reader can understand and, subsequently,

agree with it. In the preface to Chembūr kā Dātā, Pathak mentions
a reader’s letter:

Narendra Malik, a civil engineer from Chandigarh, noticed

a discrepancy in the salary of a police sub-inspector, which
I had written to be 12–13 thousand. According to his letter,
from 1.1.2010, the salary for a sub-inspector was 23,355
including basic pay and all allowances. In this context he also
referred to the sixth Pay Commission according to which it is
compulsory for a sub-inspector’s salary to be between 25 and
30 thousand.35

The reader is thus involved in the reading of a Pathak novel not merely
with respect to consuming and judging it on the basis of how much
pleasure it provides her/him. Quite relevant to our mapping of this
impulse of the ‘new’ or middlebrow reader, Pathak’s reader is also an
active participant in the formation of a ‘believable’ plot with Pathak
himself, for instance, even educating him on the salary a sub-inspector
actually gets.
In the preface to Choron kī Bārāt, or The Procession of Thieves,
Pathak himself acknowledges this shift in his, and the readers’, idea
of the thriller. With respect to the ‘Sunil’ series of novels, Pathak says
that he has to construct an appropriate storyline given the pace of the
novel – the average ‘Sunil’ novel runs over a diegetic time of three to
four days – and this particular pacing does not allow for the use of
clues such as fingerprints, as:

Reports are received after a long time. Some tests require sam-
ples to be sent to labs set up in Hyderabad, Chandigarh, etc.
Now think for yourself: If a sample is sent to these places
from Delhi, how long will it take to get the results?36

Pathak refuses to compromise on the plausibility of events, always

giving primary importance to believability and reasonableness rather
than plotlines that might be more exciting or thrilling. This insertion
of the ‘believability’ clause – that is, moving the action into the world
of the everyday – reduces the enterprise of the erstwhile crime ‘thriller’
in Hindi pulp of the ’80s and ’90s to something that is, affectively, not
‘thrilling’ at all. This new articulation of the thriller in India has a new
audience.

198
 F rom the colloquial to the ‘ L iterary ’

The construction of an alternative middlebrow

As suggested earlier, Pathak’s transformation, in terms of publishing
strategy as well as genre, brings another kind of politics into play.
Even as it destabilises the idea of the ‘literary’ by virtue of being popu-
lar crime fiction writing, it also creates a ‘new literary’, that of mid-
dlebrow readership. A large section of Pathak’s new readership, as
the letters to Pathak show, belongs to the middle-class readers who
choose to read Hindi pulp or genre fiction, but choose Pathak specifi-
cally for his distinctive traits, thereby marking their own distinction in
the process.
Pathak was, at least till the 1990s, consumed across classes. The
fetish of the book was not a concern for its readers engaged in reading
a Pathak novel. Yet we saw how readers treated the new Pathak ‘col-
lectible editions’ as objects imbued with an auratic quality. By raising
the price of his novels, the author communicated to these middlebrow
readers their own rightful entry into the world of letters, a world that
now rejected the mass and denied it access by making it difficult for
the masses to buy the novel, still available for purchase but at double
the price.
Pierre Bourdieu’s formulation of taste and distinctiveness is useful to
approach Pathak’s transformation. Bourdieu argues that taste is deter-
mined by class, that ‘it must never be forgotten that the working-class
“aesthetic” is a dominated “aesthetic” which is constantly obliged to
define itself in terms of the dominant aesthetics’.37 Bourdieu not only
speaks of the determined nature of the so-called dominated class but
also of the determined nature of the dominant class itself and how
it consumes cultural commodities over the years, passing on a deter-
mined and specific kind of aesthetic across generations. In terms of
Pathak and his pulp novels, however, the kinds of aesthetic people
experience is not limited to their class affiliations or even to the eco-
nomic or social structures that they belong to, but instead, any aes-
thetic is now widely distributed and appropriated because of the kind
of media that people across classes have access to, that in turn, makes
them re-articulate their idea of taste and distinctiveness. The way in
which different classes of readers experience a cultural commodity
may vary; perhaps, as Bourdieu suggests, the lower stratum ‘subordi-
nates the form and the very “existence” of the image to its function’.38
As we can see in the case of the post-2009 Pathak novels, a similar
cultural commodity is reconfigured for many readers who already read
Pathak before, who now re-imagine themselves as distinctive from

199
 A akriti M andhwani

their imagination before this change occurred. While the Pathak novel
still harbours the same hero-protagonist and plots, the treatment of his
novels, and more to the purposes of this essay, the production value of
his novels, have changed to cater to the new aspirational middle-class
experience.

Conclusion
This essay has attempted to mark an important milestone in the history
of contemporary Hindi pulp fiction. First, the essay provides an out-
line of the post-2000 pulp fiction that is produced by smaller presses
in North India. Second, it unravels a new investment in contemporary
Hindi genre fiction, one that articulates a markedly aspirational and
arguably conservative cultural aesthetic.
Merely looking at the sales figures, one thing rings true: Hindi pulp,
as it used to be, has now come to a decline. Part of the reason may lie
in the rise of increased access to other entertainment mass media like
cheap cinema and television, or in the changes in the overall trajectory
of the Hindi reading sphere itself: the new culture of belonging dic-
tates that a reader might as well read a popular, and most importantly,
English novel than a popular Hindi one. What becomes important for
analysis, however, is the entrepreneurship employed by the contempo-
rary author in reinventing himself, and the ‘new’ middlebrow reader
of Pathak’s newer ‘non-pulp’ pulp novels.

Notes
1 ‘Surender Mohan Pathak – Blaft Interview,’ blaftpubs Youtube. 15 Decem-
ber 2017. www.youtube.com/watch?v=G86OqWiYNm8.
2 Sanjay Srivastava, ‘Thrilling Affects,’ Interventions, vol. 15, no. 4, 1 Decem-
ber 2013, pp. 567–585. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2013.849426.
3 Prabhat Ranjan, ‘Lugdi Sahitya ke Andhere-Ujaale,’ in Diwan-e-Sarai:
Media Vimarsh/Hindi Janpad. ed. Ravikant and Sanjay Sharma. Delhi:
Sarai Media Lab-Sarai, 2002, pp. 82–91. Print., Here: p. 83.
4 Indeed, ‘pulp’ as a category itself is a recent phenomenon in Hindi writing.
Coming to carry certain assumptions about ‘high brow’ and ‘low brow,’
the word has been borrowed from, and carries, a Western – particularly
American – understanding of pulp. The American Heritage Dictionary
defines pulp as ‘A book containing lurid subject matter, and being char-
acteristically printed on rough, unfinished paper’. The term originated
specifically in the context of magazines of the 1930s onwards because of
the low-quality paper used between the covers. See Sandra Radtke, Pulp
Fiction – An Analysis of Storyline and Characters. Norderstedt: Auflage,
2004. Print.

200
 F rom the colloquial to the ‘ L iterary ’

5 I propose to contextualise the category of ‘pulp’ with its contemporary

moral significations of un-literariness and seek to historicise it, comparing
it with pre-Independence categories of ‘sastā’ or ‘cheap’, ‘gandā’ or ‘vul-
gar’, ‘lokpriya’ or ‘popular’ literature and, most significantly, what came
to be understood as lugṛi sahitya – or literature produced on low-quality
paper – and examining how this significantly altered the idea of literari-
ness and language in the 1960s.
6 Harper Hindi published the first Pathak novel Colaba Conspiracy in 2014
and has remained Pathak’s publisher since then.
7 Of the overlaps in names of fictional characters with authors in real life
and vice versa, Sadiq Naqvi says, ‘This is a trade in which plagiarism and
ghost-writing are common, and sometimes, uncannily, old fictional char-
acters end up as new writers of fiction. A case in point is that of Keshav
Pandit, a legendary character created by Ved Prakash Sharma in 1986 as
the hero of Bahu Mange Insaaf, or The Daughter-in-law Demands Justice.
Once the character became a hit, another publisher came up with novels
apparently authored by Keshav Pandit!’ (Sadiq Naqvi, ‘The Hindi Pulp
Fiction Thriller Still Entices and Enthrals,’ Hard News, September 2010.
12 July 2013. www.hardnewsmedia.com/2010/09/3681#sthash.vbUwr
RPL.dpuf)
8 It is worthy of note that almost all Hindi pulp presses operate from Meerut,
Uttar Pradesh. Benares and Allahabad, the previously favoured centres for
publishing, gave way to Delhi in the post-Independence period because of
cheap printing technologies. The presses finally shifted to Meerut in the
’90s for the same reason (Ranjan, Lugdi, 2013).
9 For more on Ved Prakash Sharma, see Akriti Mandhwani and Kartikeya
Tripathi, ‘Forensic Science in Hindi Pulp Fiction Blockbusters,’ The Inde-
pendent, 23 March 2017. www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/
films/forensic-science-in-hindi-pulp-fiction-blockbusters-a7645341.html.
10 This could be attributed to just carelessness; however, it is interesting that
most of these books from the presses do not even have a registered ISBN
number, a testimony to their treatment of the pulp novel as ephemera.
11 Ved Prakash Sharma’s bestselling novels from the era frequently engage
with these themes. In fact, apart from Vardīvālā Gūṇḍā, two other novels
were filmed, Sabse Bada Khiladi or The Biggest Player and International
Khiladi or International Player, starring Akshay Kumar in 1995 and 1999
respectively. Both were huge commercial successes (Aasheesh Sharma,
‘A Peek Into the Noir World of Hindi Pulp Fiction.’ Hindustan Times, 6
April 2013. www.hindustantimes.com/brunch/brunch-stories/cover-story-
a-peek-into-the-noir-world-of-hindi-pulp-fiction/article1–1037885.aspx.
12 Even Ved Prakash Sharma returned to supernatural fiction in his latest
novels Ḍāīn, or Witch, and Ḍāīn Part 2 in 2013.
13 Reema Bharti, Jungleraj. Meerut: Dheeraj Pocket Books, n.d. Print, p. 33.
14 Ibid., p. 19.
15 Scott McCracken, Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction. Manchester: Manches-
ter University Press, 1998, p. 3.
16 D.A. Miller, The Novel and the Police. Los Angeles: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1988. Print, p. x.
17 Ibid., pp. xii–xiii.

201
 A akriti M andhwani

18 Nisha Susan, ‘Do You Know This Man?’ Tehelka Magazine, 20 Feb-
ruary 2010. 1 December 2011. www.tehelka.com/story_main43.
asp?filename=hub200210do_you.asp.
19 Pathak is, in fact, an eminent member of the magazine culture that first
flourished in the 1950s. His first story, ‘57 Sāl Purānā ādmī,’ or ‘The
57-Year-Old Man’, appeared in the magazine Manohar Kahāniyā in 1959
(Vishi Sinha, personal interview, 10 August 2013).
20 Sudarshan Purohit, personal interview, 9 October 2011.
21 Ved Prakash Sharma is also important in the history of pulp because his
novel Vardīvālā Gūṇḍā, or The Goon in Uniform, published in the early
1990s, sold an unprecedented first print run of one and a half million
copies (Md Tausif Alam, ‘Era of Pulp Fiction Will Be Back: Ved Prakash
Sharma, Meerut Publisher,’ The Economic Times, 24 February 2012.
1 August 2013. http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-02-24/
news/31091718_1_hindi-pulp-publisher-publication-house). In May 2013,
a Bhojpuri film based on the same novel was released to commercial
acclaim.
22 Sanjay Gupta, personal interview, 10 November 2011.
23 Susan, Do You Know This Man 2010; Purohit, personal interview, 2011.
24 Both these novels, The 65 Lakh Heist and Daylight Robbery, have been
published by Blaft Publications, Chennai.
25 Gupta, personal interview, 2011; Purohit, personal interview, 2011.
26 Pathak significantly introduces most of his novels with a detailed preface.
Among other things, this note at once spells out for the reader what series
the book forms part of; quantitative figures illustrating, for instance, the
number of copies sold; etc. Additionally, more than talking about what
is to come in the novel itself, the preface seeks to talk about Pathak’s last
novels and their reception.
27 Surender Mohan Pathak, Midnight Club. Delhi: Raja Pocket Books, 2008.
Print, p. 2.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., p. 3.
30 Ibid.
31 Surender Mohan Pathak, Dhokha. Delhi: Raja Pocket Books, 2009. Print,
p. 2.
32 Surender Mohan Pathak, Mawaali. Delhi: Raja Pocket Books, 1995. Print,
p. 1.
33 Vishi Sinha, personal interview, 10 August 2013; Sudhir Barak, personal
interview, 10 August 2013.
34 Akash, personal interview, 10 November 2011.
35 Surender Mohan Pathak, Chembur ka Daata. Delhi: Raja Pocket Books,
2011. Print, p. 3.
36 Surender Mohan Pathak, Choron Ki Baaraat. Delhi: Raja Pocket Books,
2012. Print, p. 3.
37 Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary
Field. Trans. Susan Emanuel. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.
Print, p. 41.
38 Ibid., p. 42.

202
 INDEX

‘20 Rules for Writing Detective Apradhini (Shivani) 98 – 100

Stories’ (Dine) 3 – 4 Apu Trilogy, The 114
Arni, Samhita 141, 146, 148,
Aajgubi (Majumdar) 78 152 – 154; see also Missing Queen,
Abhinavagupta 103, 105, 107 – 108, The (Arni)
109 Arthur C. Clarke Award 2
adbhuta rasa 105, 109, 115 – 116; Arunachal Pradesh 135n15;
causes of 110; ‘Journey into Adi community of 125 – 127,
Darkness, A’ (Jawadekar) 131 – 133, 134
110 – 112; Khagam (Ray) Aryavarta Chronicles (Udayasankar)
112 – 114; Rokto Golap o Rongin 9, 159, 161 – 166
Sura (Das) 114 – 116 Asiatic Society 74 – 75
Adi community of Arunachal Asrar-e Darbar-e Harampur
Pradesh 125 – 127, 131 – 133, 134 (Sharar) 53
Adi Parva (Patil) 9, 159, 161, 166–170 Asrar-e Hind 52
African literature 175, 176 Asrar-e Ma’abid (Premchand) 52
Agyeya 95 asrar novels (Urdu) 51 – 54; see also
aitihasik (historic) 164 specific novel
Akasher Katha (Chaudhuri) 80 Assamese 122
Akash Ghati (Majumdar) 78 Atwood, Margaret 2, 163
Allahabad University 101 Austen, Jane 175
Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) 166, 167,
169, 170, 182 Baapre ki bhayanak Ashwiney jhar
Amazon India 143, 170 (Bandyopadhyay) 61
Ambedkar, Bhim Rao 176; see also Baapre ki bisham jhar
Bhimayana (Chakraborti) 64
American Futurians 4 Babusa ka Chakravyuh (Mohan)
amrit-manthan 169 – 170 192
Anand, S. 177 Bachchan, Harivansh Rai 94,
Ananta Vikatan 11, 17 – 18, 20 – 34 101
Anthology of Contemporary Poetry Bandyopadhyay, Bhabanicharan 58
from the Northeast (Ngangom Bandyopadhyay, Chintamoni 68
and Nongkynrih) 123 Bandyopadhyay, Kailashchandra
Ao, Temsula 9, 121, 123 – 124, 126, 61 – 62
127, 128 – 129, 130, 133 – 134 Banerjee, Sarnath 9

203
 INDEX

Bangiya Bigyan Parishad 77 calamity chapbooks 11

Banker, Ashok 143, 160 Calcutta Chromosome, The
Basu, Samit 160 (Ghosh) 2
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns Calcutta School Book Society 74
(Miller) 178 camatkara 107 – 108
Battala, Bengal 59 Campfire 167
Bengal: bhadralok community capitalist society 58
57 – 58; caste hierarchies in 57 – 58; Carroll, Lewis 176
cholera epidemic of 1817 65; caste: Bhimayana and 181 – 183;
dengue spread 65 – 66; education General category 177; reality
in 58 – 59; science fiction in of 181; reservation based on
5, 73 – 84; weird/horror story 177 – 178
112 – 114; see also chapbooks caste-based violence 182
Bengali 122 Chakrabarty, Arindam 108
Bennett and Coleman (B&C) 95 Chakraborti, Haribandhu 64
Bentinck 61 Chakraborty, Nagendranath 77
bhadralok community, in Bengal chakuris 57
57 – 58 Chander, Krishan 93
Bhagat, Chetan 12, 144 Chandra, Nandini 166, 183, 184
Bhakti movement 103 – 104 chapbooks, Bengal 11, 57 – 69; caste
Bhandari, Mannu 93, 94 hierarchies in 57 – 58; cholera
Bharati, Dharmvir 94 epidemic of 1817 65; dengue
Bharati fantasy 160 spread 65 – 66; disease-related
bhasha literatures 8; mythological narratives 65 – 68; natural disasters
fiction 6 in 60 – 65
Bhattacharya, Monoranjan 77 charita 6
Bhattacharya, Sucheta 10 Chase, James Hadley 193
bhayanaka rasa 105, 109, 110; Chattopadhyay, Bodhisattva 160
‘Journey into Darkness, A’ Chaudhuri, Supriya 18, 19, 20
(Jawadekar) 110 – 112; Khagam Chaudhuri, Upendrakishore Ray
(Ray) 112 – 114; Rokto Golap o 77, 80
Rongin Sura (Das) 114 – 116 Chauhan, Anuja 144
Bhimayana 9, 175 – 186; books Chavdar Tale Satyagraha 187n10
177, 178; caste and 181 – 183; as Chembur ka Data (Pathak) 198
graphic novel 177 – 181; historical chhayavad poets 94
context 182; as the ‘popular’ children’s journals 77
183 – 185; teaching 185 – 186 Chokalingam, T. S. 22
bibhatsa rasa 105, 109, 110 cholera epidemic of 1817 65
Birth of Venus (Boticelli) 169 Chopra, Deepak 166
Blanford, Henry 61 Choron ki Barat (Pathak) 197
blogosphere 1 Christie, Agatha 9, 176
Boats on Land (Pariat) 124, 136n18 Chughtai, Ismat 98
Bodo language 122 churning of the ocean 169 – 170
Bose, Satyendranath 77 Cirpiyin Narakam see Sculptor’s
Bourdieu, Pierre 184, 199 Hell, The (Pudumaippittan)
Branson, Richard 166 climate change, literature dealing
Breuck, Laura 180 with 2
British India 73 Coleridge, S. T. 175
Byomjatrir Diary (Ray) 78 comic books 166 – 167

204
 INDEX

commercial fiction 143 – 144, 145; Dickens, Charles 53, 175

see also popular fiction Dihlawi, Syed Ahmad 52
community fiction 121 – 134; as Dinaman 95
narrative of community 125; see Dine, S.S. Van 3
also North-East Indian literature disease-related mythological
compassionate/pathetic rasa 109 narratives 65 – 68
concordant rasas 109 ‘Disgust and Ugly’ 108
Conrad, Joseph 181 d’Mello, Melville 90
Constitution of India 177, 181 Doordarshan 100
contrapuntal reading 179 Doyle, Arthur Conan 81
Cook, William Wallace 3 Dumas, Alexandre 39
Corridor (Banerjee) 9 Durga Puja 61
Cotton University, Assam 121 Dutt, Guru 93
critical literacy of graphic Dutta, Aminchandra 67
narrative 180 Dwivedi, Hajari Prasad 93

Dai, Mamang 9, 121, 123, 124 – 127, East Indian Company 39, 74 – 76
131, 132 – 134 Eki asambhab Karttike jhar (De) 63
dalit 180 – 181, 182, 184 – 185, ‘Ek Thi Ramrati’(Shivani) 97
187n17 Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, The
Dalit Discourse 176, 184, 186n5 162 – 163
Dalit literature 180 – 181 English fiction: domestic literary
Dalit Voices 176, 184, 186n5 scene in 142; fiction market in
Dalmia, Vasudha 96 142; post-millennial writing
Damarucharita (Mukhopadhyay) 6 142 – 145
Dance (Matisse) 169 English literature, in Indian
Das, Gopalchandra 65 universities 175 – 177; institutional
Das, Kanduri Charan 114 – 116 assumption 176 – 177; North-East
Das, Maheshchandra 66 India Studies Programme 121
Das, Prasanta 122 English newspapers and magazines
Dasgupta, Prabuddha 169 101
Dawn Society Magazine, The 76
De, Maheshchandra 62 – 63 fantasy 2, 4
De, Manna 93 Farhang-e Asafiya (Dihlawi) 52
Deka, Harekrishna 121 Fasana-e Azad (Sarshar) 53
Delhi University 9 Fasih, Ghulam Qadir 39 – 40
Dengue jwarer pnachali (Das) 66 Ferozepuri, Tirath Ram 48 – 51
Dengue jwar o daktar saheb Filmfare 95
(Nath) 66 films 93
detective fiction 4, 5 Five Point Someone (Bhagat) 12
Devi 167 Flipkart 143
‘Devraj Chauhan’ series (Mohan) Fort William College 74
192 forums 1
Dharmyug 94 – 95 Frankenstein (Shelley) 111
Dharwardker, Vinay 18, 19, 20 Funny Boy (Selvadurai) 176
Dheeraj Pocket Books 190
Dhokha (Pathak) 195 – 196 Gandhi’s Salt March 17
‘Diamond Harbour’ Ganga-Jamuni culture of Lucknow
(Bandyopadhyay) 61 97, 101

205
 INDEX

Gastrell, James 61 Hindi pulp 189 – 200; authors

Gaugin, Paul 168 190 – 194; as cheap 189; golden
Gauhati University, Assam 121 age 190; language 189; market for
Gauhati University Institute of 193, 194 – 195; overview 189 – 190;
North-East India Studies 121 Pathak on 189; production quality
General category of caste 177 193 – 194; readers/readership
genre(s): as collection of motifs 2; of 194 – 198; small presses and
as a container 3; as description 190 – 193; typesetting 194; see also
of narrative form 1; non- Pathak, Surender Mohan
Anglocentrism manifesto 1; usage Hindu College 74
as a term 1 – 2 Hindustan Times group 95
genre classifications 2 Hindutva 12
genre fiction 1; emergence of 5; hippie 93
indigenous roots and traditions House With a Thousand Stories, A
5; major languages 11; in (Kashyap) 124, 136n17
marginalized languages 11 – 12; Huggan, Graham 175
Mukhopadhyay 6 – 7; myth in Hum Log 100
5 – 6; political relevance 7 – 8; post- Husain, Sajjad 38
millennial writing as 142 – 145; Husn ka Daku (Sharar) 53 – 54
Rieder’s analysis of 3, 4
Genre Fiction of New India Illustrated Weekly of India 95
(Varughese) 143 Indian Association for the
Ghosh, Amitav 2 Cultivation of Science 76
Ghosh, Pannalal 90 Indian English publishing industry
Gond art/artwork 176, 178, 179, 159 – 160
187n11 Indian Newsreel 90
Gorakhpuri, Firaq 94, 101 Indian science fiction 4 – 5; as
Goswami, Indira 121 children and young adult
Grant, Charles 76 literature 5
graphic novels 2, 9; Adi Parva 9, Indian Writing in English (IWE) 8–10
166 – 170; Bhimayana 177 – 181; Industrial Revolution 77
market for 167 Infibeam 143
Great Derangement: Climate inimical rasa 109
Change and the Unthinkable, The itihasa 141, 147, 150, 152, 153 – 154
(Ghosh) 2 itihasa-purana tradition 6
Guha, Ananya S. 122 – 123, 126 Iyengar, V. Ramaswamy 22
Gupta, Sanjay 194
Gupta, Suman 143 – 144 Jain, Rama 95
Gyan O Bigyan 77 Jain, Sahu 95
Jangalraj (Reema Bharti) 191
Haider, Qurratulain 98 Ja re Ekaki (Shivani) 98
Hai re ashwine jhar (De) 62 Jawadekar, Subodh 110 – 112
HarperCollins India 166, 167 Jawaharlal Nehru University, New
Harry Potter series 185 Delhi 121
Hatfield, Charles 181 Joshi, Ilachandra 94
Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 181 Joshi, Manohar Shyam 100
Heshoram Hushiyarer Diary (Ray) ‘Journey into Darkness, A’
73 – 74, 81 – 84 (Jawadekar) 110 – 112
Hindi magazines 101 Juluri, Vamsee 143

206
 INDEX

Kabir 175 – 176 Love in South Asia (Orsini) 10

Kadambari 95 lower castes 57
Kalidasa 175 Lucknow University 101
Kalikata Kamalalaya
(Bandyopadhyay) 58 Machher basanta (Sharma) 67
Kaliyuga: chimaera of 59; corruption Machh khabo ki poka khabo
of 59; see also chapbooks (Bandyopadhyay) 68
Kalki 59 magi hatobhagi 67
kalpavigyan see science fiction (SF) Mahabharata 9, 143, 145 – 146; see
Kamleshwar 95 also Adi Parva (Patil); Aryavarta
Kapur, Geeta 19 – 20 Chronicles (Udayasankar)
Kapur, Shekhar 166 Mahad Satyagraha 178, 179, 183,
Karttike jharer pnachali (Sarar) 185, 187n10
63 – 64 Majumdar, Leela 73, 74, 77 – 80, 83
Karttike jhar khandapralay (Das) Malhotra, Rajiv 155
64 – 65 Mangeshkar, Lata 93
Kashite Hoy Bhumikapma, Narider Manikkoti 11, 17 – 18, 20 – 34
e ki Dambha (Namdar) 60 – 61 Marathi SF 110 – 112
Kashyap, Aruni 124, 136n17 market, for Hindi pulp 193,
Kaviraj, Sudipta 164 194 – 195
Khagam (Ray) 112 – 114 Marvel Comics 181
Khairabadi, Riyaz 38 mass cultural genre system 3
Khan, Amir Abdur Rahman 43 Matisse, Henri 169
Khan, Amir Sher Ali 43 Maus (Spiegelman) 178
Khan, Sirdar Ghulam Haidar Mavali (Pathak) 196 – 197
43 – 44 McCracken, Scott 144 – 145, 192
Khan, Sirdar Nur Muhammad 43 McGuire, John 57 – 58
Kharmawphlang, Desmond Mehrotra, A. K. 122
121, 122 Mehta, Vishnuprasad 196
Khasi language 122 Meitei 122
Kincaid, Paul 162 Mendelsohn, Farah 162
Klose, Alexander 3 ‘Mera Bhai’ (Shivani) 97
Koli 59 ‘Metro Reads’ 12
Krishanmurthy, R. ‘Kalki’ 17, middle-class homes 96 – 97
21 – 22, 23, 24, 25 – 26, 28, 32, 33 Midnight Club (Pathak) 195 – 196
Krishnakali (Shivani) 95 Miller, D. A. 192 – 193
Miller, Frank 178
Lahore 38 – 39 Ministry of Information and
Legends of Pensam, The (Dai) 9, Broadcasting 100
123, 125 – 127, 130 – 132, 134 Ministry of Utmost Happiness
liberalisation 159 (Roy) 170
Lihaf (Chughtai) 98 Ministry of Utmost Happiness,The
Liquid Comics 166 – 167 (Roy) 98
literature, and science 76 – 84 Misra, Tilottoma 131
‘Locating Cultures: A Semi- Missing Queen, The (Arni) 141,
Academic Essay on the 146, 152 – 154
English Poetry of the North- Mistriz af Delhi (Shuhrat) 44 – 48
East’(Satpathy) 122 Mistriz af Firozpur (Ferozepuri)
Lost Worlds (Doyle) 81 48 – 51

207
 INDEX

Mistriz af Kabul (Khan) 41, 43 – 44 ‘Narrative of Community: The

Mistriz af Kohat 41 Identification of a Genre’
Mistriz af Pishavar 41 (Zagarell) 125
Mistriz af Ravalpindi (Shafaq) Natarajan, Srividya 177
41 – 43 Nath, Nabakumar 66
mistriz novels (Urdu) 38 – 51; see National Book Trust 94
also specific novel national-modern dialectic 19 – 20
Mitra, Premendra 78 natural disasters, Bengali chapbooks
modernism 18; Kapur’s theorisation 60 – 65
of 19 – 20 naturalism 39
Mohan, Anil 190, 191, 192 Natyasastra (Bharata) 103, 104,
Moore, Alan 178 108 – 109
Mukherjee, Satish Chandra 76 Nayar, Pramod 180, 183 – 184,
Mukhopadhyay, Trailokyanath 187n19
6–7 Nazar, Naubat Rai 38
Mukul 77, 80 Neelakanthan, Anand 171
Mullick, Pankaj 93 Neo-Enlightenment sciences 73 – 74,
Murder in Mahim (Pinto) 12 77
Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The New York Times, The 61
(Christie) 9, 176 Ngangom, Robin S. 121, 122
music 93 Nirala 94
Mysteries of London, The non-Anglocentrism manifesto 1
(Reynolds) 38, 39, 40 – 41, 51 Nongkynrih, Kynpham Sing 122
Mysteries of Paris, The (Sue) 40 North-East India 122
Mysteries of the Court of London, North-East Indian literature 9,
The (Reynolds) 38, 39, 52 121 – 134; as a genre 122; as
myth and history 163 – 164 insurgency literature 124; Legends
mytho-history 163 – 164 of Pensam, The (Dai) 9, 123,
mythologerm 5 – 6 125 – 127, 130 – 132, 134; poets
mythology-inspired fiction 8 – 9; and poetry 122 – 123; These Hills
Adi Parva (Patil) 9, 159, 161, Called Home: Stories from a
166 – 170; approaches of telling War Zone (Ao) 9, 123 – 124, 125,
146 – 147; Aryavarta Chronicles 128 – 130, 133 – 134
(Udayasankar) 9, 159, 161 – 166; North-East India Studies Programme
global reader and 154 – 156; 121
The Missing Queen (Arni) 141, Nutan Roga (Dutta) 67
146, 152 – 154; post-millennial
142 – 145; Pradyumna: Son Orsini, Francesca 10
of Krishna (Narayanan) 141, Other Backward Classes (OBCs) 177
146, 147 – 149; proliferation of Oxford Anthology of Writings from
144 – 145; retailing/sales 142 – 143, the North-East India: Poetry and
144; Scion of Ikshvaku (Tripathi) Essays, The (Misra) 131
141, 149 – 152 Oxford India Anthology of Twelve
Modern Indian Poets, The
Nagas 125, 127 – 129, 133, 135n12 (Mehrotra) 122
Namdar, Munshi 60 – 61
Nanda, Gulshan 93, 193 Pandav, Rajkumar 196
Narayanan, Usha 141, 146, Pande, Mrinal 96
147 – 149; see also Pradyumna: Pant, Gaura see Shivani
Son of Krishna (Narayanan) Pant, Sumitranandan 94

208
 INDEX

Paramhamsa, Ramakrishna 58 Radway, Janice 10

Pariat, Janice 124, 136n18 Raga Piloo 90
Pathak, Surender Mohan 10, Raghavan, Venkataraman 107
189, 193 – 200; believability in Rai, Amrit 94
novels of 197 – 198; career and Rai, Sripat 94
success of 193; compared with Raja Pocket Books 10, 190, 192,
other Hindi novelists 194, 197; 193, 194 – 195, 197
middlebrow readership 198, Ramaiah, B. S. 22 – 23, 24, 26
199 – 200; plot constructions Ramanujan, A. K. 161
197 – 198; post-2009 novels Ramayana 143, 145 – 146; see also
194 – 198; on pulp 189; readers/ Missing Queen, The (Arni); Scion
readership 195 – 198; see also of Ikshvaku (Tripathi)
Hindi pulp Ramayana 3392 AD 167
Patil, Amruta 9, 159, 161, Ramayana Reloaded 167
166 – 170, 171; see also Adi Ramcharitmanas (Tulsidas) 6
Parva (Patil) Ramdhenu (Bhattacharya) 77
Pattanaik, Devdutt 171 Ramjas College, University of
pauranik (mythological) 164 Delhi 176
Penguin 12, 167 Random House 12
Persepolis (Satrapi) 178, 181 Ranjit, Colonel 93
Phukan, Mitra 121 rasa: Bhakti movement 103 – 104;
Pinto, Jerry 12 camatkara 107 – 108;
Piprey Puran (Mitra) 78 compassionate/pathetic 109;
Plotto (Cook) 3 concordant 109; emotions 104;
Pohl, Fredrick 4 overview 103 – 105; principles
Pollock, Sheldon 104, 108 105 – 108; print culture 104;
popular fiction 143 – 144, 145; see sadharanikarana 106 – 107;
also commercial fiction sahridaya audience/spectator
Popular Literature, University of 105 – 106; Sanskrit tradition 103,
Delhi 176; see also Bhimayana 109; sthayi bhavas 109; types
post-millennial writing, as genre of 109; see also adbhuta rasa;
fiction 142 – 145 bhayanaka rasa
Postone, Moishe 58 rasa, in contemporary times 5,
Pradyumna: Son of Krishna 103 – 116
(Narayanan) 141, 146, 147 – 149 ‘Rasa in Shakespeare’ 104
Premchand 52 – 53, 93 Ravi Pocket Books 190
Priyamvada, Usha 94 Ray, Satyajit 78, 93; Byomjatrir
production and distribution 3 Diary 78; Khagam 112 – 114
production quality, of Hindi pulp Ray, Sukumar 73 – 74, 81 – 84
193 – 194 Reader’s Digest 95
publishing industry, Indian English Reading the Romance (Radway) 10
159 – 160 realism 39
Pudumappittan 28 – 29, 32 – 33 Reasons for Belonging (Hoskote) 122
pulp see Hindi pulp Reema Bharti 190, 191 – 192
pulp-quality paper 189 reservation, caste-based policy of
Punjab Press, The 39 177 – 178
Puranas 143 retellings and re-imaginings 143
Pure Tamil Movement 17, 20, 21, Reynolds, G. W. M. 10, 38 – 39,
32, 33 40; see also Urdu translations of
Purohit, Sudarshan 194 – 195 Reynolds’s novels

209
 INDEX

Rieder, John 3 Sculptor’s Hell, The

River of Stories (Sen) 9 (Pudumaippittan) 29 – 31
Robinson, Kim Stanley 2 Self-Respect Movement 17 – 18, 20,
Rokto Golap o Rongin Sura (Das) 21, 22, 33
114 – 116 self-styled critics 97
‘Romance@Work’ 12 Selvadurai, Shyam 176
romance writers 10 Sen, Orijit 9
Roxburgh, William 75 sentence and solas 5
Roy, Arundhati 170 serialised novel 95, 96
Roy, Bimal 93 serials 100
Rushdie, Salman 175 Shafaq, Bihari Lal 41
Shakespeare, William 175
sadharanikarana 106 – 107; see also Sharar, Abdul Halim 38
rasa Sharma, Dwijabar 67
sadhvis 98 Sharma, Ved Prakash 190, 193,
Sahi, VDN 94 197
Sahitya Akademi 94 Sharma, Veena see Reema Bharti
Sahityadarpana (Visvanatha) 109 Shelley, Mary 111
sahityik goshtis (literary soirees) 97 ‘Shelter’ (Bhimayana) 177, 178
sahridaya audience/spectator ‘Shillong poets’ 122 – 123
105 – 106 Shiva (lord) 61 – 62
Saket, Pervin 146 Shivani 10, 89 – 90, 94; Apradhini
sanatan dharma 68 98 – 100; ‘Ek Thi Ramrati’
Sandesh 77, 80 – 81 97; female characters 98;
Sanghi, Ashwin 143 Krishnakali 95; ‘Mera Bhai’ 97;
Sanskrit 92 serialised novel 95, 96; social
Saptahik Hindustan 95, 101 outcasts and 98
Sarar, Ishwarchandra 63 – 64 Shiva Trilogy, The (Tripathi) 8 – 9,
Sarika 95 144, 146
Sarshar, Ratan Nath 53 ‘Shortcut’ (Majumdar) 78 – 80
Satpathy, Sumanyu 122 shudras 57
Satrapi, Marjane 178 Shuhrat, Muhammad Nisar Ali
Scheduled Castes (SC) 177 44 – 48
Scheduled Tribes (ST) 177 Siddiq Book Depot of Lucknow 52
science: East Indian Company and Siddiqi, Salma 94
74 – 76; education of 74 – 76; Singh, Dara 93
literature and 76 – 84; Neo- Singh, Narayan 196
Enlightenment 73 – 74, 77 Singh, Ravindra 12
science fiction (SF) 2, 4 – 5; American Sircar, Mahendralal 76
Futurians 4; Bengal 5, 73 – 84; Sitala 67
as children and young adult Sita: Warrior of Mithila (Tripathi)
literature 5; defining 162 – 163; 9, 170
emergence phase writers 4; 60 Indian Poets (Thayil) 122
Marathi 110 – 112; mythology and Sketches by Boz (Dickens) 53
159 – 163 Small presses, Hindi pulp and
Science Fiction and the Mass 190 – 193
Cultural Genre System (Rieder) 3 Sobti, Krishna 98
Scion of Ikshvaku (Tripathi) 141, soft-pornographic literature 4
149 – 152 South Asian literary traditions 164

210
 INDEX

speculative fiction (spec-fic) 160, Udayasankar, Krishna 9, 159, 161,

162, 163 163 – 166, 171; see also Aryavarta
Spiegelman, Art 178 Chronicles (Udayasankar)
Srinivasan, K. 22 Urdu novels and novelists 38 – 55;
sthayi bhavas 109 asrar 51 – 54; mistriz 38 – 51
Stop Press (Pathak) 197 Urdu translations of Reynolds’s
Strange Horizons Readers’ Poll novels: Mysteries of London, The
Award 1 38, 39, 40 – 41, 51; Mysteries of
subgenres 12 the Court of London, The 38, 39,
Sue, Eugène 40 52; Premchand on 53
sugam sangeet 93 Urmila (Saket) 146
Suvin, Darko 162
Swift, Jonathan 39 Valmiki, Om Prakash 175
Varughese, Emma Dawson 6, 160, 161
Tagore, Rabindranath 7, 175 Venkatachalapathy, A. R. 10
Tamil literature 17 – 34; Verma, Mahadevi 94
Krishanmurthy (Kalki) 17, Verne, Jules 39
21 – 22, 23, 24, 25 – 26, 28, 32, 33; vibhavas 110, 113
modernism 18; new publications violence, caste-based 182
31 – 34; overview 17 – 18; Virgin Comics 166; see also Liquid
Pudumappittan 28 – 29, 32 – 33; Comics
purpose of 24 – 31 Vishnu 59
teaching Bhimayana 185 – 186 Vision after the Sermon (Gaugin) 168
Teaching the Graphic Novel Vividh Bharati 91 – 92
(Hatfield) 181 Vogue India 169
technology and technoculture 165 vote-bank politics 178
Tehri Lakir (Chughtai) 98 vulgarity 96
television 100 vyabhicari bhavas 110
Thapar, Romesh 90 Vyam, Durgabai 176, 177
These Hills Called Home: Stories Vyam, Subhash 176, 177
from a War Zone (Ao) 9,
123 – 124, 125, 128 – 130, ‘Waiting to Be Taken Onboard:
133 – 134 The Poetry of Robin Ngangom,
Through the Looking Glass Desmond Kharmawphlang, and
(Carroll) 176 Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih’ (Das)
‘Travel’ (Bhimayana) 177, 178 122
Tripathi, Amish 8 – 9, 143, 144, Watchmen (Moore) 178
160, 170; The Immortals of ‘Water’ (Bhimayana) 177, 178
Meluha 160; Scion of Ikshvaku Way the Future Was, The (Pohl) 4
141, 149 – 152; The Shiva Trilogy Western classics 175
8 – 9, 144, 146; Sita: Warrior of Western science 74 – 76, 77, 80
Mithila 9, 170; Westland and 9, women writers in Hindi 89 – 102
160 ‘Words of Women, The’ (Dai)
Tuchman, Barbara 68 131 – 132
Tuchman’s Law 68 Wordsworth, William 175
Tulsi Pocket Books 190 WorldCat 40
Twitter 1
typesetting, Hindi pulp 194 Zagarell, Sandra 125, 136n20

211