Indian Genre Fiction - Pasts and Future Histories - Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani and Anwesha - Studies in Global Genre Fiction, 2019 - 9780429456169 - Anna's Archive
Indian Genre Fiction - Pasts and Future Histories - Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani and Anwesha - Studies in Global Genre Fiction, 2019 - 9780429456169 - Anna's Archive
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.
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.
Edited by
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay,
Aakriti Mandhwani and
Anwesha Maity
First published 2019
by Routledge
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© 2019 selection and editorial matter, Bodhisattva
Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani and Anwesha Maity;
individual chapters, the contributors
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and Anwesha Maity to be identified as the authors of the
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CONTENTS
List of contributorsxi
PART I
Emergence of distinctions 15
ix
C ontents
PART II
Postcolonial reassertions 87
PART III
Genres in the 21st century 139
Index203
x
CONTRIBUTORS
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
1
B odhisattva C hattopadhyay et al .
2
I ntroduction
3
B odhisattva C hattopadhyay et al .
4
I ntroduction
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
7
B odhisattva C hattopadhyay et al .
8
I ntroduction
9
B odhisattva C hattopadhyay et al .
10
I ntroduction
11
B odhisattva C hattopadhyay et al .
12
I ntroduction
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
17
P reetha M ani
18
F iction in late colonial T amil N adu
19
P reetha M ani
20
F iction in late colonial T amil N adu
21
P reetha M ani
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:
23
P reetha M ani
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:
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
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:
28
F iction in late colonial T amil N adu
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.
31
P reetha M ani
32
F iction in late colonial T amil N adu
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
35
P reetha M ani
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 ’
39
C . M . N aim
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 ’
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:
42
H omage to a ‘ M agic - W riter ’
43
C . M . N aim
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
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.
46
H omage to a ‘ M agic - W riter ’
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 ’
49
C . M . N aim
50
H omage to a ‘ M agic - W riter ’
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 ’
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
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
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
58
A series of unfortunate events
59
A ritra C hakraborti
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
60
A series of unfortunate events
61
A ritra C hakraborti
62
A series of unfortunate events
63
A ritra C hakraborti
sent because people of the lower castes tried to usurp the roles of the
‘social superiors’:
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
64
A series of unfortunate events
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
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:
66
A series of unfortunate events
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
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A series of unfortunate events
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.
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A series of unfortunate events
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A ritra C hakraborti
72
4
EXPLORERS OF SUBVERSIVE
KNOWLEDGE
The science fantasy of Leela Majumdar
and Sukumar Ray
Debjani Sengupta
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D ebjani S engupta
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E xplorers of subversive knowledge
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D ebjani S engupta
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E xplorers of subversive knowledge
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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
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E xplorers of subversive knowledge
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:
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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
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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
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D ebjani S engupta
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
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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
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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
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I ra P ande
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.
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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
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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:
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
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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J eetumoni B asumatary
122
C ommunity fiction
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
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C ommunity fiction
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
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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
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J eetumoni B asumatary
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,
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J eetumoni B asumatary
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
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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
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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,
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
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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’.
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J eetumoni B asumatary
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
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J eetumoni B asumatary
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(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.
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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
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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:
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* * *
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
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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:
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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169
C hinmay S harma
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
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E xpanding world of I ndian E nglish fiction
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
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174
10
WHEN BHIMAYANA ENTERS
THE CLASSROOM. . .
Aratrika Das
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
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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 . . .
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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 . . .
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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
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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’.
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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 . . .
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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 . . .
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
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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.
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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 . . .
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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
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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.
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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.
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192
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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.
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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.
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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:
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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
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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
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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.
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201
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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
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INDEX
204
INDEX
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
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207
INDEX
208
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209
INDEX
210
INDEX
211