Imaginingindianness

Imagining Indianness
Cultural Identity
and Literature
Edited by Diana Dimitrova

Thomas de Bruijn
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Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology
Series Editors
Deborah Reed-Danahay
Department of Anthropology
The State University of New York at Buffalo
Buffalo, New York, USA
Helena Wulff
Department of Social Anthropology
Stockholm University
Stockholm, Sweden
This book series aims to publish explorations of new ethnographic objects
and emerging genres of writing at the intersection of literary and anthro-
pological studies. Books in this series will be grounded in ethnographic
perspectives and the broader cross-cultural lens that anthropology brings
to the study of reading and writing. The series will explore the ethnogra-
phy of fiction, ethnographic fiction, narrative ethnography, creative non-
fiction, memoir, autoethnography, and the connections between travel
literature and ethnographic writing.
More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/15120
Diana Dimitrova • Thomas de Bruijn
Editors
Imagining Indianness
Cultural Identity and Literature
Editors
Diana Dimitrova Thomas de Bruijn
Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology

ISBN 978-3-319-41014-2 ISBN 978-3-319-41015-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41015-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016957710
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

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To my professors Monika Horstmann and Axel Michaels
Diana Dimitrova
Editors’ Preface
Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology publishes explorations of new

ethnographic objects and emerging genres of writing at the intersection of
literary and anthropological studies. Books in this series are grounded in
ethnographic perspectives and the broader cross-cultural lens that anthro-
pology brings to the study of reading and writing. By introducing work
that applies an anthropological approach to literature, whether drawing
on ethnography or other materials in relation to anthropological and liter-
ary theory, this series moves the conversation forward not only in liter-
ary anthropology but in general anthropology, literary studies, cultural
studies, sociology, ethnographic writing and creative writing. The “literary
turn” in anthropology and critical research on world literatures share a
comparable sensibility regarding global perspectives.
Fiction and autobiography have connections to ethnography that
underscore the idea of the author as ethnographer and the ethnographer as
author. Literary works are frequently included in anthropological research
and writing, as well as in studies that do not focus specifically on litera-
ture. Anthropologists take an interest in fiction and memoir set in their
field locations, and produced by “native” writers, in order to further their
insights into the cultures and contexts they research. Experimental genres
in anthropology have benefitted from the style and structure of fiction
and autoethnography, as well as by other expressive forms ranging from
film and performance art to technology, especially the internet and social
media. There are renowned fiction writers who trained as anthropologists
but moved on to a literary career. Their anthropologically inspired work
is a common sounding board in literary anthropology. In the endeavour
vii
viii EDITORS’ PREFACE
to foster writing skills in different genres, there are now courses on ethno-
graphic writing, anthropological writing genres, experimental writing and
even creative writing taught by anthropologists. And increasingly, literary
and reading communities are attracting anthropological attention, includ-
ing an engagement with issues of how to reach a wider audience.
Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology publishes scholarship on
the ethnography of fiction and other writing genres, the connections
between travel literature and ethnographic writing and internet writing.
It also publishes creative works such as ethnographic fiction, narrative eth-
nography, creative non-fiction, memoir and autoethnography. Books in
the series include monographs and edited collections, as well as shorter
works that appear as Palgrave Pivots. This series aims to reach a broad
audience among scholars, students and a general readership.
Buffalo, NY, USA Deborah Reed-Danahay

Stockholm, Sweden Helena Wulff
Advisory Board
Ruth Behar, University of Michigan
Don Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz
Regina Bendix, University of Göttingen
Mary Gallagher, University College Dublin
Kirin Narayan, Australian National University
Nigel Rapport, University of St Andrews
Ato Quayson, University of Toronto
Julia Watson, Ohio State University
Contents
1 Introduction: On “Indianness” and Indian

Cultural Identity in South Asian Literature 1
Diana Dimitrova
Part I Indianness, Literature and Culture:

A Critical Perspective 13
2 Of Many Indias: Alternative Nationhoods

in Contemporary Indian Poetry 15
K. Satchidanandan
3 Reviewing Nirmal Varma, Jaidev and the Indianness

of Indian Literature 35
Hans Harder
4 Indianness as a Category in Literary Criticism

on Nay ī Kah ān ī 55
Thomas de Bruijn
5 Imagining “Indianness” and Modern Hindi Drama 77

Diana Dimitrova
ix
x Contents
Part II Indian Cultural Identity and the Crisis

of Modernity: Reworking of Myth and Tradition 93
6 The Indian Contexts and Subtexts of My Text 95

Krishna Baldev Vaid
7 Kishorilal Gosvami’s Indumatı̄ 111

G. H. Schokker
8 Indianness, Absurdism, Existentialism, and the Work

of Imagination: Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Naukar kı̄ kamı̄z 131
Martin Christof-Fuechsle
9
‘Subah kī sair’ and ‘Dūsrı̄ duniyā’, Two Short
Stories by Nirmal Varma 147
Mariola Offredi
Index 163
The Editors
Diana Dimitrova obtained her Ph.D. in Modern and Classical Indology

at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, in 2000. She is Professor of
Hinduism and South Asian Religions at the University of Montreal in
Montreal, Canada. Her research interests are Hindi drama and theatre,
Bollywood film, modern and pre-modern literary and religious cultures of
North India, especially sant and bhakti literary and religious traditions. She
is the author of Hinduism and Hindi Theater (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016); Gender, Religion, and Modern Hindi Drama (Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008); and Western Tradition and
Naturalistic Hindi Theatre (New York: Peter Lang, 2004). She is also the
editor of The Other in South Asian Religion, Literature and Film: Perspectives
on Otherism and Otherness (New York and London: Routledge, 2014) and
Religion in Literature and Film in South Asia (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010). Her articles include “The Treatment of Women and
Gender in the Plays Asharh ka ek din and Adhe adhure by Mohan Rakesh
(1925–1972)” in Tohfa-e-dil. Festschrift Helmut Nespital (Reinbek:
I. Wezler, 2001); “Of Satis, Sitas, and Miras: Three Female Protagonists in
Modern Hindi Drama” in Heroes and Heritage: The Protagonist in Indian
Literature and Film (Leiden: Research School CNWS, Leiden University,
2003); “The Indian Character of Modern Hindi Drama: Neo-Sanskritic,
Pro-Western Naturalistic or Nativistic Dramas?” in Theology and Literature:
Rethinking Reader Response (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006);
“Upendranath Ashk’s Play Tufan se pahle and Hindu-Muslim Cultural
Hybridity” in Voices from South Asia (Zagreb: Bibliotheca Orientalica of
the Croatian Philological Society, 2006); “The Development of Sanatana
xi
xii The Editors
Dharma in the Twentieth Century: A Radhasoami Perspective” The

International Journal of Hindu Studies, Volume 1, Issue 1 (2007): 89–98;
“Neo-Sanskritic and Naturalistic Hindi Drama,” in Modern Indian Theatre
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); and “Hinduism
and Its Others in Bollywood Film of the 2000s,” Journal of Religion &
Film: Vol. 20: Iss. 1, Article 10. 20 pages.
Thomas de Bruijn studied Indian languages and culture at Leiden

University, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1996 on a thesis on the poetics
of Malik Muhammad Jayasi’s Padmāvat. Later, de Bruijn turned his atten-
tion to modern Hindi writing and published on various aspects of the
Nayī Kahānī movement. Themes in his research are the esthetics of Hindi
writing of both modern and pre-modern periods and its reception in his-
toriography and literary criticism. During 2004–2005 he taught Hindi
literature at INALCO in Paris. He is currently working in an administra-
tive position in higher education in the Netherlands. In 2012 he published
Ruby in the Dust: Poetry and History of the Padmāvat by the Indian Sufi
Poet Muḥammad Jāyasī (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2012). His pub-
lications also include “Under Indian Eyes: Characterization and Dialogism
in Modern Hindi Fiction” in Chewing Over the West: Occidental Narratives
in Non- Western Readings, ed. Doris Jedamski (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2009), 183–212; “A Discourse of Difference: ‘Syncretism’ as a Category
in Indian Literary History” in Literature and Nationalist Ideology: Writing
Histories of Modern Indian Languages, ed. Hans Harder (Delhi: Social
Science Press, 2009), 282–304; “Dialogism in a Medieval Genre: The
Case of the Avadhi Epics” in Before the Divide: Hindi and Urdu Literary
Culture, ed. Francesca Orsini (Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2010), 121–142;
“Lost Voices: The Creation of Images of India through Translation” in
India in Translation Through Hindi Literature: A Plurality of Voices, eds.
Maya Burger and Nicola Pozza (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), 77–102; and de
Bruijn, Thomas and Sunny Singh, “Q&A on Sunny Singh’s Short Story A
Cup Full of Jasmine Oil” Orientalia Suecana 60 (2012): 83–96.
The Contributors
Martin Christof-Fuechsle obtained his Ph.D. in Indology at the

University of Tübingen, Germany, in 1997. He currently holds a position
as co-ordinator/researcher in a project entitled “Modern India in German
Archives” at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of
Göttingen. He is the author of Rajputentum und puranische
Geschichtsschreibung (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997) and the co-editor of
Charisma and Canon: Essays on the Religious History of the Indian
Subcontinent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). His current
research interests focus on modern Hindi literature and especially Dalit
literature and on the history of the reception of India in German academ-
ics and other facets of the Indo-German encounter. He is also working on
the translation of some of the plays of Bhisham Sahni.
Hans Harder is Professor of Modern Indian Languages at Heidelberg

University and director of the South Asia Institute Heidelberg. He
obtained his Ph.D. in 1997 on a study of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s
Srimadbhagabadgita. He habilitated in 2006 at the University of Halle-
Wittenberg, where he was a supervisor of a research group funded by the
Volkswagen Foundation on Nationalist Ideology and the Historiography
of Literature. His publications include Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s
Srimadbhagabadgita: Translation and Analysis (South Asian Studies
XXXVII. Delhi, Manohar, 2001); Der verrückte Gofur spricht. Mystische
Lieder aus Ostbengalen (Heidelberg, Draupadi Verlag, 2004); Hans
Harder, ed. Literature and Nationalist Ideology: Writing Histories of
xiii
xiv The Contributors
Modern Indian Languages (New Delhi, Social Science Press, 2010); Sufism
and Saint Veneration in Contemporary Bangladesh: The Maijbhandaris of
Chittagong (London, Routledge, 2011); and Verkehrte Welten. Bengalische
Satiren aus dem kolonialen Kalkutta (Heidelberg, Draupadi Verlag, 2011).
Mariola Offredi is a former associate professor of Hindi Language and

Literature at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy. She retired on 1
November 2005 on superannuation. She earned a diploma in Hindi
Language and Indian Culture in 1958 from the IsMEO (Institute for the
Middle and Far East) of Milan and in 1961 was awarded a degree in Social
and Political Sciences from the Catholic University of Milan with a dis-
sertation thesis on Community Development in India. She has worked
and published extensively on Hindi Literature (fiction, journalism and
poetry) and translated works into Italian (Premchand’s Godan, 1970;
Rudr’s Bahti Ganga, 1980; Alka Saraogi’s Kali-katha: vaya baipas, 2002,
and Shesh Kadambari, 2004 [her translations of the three novels were the
first ever into a foreign language]). She has published a book on the con-
temporary Hindi novel (1974), essays and books on Hindi poetry (1972,
1984, 1986, 1998, 2003, 2006) with translations of poems into Italian
and a book on Hindi journalism from 1826 to 1926 (1971). Recently, she
has researched and published three essays on Krishna Sobti (2007, 2008,
2009). She also researched and published her findings on the impact of
industrialization on the tribal peoples of the Bastar district of Madhya
Pradesh (1983), the Muslim weavers of Banaras and Mau (Uttar Pradesh)
(1984) and contemporary Indian Art (1992). She has also worked on
three unpublished manuscripts ascribed to Gorakhnath, publishing a book
(1991) and essays on the same subject. She is currently researching on the
Hindi fiction writer S.R. Harnot.
K. Satchidanandan is a Malayalam poet, essayist and translator and a

bilingual critic and editor. He has a doctorate in post-structuralist poetics
and was a professor of English at Christ College, University of Calicut,
Kerala; editor of Indian Literature, the journal of the Sahitya Akademi
(The National Academy of Letters); and later the chief executive of the
Akademi. He then worked as a language policy consultant for the
Government of India and has been associated, as editor, with Katha, Delhi,
and the Foundation of SAARC Writers and Literature. He edits the poetry
quarterly Kerala Kavita in Malayalam and the series of translations from
South Asian literature, The South Asian Library of Literature in English.
The Contributors xv
He retired in 2011 as director and professor, School of Translation Studies

and Training, Indira Gandhi National Open University, Delhi. He is also
on the Project Advisory Board of Indian Literature Abroad and the
National Executive of the National Translation Mission and was member,
Executive Board, Sahitya Akademi, besides being on the academic/gov-
erning bodies of JNU (Delhi), Ambedkar University (Delhi) and
Malayalam University (Kerala) and has been on the Ph.D. board of four
universities. He has 22 collections of poetry in Malayalam, 16 collections
of world poetry in translation, 4 plays, 3 books of travel and 23 collections
of critical essays and interviews besides 4 collections of essays in English.
He has edited several anthologies of poetry and prose in Malayalam,
English and Hindi. He has 27 collections of his poems in translation in 17
languages, including 5 collections in English, 6 in Hindi and 1 each in
Irish, Arabic, German, French and Italian besides all the major Indian
languages. Satchidanandan has represented India in several international
literary events like the international literary festivals in Sarajevo, Berlin,
Montreal, Beijing, Moscow, Ivry-sur Seine, Rotterdam, Jaipur and Delhi,
Hay Festival-Trivandrum and Medellin International Poetry Festival in
Colombia and book fairs at Delhi, Lahore, Kolkata, Abu Dhabi, Frankfurt,
Leipzig, London, Paris and Moscow. He has also read and talked at Bonn,
Rome, Verona, Ravenna, Leiden, New York, St. Petersburg, Damascus,
Aberystwyth, Manchester, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Oman, Sharjah, Singapore,
Colombia, Cuba, Peru, and so on besides most of the cities in India.
Satchidanandan has been honoured with Knighthood of the Order of
Merit by the Government of Italy, with the Dante Medal by the Dante
Institute, Ravenna, and the India-Poland Friendship Medal by the
Government of Poland. He has also been an activist for secularism, envi-
ronment and human rights.
G. H. Schokker was reader of Hindi language and literature, as well as

Bengali and Marathi at Leiden University, from 1966 until his retirement
in 1994. He passed away in 2009. He studied Theology and Indian lan-
guages at the University of Groningen and at Leiden University. He was
an expert of Sanskrit drama, of modern and pre-modern Hindi literature
and of the history of Indian poetics. Among his publications are The
Pādatāḍitaka of Śyāmilaka, part 1 (The Hague: Mouton, 1966), part 2
(in co-operation with P.J. Worsley) (Dordrecht-Boston: Reidel, 1976);
“Study in Braja and Avadhi Grammar and in Keśavadāsa’s Rasikapriyā” in
Early Hindi Devotional Literature in Current Research, ed. W.M. Callewaert
xvi The Contributors
(Leuven: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 1980); with M.K. Gautam “The

Language of Bhakti: Popular and Literary Expression in the Works of
Tulasidasa” (Acta Indologica 6 (1984): 383–433; with A.G. Menon,
“Linguistic Convergence: The Tamil-Hindi Auxiliaries,” Bulletin of the
School of Oriental and African Studies 53,2 (1990): 266–282; with
M.K. Gautam, eds. Bhakti in Current Research 1982–1985: Proceedings of
the Third International Conference on Devotional Literature in the New
Indo-Aryan languages, Noordwijkerhout 1985 [Kern Institute miscellanea
10] (Lucknow, 2000); “The Control of the Uncontrollable” in Bhakti in
Current Research 1982–1985, eds. M.K. Gautam and G.H. Schokker
(Lucknow, 2000).
Krishna Baldev Vaid obtained his M.A. (English) from Panjab University

and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He taught English and American
literature at various Indian and American Universities such as Delhi,
Panjab, State University of New York and Brandeis. He retired early in
1985 from State University of New York at Potsdam in order to devote
himself exclusively to creative writing. He has published ten novels, eleven
collections of short fiction, seven plays, four diaries and three books of
miscellaneous prose in Hindi. He has translated and published several of
his own novels, plays and short stories into English. A few of his works
have been translated into French, German, Russian, Japanese and of
course English. He has also published one book of literary criticism,
Technique in the Tales of Henry James (Harvard University Press). He has
translated Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Lewis
Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Racine’s Phaedra into Hindi and Nirmal
Verma’s Veh Din and Muktibodh’s Andhere Mein into English. He is an
important Indian writer known for his iconoclastic and innovative work.
He spends most of his time now in College Station, Texas.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: On “Indianness” and Indian

Cultural Identity in South Asian Literature
Diana Dimitrova
Imagining Bhāratıȳ tā (“Indianness”)

The notion of “Indianness” as a perceived collective cultural identity is
difficult to define. It is important to bear in mind that “Indianness” is
not a “scientific” or existing, real category. It is rather a perceived, fluid
and ideologically colored discourse that constantly changes over time and
is being conditioned by the ideological orientations and positions of the
specific period discussed. Benedict Anderson speaks of “imagined com-
munities” and how this concept is essential to understanding nationalism
(Anderson 1983). Another influential scholar, Stuart Hall, has pointed
out the importance of cultural identity of modern individuals as unfixed,
multi-layered and ever changing (Hall 2000, 595–634). I have also dis-
cussed the importance of both nationalism and identity with regard to the
study of otherism and otherness (Dimitrova 2014, 1–16).
If we look carefully into the inferences of all three studies, we may inquire
further and reflect on the issue of a possible “national” or “collective cul-
tural identity.” This collective cultural identity is not limited to Indian real-
ity only—it is common to all national and cultural formations and has some
common characteristics. Thus, it is unfixed, multi-layered, ever c hanging,
D. Dimitrova (*)
© The Author(s) 2017 1

D. Dimitrova, T. de Bruijn (eds.), Imagining Indianness,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41015-9_1
2 D. DIMITROVA
and most importantly always “imagined” and conditioned through our

ideological positions—to be constantly created and re-created in our dis-
courses and our cultural and academic narratives. It follows that the only
way to discuss “collective cultural identity,” in our case “Indianness,”
would be to analyze specific texts and discourses while always bearing in
mind the specific cultural, historic, religious and socio-economic context.
Bhāratıȳ tā (“Indianness”) and Hindutva

(“Hindudom/Hinduness”)
It is important to note that the notion of bhāratı̄ytā is not identical with the
concept of hindutva. Bhāratı̄ytā is a term which we can reference to two
texts on this topic: N.S. Jagannathan’s article “Whose Indian Literature
is it anyway” (The Book Review August 1997) and Jaidev’s volume The
Culture of Pastiche: Existential Aestheticism in the Contemporary Hindi
Novel (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1993). Both writers
discuss the concept of “Indianness” or the “Indian” character of Indian
literature. Jagannathan reflects on the issue of the invisibility of South
Asian writing in South Asian languages. He critiques the gap between
those South Asian authors who write in English like Salman Rushdie and
the authors who write in South Asian languages. Finally, Jagannathan
holds that one should resist translation, as Indian sensibility is represented
in its myriad linguistic forms, myths and legends.
Jaidev, on the contrary, believes that contemporary Indian writing
defies “Indianness” because it is what he considers a pastiche of Western
existentialist world view. The representation of urban middle-class milieus
strikes him as “non-Indian” and antithetic to the meaning and purpose of
Indian writing. Jaidev critiques the portrayal of Westernized worldviews
and the “pastiche” of Western sensibilities in South Asian writing.
Thus, independently of the different meanings, which these two think-
ers attribute to “Indianness,” to both of them “Indianness” denotes a
particular Indian cultural identity that is inherent to India and can only be
understood against the background of the plurality of India’s languages,
myths, religions and literatures—its shared linguistic, literary, cultural and
religious history—that is, the ways Indians “imagine” “Indianness”.
By contrast, hindutva is a secular notion that understands Hinduism
as a cultural and political unifying reality in modern India and not as
a religious concept of “Hindu dharma” (Klostermaier 1994; Flood
INTRODUCTION: ON “INDIANNESS” AND INDIAN CULTURAL IDENTITY... 3
1996). It has been promoted in the past two to three decades as the
prevailing cultural and religious ideology under the growing influence
of the Bhār tı̄ya Janatā Pār tı̣ ̄ (Bharatiya Janata Party/Indian People’s
Party or BJP) and of Hindu nationalism (Sharma 2002, 1–36). The
term hindutva was first used by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in 1923
(Savarkar 1923) and it was taken on by the BJP as its ideology in
the late 1980s. It has also inspired the worldview of members of the
Hindu nationalist organization Rās ṭ ṛ ı̄ya Svayaṃsevak Saṅgh (National
Volunteer Organization or RSS) and also of the Viśva Hindu Pariṣad
(World Hindu Council or VHP).
However, this secular notion of hindutva has not remained immune
to the general process of conservative remythologizing of the present
(Dimitrova 2008, 98). There is a call to return to orthodox tradition and
religious values and to understand Indian cultural identity as Hindu cultural
identity, thus assimilating or excluding other religious and cultural identi-
ties, be it Sikh, Buddhist, Christian or Muslim. The proponents of hindutva
include all religious traditions that originated in South Asia, such as the vari-
ous forms of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism as part of hindu-
tva. However, they regard Islam and Christianity as foreign traditions and
outside of hindutva. Thus, even though promoted as a cultural and secular
identity for all Indians, the ideology of hindutva has not succeeded into
including all religious, social and cultural groups of Indian society.
In order to better analyze the links between the ideology of hindutva
and the constructed notion of Muslims, Christians and untouchables as
the “others,” I would like to look at Edward Said’s study of the discourse
of orientalism, Talal Asad’s reflection on Islam and the political discourse
in Europe, and my own work on the discourse of otherism.
In his book Orientalism, Edward Said analyzed several discourses
which were instrumental in the construction of the notion he called
“the Orient” as a domain of inquiry. He refers to this discourse as “ori-
entalism.” Said studies mainly the Middle East and his research deals
with French writing about the Middle East. His analysis can be used
to reflect on similar discourses about South Asia and India, as revealed
in British colonial writing. The discursive practices of “orientalism”
are informed by idealization, the imposition of Western fantasies, the
employment of stereotypes, the tendency to generalize, the wish to
view phenomena through the lens of European values and to think of
difference through the ways of perception and thinking of the West
4 D. DIMITROVA
(Hall 2000, 215). As Said has stated, “the essence of Orientalism is
the ineradicable distinction between Western superiority and Oriental
inferiority” (Said 1985, 42).
I would like to point here to Talal Asad’s article “Muslims and
European Identity: Can Europe Represent Islam?” Asad reflects on how
Islam was important in essentializing European identity through narra-
tives of history. He proceeds to question the cultural representation of
Islam in European political discourse, which he considers to be part of
the discourse of Christian Europe (Asad 2000, 11–27). Similarly, if we
look into the cultural representations of Islam and Christianity in political
discourse linked to hindutva, we may conclude that they have contributed
to essentializing Indian identity and that they are intrinsically linked to the
discourse of Hindu India.
Lastly, I would like to point out that the construction of difference
need not be related to the West and colonialism. Thus, I have coined the
term “otherism” to refer to the universal discourse of “otherness and oth-
ering” (Dimitrova 2014, 1–16). The term is more inclusive, as it consid-
ers otherness and the construction of difference with regard to race and
ethnicity, gender and sexuality and goes beyond “West and the rest”—
dichotomy. Essentializing can also be linked to gender, caste and sexual
orientation. While it is self-explanatory that an ideology that is based on
traditional Hindu values would exclude or marginalize former untouch-
ables or women, further studies are needed to explore the complex links
between hindutva and societal groups with different sexual orientation.
As discussed above, this book understands “Indianness” in a non-
essentializing sense, as a pluralistic, open-ended and dynamic concept that
is inclusive of all religious, cultural and socio-political traditions and cur-
rents in South Asia and beyond.
Cultural Identity
Cultural identities are those aspects of our identities which arise from our
“belonging” to distinctive ethnic, racial linguistic, religious and, above
all, national cultures (Hall 2000, 596). Modern societies are societies of
constant, rapid and permanent change. Late-modern societies are charac-
terized by “difference”: they are cut through by different social divisions
and antagonisms which produce a variety of different “subject posi-
tions”—identities for individuals. As discussed earlier, meaning arises in
the relations of similarity and difference which words have to other words
within the language code. There is an analogy not only between language
and culture, as argued above, but also between language and identity,
that is, “I know who I am in relation to the ‘other’” (Hall 2000, 609).
This leads to fragmentation or pluralization of identities. People no longer
identify their social interests exclusively in class terms, and the new social
movements such as feminism, ecological movements and national libera-
tion offer additional possibilities for identification. Moreover, modern
societies are cultural hybrids, as they are comprised of members belong-
ing to different ethnic, religious and racial groups. The phenomena of
globalization and diaspora have impact on cultural identity, too. Thus, in
late modernity, the subject is conceptualized as having no fixed, essential
or permanent identity. Modern identities are “de-centered,” dislocated or
fragmented.
How does one contain all these identities and meanings together? In
pre-modern societies, it was mainly religion that produced meanings, val-
ues and identities. In the age of modernity, in the era of secularism, what
is it that conveys meanings and defines values and identities to people in
modern societies?
It has been extensively discussed that it is the nation and national cul-
ture that have assumed this function, while religion continues to play a
prominent role in the ideological construction of national communities.
Benedict Anderson has argued that national cultures are “imagined com-
munities.” National cultures are a discourse: they construct identities by
producing meanings about “the nation” with which one can identify. The
emphasis is on origins, continuity, tradition and timelessness. Hobsbawm
and Ranger refer to this phenomenon as “the invention of tradition.”
Often, traditions that are recent in origin invent rituals and symbols that
imply continuity and a historical past (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983, 1).
Homi Bhabha points out that the narrative of the national culture is told
and retold in national histories, literatures, the media and popular culture
(Bhabha 1990, 1). Literature plays a significant role in constructing and
defining the “narrative of the nation”.
This narrative needs to be retold in times of crisis and threat to the
national unity, which could be of internal nature, such as communalism,
separatism and terrorism, or of external nature, such as the challenges
posed by Westernization, globalization and the diaspora. It is therefore
important to explore how authors have imagined and re-created in their
works cultural identity and “Indianness” as well as their vision of the nar-
rative of the nation.
6 D. DIMITROVA
The book1
This book deals with the issue of cultural identity in South Asian litera-
ture. It brings together a number of chapters dealing with the interface
between identity, culture and literature. The book is organized in two
parts: “Indianness,” literature and culture: a cultural perspective, and
Indian cultural identity and the crisis of modernity. The common thread
that links the two parts is the exploration of how one imagines national
identity (Anderson 1983), and how this concept is revealed in the “narra-
tives of the nation” (Chatterjee 1993) and the production of various cul-
tural discourses (Foucault 1965; Hall 2000; Dimitrova 2014). All chapters
explore the various aspects of the ongoing process of constructing, imagin-
ing, re-imagining and narrating “Indianness,” as revealed in the literatures
and cultures of South Asia. The chapters in this collection respond to the
same question: how to interpret the Indian past and present? What is the
meaning of ancient and venerated Indian culture in ancient times and now-
adays? What defines the “Indian” character of the production of literature
and culture? What are the ideological implications of the interpretation of
identity and “Indianness” and how do they reflect and influence the power
structures of contemporary societies in South Asia? Thus, all chapters
approach the questions raised from the perspective of ideological criticism,
post-colonial theories and theories of discourse, identity and nationalism.
The methodologies refer to a thematic and philological analysis of texts in
South Asian languages.
Both the quality of the chapters written by internationally renowned
scholars from Europe, North America and South Asia and the innovative
interdisciplinary approach ensure new insights into the study of cultural
identity in South Asian literature. It is important to note that that all chap-
ters are based on the study of works written in South Asian languages from
different periods and regions. This is a unique feature and gives a different
perspective than studies based on translations or works written in English.
The study of “Indianness” in South Asian literature and culture has
never been examined in this interdisciplinary and innovative way. We
may say that it is a dialogical Bakhtinian way of dealing with the topic, as
authors, critics and scholars contribute to the volume. This collection is a
pioneering project and a desideratum in the field of South Asian literature
and culture.
The following section summarizes some of the major themes that each
of the chapters undertakes.
In Chapter 2 K. Satchidanandan studies contemporary Indian poetry

that militates against the monolithic idea of a past or projected “Indianness”
and asserts the plurality of the perceptions of India in the present con-
text. The author affirms that the poems quoted are context-sensitive in the
strictest sense of the term while also containing within them the desire to
be free of certain contexts of class, caste or gender, for example—to arrive
at a society where cultural difference is not bound to oppressive categories
but springs from creative regional and linguistic contexts. The poets he
has chosen believe that it is necessary to problematize the concept of India
in order to fight its oppressive implications and to recontextualize poetry
in order to build a free democratic society in the country. In the context
of the threat of a forced homogenization and cultural globalization, dif-
ference becomes the key concept that defines the poetry of the Indian
avant-garde.
In Chapter 3 Hans Harder studies the views of two authors and think-
ers—Nirmal Varma and Jaidev—on “Indianness.” Harder distinguishes
between two basically different ways of using the word “Indian,” and he
points out that this distinction can best be exemplified by the expression:
“The Indianness of Indian Literature.” He discusses that the term is obvi-
ously used in two distinct ways. In “Indian Literature,” “Indian” is an
attribute denoting topographical and cultural origin and belonging. The
“Indianness” of the title, by contrast, is conceived as a matter of debate.
Harder suggests that this second meaning is highly marked, as its opposite
would be “Un-Indian” rather than “non-Indian,” the English negative
form being more explicit here than the positive.
In Chapter 4 Thomas de Bruijn states that the critical discussions on
the particular Indian character of Indian literature which are under review
in the current volume, there is a notable tendency to view the concept of
“Indianness” as a predominantly positive notion. The author studies how
the concept of “Indianness” is present and productive in the critical essays
and creative writing that was produced in the context of the Nayı̄ Kahānı̄
movement—the major innovative force in Indian writing of the 1950s
and 1960s. He examines in greater detail how Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ deals with
the representation of negative or ambivalent notions of Indian reality and
moral values, which were the hallmark of this movement and inherent in
their modernist outlook.
In Chapter 5 Diana Dimitrova explores the notion of “Indianness”
with relation to the creation of the canon of modern Hindi drama. She
reflects on the issue of “Indianness” and of imagining “Indianness” and
8 D. DIMITROVA
Hindi drama by looking into the cultural segments that have influenced
the development of the dramatic genre of Hindi. The author discusses
the ideological implications of constructing the tradition of Hindi drama
as a neo-Sanskritic one while ignoring and suppressing both Western
(British) and Islamic (Urdu) influences. She points out that while the
post-1960s “rediscovery” of folk/indigenous/deśi theatrical traditions
has been of great importance, it has not been sufficient to “revive” and
stop the demise of modern Hindi drama, as it has not truly represented
“Indianness.” Thus, Dimitrova argues that “Indianness” is a pluralistic
category which is informed by multiple cultural segments, such as Western
(British), Brahmanic (Sanskritic), Islamic (Urdu) and indigenous (folk)
literary traditions. Therefore, all schools of Hindi drama—neo-Sanskritic,
naturalistic and nativistic—represent “Indianness” and should be part of
the literary canon of Hindi.
In Chapter 6 Krishna Baldev Vaid reflects on the Indian contexts and
subtexts of his texts. He studies the themes and problems in some of his
major works and examines how the notion of “Indianness” is reflected
in them—consciously or subconsciously. The author voices his suspicion
regarding any variety of cultural nationalism and critiques its re-emer-
gence anywhere but especially in India. He points out that in its reductive
manifestations in literature and literary criticism, it can espouse jingoism
and xenophobia. He reminds his readers that great literature has always
professed and often practiced defiance of space and time and that these
two elements nourish it in the first place. Vaid argues that some of the
questions that haunt every theoretical meditation on literature are related
to how it manages to transcend the conditions out of which it is created
and whether it does so self-consciously.
In Chapter 7 G.H. Schokker studies “Indianness” in Kishorilal
Gosvami’s story Indumatı̄. He asserts that Kishorilal Gosvami stands forth
as the champion of traditional Hindu cultural values. Schokker points out
that while he in his social novels concerns himself with contemporary
Indian society, in his historical novels he tries to evoke the Hindu ideals of
the past. He affirms that his historical story Indumatı̄, placed in the first
half of the sixteenth century (shortly after the battle of Panipat), contrasts
the Rajput ideal and the misconduct of Ibrāhim Lodı̄. The author dis-
cusses that in keeping with the conventional nature of the story, its actors
are well-known classic types. Schokker argues that Indumatı̄ embodies the
classic ideal of a virtuous and unselfish woman (satı̄). The youth, who is
himself the son of a Hindu Rājā, embodies the Rajput ideals of heroism
(vı̄ratā) and nobleness (udāratā).
In Chapter 8 Martin Christof-Fuechsle discusses “Indianness” in the
novel Naukar kı̄ kamı̄z (1979) by Vinod Kumar Shukla. He argues that
the novel was also highly acclaimed by Indian critics. Thus, in his pref-
ace to the Marathi translation of Naukar kı̄ kamı̄z (Khare 1996), Vishnu
Khare praises the novel as an authentic portrait of lower-middle-class life
in a small town in Madhya Pradesh and, at the same time, highlights the
fact that it does not contain traces of much-used Western models such
as the works of Joyce, Proust or Camus and that there is also no dis-
play of “-isms” such as existentialism, structuralism, and so on. Christof-
Fuechsle points out that Khare emphatically designates it as a thoroughly
Indian novel by a thoroughly Indian narrator. The author also asserts that
Naukar kı̄ kamı̄z is regularly counted among the best novels of Hindi
literature since independence and proceeds to analyze the cultural context
for this enthusiastic review of the novel.
In Chapter 9 Mariola Offredi discusses “Indianness” in two short sto-
ries by Nirmal Varma—“Subah kı̄ sair” and “Dūsrı̄ duniyā.” She reflects
on Nirmal Varma’s cultural identity and states that the Indian of today
lives in a state of limbo and points out that the Indian’s life is also in
abeyance, a limbo, a state between two different cultures. Offredi argues
that the reader interprets this limbo and re-creates it. Offredi points out
that Nirmal Varma expresses as a “state,” or situation, something that is
still fluid, something that is being done now, and something that lies in
the future. She concludes that what is in the making is the Indian mind,
a cultural identity still in the making. The author suggests that we readers
perceive it as being in the making because we are immersed in it and are
partly involved in its making.
To conclude, it is important to note that all the chapters in this book have
examined different ways of looking at “Indianness” and of inflecting the
meaning of Indian cultural identity. This book has presented the concept of
“Indianness” as dynamic and ever-changing category, which has been con-
structed and continues to be constructed to reflect various political, religious,
national and cultural discourses. It is an inclusive concept which encompasses
diverse religious, cultural, historical and socio-political sources and currents.
Thus, the book argues for a multi-faceted and multi-layered pluralistic under-
standing of bhāratı̄ytā or “Indianness”—a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and
multi-religious Indian identity that is both fragmented and whole.
10 D. DIMITROVA
Note
1. Initial research on this book was made possible by a contribution
from the Gonda Foundation of the Royal Netherlands Academy of
Arts and Sciences (KNAW).
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——— (ed). 2014. The Other in South Asian Religion, Literature and Film:
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On Transliteration
The system of transliteration in this work follows a standard system for

Hindi, in which long vowels are marked with a macron, for instance, ā,
and reftroflex consonants with a dot beneath the letter, for example, ḍ.
Nasalization is indicated by the sign ṃ, which follows the nasalized vocal.
No special symbol is used for anusvāra (superscript dot denoting hom-
organic or other nasal consonant) in the transliteration, the appropriate
nasal consonant being written to avoid confusion in the pronunciation.
All Hindi words and titles of works are spelled according to the translitera-
tion system for Hindi. The names of authors have not been marked with
diacritics.
PART I
Indianness, Literature and Culture: A

Critical Perspective
CHAPTER 2
Of Many Indias: Alternative Nationhoods

in Contemporary Indian Poetry
K. Satchidanandan
“Do you still love this land?” …

“… But not this India, not this valley of Skeletons”
K. Satchidanandan (“Fever”) (1992, 199, tr. poet)
This essay looks at the state of the concept of “Indianness” in the present
context of cultural nationalism linked to religious revivalism on the one
hand and cultural standardization in the name of globalization on the
other. It looks at India as a republic of languages, literatures, religions
and ethnicities, each of which is authentically Indian. There is hardly any
dichotomy between the regional and the national in Indian culture and
literature as the latter manifests itself in regional forms, and construct-
ing another “Indianness” outside of them is nothing but an Orientalist
fantasy. The focus of this essay is on contemporary Indian poetry that
beautifully reflects this cultural pluralism in myriad ways. I first discuss
the general premises of India’s pluralist culture and the many violent
forces and concepts that threaten to undermine this diversity and silence
minority voices which too are a legitimate part of Indian culture. In an
attempt to elaborate upon my concept of diversity, I discuss selected
poems by Dhumil, Raghuvir Sahay, Kedarnath Singh (Hindi), P. Lankesh
K. Satchidanandan (*)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41015-9_2
16 K. SATCHIDANANDAN
(Kannada), Attur Ravivarma (Malayalam), Kamala Das, Imtiaz Dharker,

(English), Malika Amar Sheikh (Marathi) and Pravin Gadhvi (Gujarati)
and Pash (Punjabi), all of which in diverse ways question the concept of
an India that circumvents regional cultural and linguistic identities, not
to speak of ethnic and religious ones. From these examples I come to
the conclusion that a poetics of difference is in operation in contempo-
rary poetic practice in India. Caste, ethnicity, gender, religion, region and
sexuality are the chief axes on which this idea of diversity of identity is set
in motion. That this cultural plurality by no means threatens India’s politi-
cal unity as a nation is evident from the fact that the many Rāmāyaṇās,
Mahābhāratas and the various strains of Bhakti and Sufi poetry have in the
past only strengthened India’s unity at the people’s level. Any essentialist
and deliberate attempt to construct “standard” versions of Indian litera-
ture and culture—as the Hindu religious extremists are doing today—
without addressing the question of this inherent and enriching plurality
will only end up creating a parody of Indian reality and is sure to lead to
the balkanization of the country.
The Parable and the Lesson

A.K. Ramanujan concludes his “informal essay” “Is There an Indian Way
of Thinking?” narrating a parable told by the Buddha: Once a man was
drowning in a sudden flood. Just as he was about to drown, he found a
raft. He clung to it and it carried him safely to dry land. And he was so
grateful to the raft that he carried it on his back for the rest of the life
(Dharwadker 1999, 51).
The concept of a cultural Indianness that transcends the contexts of lan-
guage, caste, class and gender is not unlike this raft: it has saved us from
drowning on many an occasion in the past, the last one being during our
struggle against British colonialism. But cultural nationalism today has
become synonymous with a carnivorous revivalism that seeks to recreate
the past in its own image and impose its oppressive authority over the pres-
ent whose truth and strength lie in its cultural pluralism. India is a republic
of languages, literatures, religions and ethnicities, each of which is authenti-
cally Indian and not “regional” as they are often dubbed; any attempt to
standardize Indian culture is more than likely to invite the disaster of bal-
kanization. Constructing an India over the tomb of cultural differences that
constitute the mosaic of its culture is certain to please the Orientalist with his
perceptions of a homogeneous Indian culture, the globalizer who seeks to
OF MANY INDIAS: ALTERNATIVE NATIONHOODS IN CONTEMPORARY INDIAN... 17
hand India packaged in a comprehensible and easy format over to the alien
consumer awed by its inaccessible plurality and the obscurantist who seeks
political hegemony through biased cultural representations that entirely
marginalize women, Dalits, tribals and entire linguistic and religious minor-
ities of India with their different, often subaltern if not subversive, traditions
and perceptions of Indian culture. The construction of a monolithic Indian
culture, character or literature is thus an act of civilizational violence that
inevitably involves a negation of heteroglossia, a silencing of ethnic diver-
sity and religious pluralism and a bulldozing of diverse cosmologies and
world views that together constitute the federation of Indian culture. This is
not to deny certain shared patterns of literary evolution, linguistic kinships
and intercultural ties developed over centuries of co-existence. The foreign
observer looking from a distance does find a semblance of cultural unity in
India, but coming closer one begins to see hundreds of Rāmāyaṇas and
Mahābhāratas, dozens of philosophical systems and religious cults which
were never called Hindu until the nineteenth century, as many modernisms
as there are languages, as many different ways of negotiating foreign influ-
ences and as many ways of ethnic and linguistic expression that reflect the
genius of the Indian people. “Indian culture” and “Indian literature” are
no more than convenient umbrella terms that embrace diverse cultures and
literatures whose historical and geographical co-existence has led to certain
exchanges and at times produced examples of multilingual creativity. The
raft that saved us is gradually, imperceptibly, turning into the old man in the
Sindbad story pressing us down, suffocating our cultures and silencing our
many voices reducing them all to a mere stammer.
We are not unfamiliar with the European stereotypes of India, both
positive (e.g. Max Müller) and negative (e.g. Hegel). The salient fea-
tures of this characterization are the denial of empirical reality, the inabil-
ity to distinguish the self from the non-self and interior from exterior, a
neglect of universal human nature, a refusal to create synoptic systems
and the consequent construction of an illogical bricolage of tools and sys-
tems, the theories of karma or of saṃsāra, the hierarchies of caste and
the hegemony of vedānta in philosophy or of dhvani in literature or rasa
in theater: but each one of these has not merely exceptions but parallels
and alternatives. A.K. Ramanujan, in the essay cited above, labors hard
to discover and define a certain movement in Indian thought from the
context-sensitive to the context-free. He points out how the Indian con-
cept of dharma has always been bound to regions and castes. No Indian
literary text, even the dateless and anonymous ones, until the nineteenth
century comes without a context or a frame and that every story within
the epics is encased in a meta-story like the tale of Nala told by a sage to
a dependent Yudihiṣt ̣hira in his exile in the woods which itself is part of
the macro-tale called Mahābhārata. The taxonomy of landscapes in Tamil
cankam poetry is another example of intense contextualization where the
character and mood are related to the patterns of landscape, labor and
food. Again he points to the collapsing of nature and culture as against
the Levi-Straussian opposition, a metonymic view of man in nature or an
expression of culture that is enclosed in nature. Such a pattern of concen-
tric containments like when the little Kṛṣṇa swallows the three worlds and
his mother sees herself and her son also within his open mouth is then sup-
posed endemic to Indian cultural representations. Even space and time are
particularized, and each kind of soil, each type of house, each season, each
hour of the day has its special mood and character. Thus, from the caste
system in society to the rāga system in music, everything seems to reflect
context-sensitivity. Hence, all counter-movements in India according to
Ramanujan are attempts to be context-free: rasa in aesthetics, mokśa in
the puruṣār thas (or the aims of life), saṃnyāsa in the āśramas (or the
stages of life) sphoṭa in semantics and bhakti in religion define themselves
against a background of inexorable contextuality. They are universal and
generalized and betoken a liberation from the context—let it be from rela-
tional social roles as in mokśa, from worldly ties as in saṃnyāsa, from the
particularity of bhāvas as in rasa, from the sequence and time as in sphot ̣a
or from caste, ritual, gender and custom as in bhakti. If in the West, the
revolt is against a status quo that is abstract, universal and context-free,
in India, the rebellion is against the context-bound, to create universals.
Ramanujan sees modernization in India as a movement towards context-
free systems and practices: Gandhi’s egalitarianism as against Manu’s hier-
archies, the singing of rāgas free from the time-contexts of convention or
borrowings from Western culture re-aligned to fit earlier context-sensitive
needs, for example.
Let us look at some samples of contemporary Indian poetry that mili-
tate against the monolithic idea of a past or projected “Indianness” and
assert the plurality of the perceptions of India in the present context. They
are context-sensitive in the strictest sense of the term but also contain
within them the desire to be free of certain contexts of class, caste or
gender, for example—to arrive at a society where cultural difference is
not bound to oppressive categories but springs from creative regional and
linguistic contexts.
The poets I choose here like hundreds of their contemporaries seem

to believe that it is necessary to problematize the concept of India in
order to fight its oppressive implications and to re-contextualize poetry
in order to build a free democratic society in the country. In the context
of the threat of a forced homogenization and cultural globalization, dif-
ference becomes the key concept that defines the poetry of the Indian
avant-garde.
A Cow Has Slopped Its Dung on the Map of India
In “Twenty Years after Independence,” Dhumil (real name: Sudama

Pandey 1935–1975), one of the most radical of political poets in Hindi,
interrogates the very concept of free India symbolized by the national
flag. The warnings seem to have overcome the dangers they foresaw: once
again the poet sees the jungle before him as a solid green sea where trees
have lost their identity. Signals have all turned green: everything is permit-
ted here, the moral scruples at work during the struggle of Independence
no longer operate.
Twenty years later

I ask myself—How much endurance does it take
To turn into an animal?
(Dhumil 1999, 194–195, tr. Vinay Dharwadker)
Only silence answers the poet. He finds it “almost dishonest” to follow

one’s impulses, “to go chasing the little leaves/blowing about in blood.”
It is the autumn of the heart: the fall before the chill winter of death. The
poet finds the houses around locked, suggesting martial law, mourning,
curfew or hartāl. The growing violence of the present is suggested in
the following lines: a disaster written in the language of bullets buried
in the walls and shoes scattered in the street. Obviously there has been a
protest march and a shooting by the police. This image of violence is jux-
taposed against the grotesquely comic picture of “a cow that has slopped
its dung on the map of India flapping in the wind.” Something dies in the
poet’s heart: it is nothing but the image of a peaceful, just and prosperous
India dreamt of by the freedom fighters. The map is but a representation
of that beloved country now covered by the dung of shame. The word
“shame” immediately follows: it is not the time to measure the shame of
a scared people. The poet wonders whether the policeman or the saint
is the country’s greater misfortune: the former represents a mockery of

law and the latter, in the context of the poem, a mockery of religion since
this “saint” has nothing to do with the tradition of Kabir or Tukaram:
he is the venomous fundamentalist presiding over the dharma saṃsads,
the “religious parliaments,” the saffron-clad politician, the communal-
izer, the pseudo-moralist and the censor. The policeman and the “saint”
here represent two forms of violence: of the state and of the obscurantist
forces in the civil society. The poet dares not go back to the street he had
fled during the encounter to retrieve his shoes. Only he passes through
the deserted lanes “like a thief” and asks himself:
… is freedom only the name

of three tired colors
dragged by a single wheel?
(ibid.)
The colors and wheel of the flag that used to signify abundance, purity,
youthfulness and the commitment to dharma and the welfare of the peo-
ple have lost their meaning: they denote nothing when people are shot
down like rats on the streets. The poet’s question about the significance of
the flag remains unanswered; this silence suggests an absent, yet unborn,
India, just as do the lines quoted at the beginning of the paper from my
own poem “Fever.”
The poem “Bhārat” by Pash, the Punjabi poet-martyr (1950–1988)
whose real name was Avtar Singh Sandhu, also projects an alternative,
subaltern, idea of nationhood: for the poet the word stands for the
sons of the soil who measure time with the shadows of trees, who can
munch their own bones when they are hungry, who consider death
a deliverance and life a convention (cf. Gill 1999). The poet wants
to hurl his cap in the air when someone speaks of one Bhārat or of
national integration, so that he may put into his head the idea that
Bhārat has many meanings and that it has nothing to do with the name
of Bharat, the son of King Duśyanta and Śakuntalā. About those mean-
ings the poet says: “They register themselves in the fields/where all
the corn grows/and so many burglars go” (Gill 1999, 1). The poem is
characterized by an assertion of the India of the peasants and has also a
hidden “Punjabiness” about its commitment to the corn field and the
landless peasant.
There Was Soil …
“Kudāl” (The Spade), a Hindi poem by Kedarnath Singh (b.1932),
reflects the conflict between two Indias: the India of the rural peasant
and that of the city dweller (cf. Singh 1995, 16–18).1 True to Kedarnath
Singh’s method of choosing symbols from ordinary life—a mode prob-
ably inherited from the Bhakti poets—in this poem he chooses a kudāl, a
spade, as the symbol of India’s agricultural civilization juxtaposed against
the urban one, though the poem reveals many more levels of meaning and
of conflict. The poet’s eyes are disturbed by the sight of a spade left by the
gardener at his door. It looks quite out of place there. At the same time
he is fascinated by its “strange, curvaceous, dust-laden beauty.” The word
“dust” is very important here as it is a recurring symbol in Kedarnath’s
poems. In the poem “Kasabe ke dhūl” (The Dust of Kasaba), he says: “I
am aware because/this dust is the most living/and lovely thing of my
land/the most restless/the most active/the earth’s most nascent/and the
most ancient dust.” In a conversation the poet says:
Dust represents the whole Indian life itself. It is always active and flying in
the atmosphere. The darkness and sadness are there in dust. The slowness of
its movement represents the rhythm of semi-rural Indian life I am familiar
with.
This dust is also related to the past, for the poet sees the spade “in the
pale light of the departing day” (jāte hue din kı̄ dhuṃdhalı̄ rośnı̄ meṃ).
The departing day implies also the disappearance of a whole culture rep-
resented by the spade:
There was work

It is over
There was soil
It has been dug to the roots
And now this spade
Stands at the door
Like a silent challenge.
(Singh 1995, 16–18)
The spade has already done its work; the rustic cultures of the peasant have
contributed to an awareness of our roots. Perhaps it also suggests that the
village has already played its role in the shaping of the poet’s vision and
sensibility.
The poet thinks of taking the spade inside the house and leaning it in
some corner. First he thinks of keeping it in the drawing room; why not
the spade if he can keep the nāgphani there? But immediately he discovers
that the presence of the spade will upset the balance of the whole house.
What about the kitchen? But the kitchen had a “fresh-washed sacredness”
before which the dusty spade looked out of place. The products of the
peasant can enter the kitchen but not the peasant himself nor his earth-
laden tool. The spade cannot be kept in the darkness under the cot. It will
be an act of cowardice—like concealing one’s true origins. The house may
however become warmer by that odor of mystery that will fill the air. A
spade under a cot is a strange image; it makes the poet laugh.
Finally the poet stops by the spade for a while to meditate over it. He
feels he is standing in some invisible court, with the spade on his shoulder,
to witness the being of the spade on earth. One cannot but acknowledge
the presence of the peasant and his contribution to man’s making and civi-
lization. But for him the cities would not have been; but for him we would
go without food and even without culture, for the roots of our literary cul-
ture lie in the great oral traditions and our music, dance, painting, sculp-
ture and architecture, even our wisdom, owe much to the folksingers,
ritual dancers, carpenters, masons and other artisans, all products of a rural
culture with agriculture at its center. Not only India’s marvelous temples
are products of rural artistry; our classical dances and music can easily be
traced to their folk roots, and our epic Rāmāyaṇa, if we can believe the
legends, was authored by a hunter-turned sage and Mahābhārata by the
son of a fisher woman. The post-industrial culture of the cities may try
to conceal these beginnings by hiding them in the darkness under their
cots and sleeping over them. But its presence is undeniable, and poetry is
perhaps the last witness to that ancestral civilization. This is why the poet
feels the gardener has raised “the most difficult question of my century.”
The final stanza sounds like a warning. It is like the “village encircling
the city.” As it grows darker, the spade’s blade seems to be growing; it is
dangerous to leave it at the door. Throwing it to the streets is also impos-
sible. We cannot disinherit or disown our fathers. If Cavafy’s people of the
city wait for the barbarians to destroy their culture and offer an alternative,
the poet here is caught between two cultures, the rural and the urban, the
agricultural and the industrial. The poet does not resolve the question;
his project is only to present the poser, to highlight the ambivalence of
the culture we live. Such an ending is quite natural to a poet who sees the
emptiness of the post-card as a message that tells us, “to write is to see the
whole world including the blind” (“Postcard” in Singh 1995).
A Wild Jungle Bear Has No Need for Your Gita …

P. Lankesh’s (1935–2000) Kannada poem “Mother” rejects the stereo-
types of the Indian tradition in order to celebrate the illiterate rural woman
struggling hard to bring up her children.
My mother, black, prolific earth,

green leaf: a festival of white flowers
With every burn, the earthier.
With every pang more fruit and petal.
(Lankesh 1992, 139–40, tr. A.K. Ramanujan)
She has “limbs that thrill to children’s kicks.” Her life was spent in raising
millet, swilling water for each clod of earth, to nourish pepper and peas
and grain, hiding her youth in a tatter of sāṛı̄s. She grew into a hag bent
double, weeping for coin, for dead calf and ruined grain, roaming villages
for an ancient runaway buffalo.
No, not Savitri, Janaki, nor Urmila

nor a heroine out of history books,
tranquil, fair, grave, in dignity
nor like the wives of Gandhi
and Ramakrishna. Did not worship the gods,
nor listen to holy legends, nor did she wear
like a good auspicious wife
any vermilion on her brow.
(ibid.)
The poet calls her “a wild bear leaving a litter of little ones,” snarling and
grumbling like a hurt bitch, rearing a husband, saving coins in the knots
of cloth, ready to scratch like a monkey.
A wild jungle bear has no need for your Gita

My mother lived
For stick and grain, labour and babies
For rafter overhead, rice, bread, a blanket;
To walk upright among equals

(ibid.)
Her death is also casual; she lays down the basket on her head, groans
and closes her eyes never again to open them. It was as if she were leaving
home for the fields, “cool in the middle of small talk.” The whole poem is
a tribute to a woman who lived in mud and soil, rejecting the role models
assigned to her by the “great” Hindu tradition. The poet’s position can
perhaps be appreciated better if we compare this poem with a poem like
Sitakant Mahapatra’s “Father” that opens with the lines “Behind all his
action lurked one desire Vaikuntha./He would not slip out of the house/
without taking the name Durga Madhav” (Mahapatra 1992, 18–20).
Her Fierce Hunger May I Put into the

Forest Fires …
Attur Ravivarma’s (b. 1931) “Metamorphosis,” a Malayalam poem, speaks
of the transformation of such a woman into an embodiment of revenge.
The speaking middle-class subject feels a sense of sin that he wants to
expiate, carrying the rotten corpse of that woman-servant inside him. He
goes about with fingers stuck in his nostrils; but the odor keeps everyone
away. As a child he had seen this maid, a leech in his eyes; her child had
died of overeating from hunger. She had a woman’s head by birth, but the
sea never roared in its ears; it had eyes only to be closed at midnight, its
lips were the edges of a silent wound. She went to bed after every star had
slept and woke up with a start much before the sun did. She has walked a
thousand miles and yet is where she was; kicked and trodden a thousand
times, she has not yet woken up. She is
the stump of a broom,

a stinking swab, a gruel plate
with a warped rim
a lump of earth.
(Ravivarma 2000, 197–198, tr. Ayyappa Paniker)
The second part of the poem is like a magic ritual where the poet wants
to rouse and to transform her into a beast of prey. He would like to dis-
mantle the unlaid ghost of her soul like a machine and cautiously fasten it
to another body:
Not to the body of a woman

creeping like a leech
but to a man-eating tiger on the prowl for hunger.
(ibid.)
He would like sleeping children to hear its growl, moving closer to their
home. He longs to take her tongue and fasten it to the “throat not of a
stray bitch relishing leftovers” but of a “hungry wolf that rounds up and
kills and dines on its prey.” He would put her fierce hunger into the forest
fires that beset and burn cities and settlements, her agony in the twilight
sky dripping with pus and blood: He would infuse her curse into the sun
who scorches the fertile fields. Her death thus becomes a sacrifice to the
goddess who sows the seeds of small pox, represented by the sky with the
stars for pockmarks. The poem with its dense imagery and radical symbol-
ism, characteristic of much of the Indian poetry of the 1970s, sums up
the dreams of the subaltern India, of transforming the society through a
purifying act of violence.
I Don’t Know Politics …

How does a woman poet reconstruct her India? Look at Kamala Das’s
much discussed poem “An Introduction” (Das 1996, 96–97; cf. also
my introduction to the volume) that works simultaneously at the indi-
vidual and social levels proving once again the truth of the feminist slo-
gan, “The personal is the political.” “An Introduction” is a polyphonic
text with several of the poet’s voices seeking articulation in a single
verbal construct. The opening statement “I don’t know politics” has an
ambiguous tone that comes from a woman’s marginalized position in
society. Outwardly it is a confession of ignorance, but it also conceals
in it a potential irony as the society does not expect a woman to deal in
politics. She is never the master in politics, only the victim, hence her
lack of knowledge of the names of those in power who have no con-
tent for her. Then she situates herself more specifically using nationality,
complexion, place of birth and the languages known, an ironic filling up
of an ungiven form. The “language she dreams in” again is ambiguous
enough to warrant many interpretations: it could be that of imagina-
tion, woman’s language, English or Malayalam, her mother tongue. She
also justifies her choice of English as she believes she is using it with her
own angularities and eccentricities. It is the voice of her instinct as is the
lion’s roar and the crow’s cawing. She recalls the unconscious terrors of
her childhood as she tries to differentiate herself from trees: monsoon
clouds and rains bring in the locale of Kerala. Speaking of adolescence
her female body inscribes itself on the text, and she remembers too
her first encounter with masculine violence that belongs to the same
frightening world of trees in the storm and the mutterings of the funeral
pyre. References to swelling limbs, growing hairs, the pitiful weight of
breasts and womb and the “sad woman body” emphasize the corporeal
ground of woman’s experience, female physicality often identified with
female textuality.
It has been said that women suffer cultural scripts in their bodies and
women writers are like the mythic woman warrior who went into battle
scarred by the thin blades which her parents literally used to write fine
lines of script on her body. Woman herself becomes the text, and this may
explain women writer’s preference for confessional modes of writing.
(However, a crude emphasis on the difference of the body can even be
dangerous as that is also the foundation of gender discrimination against
women, hence the ironic comment that the identity of woman’s literary
practice must be sought in “the body of her writing and not the writing
of her body.”) The woman cannot change her body; so the poet changes
her dress and tries to imitate men. But the voices of tradition would
force her back into sāṛı̄s, the sāṛı̄ becoming here a sign of convention.
She is pushed back into her expected gender roles: wife, cook, embroi-
derer, quarreller with servants; the gender role also becomes a class
role. The elders fill her world with taboos asking her to be her parents’
Amy, her friends’ Kamala or her readers’ Madhavikutty (her penname in
Malayalam). Every deviation from the norm is looked upon as perversion
or mental illness. Her hurt humiliated soul goes on begging for love; the
nature similes of the hasty river and the waiting ocean re-emphasize the
element of instinct that drives the woman in her. The many ontological
dimensions of her being—lover’s darling, drinker of the city nights, one
who makes love and feels shame, sinner, saint, beloved, betrayed—are
tied together at the end of the poem where the poet’s ego dissolves in
others as soon as it is asserted. If the poet finds the male ego “tightly
packed like the sword in its sheath,” violent, arrogant and exclusive, she
finds her identity to be a moment of difference before a final dissolution
in others as she finds that her joys and aches are the same as those of
her readers. The poet dreams of another India where the female body
is free from the oppressive male gaze and the patriarchal violence that it
engenders, where women do not have to play the roles assigned to them
by the conventions of the family and the canons of literature but can be
everything until she becomes a true person, a human being with all pos-
sible dimensions.
One Kind of Hunger Swallows Another

This feminine discourse however is not uniform as it gets qualified by caste
and religion. A Dalit woman poet in Marathi like Malika Amar Sheikh
(b.1959) looks at the city from its margins as in her “Metropolis—24.”
People in the city, she says, haven’t slept for years.
By night men are transformed

Into different kinds of hungers
And one kind of hunger swallows another.
(Amar Sheikh 1999, 97, tr. Ravindra Kimbahune)
Men suspended from the tree of passion fly by night towards blind bodies.
This is the moment when the hungry woman sells herself tempted not by
flesh but by food. “We’ve often lost ourselves/in the jungle of intestines/
Even a white hot bread/conquers us completely.” This language of pure
biology reflects the play of instincts: of hunger answering lust. During the
day robots rule the city; night is the women’s empire. Yet no one even
thinks these dark women exist; only “a poet or two” have this suspicion.
This invisibility comes from the complete marginalization of the woman,
particularly the Dalit woman in contemporary India. The poet suggests
no alternative: it is as if there is the India of eternal present juxtaposed
against the glorious image of India and Indian women projected by the
champions of the past.
A Muslim woman poet like Imtiaz Dharker (b.1954) is forced to medi-
tate over the purdah. In “Purdah, 1” the purdah grows into a paradox of
simultaneous oppression and security (Dharker 1994, 170–171).
One day they said

She was old enough to learn some shame.
She found it came quite naturally
The woman overcome by shame finds some safety in the purdah where
the body finds a place to hide: but soon comes the realization that it is
almost a coffin and the cloth that fans out against the skin is like the
earth that falls on the coffin. The purdah also sharpens her vision: she
begins to notice the angles people make in the light as they stand up or
sit down, notice their sly, slanting eyes. She also remembers her secret
liaisons and carries a sense of sin between her thighs. The cloth grows
closer to the woman’s skin; light filters inward through the body’s walls.
The voices inside grow louder: she stands outside herself inches past
herself. She feels she is a clod of earth; roots inside her scratch for a hold
between her ribs. As she passes out of her own hands into the corner
of someone else’s eyes, doors keep opening inward: thus the purdah
that keeps her hidden from the world forces her to travel into the inner
world—hers is also an experience of double marginalization, first as a
member of a minority community and then marginalized by that com-
munity’s patriarchy.
Pravin Gadhvi, the Gujarati Dalit poet (b.1951), opens his “Shadow”
with a line from Lorca, “O, Woodcutter, cut my shadow.” The shadow in
the poem is the shame of having been born a Dalit.
I can be a Hindu,
a Buddhist
a Muslim.
But this shadow
Shall never be severed from me.
(Gadhvi 1999, 43, tr. K.M. Sherrif)
Even conversion does not seem to offer a solution. He has thrown away
the caste marks, the sweeper’s bucket and the broom, but the shadow
sticks. Even after changing the name, the job, the village, even the caste,
the shadow of ostracization, of estrangement, gathered over generations
stays with him. The language and the dress and the gestures have changed;
yet the shadow resolutely plods on. A new smṛti, different from Manusmṛti
that legitimizes caturvarṇa, the four-caste system, a new constitution that
proclaims equal rights to all citizens, a new penal code that punishes the
practice of untouchability: none of these seems to help to change him into
a confident new man. The shadow, the poet feels, will stick to him forever.
Thus, being born in India in a so-called low caste becomes a curse without
redemption, forcing another Dalit poet, Baburao Bagul, to say “You who
have made the mistake of being born in this country must now rectify it:
either leave the country or make war.”
In What Language Shall We Fight for Freedom?

Language and region are other key concepts that define the dissent in con-
temporary Indian poetry. Raghuvir Sahay’s (1929–1990) poem “Hindi,”
for example, speaks of the battle between two Hindis: Hindi as the lan-
guage of power and hegemony and Hindi as the creative expression of the
ordinary people. The poem opens directly:
We were fighting
a language battle to change society
but the question of Hindi is no longer simply
a question of Hindi—We have lost out.
(Sahay 1994a, 7–8, tr. Harish Trivedi, Daniel Weissbort)
In a mood of self-examination typical of this Hindi poet that militates

against the manufactured consents that inhibit our voices and the idea of
a liberation achieved through an external agency, the poet asks the sol-
diers in the battle for Hindi whether they and those on whose behalf they
fought had been the same folk or whether they had at best been sympa-
thetic, well-meaning and well-schooled agents of their oppressors. This is
a moral question very much like: can the rich liberate the poor, can the
Brahmin fight for the Dalit, can man take up women’s battles for eman-
cipation from patriarchy? Clearly, this poet thinks that any battle without
the victims’ involvement will only be a proxy war that does not finally free
the victims but only creates new masters: a fact proved again and again by
history. Raghuvir Sahay expresses himself in a characteristic paradox:
Those who are masters are slaves.

Their slaves are those who are not masters
If Hindi belongs to the masters.
then in what language shall we fight for freedom?
(ibid.)
The poet then plays on the relationship between English and Hindi in
India as two languages fighting for hegemony. The demand for Hindi,
he says, is no more a demand for rights: it wants better treatment; this
demand is put to the slave masters by the agents who use Hindi in place
of English. The difference is only that the masters use English in place of
Hindi. This looks more like an exchange deal than a victory. Only those
who expose this power game being played within the upper class—the
rich, the bureaucrats, the elite intellectuals—will really be able to liberate
Hindi from its slavery.
This will be the one who when he speaks Hindi,

will show us what simple folk really feel.
(ibid.)
In a related poem, “Our Hindi,” Raghuvir Sahay compares Hindi to the

state of a widower’s new wife who talks, eats and sleeps too much (1994b,
105–106, tr. Vinay Dharwadker). The widower goes on making new orna-
ments for her and makes her get fat while she smuggles the stuff out to her
mother’s. She envies the neighbors and quarrels over garbage disposal; she
is kept in the house with all that she requires, a Mahābhārata, a Rāmāyaṇa
by Tulsidas and one by Radhesyam, the story of the film Nagı̄n, its lyrics
a Kokaśāstra, a textbook of lovemaking printed in the spoken language,
a maid to make a mess of household things, a middle-aged husband to
quarrel or make love with, an untended garden, many rooms like prison
cells, dirty linens for washing at the well, soiled pillows, falling glasses,
crumpled clothes, darkness in the house, five kilograms of gold, a child
with an enlarged liver being taught to squat over monthly magazines and
a plot of land to build a house for Hindi (the Hindī Bhavan). The poem
full of irony ends saying “let the faultfinders say what they will/our Hindi
is a married woman, she’s faithful, she’s happy/she wants to die before
her husband dies/everything’s okay but first her husband must survive
her/for how else can she have her wish.” Thus, practically Hindi becomes
the expensive, much fondled, keep of English that’s certain to survive
the mistress. Similar anxieties have been expressed for other languages
too—for example, for Malayalam, by me (1998, 19) or Gujarati by Sitansu
Yashascandra (1999), 124–128).
While Seeking What Is Lost …

Attur Ravivarma’s Malayalam poem “Pandi” (A form of percussion in
Kerala) foregrounds the regional against the national (1995, 101–102).
The speaking subject in the poem—the poets’ own alter ego—is one who
leaves his native village in search of a job. The poet only says he had gone
to the east giving up “his mango and tamarind trees, his plot of land, his
moonlight and darkness.” He reaches a town where he joins a big hotel as
a waiter. He spends his time following orders, carrying plates in haste and
visiting a temple, sitting on the beach or watching a film in the evenings.
While alone he tries to recollect the shapes of the flowers of his village.
He has met several great men whose pictures appear in the newspapers,
who pull crowds on the street, whose names dance on every tongue; he
has watched them speak and smile and eat. As years go by, the trains run
faster, yet he stops going to his village for its festivals, he forgets several
words of his language, even his dreams dry up. Then one day the owner
of the hotel dies on his chair, food loses its natural taste, visitors change,
the dining hall is rebuilt, new waiters replace old ones. After 30 years he
goes back to his village, only to find that all his friends and relatives have
gone, even his enemies have left the place; plants and beasts do not rec-
ognize him; the sterile hill, the dried-up stream and the perplexed star do
not remember him. He tries to locate what is lost. Suddenly he hears the
ancient drums of the village temple: the beating rods have changed, the
pipes and ears have changed; yet in that percussion he recognizes himself
and retrieves his identity.
The whole poem can be viewed as a complex metaphor where the big
hotel with its din and its strange visitors stands for the concept of the
“national” with its diffuse identity clearly juxtaposed against the local/
regional represented by specific trees (mango, tamarind), names of festivals
(onam, pūram) and finally the percussion typical of Kerala. The “nation”
alienates the subject dissolving its identity in a motley crowd who speak
different languages, eat different kinds of food and dress differently while
the region defines it, giving it definite shape, definite cultural and natural
memories and definite language.
Conclusion
These few examples from contemporary Indian poetic practice must be
enough to convince us of the operation of a poetics of difference that gov-
erns this practice and surfaces as a centripetal tendency in recent poetry.
The women poets emphasize difference in terms of gender and seek to
rewrite the patriarchal discourse challenging the phallocentric order of
things. Many of them are engaged in revisionist mythmaking and the
establishment of a parallel semiotics centered round the female body, cre-
ating a sacred zone for the female subject and delving into the possibilities
of retrieving a buried mother tongue, a secret language of female bonding
that resists the male linguistic gaze. The Dalit poets too have redrawn the
map of literature by discovering and exploring a whole new continent of

experience that had so far been left to darkness and silence, by helping
literature overcome stagnation through a cleansing renewal, by disturbing
the sterile complacency of the dominant social groups by challenging their
set mores and fixed modes of looking at reality, their stale habits of order-
ing knowledge, beauty and power and their literary canons, bringing in to
focus neglected, suppressed or marginalized aspects of experience, vision,
language and reality and forcing the community to refashion its tools and
observe itself critically from a different angle. Dalit poetry also throws over-
board the dominant poetics of dhvani, rasa and aucitya by interrogating
values like understatement, fixed moods and conventions, propriety and
restraint and by challenging the middle-class notions of linguistic decency
and employing words that are aślīla (obscene), cyūtasaṃskāra (uncouth)
and grāmya (rustic), all proscribed by conventional poetics. The poets
who foreground the local and the regional renew poetry by retrieving lost
rhythms, deploying provincial archetypes and cultural symbols, alluding
to regional rituals, festivals and local flora and fauna, thus constructing
an eco-aesthetics of racial retrospection and introspection. This assertion
of pluralism is a revolt against the felt erosion of geo-political and lin-
guistic federalism in the everyday practices of the country’s governance.
The nativists hold that only a constructive concept of multiculturalism
and heteroglossia can fight the pressures of standardization imposed by
the culture-market.
Cultural pluralism has never been a threat to the unity of the country
at the peoples’ level, and creative diversity has never stopped the people
from enriching exchanges. The general thrust of our cultural evolution
has been from the unitary to the plural, from the domination of a single
language to a federation of many languages, and the present context of
democracy and decolonization demands a retrieval of the regional as well
as the foregrounding of the marginal against an assumed “Indianness”
which unfortunately implies a suppression of the non-canonical and the
counter-hegemonic, a privileging of high textuality, aesthetic reduc-
tionism and revivalist nostalgia striving to construct a golden past
which never existed in real history for the majority of the people. Let
us remember that literatures in India have a whole parallel history of
counter-poetic practices with their own poetics that disapprove of the
hegemonic aesthetics: a second tradition that includes the hundreds of
oral, written and performed Rāmāyaṇas and Mahābhāratas in the lan-
guages and dialects, the Buddhist and Jaina literature, the Bhakti and
Sufi poetry of the period from the sixth to the twentieth century, the
poetry of the freedom struggle especially of Kumaran Asan, Subramania
Bharati, Nazrul Islam and others, the progressive poetry of poets from
Shri Shri to Faiz Ahmad Faiz and the contemporary subaltern and nativ-
istic poetic trends. It is not accidental that a Punjabi Dalit poet, Sant
Ram Udasi, pays homage to the great camār saint-poet Ravidas whose
hoe “tore up ugly illusions” and whose needle “sewed up the wounds
of the people” (Udasi 1994, 25). The Marathi Dalit poet Daya Pawar
reveals a radical Buddha “speaking and walking amongst the humble and
the week with torch in hand” (Pawar 1994, 59–60), and the Kannada
feminist poet Bhagya Jayasudarshana addresses the Kannada woman
saint Akka Mahadevi with her “thunders and rains” and her “freedom
from constraints imposed from within and without” (Jayasudarshana
1993). Any essentialist attempt to construct a standard Indian literature,
Indian culture or Indian character without addressing the question of
this inherent and enriching plurality will only end up creating a parody
of Indian reality.
Note
1. Cf. Singh 1995, 16–18. Also see my analysis of this poem along with
that of another Kedarnath Singh poem, ‘Ṭ uṭā huā Ṭ ruck’ (The
Broken-down Truck) (Satchidanandan 1999, 162–170).
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Sahay, Rahguvir. 1994a. Hindi. In Survival, ed. Daniel Weissbort, and Rathi
Girdhar, 7–8. Delhi: Sahitya Akademi.
———. 1994b. Our Hindi. In The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry, ed.
Vinay Dharwadker, and A.K. Ramanujan, 105–106. Delhi: Oxford University
Press.
Satchidanandan, K. 1992. Fever. In Vibhava, ed. U.R. Anantha Murthy, 199.
Bangalore: Panther.
———. 1998. Languages. In Delli – Dali, How to Go to the Tao Temple, 19. Trans.
the poet. Delhi: Haranand.
———. 1999. Two Poems of Kedarnath Singh. In Indian Literature: Positions
and Propositions, 162–170. Delhi: Pencraft International.
Singh, Kedarnath. 1995. Uttar Kabı̄r aur anya kavitāyeṃ. Delhi: Rajkamal.
Udasi, Sant Ram. 1994. For Bhagat Ravidas. In Indian Literature 185, 25. Trans.
Tejwant Singh Gill. Delhi: Sahitya Akademi.
Yashascandra, Sitanshu. 1999. Language. In The Tree of Tongues, ed.
E.V. Ramakrishnan, 124–128. Trans. Rumy Naqvi, poet. Shimla: Indian
Institute of Advanced Studies.
CHAPTER 3
Reviewing Nirmal Varma, Jaidev

and the Indianness of Indian Literature
Hans Harder
This article takes up the case of Nirmal Varma’s Ek chitṛā sukh (1979)
and reflects earlier research done under the impact of the debate about
aesthetic derivativeness that was triggered by literary scholar Jaidev and
his Culture of Pastiche (1993). After a detailed review of this novel and
its politics of representation, the question of its authenticity, called in
question by Jaidev in his book, is taken up for perusal. It is argued that
non-conformity with a normative notion of Indianness, as professed by
Jaidev, is insufficient ground for declaring the novel unauthentic, despite
its problematic position within existing modes of aesthetic production
and the general relativity of authenticity judgments. All the while, uses
of the adjective ‘Indian’ are distinguished with regard to their normative
or empirical semantics. The article is an attempt to render plausible both
positions, the writer’s and his critic’s, but ultimately argues for aesthetic
accommodation rather than normative exclusion.
For help and discussions in connection with this article, I wish to thank Harald
Fischer-Tiné and Alokeranjan Dasgupta (Hirschberg).
H. Harder (*)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41015-9_3
36 H. HARDER
Indianness
The adjective ‘Indian’ can, we may suppose, assume an infinite number of
meanings, and it is part of cultural history to explore the ways in which it
has developed from a term coined by foreigners into a self-denomination
of the Indian people. As terms of identity, words like ‘Indian’, ‘American’,
‘Arabic’ and so on in general share an extraordinary proneness to semanti-
cally enrich themselves by undergoing a constant process of elaboration,
definition and redefinition. This perpetual addition of new semantical frames
makes these terms extremely productive and at the same time extremely
fugitive and hazardous too. Many meanings coexist in such terms and cre-
ate inner tensions which frequently find expression in polemic usages.
In our quest for the Indianness of Indian Literature, then, it is use-
ful to distinguish between two basically different ways of using the word
‘Indian’, and this distinction can best be exemplified by this very expres-
sion: ‘The Indianness of Indian Literature’. Here, the term is obviously
used in two distinct ways—were it not so, the repetition would be point-
less and tautological. In ‘Indian Literature’, ‘Indian’ is an attribute denot-
ing topographical and cultural origin and belonging. There is nothing
contested or problematic about this literature being called Indian; it sim-
ply marks off literature of Indian from literature of non-Indian origin. The
‘Indianness’ of the title, by contrast, is conceived as a matter of debate. It
is highly marked, as its opposite would be ‘Un-Indian’ rather than ‘non-
Indian’, the English negative form being more explicit here than the posi-
tive. Something markedly Indian is called for here—hence also the ease
with which this ‘Indian’ lends itself to the formation of the abstractum
‘Indianness’. Wherever feasible, I will in the following try to distinguish
between the two by writing marked Indian as opposed to unmarked
indian; in the remaining cases that are too complex for such a decision, I
will stick to non-italicized Indian.
The co-occurrence of unloaded, unmarked, pragmatic and loaded, ide-
ologized, normative uses within one and the same term is nothing spe-
cifically Indian but a common feature with terms that qualify as group
denominations, that is, identity categories. The situation is hardly different
with terms denoting regional (Rāṛhı̄ vs. Bārendra in Bengal), religious
(Sikh, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, etc.) or ethnic (e.g. Bhı̄l or, on a differ-
ent level, Dravid) belonging. It is very much the same with other national
denominators (Bangladeshi, Dutch, German), given the more or less com-
mon factor of a history of national identity search in all these nations.
REVIEWING NIRMAL VARMA, JAIDEV AND THE INDIANNESS OF INDIAN... 37
Such co-occurrences seem unavoidable. Since the term Indian belongs

to these identity terms, a once-for-all deconstruction of its loaded versions
is maybe a nice piece of academic imagination but is on the whole simply
not feasible. Such a deconstruction would neither achieve any influence on
the ongoing normative and essentializing usage of the term within India
nor do justice to the parameters of non-Indian academic discourse about
India. Everyone dealing with India, either from inside or from outside,
will have to handle loaded Indianness in one way or the other. But an
awareness of the problem seems important.
As a term of identity, Indian is bound to be complex. It forms a semantical
system and, to borrow from the German sociologist Luhmann,1 is reflected
at its borders; it generates an Inside and an Outside by binary oppositions,
a marked and an unmarked nameless environment. It verges into the politi-
cal, and for certain some sorts of redefinitions can lead to wars, the ulti-
mate level of reflection at the ‘frontier’. Possible constellations that could
serve as de facto demonstrations of these theoretical arguments are the pairs
Indian vs. Pakistani, Indian vs. the West, and Indian vs. global capitalism. In
settled political circumstances, indian has a safe semantic territory, a com-
mon denominator beyond ideologies, at least some amount of undisputed,
uncontested terrain. Here it is unmarked, self-understood and perceived as
unproblematic by both insiders and outsiders. Alongside, Indian functions
as identity on the move; it is polemical, potentially political and ideological.
Indian can interfere with indian, so that we can have an indian which/who
is not really Indian. This shows that the ‘pragmatic’ usage is very closely
interlinked with the ideological one, and cases are conceivable in which the
strain of Indian would make it impossible to speak of Indian.
These opening remarks may seem theoretical and somewhat discon-
nected, but I hope the following discussion about Hindi novelist Nirmal
Varma and his critic Jaidev will show that they are not far-fetched. The
former’s novel Ek chitṛā sukh has recently been analysed by the latter as an
example of Indian pastiche writing, and the point of this article is to lay
bare exemplary the way in which concepts of Indian enter both the mak-
ing of modern Indian literature and Indian literary criticism.
Nirmal Varma on Indianness
In his essays, Nirmal Varma has repeatedly dwelt on the question of

Indianness.2 Jaidev, his critic, passes some sweeping remarks on these in
the end of his chapter on Ek chitṛā sukh, his highly polemical point being:
38 H. HARDER
How do we explain the breath-taking contrast between an extreme, India-

loving, Hindutva-celebrating, Gandhi-worshipping, parampara-praising
sensibility in Varma’s essays and an extreme, Westward, elite-aesthetic, High
Modernist one in his fiction? (Jaidev 1993, 92)
Beyond all polemicism, this point does remain striking to any reader of
Nirmal Varma’s writings. So in the following, in a reversal of Jaidev’s pro-
cedure, I wish to elaborate upon Nirmal Varma’s concept of Indianness first
and turn towards a reconsideration of his novel Ek chitṛā sukh afterwards.
Varma is concerned with what he calls the ‘still centre of [Indian] cul-
ture’ as contrasted to the ‘surface movements of history’ (Varma 1989,
32). In outlining this ‘basic truth and essence of a culture’ (ibid.), the con-
stitutive principle of his arguments is the fundamental opposition between
India and the West. The major dichotomy with regard to India is thus
that between pre-colonial India on the one hand side and colonial and
postcolonial India on the other. The colonial encounter and its results are
seen as the severest crisis the Indian civilization (sabhyatā)—Varma regards
India as a civilization rather than a culture (saṃskṛti) (Varma 1995, 111)—
has ever had to face, and the imminent challenge to the Indian people to
choose a path in accordance with the Indian ‘consciousness of civiliza-
tion’ (sabhyatā-bodh) or ‘stream of inspiration’ (prerṇā-śrot) (Varma 1995,
112ff.) is recurrent in several of his essays.3
One of Varma’s main points regarding colonial rule in India is the his-
torization of India by the West. This historization, according to Varma,
violates one of the basic properties of Indian civilization. Speaking as an
over-individual, collective kind of Indian self, Varma states:
What is historically given to an Englishman, or to a German by the sense of

past, a conscious awareness of ‘tradition’, is something which I lack; I don’t
remember what I was, because I live and remember in the present, which has
always been. (Varma 1989, 78; his italics)
What there was in Indian society was a ‘vague sense of belonging, a

feeling too personal to be egoistic, too vast to be patriotic’ (ibid.); the
past did not have to be invoked, because ‘tradition lived in us undefined
and inarticulate in the continuous present’ (Varma 1989, 79). Since the
Renaissance, European society became gradually more and more frag-
mented (khaṇḍit); what emerged was the ‘image of self-centred man’
(Varma 1995, 110)4 and subsequently, in analogy to it, secularism and
nationalism. The ‘wholeness’ (samagratā) of India, being confronted
with the historization and fragmentation of the West mediated by colonial

rule, suffered immensely, and while it could not be erased until the pres-
ent, its connecting link was lost in the process (Varma 1989, 80). Indian
nationalist leaders, themselves products of colonialism, did not find their
way out of the dilemma:
The ideal of the future was somewhere in remote Europe, the ideal of India
somewhere in the remote past—[they were] both worshippers of Europe
and oriented toward the past. In the middle was the Western historical con-
sciousness which, instead of linking the two by a vital sense of tradition,
divided them into two separate blocks of time. (Varma 1995, 117)
Nor could the solely past-oriented traditionalist prevent the erosion of

that ‘sense of tradition’. The only valid stream of thought was, accord-
ing to Varma, the third one of Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Aurobindo
and Gandhi which succeeded in positing India’s spiritual tradition in the
present:
It was the victory of this consciousness of civilization that despite the hor-
rible tragedy of the partition, India did not in imitation of Pakistan build a
Hindu nation [rāsṭ ṛ a] on the basis of so-called dharma. Not because the
Indian tradition was indifferent [nirapekṣ] regarding dharma, but because
the Hindu definition of dharma was immersed in the complete stately
tradition, building which the other religious traditions had made just as
important contributions as the Hindus. In this sense, the [Indian] concept
of nationalism [rāsṭ ̣rı̄yatā] surpasses the narrow and confined awareness
[regarding nationalism] of Europe. (Varma 1995, 119)
If traditional civilizations like India have somehow survived through the

millennia, this is accordingly not due to some state power but ‘because of
those simple and life-giving beliefs which bestowed meaning and safety on
their living together on a part of the earth’ (Varma 1995, 111). Varma thus
finds positive character traits of India in its beliefs, rituals and mythology,
the preponderance of puranic cyclical over linear time and so on. The dif-
ference between India and the West is summed up most comprehensively
in the terms ‘dream principle’ vs. ‘reality principle’, one characterized by
wholeness, the other by fragmentation. Varma personally confesses that
I am totally split between the ‘reality principle’ of modern experience and

what I would quietly call the ‘dream principle’ inherent in the traditional
40 H. HARDER
mode of life. As the split bifurcates my consciousness, it also cuts asunder

the patterns of my social existence. There is always a part of myself, which
refuses to submit to the total experience of reality. The tribal and the mod-
ern, both co-existing in the structure of my experience, belong to the oppo-
site poles of my contemporary consciousness and there is no bridge available
to connect a part of reality with the reality of wholeness which is hidden
within me as a dream. (Varma 1989, 84)
In relating his cultural ideas again and again back to his own self and in his
blunt exposure of his personal feeling of fragmentation, Varma, I feel, gains
additional legitimacy to utter his highly ideological ideas about Indianness,
which thus prove to be more than mere theory. Compare, for example,
what he wrote in 1970 after returning to India from a nine years’ stay in
Czechoslovakia: ‘I am a native stranger who has come back. I am an alien
Indian who is suspect everywhere, most so to himself’ (Varma 1989, 119).
In a few cases, Varma narrates experiences that qualify as truly Indian in
the sense elaborated by him. In the essay Twilight of an Era quoted at ran-
dom above (Varma 1989, 77–90), he concludes with such experiences: a
‘sensation of total fearlessness’ when seeing a tiger in Madhya Pradesh and
a ‘sense of belonging’ at the Kumbh Melā. A similar scene features at the
very end of his novel Rāt kā riporṭar, where the protagonist Ṛṣi visualizes
a gathering of tribals in Bastar5; in the context of the novel, that scene can
be interpreted as standing for that Indian wholeness lost forever in mod-
ern urban life. I want to see in the following whether it is possible to relate
any of his ideas about Indianness to his novel Ek chitṛā sukh and in this way
attempt a reconsideration of both the novel and Jaidev’s interpretation.
Ek chitṛā sukh
Ek chitṛā sukh (A Shattered Happiness) appeared first in 1979. A short
novel of around 150 pages, it is divided into 12 vaguely chronological
chapters. The protagonist and narrator, Munnū or ‘the Cousin’, is a boy
of about 14 years from Allahabad who, suffering from some unnamed
chronic disease, spends some 4 months with his cousin Bit ̣t ̣ı̄, actress in a
theatre group in Delhi. As in Rāt kā riporṭar, Varma alternates between
first and third person narration. The time of narration alters too; a first
level of remembering is represented by a diary the protagonist writes
during the events of the novel, but further a posteriori levels are built
up on it, resulting in second and third degree reflexions on memories
(e.g. Varma 1984, 55ff.). Apart from the narrator and Biṭṭı̄, the main char-
acters of the book are Darry (Daiṛı̄), a frustrated former political activist in
Bihar, who has dedicated his life to theatre and is Biṭt ̣ı̄’s lover; Nit ̣t ̣ı̄ Bhāı,̄
a married architect; and Irā, in love with Niṭṭı̄ Bhāı,̄ who has left her home
in Great Britain for his sake and for playing theatre in Delhi. An important
side character is Darry’s sister, possibly of the Cousin’s age, who lives in
Darry’s bungalow. Most of the story plays in Biṭṭı̄’s barsātı̄, a roof-top
apartment in Nizamuddin, Delhi.
Ek chitṛā sukh does not have much of a conventional plot, the greater
part of it consisting of reflections, inner monologues, memories, dialogues
and so on. A major topic is theatre. The dramas discussed and rehearsed
are Chekhov’s Seagull and an unnamed piece of Strindberg. But it is the
function of theatre as such, as an alternative life model, a ‘second life’,6
that interests Varma. Theatre, reflexions about life and personal relations
occupy much space in the novel, and it is only towards the end that the
plot accelerates: Irā, unable to bear the terms of her relationship with mar-
ried Niṭt ̣ı̄ Bhāı ̄ any longer, sends him a letter through the Cousin-narrator
(Chap. 10, p. 117ff.), and Nit ̣t ̣ı̄ Bhāı ̄ then kills himself in the bathtub of
his studio (Chap. 11, p. 138ff.). The Cousin decides to return to Illahabad
the evening the premiere of the Strindberg play is going to take place.
Varma intensifies the atmosphere and the emotions of his characters by
a general scarcity of contextual information which is partly motivated by
the reflector he uses, a young boy. The somewhat bohemian and l’art pour
l’art-atmosphere prevailing among the characters is allowed to dominate
the scene almost completely, outer realities are largely eclipsed.7 All the
while, however, this atmosphere is not in any way portrayed as shallow or
superfluous but shown in its totality; feelings are given a space which is not
fragmentized or qualified by any context, and an air of existentialist seri-
ousness is successfully created. Lastly, Western elements in the taste and
lifestyle of the protagonists are legion (we have violins and jazz playing,
salami and brown bread eaten, Chekhov and Strindberg discussed), and
in Ek chitṛā sukh we are no doubt confronted with extremely Westernized
characters, atmosphere and intertextuality.
This short summary, far from doing justice to the text, will have to
do here. Jaidev, in Chap. 1 of his The Culture of Pastiche, has presented
an extensive analysis of the novel, and without losing track of the text, it
is necessary to give an outline here of his arguments in pursuance of our
main concern with the Indianness of modern indian literature.
42 H. HARDER
Jaidev on Ek chitṛā sukh
The Culture of Pastiche is a book ‘against the undue privileging of [Western]

influence’ (Jaidev 1993, 224) in the Hindi novel, that is, the fetishization
of the West. The term pastiche, for Jaidev, in itself denotes not as much
as this but simply an element of stylistic mixture in the world narrated
or the narration.8 In Western literatures, Jaidev states that such pastiches
are usually light and slightly ridiculed; in the Hindi cases studied by him,
however, they are heavy and serious. The Culture of Pastiche, the title hint-
ing at a writing and living culture based on fetishizing stylistic borrowings
from the West, is a carefully argued and nevertheless very polemical study.
Mridula Garg and Krishna Baldev Vaid are Jaidev’s chief opponents and
targets, while Nirmal Varma and his Ek chitṛā sukh are assigned to ‘the
neighbourhood of pastiche’ (p. 46).
Jaidev devotes 50 pages to Varma and starts out with a general appraisal
of Varma as a fiction writer and especially as a stylist (p. 46f.). If Varma has
shown that he is capable to ‘confidently adapt Western motifs’ (p. 49), his
novels ‘also represent a less enviable situation in which he is forced to distort
or diminish his own ground in order to “settle” Western influence’ (p. 47),
especially so Ek chitṛā sukh. In the following, I am summarizing some of
the salient points of Jaidev’s sophisticated, in-depth critique of that novel.
Nirmal Varma’s style, for all its avowed excellence, is suspicious to
Jaidev. The frequent image clusters and the lyricism can be deceptive: ‘Even
when there is not much substance in them, they lull us into the belief that
something significant is on.’ Varma’s very stylistic perfection and exquisite
language are a bother because they are employed in the wrong cause, as
Jaidev makes clear in an article (Jaidev 1996, 150): Following Baudrillard,
he points out the role of dominant cultures which ‘seduce’ individuals to
deviate ‘from their own truth’, forcing the subdued culture thereby to
alter itself, and Varma’s language is here seen as such an instrument of
seduction (Jaidev 1996, 157).
Jaidev goes into some detail in demonstrating the way Varma adopts
what Jaidev sees as the Proustian model of remembering. Though struc-
turally sound, Varma’s multi-reflection model is found suffering from a
major defect. The highest level of remembering, that of the grown-up art-
ist the Cousin has become, does not differ in perceptive quality from the
other levels closer to the Delhi plot.
[…] there is no sign of any emotional distance in the Cousin in the later
perspective. As a moral being, he has stayed the same as he was during the
Delhi days. His re-vision of that past shows no irony, no maturity. (Jaidev
1993, 65)
This creates problems with the chronology of the novel and ultimately
comes down to a clumsy adaptation of Western modernist prestigious sty-
listic devices. The raison d’être of this model in the novel, Jaidev states
frankly, is ‘Varma’s desire to follow Proust’ (p. 66). Likewise, Jaidev finds
the ratio for the novel’s ‘obsession’ (p. 69) with Strindberg absent in the
text, the result being much the same as in the case of Proust.
The Cousin-narrator writing his diary in Delhi is further overburdened
with several -isms (modernism, nihilism, existentialism), which are some-
what too heavy for this ‘innocent boy’ to carry (p. 66). All these -isms,
following Jaidev, are ultimately assimilated into an all-embracing aestheti-
cism. Varma is shown to elaborate a dichotomy between art and life, to
which the opposition of sukh and duḥkh, a leitmotiv of the book, is allo-
cated. Jaidev traces this opposition back to Schopenhauer9: Since Varma’s
happiness is in art, life otherwise being inescapably miserable, the strategy
of survival in Ek chitṛā sukh is to aestheticize experience by stripping it
of all other meaning. ‘Aestheticism is an article of faith with Varma. He
has no doubt that art alone can provide salvation to man’ (p. 67) runs
Jaidev’s comment.10
The critique of Varma’s novel reaches its peak when it comes to the
assessment of the characters (p. 83ff.). They are shown as highly alienated
and Westernized. Varma’s portrayal of this alienation coincides with a con-
sequent erasure of their social environment, family background and so on.
They are ‘alienated in an absolutist sense, (p. 85) the counterpart, that from
which they are alienated, being absent in the narrative framework. This
absence may be justified by the restriction on information imposed by the
perspective of the Cousin-narrator. But Jaidev’s point is that ‘Varma seems
both to adopt and endorse the terms of discourse peculiar to the characters
themselves’ (p. 86). Self-disgust is part and parcel with them (Bovarysme is
the term Jaidev employs for this), and—one of the strongest and harshest
points in Jaidev’s critique—such Bovarysme has its market value:
Today, bovarysme has become a commercially produced consumer good,

aimed at satisfying the consumer’s need to treat his or her private, non-
heroic self-dissatisfaction as a certificate of ‘superior’ sensitivity and good-
ness. […] People desirous of easy, purchasable transcendence take to it,
because it consecrates their dissatisfaction as noble, saintly, and exceptional.
(p. 85)
44 H. HARDER
Furthermore, the exponents of this Bovarysme are set in a context which

‘consists almost exclusively of Western artists and artifacts’ and are mostly
‘aesthetic’ (p. 87). So alienation, itself a Western export good and invested
with a number of Western attributes in Ek chitṛā sukh, becomes an object
of veneration according to Jaidev:
In these characters, alienation is not a predicament but a fetish, and there-

fore its own justification. (p. 89)
In the final evaluation of his analysis, Jaidev tries to resolve the seemingly
paradoxical situation resulting from a juxtaposition of this diagnosis with
Varma’s concerns with Indianness in his essays. Both honesty and aware-
ness are attributed to Varma (p. 92). Jaidev calls Varma’s notions about
India nostalgic, exotic and far removed from modern realities, too far in
fact to be
[…] available to educated, urban, modern Indians, so culture—another

good culture—must be elsewhere. Given the obvious impossibility of
‘presenting’ past culture in contemporary urban space, any sensitive, ‘supe-
rior’ Indian has to turn to the West, if he or she cannot turn into a beggar
or a tribal, if, in other words, he or she cannot fall outside history. (p. 93f.)
Jaidev’s analysis and critique of Ek chitṛā sukh is strong. Still, I think, a

slightly different reading of the novel is equally feasible. It does not take
away the problematic aspects of the novel but shifts them to a different
level. What it certainly does is take the polemics out of the discussion.
An Antithesis in Ek chitṛā sukh
The thesis about the fetishization of alienation and Western art and cul-
ture that Jaidev utters holds true in the following cases: if in a piece of
narrative fiction, these are portrayed in a positive light and there is no con-
textualization or distancing in the text that would give the reader at least a
hint for questioning its code; plus, if the readership cannot be expected to
decode the text without such hints, for example, read it as a parody or the
like. In Ek chitṛā sukh, the Cousin-narrator fails in establishing any such
detached perspective on the plot, and likewise the author fails in setting
this narrator into any perspective which would enable the common reader
to view him and his narration from a distance. But there is one scene in
Chap. 5 (Varma 1984, 57–72) which, I think, can be read as a kind of

internal distance marker. Jaidev does not deal with this passage.
During one of the rehearsals in the garden of Darry’s bungalow, the
Cousin walks around and meets Darry’s sister who, first invisible, calls him
from a tree (p. 59). They talk first about him, then about Bit ̣t ̣ı̄ and her part
in the rehearsal, upon which the conversation runs thus (English of the
Hindi original is set in italics):
“What kind of part?” Her lips opened in a strange stuttering, “They are
cheating themselves.”—“Cheating?”—“They are ruining their lives … Do
you understand the meaning of ‘ruining’? She was laughing. “To waste, to
finish, to destroy”, she said. […He said:] “Don’t you like theatre?”—“They
are wasting their time,” her voice was somewhat tired, empty, disappointed,
“I never go there.”—“Why?”—“It is not real [aslı̄],” she said, so slowly as
if she was telling a great secret [gupt, gopaniya rahasya], “They are only
pretending [bahānā].” (Varma 1984, 60f.)
After this, the girl first threatens him with a pistol and, seeing him para-
lysed, shakes him somewhat terrified: ‘“I thought you had really died.”
[…] “You were only acting”’ (p. 61f.). He still wonders whether she is
mad when she takes him into the house and forcefully covers his eyes with
her hands. He first does not manage to free himself and, thinking that
‘She was really mad’ (p. 62), angrily scratches her arms with his nails, upon
which she lets go of him and stares at her bleeding arms. They start talking
again; she tells him that she does not want to go into the ‘outer world’ in
order to avoid being confronted with unhappiness: ‘That’s why I don’t
go anywhere. Nothing, nobody can come here, neither unhappiness, nor
fear, nor people from outside’ (p. 65). Next, the girl shows him a knife
which she has used to frighten people who used to come for searching her
but don’t come any longer, as she tells him (p. 66f.); he should see to it
that he gets away from Delhi, for ‘they’ could do anything to him and kill
him. Then she draws him close to her and, holding the blade of her knife
above her, wants to show Darry to him on that blade who is hiding in the
fields of Bihar. As the Cousin learns, she conceives of her brother Darry
as still living there; the present Darry, she reveals to him, is no longer her
brother, but Biṭṭı̄’s lover (p. 69).
This passage is an extreme case of the mystification inherent in Varma’s
prose which is often produced by an artificial scarcity of information—
the reader is not told, for example, who ‘they’ are (nor, of course, is the
46 H. HARDER
narrator), and one is left with an existential pose of menace bereft of any
context. Further, it is deeply entrenched in what Jaidev calls pastiche, and
the alienation Darry’s sister demonstrates by her words and behaviour tops
even the sufficiently alienated narrator’s. It would thus be a rather difficult
task to read this passage as any sort of ‘other voice’ which could consis-
tently give any different codification to the novel. But the fact remains that
at least one consensus of the novel’s characters as elaborated by Jaidev is
challenged here: the privilege of art, here theatre, over life. It is question-
able what amount of authority the deciphering reader owes to Darry’s
sister, a side character whom the narrator initially suspects to be mad. It
would be nothing out of literary order, however, to have the marginalized
say the otherwise equally marginalized truth, and maybe even likely in Ek
chitṛā sukh where it is a dwarf in a circus who has the ultimate definition of
sukh, happiness (pp. 95–97). In fact, her marginality is reversed when the
Cousin refers to Darry’s sister later, recalling her words as a serious and
adequate warning: ‘She wanted me to return home, I have no place here,
neither in the play nor in the auditorium’ (p. 117).
The sister’s statements regarding theatre eventually reappear in the
novel in another key scene in Chap. 8. A long conversation between Darry
and Biṭṭı̄ ends in a fight (pp. 108–10) which is initially triggered by what
she says about herself being an actress:
“I am living the life of others, but myself, I am exactly where I used to

be before … even worse than before. When I was in Illahabad, at least I
didn’t pretend to be something.”—[Darry replies:] “Are you, Bit ̣tı̣ ̄ … are
you thinking about all this as a pretence?”
In the following, Biṭṭı̄ refers to Darry’s past work in Bihar as ‘real life’
(p. 109) and starts shouting at him when he questions her idea of leaving
Delhi for something else: ‘You are going to sit with the beggars … like
Mother Theresa […]’ (ibid.).
Jaidev stresses that Mother Theresa too gets fetishized in the novel, and
the concern for the poor and beggars gets frozen into a dead pose and
does not encourage any action whatsoever. The first is arguable, the sec-
ond true; but my point here is to evaluate what the two scenes have to say
about acting, that is, generally speaking about art. Would a novel consis-
tently fetishizing art be likely to contain passages like these: the former
an antithesis which gets validated in retrospect by the narrator, the sec-
ond an expression of deep doubt which is not resolved in any decisive way
a fterwards? I think not; and it will probably have to be admitted that while
a consistent detachment from pastiche culture is absent in the novel, so is a
consistent privilegization of art over life and the fetishization of alienation
and Western culture that goes along with it. Presuming that Nirmal Varma
possesses the writing skills to construe a coherent pastiche and a coherent
fetishization of art, it will further have to be admitted that it was to all
appearance not Nirmal Varma’s intention to construe these. In this point, I
disagree with Jaidev, who seems to understand Varma the other way round:
The novel’s chief value lies in its unconscious. Even while glamourizing its
aesthetes, its alienated characters, it, without quite knowing it, gives us a
vivid portrait of cultural pastiches. (Jaidev 1993, 95)
We can say that Varma unconsciously portrays pastiche, but not that he
consciously glorifies alienation. Were Varma a conscious caterer to an
uprooted middle-class readership which desires sanctification of their
alienation, his novel would have fared better without the open question
marks posed by Darry’s sister and Biṭṭı̄ herself, and Jaidev would not have
had to emphasize his belief in Varma’s honesty (p. 92). No doubt, these
passages do not obstruct a thoroughly aesthetic reception of his novel, for
which, I find, Sudhir Chandra’s essay Pı̄ṛā bhedna kā unmatt prayās (in
Vajpeyi 1990, 210–14) is a perfect demonstration.11 But a proper seducer
into pure aestheticism would either resolve the self-doubt these question
marks convey more consistently or exclude them from the text.
The Symptomatic Indianness of Ek chitṛā sukh

Jaidev would not dispute the indianness of Ek chitṛā sukh but probably
its Indianness. We will come back to this below. The main problem when
it comes to evaluating the novel is where we should situate its author.
We may, in this context and as a possibility of interpretation, point to
Chekhov—another author concerned with bourgeois culture who was
initially not localized safely vis-à-vis his work. Kay Borowsky, in his post-
script to the German translation of Seagull (Tschechow 1975), shows how
Chekhov for a long time used to be misunderstood as a kind of impres-
sionist and aestheticist, and only in the 1960s, this picture was revised
and his critical potential was discovered—at least in the Western German
discussion, his socialist reception being another story (p. 70ff.). Jaidev
in one instance concedes, as quoted above: ‘[The novel] give us a vivid
48 H. HARDER
portrait of cultural pastiches’ (Jaidev 1993, 94). This means that the novel
does after all not only give us ‘brilliance sans significance’12—not only sty-
listic beauty, but also a ‘vivid’ picture of a relevant part of modern Indian
culture. Should it be possible that his reception could, under changed
socio-cultural parameters, undergo a shift similar to Chekhov’s?
The point here seems to be that Varma is not, cannot be self-conscious
enough to give a distanced portrait; he is not sufficiently outside his own
text to send clear meta-messages about the world he portrays. Varma’s is
not a bird’s-eye view but rather the perspective of a swimmer struggling
his way through stormy waters. Because he is ‘nourished’ by what is nega-
tively called pastiche, positively a look towards world (which, admittedly, is
coterminous with Western) culture draws his creativity from it. Compare,
for example, his essay Twilight of an Era (Varma 1989, 77–90), written in
1985. Varma writes about the bifurcation of his own consciousness with
regard to what he sees as Indian tradition and modernity:
In Bhopal, at Bharat Bhavan, there are two separate galleries, one containing
the art objects of our tribal people and the other displaying the paintings
and sculptures of modern Indian artists. Going from one gallery to another,
one passes through a strange experience, the feeling of wholeness which you
get from the tribal paintings […] is a part of a dream which I carry inside
me and is yet so remote from my modern consciousness, while just a few
steps away in the other gallery of modern Indian art, I suddenly come into
contact with a glow and intensity of imagination, the fevered fragments of
reality, which evoke a degree of identification so alien to my dream of whole-
ness—and yet so near to my contemporary consciousness. (p. 83)
What is this other than an identification with what Jaidev calls pastiche?13
Unable to find a feasible combination of, but also to properly disentangle
India and modernity, Varma here professes his strong emotional ties to
this—polemically speaking—Unindian indianness. Can Ek chitṛā sukh not
be read as an expression and a symptom of this truly fragmented constel-
lation? Further, paradoxically, the ‘dream principle’ which Varma sees at
work in the Indian tradition and occupies him in his essays seems to enter
the creative process underlying Ek chitṛā sukh. It may account for the fre-
quent erasure of contexts Jaidev criticizes so convincingly; on the other
hand, it is also a sign of intuitive, creative writing as opposed to market-
calculated fabrication of literature. His aspiration to ‘wholeness’ pervades
the novel—an attempt to put together those ‘fragments of reality’ he
identifies with. Highly dissatisfied with modern indian realities, Varma
makes these undergo a thorough aesthetization, and their fragmentary

nature, after this process of distillation, gets converted into a strong sense
of alienation pervading his novel as a whole as well as in parts.
If this be somewhat accurate, it is problematic to see Varma as a con-
scious ‘seducer’ trapping Indian Hindi readers into the fetishization of
Western culture cum alienation. It is doubtful whether the question mark
posed to Ek chitṛā sukh by Darry’s sister is enough to reframe the plot, but
on the other hand, it is equally doubtful to regard the novel as a suitable
vehicle for the propagation of Western culture and alienation. It makes
more sense, then, to see the novel as symptomatic of a larger process of
acculturation and Varma himself as seduced rather than seducer. Varma’s
writing seems to have cathartic aspects, and the suffering from pastiche on
the part of the author is born out in it. In this sense, Varma as an authen-
tic author offers not only his characters to the middle-class readership
but also himself. To blame him alone for the ideological d istortions from
which the novel suffers would mean to put a heavy burden of responsibil-
ity on Varma, a burden which ought in fact to be given to the ‘pastiche
culture’ he comes from and struggles his way through.
All this does not make Ek chitṛā sukh a happy novel. But it does show a
certain state of things, a state of things which may be submitted to change,
and authentic fictional writings are generally open to recontextualizations
and changes of meaning.
Conclusion
Jaidev’s somewhat polemical approach to Varma’s novel is to be appreci-
ated. It originates from completely different ideas about aesthetics and
ultimately also about Indianness. Other than Varma, Jaidev is not very
outspoken about his notion of Indian. But he, too, uses the loaded term
Indian as a cultural and aesthetical category. Discussing what he consid-
ers a healthy amount of borrowing (‘absorbing’ is the term he uses) from
Western literature, Jaidev writes:
Books like Maila Anchal, Zindaginama, Jhini Jhini Bini Chadriya, and
Maiyadas ki Madi are not at all unaware of the Western novel, but they are
often superior to its achievements. Above all, they are Indian and part of the
contemporary Hindi novel. (Jaidev 1996, 163)
This ‘Indian’ is decisively Indian, a mere indian would not make up

for the emphasis. It is clear that Jaidev’s concept of pastiche is bound to
50 H. HARDER
bring Indianness in through the back door; it is already latently present

in the definition of pastiche as a ‘border’ phenomenon of borrowing and
importing. Novels like the ones mentioned represent an Indianness that
can easily be localized in modern Indian reality, treat common instead of
elite life and desist from unnecessary adoptions of foreign stylistic features.
Jaidev’s Indian is brought into close touch with contemporary indian
realities; the allocation of this concept of Indian, to use Varma’s terminol-
ogy, within the frame of the ‘reality principle’ is dramatically opposed to
Varma’s own. Realism is what Jaidev seems to feel is the way of writing
suitable in this indian reality, and it is as a spokesman of this not very
bountiful reality, too, that Jaidev is provoked by Varma’s pure aestheti-
cism. So the basic conflict is that between Varma’s rather elitist, bourgeois,
l’art pour l’art notion and Jaidev’s more ‘progressive’, socially sensitive
and on the whole more leftist model of art.
The Indianness of indian literature, then, is first and foremost a func-
tion of indian literature and literary criticism itself. The term is under
strain for historical reasons,14 and if this applies to all identity markers,
India is certainly a special case, which creates additional problems due to
the vastness of the entity it denotes. But a mere deconstructionist atti-
tude towards this Indianness would ignore the function of loaded iden-
tity terminology and miss the mechanisms which ultimately put identity
on the move.
Notes
1. These remarks are loosely inspired by basic terms of Niklas
Luhmann’s system theory, as, for example, exemplified in the
chapter ‘Die Ausdifferenzierung der Religion’ in Luhmann 1993,
259–357.
2. The volumes used for this article are Śatābdı̄ ke ḍhalte varṣoṃ meṃ
(Varma 1995) and Word and Memory (Varma 1989). The latter
comprises both original English and essays translated from Hindi.
Both volumes apparently contain writings from about two decades,
starting in 1970 and reaching into the 1990s.
3. Cf. Twilight of an Era (Varma 1989, 77–90) and especially the
Hindi essay Kyoṃ bhār tı̄ya saṃskṛti ko bacānā ẓarūrı̄ hai? (Varma
1995, 172–7), which deals with concrete political and social
events—the Khalistan movement, the assassination of Indira
Gandhi and the ensuing riots in Delhi. It is noteworthy, by the
way, that here, India is termed as a saṃskṛti, not sabhyatā.
Unfortunately, his Hindi essays are not dated, so it is a matter of

speculation to try to account for this shift in terminology. In
English, we hear him speaking of ‘culture’ still in 1986 (cf. the
initial quotations from Indian Fiction and Colonial Reality, Varma
1989, 31–42).
4. Varma criticizes Hegel’s concept of the ego as something defined
against the others as a typically Western and, if I may say so,
Unindian construct (Varma 1989, 81).
5. I am quoting from the English translation of Rāt kā riport ̣ar (Dark
Dispatches) (Varma 1993, 157f.). The passage runs thus: ‘For a
brief moment Rishi had the illusion that he was walking, not in the
streets of Delhi, but in the forests of Bastar—the same crackling
fire, the same moonlight spread over the Ghotul, the same whisper
of smoke, the same ecstatic, entranced sound of drums which
brought all the old gods and goddesses out of the surrounding
shadows of the forest, to dance around the fire intoxicated by the
drums and the moonlight and the perfume of mahua; fire, which
devours everything, paper, corpses, bones, everything in the uni-
verse which is mortal, destructible, perishable.’
6. Cf. Varma 1984, 99, where Biṭt ı̣ ̄ and the Cousin talk about this
second life; the connection with theatre is not explicitly drawn but
can easily be inferred.
7. Kimmich (1994) calls this ‘confinement’ a general tendency in
Varma’s prose and attempts to protect Varma from his critics:
‘Almost exclusively based on personal experience, its limits are
obvious and soon became the target of his critics as one might
expect in a literary scene dominated by various doctrines of real-
ism. But the strict adherence to his own experience implies a sound
rejection of the traditional doctrine of an omniscient narrator that
is possible only in a world governed by a principle allowing for an
over-all explanation of reality, be it God or any totalitarian ideol-
ogy’ (p. 265f.). The resulting problem of locating Varma in his
writings will be dealt with in the following.
8. Jaidev explains this concept in detail in his introduction (Jaidev
1993, 1–45) and, in short, in an article which summarizes the main
points of his book (Jaidev 1996, 151–3).
9. It is not completely clear here whether Jaidev insinuates that Varma
has directly taken these terms with their specific connotations from
Schopenhauer or whether he only traces their origin in intellectual
history. The former seems to be the case, however, and brings up
52 H. HARDER
one reservation which holds true for some part of his remarks on
intertextuality, too (pp. 68–82). The historian of comparative
literature is an expert in intertextuality, and the danger here and in
general is that his or her specific education especially in matters of
literary heterogeneity may tempt him/her to read this latter thor-
oughly into the text he/she discusses. Unless the direct influence
of Schopenhauer can be demonstrated, this link, I feel, should be
treated with care.
10. Cf., in this context, also Vagish Shukla’s critique of Varma’s con-
cept of art (in his article ‘Nirmal Varmā kā socnā’ in Vajpeyi 1990,
215–22; 218f.).
11. Cf. the remarks on theatre and life: ‘The parts in theatre and life
are getting mixed in such a way that it begins to seem not only
wrong to separate them from each other, but also wrong’
(p. 212)—this being to all appearances simultaneously a paraphrase
of the novel and a meta-comment. Chandra summarizes his read-
ing of the novel aptly in the end when he tells us that ‘after reading
Ek chitṛā sukh, I spontaneously put on Vilayat Khan’s Darbārı̄’
(p. 214).
12. The title of an article about Nirmal Varma by Jaidev (see

bibliography).
13. I have only a very faint notion about modern Indian paintings, but
even from these superficial ideas it seems to me that this art-form
would be much more fertile ground for a pastiche study than Hindi
literature. It is probably the higher degree of aesthetization consti-
tutive of art painting as compared to literature which acts as a mys-
tifying border here and—paradoxically—obscures this kind of
‘vision’.
14. One of these is the Bengal Renaissance legacy of Bankim Chandra
Chattopadhyay, Vivekananda and others, to which Varma is com-
mitted, with its binary opposition of the spiritual East vs. the mate-
rialistic West—an opposition which again would have been rather
inconceivable without the contributions made by European
Orientalism.
Bibliography
Jaidev. 1993. The Culture of Pastiche. Existential Aestheticism in the Contemporary
Hindi Novel. Shimla: IIAS.
———. 1996. The Culture of Pastiche: The Lessons of Some Contemporary

Hindi Novels. In Cultural Reorientation in Modern India, ed. Indu Banga,
and Jaidev, 150–164. Shimla: IIAS.
Kimmich, Rainer. 1994. In Quest of the Elusive. Some Reflexions on Nirmal
Varma. In Tender Ironies. A Tribute to Lothar Lutze, ed. Dilip Chitre, 264–277.
Delhi: Manohar.
Luhmann, Niklas. 1998. Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik. Studien zur
Wissenssoziologie der modernen Gesellschaft, vol 3. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt/Main.
Vajpeyi, Ashok (ed). 1990. Nirmal Varmā. New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan.
Varma, Nirmal. 1984. Ek chitṛā sukh. New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan.
———. 1989. Word and Memory. Bikaner: Vagdevi Prakashan.
———. 1993. Dark Dispatches (English translation of his novel Rāt kā riportạ r by
Alok Bhalla). New Delhi: Indus.
———. 1995. Śatābdı̄ ke ḍhalte varṣoṃ meṃ. New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan.
Tschechow, Anton. 1975. Die Möwe. Kommödie in vier Akten (German transla-
tion of Chekhov’s Seagull and postscript by Kay Borowsky). Stuttgart: Reclam.
CHAPTER 4
Indianness as a Category in Literary

Criticism on Nayī Kahānī
Thomas de Bruijn
This chapter deals with Indianness as an element in the appreciation of the

innovations brought to Hindi writing in the 1950s and 1960s by the authors
associated with the Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ movement. It discusses the difference in
the framing of negative images on Indianness by Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ authors and
earlier writers. The new generation of Hindi writers seems to succeed in
‘negotiating’ between their sense of alienation with modernity and a root-
edness in Indian culture. This is illustrated in a particular type of stories in
the Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ corpus, in which a realistic description of the hardship of
modern Indian society is juxtaposed to idealized notions from fairy tales
remembered by the characters or referred to in the story as parallel narra-
tives with an opposite thematic polarity. The chapter concludes by pointing
at the central role of the concept of Indianness in the literary field, which
forced the post-Independence authors to negotiate with it. Instead opting
for a marginal avant-gardist position, they defined a literary idiom in which
critical or negative images of India could be expressed without alienating
themselves from a sense of ‘Indianness’. This contributed to their rapid suc-
cess and dominant presence in the literary field of Hindi writing after 1947.
In the critical discussions on the particular Indian character of Indian
literature which are under review in the current volume, there is a notable
T. de Bruijn (*)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41015-9_4
56 T. DE BRUIJN
tendency to view the concept of Indianness as a predominantly positive

notion. Jaidev has mentioned the presence of Indian saṃskāras—‘inherited
value systems, traditional pieties and sanctities’—in the characters of
Mohan Rakesh’s novels (Jaidev 1993, 193). Even when the characters are
critical and show traces of Western influences in their lifestyle and outlook,
Jaidev approves of their rootedness and relevance to the Indian social and
cultural past and present. The ‘Indian sensibility’ which N.S. Jagannathan
has put forward as the unalienable and almost untranslatable quality of
highlights of Indian fiction should also be understood as a positive and
enriching link with Indian cultural traditions (Jagannathan 1997).
Criticizing postmodern tongue-in-cheek or infatuation with existential-
ist and high modernist postures in modern Indian writing is relevant and
justified. However, when such critique connects Indianness exclusively
with positive notions of identity, wholeness and contiguity with a cultural
past and tradition, it is problematic. This polarity disqualifies the existen-
tial Angst, psychological extremism and infatuation with Western ideas
in modern Indian novels as affective and alien characteristics which have
no base in Indian traditions. Thereby, it dismisses Indian texts that depict
an uprooted India or use ‘Western codes’ and modernist ‘lore’ as tools
for genuinely expressing the more disturbing experiences of hybridity and
interculturality that haunted modern Indian (upper) middle-class society
in various periods.
This chapter does not intend to question the way the concept of
Indianness is being dealt with in literary criticism on Indian writing, such
as in Jaidev’s analysis and judgment on novels by Krishna Baldev Vaid,
Mridula Garg and Nirmal Varma (1993). This chapter will follow how
the concept of Indianness is present and productive in the critical essays
and creative writing that was produced in the context of the Nayı̄ Kahānı̄
movement—the major innovative force in Indian writing of the 1950s
and 1960s. It will examine in greater detail how Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ dealt with
the representation of negative or ambivalent notions of Indian reality and
moral values, which were the hallmark of this movement and inherent in
their modernist outlook.
Authenticity and Modernism
At the heart of the stylistic and thematic innovations Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ brought
to modern Indian literature was the tension between presumedly authen-
tic Indian forms of narration and a modernist perspective on society and
INDIANNESS AS A CATEGORY IN LITERARY CRITICISM ON NAYĪ KAHĀNĪ 57
literature. The movement’s rise in the 1950s coincided with a grow-

ing sense of disillusion with the economic and political achievements of
independent India and with the way the idealist nationalist movement
had petrified into a self-serving bureaucracy. The bloodshed and dis-
placement of large numbers of refugees that accompanied the Partition
of India and Pakistan cast a long-lasting shadow on the jubilation over
India’s freedom from colonial rule. These sentiments were picked up by
young writers in the period after 1947 and influenced their writing, as
well as their opinions on what Indian writing could and should mean
in these new social circumstances. In his Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ kı̄ bhūmikā, the
writer Kamleshvar describes how the events of the Partition had made all
Indians in some way feel like ‘refugees in their own country’ (1966, 11).
The predicaments of the first decade after Independence were con-
nected with specific historical events but should also be seen as a last stage
in a long-term process of modernization that changed urban middle-class
India from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards. Modernity
had brought new cultural identities and rapid changes in social struc-
tures, especially in the urban centers. Increased education, changes in the
social roles of women and the influence of Western ideas and social forms
had toppled the primacy of traditional moral values and social patterns in
Indian society.
The literature of the pre-Independence period shows the first attempts
to come to terms with these changed conditions. In the eyes of the Nayı̄
Kahānı̄ writers, the rate of change after Independence made the nation-
alist, Gandhian idealism of Premchand, the socialism of the progressive
writers or the escapist introversion of Ajneya, Jainendra Kumar and oth-
ers irrelevant. They want to express the troubled state of mind of the
urban middle-class society by putting the human character in the center
of a highly realist style of writing. Instead of a retreat into idealism, they
endeavored to reestablish the character’s contact with his or her direct
social and cultural environment and present, whom Kamleshvar describes
as: ‘[…] the Indian individual who bears the transitions of modernity in
his entirely Indian circumstances and times […]’ (1966, 16).1
Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ produced many short stories, novels and stage plays and
created a vast body of critical essays, magazine editorials and commen-
taries on art and literature and their place in society. For this essay some
of these texts have been examined to find out how a few leading Nayı̄
Kahānı̄ authors formulated ideas on Indianness and its nature and func-
tion in modern Indian literature. The topic is directly mentioned in many
58 T. DE BRUIJN
pieces, but also indirectly present in comments on aspects of literature

in which cultural background plays an important role. A very interesting
source is a discussion on the theme of Indianness between various leading
Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ writers which is presented in a volume of essays by Mohan
Rakesh, with the title: Mohan Rākeś: sāhityik aur sāṃskrtik dṛṣṭi (1975).2
Several statements are made in this conversation; Kamleshvar argues that
Indianness is present in the form of historical structures and ‘[…] that it is
still before us in the form of those values that form the basis of our lives—
those values that up to this day have not become eroded or insignificant’
(Rakesh 1975, 63). On the question whether this is especially relevant
for modern Indian literature, he answers that the Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ writers
have precisely chosen from life those characters that can carry these val-
ues (ibid.). He continues with an interpretation of the role of Indianness
in modern Indian literature that gives a very specific qualification of the
realist principles of Nayı̄ Kahānı̄. He points out that in important Indian
literature, Indian values have prevented the representation of immorality
in literature, such as the murder of a father by his son, a mother who is
thrown out of the house by a son or sexual intimacy between a brother
and sister (ibid.).
In the same discussion, Rajendra Yadav makes an observation which
underlines the modernist and innovative aspect of Nayı̄ Kahānı̄’s approach
to Indian writing: he argues that for him only living reality is Indianness,
and he denounces all those who can see Indianness only in the past and in
stories that are ‘written on ruins’. In his words:
When our present clothes, behavior, food, have all become part of our lives,
how could these things have become non-Indian? It is wrong to regard
Indian society as a society from the past. (Rakesh 1975, 64)3
Mohan Rakesh follows a line of argument which gives more room for dif-
ferent approaches to Indianness, as he stresses the element of genuineness.
He argues that writers like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre were genu-
ine because they knew how to grasp the gist of their time and environ-
ment. In his words: ‘Camus could not have written l’Étranger from the
perspective of Indian life’ (Rakesh 1975, 65). Echoes of this last argument
can be found in a separate essay by Kamleshvar in which the author argues
against the use of literature to express ideologies or ‘eternal’ moral or reli-
gious values. He fiercely denounces the stereotypes for Hindus, Muslims
and Christian in some works, as well as the politically correctness in the
representation of social groups. In his view, Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ focuses on the

human being in his own right and not as an icon for cultural concepts or
values. On the tendency to portray characters as promoters of ‘Hinduness’
(hindūpan), he remarks:
There should be no shame in being a Hindu, but if one is Hindu before

being human, there is cause for concern. (Kamleshvar 1966, 22)
He goes on to rebuke the stereotypes of the wife, the Muslim, the hus-
band, the son, the mother and other characters that can be found in
Indian writing. By emphasizing a non-idealist characterization, he leaves
room for the representation of a less benign and less positive notion of
Indianness. The genuine humanity of the characters should prevail in his
eyes over the depiction of cultural values or ideals. This is an important
step in Indian writing as it acknowledges that the darker sides of Indian
society and the character’s being uprooted and alienated from established
cultural values deserve a place in literature, as long as they do not include
depictions of extreme or immoral behavior.
Interesting comments on Indianness abound in the Ramesh Gaur
interview: the author Markandeya mentions that he is surprised to hear
his fellow writers being so intent on defining certain notions as Indian
because they fit so well in the current time frame. In his view that should
be a cause for concern: the present time calls for breaking out of existing
limits. It appears that he accepts un-Indian elements in literature because
they are able to break these limits (Rakesh 1975, 65).
A very strong opinion comes from the author and critic Mudrarakshas,
who proclaims: ‘Excuse me, but the fact of the matter is that Indianness
is like one of these whores about whom Hindi writers have heard many
myths—they have taken these myths from various people, ranging from
Max Müller, Elliot, Schopenhauer, to Kennedy and Cruchow—people
who have either ridden her loins—or from Valmiki to Nirala and Gandhi,
who have given her everything from kisses to syphilis. But Hindi writers
are such pious offspring of all of them, that, by worshipping her as a
mother, they pollute both her and their own soil’ (Rakesh 1975, 65).
Other views on the matter can be found in the large essay on the artistic
principles of Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ written by Rajendra Yadav as an introduction
to a volume of short stories by various writers, with the title Ek duniyā
samānāntar (A Parallel World, 1969). The essay looks back on the devel-
opment of modernist writing in Indian literature and argues that the
60 T. DE BRUIJN
somber and pessimist descriptions of Indian reality in Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ has

reached a critical point, whence it should start to find new ways of prog-
ress and development (75). The impressive opening vision of this essay
portrays the modern Indian writer as a desperate, lonely figure who has
turned his back on the real world and found refuge in a parallel world. The
escapism that is part of the artist’s habitus is now rooted in experience of
the modern world. The long and complicated essay argues for the accep-
tance of more ambivalent notions of Indianness but not as an endpoint to
intellectual development in Indian literature.
The quotes that are chosen here are just a selection from an abundance
of critical and analytical essays by Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ authors. They mainly
serve to give an indication of the various arguments that are put forward
on this matter.4 It is evident that Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ wanted to reconnect the
disenchantment and loss of moral values inherent in the modernist out-
look to the Indian context by focusing on the character’s emotions and
experiences without lifting him or her from the reality of modern Indian
life. By taking this position, Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ makes room for existential-
ist ideas and other modernist influences—not only from Western litera-
ture—while still acknowledging Indian cultural traditions and inherent
moral values as a major conceptual framework in modern Indian litera-
ture. This position can best be characterized as a negotiation with the
concept of Indianness and the positive connotation it acquired in the
course of India’s modern history.
Representations of uprooting, alienation and negative experiences
of Indian culture are not uncommon in modern Hindi writing before
Nayı̄ Kahānı̄. Premcand’s later stories, the work of Jaishankar Prasad
(1889–1937), the novels of Upandranath Ashk (1910–1996), such as Girtı̄
divāreṃ (1947), and works of the authors belonging to the Progressive
Writers Movement are examples of a realist expression of the frustrations
and negative experiences of living in a disenchanted contemporary India
where modernity shifted moral values and social patterns from their eternal
and ‘sacred’ positions. Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ adopted and further developed many
of the stylistic and thematic elements of these predecessors. The ambiva-
lent perspective on Indian society presented in these earlier works deviated
from the nationalist ideologies that influenced the development of Hindi
writing in its formative period in the first half of the twentieth century
caused primarily by its adoption by the Hindu nationalist movement as the
preferred medium for uniting the Hindu community and as prospective
national language for independent India in the struggle for Independence.
Although this position affected individual writers in many different ways,

a general tone of moral didactics, social reform and belief in the value of
Indian culture as a basis for the culture of an independent Indian nation
became an established trend in early Hindi writing. One of the effects of
the ideological impact on Hindi literature in its formative period was that
Indian culture and social codes were primarily seen as basically positive and
wholesome notions that could eventually serve as building blocks for a
postcolonial society.
Questioning this ideology meant placing oneself at the margin or at
least in a somewhat eccentric, avant-garde position. In the changed world
of post-Independence India, Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ used to bring to the fore these
non-conformist, modernist perceptions of Indian tradition and culture as
a valid ideological inspiration for new Hindi writing. They argued that a
new literature that reflected these ‘eccentric’ notions could just as well
play the central role in society that was attributed to earlier, idealist Hindi
writing. Thus, Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ challenged earlier generations of writers and
established itself right in the center of Hindi writing. The remarks on
Indianness found in the critical essays show how the authors carefully take
positions that leaves the importance of an Indian identity in literature
intact. Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ was critical and innovative, but by carefully negotiat-
ing the ideological base of the literary field, they managed to fill existing
positions with new contents.
The notion of the ‘literary field’ as developed by Pierre Bourdieu
(1992) provides a good framework to describe the way the innovations
promoted by Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ gradually came to dominate Hindi writing.
Bourdieu’s model maps the production of literature onto a field in which
each activity—writing, editing, criticism—involves the accretion or con-
version of value or capital. In the case of Hindi literature at the time of
the rise of Nayı̄ Kahānı̄, the nationalist ideology behind the promotion
of Hindi writing represented a major source of cultural capital. Being fully
supportive to this ideology led to a high status, deviating from it meant
going for a position in which little capital was invested. The distribution
of this capital was enforced by institutions which promoted Hindi writing,
allotted prizes and awards and aided the formation of a ‘canon’.
In the field of Hindi writing of the 1950s and 1960s, the positive con-
notation of rootedness in Indian culture and tradition still represented a
central value. Avant-gardists or writers who thwarted or challenged this
opted for a marginal position. Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ seems to have chosen a differ-
ent approach, combining the innovations and artistic appeal of the earlier
62 T. DE BRUIJN
avant-gardist writers but staying within the perimeter of the established

values of Hindi writing by proclaiming that their literary innovations did
not contradict the ‘Indianness’ of their writing. It managed to bring a
new perspective to the center of the field of Hindi writing by challenging
but not overruling central ideologies of the field. Whatever the changes
in Indian society after 1947, the field was still centered around the notion
that Hindi writing had a special place in Indian culture as the repository of
cultural identities and values that were to form the bedrock of the young
nation’s cultural and social outlook. Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ proclaimed stylistic and
thematic innovations that referred to the ambivalent, dark views of Indian
reality that had been around in earlier writing but made them acceptable as
a new lingua franca for a thoroughly ‘Indian’ literature that included and
processed many influences from Western modernist writing. Redefining
the Indianness of Hindi writing was the essence of Nayı̄ Kahānı̄’s chal-
lenge and is what is still being fought over by critics such as Jaidev. To a
large extent, this debate concerns the control over what modern Indian
writing should be: ambivalent and cynically modernist or idealist. What
may have helped Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ authors to consolidate their position in
the field was their connection to important journals and the rise of these
media in the 1950s and 1960s.
Modernist Approaches
The analysis presented above can be illustrated with a reading and further
interpretation of stories that represent dissident or—in the eyes of some
contemporary readers—objectionable images of Indianness and compare
these with examples of Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ stories. This reading focuses on the
polarity of the cultural notions that are referred to in the stories, linking
these representations to the relative position of artistic and cultural values
in the field of cultural production.
An example of an early modernist’s approach to Indianness can be
found in the works of one of the authors that preceded and inspired Nayı̄
Kahānı̄, Saadat Hasan Manto (1912–1955). The image of the Indian
context in Manto’s stories expresses an ambivalence of conventions and
traditional values that confronts the reader with the writer’s puzzled view
of his times. ‘If you cannot bear my stories, that means this is an unbear-
able time. The evils in me are those of this era’, in his own words.5
In 1981, the literary magazine Sārikā published two Manto stories,
‘Bū’ (Smell, 1942) and ‘Ṭ haṇḍā Gośt’ (Cold flesh, 1950), in a set of two
issues dedicated to ‘proscribed’ (ẓabtśodā) literature, which featured also

excerpts from Lolita by Nabokov and other works by Indian and Western
authors that were previously regarded as scandalous or obscene.6 The
‘taboo’ aspect of the Manto stories was less sharp for a modern audience,
but they still represent in the eyes of the editors a somewhat eccentric
position. The obscenity in ‘Bū’ is very mild: the compact and apparently
simple story consists of a reminiscence by a dandy-like young man in
Bombay of his infatuation for a girl from the hills, especially with the pun-
gent but intoxicating smell she exudes. He recalls how he dated numerous
women and quickly grew bored with them, also sexually. In great detail
he describes his first physical contact with the girl from the hills and his
perception of the smell of her body.7 At the end of the story, the context
of the reminiscence is revealed: the morning after his wedding night with
a fair-skinned (gorā) girl. He realizes that the smell of her perfumed body
repels him; his only experience of true attraction was through the smell of
the girl from the hills.
The disturbing effect of the story is created primarily by the use of
images that refer to Indian literary conventions of romance and eroticism:
the rain which is mentioned in the opening sentence, ‘barsāt ke yahı̄ din
the’ creating an atmosphere as in bārahmāsā poetry; the hill girl and her
smell—a conventional object of unworldly, true love and physical attrac-
tion; the descriptions of the body as in a classical nakh-śikh; the longing of
the lover of Urdu love poems and Sufi poetry.
These images which by convention should create an idyllic bhāv now
describe a love that is obsessive, cynical and all too human, thus subvert-
ing the established connotation of idyllic romance. The references to
the Indian cultural background emanate from a most unfitting reality
that is described in the story: a womanizing dandy who marries a fair
(European?) woman (of his own social class) whom he will never love as
passionately as the lower-class ghāt ̣ı̄ girl he remembers. The Verfremdung
in this r epresentation conveys Manto’s modernist perspective. The subver-
sion of the conventional meaning of the cultural markers and the ensuing
failure and alienation of the lover symbolize the crisis of modern man. Yet,
Manto leaves a ray of hope in the form of the mystical aspect in the love for
the hill girl. Paradoxically, this can only be realized through an experience
of this world’s vanity. With this allusion to Sufi mysticism, Manto recon-
nects the modernity of ‘Bū’ with India’s rich cultural traditions.
The central concept in the story is that of smell, which is ephemeral
but ambivalent as the modern condition: it oscillates between being on
64 T. DE BRUIJN
the one hand comforting and intimate, on the other hand repellant and
discomforting. Thus, it is an appropriate metaphor for the ambivalence
of all things Indian or conventional in the modern world, as perceived
by Manto.
The techniques of ‘Bū’ are also present in the chilling story ‘Ṭ haṇḍā
Gośt’ which is situated in the horrific events of Partition in 1947. In this
story Manto deconstructs the conventional connotation of Sikh virility
and warrior ethos in an unsettling way: a Sikh man comes back to his vil-
lage after a few days looting and killing and is unable to make love to his
mistress. She suspects that he has seen another woman and, enraged by
his ambivalent explanation, stabs him with his own dagger. With his last
breath he explains that the woman he mentioned was a young girl he had
raped. On top of the guilt over being unfaithful, he tells of his shock when
he realized the girl was already dead. The remorse makes him succumb to
his mistress’s anger.
As in ‘Bū’, the traditional world order has broken down, and this time
the Partition provides a perfectly genuine backdrop. The chaos of moral-
ity and ethics is made whole at the end in the remorse of the Sikh man,
but only in a very grim sort of justice. In the coldness of the bodies of
the raped girl and the Sikh ‘hero’ against the background of the moral
no-man’s land of Partition, Manto projects the emptiness of modernity.
Another interesting example of the reversal of the conventional con-
notation of images from Indian culture can be found in the same issue
of Sārikā issue, in a story by Yashpal, called ‘Dharmaraks.ā’ (The protec-
tion of the Faith). The story describes how the bright brahmin professor
Brahmabrata abandons a promising career as a scientist to lead the life of a
brahmācār ya (renouncer). He starts a Vedic school and devotes his life to
teaching Vedic knowledge in his ‘Anglo-Vedic School’. The world keeps
interfering with his ideal. He breaks his vow of celibacy when his parents
chose a beautiful young bride for him and he succumbs to her charms.
He makes her pregnant of a beautiful daughter: Jñānavatı̄. After the early
death of her mother, Jñānavatı̄ comes to live in her father’s college. She is
brash and charming, but also a serious student. When she reaches the age
of marriage, Brahmabrata is abhorred by the idea of having to find her a
husband for his daughter.
The struggle with his ideals torments Brahmabrata while he goes on a
short trip. On his return he remembers the voyage he made to his ances-
tral village to meet his young bride and the ensuing breach of his vows.
Confused by both the arousal this memory causes and his anger, he loses
control when, on his return home, he finds his daughter in bed with
the male servant. He lashes out at her and is suddenly overcome by lust
and tries to rape her. She wards him off and tells him that she has pro-
nounced a vow of marriage which sanctifies her intercourse with the boy.
Brahmabrata loses all hope and flees to the river to commit suicide. He
then considers that this act is also a sin and he goes back to the college.
The next day he tells his daughter that, because of his sin, he is going away
to live the life of a saṃnyāsin and that he will care for the arrangement of
her marriage. Thus, the stain of sin will still be on their lives, but ‘that is
necessary to maintain dharma’.
Yashpal refers in this story to the traditional concepts in a Sanskritized
Hindi and with a withheld kind of irony, which seems to underline the
defeat of this cultural and religious idiom in a modern world. The story
can be read as a criticism against Hindu nationalist notions of control
of sensual pleasure that could not provide a sensible and relevant ethical
program for life in a modern society.8 This critical stance towards the use
of traditional concepts is represented in the story by showing the skewed
and problematic nature of these Indian values, especially when they are
reconstructed in modern society. The character of Brahmabrata effectively
conveys this position as he is the scientist trained in the modern (Western)
sciences who turns into brahmācār ya.
Indianness in Nay ī Kahān ī Stories

The large corpus of writing that can be linked to Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ contains
many dark images of Indianness, but for the present discussion, another
type of story is more interesting, as it represents the negotiation with the
idealist notions of Indianness that can also be found in the critical essays
by authors associated with this movement. Stories of this type include
‘Rājā Nirbaṃsiyā’ (King Nirbansiya, 1957) by Kamleshvar (1932–2007)
and ‘Jahāṃ Lakṣmī qaid hai’ (Where Lakshmi was held in prison, 1955)
by Rajendra Yadav (1929–2013).9 The two stories have in common that
they juxtapose a realist narration of tragic events with a folk story or fairy
tale which tells a simple, naïve story that mirrors in many ways the main
narrative, but then with a happy end.
Kamleshvar intertwines the story of the growing alienation of a young
clerk Jagpati, whose marriage with the village girl Canda remains without
progeny, with a folk story told to the narrator by his mother. This story
tells of a king without offspring whose once prosperous kingship began to
66 T. DE BRUIJN
whither. The people in his realm are afraid to meet him as they fear that
the curse of childlessness will affect them too. The king decides to give up
his kingship and go abroad. On the same night, the queen sees in a dream
a prediction that she will get pregnant if she sleeps with her husband dur-
ing the coming night. She goes after him and finds him in the place where
he spends the night, sleeps with him in disguise and leaves him before he
wakes up. The king then leaves for another country. When he returns to
the palace after a few years, laden with riches, two boys help him get his
cart get unstuck and reach the palace. He is surprised to learn from the
queen that these boys are his sons. He suspects that his minister is the
father and refuses to accept them. He submits the queen to a test of purity
to see if they are really his offspring. With penance and the intervention of
the kuladevatā (family deity), she proves her faithfulness and the identity
of the sons, and the royal couple is happily reunited again.
In the story of Jagpati and Canda, there is also a third man, but things
do not turn out well. When Jagpati gets wounded in a fight and lies ill for
a long time, he loses his job. The ‘compounder’, Bacan Siṃha, who cares
for Jagpati, tells Canda that her husband needs powerful, expensive drugs.
She then wants to sell her bracelets to buy the drugs. Jagpati is adamant
that she does not borrow money. Bacan Siṃha is a well-respected man
in the neighborhood, and he prevents her from selling the bracelets by
donating the drugs. After his recovery, Jagpati goes out to look for work
and Bacan Siṃha becomes a regular visitor to his home.
The couple’s infertility and the neighborhood’s perception of this cast a
deep shadow on their marriage. Jagpati is desperate for work and borrows
money from Bacan Siṃha to set up a small firewood trade. He immerses
himself in the job and is increasingly overcome by shame for not provid-
ing for Canda as a husband should. She accuses him of having ‘sold’ her
for the loan from Bacan Siṃha. Finally, Canda does get pregnant and goes
back to her own village to stay with another man. Jagpati loses all faith in
moral values and kills himself. He leaves a note in which he states that no
man is to blame for his death and that the money and the debt killed him.
He demands that his body will not be cremated before Canda and her
child are present, implying that he still regards them as his family.
The central point in both the folktale and the main narrative is the fixed
framework of social roles and values and the pressure of family and neigh-
bors to enforce these rules. This structure becomes harsh and alienating
when there is no offspring and when the man cannot provide for his wife.
The crisis in the folk story is resolved by religious vows, offerings and a
test of purity. Reality does not provide these solutions, and the disenchant-
ment of a world where the breach of morals cannot be restored is too
much for Jagpati.
By switching between two narratives, Kamleshvar sets off the wholeness
and comfort provided by the fairy tale against the disillusion and failure of
modern reality. The structure of the text frames the breakdown in Jagpati’s
story in an Indian cultural context which attenuates the existential crisis.
The author does not turn his back on his lost hero but provides a meaning
for his suffering that is based in the inherent harshness of Indian society.
Jagpati is courageous and was wounded in a desperate battle. Borrowing
the money and thus letting Bacan Siṃha get a hold on him and his wife
was his only mistake, for which he paid a high price.
The friction between the value systems represented in the stories of the
king and of Jagpati and Canda is represented in the use of two different
styles of narration. The main frame of the story is told by a first-person
narrator, a youth friend of Jagpati’s, who recalls in a childhood memory
how his mother told the story of the childless king to a group of chil-
dren at some festive occasion. Apparently, the main narrator was among
the children. He recalls the story of Jagpati because for him he was the
‘real’ Rājā Nirbaṃsiyā. The two narrations represent two opposite value
systems: on the one hand the strict mythical past where righteousness is
ensured by divine intervention and in which truth always prevails in the
end. The opposite is the unforgiving world in which the narrator and his
friend Jagpati live. Childlessness in this world leads to social ostracism.
The narration of the mythical story retains the characteristic of a tale
told by a mother to little children, perhaps with the only exception that
the pointe of the story can only be understood by children with a minimal
of sexual education. Within this voicing, the story is presented as a typical
fairy tale, without going into realistic details but focusing on the magic
and miracles that saved the happiness in the king’s life. Its obvious moral
is that fate will always prevail: the king was destined to have children and
removed the obstacles that prevented that.
In contrast to this, the story of Jagpati is told by an adult narrator, a fully
conscious and critical member of a society that is uncaring and indifferent to
the suffering of others. Surprisingly, the criticism at social evils is rendered
without any overt didacticism. Instead, Kamleshvar switches between nar-
ration of the events, elaborate introspective passages which convey either
Canda’s or Jagpati’s perspective, and descriptions of the surroundings of
the characters which enhance the ominous mood of the story. He tells the
68 T. DE BRUIJN
story as a personal reminiscence in which he stands very close to both the

king’s story, told by his mother, and the tragic life story of his youth com-
panion Jagpati, creating a heightened sense of intensity and intimacy. In
the narration of Canda’s or Jagpati’s reflections, their private value systems
are guiding the representation of the situation and their moral judgment.
A good example is the scene in which Canda observes how Jagpati suffers
both from his wounds and from the fact that he cannot come up with the
money for the drugs he needs without taking on a loan or letting his wife
sell her jewelry. Her reflections are narrated directly and show how she is
angry that he suddenly refuses to let her take a loan for the drugs:
Then it crossed her mind to say (to him): “Well, tell me, did you really never
take any money in loan from anyone until now? But then you took it your-
self and did not have to come before me for approval. You did not hesitate
to take a loan in that way, but now that you have to justify it before me,
suddenly some false sense of male pride awakes and presents itself.” But the
depth of the ideals, presenting itself in the form of the pain that was spread
out all over Jagpati’s face, crept like a thief into Canda’s mind, and brushing
her hand over his head she said in a perfectly natural way: “These drugs are
not someone’s kind gift, I gave a bracelet to buy them. That’s where they
come from”. (Kamleshvar 1993, 13)10
Canda’s words present her own values that conflict with her husband’s
opinions and his perception of the situation. She notices how Bacan Siṃha
looks at her bangles and her hands and feet. When she enters his office
to give him the bracelet, she feels like falling into a pit of sin and initially
shrinks back from approaching him, as if she senses that this will bring
her misfortune. The ominous description of that scene foreshadows the
unhappy ending of the story. The image of the dark shadow of a tree
that falls over the scene suggests that this is a fate that cannot be avoided,
regardless of the actions of those involved.
The dark dense tree in front stood motionless; it was as if, at one moment,
the border of its dark shadow spread to take one into its circle, and the other
moment it let one go. The lamp of the dispensary suddenly fluttered and
went out, from the rooms of the patients a groaning sound went out over
the field and died down at its edge (ibid.).
Similar ominous signs are present in the description of the place where
Jagpati collects and sells wood. In absence of a guard, he also sleeps on
the site and sees a woman there tending a grave twice a day with flowers
and lighting lamps in the evening. When she has lit the lights, she leaves,
first sadly and slowly, but then swift and with energy. After she leaves, the
place is silent:
And again she disappears into the quarter and then, in the loneliness of
the night … it is as if, from among the thorns of the acacia, a spirit comes
up from that grave and wanders, totally alone, over this rustling, uneven
field…. (ibid., 22)
The image of the rūh, the spirit, wandering around the graveyard conveys
notions of loneliness and renunciation. The scene at the grave is full of
symbolism: the woman who tends the grave of her husband is an image
of marital fidelity and thereby enhances Jagpati’s feeling of falling short
to this ideal. The use of the Arabic word rūh adds to the surreal nature of
the scene, referring to images from fairy tales and popular religious stories.
The word also has a pronounced meaning in Sufi mysticism, in the pair
nafṣ-rūh, the mortal body and the divine, eternal soul, which connotation
adds a metaphysical layer to the scene. In the parallel story, the king leaves
his country after he notices how he is ostracized because of his misfor-
tune—a conventional image of quest or escape from social pressures. In
Jagpati’s case, his loneliness is a desolate state which is not liberating as a
renunciation in a religious sense. It is the result of his not being able to
comply with social norms and provide basic needs for his wife. The image
of the wandering spirit—needless to say—points ahead to Jagpati’s suicide.
Kamleshvar’s story constitutes a dialogue of values and narrations and
is therefore an excellent example of Nayī Kahānī’s position with regards
to Indianness. The movement created a space for questioning nationalist
ideals and for the modern intellectuals’ critical attitude towards conven-
tional values, without losing touch with the notion that this was still a lit-
erature rooted in Indian culture. Nayī Kahānī stories r epresent dilemmas
and attitudes which have deep roots in the nation’s cultural consciousness
but without the bias and rhetoric emphasis of Hindu nationalism. Their
aesthetic perspective was also more comprehensive and encompassed the
diversity of modern literary traditions, especially that of Urdu prose and
poetry, as this was an important background for contemporary fiction.
Nayī Kahānī did not exclude these influences as alien, as the Hindu-
oriented nationalist agenda did, but presented them as concepts in need of
reinterpretation and re-integration in modern Indian society.
In ‘Jahāṃ Lakṣmī qaid hai’, Rajendra Yadav portrays the dilemma of
a young man, Govind, who goes to town to study and lives there in the
70 T. DE BRUIJN
house of a friend of his father’s, Lāl Rūpārām. To pay for his lodging,
Govind does the accounts of the factory of the rich but avaricious owner.
After a short while, Govind discovers that Lāl Rūpārām’s niece Lakṣmī is
held locked up somewhere in the house. He finds out that the superstition
that her presence will avert misfortune is the reason that Rūpārām has not
married the girl off and keeps her locked away. Her father, Rocūrām, had
made a fortune after the birth of his daughter Gauṛı̄. From then onwards,
the family believed the girl was a devı̄ (goddess) who brought good for-
tune. This belief was reinforced when, as soon as plans were made to
marry off Gauṛı̄, Rocūrām lost his fortune and died. Rūpārām had also
become rich, but he lived as a recluse and did not spend his wealth. In
shock of what happened to his brother, he took the girl he considered
his ‘Lakṣmī’—goddess of wealth—in his house and locked her up so she
would never go away. Gauṛı̄ lost her sanity in the loneliness and occasion-
ally goes into rages, one of which was overheard by Govind. He suspects
she sent him a message, asking him to release her and carry her off. At this
moment he remembers a childhood story of a knight who rescues a beau-
tiful princess from the hands of a demon. In the end he cannot be like the
knight and fails to rescue Gauṛı̄/Lakṣmī.
The intertwining of the two stories is less elaborate than in Kamleshvar’s
story. Yadav uses the sub-story of the knight and also other sub-plots in
the story to contrast Rūpārām’s greed and the cruelty of Lakṣmī’s fate
with the wholeness and innocence of the childhood story, which is located
in an idealized naïve world where the noble knight slays the demon. The
name of the girl indicates another realm of myth where Lakṣmī does not
stand for useless unspent fortune but for the consort of the god Viṣṇu.
The opening lines of the story convey this opposition:
Wait a little, this story is not about Lakṣmı̄, the consort of Viṣṇu, but about
a girl called Lakṣmı̄ who wanted to escape from her imprisonment. It is nat-
ural that there is confusion over the two names, just as it confused Govind
for a while (Yadava 1990, 540).
The stylistics and narrative technique of this story are in line with other
works by Yadav and conform to the literary aesthetics of Nayı̄ Kahānı̄. The
narrator follows his characters very closely and gives a full account of their
reaction to the situation from within. In the first scene of the story, the nar-
ration focuses on the confused thoughts of Govind who wakes up at night,
thinking he has heard a voice calling him. He believes it was Lakṣmī asking
him to free her from her prison. At this point, Govind is not sure whether
this is a dream or reality: he remembers his dream, which leads into another
parallel narrative. The ambivalence in the way this scene is narrated, leaving
both Govind and the reader guessing what actually happened, assists in cre-
ating the contrast of different perspectives that is characteristic of this story.
Similar to Kamleshvar’s story, various forms of narration are used in ‘Jahāṃ
Lakṣmī qaid hai’: Govind’s dream, the tale of the demon-slaying knight, the
events that occur in the house and the lengthy narration of Lakṣmī’s fate by
Rūpārām’s caukı̄dār (watchman), Dilāvar Siṃha. Each of these narrations
carries its own perspective and set of values that produces a different evalu-
ation of the facts. The story is like a framework in which Yadav juxtaposes
these narrations and lets them enter into dialogue. In this confrontation,
various angles on the tale of Lakṣmī and on Indianness are presented.
Govind is the central character of the story, and the reader registers
events through his perspective and interpretation. What the young man
sees and hears does not add up to a coherent set of facts but is rather a
dialogue of voices and narrations. This dialogic effect is most evident in
the scenes towards the end of the story, when Dilāvar Siṃha sits down
and tells Govind about Lakṣmī, using all his skills as a teller of tales. The
caukı̄dār has a deep grudge against Rūpārām and his greed. Being a vet-
eran soldier, he is tough and constantly reminds his audience of his war
experiences. His perspective is that of resignation with the state of society
after the war, r ealizing that ideals and values have been lost. He despises
what Rūpārām does to the girl and why he is so fruitlessly obsessed with
his wealth. One could say his voice presents a seasoned, disillusioned com-
ment on the development of Indian society after Independence.
Govind’s role in the dialogue is that of asking questions. He is a new-
comer to the situation and is innocent and naïve. His imagination is still
locked up in the world of myths about noble knights rescuing damsels
in distress. The name Govind, an epithet of Kṛṣṇa, seems to convey this
perspective. Yet, at the end of the story, the author shows how Govind has
matured and how he realizes that many more could have had the experi-
ence he had, losing their innocence and seeing the ambivalence of those
icons of Indianness that used to have a purely positive connotation. This
is a chilling and sobering experience in which the disappointment of the
generation of Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ is expressed:
Lying in bed in his small room in the middle of the night, Govinda thought
of Lakṣmī,̄ and in the light of the candle each and every image of her story
72 T. DE BRUIJN
appeared before his eyes. Encircled by the ramparts of darkness he again

read the hand-written lines in the dim light of the candle that shed warm
tears:
“I love you with all my heart”
“Take me with you away from here…”
“I will hang myself…”
A question raised itself in Govind’s mind, “Am I the first man who is so
upset after hearing this call, or have others also heard it and ignored it? Can
one ever ignore the call of a young girl once it is heard?”
(ibid., 558)
Another interesting parallel with Kamleshvar’s story and a common ele-

ment in modern Hindi stories that carry a threatening, somber mood is
the use of the environment to indicate the mood of the characters or the
situation. In this story, the room where Govind and another employee of
Rūpārām sit and listen to the caukı̄dār’s reflects the somber content of
what is being told there. In the room is a large black stone flour mill, cov-
ered with flour dust. Because of the pipe that protrudes from it, it resem-
bles a large elephant. On the other side is a large engine, also covered in
dust, carrying signs saying: ‘Danger!’ A heavy balance with its arms lifted
resembles a Kathakali dancer. The steel of the weights is so cold in winter
that Dilāvar Siṃha ignores Rūpārām’s orders to remove them after use.
The images of the elephant and the dancer give the somber mood of this
room a mythical quality, alluding to images of Ganeś (the elephant-god)
and Śiva Naṭarājā (Śiva performing his dance at the destruction of the
world), suggesting that wealth and death live side by side here.
Conclusion
A closer analysis of the two stories outlined here may provide a much
more detailed illustration but is evident from the reading presented here
how two leading Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ writers deal with the concept of Indianness
in the disenchanted context of post-Independence India. The narration
closely follows the perception of the characters and the reminiscences of
the childhood stories represent intimate experiences. Kamleshvar uses a
first-person narrator, who is a childhood friend of the main character and
tells the story as a memory. Yadav uses a third-person narrator but relates
all the intimate thoughts and dreams of the main character, including the
childhood story. The use of changes in the chronology of the narrative
(a preview of the closure of the story is given at the beginning) pulls the
reader’s attention to the somewhat drawn-out revelation of Lakṣmī’s true
fate as told by the watchman. In the two narratives, the sub-stories point
to the subconscious awareness of ideal social patterns and moral values in
Indian culture, which are in both cases contradicted by the experiences
of reality.
The Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ stories analyzed here seem to be less absolute in
their representation of the conflict of modernity and their culture’s ideals
and conventions. They show how far removed these have become from
the reality of the modern nation, but this tension is a fruitful one, giving
rise to a new awareness which is less idealist and optimistic. Yadav and
Kamleshvar present a new meaning of Indianness as a context for their
stories, which has lost a lot of its comforting meaning or the nationalist
rhetoric, but is not as desperate and dark as the world of Manto’s stories.
It also seems that the authors may have been less negative towards accept-
ing moral values that are based in classical Indian tradition as guidelines
for modern life than what can be read from Yashpal’s story.
In line with what has been observed in the critical essays by Nayı̄ Kahānı̄
authors, the stories confirm the notion that the innovations proposed by
this movement were aimed at a central notions of what a modern ‘Indian’
literature should look like. They fiercely defended their ‘Indianness’, refus-
ing to be set aside as a marginal, avant-garde phenomenon or as a clone of
Western fiction. The rise of Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ created considerable controversy
and resistance from the older generation of writers and critics, which cen-
tered on whether or not this kind of writing was ‘Indian’.
Perhaps more than intended, the young authors saw themselves
forced to formulate their literary argument in terms of the contribution
of their fiction to the new nation’s culture and identity. Debates on the
‘Indianness’ of Indian literature will always be around in the literary and
cultural discourse in India. They are a remnant from the beginnings of
modern writing in Hindi, when forming an ‘Indian’ nation was at stake.
This made Indianness the primary ideological axis of the literary field of
Hindi writing. In the course of the 1960s, the impact of the proposed
innovations of Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ on fundamental notions of what modern
Indian literature should be could not be dismissed. The movement had
brought a more shaded and ambivalent perception of Indian ideals and
icons, which had been around in Hindi writing for much longer, to the
center to the literary field.
74 T. DE BRUIJN
Notes
1. In Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ kı̄ bhūmikā (1966) Kamleshvar refers to earlier
modern Hindi writing as a kind of rı̄tikāl in which mannerisms and
Freudian introspection had taken away the focus from the Indian
environment of the characters; they had come loose from their
background. He also criticizes the progressive writers for turning
their characters into idealist stereotypes who represented ideas
rather than real-life humans (1966, 9–20).
2. This discussion is conducted by Ramesh Gaur and was first pub-
lished by him in the magazine Kendu. It is included under the head-
ing Samkālı̄n hindı̄ kahānı̄: ek paricarcā (Rakesh 1975, 55–80).
3. All translations from Hindi sources are by the present author.
4. The scope of this chapter does not allow for an enumeration of all
the places where this topic is discussed by writers and critics. The
arguments that are referred to here are repeated many times and
also appear in other contexts. One important thread in the discus-
sion on Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ and Indianness is the topic of universality or
local relevance of stories. In fact, this touches on many of the points
raised in other discussions: for the Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ writer a more uni-
versal meaning or expression was considered important, but at the
same time it had to be relevant to the Indian background.
5. Quoted in Flemming 1985, 32.
6. Sārikā, year 21, part 288, 1–15 July 1981. This is the first of two
issues dedicated to the ‘proscribed’ works. The commentaries that
accompany the stories show how the attitudes towards ‘obscenity’
have changed but still appeal to audience’s curiosity for this taboo
literature. The stories by Manto exist in various reprints. ‘Bū’ was
first published in a magazine in 1942 and later included in the
volume Lazzat-e sang (1947?) (Flemming 1985, 60). ‘Ṭhaṇḍā
Gośt’ was published in a volume of the same name (Manto 1950).
The text in Sārikā is a Hindi ‘translation’ and contains some
changes, mostly in vocabulary, compared to the Urdu original (cf.
also other translations into Hindi of Manto’s texts: 1974, 1981).
The differences between Hindi and Urdu versions of literary texts
have been analyzed in greater detail by Christine Everaert (2009).
7. For the interpretation of the Hindi term ghāṭī as: ‘girl from the
hills’, I am indebted to Dr. Kamala Ganesh, Bombay University.
8. In comments on the story in the same Sārikā issue in which the
story was presented, the commentator Bira Raja argues that Yashpal
may have targeted Ā rya samāj ideas on the restriction of sensual

pleasures. Raja reads the story as an attempt to discredit the value
of such conservative notions in a modern society (p. 14–15).
9. The quotations refer to the version of the story published in the
collection Carcita Kahāniyāṃ, published in 1993. The text of
Yadav’s story used here is from the two volume collection of short
stories Yahāṃ tak (1990).
10. This is a crucial scene in the story: Canda has not yet sold the
bracelet, and the drugs are a donation by Bacan Siṃha, who refuses
to take her bracelet. Canda hides the bracelet from Jagpati, but he
finds it under her pillow and suspects that she has bought the drugs
for sex. He feels utterly inadequate for not being able to prevent
this. Although no such deal happened, Bacan Siṃha gains influ-
ence over Canda and Jagpati. She later accuses Jagpati of having
‘sold’ her by refusing a loan for the drugs, which adds to his despair.
References
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1992. Les règles de l’art Genèse et structure du champ litéraire.
Paris: Seuil.
Everaert, Christine. 2009. Tracing the Boundaries Between Hindi and Urdu: Lost
and Added in Translation between 20th Century Short Stories. Leiden: Brill.
Flemming, Leslie A. 1985. Another Lonely Voice: The Life and Works of Saadat
Hasan Manto. In The Life and Works of Saadat Hassan Manto. Introduction by
Leslie A. Flemming; Short Stories Trans. Tahira Naqvi. Lahore: Vanguard.
Jagannathan, N.S. 1997. Whose Indian Literature Is It Anyway. In The Book
Review, August: 57.
Hindi Novel. Shimla: IIAS.
Kamleśvar. 1966. Nayı̄ Kahānı̄ kı̄ bhūmikā. Delhi: Akshar Prakashan.
———. 1993. Carcita kahāniyāṃ. New Delhi: Samayik Prakashan.
Manto, Saadat Hasan. 1950. Ṭhaṇḍā Gośt. Delhi: Maktaba-e Nau.
———. 1974. Manto kı̄ tı̄s kahāniyāṃ: cayana aura bhūmikā. Allahabad: Nilabh
Prakashan.
———. 1981. In Mantonāmā, ed. Devendra Issara. Delhi: Indraprastha Prakashan.
Rakesh, Mohan. 1975. Mohan Rākeś: sāhityik aur sāṃskrtik dṛṣṭi. Delhi:
Radhakrishna Prakashan..
Yadav, Rajendra (ed). 1969. Eka duniyā: samānāntar. Delhi: Akshar Prakashan.
——— (ed). 1990. Yahāṃ tak: Rājendra Yādava kı̄ kahāniyāṃ, paṛāv 1. New
Delhi: National Publishing House.
CHAPTER 5
Imagining “Indianness” and Modern

Hindi Drama
Diana Dimitrova
This chapter explores the notion of “Indianness” with relation to the

creation of the canon of modern Hindi drama. I reflect on the issue of
“Indianness,” or to be more precise, of imagining “Indianness” and Hindi
drama by looking into the cultural segments that have influenced the devel-
opment of the dramatic genre of Hindi. I discuss the ideological impli-
cations of constructing the tradition of Hindi drama as a neo-Sanskritic
one while ignoring and suppressing both Western (British) and Islamic
(Urdu) influences. I point out that while the post-1960s “rediscovery” of
folk/indigenous/deśi theatrical traditions has been of great importance, it
has not been sufficient to “revive” and stop the demise of modern Hindi
drama, as it has not truly represented “Indianness.” I proceed to study
two plays by Lakshminaryan Mishra, whose work blends Western dramat-
ics with a neo-Sanskritic world view and conservative Hindu ideas, dem-
onstrating the complexity and plurality of “Indianness,” cultural identity
and modern Hindi drama. Thus, I argue that “Indianness” is a plural-
istic category, which is informed by multiple cultural segments, such as
Western (British), Brahmanic (Sanskritic), Islamic (Urdu) and indigenous
D. Dimitrova (*)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41015-9_5
78 D. DIMITROVA
(folk) literary traditions. Therefore all schools of Hindi drama—neo-

Sanskritic, naturalistic and nativistic (Dimitrova 2004:11–37)—represent
“Indianness” and should be part of the literary canon of Hindi.
Imagining “Indianness” and Hindi Drama

The concept of “Indianness” as a perceived collective cultural identity is
not to be outlined easily. It should be noted that “Indianness” is not a
‘scientific’ category that exists in reality. Rather, it is a notion that is con-
structed and shaped in ideologically coloured discourses. Furthermore, it
is not constant and can be transformed over the years – in this way it is
being defined by the ideological positions and representations during a
certain period of time. Benedict Anderson evokes the notion of ‘imagined
communities’ and how this is a key-term by means of which we can think
of nationalism (Anderson, 1983). Another important thinker, Stuart Hall,
has emphasized the nature of cultural identity of modern individuals as
unstable, multi-layered and constantly changing (Hall 2000, 595–634). I
have also written on the connections between nationalism and identity with
regard to understanding otherism and otherness (Dimitrova 2014, 1–16).
If we reflect on the insights of all three studies, we may continue our dis-
cussion and inquire into the existence of a possible ‘national’ or ‘collective
cultural identity.’ This collective cultural identity is not confined to Indian
reality only–it is to be found in all national and cultural formations and has
some common characteristics. Thus, it is consists of several layers, and it is
not stable, but constantly changing, and most significantly, it is always ‘imag-
ined’ and shaped by our ideological positions–to be always constructed and
re-created in our discourses and our narratives, be it cultural or academic.
Thus, we may conclude that the only way to talk of ‘collective cultural
identity’, in this case “Indianness,” would be to analyse concrete texts and
discourses while always taking into account the concrete cultural, historic,
religious and socio-economic context. I will therefore proceed to discuss
Hindi theatre and how it has been shaped by the notion of imagined and
constructed “Indianness”—or collective Indian cultural identity—inher-
ent in the prevalent ideological discourses of the time.
The Rise of Hindi Theatre

The origin and development of Hindi theatre is related to the estab-
lishment of the British colonial state (Gaeffke 1978: 93–95). The
Indian elite became familiar with major works of European theatre
IMAGINING “INDIANNESS” AND MODERN HINDI DRAMA 79
through English literature and the English translations of European

drama. This interest in European dramatic literature led to the creation
of several professional theatrical groups in Calcutta in 1835 (Gaeffke
1978: 93–95). Hindi professional theatre, however, emerged only after
Independence in 1947. Peter Gaeffke argues that British education and
economics had a lesser impact in the Hindi speaking area than in Bengal
and Maharashtra. He also attributes the lack of professional Hindi the-
atre to the strong presence of the Muslims in North India in the previ-
ous centuries and to what he considers a culture that had no interest in
drama. Thirdly, he argues that Hindi playwrights did not benefit from
the tradition of nauṭaṅkı̄ (“name of a type of folk-drama in Braj bhāṣā
or Khaṛı̄ Bolı̄ languages on legendary themes with music”) up to the
1960s (Gaeffke 1978: 93–95).
Gaeffke states that the Parsi theatre and the folk theatre of rāslı̄lā
(“Krishna’s round love-dance with the cowherd girls of Braj”) and
naut ̣aṅkı̄ were the only living theatrical traditions during the nineteenth
century. He sees the Parsi theatre as unfit to stimulate the growth of pro-
fessional Hindi theatre, as its main concern was commercial success and
as the language that it used until the 1910 was Urdu, and not Hindi.1
This position has been refuted by Kathryn Hansen and Jan Marek who
convincingly show the importance of both the Parsi theatre and Urdu
court drama for the development of Hindi theatre (Hansen n.d., 43–63;
Marek 1984: 117–128; Dimitrova 2014: 84–99). Thus, we may state that
not the presence of Parsi theatre and Urdu-Islamic culture but rather their
exclusion from the Hindi tradition, which had begun to be increasingly
defined as predominantly Hindu and neo-Sanskritic, may be the reason for
the slow development of Hindi professional theatre in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. These phenomena of the creation of the
Hindi tradition as a neo-Sanskritic one should be seen in the wake of the
rise of Hindi-Urdu nationalism and the association of the Hindi language
with “Hinduness” and of the Urdu language—with Islam (Orsini 2002:
176–193; Dimitrova 2014: 84–99).
Therefore, even though the influence of Western drama, the spread of
Western education and the consolidation of Hindi as a literary language
are indispensable to the origin and development of Hindi theatre, they
should be studied alongside with the other factors that contributed to its
growth (Dimitrova 2014: 84–99).
The work of Bharatendu Harishcandra (1850–1885), Jayshankar Prasad
(1889–1937), Laksminarayan Mishra (1903–1987), Mohan Rakesh
(1925–1972), Bhuvaneshvar (1912/1914–1957) and Upendranath
80 D. DIMITROVA
Ashk (1910–1996) mark important trends in the history of modern Hindi

theatre from the 1880s and up to the 1960s (Dimitrova 2004: 11–37,
2008: 3–15). These playwrights wrote historical dramas and social prob-
lem-plays discussing issues topical of the day. While Bharatendu, Prasad
and Rakesh used a highly Sanskritized vocabulary, Mishra, Bhuvaneshvar
and Ask employed a more understandable Hindustani in which there were
many Urdu words. The employment of highly Sanskritized vocabulary
and the glorification of the great Hindu past together with the introduc-
tion of stylistic devices of classical Sanskrit drama gave birth to the neo-
Sanskritic play of Hindi, which has been influential up to the present day
and has received much acclaim by the critics (Dimitrova 2004: 11–37,
2006: 173–183).
After Independence, naturalistic Hindi drama, which discussed social
issues topical of the day, became the most popular dramatic genre. The ide-
ology of Progressivism encouraged authors to relate problems in the family
to major social evils. The plays of Upendranath Ashk and Bhuvaneshvar are
most representative of this time (Dimitrova 2004: 11–37, 2006: 173–183).
In the 1960s there was a new ideological orientation which brought about
new subject matter and new dramaturgical techniques. Many Hindi play-
wrights sought an alternative to the overwhelming hegemony of Western
drama and began writing nativistic dramas by reworking subjects from the
folk dramatic tradition. In North India, most prominent is the work of Habib
Tanvir and Shanta Gandhi (Dimitrova 2004: 11–37, 2006: 173–183).
“Indianness” and the Ideology of Hindi Drama

Western dramatic school and naturalistic Hindi drama were essential to the
rise of contemporary theatre in Hindi. However, the ideological institutions
of Indian criticism saw the notion of “Western” as deeply embedded in the
hegemonic position of British colonialism in India. Therefore “Western”
influence also came to be seen as “non-Indian” in the sphere of literature
and culture. “Indianness” was something that did not entail “Westernness.”
As discussed earlier, it was also separate from “Muslimness.” This invented
tradition, this newly-defined “Indianness” was imagined as Hindi, Hindu
and neo-Sanskritic (Dimitrova 2014: 84–99). This led to the negative
attitudes towards the naturalistic play of Hindi and those dramatists who
adhered to it, as their work was influenced by Western drama.
Naturalistic Western theatre sought to portray the social milieu of
the protagonists in a realistic way. In this sense, the influence of Western
ramatic tradition is also revealed in the fact that all authors discussed
d
expose social evils of contemporary Indian society, and criticize social
injustice and corruption in their plays.
In the play of Hindi, Bhuvaneshvar was the first mature recipient
of Strindberg’s work. In his work, he explores difficult relationships
between man and woman in marriage.2 A parallel can be made between
Bhuvaneshvar’s plays Sṭṛāık̄ (Strike), 1938 and Lāt ̣ṛı̄ (Lottery), 1935 and
Strindberg’s Play with Fire, 1892, and Dance of Death, 1902 (Dimitrova
2006: 173–183).
Similarly, Ashk was influenced by Ibsen’s work and placed an empha-
sis on exposing women’s oppression by the social system and advocating
women’s rights. Thus, there are many similarities between Ashk’s plays
Uṛān (Flight), 1950, and Alag alag rāste (Separate Ways), 19543 and
Ibsen’s A Doll House, 18794 (Dimitrova 2008: 49–71, 2006: 173–183).
Hindi drama is indebted to Western drama, and naturalistic Hindi the-
atre and the oeuvres of Ashk and Bhuvaneshvar would have been unthink-
able without the legacy of European dramaturgy. These authors worked
in the immediate decades before and after Independence. This period
involved the historical and political struggle for Indian independence,
which gave rise to nationalistic movements, and a flux of anti-Western
attitudes.
Thus, the aspirations for a culturally independent state disliked ideo-
logically and intellectually naturalistic Hindi drama and the works of its
representatives. The hegemony of Western thought was soon replaced by
the counter-hegemony of Sanskritic or Brahmanic revivalist ideas. Thus,
British (cultural) imperialism was countered by Sanskritic (cultural) neo-
imperialism (Dimitrova 2006: 173–183).
The rise of this new ideology was instrumental in promoting Prasad’s
dramatic work which was “neo-Sanskritic” and which became the
expression of the lofty idea of Brahmanic revivalism. It played an impor-
tant role in the formation of this new neo-Sanskritic cultural identity.
Similarly, institutions, such as the Academy of Music and Drama and
the National School of Drama, which were founded in the late 1950s,
did not affirm the naturalistic plays of Bhuvaneshvar and Ashk, as these
two authors expressed openly their fascination with European theatre.
Thus, ideological discourse considered “Indianness” neo-Sanskritic,
and not “Western.” Therefore the neo-Sanskritic play could represent
“Indianness” while naturalistic drama was ideologically “Western,” and
thus, “non-Indian”.
82 D. DIMITROVA
An interesting case is the work of Lakshminaryan Mishra. While the

author promotes an ideology and cultural identity that is consistent with
neo-
Sanskritism, which we would define loosely here as revivalism of
ancient Vedic-Brahmanic Sanskritic values, he expresses his ideas by using
the medium of Western dramatics. Thus, Mishra’s work demonstrates the
complexity of the issues related to Indianness, cultural identity and mod-
ern Hindi drama.
Other authors, such as Ashk and Bhuvaneshvar did not reinterpret tradi-
tional Hindu values in an idealistic way. This is why their dramatic achieve-
ment was not in line with the ideological discourse on modern Hindi drama
of the time. They sought to subvert orthodox Hindu tradition and to pro-
mote values that were influenced by Western thought. As their work could
not represent “Indianness” in harmony with the prevalent ideological dis-
courses, their position in the Hindi world of letters was marked by margin-
alization and even exclusion from the canon (Dimitrova 2006: 173–183).
Rejection of Western thought, aesthetic and ideals in Indian national-
istic critical discourse led to a new cultural and literary development after
Independence. A new understanding of “Indianness” emerged at that
time. It also permeated the notion of Indian art and Indian drama. Deśıv̄ ād
or nativism was against both the Anglicized and the Sanskritized elites of
contemporary society. It stressed the importance of the language of the
common people in the creation of art. Many Indian intellectuals embraced
it at the beginning as an attempt to emancipate a formerly colonized nation
from the dominance of Anglo-American universalistic critical discourse
(Prasanna 1997: 95–100; Dimitrova 2006: 173–183). However, they have
later seen it as an expression of “indigenism” and cultural nationalism lead-
ing to marginalizing the pluralistic and multi-faceted Indian literary culture
(Prasanna 1997: 95–100, Dimitrova 2006: 173–183).
“Indianness” and Indian Theatre—Two

Intellectual Positions
In order to understand the complexity of the ideological implication of
“Indianness” and its link with Indian drama, we may look at the essays
of two Indian intellectuals—Prasanna and Girish Karnad and their insight
regarding “Indianness” and the plight of Indian theatre. At first sight, it
may seem as if they represented two different ideological positions.
Prasanna expresses his disappointment with the ideological discourse

and critical nomenclature which require playwrights to create their work
following the prescribed nativistic genre for their region in order to qualify
for a prize or an award. Playwrights were made to write in the mode of
folk theatre traditions, and influential critics propagated this new theatri-
cal policy.4 The National School of Drama and the Academy of Music
and Drama established seminars and gave awards to dramatists accord-
ing to these new recommendations of creating a deśı̄ (“national”) theatre
(Prasanna 1997: 95–100).
Girish Karnad, on the other hand, criticizes the blind adoption of
Western models by playwrights and appears to be in favour of a naturalistic
approach, which is more “deśı̄/nativistic.” In his essay, Theatre in India,
Karnad discusses the main reasons for the absence of a thriving theatri-
cal tradition in modern (Karnad 1989: 331–353). He implies that mod-
ern Hindi drama belies the core of Indian reality. It promotes double set
of values underlying the life of the urban middle-class affirming Western
values of equality, individualism, secularism or free competition in public
while adhering to caste and family loyalties in the domestic sphere. Karnad
warns against the mechanical and literal borrowing of Western interior for
the setting of the interior of an Indian house. He argues that the central-
ity of the living-room in Western plays should be rethought by Indian
playwrights, as not the living-room but the puja-room and the kitchen
are important to Indian family life. At the same time, Karnad also points
out that Hindi theatre needs to adapt to the nature of social and family
life in India, which is defined by hierarchies. Thus, it would be unusual
for women to sit together with men and discuss their most private affairs
openly in front of the audience, the way Western plays are staged (Karnad
1989: 331–353).
Prasanna’s and Karnad’s critical essays are esssential to understanding
the lack of popularity of Hindi theatre. Even though they may seem to
represent different ideological positions, we may interpret their comments
in the light of the misrepresentation of the Indian cultural “habitus” or
“Indianness.” Furthermore, neither author discusses the new trends on
the theatrical stage, for instance, the growing popularity and importance
of recent plays by women directors as well as the success of performances
staged by community theatre-activists re-enacting the traditional versions
of the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata in a new way (Bhatia 2004).
These plays offer new possibilities of interpretation of the subject matter
84 D. DIMITROVA
and engage women spectators in thought-provoking performances that

seek to question and challenge the status quo, thus constituting a truly liv-
ing theatrical tradition for both urban and village audiences. In my view, it
would be unthinkable to imagine “Indianness” and modern Hindi drama
without also looking into the important place of contemporary commu-
nity theatre.
The Plays of Laksminarayan Mishra

In order to analyse the complexity of “Indianness” and modern Hindi
drama, I would like to discuss here two plays by Hindi playwright
Laksminarayan Mishra. His dramas are created in consistency with Western
dramaturgy—they are naturalistic in character, and display features that
have been influenced by Ibsen and Strindberg. The author, however, uses
the modern dramatic form to affirm orthodox Hindu values and tradi-
tional roles for men and women. Furthermore, Indian cultural identity is
affirmed in contrast to British/Western cultural identity and is imagined
along the lines of Vedic-Brahmanic ideals of varṇāśramadharma (moral,
religious duty according to one’s class and stage in life). It is especially
important to consider the interplay between gender, religion and cultural
identity in the author’s oeuvre, as it is in the interpretation of gender that
cultural identity is revealed.
Mishra’s dramatic work reinforces traditional Hindu images of the
feminine. In the plays, the dramatist promotes the ideal of the devoted
pativratā and vidhavā as a model for modern women. Significantly, Mishra
conveys his message of Indian cultural identity as deeply embedded in the
values of orthodox Hinduism by rendering his female characters not pas-
sive, but active and fully in control of their fate. They serve as the mouth-
piece of the author’s conservative ideas and propagate enthusiastically the
ideals of female submission to the husband-lord, widowhood and even
child marriage.
Mishra’s dramatic work is an interesting instance of an artistic encoun-
ter with Western tradition, which results in innovations, experimentalism
and openness in dramatic form, and conservatism in the interpretation of
women’s issues. Thus, the playwright’s work presents an interesting case
of multiple strands, complexity and plurality in the study of the question
of cultural identity in Hindi drama.
A Modern Vidhavā
Dramaturgically, Mishra’s plays introduce new elements and have been
influenced by Ibsen’s dramatic style. For instance, there is a secret, an
event that has occurred some time ago and that becomes known to the
dramatic figures only at the end of the drama. An instance of this is the
killing of Manojshankar’s father by Murarilal in the play Sindūr kı̄ holı̄
(The Vermilion Holi), 1934. However, it should be stated that the sig-
nificance of the “secret” in Mishra’s plays is not similar to that in Ibsen’s
plays. Thus, Nora’s secret borrowing of money for her husband’s well-
being in A Doll House, 1879, the secret of the wild duck in The Wild Duck,
1884, or of Hedda Gabler’s love for Loevborg in Hedda Gabler, 1890,
makes the action move forward and brings about the “catastrophe” and
tragedy in the above-mentioned plays. It is obvious that the disclosure of
Murarilal’s crime has no impact on the development of the action and on
the final decision Candrakala makes (Dimitrova 2008: 30–33).
Another feature of Mishra’s dramatic style, which is influenced by
Ibsen, is the open ending of his plays. Mishra is the first Hindi playwright
who uses this technique. His plays do not offer ready solutions to the
problems but only portray them objectively. There are usually two dra-
matic figures in the author’s plays that expose two different views on the
discussed issue, for example, Manorama and Candrakala in Sindūr kı̄ holı̄.
The author conveys his message by constructing one of the two characters
more in harmony with the lofty ideals of Hindu tradition and by present-
ing his/her arguments as more convincing.
Mishra’s reduction of the number of acts and dramatis personae,
and the constructing of the action according to the pattern of modern
European drama, consisting of an exposition, rising action, climax and
falling action, marks a new phase in the development of modern Hindi
drama. Furthermore, Mishra’s employment of language is also differ-
ent from Prasad’s idiom. It is a comprehensible everyday Hindustani,
which sounds more Urduized when Muslim characters talk, like Mahirali
in Sindūr kı̄ holı̄ or the Afghani students in Sanyāsı̄ (The Ascetic), 1929.
This is in contrast with Prasad who was opposed to using regional lan-
guages as a way of characterization. Thus, Prasad was against the employ-
ment of Rajasthani as a linguistic characteristic of the Rajputs.
One major difference between Ibsen and Mishra, however, is the treat-
ment of women’s issues. While Ibsen pronounces himself for more rights and
86 D. DIMITROVA
education for women and is a promoter of the emancipation of the female sex,
Mishra is extremely traditional in his views and upholds those Hindu practices
that are antagonistic to women and instrumental in their oppression.
In his most famous play, Sindūr kı̄ holı̄, the playwright defends his
position as an advocate of the Hindu way of life. The play has three acts
and is about the social position of the Hindu widow. It also mentions the
problems of corruption in present-day India.
In this drama, Mishra speaks against remarriage of Hindu widows. He
emphasizes the widowed woman’s high morality and her important role in
Hindu society. Significantly, one of the characters in the play, child widow
Manorama, is against a remarriage for widowed women, as she believes
that it will bring about the disaster of divorce. Additionally, she tells her
friend Manojshankar that all movements for the betterment of the position
of the widows come from men and are actually against women’s freedom.
In this sense, it is important to point out that another female character in
the drama, young Candrakala, becomes a widow out of her own will in
order to free herself from becoming a slave of a husband (Dimitrova 2008:
30–33).
The ethical implications of Mishra’s position in Manorama’s case are
questionable. She was married as an eight-year-old girl and became a widow
at the age of ten. The marriage was never consummated. Nevertheless, the
author does not question the absurdity of her situation and the fact that
she will have to spend her life alone and in chastity although she loves
Manojshankar. Her fervent support of the ideal of widowhood appears
even more shocking when taking into account the fact that she is actually
the one who advises Candrakala against becoming a widow. Furthermore,
this “contest” of the two young female characters for widowhood appears
to be rather absurd and unnatural.
A married woman, whose husband is alive, is a symbol of saubhāgya,
good fortune, auspiciousness and prosperity. By contrast, a widow
(Sanskrit vidhavā, Hindi vidhvā) is conceived of as inauspicious, bringing
bad luck and misfortune. She is to be avoided. A widow is not allowed
to remarry and is expected to live a life of an ascetic. While her husband
is alive, a woman should observe vratas (fasts) for his well-being. When
dead, she should make daily offerings to him and meditate constantly
on him.
Devotion to one’s husband, even after his death, remains the purpose
of a widow’s existence. Historically, her difficult situation was worse if she
did not have a son at the time of her husband’s demise. Often, another
man was “assigned” to her, usually her brother-in-law, to have sexual

relations with. The aim was to give birth to a son for the deceased hus-
band. It is a Vedic belief that a son is essential to performing the śrāddha
(last rites) ceremonies. In his section vidhavādharmāḥ (the religious duties
of the widow), Tryambaka comes to the conclusion that the best option
for a widow is to die with her husband (Leslie 1989a, b: 273–288). And
indeed, a death as a satı̄ with the implied glorification and the promise
of immediate religious liberation for both husband and wife must have
appeared to many women as an escape from a difficult life as a widow
(Dimitrova 2008: 30–33).
The practices of child marriages and the prohibition of remarriage
of widows were condemned by Hindu reformers in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries. These outdated customs were
defended by the sanātanists (adherents of Sanātan dharma, or tra-
ditional Hinduism). In the play Sindūr kı̄ holı̄, Mishra upholds the
ideal of Hindu widowhood and child marriage as models for modern
women. The play reveals the employment of an innovative dramatic
form which is used to promote the author’s traditional and conserva-
tive world view.
Woman as Symbol of Sam -

. sara
The play Sanyāsı̄ (The Ascetic), 1929, consists of four acts. It discusses
the questions of romantic love and traditional marriage, which became
topical in India in the 1920s under the impact of Western education and
way of life. The two figure constellations, as represented by Kiranmayi,
Dinanath and Murlidhar on the one side, and by Malti, Vishvanath and
Ramashankar on the other, serve to illustrate the two contrasting positions
about which Mishra’s fellow-citizens were debating.
With the spread of the British educational system, there emerged mixed
classes, in which girls and boys studied together. This brought about
changes in the social structure of Indian society of the 1920s and 1930s.
The traditional institution of arranged marriage was menaced, as the new
social freedom in the colleges made friendship between boys and girls of
marriageable age a reality. The phenomenon of “romantic love” became
a threat to the marriage practices of orthodox Hindu society (Dimitrova
2004: 20–22).
Thus, young Malti and Vishvanath are fellow students and in love with
each other. When the jealous Ramashankar makes Vishvanath’s love let-
88 D. DIMITROVA
ter to the young girl public, he brings disgrace on her. In the second act,
Malti’s father asks the student to marry his daughter. However, Vishvanath
declines, as he has already vowed his life to the national independence of
India. He writes to her that she should accept marriage with another man
and sees his decision as self-sacrifice.
Malti concludes that she does not want the romantic relationship that
she had had with Vishvanath but a marriage that will last and therefore
accepts the proposal of much older Ramashankar. Kiranmayi, who has
loved her whole life the inaccessible Murlidhar, tries to make her recon-
sider her decision. Malti, however, sees her acceptance of Ramashankar
not as the defeat but as the victory of woman over man. She tells her friend
that she will marry him because of her own needs, and not to submit to
him.
Malti’s and Kiranmayi’s situations are presented as very similar, as both
women hold dear the thoughts of the man they have loved first and who
has not married them. They have both married an older man, whom they
do not love, but who has taken the responsibility of taking care of them,
providing them with a home, social life and security. The author implies
that Kiranmayi will never overcome her dream of her romantic love for
Murlidhar and will always be unhappy with her husband, hating both him
and herself for making a compromise. By contrast, he shows that Malti
realises the importance of a compromise and of leaving behind her love
for the young and unreliable Vishvanath, and wishes for a stable marriage
with Ramashankar (Dimitrova 2004: 20–22).
The author implies that Malti’s way, which is the way of tradition and
common sense, is the only possible way for the Indian woman to be happy.
He supports his views by showing the noble attitude and understanding of
Kiranmayi’s husband Dinanath, who understands her suffering and is full
of compassion for her. Moreover, the author makes Kiranmayi ask her hus-
band to forgive her, thus admitting that she has made a mistake when she
first rejected him. With his drama, Mishra upholds the ideals of orthodox
Hinduism and traditional Indian marriage and conveys the message that
the new social structure, which has come into being under British influ-
ence, will destroy the harmony and order of Indian society.
In another sense, the play Sannyāsı̄ affirms the orthodox Hindu view
of woman as an obstacle to men’s pursuit of mokṣa, liberation. Thus,
Vishvanath’s decision to become a modern sannyāsı̄ and fight for inde-
pendence is a modification of the classical Indian view that a “high-caste”
man should take sannyāsa as the last stage of his life in active pursuit of
liberation. This he must do on his own, leaving his wife behind, as he is
expected to live in chastity and meditate on the ultimate reality. Thus,
woman, who stood for the temptations of the world and who was seen
as a symbol of saṃsāra, was viewed as an obstacle to attaining mokṣa.
Though Mishra reinterprets the sannyāsa in a secular way, leaving aside
the religious connotations, he does not offer a different interpretation
of the position of women within the sannyāsa stage of life. It remains
an exclusively male domain, where women are inferior and seen as a
hindrance to attaining the high goals one has set for oneself, no matter
whether they are of religious or secular nature.
Mishra’s conservatism in the treatment of religious tradition and wom-
en’s issues prompted him to pronounce himself against widow remarriage
and in favour of child and arranged marriages. Therefore, he could not
respond to women’s problems and their search for a solution. His work is
significant because of the dramaturgical innovations he introduced into his
plays and because he employed a Western idiom to argue neo-Sanskritic
values and ideals.
Conclusion
We discussed the complexity of “Indianness”—imagined, constructed and
desired and its relation to modern Hindi drama. It is the inference of my
study that the prevalent ideological discourse of the time ignored the plu-
rality of the multi-faceted Indian theatrical tradition and misrepresented
“Indianness” and Indian cultural identity. Western (British), Brahmanic
(neo-Sanskritic), Islamic (Urdu) and indigenous (folk) theatrical tradi-
tions need all be considered part of “Indianness” and have all constituted
culturally the Hindi theatrical tradition.
My discussion of Mishra’s work revealed the complexity of the analysis
of Indianness and modern Hindi drama. While authors Bharatendu and
Prasad constructed neo-Sanskritic cultural identity by making full use of the
rich tradition of Sanskrit poetics, other dramatists, such as Bhuvaneshvar
and Ashk, proposed pro-Western Indian cultural identity and were
indebted to Western dramatics for the creation of their plays. Lastly, there
were also authors such as Lakshminaryan Mishra who propagated neo-
Sanskritic cultural identity, but were truly fascinated with Western dra-
90 D. DIMITROVA
matic form and used the medium of the proscenium theatre for their plays.
Thus, we may state that the notion of “Indianness” with regard to both
cultural identity and modern Hindi drama is neither uniform nor static. By
contrast, it is extremely varied, complex, pluralistic and dynamic.
“Indianness”—this notion of cultural identity is historically defined and
changes over time, much like our cosmopolitan multiple cultural identi-
ties of modern individuals, thus militating against any fixed, stable and
permanent “character” or absolute definition (Dimitrova 2014: 84–99).
In my study I analysed and reflected on the ideology of “Indianness” in
the period 1880–1960 and its implications for the rise and development
of modern Hindi theatre. Further work is needed to explore the new and
reimagined “Indianness” after the 1960s and in the present period, and
the way it has impacted contemporary Indian theatre, which is ever chang-
ing and growing—in the form of community theatre for village and urban
audiences directed by women directors as well as in the form of new neo-
Sanskritic, naturalistic and nativistic performances.
Notes
1. Some of the most well-known Parsi companies were established in
Bombay (nowadays Mumbai), Lucknow, Varanasi and Delhi. They
travelled to different locations where they staged their plays (Gaeffke
1978: 94–95).
2. My discussion is based on several texts. For more information, see
R. Bedār and R. Śarmā (1992: 45–51, 53–61, 95–103, 87–903).
3. My analysis refers to the plays published in 1954 and 1950 respec-
tively and included in the newer editions of 1986 and 1972. For
detailed information, see U. Aśk (1972, 1986).
4. Prasanna mentions Suresh Avasthi and Nemicandra Jain. See
Prasanna, “A Critique of Nativism in Contemporary Indian
Theatre,” Nativism: Essays in Criticism, ed. Makarand Paranjape
(New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1997) 95.
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Aśk, Upendranāth. 1972. Kaid aur uṛān. Ilāhābād: Nı̄lābh.
———. 1986. Alag alag rāste. Ilāhābād: Nı̄lābh.
Avasthi, Suresh. 2009. In Defence of the ‘Theatre of the Roots. In Modern Hindi
Theatre: A Reader, ed. Nandi Bhatia, 295–311. New Delhi: Oxford University
Press.
Bhatia, Nandi. 2004. Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance: Theatre and Politics
in Colonial and Postcolonial India. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan
Press.
——— (ed). 2009. Modern Indian Theatre: A Reader. New Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
Bhuvaneśvar. 1992. Bhuvaneśvar Sāhitya. eds. R. Bedār and Rājkumār Śarmā.
Śāhjahāṃpur: Bhuvaneśvar Prasād Śodhsaṃsthān.
Dalmia, Vasudha. 1994. Neither Half nor Whole. Dialogue and Disjunction in the
Plays of Mohan Rakesh. In Tender Ironies: A Tribute to Lothar Lutze, eds. Dilip
Chitre et al. New Delhi: Manohar.
———. 2005. Poetics, Plays and Performances: The Politics of Modern Indian
Theatre. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Dimitrova, Diana. 2004. Western Tradition and Naturalistic Hindi Theatre.
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———. 2006. The Indian Character of Modern Hindi Drama: Neo-Sanskritic,
Pro-Western Naturalistic or Nativistic Dramas? In Theology and Literature:
Rethinking Reader Response, eds. Clara Joseph and Gaye Ortiz, 173–183.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
———. 2008. Gender, Religion and Modern Hindi Drama. Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s University Press.
——— (ed). 2014. The Other in South Asian Religion, Literature and Film:
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An Introduction to Modern Societies, eds. Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert,
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repr. 2000b. Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies. Oxford:
Blackwell.
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Harishcandra, Bharatendu. 1981. Andher nagarı̄. Naı̄ Dillı̄: Ū rdū Prakāśan.
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Delhi: Vikas Publishing House.
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Leslie, Julia. 1989a. The Duties Common to all Women. In The Perfect Wife: The
Orthodox Hindu Woman According to the Strı̄dharmapaddhati of
Tryambakayajvan, 273–288. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
———. 1989b. The Perfect Wife: The Orthodox Hindu Woman According to the
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Akademi: New Delhi.
PART II
Indian Cultural Identity and the

Crisis of Modernity: Reworking of
Myth and Tradition
CHAPTER 6
The Indian Contexts and Subtexts of

My Text
Krishna Baldev Vaid
This chapter discusses the Indian contexts and subtexts of Vaid’s texts. It
studies the themes and problems in some of the author’s major works and
examines how the notion of ‘Indianness’ is reflected in them—consciously
or subconsciously. It voices the writer’s suspicion regarding any variety of
cultural nationalism and critiques its re-emergence anywhere but especially in
India. The chapter points out that in its reductive manifestations in literature
and literary criticism, it can espouse jingoism and xenophobia. It also reminds
the readers that great literature has always professed and often practiced defi-
ance of space and time and that the two elements that nourish it in the first
place. The chapter argues that some of the questions that haunt every theo-
retical meditation on literature are related to how it manages to transcend the
conditions out of which it is created and whether it does so self-consciously.1
1
Perhaps I should start, without any theoretical preamble, with a parable I
wrote and published about 25 years ago. The parable is called ‘Buṛhiyā kı̄
gaṭharı̄’ (The Old Woman’s Bundle). Here Mother India is personified as a
K.B. Vaid (*)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41015-9_6
96 K.B. VAID
poor old country woman, clasping an enigmatic little bundle to her shriv-
eled bosom, sitting woebegone and lost, by the side of a rough urban street.
A poor old woman, with a poor old bundle in her lap, is sitting by the side of
a poor new road, immersed in who knows which reflections, dreams, memo-
ries, resolutions, regrets. The road reminds one of a crushed python, the old
woman of a grand ruin. The old woman’s head is bent over her bundle like a
doting maternal granny’s over her sick and dying grand-daughter. (‘Buṛhiyā
kı̄ gat ̣harı̄’, 8)2
Her situation arouses a variety of speculative reactions and concerns in the

minds of those who know her well, her children struggling to survive in the
inhospitable city, her self-confessed bhaktas, and her skeptical critics and in
the mind of the omniscient narrator who reports these reactions and con-
cerns in a voice that is scrupulously dispassionate and neutral. The reactions
and concerns span a whole gamut of speculations about the causes of her
present pitiable condition, the glories of her wonderful past, the measures
that need to be adopted to improve her lot and reinstate her in her gran-
deur, the contents of her bundle and her consciousness, the perils to which
she is exposed, her age, her wisdom, her future, and so on. Toward the
end of the story, the narrator alludes briefly to a few ‘mastmaula’ individu-
als according to whose perception this old woman is neither old nor poor
but the most beautiful young woman in the whole world, whose bundle is
actually a lovely handbag stuffed with the choicest jewelry and who hap-
pens to be sitting by the rough roadside not because she is lost and helpless
but because of her romantic and colorful personality. The old woman does
not utter a word in the story; the omniscient narrator does not share with
us his/her omniscience about what the old woman herself thinks or desires
or hopes or waits for. It is suggested at the end that she looks so utterly lost
that she may have gone into a state that is beyond hope and waiting.
2
‘Buṛhiyā kı̄ gaṭharı̄’ is a fair representation of how I see, inconclusively
of course, the problematic reality of modern India, the enigmatic real-
ity of her heritage and the puzzling relationship between the two. I see
India all but devastated by poverty and development; I see her all but lost
in the rough and tumble of modernity; I see her enormous capacity for
endurance; I see her as guarding her ‘bundle’, her heritage, and cherishing
THE INDIAN CONTEXTS AND SUBTEXTS OF MY TEXT 97
it as her most valuable possession; I see her proud and defiant in all her
misery and bewilderment; I see her as an object of endless speculation and
concern, not all of which is either profound or well-informed; I also see
her as an object of blind devotion and a target of mindless criticism; I see
little unanimity or clarity as to what constitutes Indianness. The story is
also a fair indication of my preoccupation, perhaps my obsession, with the
rampant poverty and suffering of my country, of my inability to close my
eyes to it, of my refusal to either underplay or prettify it, of my inability to
accept it as a proof of my country’s immersion in spiritual pursuits and her
indifference to materialistic pressures.
It is also an oblique and unabashed admission of my own enormous
indecision as to what constitutes bhāratı̄yatā (Indianness) and my equally
enormous ambivalence toward what some of my more patriotic peers
represent as bhāratı̄yatā. Finally, the story offers some clues to some of
my quirks and strategies as a fictionist: my ironic stance, my deliberately
dispassionate tone, my efforts to abstain from realistic conventions, my
parabolic predilections, my minimalism and my tendency to demystify
entrenched clichés.
3
This poor old woman reappears in a terrifying reincarnation, as a charac-
ter called ‘Doharı̄ Māı’̄ (The Bent Old Woman) in my novel Kālā Kolāj
(Collage in Black). There she haunts the middle-aged narrator, an expatri-
ate with an exilic mind. She lives off the garbage heap at the back of the
narrator’s house. The guilt-ridden self-castigating but ineffectual narrator
keeps seeing in her his own dead mother and his poverty-stricken coun-
try. The descriptions of this old woman in the novel are relentlessly stark
and horrifying; her silence and endurance are equally so. She figures in
the middle section of the novel. The section is subtitled, ‘Nightmareland’,
and the old woman is a nightmare incarnate. Because of the collage-like
form of the novel, her presence is distributed over eight short subsections
that do not amount to more than 10 or 11 pages in all. She has a shack
to which she resorts when she is not scavenging or begging; she also has
a parasitic grandson who does nothing but sponge on her. Even though
she is rendered minimally, she is obviously symbolic of Indian poverty and
is intended to haunt the reader as much as she does the narrator. I have
reasons to believe, however, that some readers are repelled by this spectral
old woman even as they are by the tormented but ineffectual narrator.
98 K.B. VAID
Ruthlessly realistic representations of Indian poverty are often unaccept-

able to my critics, even to those who profess to be profoundly concerned
about it and swear by realism. It is mistakenly thought that such repre-
sentations are indicative of the writer’s condemnation of India and of his
scornful attitude to the poor.
Now I have had an early and ineradicable experience of poverty, and I do
despise poverty. I identify with the poor, admire them for their endurance,
feel compassion for their suffering, see myself constantly in them, but am
at the same time deeply disturbed by their lot. Perhaps I carry unhealed
wounds in my psyche, wounds that are memories of my own experience
of poverty. I do not have to consult statistics in order to be convinced of
the prevalence of acute poverty all over the country. The knowledge that
there are poor and hungry people in other countries including America
brings me no relief of any kind. My awareness of the reality around me
does not allow me to ignore it or to gloss over it or to romanticize it or to
accept it as the consequence of karma. I know that some readers are upset
by the idea that the narrator of Kālā Kolāj sees his mother and motherland
in Doharı̄ Māı.̄ Perhaps they would like him to do something practical
instead of indulging in self-laceration. Perhaps they would like him to shed
straight tears over the lot of the poor old woman. Perhaps even I would
like him to do these things. If I do not show him doing so, it is because
I do not believe in creating positive characters who will not ring true in
my own ears. I take it as my dharma as a writer to portray poverty to the
best of my insight and experience and capacity. I cannot do anything to
alleviate the discomfort of the squeamish or the patriotic Indian readers
except to urge them to overcome their squeamishness and not to confuse
patriotism with an excessively defensive nationalism. They should take my
disconcerting representations of poverty as one writer’s experience and
vision of one aspect of the Indian reality.
4
Fictional characters sometimes become phantoms that do not leave a writer
alone and keep coming back to haunt and provoke him into yet another
effort to incarnate them. A few years back, my symbolic old woman with
her bundle came back to me as a potential heroine of a ritualistic play,
which I started and discarded several times before finally completing it a
year or so back. In this play, Hamārı̄ buṛhiyā (Our Old Woman), the cen-
tral but impenetrably silent character is a grand old woman, clasping an
enigmatic bundle to her bosom, reclining on a throne-like old bed, laid out
on the terrace of a grand ruin, surrounded by modem litter. There are five
other characters, two women and three men, who are intended to exem-
plify the bewildered, confused, self-contradictory, self-critical, defensive,
argumentative Indians, more or less educated, more or less intellectual in
their inclinations, if not in their attainments. They take some time in rec-
ognizing the old woman as their mother, then in speculating as to why she
is lying there, then in wondering whether she is dead, half-dead, uncon-
scious or asleep, whether she is dreaming or daydreaming, what she is
hiding in her bundle and what they should do with or about her. The old
woman does not utter a word throughout the play, the other characters
frequently fall into an uncomfortable silence. Toward the end of the play,
she raises her head slowly, stretches herself, gets off the bed slowly, settles
her bundle on her head and joins the other characters whose choral chant
begins to fade away as the old woman opens her mouth out of which
comes wordless music. According to the stage direction, the play ends
with the dim illumination of dawn and music, which is in contrast with the
grim and ominous final chant of the choral characters.
5
There are shades of differences between ‘Buṛhiyā kı̄ gaṭharı̄’ and Hamārı̄
buṛhiyā, reflecting the shades of differences between my own perceptions
then and now. The old woman in the play is less pathetic, her children
more articulate, if not more clearheaded; the conclusion of the play is a
shade less pessimistic, a shade less inconclusive, than that of the story; the
range of issues covered by the choral characters is wider than that covered
by the narrator of the story. And, because of the difference of genre, there
are some other inevitable differences of emphasis and effect. But the main
concern remains essentially unchanged—the plight of modern India in the
light of her ancient glory and the confused and ambivalent attitudes of the
concerned Indians.
6
My works, then, are overpopulated by poor, helpless, bedraggled, beg-
garly old people, quite a few of whom are old women, most of whom
are unfulfilled and unhappy, a few of whom can be seen as more or less
emblematic representations of present-day India, some of them without
100 K.B. VAID
ceasing to be flesh-and-blood individuals. It will not do to parade all of

them here, but I would like to allude briefly to my first adequately realized
old woman in my first novel, Us kā bacpan (His Childhood)—Jānakı̄, the
mother of Bı̄ro, the child hero of that novel. She is a strong weak character
with many unlikable and some endearing traits, who has suffered and
survived a lot. Like most lower middle-class semiliterate Indian women,
she is totally consumed by the domestic drudgery. Brutalized by her hus-
band, who has his own problems, she turns constantly to her little boy,
Bı̄ro, whom she keeps entreating to give her sukh (happiness) when he
grows up. Bı̄ro listens to her entreaties and the installments of her autobi-
ography with an impatient ambivalence, overwhelmed as he is by his own
psychological confusions caused by the poverty and the dissensions of his
family. I wrote Us kā bacpan in an attempt to recreate my own misery as
a child and to exorcize my own ghosts, but now I see in Bı̄ro’s mother a
foreshadowing of my later personification of Bhārat Mātā (Mother India)
in ‘Buṛhiyā kı̄ gatḥ arı̄’ and Hamārı̄ buṛhiyā and of many of my other old,
indigent and unhappy women. And I see in Bı̄ro’s painfully ambivalent
attitude to his mother and her misery a foreshadowing of my narrator in
‘Buṛhiyā kı̄ gatḥ arı̄’ the protagonist in Kālā Kolāj and the choral charac-
ters in Hamārı̄ buṛhiyā. And, as I have said already, I see odd glimpses of
India in all the old women that haunt my work. I am thinking particu-
larly of Māı ̄ Māyā of my story, ‘Māı ̄ kı̄ mahı̄mā’ (In praise of Māı)̄ , Paśo
of ‘Ek badbūdar galı̄’ (A Stinking Alley), Banjh Mānjı̄ of my novel, Nar
nārı̄ (Men and Women) and the mad old woman of the stories ‘Kolāj-1’
(Collage 1) and ‘Kolāj-2’ (Collage-2).
7
My portrayal of poverty is an implicit indictment of the socio-economic
system that creates and perpetuates it; it is also an equally important
indictment, implicit again, of the doctrine of karma that is often used
to explain away not only poverty but also almost every other abomina-
tion. Some of the poor in my work sometimes protest, but most of the
time they suffer and endure more or less passively. For the most part I
have been content with stark but sympathetic portrayals of the poor and
the exploited. I have eschewed radical postures and exhortatory gestures.
In two relatively recent works, however, I have deviated a little from my
stance—I am thinking of the story, ‘Bhūkh Kumārı̄ ke sāth ek śām’ (An
Evening with Bhūkh Kumārı̄), and the play Bhūkh āg hai (Hunger is Fire).
Bhūkh Kumārı̄, the vivacious pre-adolescent ragpicking heroine of the

story, invades the isolation of a reclusive elderly writer—also the narrator
of the story—one evening, during his walk. Unlike most of my other poor
characters, Bhūkh Kumārı̄, undimmed by her indigence, behaves more
like a little fairy princess who takes upon herself the task of helping the
elderly writer out of his writer’s block. The writer-narrator is astonished by
her winsome manners and sharp intelligence and moved by her seemingly
casual acceptance of her situation as an orphaned ragpicker. Like most of
my unpoor observer-narrators, he is instantly assailed by sincere guilt:
I didn’t give myself time to feel surprised or pleased at the intelligent care
she took in collecting and collating my crumpled and shredded rough
drafts; I just let myself go without censoring my outburst: I don’t believe
you are a rag-picker; I don’t believe you eat garbage; I don’t believe you
collect my crumpled and shredded waste papers and paste those pieces
and try to make conjectures about my intentions as a writer; I don’t
believe you live in that shanty colony far below; I don’t believe your name
is Bhookh Kumari; I don’t believe you are sitting there in front of me;
I don’t believe your language, your style, your smartness, your sarcasm,
your manners, your self-confidence, your eyes could have been acquired
by a rag-picker girl from garbage dumps and from shanty colonies and
from a rag-picking family; tell me the truth—Who are you! (‘Bhūkh
Kumārı̄ ke sāth ek śām’, 300)
Bhūkh Kumārī, however, is quite cool and remains unperturbed by the

narrator’s agitated speech. She lectures him, in return, about how a writer
like him should not be shocked by anything. She offers to help him with
his blocked story on hunger—she knows all about his writer’s block and
his struggle with his story on hunger because of the crumpled and torn
papers that she finds on the garbage heap and which she pieces together in
her shack. When he accepts her offer, she invites him to come live with her
in her slum for a few days, in the middle of want and filth, and revive his
links with his past when he was young and poor himself and used to dream
of eradicating hunger. She warns him that he will have to eat garbage
too sometimes, like everybody else in the slum, overcome his nausea and
go beyond the barriers of his imagination. The narrator is dumbfounded
by her invitation and her conditions but is willing to accept them. She,
however, wants him to think it all over before giving his final answer.
She promises to visit him in one of his dreams one night and he can then
inform her of his decision:
102 K.B. VAID
She kept on speaking for quite some time while I listened to her quietly. My
head was bent. Her voice came to me as if it was descending from the sky.
I was getting ready to accept all her conditions but couldn’t quite utter the
words. She fell silent abruptly. I raised my head and saw her smiling. She
had seen through my dilemma. She said: You don’t have to give me your
decision right now; I’ll visit you in one of your dreams some night; till then
please mull over my conditions in your mind.
Then she climbed down from her perch on the boulder and started an
unsteady run down the slope that ended in the twinkling lights of her shanty
colony. I sat there for a while, then got up, and wended my way home.
Many days have gone by since then. Every night I wait for the dream
in which Bhookh Kumari will visit me and I’ll give her my answer. (ibid.,
303–304)
Bhūkh Kumārī foreshadows the hungry beggar girl and her two elderly
companions of my play Bhūkh āg hai, who also step out of their real-
istic roles every now and then in the play and enter into a disturbing
dialogue with the three other characters who represent the well-heeled
descendants of an earlier generation that used to dream of eradicating
poverty and hunger by bringing about a socialist revolution. The play
dramatizes the widening gap between the rich and the poor through
a conceit that focuses on the difference between hunger and appetite
and on the fact that the rich little girl knows all about appetite but little
about hunger. A tragi-comic play, it is a virtual dirge for the death of
the dream to eradicate hunger and seems to go a little further than
the point at which most of my fictional representations of poverty
usually stop.
8
Bimal, the writer-protagonist of Bimal urf jāyeṃ to jāyeṃ kahāṃ (Bimal alias
Where to Go), can be viewed as an adult and more seriously estranged and
self-estranged version of Bı̄ro, the little hero of Us kā bacpan and its sequel
Guzarā huā zamānā (Time Gone By). The first four sections of the novel
cover the four major segments of Bimal’s estrangement: from his family
in the first section, ‘Samādhi’; from his job in the second section, ‘Sthiti’;
from his city and, by extension, his society in the third section, ‘Sair’; and
from his intellectual milieu and himself in the fourth section, ‘Savāl’. The
fifth section, ‘Samādhan’, offers a comic pseudo-solution to his problems
even as it enables the narrator to make some good-humored fun of some

of the major styles of Hindi prose. Bimal urf attempts to portray through
Bimal a whole generation of educated Indians in the post-Independence
era and their psycho-sexual frustrations, intellectual confusions, spiritual
and moral ambivalences, and persistent self-questioning. It is an irreverent
novel, replete with ribald humor and scathing scorn for many hypocritical
pieties of the Indian middle class. It spares nobody, least of Bimal and his
creator. It reflects a disillusionment that is all-embracing and full of comic
exaggerations. Since it is a comic novel, dealing subversively with seri-
ous situations, it has a deeply disconcerting aspect to it and is likely to be
offensive to readers with a self-defensive nationalistic bias. By way of illus-
trating some of these points, let me cite one brief excerpt from the fourth
section, ‘Savāl’, in which Bimal is sitting in a Delhi Coffee House—ironi-
cally dubbed as a temple of Indian intellectuality—surrounded by young
people engaged in loud gossip, intellectual as well as otherwise that is
refracted through Bimal’s critical and self-critical stream of consciousness:
The Congress Party ‘sali’ belongs to the capitalists!

What’s wrong with capitalism ‘sali’!
Nothing’s wrong with any ‘sali’!
This ‘sala’ is ever ready with a retort!
But he’s evading the argument!
Argument ‘sali’ is an evil addiction!
Argument ‘sali’ doesn’t quench hunger!
That’s the truth!
Intellectuals ‘sala’s’ love to argue!
Argument ‘sali’ doesn’t answer any question!
Who the fuck wants an answer!
Posing the right question is the real thing!
This ‘sala’ never fails!
You are all talking rot!
Here comes the statesman ‘sala’!
He’ll kill capitalism!
While sitting in the Coffee House!
He can’t think straight!
Questions are rising on sorrowful faces and withered lips!
What a line!
This ‘sala’ is still composing ghazals!
We want poems!
Then listen, ‘salo’!
104 K.B. VAID
We’re listening, ‘saley’!

(Bimal urf jāyeṃ to jāyeṃ kahāṃ, 140)
Bimal urf has been attacked for its obscenity, its irreverent attitudes, its bor-
rowed codes, its borrowed techniques and its allusions to Western works of
literature. Most of the attacks are on the basis of bits and pieces torn out
of their rather intricate ironic contexts and on the basis of gross misread-
ings. I cannot present, here, an answer to these ill-conceived criticisms. All
I can do is to suggest that it is the central intention of the novel to target
Bimal as an object of irony even while using him as the central conscious-
ness that targets so many aspects of Indian reality and traditions as objects
of his angry, incompletely informed, indignant but never self-righteous
irony. Bimal is a rootless character, painfully aware of his rootlessness and
his other flaws, aware also of the hypocrisies of his society, of the preten-
sions of his literary and intellectual milieu, extremely unhappy with him-
self and his world, trying desperately to maintain his sanity through black
humor and bleak irony. It is a travesty of the novel to read it as privileging
Western cultural codes and foregrounding Western values or even Western
novelistic techniques. If I have made use of the Joycean ‘monologues of
the interior’, I have committed no sin—this technique after Joyce is avail-
able for use or misuse by anybody, even as the well-worn Western realistic
conventions are. Perhaps the roots of adverse attitudes to Bimal urf, in
particular, and to the rest of my work in general are to be found in the
supersensitivity of my critics to what is misperceived as my negative repre-
sentations of India because of my obsessive attention to poverty and my
ironic attitudes to Indian pieties with regard to Indian traditions. Even
those who swear by realism and radicalism are made uncomfortable by my
unsparing ‘realism’ and ironism. Bimal urf, like any other work of mine,
is far from perfect in any of its aspects. I have no problem admitting that
I am by nature a nay-sayer, by temperament as well as choice an outsider,
but when I am dubbed by people who should know better as an un-Indian
writer who hates India and loves the West, I am hurt as well as amused.
9
The seeds of the theme of alienation and the attitude of an all-embracing
irony can be seen in my first novel, Us kā bacpan, and some of the stories
written in that early phase—stories such as ‘Bı̄c kā darvāzā’ (The Door in
between), ‘Ek badbūdar galı̄’, ‘Urān’ (Flight), ‘Jāmun kı̄ gut ̣halı̄’ (The
Stone of a Jamun), ‘Lachman Singh’ and so on. With Bimal urf, however,
the theme of alienation and the ironic stance become predominant in my
work. Alienation does not make me blind to the Indian realities; irony
does not blunt my capacity for compassion. Even in the three novels—
Nasrı̄n, Dusarā na koı̄ (None Other), Dard lā davā (Pain No Panacea)—
that are ostensibly remote from the everyday reality of India, I remain
rooted—I use the word deliberately—in a variety of rootlessness that is
Indian, though not exclusively so. Here I may interpolate that nothing is
either exclusively Indian or non-Indian. The Indian traditional attitudes
are known to be universalist. Despite differences in history, geography,
religions, customs and philosophies, at some innermost and higher most
levels, all of us converge and share with one another our materiality, our
animality and our humanity. To proceed with my argument about alien-
ation and irony, I wish to claim that these are as Indian as milk and honey.
In Nasrı̄n, I portray an expatriate Indian who returns to India for a
while and becomes intensely involved with an old flame, Nasrı̄n, who for a
while becomes, for him, an all-absorbing embodiment of his troubled past
and of his troubled relationship with that. To an extent, she also becomes
an embodiment of his native city and, by extension, of his native country.
I have said before, and I do so now, that Nasrı̄n is an extremely flawed
novel. Some of its flaws stem from my unsuccessful efforts to elevate
Nasrı̄n, the character, to a symbolic level and others from my romanticiza-
tion of the expatriate protagonist who seeks, in vain, to connect with his
past through a morbidly erotic possession of Nasrı̄n. In Dusarā na koı̄, the
reclusive old writer living abroad in absolute isolation is perhaps reminis-
cent of Beckett’s recluses but his preoccupations with his decrepitude, his
bodily functions, his compulsive record-keeping, his imaginary interlocu-
tor, his old woman who may also be imaginary and his impulse to leave the
dubious security of his ramshackle house—all these are details that I use to
portray an Indian exile engaged, comically, in contemplation of issues that
are basic, and from a point of view that is, in my view, Indian, again with-
out being exclusively so. The portrayal is comic, but the issues are neither
ridiculed nor debased. And the same, I submit, is true of Dard lā davā too.
10
To read these novels disparagingly in the alien light of modernism and
existentialism is to lose sight of the fact of our own traditions in which
alienation—our own name for it is virakti or vairāgya—is an inevitable
106 K.B. VAID
part of the sādhanā that may or may not lead to self-integration and
enlightenment. Our sufis and bhaktas went through phases and degrees of
alienation before they became sufis and bhaktas. Our poetic literature, in
more than one language, is rich with examples of illumination that is pre-
ceded by intense alienation. We, in India, I repeat, have a hallowed tradi-
tion of metaphysical alienation and exilic states of mind enthroned in our
great epics, our myths and legends, our great devotional poetry, our philo-
sophical systems and our fourfold phases or ashrams of human life. We
have enshrined the concept and desirability of exile in vanaprasthā āśram
and saṃnyāsa āśram. Vairāgya is nothing but a visitation of the feeling
of absurdity which launches one on the arduous path of self-realization,
a path that winds its way through extreme and painful varieties of alien-
ation and exile. These ideas may not be operative now on the scale they
were in traditional times, but they are still part of the saṃskārass, the inner
stream of the consciousness, of a vast majority of Indians. Arjuna, when
he was assailed by paralyzing doubts and self-doubt in the battle field of
Kurukśetra, was experiencing a profound variety of alienation. The great
response he evoked from Kṛṣṇa, in the form of the Bhagavad Gı̄tā, in its
essence is a philosophy of the sublimation and transcendence of alienation
and the exilic states of mind through the noble and difficult doctrine of
niṣkāmakarma, anāsakti, non-attachment. The concept of jı̄vanmukta—
someone who is in the world but not of the world—is the noblest form of
alienation. In my representation of the alienated Indian in the contempo-
rary text, I am as aware of the Indian tradition as I am of the Western con-
cept of alienation. In Māyā lok (The World of Illusion), my latest novel,
I am much closer to the Indian concept than I am to the Western, which
is not to claim that this novel is the final word either on alienation or my
view of it. In my representations of the alienated Indian, I do not dethrone
Indian culture, nor do I foreground the Western cultural structures. I
never lose sight of the comicality of alienation, even as I am keenly aware
of its serious metaphysical aspect; my protagonists too are too self-aware
to be ignorant of their own comicality, and whenever they are, they are
unfailingly made aware of it by my novelist, that is me.
11
An important strand of my protagonists’ alienation is their often intense
and ambivalent relationship with India. In this connection, I wish to
allude to ‘Us ke bayān’ (His Statements), a series of essay-like parables
about an artist in exile. These ten pieces are in the form of his pithy state-
ments about various aspects of his creative process and work. One piece,
‘Us kā deś’, takes up his relationship with his country. I cite two passages
from this piece:
He says I often assert to myself and a few others that my country has no
particular name or map, that in my eyes my country and the rest of the
world are one, that even while living in my country I don’t altogether live
there, that even while living out of my country I don’t altogether live out
of it, that loud claims of excessive love for and dedication to one’s country
in this day and age are often made by those who are either mendacious
or mentally deficient, that patriotism has often been the refuge of the dis-
honest and the barbaric scoundrels, that the artists and iconoclasts do not
belong exclusively to any one country, that whichever place provides them
with their favourite mud or marble or bronze or steel or iron or blood or
flesh or whatever other raw material they need and can transform according
to their own wills or whims and wherever they find lifeless and false icons
that they can demolish, becomes their country, that for me a country is not
constituted by a particular earth or sky as much as it is by my own inner
climate which keeps changing under influences that go beyond a particular
earth and sky and which sometimes changes without any reason, that I
want to be counted among those very few who can be properly evaluated
only if you liberate them from the boundaries of time and place! He says I
often assert all this and much more but I can’t help noticing a phoniness
or flaw lurking behind all my assertions that prevent me from getting rid of
my mental fog about my country. And when I try to seize that phoniness
or flaw, I find that I have seized nothing. (‘Us ke bayān’, 97–8)
He says I do not claim that I am liberated from all attachment and shit and
mundane matters or that I have an illusion I can blow freely like a breeze
through a desolate desert or a verdant garden with equal ease or I do not
miss the fragrance of my country’s mud or rain or grass or that I experience
the intoxication of all fears and joys in the same way or that I have become
immune to all my ghosts or that my roots are free now of the stranglehold of
my ancient soil or that I imagine they are free or that my old pains no longer
haunt my nightmares and my sculptures. But, he says, whenever I close my
eyes and think of my country, instead of my country, I see countless and
disorderly sights—smoke as silent, ominous, and graceful as a cobra, soiled
irritable faces, ashes, sand, emaciated urchins licking heaps of mud sand
and ashes, skeletons, thin needles of voices, dying cattle, blood-red sky, big
sickly eyes, lost ruins, stinking swamps, crazy bulls, fat expectorating human
beings, fierce sun, shit, urine, sweat, pus, spit…. (ibid., 90)
108 K.B. VAID
In the first excerpt, as you can see, he recounts his assertions about his
complex relationship with his country, about his having emancipated him-
self from the narrow confines of nationalism, about his having attained
a universalist elevation from where he sees little difference between his
country and the rest of the world, about his belief that the artist is not tied
exclusively to any one country, but then he undercuts all these assertions
by admitting that he is never fully convinced by them, for he is painfully
aware of some basic flaw or falsehood lurking in all of them, which, how-
ever, he cannot locate in spite of all his desperate efforts. In the second
excerpt, he makes another effort to unravel his knotty connection with his
country. He says that despite his exile, or indeed because of it, he is still
enthralled by his memories of the smell of the earth and rain and grass of
his country, that he is still haunted by his ghosts, that his work and his
nightmares are still obsessively linked with his country, but, he says, when
he closes his eyes and meditates on his country, he does not see her—all
he sees is a collage of chaotic scenes: smoke rising gracefully like a verita-
ble cobra, soiled irritable faces, ashes, sand, skeletal children licking mud,
bones, thin voices, lost ruins, bogs, shit, urine, sweat, pus, spit and so on.
My representations of India and my protagonists’ convoluted ambiv-
alence toward her are not from the point of view of a devout cultural
nationalist writer; they are, instead, from the point of view of an alien-
ated Indian writer who is, however, as profoundly concerned with India as
any other writer but who tries to remain true to his own experience and
insight, such as they are, without being seduced by others’ more beatific
experiences and insights. His alienation, like his obsessive probes into
Indian poverty, may be blameworthy according to some but is neither
inauthentic nor un-Indian. Indeed, the very concept of the ‘un-Indian’ is
alien to the spirit of Indian traditions.
12
To conclude, perhaps, I should confess that I am suspicious of any variety
or degree of cultural nationalism and dread its re-emergence anywhere
but especially in India; in its reductive manifestations in literature and
literary criticism, it can espouse jingoism and xenophobia. Let us not
forget that great literature has always professed and often practiced defi-
ance of space and time, the two elements that nourish it in the first place.
Born of specific conditions—geographic, historical, national, political,
psychological, racial, socio-economic, cultural, civilizational—add to this
list whatever else you will, it aspires to an unconditioned state. When it is

able to fulfill this aspiration, it becomes universal. Some of the questions
that haunt every theoretical meditation on literature are: How does it
manage to transcend the conditions out of which it is created? Does it do
so s elf-consciously? Or is it in the nature of the beast to do so? Is literature
always self-consciously nationalistic? When it is not, should it invite our
opprobrium? Are there some inviolable national and nationalistic charac-
teristics and criteria that every work of literature must have and satisfy? I
do not know about others, but when I think of the Indian character of
Indian literature, I experience a blurring of my vision in which the two
key words—Indian and character—do not radiate a meaning free from
stereotypical clichés and banal half-truths. I feel like repeating the ques-
tion raised by Octavio Paz in his Nobel address: ‘But can we say that a
literature has a character? Does it possess a set of features that distinguish
it from other literatures? I doubt it. A literature is not defined by some
fanciful, intangible character; it is, rather, a society of unique works united
by relations of both opposition and affinity.’
Notes
1. This short paragraph was added by the editors.
2. The English versions of the Hindi excerpts included in this chapter
have been done by the author especially for this book and are closer
to the Hindi texts. The already published English versions are ‘freer’
and slightly different.
Cited Works
‘Bı̄c kā darvāzā’. 1963. Hindi Version in the short story collection Bı̄c kā darvāzā.
Allahabad: Nilabh Prakashan (Trans. the author as: Door in the Wall, included
in Silence. Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1972).
Bimal urf jāyeṃ to jāyeṃ kahāṃ. 1972. Calcutta: Writers Workshop (repr. New
Delhi: National Publishing House, 1997. Trans. the author as: Bimal in Bog,
1972, New Delhi. repr. New Delhi: National, 2002).
Bhūkh āg hai. 1998, repr. 2009. New Delhi: Rajpal and Sons (Trans. Nirupama
Dutt as: Fire in the Belly, published in a special issue of The Little Magazine,
2001. New Delhi).
‘Bhūkh Kumārı̄ ke sāth ek śām’. 1999. Rāt kı̄ sair, Sampūrṇa Kahāniyāṃ
(1951–1998), vol. 2. Delhi: National Publishing House (Trans. the author as:
An Evening with Bhookh Kumari. In Dying Alone: A Novella and Ten Short
110 K.B. VAID
Stories. New Delhi/New York: Penguin Books, 1992 and The Sculptor in Exile.
New Delhi: Penguin, 2014 [Modern Classics]).
‘Buṛhiyā kı̄ gatḥ arı̄’. 1997. Kalā-prayojan 9, July–September. Udaipur: West Zone
Culture Centre.
Dard lā davā. 1980. Hapur: Sambhavana Prakashan.
Dusarā na koı̄. 1978. Hapur: Paricay Prakshan (Trans. the author and included in
Dying Alone: A Novella and Ten Short Stories. New Delhi/New York: Penguin
Books, 1992).
‘Ek badbūdar galı̄’. 1963. Hindi Version in the short story collection Bı̄c kā
darvāzā. Allahabad: Nilabh Prakashan (Trans. the author as: A Blind Alley. In
The Sculptor in Exile. New Delhi: Penguin, 2014 [Modern Classics]).
Guzarā huā zamānā. 1981, repr. 2002. New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan (Trans.
Charles Sparrow in collaboration with the author as: The Broken Mirror. New
Delhi: Penguin, 1994, repr. 2014 [Modern Classics]).
Hamārı̄ buṛhiyā. 2000. New Delhi:Rajpal and Sons.
‘Jāmun kı̄ guṭhalı̄’. 1963. Hindi Version in the short story collection Bı̄c kā
darvāzā. Allahabad: Nilabh Prakashan (Trans. the author as The Stone of a
Jamun. In Dying Alone: A Novella and Ten Short Stories. New Delhi/New
York: Penguin Books, 1992).
Kālā Kolāj. 1989. Bikaner: Vagdevi Prakashan.
‘Māı ̄ kı̄ mahı̄mā’. 1963. Hindi Version in the short story collection Bı̄c kā darvāzā.
Allahabad: Nilabh Prakashan (Trans. the author as Portrait of Old Maya. In The
Sculptor in Exile. New Delhi: Penguin, 2014 [Modern Classics]).
Māyā Lok. 1999. Bikaner: Vagdevi Prakashan.
Nar nārı̄. 1996. New Delhi: Rajpal and Sons.
Nasrı̄n. 1975. Hapur: Sambhavan Prakashan.
‘Urān’. 1963. Hindi Version in the short story collection Bı̄c kā darvāzā.
Allahabad: Nilabh Prakashan (Trans. the author as: ‘Women on Holiday’).
Us kā bacpan. 1957. New Delhi: Saraswati Press (repr. New Delhi: Radhakrishnan
Prakashan, 1981; Bikaner: Vagdevi Prakashan, and 1977. Trans. the author as:
Steps in Darkness. 1962. New York: Orion Press. repr. New Delhi: Penguin,
1995; re-issued Penguin, 2014 [Modern Classics]).
‘Us ke bayān’. 1999. Sampūrṇa Kahāniyāṃ (1951–1998). Delhi: National
Publishing House.
CHAPTER 7
Kishorilal Gosvami’s Indumatı̄
G.H. Schokker
This chapter discusses the representation of Indianness in Kishorilal

Gosvami’s Indumatı̄ (1902), a love story situated against the backdrop
of the battle of Panipat of 1526.1 The story describes how Indumatı̄
meets a young Rajput prince who turns out to be the murderer of sultan
Ibrāhim Lodı̄. Her father has fled Devgarh after the capture by the sultan
and has vowed to marry his daughter to the killer of the Muslim ruler.
This chapter discusses various elements of the story: the characteriza-
tion of the actors, who represent classical cultural ideals and values, and
the structure of the story, in which the strength of the love of the pro-
tagonists is being tested. The chapter concludes by demonstrating how
Gosvami fictionalizes the historical theme of the battle against Ibrāhim
Lodı̄ in order to make the story evoke Hindu ideals of the past and uses
elements from conventional models of Sanskrit aesthetics to achieve this
goal. It further describes some of the linguistic features of the Hindi used
in the story.
G.H. Schokker

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41015-9_7
112 G.H. SCHOKKER
Introduction2
Kishorilal Gosvami (1862–1932) was born in Vrindavan. He was the
son of Vasudevlal and the grandson of Gosvami Kedarnath, a profound
scholar of Sanskrit and abbot of the At ̣albihārı̄jı̄ temple in Vrindavan. His
mother was the daughter of Gosvami Krishnacaitanyadev, an inhabitant
of Benares. Thus, he came of a thorough Vaishnava family which had a
great regard for Sanskrit. He himself also studied Sanskrit and became a
preceptor of literature (sāhityācār ya). Further, he had a good knowledge
of Urdu. After 1890 he settled in Benares. In 1898 he brought out a
monthly, called Upanyās māsik patrikā,3 and in 1913 he founded his own
press, named ‘Śrı̄ Sudarśan Press’, in Mathura.
He received his inspiration to write Hindi novels from Bharatendu
Harishcandra (1850–1885). He was a prolific writer. He wrote 65 nov-
els, as well as novelettes, short stories, plays, poems and biographies. His
novels deal with various themes which in his days were en vogue: history
(itihās),4 society (samāj)5 and detection (jāsūsı̄).6 As is usual in nineteenth-
century narrative tradition,7 he often weaves magic (tilasma) and cun-
ningness (aiyārı̄) into his novels so as to excite the curiosity of his readers.
Some of his novels are adaptations from Bengali, especially from Bengali
novels written by Bankimcandra Cattopadhyay.8
Kishorilal Gosvami was a partisan of traditional Hinduism (sanātan
dharma) and opposed to the increasing influence of English civilization.9
In keeping with this, he aimed at writing in what he called śuddh ār yabhāsạ ̄
‘pure Aryan language’, that is, Sanskritized Hindi ‘as a vehicle suited to
the expression of traditional cultural values’.10 This may account for his
novels having been less popular than those of his contemporary Devaki
Nandan Khatri like Candrakāntā.11
Indumatı̄ (1902) is a love story with a historical setting, namely, the
battle of Panipat of 21 April 1526 in which Ibrāhim Lodı̄ was defeated by
Bābar. As pointed out by Kishorilal Gosvami himself, his historical novels
contain more fiction than history.12 According to him, the Muslim histori-
cal writers would have been partial and would have distorted the facts in
order to humble the Hindus. He, therefore, decided to use the material of
Europeans which in his days had become available, like Tod’s Annals and
antiquities of Rajasthan. But he in his turn also became biased by painting
black the Muslims and extolling the Hindus, in particular the Rajputs. As
will be seen, in Indumatı̄ this tendency even leads him to misrepresent the
way Ibrāhim Lodı̄ died on the battlefield.
KISHORILAL GOSVAMI’S INDUMAT Ī 113
Summary of Events
Indumatı̄, from whom the story derives its title, is a 16-year-old girl who
lives with her old father in the dense jungle of the Vindhya Range of hills.
At noon of a summer’s day, she meets in the forest an unknown youth
who has lost his way and asks her for hospitality. She takes the youth
home, but on their arrival at her hut, her father flies into a rage against
the youth and even threatens to behead him. At her entreaty the father
decides to hold the youth captive all his days and give him slave labor to
do. First the youth has to cut down a withered tree and deposit its logs in
the hut (pars. 1–5).
The youth starts cutting down the tree but is soon worn out with fatigue.
After some discussion Indumatı̄ takes the axe from his hands, asks him to
have a rest and take some fruit and water, and starts herself cutting down the
tree. The father angrily comes out of the hut and threatens to kill them. But
when they each take the blame on themselves and ask the father to spare the
other’s life, he pardons them. The youth resumes the cutting down of the
tree. After a short time the father again comes out of the hut and orders the
youth to stop working since it has become dusk. Now Indumatı̄ may take
the youth into the hut. After the father’s departure, they enter the hut and
take some fruit and water. Then they leave the hut, sit down on a rock in the
moonlight and start to talk to each other (pars. 7–12).
By secretly overhearing their conversation, the father gets to know who
the youth is and how he has come to be in the jungle (cf. Sect. 3.3). After
midnight he tells this to a number of his retainers. He explains to them
that he only feigned anger with the youth in order to test the love that
could come into being between the youth and Indumatı̄. But now he has
ascertained that they truly love each other. Moreover, their love is the
fulfillment of a vow taken by him (cf. Sect. 3.2). On the next day he will,
therefore, give Indumatı̄ in marriage to the youth (par. 14).
Early in the morning of the next day, the youth resumes the cutting
of the wood but is soon again worn out with fatigue. The father comes
out of the hut and orders him for the present to stop cutting down the
tree and first to pile up the logs at the back of the hut. After the father’s
departure, the youth starts piling up the logs. But Indumatı̄ cannot bear
to see his effort and asks him to have a rest. Meanwhile she will take
over his work. When the youth objects to her proposal, a prolonged
discussion evidencing their reciprocal love arises between them. Secretly
overhearing their discussion, the father rejoices in it, but he wants to
114 G.H. SCHOKKER
test their love for the last time. After they have stood this test, the father
expresses the wish to join them in marriage (par. 15—the beginning of
par. 22).
In a flashback the father tells the youth the story of his checkered life
(cf. Sect. 3.2). He marries Indumatı̄ and the youth and sets out for the
Himalaya (pars. 22–23).
Characterization of the Actors
Indumatı̄
The name Indumatı̄ means ‘Full Moon’ and seems to stand for the purity of
the principal personage. The entire first paragraph of the story is devoted to
suggesting her purity. This suggestion consists of two elements. Firstly, it is
described how she since her arrival at the jungle at the age of four or five has
seen no other man than her old father. That means that at the beginning of
the story, love (śṛṅgār) is unknown to her. Secondly, it is said that she since
her attainment of the age of discretion has become acquainted with neither
the world (saṃsār) nor mundane happiness (saṃsārı̄ sukh) and is not aware
of the manifold things (vicitra padār tha) they contain. She only knows the
various sorts of wild animals and birds, the rows of trees and the current
of the Ganges. She occupies herself only with deer, all day walking in the
forest and listening to the singing of birds. Thus, she is not familiar with
culture (saṃskṛti) but only with nature (prakṛti) in all its serenity (śan̄ ti).
Moreover, she is characterized by unselfishness. In paragraph two it is
reported that one day she became enchanted with seeing her reflection in
the river but, realizing that it was her own reflection, felt so ashamed that
she never again looked at her face in the river. In her interior monologue
at the beginning of paragraph four, she returns to this point while reflect-
ing on the great handsomeness of the youth: ‘One day I became in the
same manner enchanted with looking at my beauty in water, but in front
of his good looks my appearance becomes much ashamed’13 (ek din maiṃ
jal meṃ apnı̄ sundartā dekhkar aisı̄ mohit huı̄ thı̄, kintu in kı̄ sundartā ke
āge to merā rūp-raṅga nirā pānı̄ hai).
By her purity and unselfishness Indumatı̄ embodies the classic ideal of
virtuous woman (satı̄). Her purity in particular underlies the report of her
first meeting with the youth (pars. 3–4). Her unselfishness manifests itself
in her attitude towards the youth. Time and again she assists him during
his captivity and pleads his cause with her angry father.
Indumatı̄’s Father
In the first paragraph, it is reported that after the death of his wife,
Indumatı̄’s father went with his four- or five-year-old daughter into the
wilds and became a hermit (vanvāsı̄). His reason for having done so is
given in a flashback at the end of the story (par. 22). In paragraphs three
and five, he is described as reading the Bhagavadgı̄tā. At the end of the
story, he is said to set out for the Himalaya (par. 23). These features lend
him an aura of sainthood. But in point of fact he chiefly acts the part of
an enraged saint: contrary to the generally accepted rules of hospitality,
he flies into a rage against the youth over coming with Indumatı̄ to his
hut without his permission. From his speech to a number of his retainers
(par. 14), however, it appears that he acted this part only for the purpose
of testing the love that could spring up between the youth and Indumatı̄.
This speech also shows that he has a somewhat underhanded way of doing
things: he has secretly overheard the preceding conversation between
Indumatı̄ and the youth (cf. also par. 20) and waits for a while before
informing them of his decision to join them in marriage (cf. pars. 15–22).
Throughout the story he remains nameless. Only at the end of the story
(par. 22) he tells the story of his life to the youth. This story is based on
a well-known theme of medieval Indian literature, that is, the attempt of
a Muslim ruler to seize the wife of a Hindu Rājā.14 Indumatı̄’s father was
the Rājā of Devgarh (a fictitious place). When Indumatı̄ was four years old,
Ibrāhim Lodı̄ (reigned 1517–1526) besieged his residence and confronted
him with the choice between handing over his wife or waging war. When
Indumatı̄’s father expelled Ibrāhim’s messenger, Ibrāhim attacked and
destroyed his city. Indumatı̄’s mother committed suicide and her father,
eager to take revenge, went with his daughter into the wilds. Fifty loyal
retainers attended him. This happened 12 years ago. Meanwhile he sought
the aid of all Rājās of Rajasthan, and he took the vow to give Indumatı̄ in
marriage to him who would cut off Ibrāhim’s head and bring it to him.
But none of them would listen to him and all of them would laugh at him.
Since the youth had killed Ibrāhim (cf. Sect. 3.3), by coming into the
hermitage and falling in love with Indumatı̄, he fulfilled her father’s vow.
The Youth
Till paragraph fourteen the identity of the youth remains unknown to the
reader. But in his speech to Indumatı̄ at his first meeting with her (par. 3),
116 G.H. SCHOKKER
he hints at his being of princely stock: ‘If you are the daughter of a man,
then have no fear! Kṣatriyas don’t do harm except for the protection of
women’ (yadi tum manuṣya kı̄ laṛkı̄ ho to ḍaro mat. Kṣatrı̄ log striyoṃ kı̄
rakṣā karne ke sivāy burāı ̄ nahı̄ṃ karte). This statement seems to refer to
the king/god Rāma, the divine ancestor of the Kṣatriyas, as the Protector
of women. Within the present context, the youth further confirms himself
to telling Indumatı̄ that he, overtaken by misfortune, for three days has
been wandering in the forest, and to asking for her hospitality.
The reader gets to know the identity of the youth only when Indumatı̄’s
father, after secretly overhearing a conversation between him and
Indumatı̄, discloses it in his speech to a number of his retainers (par. 14).
The youth appears to be Prince Candraśekhar, the son of Rājā Rājśekhar
of Ajaygarh (a fictitious place). Rājśekhar had treacherously been killed by
Ibrāhim Lodı̄ in Delhi. This event is unknown from history. But Ibrāhim
seems to have had a treacherous nature.15 In order to avenge the murder
of his father, Candraśekhar in disguise entered Ibrāhim’s army during the
latter’s battle against Bābar at Panipat on 21 April 1526 and killed him.
This representation of the way Ibrāhim died on the battlefield seems to
be mere fiction.16 The story has it that after killing Ibrāhim, Candraśekhar
was discovered by a general of Ibrāhim and pursued by him. Ultimately
Candraśekhar killed the general in a duel, but he lost his horse, missed his
way and reached the hermitage where Indumatı̄ offered him hospitality.
As appears from his acts of bravery, the youth embodies the Rajput
ideal of heroism (vı̄ratā). And, like Indumatı̄, he is noble-minded. But
owing to his high descent, he is unequal to the hard labor of cutting down
a tree (pars. 7 and 15) or piling up its logs (par. 15). In this connection
Indumatı̄ significantly remarks (par. 15): ‘Alas! At the sight of your effort
my heart quite breaks with sorrow. O darling, how is it that you, a prince,
are cutting wood to-day? Stop, take a rest!’ (hāy, tumhārā pariśram dekh-
kar merı̄ chātı̄ phaṭı̄ jātı̄ hai. pyāre, tum rājkumār hokar āj lakṛı̄ kāt ̣ate ho?
tḥ aharo, tum sustā lo).
The Narrator
The occurrence of the narrator is evidenced five times. Twice he refers to
himself with a first-person plural pronoun (cf. pars. 6 and 15) in which
cases he can be called an ‘internal’ informer. In three instances he passes
comments on the events (pars. 6, 15 and 24). In one instance he addresses
the reader (pāt ̣hak) in order to excite his curiosity (par. 13).
The Comments of the Narrator

The comments of the narrator occur at two turning points of the story
and at its end.
Par. 6 (after the youth has fallen into captivity): ‘We are unable to
describe what sorts of emotional waves may have arisen in the heart of our
youth at the sight of the odd behavior of the old man. But he will certainly
have concluded that if this beautiful woman is really the daughter of this
old man, the Creator has produced butter from stone.’
(buḍḍhe kā vicitra raṅg-ḍhaṃg dekhkar hamāre yuvak ke hṛday meṃ
kaise-kaise bhāvoṃ kı̄ taraṅgeṃ ut ḥ ı̄ hoṃgı̄ ise ham likhne meṃ asamar-
tha haiṃ. par hāṃ itnā to us ne avaśya niścay kiyā hogā ki ‘yadi sacmuc
yah sundarı̄ is buḍḍhe kı̄ laṛkı̄ ho to vidhātā ne patthar se navnı̄t paidā
kiyā hai’.)
Par. 15 (after the father’s crucial speech to his retainers): ‘O! Love!! You
are blessed!!! Now that she has got entangled in love, the same Indumatı̄
who up to now worshipped her father like a deity and, even in mistake,
never disregarded his order, conducts herself in an opposite way.’
(ahā! prem!! tū dhanya hai!!! jis indumatı̄ ne āj tak devtā kı̄ bhāṃti apne
pitā kı̄ sevā kı̄, aur bhūl kar bhı̄ kabhı̄ ājñā na ṭālı̄, āj vah prem ke phaṃde
meṃ phāṃs kar us kā ult ̣ā bartāv kartı̄ hai.)
Par. 24 (in conclusion of the story): ‘Ah! The same Indumatı̄ who for
such a long time was a forest bird, has now proceeded to settle in the cage
of a home. Who can fathom the majesty of the Supreme Lord?’
(ahā! jo indumatı̄ itne dinoṃ tak van vihaṃginı̄ thı̄, vah āj ghar ke
piṃjare meṃ baṃda hone calı̄, parameśvar kı̄ mahimā kā kaun pār pā saktā
hai!)
Here Indumatı̄’s identification with a forest bird alludes to the freedom
of her unmarried state in the open, natural atmosphere of her hut. On the
other hand, the image of her settlement in the cage of a home hints at the
sacred bond of marriage.
The Narrator Addresses the Reader

Par. 13 (before the father’s crucial speech to his retainers): ‘On a sloping
peak at a very short distance from the hut ten to twelve people were talk-
ing. Reader, come on! Look what these people are talking about.’
(kuṭı ̄ se thoṛı̄ hı̄ dūr par ek ḍhaluāṃ cot ̣ı̄ par das bārah ādmı̄ bāteṃ kar
rahe the. calie pātḥ ak! dekhie ye log kyā bāteṃ karte haiṃ.)
118 G.H. SCHOKKER
In two respects this passage is of interest. Firstly, the use of the word
pāt ̣hak ‘reader’ shows that the story is intended for reading. Secondly, the
past imperfective bāteṃ kar rahe the ‘were talking’ contrasts with the fol-
lowing imperfective present bāteṃ karte haiṃ ‘are talking’. This may be
accounted for by the fact that in the former construction, a narrative situ-
ation is described, while in the latter construction, the reader is requested
to look at this situation for himself.
Time
The sequence of narrated events starts at noon of a summer’s day (cf. par.
3: garmı̄ kı̄ ṛtu—dopahar kā samay) and at least lasts up to and including
the early morning of the next day (cf. par. 15: saverā hote hı̄ yuvak kut ̣hār
le lakṛı̄ kāt ̣ne lagā ‘as soon as day had broken, the youth took up the axe
and started cutting the wood’).
The description of Indumatı̄ at the beginning of the story starts with
referring to her having come with her father to the jungle at the age of
four or five (cf. Sect. 3.1). From the speech of her father to his retainers
(par. 14) and his retrospect of his life (par. 22), it appears that since then
12 years have elapsed. This space of time is a well-known topos in Indian
literature. It is especially used to indicate the period of a king’s enforced
absence from his residence (cf., e.g., Rāma’s exile from Ayodhya).
When taking into account the historical setting of the story, that is, the
battle of Panipat on 21 April 1526, Ibrāhim Lodı̄ would have attacked
and destroyed Devgarh, the residence of Indumatı̄’s father, in 1514. But
according to history, Ibrāhim reigned from 1517 till 1526. That would
mean that if we rely on the story, Ibrāhim at the time of his attack on
Devgarh had not yet ascended the throne.
On the other hand, 21 April 1526 may be considered the terminus a
quo for dating the sequence of narrated events. According to paragraph
three, the youth for three days wandered about in the forest before meet-
ing Indumatı̄ (cf. also Sect. 3.3). But it cannot be ascertained how much
time it took him to come from Panipat, to the north of Delhi, to the
Vindhya Range of hills.
Localization
The scene of the story is laid in the dense jungle of the Vindhya Range of
hills (cf. par. 1). Here Indumatı̄’s father and his daughter are living in a
smallish hut built on the top of a beautiful hill from which a footpath leads
down to the Ganges (cf. pars. 4 and 12). This scenery evokes the atmo-
sphere of a hermitage. In particular the reference to the Ganges lends the
abode a sacred character. But it seems impossible to determine its position.
The hut in which the father and Indumatı̄ are living is the center of the
action in the story.
Both Devgarh and Ajaygarh, the respective royal residences of
Indumatı̄’s and the youth’s fathers, seem to be fictitious place names.
Structure of the Story
The story starts with a description of Indumatı̄ as embodying the classic
ideal of virtuous woman (satı̄; cf. Sect. 3.1). After that it consists of the
following four parts:
1. The first meeting of Indumatı̄ and the youth.

2. The crisis represented by the anger of Indumatı̄’s father with the
youth.
3. The ensuing sequence of events.
4. The dénouement.
The First Meeting of Indumatı̄ and the Youth

As noted (Sect. 3.1), the report of the first meeting of Indumatı̄ and the
youth (pars. 3–4) is based on her purity. This first meeting takes place
when she, walking about in the forest, perceives the youth sleeping on the
grass in the shade of a tree on the bank of the Ganges. Since she up to now
has seen no other man than her father, she is amazed at the youth’s sight.
She takes him for one of the gods about whom her father has told her.
When the youth awakes and perceives her ‘very beautiful, divine shape’
(param sundarı̄ devı̄-mūr tı̄), he is equally amazed. Thus, their first meet-
ing is characterized by a mutual feeling of wonder.
While Indumatı̄ through ignorance takes the youth for a god, he is won-
dering where in this terrible, dense jungle such a charming, very beautiful
woman may have come from. Either he must have traveled in a dream to
heaven or some celestial maiden (devkanyā) or sylvan goddess (vandevı̄)
must have appeared with the intention of deluding him. Pondering on this,
he starts giving her a searching look. As a result, their eyes become united
with no other feeling than amazement (acraj) shining forth from them.
But all of a sudden some unprecedented feeling (apūr vabhāva), that
is, desire, comes to her, which makes her so much ashamed that she casts
120 G.H. SCHOKKER
down her eyes and her face becomes red. She is about to run away, but he
stops her and asks her what she really is: a woman, a celestial maiden or a
sylvan goddess? From their ensuing dialogue, it appears that both of them
are human beings. He then requests her to give him hospitality for that
day. She complies with his request and takes him home.
The way in which the first meeting of Indumatı̄ and the youth is
reported suggests that it is modeled on the theme of prathama-darśana
‘the first sight [of the lovers]’ as known from the Sanskrit theory of aes-
thetic moods (rasa-śāstra). This theme implies a feeling of wonder and a
union of the eyes which excites desire.17
The Crisis Represented by the Anger of Indumatı̄’s Father

with the Youth
Immediately after the arrival of Indumatı̄ and the youth at the hut, her
father becomes angry with the youth at fearlessly talking with her and
coming to the hut without his permission (par. 5). The father even threat-
ens to behead the youth. Observing her father’s unusual anger, Indumatı̄
at first becomes very afraid. But realizing that the youth is in imminent
danger of losing his life for her sake, she beseeches her father to spare his
life. Taking the blame of the youth’s coming to the hut on herself, she asks
her father to punish her instead.18 Relenting by her entreaties, the father
tells the youth that he will spare his life but hold him captive all his days.
The youth will have to do slave labor for him. If he tries to escape, he
will immediately be killed. The father orders the youth first to cut down a
withered tree and deposit its logs in the hut. He warns the youth against
disobeying him and forbids Indumatı̄ to talk to the youth. If she fails to
obey him, her head will also be cut off. After that the father re-enters the
hut and resumes the reading of the Bhagavadgı̄tā (cf. Sect. 3.2).
The Ensuing Sequence of Events

The ensuing sequence of events seems to have been arranged to a well-
considered pattern. There are four scenes relating to the woodcutting.
The first and fourth scenes are concluded by dialogues between Indumatı̄
and the youth. The second scene is introduced by such a dialogue. The
third scene lacks a dialogue. Each of the four scenes is succeeded by an
intervention of Indumatı̄’s father. Between the second and third scenes,
a scene relating to Indumatı̄’s and the youth’s nocturnal stay in the hut
and a speech of the father to a number of his retainers occur. The last-
mentioned scene preludes the father’s speech which marks a turning point
in the story. The fourth intervention of the father constitutes the transi-
tion into the dénouement.
The underlying idea of the scenes relating to the woodcutting is that,
owing to his being unaccustomed to this kind of hard labor (cf. Sect.
3.3), the youth soon becomes exhausted by it. In the dialogues Indumatı̄
tries to support him. The interventions of the father are intended to test
their love.
In her dialogue with the youth which concludes the first scene,
Indumatı̄ urges him to have a rest and take some fruit and water. But
reminding her of her father’s threat, he refuses to do so. Thereupon she
forcibly takes the axe from his hands and starts herself to cut down the
tree. The father comes out of his hut and threatens to kill both of them
on account of their disobedience. But Indumatı̄ and the youth each take
the blame on themselves and entreat the father to spare the other’s life.
The father pardons them but repeats his threat. He re-enters the hut (par.
7—the beginning of par. 12).
In the dialogue introducing the second scene, Indumatı̄ reassures the
youth and the latter asks her not to trouble herself about him. After the
youth has resumed the woodcutting, the father intervenes for the sec-
ond time and orders him to stop working since it has become dusk. Now
Indumatı̄ may take the youth into the hut and give him some bad food
(par. 12).
After her father’s departure, Indumatı̄ takes the youth into the hut and,
contrary to her father’s order, gives him good food. Then they leave the
hut, sit down on a rock in the moonlight and begin to talk to each other
(par. 12). By evidencing their mutual love, this nocturnal scene preludes
the following, crucial speech of the father to a number of his retainers.
The speech of the father to his retainers (par. 14) revolves round
three interconnected points: (1) the identity of the youth, (2) the love
between Indumatı̄ and the youth and (3) the father’s decision to join
them in marriage. By secretly overhearing the preceding conversation
between Indumatı̄ and the youth, the father has come to know the first
two points. He now tells his retainers who the youth is (cf. Sect. 3.3) and
that Indumatı̄ and the youth truly love each other. Since the youth killed
Ibrāhim Lodı̄ and loves Indumatı̄, he has fulfilled the father’s vow. The
circumstances which led the father to take this vow only become known to
the reader at the end of the story when the father tells his life story to the
122 G.H. SCHOKKER
youth (par. 22). Within the present contact, the father confines himself to
telling his retainers that on the next day he will give Indumatı̄ in marriage
to the youth, that his retainers will have to see them home and that he
himself will retire into the Himalaya.
In the third scene, it is only briefly reported that at daybreak the youth
resumes the woodcutting and that he is soon worn out with fatigue.
(Showing no sign of his recent decision to join Indumatı̄ and the youth in
marriage) The father intervenes for the third time and orders the youth for
the present to stop the woodcutting and first to pile up the logs (par. 15).
The fourth scene deals with the piling up of the logs by the youth.
Indumatı̄ cannot bear to see his effort and affectionately asks him to stop
the work. Meanwhile, she herself will pile up the logs. This gives rise to
a prolonged dialogue between them, which proves their mutual love.
Secretly overhearing their dialogue, the father rejoices in it. But he tests
their love for the last time. When they have stood this final test, the father
tells them that he only feigned anger with them in order to test their love.
Now that he has acquainted himself with their true love, he regards the
youth as Indumatı̄’s most suitable husband (par. 15—the beginning of
par. 22).
The Dénouement
The dénouement is presented by the flashback in which the father tells
the youth the story of his life (par. 22; cf. Sect. 3.2). It consists in the fact
that both the father and the youth, though for different reasons, wanted
to revenge themselves on Ibrāhim Lodı̄. For this purpose the father
had taken the vow to give Indumatı̄ in marriage to him who would kill
Ibrāhim. By killing Ibrāhim and falling in love with Indumatı̄, the youth
did fulfill this vow.
Conclusion
Kishorilal Gosvami stands forth as the champion of traditional Hindu cul-
tural values. While he in his social novels concerns himself with contem-
porary Indian society, in his historical novels he tries to evoke the Hindu
ideals of the past. His historical story Indumatı̄, placed in the first half
of the sixteenth century (shortly after the battle of Panipat), contrasts
the Rajput ideal and the misconduct of Ibrāhim Lodı̄. Both Indumatı̄’s
father and the youth are Ibrāhim’s victims and want to revenge themselves
on Ibrāhim. This happens when the youth kills Ibrāhim in the battle of
Panipat.
In keeping with the conventional nature of the story, its actors are well-
known classic types. Indumatı̄’s father represents the type of Rājā who,
after losing his wife and capital, has become a hermit. Closely allied with
this is that at the beginning of the story these events are said to have taken
place 12 years ago, the usual space of time for a king’s enforced absence
from his capital. As a hermit the father has an aura of sainthood, but he
chiefly acts the part of an enraged saint in order to test the love which
could spring up between his daughter and the youth. Indumatı̄ embodies
the classic ideal of a virtuous and unselfish woman (satı̄). The youth, who
is himself the son of a Hindu Rājā, embodies the Rajput ideals of heroism
(vı̄ratā) and nobleness (udāratā).
But the other side of the picture is that owing to his being of princely
stock, the youth is unequal to the hard labor of woodcutting to which
he has been convicted by Indumatı̄’s father. Each time that he becomes
exhausted by the woodcutting, Indumatı̄ lends him assistance by word
and deed. But the essence of the love test to which they are submitted is
expressed by the father in his following statement at the end of the story
(par. 22): ‘If the love of you two should not have been true, then why
would you have risked your life in asking my pardon for each other?’ (yadi
tum donoṃ kā saccā prem na hotā to kyoṃ ek dusre ke lie jān par khelkar
kṣamā cāhte.) The idea that true love (saccā prem) requires a willingness to
sacrifice one’s life is known all over the world. But the question is whether
Kishorilal Gosvami has taken it from a particular Indian source.
The report of the first meeting of Indumatı̄ and the youth may also
be of a conventional nature since it seems to be modeled on the theme
of prathama-darśana ‘the first sight [of the lovers]’ as known from the
Sanskrit theory of aesthetic moods (rasa-śāstra). It is in marked contrast
with the following crisis consisting in the unexpected anger of Indumatı̄’s
father with the youth.
As pointed out, the sequence of events ensuing from the crisis seems to
have been arranged according to a well-considered pattern. This pattern
is characterized by a regular alternation of woodcutting scenes, dialogues
between Indumatı̄ and the youth and interventions of the father intended
to tests their love. Central in it is the crucial speech of the father to a num-
ber of his retainers.
124 G.H. SCHOKKER
Notes
1. This short paragraph was added by the editors.
2. The following information about Kishorilal Gosvami is mainly
based on Vishvambhar ‘Manav’ 1970, 57–73.
3. According to McGregor 1970, 165–166, this monthly was edited
by Kishorilal Gosvami from 1901, and many of his writings were
first published in it.
4. His historical novels cover the period between the Slave Dynasty
(thirteenth century) and the fall of the Navābs of Bengal (second
half of the eighteenth century). In illustration the following instances
may be cited: Sultānā rajiyā begam vā raṅgamahal meṃ halāhal
‘Sultan Rajiyā Begam or poison in the harem’ (1904) and Mallikādevı̄
vā baṃga sarojinı̄ ‘Mallikādevı̄ or the lotus of Bengal’ (1905) are set
in the times of Sultan Rajiyā Begam (reigned 1236–1240) and
Sultan Balban (reigned 1266–1286), respectively. Tārā vā kṣatra-
kul-kamalinı̄ ‘Tārā or the lotus of the royal family’ (1902) relates to
Tārā, the daughter of Rāṇā Amarasiṃha, who in 1614 submitted to
Prince Khurram (later Shāh Jahān). Kanak kusum vā mastānı̄ ‘The
golden flower or Mastānı̄’ (1904) deals with the love of Bājı̄rāv
Peśvā (reigned 1720–1740) and Mastānı̄. Hṛdayhāriṇı̄ vā ādarśa
ramaṇı̄ ‘Hṛdayhāriṇı̄ or the ideal wife’ (1890) and Lavaṃgalatā vā
ādarśa bālā ‘Lavaṃgalatā or the ideal girl’ (1890) are laid in the
time of Navāb Sirājuddaulā of Bengal (reigned 1756–1757).
Gulbahār vā bhrātṛsneh ‘Gul and Bahār or brotherly love’ (1916)
treats of the battle of Baksar (1764), the tragic end of Gul and
Bahār, the respective daughter and son of Navāb Mı̄r Kāsim of
Bengal (reigned 1761–1764) and also Mı̄r Kāsim’s suicide.
5. Instances of his social novels are Triveṇı̄ vā saubhāgyaśreṇı̄ ‘Triveṇı̄
or the status of married happiness’ (written in 1890 but first printed
in 1907), Lı̄lāvatı̄ vā ādarśa satı̄ ‘Lı̄lāvatı̄ or the ideal virtuous wife’
(1901), Rājkumārı̄ ‘The Princess’ (1902), Capalā vā navya samāj
citra ‘Capalā or a picture of modern society’ (1903), Punarjanma
vā sautiyādāha ‘Rebirth or jealousy among rival wives’ (1907),
Mādhavı̄ mādhav vā madan mohinı̄ ‘Mādhavı̄ and Mādhav or
Madan and Mohinı̄’ (1916), and Aṃgūt ̣hı̄ kā nagı̄nā ‘The gem of
the finger-ring’ (1918). For a discussion of Lı̄lāvatı̄ vā ādarśa satı̄,
see McGregor 1970, 164–165.
6. Detective stories by Kishorilal Gosvami are Candrikā and

Candrāvalı̄. For a discussion of these stories, see McGregor 1970,
165.
7. An early story in which these themes occur is Insha Allah Khan’s
Rānı̄ Ketkı̄ kı̄ Kahānı̄ ‘Tale of Queen Ketkı̄’ (ca. 1803). Cf.
McGregor 1970, 145–147.
8. Vishvambhar ‘Manav’ (1970, 61) surmises that in composing his
historical novel Tārā vā kṣatra-kulkamalinı̄ (cf. note 3), Kishorilal
Gosvami was inspired by Bankimcandra Cattopadhyay’s Bengali
novel Rājsiṃha (1882). According to McGregor 1970, 163,
‘Sukhśarvarı̄ is described on its title page as a novel of coincidence
adapted from Bengali into pure Hindi’. McGregor makes the
observation on this that the Bengali novel concerned to some
extent may have been Bankimcandra Cattopadhyay’s novel
Kapālkuṇḍalā ‘The ear-ring of the skull’ (1866).
9. Cf., for example, his social novel Lı̄lāvatı̄ vā ādarśa satı̄ (cf. note 4)
which contrasts the fortunes of the virtuous Lı̄lāvatı̄ with those of
her sister Kalāvatı̄ who breaks with all the traditions of orthodox
society. See McGregor 1970, 164–165.
10. Cf. McGregor 1970, 163, n.2.
11. Cf. McGregor 1970, 162–163.
12. Cf. Vishvambhar ‘Manav’ 1970, 58–60.
13. nirā pānı̄ hai, literally ‘is mere water’, is an idiomatic expression
used in the meaning of ‘becomes much ashamed’.
14. Cf., for example, Malik Muhammad Jayasi’s Padmāvat (ca. 1540)
which in its second part deals with Alā-uddı̄n’s attack on Chitor
(1303) in order to gain possession of Queen Padminı̄.
15. For Ibrāhim’s character, see Halim 1974, 193–198.
16. For a historical account of the battle of Panipat, see Halim 1974,
184–192.
17. Cf., for example, Schokker 1983, 89–90. McGregor 1970,

164–165 interestingly notes that Lı̄lāvatı̄ vā ādarśa satı̄ (cf. note
4) ‘disclaims any ability to emulate the Sanskrit poets in a descrip-
tion of the heroine’s charms, and then proceeds to give just such a
description, in the manner of the śṛṇgāra poetry of the eighteenth
century’.
18. This is the first instance of her unselfishness (cf. Sect. 3.1).
126 G.H. SCHOKKER
Appendix
Below are given some noticeable features of the language of Kishorilal
Gosvami’s Indumatı̄:
Alternation of Forms of the Words

ṭhāmhanā ‘to grasp’ (par. 12): t ̣hāmnā (par. 15).
musakyānā ‘to smile’ (par 16): musakānā (par. 12).
vṛddha ‘old man’ (pars. 15; 20; 21): buḍḍhā (pars. 5; 6; 8; 12; 14; 15;
22; 23): būṛhā (pars. 1; 3; 4; 5; 12; 13; 14).
Braj Words
Pronouns
tai ne ‘by you’ (pars. 9; 20) for tū ne.
Verb Forms
hoy ‘it may be’ (par. 17), third person singular subjunctive, for ho (cf.,
e.g., par 8).
hoūṃgā (cf. Braj hoūṃgo(/-au) ‘I shall be’ (par. 3), first person singular
future, for hūṃgā.
kāt ̣iyo ‘it should be cut’ (par. 15) and dekhiyo ‘it should be seen’ (par.
12), imperative based on the old passive, for kāt ̣iye and dekhie (par. 13),
respectively. According to Kellog 1938: par. 767, of the two forms in –iyo
and –iye, the former is properly used only to equals and inferiors and the
latter to equals and superiors.
bhaï ‘it has become’ (par. 12), feminine perfective participle, for huı̄
(passim).
Gender
kuṭhār ‘axe’ is once masculine (par. 8) and once feminine (par. 11).
According to HŚS, kuṭhār is masculine.
sāmarthya ‘power’ (par. 9) is feminine. According to HŚS, the word
can be either masculine or feminine.
Number
In order to show respect, pı̄tā ‘father’ is usually treated as a plural. But
once (par. 13) the word is put in the singular: indumatı̄ kā pı̄tā ek cat ̣āı ̄
par bait ̣hā hai ‘Indumatı̄’s father is seated on a mat’.
Verbal Compounds
In present-day Hindi the construction of cāhnā ‘to wish’ with a perfec-
tive participle ending in invariable—ā expresses the immediate future,
while the collocation of this verb with an infinitive denotes desire. In
paragraph four of Indumatı̄, however, the former construction seems to
express desire: yadi tum mere atithi huā cāhte ho... ‘if you wish to be my
guest...’ On the other hand, in two instances the latter construction seems
to denote the immediate future: par. 3: vah bhāgnā cāhtı̄ thı̄ ki... ‘She was
about to run away when...’; par. 21: vṛddha jyoṃhı̄ apnı̄ talvār yuvak kı̄
gardan par rakhnā cāhtā thā ki... ‘As soon as the old man was about to
place his sword on the neck of the youth...’ For the usage of the former
construction to express either the immediate future or desire, see Kellog
1938: par. 436.
Once jānā ‘to go’ is used with the perfective participle of an intransitive
verb to express the involvement of the subject in a given state: par. 15: hāy,
tumhārā pariśram dekhkar merı̄ chātı̄ phat ̣ı̄ jātı̄ hai ‘Ah! At the sight of
your exertion my heart quite breaks [with sorrow].’ Here the heart is not
said to pass into the state of breaking but to be already involved in it. Cf.
Hacker 1958, par. 80.
Once rakhnā ‘to keep’ is used with the kar-gerund of a transitive verb
to emphasize the continuation of an action: par. 7: sāre saṃsār ke peṛ kāt ̣
kar rakh dūṃ ‘I could keep cutting down the trees of the whole world. Cf.
also Hacker 1958, par. 82.
Direct Discourse Versus Indirect Speech

There are ten verbs or verbal constructions which are used with ki:
kahnā ‘to say, tell’

kahlānā ‘to send word’
jānnā ‘to know’
128 G.H. SCHOKKER
jān paṛnā ‘to seem’

dekhnā ‘to see’
niścay karnā ‘to decide, conclude’
pratijñā karnā ‘to take a vow’
bolnā ‘to speak, talk’
samjhānā ‘to explain’
socnā ‘to think’
Out of these verbs, kahnā and bolnā are used both with and without ki.
The remaining verbs are only used with ki. Kahnā is used 4 times with
ki (pars. 5 and 14) but 20 times without ki (pars. 3; 5; 7; 8; 10; 11; 12;
13; 14; 15; 16; 17; 18; 19; 20; 21; 22). On the other hand, bolnā is used
three times with ki (pars. 4; 5; 12) but five times without ki (pars. 8; 9;
12; 15; 17).
Editorial Postscript
This chapter by Godard Schokker (1929–2009) is based on a paper pre-
sented in a seminar on the theme of ‘Indianness’. Until his retirement
from Leiden University in 1995, he taught modern and early modern
Hindi, Braj and Avadhi at this institution, as well as the Prakrits and
Apabhramsha, and other modern Indo-Aryan languages. The chapter has
been included in the present book as a posthumous publication because it
provides an interesting insight into the early formation of a literary canon
of modern Hindi. This period was dominated by the figure of Bharatendu
Harischcandra and saw the adoption of many literary modes and themes in
the discourse of Hindu nationalism (see Dalmia 1997). In this process, the
idealization of Rajput heroism and the struggle with Muslim rulers was
also given a place in a new narrative of Indian history. As Schokker argues,
James Tod’s Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (1829–1832) was an
important inspiration for a revision of Rajput history. Recently, scholarly
interest in this period has been revived, such as in the study of the changes
in the representation of Rajput queens and their role in the battles with
Muslim rulers (see Sreenivasan 2007).
Kishorilal Gosvami’s Indumatı̄ fits into this pattern and there-
fore deserves mention in the context of the imagination of Indianness.
Schokker’s reading of the novel looks at how Kishorilal constructs an
idealized Indianness around a historical theme with narrative elements,
archetypical characters and literary stylistics that have a long history in
Indian literature. This reading can be connected to Schokker’s interest

in the diachronous development of Indian poetics through a complex
linguistic and cultural layering, involving the Prakrits, Apabhramsha and
early modern Indian vernaculars.
The value of this approach lies in the fact that it provides an alternative
to the notion that later Indian traditions are solely inspired by and deriva-
tive of Sanskrit and classical Indian culture. It gives the development of
the aesthetics of early modern and modern Hindi literature, as well as the
linguistic formation of the vernaculars, a place in history and provides an
important innovation over the idealized genealogy of Indian culture in
nationalist historiographies.
Godard Schokker was part of a generation of scholars who took a seri-
ous interest in Braj and Avadhi poetry, both from the synchronous per-
spective of the ‘Bhakti period’ and the rise of Indian Islamic culture, as
from a diachronic point of view. The latter comes to the fore in his studies
on the development of meter in Braj, Avadhi and Apabhramsha (1984)
and his work on the poetical treatises, such as Keshavdas’s Rasikapriyā
(1980). Recently, the interest in the impact of the categories of the tradi-
tion of Indian poetics on later cultural traditions has been revived with
the work of Allison Busch, who studied Braj poetry produced outside the
realm of vaishnava bhakti, for instance, by Muslim noblemen during the
Mughal period which continues a tradition of aesthetics that has its roots
in Sanskrit poetical treatises.
This diachronous perspective and an understanding of the mediating
role Indian vernaculars played in circulating familiar literary elements to
new religious and social contexts is crucial in the analysis of the formation
of modern literary writing in India.
Framing Kishorilal Gosvami’s novel against the background of a rein-
terpretation of themes and aesthetics from earlier periods, as Schokker
does in his chapter, introduces an important perspective in the present
study of Indianness. It is also explored in other chapters, such as that of
Thomas de Bruijn, which looks at the high realism of Nayī Kahānī against
the backdrop of literary stylistics of earlier writing. Also in that case, rein-
terpretation of cultural elements in a new context is characteristic of the
construction of ‘Indianness’.
Modern Hindi writing is a confusing phenomenon in Indian culture as
it provokes accusations of catering to a Westernized taste while it has so
much that connects it with the diverse traditions that shaped India’s early
modern literary past. Research into the complex rootedness of the literary
130 G.H. SCHOKKER
stylistics of modern Indian writing is still developing, and this book

hopes to add new insights. Schokker’s reading of Indumatı̄ and of how
Indianness is constructed in this novel is an interesting contribution to
this book. Its publication is a fitting tribute to his scholarly work and the
inspiration he provided to his students, of which this book testifies.
Bibliography
Busch, Allison. 2011. Poetry of Kings: The Classical Hindi Literature of Mughal
India. Delhi, New York: Oxford University Press.
Dalmia, Vasudha. 1997. The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu
Harischandra and Nineteenth-Century Banaras. Delhi, New York: Oxford
University Press.
Schokker, G.H. 1980. Study in Braja and Avadhi Grammar and in Keśavadāsa’s
Rasikapriyā. In Devotional Literature in Current Research, ed. W.M. Callewaert,
155–160. Leuven: Peters.
Schokker, G.H. 1984. The Language of Bhakti. Acta Indologica VI: 383–432
[Studies of Mysticism in honour of the 1150th anniversary of Kobodaishi’s
nirvāṇam].
Sreenivasan, Ramya. 2007. The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen: Heroic Pasts in
Indian History c. 1500–1900. Delhi: Permanent Black and Seattle: University
of Washington Press.
Bibliography
Hacker, P. 1958. Zur Funktion einiger Hilfsverben im modernen Hindi. Wiesbaden:
Franz Steiner Verlag.
Halim, Abdul. 1974. History of the Lodi Sultans. Delhi.
Kellog, S.H. 1938. A Grammar of the Hindi Language, 3rd edn. London: Kegan
Paul.
McGregor, R.S. 1970. The Rise of Standard Hindi, and Early Hindi Prose Fiction.
In The Novel in India. Its Birth and Development, ed. T.W. Clark, 142–179.
London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd.
Schokker, G.H. 1983. De gemeenschap van de kenners tegenovers de goddelijke
luisteraar. De literaire esthetica van het Sanskrit en de expressie van liefde voor
de God Kṛṣṇa in het werk van de Hindi-dichter Keśavadās. In De vorsten van het
Woord. teksten over dichterschap en poëzie uit Oosterse tradities. Studies en ver-
talingen, ed. W.L. Idema, 77–98. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff.
Shyamsundardas. 1965–1975. Hindı̄ Śabdasāgar. An enlarged, improved (new
edn). Varanasi: Nagari Press (HŚS).
Vishvambhar ‘Manav’. 1970. Unnı̄svı̄ṃ śatābdı̄ ke upanyāskār. Alahabad: Smriti
Prakashan.
CHAPTER 8
Indianness, Absurdism, Existentialism,

and the Work of Imagination: Vinod Kumar
Shukla’s Naukar kı̄ kamı̄z
Martin Christof-Fuechsle
This chapter discusses Indianness and labels like absurdism and existen-
tialism as well as imagination in relation to the fiction of Vinod Kumar
Shukla, mainly in his first novel Naukar kı̄ kamı̄z. The focus is on the
value of each of these labels with regard to an understanding of the novel’s
“Indianness” or “Westerness” to get to grips with the distinctive tenor of
this work of art. First I will give a brief resumé of the plot of the novel
as well as its formal features to discuss whether the novel confirms to
definitions of absurdism, then I will proceed to study its relation to exis-
tentialism, and, finally, I will highlight the central role played by imagi-
nation in the novel and as a way to understand it. In doing this, I will
follow the leads provided by the theory and methods of narratology. In
the c onclusion I will assert that the novel turns out to be not only exis-
tentialist but rather idealistic, its central theme being the working and the
liberating power of imagination. I nevertheless will answer the question
M. Christof-Fuechsle (*)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41015-9_8
132 M. CHRISTOF-FUECHSLE
as to whether a representative Indian reader (if there could ever be one)

would see any relevance in it in the affirmative.
In this chapter I propose to discuss the novel Naukar kı̄ kamı̄z (1979)
by Vinod Kumar Shukla. The starting point is mainly a subjective one:
not only did I, being a reader of Indian literature influenced by Western
norms and models, find that it was a pleasure to read the novel, but it was
also highly acclaimed by Indian critics. Among the reactions to the novel
that came to my knowledge, Vishnu Khare’s was the most enthusiastic. In
his preface to the Marathi translation of Naukar kı̄ kamı̄z (Khare 1996),
he praises the novel as an authentic portrait of lower middle-class life in a
small town in Madhya Pradesh and at the same time highlights the fact that
it does not contain traces of much used Western models such as the works
of Joyce, Proust, or Camus and that there is also no display of “-isms” such
as existentialism, structuralism, and so on.1 He emphatically designates it
as a thoroughly Indian novel by a thoroughly Indian narrator—a state-
ment which can be taken as an answer to criticism by Jaidev or G.N. Devy,
given the background of the ongoing discussion about the Indianness of
Indian literature and the concept of nativism.2 Further, Naukar kı̄ kamı̄z
is regularly counted among the best novels of Hindi literature since inde-
pendence; recently, an English translation has been published, and a film
based on the novel was completed by Mani Kaul and released in 2000.
Taking these two not necessarily exemplary evaluations of the novel
as the responses of two readers with different backgrounds, I will try to
identify the elements or characteristics of the text that might give rise to
these reactions. What I noticed in the novel was its subjectivity. The plot
was presented from the point of view of the protagonist, interspersed with
his thoughts and imaginations, which often makes for effects of the absurd
or the grotesque.
Thus, I will try to see to what extent the novel can be seen to be influ-
enced by absurdism3 and whether this concept as defined with respect to
trends in twentieth-century Western literature will be helpful in interpret-
ing the text. As will be shown, existentialism might be a better label than
absurdism as an existentialist novel has as its theme the absurd situation
of man in a chaotic, threatening universe while the form of such a novel
is not absurd. We will have to question this label also, because I will show
that the novel turns out to be not only existentialist but also idealistic, its
central theme being the working and the liberating power of imagination.
Finally—coming back to the central theme of the present volume:
“Imagining Indianness,” and hence, the Indianness of the novel discussed
INDIANNESS, ABSURDISM, EXISTENTIALISM, AND THE WORK... 133
here—we will try to find an answer to the following question: how would
a representative Indian reader respond to the novel?4 Would he perceive
any relevance to his own life?
Now, let us turn to the novel itself. The protagonists of the novel are a
young couple, Santū Bābū, who works as a junior clerk in an excise office,
and his wife who takes care of their household. They live in a small town,
a qasbā in Chattisgarh, Eastern Madhya Pradesh, presumably, during the
1960s. The people among whom they live are the usual inhabitants of small
towns: the peanut seller, the barber, the owner of the provision store, fel-
low clerks, the landlord, the Sahib, and the gardener. The circumstances of
their existence are influenced and shaped by the usual insecurities, needs,
and obligations: the need for a job and a roof above their heads, emotional
and financial obligations to the family, the insecure atmosphere at work, and
the extra services demanded by employers and landlords.
At the beginning of the novel, we come upon Santū, who has a day off
from work and does not know what to do with himself. In order not to
bother the women of his household, his visiting mother and his wife, he
searches for a reason to leave his house and stay away for some time. He
goes for a walk, sits down on a bridge, returns to his house, walks past it
to the pān shop, and sits down at the barber’s to pass time and wait there
before going home. All the time his imagination is at work, following asso-
ciations that crop up in his mind, imagining dialogues with other people,
centring around the question what he should do with his life. As the novel
unfolds, new obligations occur. While his wife goes to visit the Doctor
Madam, the wife of their landlord, to talk about the leaking roof of their
house at the onset of the rainy season and ask for remedy, ending up help-
ing out in the kitchen of the landlord’s household, Santū Bābū falls ill and
is treated by the landlord doctor without payment. Now he feels doubly
obliged because in his fever, he hurled abuse at the doctor when the latter
gave him an injection. Later, Santū Bābū is forcefully made to wear the ser-
vant’s shirt—the central symbol of the novel which also provides its title.
The Sahib, the top rank superior at the office, had this shirt made for
his servant who ran away and for whom he desperately seeks a substitute.
His only criterion for being a good servant is whether one fits into the
already made shirt or not. Although Santū Bābū together with his fellow
clerks tears the servant’s shirt to shreds in an act of protest and revolt, he
is not yet able to get rid of the symbolic power of shirt which forces him
to do errands for the Sahib instead of, or in addition to, going to work
in the office. When his wife tells him that she is pregnant, they would
like to spend more time together. But the reality is that they hardly meet
anymore during the day. Santū is either at work in his office or on duty at
the Sahib’s house, and his wife is regularly called upon by the landlord’s
watchman to help the Doctor Madam.
Finally, they both decide to take off their imaginary and real servants’
shirts: she refuses to go to Madam Doctor anymore and he quits going
to the Sahib’s house. Now he does his duty at the office and spends the
rest of his time with his wife. When, in the end, he has solemnly burned
the shreds of the servant’s shirt, which Baṛe Bābū kept for the time being,
they feel free to face their lives and the real and imaginary storms to come:
“Let the storm come,” I responded. “Let it blow the roof off. Either the
doctor will be shamed into repairing the roof or we will find ourselves a new
home. Do not be afraid; fear affects the child. If you feel anxious, breathe
deeply.” (Shukla 1999, 247, 1994, 252)5
The summary of the novel’s plot might seem straightforward with no

hints to the absurd in form and content, but this is not the way it is pre-
sented by Shukla. For a start, the narrative is not told in the third person,
but, with reference to the analytical models of narratology (cf. Bal 1985;
Rimmon-Kenan 1991), we can identify Santū Bābū, the protagonist of the
novel, as the narrator. He is a character-bound narrator who relates events
in which he has participated and still participates himself. He is also the
main focalizer which means that he presents and comments on his own
actions and feelings and those of the other actors from his own perspec-
tive. The combination of a character-bound narrator and a focalizer in one
person makes for a high degree of subjectivity. The readers have to rely
on the presentation of the plot as made by Santū and follow his subjec-
tive perceptions of events. What makes the plot far from straightforward
is the fact that his thoughts and imaginations almost constantly set off in
digressions from the plot. Events, dialogues, and thoughts create chains
of other thoughts by way of association. Often one witnesses imagined
events and dialogues in the subjunctive—a mode which the narrator either
sustains for long passages or is quickly alternated with bits of the plot. In
this manner there is not so much a lack of plot—one of the defining char-
acteristics of the absurd (cf. Hinchliffe 1969)—but a lack of logic or rather
a subjective kind of associative logic.
An example of the way the novel proceeds through action, reasoning,
and imagined dialogue is the following passage. Santū is told by Guptajı̄,
the owner of the provisions shop, that he will clandestinely sell him kero-
sene. After having bought the kerosene and having promised to Guptajı̄
that he will tell no one where he got it from, Santū feels obliged to let
others share his luck in having obtained the costly stuff on credit. So he
picks people worthy of being told were to get kerosene. Firstly, he tells
the cobbler Khajua who is cleaning his shoes. Then he enters a tea shop
and tells the owner and a woman working there. Next, he tells his friend
Sampat and then hurries of to the living quarters of poor labourers with
the urgent mission to tell them about the availability of kerosene. There,
he only succeeds in frightening a child and bewildering an old woman,
but later, when the labourers return from their daily work, he attempts to
get their attention by striking the pose of a social reformer and delivering
a speech on their living conditions and the availability of kerosene (Shukla
1999, 94–95, 1994, 95–96).
Soon he notices by the reaction of the labourers that they did not pay
him any attention, and he wonders as he walks back home whether he
had made good use of his day off: “Perhaps people did not need kerosene
as badly as I imagined they did. I had more to learn about what people
really needed” (Shukla 1999, 96). Then, his thoughts trail off in another
direction to return again to the kerosene reflecting that those people who
were unable to obtain kerosene in life could not be denied it in death
when it was used to start their funeral fires. Next he imagines a meeting
with a professor who had taught him Hindi literature asking him—out of a
former student’s sense of duty—whether he needs any kerosene. The pro-
fessor replies negatively, telling Santū that since his first wife killed herself
by pouring kerosene over herself and setting a match to it, he has banned
everything which could be used to kill oneself from his house so that his
second wife will not be able to commit suicide. This imagined dialogue
leads to the—imagined (?)—memory of the wife of the botany professor
burning herself with kerosene—a scene which is described in a grotesque
and macabre way.
That evening the botany professor’s wife poured kerosene from the stove
over herself and lit a match. Hearing her screams a crowd gathered outside.
Inside, the burning and the pain made her run in circles round the room.
Some students tried to break down the door. Some tried to reach through
the transom to the door latch on the inside. By then she had fallen to the
floor. The students, her husband, and a few others watched helplessly while
fat melted and dripped from her uncovered thighs. (Shukla 1999, 99, 1994,
99–100)
This in turn leads to the following imagined dialogue in the subjunctive

between the economics professor and the botany professor:
Shortly afterwards the economics professor must have explained to the bot-
any professor that he had suffered a heavy loss. The botany professor’s wife
had been a schoolteacher with a monthly salary of two hundred rupees. She
did all the cooking, looked after the children, washed clothes and kept the
house tidy. No housemaid could be hired for less than a hundred rupees.
The housemaid would be slovenly. She would steal. She would never treat
the work as her own. In addition, there was the important matter of sharing
the bed. “Your wife slept with you every night,” the economics professor
would say. “Now you will sleep alone. A half hour’s pleasure in the bazaar
will cost you two rupees not to mention the peril to your reputation and
employment. I want you to calculate for me how much you have lost per
month on the death of your wife.”
In consequence of this lecture the botany professor took another wife.
(Shukla 1999, 99, 1994, 100)
Then, the topic of the kerosene is dropped making room for Santū’s
thoughts of his friend Sampat, who is not yet married, and the way he and
his father mistreat the mother, a theme that came up in connection with
the kerosene mentioned in the passage quoted above.
As we gather from these passages, techniques of the grotesque (cf.
Thomson 1972) and of the macabre are also used, juxtaposed with a bit-
ter humour by critically exposing the—albeit imagined—inhumanity of
the reaction of the professors to the gruesome death of the wife as they
add up the financial loss incurred.
Further illustrations of the form of the narrative can be given, but it has
to be borne in mind that though it is not as straightforward as it could
be, it nevertheless has its logic. There is a detectable plot which, despite
of the associative way of narrating, is based on causality and follows a
time sequence—even if occasionally the reader has to detect the sequence
rather than it is presented overtly.6
Thus, the form of the novel is not consistently absurd, even if there
are at least features of the absurd on the thematic level. Following
Damsteegt (1998, 154–155) who, referring to pertinent literature on
absurdism, holds that absurd fiction is best defined by its presentation of
absurdism not only in content but also in form and that works of fiction
which deal with the absurd, but do not show the absurdism in their form,
should not be called absurd texts, but rather existentialist texts, there is
a possibility of a better understanding of Naukar kı̄ kamı̄z as such an

existentialist text.
This existentialism, or “thematic absurdism,” is characterized by the
basic tenor of alienation from life, by a feeling that life itself is chaotic and
absurd. Since the existence of God or any instance which could provide
human life with values and ideals is negated, there is an absence of moral
values to be felt, which leaves man in the world with the freedom of action
but, on the other hand, with a purposelessness of existence. This might fur-
ther result in feelings of alienation, isolation, and lack of communication.7
At least some of these themes are present in Naukar kı̄ kamı̄z. There is
the motif of finding a place in a world, which at times seems incomprehen-
sible, and the feeling that one’s own life is subject to powers one is unable
to cope with (cf. Shukla 1999, 9, 1994, 15). There is also the question
which rises on a day off from work but is more or less constantly present:
what shall I do with my life? Santū imagines himself turning to traditional
instances that provide values, namely, elders:
Wise elders there were in plenty. If we picked one out, we could say to him:
“Respected one, tell me straight out, what is the meaning of my life? What
am I supposed to attain? I am young, twenty two, or at most twenty-three
years of age. Let me know now and I will not bother you with questions
again. I have lots of enthusiasm; I can figure out how to do things, all I
need to know this once is what I am supposed to do.” (Shukla 1999, 9–10,
1994, 15)
There are no elders coming forward to give answers, and when they do,
they only tell him to keep quiet, since no one will be able to change the
world.
Pressing on him—and on his wife—are the obligations to others.
Family is on the one hand a value and he confesses to loving his wife, his
mother, his brother, and his friends, but on the other hand it adds to his
obligations. Then there are the superiors at work: the landlord, the Sahib.
At the outset, Santū Bābū does not present himself as a fighter; he is no
hero who would openly revolt against his conditions of living. But he is
acutely aware of the oppression:
The arena of struggle was modest. Blows fell softly from afar till we hardly
felt the pain. Life was sucked out of us as a matter of course. We did not
think to object, or if we did object it was a matter of course. If the price of
vegetables rose, I thought the fault lay with the vendors who went from
lane to lane with their vegetable baskets. When I bought from them, I spoke
sharply about accuracy of weighing. I told them to leave out the rotten
potatoes. I told them they were thieves and scoundrels. This was the extent
of my protest. (…)If someone came along to chop off our heads all at once,
we would have struggled mightily. So no one rushed in to chop off heads.
The head was slowly severed over generations. There was no special bother
about it, poverty was a fact of life. Our heads doddered as we kept to our
work—that is, the work of offering up our heads. (Shukla 1999, 12–13,
1994, 17–18)
Much more evidence could be provided for Santū’s awareness of the work-
ings of the world and the relationship between rich and poor (cf. Shukla
1999, 115–116, 1994, 118–119).
As for religion, it hardly figures in the novel at all. There are references
to the grave of a Sufi placed between the colonial bungalow in which part
of the office is situated and the new building, the office being known unof-
ficially as “the Sufi’s office.” At that place, qavvālı̄ performances are held
every Friday night. The office also houses a statue of Hanumānjı̄ which a
brahmin watchman had erected at the former fireplace of the bungalow,
probably because it reminded him of a temple niche. On Tuesdays people
offered prayers there. A farmer who had vowed to offer worship if his crop
would be good is allowed to do so. But later a piece of cloth is draped
over the statue, so as to keep people from further worshipping there and
disturbing the working routine in the office. Thus, religion is part of the
everyday life, but it does not provide direction or values anymore.
The underlying situation in Naukar kı̄ kamı̄z could at times be charac-
terized as an existential situation, since the individual—Santū Bābū—is left
alone with himself and there is no instance outside himself to provide him
with directions and values for his life.
Given the seemingly absurd, oppressive circumstances of his live and
his search for a purposeful existence, it is not as if the protagonist is with-
out bonds to other people. He is not uprooted, but he has to fight those
who want to alienate him from himself. Furthermore, he has his moral
values and he has his ideals: even if he wants to break free from the obliga-
tions represented by traditional bonds to the larger family, he remains full
of love for his wife—even though he himself questions that occasionally.
Thus, he declares:
“Whatever happiness I have,” I said to her, “comes from you. I cannot

imagine anyone for my wife other than you. If magic transports me to the
time before I knew you I would still seek you out.” In childhood I learned
to call a cow a cow. After marriage I learned to call a wife a wife. (Shukla
1999, 110, 1994, 111)
If this implies accepting the necessity to call his wife his wife, at other
places it becomes obvious that he really loves her and plans his future
with her and that the fact that they belong together becomes all the more
emphasized when she is pregnant.
He wants to free himself from the obligations put upon him by employ-
ers and landlords demanding extra services, who treat him and his wife as
mere servants trapped in the cage that is represented by the real and the
imaginary forms of the servant’s shirt, the central symbol of the novel. He
does not want to perpetuate the model, by turning himself into another
Baṛe Bābū, becoming infected with “Sahib-ness,” by treating those
beneath him, whom he could make obliged to him, in the same way as he
is treated by his superiors.
But finally, when he finds the means to free himself from the forces of
oppression, he finds it in himself. It turns out to be the “weapon” of his
imagination. But its potential only dawns on him gradually. In the begin-
ning, he realizes imagination as something to be consumed, the images
produced by others that provide only temporary relief and from which one
sooner or later has to return to the world as it is:
To break free from the cage of my salary was beyond me. The cage fitted
me closely, like a shirt. For that salary I poured out my strength until all that
was left was weakness. Through a peephole in the cage I watched movies,
or dreams. Movies gave me what they gave to everyone—confidence to live.
This living was status quo. If a rickshaw-puller can marry a millionaire’s
daughter he is content to pull his rickshaw. Seeing a rich girl falling in love
with a poor boy gave poor people the joy of a servant who would rather
sweep dirt from under a rich man’s bed than sleep on his own charpai […].
(Shukla 1999, 13, 1994, 18)
During the development described in the novel, his understanding of the

creative use of imagination grows. It might be used to vent protest, as in
the Brechtian or experimental play which Santū Bābū and his fellow clerks,
Gaurāha Bābū and Devāṅgan Bābū, imagine to stage as a protest against
Baṛe Bābū for not granting sick leave to Gaurāha Bābū (cf. Shukla 1999,
35–38, 1994, 38–41).
From the examples that illustrate the way in which the novel is nar-
rated, it should become clear that Santū Bābū makes ample use of his
imagination. Towards the end of the novel, when he is aware of the
situation that he and his wife want to spend more time together because
of her pregnancy but are torn apart by the duties imposed on them by the
Sahib and the Doctor Madam, he comes again to think about his situation
and makes explicit his feeling of uneasiness and constraint and the neces-
sity of change:
I felt like moving to another house. I felt like quitting my job. Perhaps
instead of changing house and job I should change myself. What should I
change into? For a long time I had been getting ready to change and noth-
ing had happened. It could happen that I would change into someone ugly
first and find the right form only later […]. (Shukla 1999, 210, 1994, 214)
It is his wife, however, who resolves not to go to Doctor Madam’s any-

more, when she learns that her mother-in-law came to visit them and had
to leave again because both of them were away due to duties imposed on
them:
“I am relieved of Doctor Madam’s work this instant,” my wife announced.

“I am not a bonded slave. If the watchman calls for me I will refuse to go.”
“I, too, will work at the office during office hours. I will not stop in at
the Sahib’s bungalow. I will come straight to the house from the office and
spend all my time with you. We will take Mother with us and lock the house
and the three of us together will go out for a stroll.” (Shukla 1999, 215,
1994, 219)
Finally, when he is away from home to fetch his mother to help them dur-
ing his wife’s pregnancy, he thinks of his wife and explicitly speaks of the
working and the power of imagination:
What was she doing at home? Imagination is a powerful thing. It is hard

to distinguish between what we remember and what we imagine. What we
remember may be true but sometimes what we imagine may be more true.
(Shukla 1999, 236–237, 1994, 241)
He goes on to imagine how his wife will be called by the watchman in the
morning to call her to duty and how she refuses, telling him to tell the
Doctor Madam that she is no servant, not accepting Madam’s claim to be
under obligation to her, and so on. He further imagines himself in the office:
What would have happened if I sat on Baṛe Bābū’s chair? I could have sat
on the Sahib’s chair as well, but even in imagination I did not want to sit on
the Sahib’s chair. I picked a jackfruit from the jackfruit tree and flung it into
an empty bus. There was a report and the commotion of people hurrying
away. No one was injured. When the smoke cleared the passengers returned
to the bus. The bus left only when all the seats were filled.
I saw a complete plaster cast of myself on the rubbish heap behind the
house. There was a hole to breathe through and holes for eyes and mouth.
The cast had just been removed. I had been broken once; now I was whole.
(Shukla 1999, 238–239, 1994, 243–244)
When using imagination creatively, one does not only flee from reality,
leaving behind the oppressive status quo, but creates a space for one-
self, one’s own individuality. Santū is now able to face life afresh and
to finally throw off the servant’s shirt, tear it to shreds, and burn these.
This kind of imagination is not a means for simply fleeing from reality
but for discovering his own direction in life. Thus, the protagonist not
only comes to see the world differently but becomes aware of the inher-
ent possibility to make his own choices, to become, idealiter, the author
of his own life.
We might, therefore, call the novel idealistic or imaginistic, parallel
to a definition of the absurd novel as being absurd in form, theme, and
content. In the case of Naukar kı̄ kamı̄z, we have a novel the form of
which is dominated by the workings of imagination which we witness in
the style of narration. Its central theme is the power of imagination made
explicit in the plot of the novel and, at crucial points in the novel, by the
protagonist himself.
Summing up, we have seen that the novel cannot be labelled as an
absurd novel, which would require absurdity in form and content—but
then, absurd novels in this sense are even rare in Western literature.
More likely, Naukar kı̄ kamı̄z could be seen as an existential novel.
This category is characterized by the acceptance of the absurd situation of
man in the universe and of the rule of chance and absurdity over human
action, reality being another name for chaos. The existentialist novel,
then, focuses on the ways to cope with absurdity. There are those novels,
in the West and in India, which Jaidev in his seminal study (1993, 20–30
and passim) subsumes under the umbrella terms of “high modernism”
or “existentialist aestheticism.” In these novels the alienated, authentic
individual is privileged at the expense of the community. The individual
is seen as the sole arbiter of his or her morality. There, the self needs to
construct its own alternative world, in which style becomes salvation, the
artist claiming credit for fashioning an alternative, superior world out of
the given, banal world. On the other hand, there are novels of the “opti-
mistic chroniclers of the absurd,” sharing the belief that man can establish
values in an absurdist world. Their heroes, according to the author of a
study of American novels of the 1960s, “all begin their quests with a vision
of the apparent lack of meaning in the world, of the mendacity and failure
of ideals, but they conclude with gestures of affirmation derived explicitly
from their realization of the significance of love” (Galloway 1970, pref.).
Thus, the existentialist situation is only tenable through individual will and
responsibility, through the sincere private gesture.
In Naukar kı̄ kamı̄z, the existentialist situation is present with little
instances that provide direction. Santū’s feeling is not quite that of being
thrown into an alien universe. The absurdity he does register around him
does not amount to the experience of a horrifying chaos. From the begin-
ning, there are values he adheres to: love, responsibility for his wife and his
unborn baby, and his decision not to play the game of masters and servants
but to treat fellow humans as humans. He is searching for a way to defend
these values and to defend his individuality. Imagination, powerful as it
is, is a means of liberation, but no end in itself, and he does not preach
individuality without any bindings to society.
Thus, Santū can be seen as rooted and contextualized. The ques-
tion which still remains to be answered is whether this makes him more
Indian—and if so, does this make the novel Indian?
Santū is represented at least in part as confirming to the “salient fea-
tures of pan-Indian cultural practices” as again mentioned by Jaidev (1993,
9–10), namely, responding to others in a familial way. In this case family is
a value, and reverence for the elderly, the neighbourhood, and community
is the major feature of India’s socio-cultural reality. Individuality is granted
to people, but individualism is not regarded as a value in itself. If these
features are also taken to characterize a representative Indian reader, he
might see the novel as Indian and would perceive the novel as relevant to
him. Obviously, the decisive point would be the characterization of this
representative Indian. To what degree is he influenced by Western models,
to what degree is he true to the characteristics of the māmūlı̄ masses, the
average people, and which would those be?
If we take the representative reader to belong to the same lower middle
class as represented in the novel, he or she might well recognize the cir-
cumstances of life represented there as authentic and relevant to him. He
will probably be conversant with the attempts to make himself free from
reality for some time by using his imagination, or by consuming images,
as presented in cinema and TV, or by reading novels. And he might well

be aware of a wish to become the “author” of his own life, as presented as
the programmatic ideal of the novel, even if the obligations described in
the novel keep him from making the ideal come true.
And if he happens to be an author, like Vishnu Khare, he might become
quite enthusiastic about a novel highlighting the power of imagination,
that is, the working of art and literature—which could partly explain why
Vinod Kumar Shukla awarded, among other designations, that of being
an authors’ author.
Notes
1. A divergent point of view is voiced by the text on the flaps of the
second hardbound edition of the novel (1987), where its style is
compared to that of the writings of Günter Grass. But this statement
might also be inspired by reasons of publicity and marketing.
2. Compare Jaidev (1993), Devy (1992), as well as the discussions in
Hatkanagalekar (ed. 1984), Satchidanandan (ed. 1994), and
Paranjape (ed. 1997).
3. This feature is also hinted at by Khare, who in the title of his preface
to the above-mentioned translation (1996) refers to the novel as
“The absurd tale/the tale of incoherence of the lower middle
classes” Nimnamadhyavarg kı̄ visaṅgati-gāthā, while the English
translator of the novel emphasizes the tone of “friendly absurdity”
as characteristic of the novel. Mariola Offredi designates some of
Shukla’s poems written before and at the same time as Naukar kı̄
kamı̄z as absurd in subject and style (Offredi 1999, 84ff).
4. Anand Patil in his “A Comparative study of nativistic intertextuality
in Indian fiction” (Patil 1997) named criteria for the “deśi-ness” of
novels such as the degree to which texts use folklore, relate or allude
to scriptures belonging to their respective culture, make use of prov-
erbs and sayings, music, songs, abusive terms, and so on, as well as
the way in which language is employed and regional and local dia-
lects, different levels of language are represented. However, it could
be asked whether all this deśı-̄ ness does qualify a novel as being more
Indian or whether it simply stands for high realism. Further, as indi-
cated in the outline of the theme of the present volume, Indianness
could be detected in specific myths, legends, or philosophy of Indian
nature or in literary devices such as symbolism.
5. The quotation is from the English translation (Shukla 1999). For

reasons of space, the quotations are not given in Hindi, but refer-
ences are given to the paperback edition of the Hindi text (Shukla
1994).
6. The reader is informed only later. For instance, in the statement that
the mother has returned to her elder son, where the fact that she was
no longer there was already mentioned many times. In the same way
we come to know that Santū’s wife is pregnant in one of the associa-
tive chains of events and thoughts triggered off by problems of stor-
age of fruit to save them from mice (Shukla 1999, 177, cf. 163–185
for context, Shukla 1994, 178, 164–186).
7. For a study of existentialism in the work of a modern Indian writer
of English novels, cf. Pandey (1998).
References
Sources
Shukla, Vinod Kumar. 1994. Naukar kı̄ kamı̄z. Naı̄ Dillı̄: Rajkamal Prakashan. (1st
edn.: Hapur, Sambhavana Prakasha, 1979).
———. 1999. The Servant’s Shirt. Trans. Satti Khanna. New Delhi: Penguin
Books India.
On Vinod Kumar Shukla

Khare, Vishnu. 1996. Nimnamadhyavarg kı̄ visaṅgati-gāthā. Kalā Prayojana 4,
April–June: 69–72.
Offredi, Mariola. 1998. La poesia di Vinod Kumār Śukl. Milan: Cesviet.
———. 1999. The Hindi Poet Vinod Kumār Śukl. Archiv Orientalni 67: 83–94.
Further References
Bal, M. 1985. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
Damsteegt, Theo. 1998. Struggling with Masculinity: Ravindra Kaliya’s’ “Maiṃ”.
In Narrative Strategies. Essays on South Asian Literature and Film, eds. Vasudha
Dalmia and Theo Damsteegt, 150–164. Leiden: Research School CNWS.
(CNWS Publications 66).
Devy, G.N. 1992. After Amnesia: Tradition and Change in Indian Literary
Criticism. Bombay: Orient Longman.
Galloway, David D. 1970. The Absurd Hero in American Fiction, Rev. edn. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Hatkanagalekar, M.D. (ed). 1984. [Issue on Nativism]. New Quest 45,
May–June.
Hinchliffe, Arnold P. 1969. The Absurd. London: Methuen. (The Critical Idiom
5).
Hindi Novel. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study. (Monograph 80).
Pandey, Mukteshwar. 1998. Arun Joshi: The Existentialist Element in His Novels.
Delhi: B. R. Publishing Corporation.
Paranjape, Makarand (ed). 1997. Nativism. Essays in Criticism. New Delhi: Sahitya
Akademi.
Patil, Anand. 1997. A Comparative Study of Nativistic Intertextuality in Indian
Fiction. In Nativism. Essays in Criticism, ed. Makarand Paranjape, 177–210.
New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi.
Rimmon-Kenan, S. [1983] 1991. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics.
London/New York: Routledge. (1st edn. London: Methuen, 1983).
Satchidanandan, K. (ed). 1994. Literary Criticism: The New Challenges. Indian
Literature 160. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi.
Thomson, Philip. 1972. The Grotesque. London: Methuen. (The Critical
Idiom 24).
CHAPTER 9
‘Subah kī sair’ and ‘Dūsrı̄ duniyā’, Two

Short Stories by Nirmal Varma
Mariola Offredi
This chapter discusses the theme of the Indian character of Indian litera-
ture through the analysis of two short stories by the Hindi writer Nirmal
Varma (Shimla 1929—New Delhi 2005): ‘Dūsrı̄ duniyā’ (Another World)
and ‘Subah kı̄ sair’ (The Morning Walk), from the collection Kavve aur
kālā pānı̄ (Crows and the Exile, 1983). The author is a symbolic example.
He has lived in two different worlds: India and Europe. Neither of the
two is a single unit. In India he has experienced two subworlds: that of
his childhood, Shimla, high in the mountains, the beauty of whose coun-
tryside left an imprint in many of his short stories and novels (Marková
2008, 359), and Delhi, when he was an MA student of History at St.
Stephen’s College and where he returned in 1972 after having lived for
many years in Europe. Here also two subworlds can be identified: Prague,
where he lived for nine years (1959–1968), and London (1968–1972,
with wide travels throughout the continent). He was a cosmopolitan who
spoke three languages: Hindi, English and Czech. The worlds the author
has lived in are the setting for the two stories: India (the jungle in ‘Subah
kı̄ sair’) and Europe (a park in London in ‘Dūsrı̄ duniyā’). Despite the dif-
ferent setting, the central theme is the same: an adult’s relationship with
M. Offredi (*)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41015-9_9
148 M. OFFREDI
a little girl. The focus of my analysis is on characters and the atmosphere

in which the action (or non-action) takes place. Relevance has been given
to the stages of space and time in the two stories, out of the consideration
that the narrative rhythm is the unifying factor of a writer’s work.
What is India, what is Indianness and what is culture? Culture can be
seen as a world in making. Nirmal Varma expresses this ‘in making’, the
Indian mind through his own mind, a mind that has experienced a cos-
mopolitan life, giving it new life through his own language. He once said:
‘When I write in Hindi, I am Indian’.
Chronologically, the short story ‘Dūsrı̄ duniyā’ was written before
‘Subah kı̄ sair’. Both were published in the collection Kavve aur kālā pānı̄,
the first edition of which appeared in 1983. The collection contains seven
short stories; ‘Dūsrı̄ duniyā’ is the second and ‘Subah kı̄ sair’ the fourth.
‘Dūsrı̄ duniyā’ is comparatively long, comprising 24 pages (pp. 17–40 in
the third edition of 1989), whereas ‘Subah kı̄ sair’ is only 16 pages long
(pp. 65–80).
In both stories, the central theme is an adult’s relationship with a little
girl; and they both take the form of rekindled memories, albeit of different
kinds. ‘Dūsrı̄ duniyā’ is the recollection of a single event, whilst ‘Subah kı̄
sair’ is a series of reminiscences which, as they run through the mind of
the central character, tell the story of his life—or, more specifically, the
inability to love which is to culminate in his suicide.
The Characters
The characters in both stories may be divided into real and imaginary
figures.
D ūsr ī duniyā
The main characters are as follows: the narrator (a young man who, dur-
ing the course of the story, is revealed to be Indian), a little girl named
Greta (the description of whom shows her to be of black West Indian
descent) and Greta’s mother, Mrs. Parker, a nurse. The principal imag-
inary characters, who exist as figments of the little girl’s imagination,
are Mrs. Thomas and the trees, which Greta treats as human beings.
Although the trees could be perceived as a group, it is actually the narra-
tor who views them as a group; as far as the little girl is concerned, they
are all different people, each of them no less an individual than the nar-
rator himself.
‘SUBAH KĪ SAIR’ AND ‘DŪSRĪ DUNIYĀ’, TWO SHORT STORIES BY NIRMAL VARMA 149
At the striking of the hospital clock, we both jumped. The little girl picked
up her satchel from the bench and walked towards the trees that stood in
silence. She went up to each tree, touching it, saying something that the
trees alone could hear. Eventually she came up to me and shook my hand,
as though I, too, were one of those trees. (‘Dūsrı̄ duniyā’, Varma 1989, 22)
Subah k ī sair

The characters in ‘Subah kı̄ sair’ may also be divided into real and imagi-
nary figures, the difference being that those in ‘Subah kı̄ sair’ are phan-
toms—people from the past who now return as ghosts to haunt the
protagonist’s mind. The real characters featured in ‘Subah kı̄ sair’ are, first
and foremost, its central figure, the elderly Colonel Nihālcandra, followed
by his servant, Devı̄sinh. The chief imaginary characters, the ghosts peo-
pling Nihālcandra’s memories, are a little girl, Kaṭṭo; his dead wife; and
the monks of the Buddhist monastery of Laddakh.
Language
In comparison with ‘Subah kı̄ sair’, the language used in ‘Dūsrı̄ duniyā’
is more elemental. In ‘Dūsrı̄ duniyā’, a conversation between the narrator
and a little girl is recalled. In the narrative, it recounted as events occurred.
“Wait, I’m coming with you, but if you try to escape … you’ll die right
here.” She stopped and looked at me: “Do you want to die?”
I hastily shook my head. It was such a hot and sunny day that I had no
wish to die.
We went to the field. I took out my handkerchief and set about gathering
flowers and leaves. What doesn’t a man do to be free.
On the way back she was silent. I looked at her out of the corner of my
eye. She looked sickly. Serious, like those children who always play alone.
When she was not speaking, her lips were clamped tightly shut: her lower lip
jutted out a bit, giving her flat nose a vulnerable look. She had very short,
jet-black hair, divided into plump curls like washed cotton to which my
hand kept straying unconsciously. But she, so wrapped up in herself, seemed
beyond reach.
“Now you can feed them,” she said. She had gone up to the trees and
paused there.
“Will they let me go?” I wanted a guarantee, some assurance.
This time she smiled—and for the first time I saw her teeth—white and
gleaming, as those of little black girls often are. (‘Dūsrı̄ duniyā’, Varma
1989, 21)
150 M. OFFREDI
The language used in ‘Subah kī sair’ is more complex. In absolute terms

(in other words, not in relative ones), it is just as elemental as that of ‘Dūsrī
duniyā’. The difference lies in the fact that the protagonist of ‘Subah kī
sair’ is far more complex than the characters in ‘Dūsrī duniyā’; the mental
re-evocation of the past whose ghosts return to torment him is mirrored
in the outside world. The outside world is filtered through his mind or is
used to convey his emotions.
That day, the children’s voices continued at length to echo through Nihālcandra’s
ears. Then everything fell silent. He took one last deep breath, which came out as
a damp sigh. He picked up his walking stick from the bridge and began to wipe
the handle with his handkerchief. Using the same handkerchief, he blew his nose
and wiped his lips. A hazy thought came to him, perhaps there was a pain inside
him, but he was not brave enough to call this pain ‘thirst’. He existed within a
fog of pains; to give them a name meant opening the marauder’s big basket,
out of which who knows how many other pains might spring out. No, brother,
better this fog, where everything is the same. (‘Subah kı̄ sair’, Varma 1989, 66)
So tall was he that, by lifting his arm just a fraction, he could touch the
skipping rope, could grab it and pull it down, yet he stayed where he was
without moving; “Kat ̣ṭo,” he murmured softly, then his voice rose a little to
a wheezing cry that had somehow managed to escape, and this time no one
stopped him, no one squeezed his throat to silence him, and he carried on
listening to his own voice echoing through the jungle, in the midst of the
bushes and trees, from infancy through to old age …
No reply came. There was no one around. The wind had risen and
the trees were rustling … the two ends of the skipping rope were swaying
drunkenly. He stayed where he was for a while, in the hope that she would
suddenly come out from the bushes, that she would return for her skipping
rope … but for a long time there was nothing, neither her laughter nor the
rustling of the bushes—nothing that could reassure him that she had come
to him that afternoon, had sat down beside him, had rummaged through his
pockets as he slept; and upon awakening, his papers were strewn about …
Nihālcandra? Did you really wake up?
When he unbuttons his coat, the whistling November wind batters his
body. Overhead, the trees, below, the bushes, in the middle the swaying
red flames of the gulmohar, rustling voices, the sound of which reminds
Nihālcandra of the jungles of Gwalior, where he used to go hunting with
his army friends. Now he can’t even remember them. A slide illuminates the
screen to a crackling sound … part of his life comes up for breath—then,
with a splash, it plunges into the dark—and Nihālcandra, walking swiftly,
disappears into the jungle. (‘Subah kı̄ sair’, Varma 1989, 67)
If the scene breaks off, it is only in one place—where the jungle starts. Here
there is no sound, no color, no light … nothing but flickering patches of
sunlight beneath the long row of trees. There is no need for sunglasses here.
Nihālcandra takes the knapsack off one shoulder and places it on the other.
As darkness fell, the wind dropped. Nothing was moving, not a shrub, not
a leaf, not a tree. Every so often, it would emerge from the jungle like a warm
sigh, making a whistling sound—rising high—above the dhobı̄ghāt ̣ … as it
continued its path, startling the dogs, sliding down to the dirty brook, and
creeping slowly towards Nihālcandra’s front door, where it came to a halt.
As he dozed, Devı̄sinh heard it—and it continued to make him feel
uneasy. He was mountain-bred, and since his infancy had been hearing these
dark, soundless jungle voices that were not voices—only the silent desires of
the jungle’s body, that would burst out in the moaning of the animals and
trees. He kept running to the door, peering out, and then racing back to the
kitchen. (‘Subah kı̄ sair’, Varma 1989, 77–78)
Setting
‘Dūsrı̄ duniyā’ is set in London, which is identified by name. ‘Subah kı̄
sair’ is set in India; several Indian locations are mentioned. ‘Dūsrı̄ duniyā’
is also the story of the meeting of two different nationalities—the Indian
narrator and the West Indian girl who invents an imaginary world contain-
ing an Englishwoman, Mrs. Thomas. Although ‘Subah kı̄ sair’ is not about
a meeting between two nationalities, the presence of a ‘foreign land’ is felt
in the recollection of the son who lives abroad. Although this son puts in
a brief—indeed, barely perceptible—appearance in the narrative, he acts
as a modern, westernized counterpart who highlights the quintessential
Indian character of his father, the elderly Colonel Nihālcandra, the pro-
tagonist of the story.
The locations of the significant scenes of the two stories are the park in
‘Dūsrı̄ duniyā’ and the jungle in ‘Subah kı̄ sair’. They may be described as
two stereotypical natural locations: the park in London and the jungle in
India. They therefore carry equal weight as ‘natural settings’.
Narrative Tense
‘Dūsrı̄ duniyā’ is narrated in the ‘zero degree of writing’, the imperfect
tense. The entire story may be described as a flashback in that it recalls a
past event. In roughly the last fifth of the story, the narrator switches to
the present tense.
152 M. OFFREDI
I remember that time, because I had just found work. It was my first job in
London. (‘Dūsrı̄ duniyā’, Varma 1989, 37)
After a hazily defined period of time—described at one point as ‘a few

days’ and later on as ‘quite a long time’—the flashback resumes. The first
flashback (taking up approximately four fifths of the story) consists of the
young man’s narrative in which the little girl, Greta, is present. The final
flashback, covering roughly the last fifth of the tale, deals with the absence
of Greta, whose father has taken her to the West Indies where he has
found a job. Unemployment has prevented him from staying in London,
where the little girl’s mother works as a nurse.
‘Subah kı̄ sair’ is narrated in the present tense. However, because the
central character relives his past life, there are numerous flashbacks (which
I will not go into here).
A preliminary reading of the stories would suggest that their narrative tenses
are different. However, if we examine the texts more closely and observe the
‘time scales’ of the narrator (who, in this case, corresponds with the author),
it becomes apparent that both stories are divided into stages. They are stages
of both space and time which reveal the rhythm of the author’s thought and
expression. This observation is of fundamental significance. Narrative rhythm
is possibly the factor which most serves to unify a writer’s work.
In both stories, three main stages may be noted. In ‘Dūsrı̄ duniyā’ they
are not referred to; however, in ‘Subah kı̄ sair’ they are mentioned.
First Stage
As soon as morning came, I went to the library […] It was one such sleepy
early afternoon that I had spotted the little girl from the open window of
the library. She had put her satchel down on a bench and hidden behind the
trees. (‘Dūsrı̄ duniyā’, Varma 1989, 17)
He carries on walking. Beyond the brook is a small bridge, gleaming with

whitewash. Once there, he stops: this is the first stage of his morning walk.
He rests his walking stick against the bridge, takes his knapsack off his shoul-
der and attaches it to the handle, straightens up, almost standing to atten-
tion. He takes a breath, drawing the air in, then tightens it into a knot
and expels it. Then he takes another breath, tightening, knotting, releas-
ing. Then the third breath … does all this soothe him? No one knows. He
doesn’t ask himself, there is no one else to ask. (‘Subah kı̄ sair’, Varma 1989,
65, italics are mine)
Second Stage
The next day the sun was shining, and I was unable to sit for long in the
library. As soon as it was midday I left, and walked round to the restaurant
where I ate each day. Here, for just one and sixpence you could have kosher
meat, two rolls and a small glass of beer. The Jewish restaurant owner, who
had lived in Lithuania before the war, would be sitting on a high stool. On
the counter stood a small cash register, and beneath it a white Siamese cat
scrutinized the customers. Maybe it had begun to recognize me, because it
stared at me with its green eyes all the time I was eating. In times of poverty
and cold and loneliness, even a cat means a lot, I used to think. I also used
to think that one day I would open an Indian restaurant myself, and keep
three cats together. (‘Dūsrı̄ duniyā’, Varma 1989, 19)
The havāmahal, a Mogul monument built in yellow stone, stands opposite.

Burning in the November sunshine …
Sweat trickles down from Nihālcandra’s grey hair to his temples. He
shakes his head vigorously, wipes his forehead with his handkerchief, sets
down his walking stick and his knapsack on the steps of the havāmahal. The
weariness from his walk slips away from his body and joins the crumbling
ruins.
This is the second stage of his morning walk. (‘Subah kı̄ sair’,
Varma 1989, 67)
Third Stage
When I left the restaurant, I no longer felt like going back to the library.
After a long wait, letters and newspapers from home had arrived that day.
I wanted to read them in the sunshine of the park. I was a little surprised
to see flowers in the park. They were tiny flowers, standing stiffly amid the
grass with uplifted heads. Maybe they were the flowers that Jesus called lilies
in the field, flowers that do not worry about tomorrow.
They reminded me of past summers.
I started to walk over those flowers in the grass.
I found it very agreeable. My worries about the future began to dissolve.
I felt carefree. I took off my shoes and set off barefoot across the grass. I was
just approaching the bench when I heard a shout behind me. Someone was
running towards me. I turned round to look, it was none other than the little
girl. She came out of the trees and stood in front of me, blocking my path.
“You are caught,” she laughed, “now you can’t go any further.”
I did not understand. I stayed where I was.
“You’ve been captured …,” she repeated, “you are on my territory.”
154 M. OFFREDI
I looked around, on the grass were the flowers, at the edge stood the
empty benches, in the middle, three evergreen trees and an oak tree with a
broad trunk. I couldn’t see her territory anywhere.
“I didn’t know,” I said, and, turning around, started to go back.
“No, no … you can’t go,” the little girl stationed herself right in front of
me. Her eyes were glittering: “They won’t let you go.”
“Who won’t let me go,” I asked.
She pointed at the trees, which now really did look like soldiers, tall,
sturdy guardsmen. I had unwittingly fallen into their invisible trap.
For a while we stood facing each other. Her eyes, excited and alert, never
left me. When she saw that I had no plan to escape, she softened a little.
(‘Dūsrı̄ duniyā’, Varma 1989, 19–20)
It was a peaceful moment. The faded November sun was slowly beginning
to draw away from the skeletal ruins of the havāghar. Trees, leaves, shrubs,
stood motionless. Nihālcandra waited with bated breath; the movement of
a blade of grass would have tensed his body. He tightly shut his eyelids,
inside which his eyeballs began to dance like multicolored balls, and then
with a sharp jerk he left himself—his body became separated from him. And
Nihālcandra? He was going in another direction, where his last and final
stage lay.
There was no one there to see him; no fear, no doubt, no witness. In the
shadow of the ruins his body lay face down. She slid towards him, turning
inside out the cunnı̄ that lay across her chest and throwing it around her
shoulders, she curled up against him and then Nihālcandra fancied that the
specks of sunlight behind his eyelids were actually the bright red dots on her
salvār-kamı̄z—right in front of him, he could touch them if he wished. But
he held back. He pretended he couldn’t see anything; he let her fingers play
over his body: “Oh Nihālı̄, [are they] really empty?”
No, today his pockets were not empty; today I have brought everything.
Do you want to see? He raised his head a fraction, and her imploring black
eyes began to swallow him up; eyes that with just one look weigh up the
deceit of his past life. (‘Subah kı̄ sair’, Varma 1989, 70–71)
The first two steps may be regarded as introductions to the significant

event, which is actually recounted in the third stage. In ‘Subah kī sair’,
the third stage is also described as the final one. In ‘Dūsrī duniyā’, where
the stages are not specifically mentioned, the main event once again takes
place during the last stage. In both tales, the event involves a quest: in
‘Dūsrī duniyā’, the quest for a free world and in ‘Subah kī sair’, the quest
for truth. Neither one nor the other is fulfilled, but in ‘Dūsrī duniyā’
(which may be described as the meeting up of different cultures against
the background of a third culture—Western culture), the search for a free
world leads to momentary freedom from the constraints of everyday life.

In ‘Subah kī sair’, however, which is set in India, with a contrasting look at
a bleak, Westernized culture (Nihālcandra’s son), the search for truth ends
in suicide, brought about by the protagonist’s realization that, through-
out his life, he has never been able to love.
D ūsr ī duniyā
The section I have described as the third and final stage takes up 9/10th
of the narrative, from just after the middle of page 19 to the end (p. 40).
Significantly, this section begins with the first gap in the text. In terms of
layout—in other words, the way the story is set out on the page—this gap
is unnecessary. Indeed, the previous section concludes with the scene in
the restaurant, which in turn has brought the library scene to a close. The
gap picks up the theme of the restaurant and library, leading up to the nar-
rator’s decision to go to the park:
When I left the restaurant, I no longer felt like going back to the library.
After a long wait, letters and newspapers from home had arrived that day.
I wanted to read them in the sunshine of the park. (‘Dūsrı̄ duniyā’, Varma
1989, 19)
In ‘Dūsrī duniyā’, this third and final stage is not complex. It does, how-
ever, highlight the author’s narrative rhythm.
Subah kī sair
In ‘Subah kı̄ sair’, the third and final stage is far more complex than in
‘Dūsrı̄ duniyā’. It is split into two ways: the reality of the scene in the jungle
and the events taking place in Nihālcandra’s memory as he recalls the time
he was posted to the desert border between Rajasthan and Pakistan. The
element linking the two stages (real and imaginary) is the quest for truth—
the Colonel’s attempt to understand why he is now alone. His loneliness
stems from the fact that, throughout his life, he has never learned to love.
This is the unspoken reply to the question put to him by the phantom
voice—personified by the little girl—in the last real stage of his journey.
There was only the girl’s finger, thick with dust, clutching the face that was
his wife, a grimy scrap of paper, a round nought, the shadow of the photo-
graph …
“Nihālı̄,” the little girl’s voice was very low, “does he come sometimes?”
156 M. OFFREDI
“Who?”, he asked in some surprise, “Who comes?”

“Your son?”
“He’s away.”
“And this woman?”, the little girl looked at the photograph.
“You’re mad!”, Nihālcandra laughed at her obtuseness, “She’s not in this
world now.”
“And what about you?”
“What about me, Kat ̣t ̣o?”
For the first time, the girl’s name slipped from his mouth—out of panic
… “What about me? What does that mean?” The little girl began looking at
him, her eyes bewildered. Her mouth gaped slightly open.
“Nihālı̄?”
“What?”
“Can you see me?”
Nihālcandra continued to stare at her with hungry, empty eyes. Suddenly
he realized how tiny Katṭ ̣o seemed after all these years—like a little dwarf.
Long ago, when she had really been just a few years old, how tall and young
she had seemed! Perhaps time moves backwards? No, he’s just imagin-
ing things. Perhaps everything seems big to a child—the house, the trees,
mummy and daddy and—all of a sudden Nihālcandra jumped, as if the girl
had turned back and whispered in his ears: “And—love, what else?”
“Love? Have you ever been able to love someone, Nihālı̄? Colonel
Nihālcandra?”
As if reeling from a blow, he retreated into himself. Who did this voice
belong to, or was it just trickery and illusion. The absurd cry from within,
which rises in the jungle of old age, a burning wandering voice, knocks at
the door, if you open it nothing is there, the endless expanse of emptiness
appears, no one for miles, the blood inside rattles against the burning lū
outside, no love, nor affection, nor the pain of attraction—not even pain,
nothing appears, the face of his wife and the memory of his son, nothing—
just me. Who, Nihālcandra, who are you?
Tak-tak-tak … she’s jumping with her skipping rope. Up and down, down
and up … in the bleakness of the ruins the echo of her feet began to slap
against Nihālcandra’s closed eyelids. (‘Subah kı̄ sair’, Varma 1989, 72–73)
The desert! His hands paused on the scattered papers. The last place he
had been posted was right there, on the border between Rajasthan and
Pakistan; the desert stretched all around. When he thinks of it now it
makes him laugh, but at that time all he wanted was to go there. He felt
as though he had reached the last stage of his life. He roamed the desert
for hours, he sat on the sand peaks, the memory of neither his wife or son
came to him, in the lonely hours he felt as though he were slowly heading
towards a truth, touching the bottom of that dark well that at the very end
of his life had left him so alone … Sometimes he was puzzled, too: was
the truth that he hadn’t been able to have from the Buddhist monks in
Laddakh finally appearing to him in the rustling flying desert dust? What
truth, Nihālı̄?
Nihālcandra turned his head, he wanted to say something, something
that had been building up inside him for years—it filled his throat to the
brim, slicing through exhaustion, age and indecision … but there was no
one there. The November sun was falling on the bushes. The dome of the
havāghar was raised in the air like a motionless sky-blue fist … neither kites,
nor sparrows, nor any voice. Not even the smack of the skipping rope. There
was only a cold gleam of stone … that now lay spread like a faded white light
across the whole jungle. (‘Subah kı̄ sair’, Varma 1989, 75)
Ending
In both stories, the ending takes place in natural surroundings, albeit for
different reasons. In ‘Dūsrı̄ duniyā’, the narrator returns to the park hop-
ing to find the little girl; in ‘Subah kı̄ sair’, Colonel Nihālcandra, in order
to return to the jungle, does not physically leave it. In both short stories,
the setting of the conclusion is the route taken on a return journey. In
‘Dūsrı̄ duniyā’, the narrator rises from the bench to make his way towards
the exit of the park; in ‘Subah kı̄ sair’, Nihālcandra makes his return jour-
ney along the same path through the jungle he has taken that morning.
Physical space also turns into mental space. In both stories, the central
character comes to a halt midway and does not wish to go any further. And
in both stories, what stops the protagonist in his tracks is a call: a voice that
is not a voice in ‘Dūsrı̄ duniyā’ and the sound of a skipping rope in ‘Subah
kı̄ sair’. In each case, memory is calling out.
This is dealt with in different ways in the two stories. However, the
factor that again allows us to link the two stories is the reversal of our
expectations of this call of memory. In ‘Dūsrı̄ duniyā’, where everything
is solidly real, the voice that calls out is a non-voice. In ‘Subah kı̄ sair’,
which is all about the ghosts that race through the mind of the central
character, the skipping rope is real. Appearing throughout the story as
a ghost that emits a real noise, the skipping rope dangling from the tree
where Nihālcandra has hanged himself from a branch is actually seen by
his servant, Devı̄sinh.
In both cases, it is another character who brings the tale to its close.
In ‘Dūsrı̄ duniyā’, it is the park keeper, and in ‘Subah kı̄ sair’, it is the
158 M. OFFREDI
servant, Devı̄sinh, the difference being that the park keeper is a stranger
(the author even makes him speak in English: ‘It is time, dear! […] It is
closing time!’ ‘Dūsrı̄ duniyā’, p. 40), whereas Devı̄sinh is Nihālcandra’s
loyal servant and ‘guardian’ who, because he knows the voices of the jun-
gle, has a place in Nihālcandra’s emotional life.
Conclusion
Could we perhaps take the two tales as a single story, the continuation
in India of an experience which took place in London? Perhaps we could
interpret ‘Subah kī sair’ as an Indian version of ‘Dūsrī duniyā’? This could
be a challenging topic, but to analyze it would involve an examination of
the author’s unconscious. This is not what I aim to do, preferring some-
thing less ambitious.
On the basis of these two short stories, I will restrict myself to dealing
with the notion of Indianness as a problem of communication.
It is undoubtedly not the first time that anyone has pointed out that
there are as many texts as there are readers. On the one hand, the nucleus
that forms like a kernel in the mind of a writer (or, for that matter, any art-
ist) grows, eventually evolving into the lives and experiences of the differ-
ent characters he creates; on the other, it enters the mind of the individual
reader who, by identifying actively with one or another of the characters,
allows that character to develop further.
First of all, let’s take a look at the author. For this chapter I have
chosen Nirmal Varma and his two short stories. In one of them, ‘Dūsrī
duniyā’, the kernel from which the story evolved was certainly the
author’s personal experience. However, much the narrator must be
regarded as a separate entity from the writer, in ‘Dūsrī duniyā’ one is
bound, at least initially, to identify the two, because several details from
the writer’s own life can be recognized in the narrator’s description of
himself. To tell the truth, Nirmal Varma himself confirmed to me that
the story is based on an event that took place whilst he was living in
London.
I didn’t stay for long in that part of London. At the time, I was moving from
one place to another, looking for cheap accommodation.
They were lean times for me. (‘Dūsrī duniyā’, Varma 1989, 17)
The author’s life and experiences are significant at this point. Nirmal Varma
has lived in two different worlds, the Indian world and the European
world. Within these two worlds, we can, if we wish, identify other spatial
and cultural units which I would broadly define as ‘subworlds’. Set inside
the Indian world, his childhood world, Shimla, can be identified, a town
which, set at an altitude of over 2000 meters, is quite unlike the plain,
or, more specifically, Delhi, where Nirmal Varma lived for many years.
Two units can be identified in the European world: London with England
and Prague with what was then known as Czechoslovakia. It may be that
Nirmal Varma perceived greater differences between the two European
subworlds because he spoke both their languages, language being the tool
required to make a culture ones own. In the narrator of ‘Dūsrī duniyā’,
we can recognize certain aspects of the Indian student who is the central
character of the novel Ve din (Those Days, 1964), which is set in Prague.
In both of the Indian subworlds, however, the language is the same—
Hindi. Given that they are linked by a single language, a tendency towards
stylistic unity can be perceived in his treatment of the various events (both
external and internal). In ‘Subah kī sair’, the mountain-bred servant
Devīsinh and Colonel Nihālcandra both hear the voices of the jungle,
but in a different way—ghosts of a barren past for Nihālcandra and voices
heard as the repressed desires of the body of the jungle for Devīsinh.
The unifying feature is style: in both cases there is a feeling of suspense,
of impending danger, which will ultimately lead to the convergence of
Nihālcandra and Devīsinh in a single point at the end of the story.
The moon had come out over the trees, and a strange light glittered
throughout the jungle. He came upon him not far away, his two arms dan-
gling in the wind. Devīsinh stopped walking. He thought it rather queer
that although it was Nihālcandra’s face alright, the same body, the same
clothes, at that moment he looked like a boy of fourteen. The innocent,
impatient face of a teenager—he was dangling his two arms in the wind. He
was calling him—and then, unafraid, he started to run. He went up to him,
and there he stopped, where he was hanging from the tree.
The rope was twisted around Nihālcandra’s neck, and the end of the
rope was tethered to a branch of the tree. The branch was moving and
Nihālcandra was hanging. Below, on the grass, lay his knapsack, his ther-
mos, his army coat, the two pockets hanging open—bare and turned inside
out, completely empty. Tak-tak … tak … he heard a strange sound, raised
his head, and he saw the children’s skipping rope, two little yellow handles
160 M. OFFREDI
swaying in the wind, which banged repeatedly against Nihālcandra’s lolling

head whenever the branch moved. (‘Subah kī sair’, Varma 1989, 79–80)
‘Dūsrī duniyā’ has been staged by Piyush Mishra. I was lucky enough to
see Piyush Mishra’s production at the Shri Ram Centre in New Delhi a few
years ago. It took the form of a monologue by Piyush Mishra, who is the
voice behind all the characters—and, most significantly, those of the narra-
tor and the little girl. Personally, I was uncomfortable with the little girl’s
voice or rather Piyush Mishra’s interpretation of it. That does not mean
to say that it was the wrong interpretation; however, when, in the past, I
had read ‘Dūsrī duniyā’, I had visualized the little girl in a different way.
A couple of days after seeing the play, I met Nirmal Varma by chance and
mentioned that I had not been convinced by the way Piyush Mishra had
recreated the little girl. I had found hers a nagging voice and a source of
irritation to the narrator. It turned out that Nirmal Varma was also feeling
somewhat uneasy with Piyush Mishra’s interpretation of ‘Dūsrī duniyā’
and that he, too, found the little girl’s voice nagging and irritating.
Nirala said that Tagore’s work sometimes disappointed because of
his overlong descriptions of the girls of Bengal (in ‘Bihārī aur Ravīndra’,
quoted by Ramvilas Sharma 1962, 59). What Nirala probably meant was
that on occasion, Tagore added some local color.
A character that is ‘different’ (in the sense of being ‘outside the culture
in which the work is set’) tends to be viewed as a touch of additional color.
Ajñey took exception to Yashpal’s novel Deśdroh ī̄ (The Traitor, 1943),
saying that the entire section set outside India (in Afghanistan, Tajikistan,
Uzbekistan and Russia) was extraneous, a distraction that did not fit in
with the scheme of the novel (Vatsyayan 1967, 94).
When Nirmal Varma introduces ideas and characters alien to Indian
culture into an Indian setting, they tend to have a folkloric quality in the
sense that they are ‘different’. In the two short stories we have examined,
though, the characters are all at home in their settings.
However, the problem is not about fitting in or appearing as a touch
of outside color. The problem is a different one, and in my opinion it is a
problem of the author’s cultural identity. Nirmal Varma’s cultural identity
(and, we might say, that of all other writers and artists) is not the same as
Kabir’s. But what was Kabir’s cultural identity? Was it an Indian identity?
Yes, if we accept the cultural wealth inherent in that phrase.
The Indian of today lives in a state of limbo. Nirmal Varma actually
used the word ‘limbo’ to describe the characters in his latest novel, Antim
araṇya (The Last Forest), which was published in January 2000. When he
presented the novel in Delhi, after begging the audience’s forgiveness for
his refusal to discuss his characters—because these characters desire free-
dom and independence from their creator—Nirmal Varma described the
characters in Antim araṇya as being in a state of limbo.
Yet the Indian’s life is also in abeyance, a limbo, a state between two
different cultures. The reader interprets this limbo and recreates it. I hap-
pened to ask an Italian teacher of the Czech language to read the Italian
translation (Rupil 1995) of Nirmal Varma’s Ve din (Those Days). My stu-
dents of Hindi had enjoyed it and considered it to be a fine novel. My col-
league judged the novel to be ‘interesting’. It hardly needs to be said that
the Czech teacher is familiar with the Prague background against which the
novel—which recounts the experiences of an Indian student who is living
in Prague after winning a scholarship—is set and therefore finds a foreign-
er’s experience merely ‘interesting’. He finds it merely interesting because
it is not identical to his own and because his reaction to the book does not
match his personal experience, past and present—of life in Czechoslovakia.
The author should be perceived as a whole person, like any ordinary
man. If we dissect the author (the author being, in this case, Nirmal Varma,
who I think is a symbolic example), we may say that he ‘quotes’—in other
words, that his work as a whole is a series of quotations placed within a
certain setting. This setting is his mind and his art, that is, his expression.
In the field of painting, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh (b. 1937) springs
to mind. Gulam Mohammed Sheikh also makes ‘quotations’. He makes
‘quotations’ because his pictorial universe is a crowded gallery of visual
experiences. These begin with his teenage years and early adulthood,
spent with his Muslim family and amongst Hindu and Jain friends,
reciting the Koran in the morning and studying Sanskrit at school in
the afternoon; there follow his studies into the history of Western and
Oriental art, ancient and modern, a visit to Italy where he discovered the
Sienese artists and Piero della Francesca, first-hand acquaintance with
the Indian miniatures kept in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum,
the Shekhawati murals in Rajasthan and his interest in the Bengali folk
painters of paṭ and in the folii of the Ḥamza Nāma (1562–1577) in
which Persian tales are depicted in an Indian context. Gulam Mohammed
Sheikh’s visual experiences are placed in a setting made up of color and
the visible physical expression of the artist’s mind; as such they are unified
by the artist’s emotions, thereby producing a successful work of art (cf.
Sheikh 1989).
162 M. OFFREDI
Nirmal Varma’s ‘quotations’—quotations which are grounded in exis-

tentialism but are drawn from his own emotional experience—are not just
quotations, they are not a plain and simple literary exercise. They are set
in an environment that is Nirmal Varma’s writing. Just as the many experi-
ences of Gulam Mohammed Sheikh are cloaked in color (very often green,
appearing in all its different shades) so are the events which form Nirmal
Varma’s narrative confined within a clean and taut literary style.
Of the two Indians, the writer Nirmal Varma warrants greater debate
than the painter Gulam Mohammed Sheikh. Why? Because ultimately,
Gulam Mohammed Sheikh expresses in the making something that has
already happened (the Sienese painters, the folios of Ḥamza Nāma, the
murals of Shekhawati—things that have already ‘been’, but which are still
in the making, in that they are seen in movement, in episodes that are
blurred together). Nirmal Varma instead expresses as a ‘state’, or situa-
tion, something that is still fluid, something being done now, and that
lies in the future. And what is in the making is the Indian mind, a cultural
identity still in the making. Or at least, what we readers perceive as being
in the making because we are immersed in it and are partly involved in
its making.
Bibliography
Marková, Dagmar. 2008. Nirmal Varmā, Writing in Hindi about Prague. In Archiv
orientální 76(3), 359–378.
Rupil, Alessandro. 1995. Quei giorni. Esperienze e valori nell'opera narrativa e sag-
gistica di Nirmal Varma. Venice: Cafoscarina.
Saccidanand Vatsyayan (Saccidanand Hiranand Vatsyayan ‘Ajñey’). 1967. Hindı̄
sāhitya: ek ādhunik paridṛśya. Delhi: Radhakrishna Prakashan.
Sharma, Ramvilas. 1962. Nirālā, 3rd edn. Agra: Shivlal Agraval.
Sheikh, Gulam Mohammed. 1989. Among Several Cultures and Times. In
Contemporary Indian Tradition. Voices on Culture, Nature, and the Challenge
of Change, ed. Carla M. Borden, 197–210. Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Institution Press.
Varma, Nirmal. [1964] 1966. Ve din, 2nd edn. Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan. (1st
edn. Delhi, 1964).
Varma, Nirmal. [1983] 1989. ‘Dūsrı̄ duniyā’. In Kavve aur kālā pānı̄, 3rd edn.
Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan. (1st edn. Delhi, 1983).
Varma, Nirmal. 2000. Antim araṇya. Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan.
Yashpal. 1943. Deśdrohı̄, 5th edn. Lucknow: Viplav Karyalay.
Index
A Braj, 79, 126, 128–9

absurdism, 86, 106, 131–44 Bū, 62–4, 74n6
Amar Sheik, Malika, 16, 27 Buṛhiyā kı̄ gaṭharı̄, 95
Anderson, Benedict, 1, 5–6, 78
Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan,
112, 128 C
Asad, Talal, 3–4 Candrakāntā, 112
Ashk, Upendranath, 60, 79–82, 89 Cattopadhyay, Bankimcandra, 112,
Avadhi, 128–9 125n8
Chandra, Sudhir, 47, 52n11
Chattisgarh, 133
B Chekhov, Anton, 41, 47–8
Baudrillard, Jean, 42 community, imagined, 1, 5, 78
Bhabha, Homi, 5 cultural pluralism, 15–16, 32–3
Bharatendu, Harishcandra, 79–80, 89, Culture of Pastiche, 2, 35, 41, 42
112, 128
Bhāratı̄ytā, 58, 97
Bhāratı̄ya Janatā Pār t ̣ı̄, 3 D
Bhūkh āg hai, 100, 102 Dalits, 17, 27–9, 31–3
Bhuvaneshvar, 79–82, 89 Dard lā davā, 105
Bimal urf jāyeṃ to jāyeṃ kahāṃ, Das, Kamala, 16, 25
102–4 deśıv̄ ād, 82
Bourdieu, Pierre, 61 Deśdrohı̄, 160
Note: Locators followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41015-9
164 INDEX
deśi-ness, 143n4 Hindi drama, neo-Sanskritic, 8, 77–81

Devy, G.N., 132, 143n2 Hindi poetry, 29
Dharker, Imtiaz, 16, 27 Hindi theatre, 78–81, 83, 90
Dharmarakṣā, 64 Hindu, 2–4, 8–9, 16–17, 24, 28, 36,
Dhumil, 15 39, 58–60, 65, 69, 77, 79–80,
discourse, 1–6, 9, 27, 31, 37, 43, 73, 82, 84–8, 111–12, 115, 122–3,
78, 81–3, 89, 127–8 128, 161
drama, Hindi, 7–8, 77–90 Hinduism, 2–3, 84, 87–8, 112
drama, nativistic, 78, 80 Hindutva, 2–4
drama, naturalistic, 78, 81
drama, neo-Sanskritic, 8, 77–80, 89–90
drama, Urdu, 8, 89 I
Dusarā na koı̄, 105 Ibrāhim Lodı̄, 8, 111–12, 115–16,
118, 121, 122
identity, cultural, 1–10, 57, 62, 77–8,
E 81–2, 84, 89, 160, 162
Ek chitṛā sukh, 35, 37–8, 40–9, 52n11 identity, Indian, 4, 9, 61, 160
exile, 18, 105–8, 118 identity, national, 6, 36
existentialism, 9, 43, 105, 131–44, 162 ideology, 1–6, 8, 36–7, 40, 49,
existentialism, existential aestheticism, 51n7, 58, 60–2, 73, 77–8,
141 80–3, 89–90
F J
fairy tales, referred to in stories, 55, 69 Jagannathan, 2, 56
flashback, literary technique, 114–15, Jahāṃ Lakṣmī qaid hai, 65, 69–71
122, 151–2 Jaidev, 2, 7, 35–52, 56, 62, 132,
141–2, 143n2
Jayasi, Malik Muhammad, 125n14
G
Gadhvi, Pravin, 16, 28
Gandhi, 18, 23, 38–9, 50n3, 59 K
Gandhi, Shanta, 80 Kālā Kolāj, 97–8, 100
Gosvami, Kishorilal, 8, 111–30 Kamleshvar, 57–9, 65, 67–73, 74n1
grotesque, literary style, 19, 132, 135–6 Kannada poetry, 23
Guzarā huā zamānā, 102 Karnad, Girish, 82–3
Kaul, Mani, 132
Khare, Vishnu, 9, 132, 143, 143n3
H Khatri, Devaki Nandan, 112
Hall, Stuart, 1, 4–6, 78
Harishcandra, Bharatendu, 79
Hindi drama, nativistic, 8, 78, 80 L
Hindi drama, naturalistic, 8, 78, 80–1, Lankesh, P., 15, 23
84, 90 literary field, 55, 61, 73
INDEX 165
London, location of stories, Pash, 16, 20

147, 151–2, 158–9, 161 poetry, Hindi, 21, 29
Luhmann, Niklas, 37, 50n1 poetry, Kannada, 23
poetry, Malayalam, 24, 30
poetry, Marathi, 27, 33
M Prague, 147, 159, 161
Malayalam poetry, 24, 25, 30 Prasad, Jayshankar, 60, 79–81,
Manto, Saadat Hasan, 62–4, 74n6 85, 89
Marathi poetry, 27, 33 prathama-darśana, 120, 123
Mathur, Jagdishcandra, Progressive Writers Movement, 60
Māyā lok, 106 Proust, Marcel, 9, 42, 43, 132
Mishra, Lakshminaryan, 77, 79–82, purdah, 27–8
84–9
Mishra, Piyush, 160
Mother-India, 95–6, 100 R
Mudrarakshas, 59 Rājā Nirbaṃsiyā, 65, 67
Rajput, ideal of heroism, 8–9,
85, 111–12, 116,
N 122–3, 128
Nar nārı̄, 100 Rakesh, Mohan, 56, 58–9, 74n2,
narrative, 2, 4–5, 6, 43, 44, 55, 65–7, 79–80
70–1, 73, 78, 112, 118, 128, Ramanujan, A.K., 16–18
134, 136, 148, 149–57, 162 rasa-śāstra, 120, 123
narratology, 131, 134 rāslı̄lā, 79
Nasrı̄n, 105 Rāṣṭrı̄ya Svayaṃsevak Saṅgh, 3
nationalism, 1, 3, 6, 8, 15–16, 38, Rāt kā riportạ r, 40, 51n5
39, 69, 78–9, 82, 95, 98, Ravivarma, Attur, 15–16, 24, 30
108, 128 remythologizing, 3
nativism, 82, 132
Nauṭaṅkı̄, 79
Nayı̄ Kahānı̄, 7, 55–75, 129 S
Sahay, Raghuvir, 15, 29–30
Said, Edward, 3–4
O Sārikā, literary magazine, 62, 64,
Orientalism, 3–4 74n6, 75n8
otherism, 1, 3–4, 78 Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar, 3
Seagull, 41, 47
Sheikh, Gulam Mohammad, 161–2
P Shimla, 2, 147, 159
Padmāvat, 125n14 Singh, Kedarnath, 15, 21, 33n1
Panipat, battle of, 8, 111–12, 118, Śrı̄ Sudarśan Press, 112
122–3, 125n16 śṛṅgār, 114, 125n17
Parsi theatre, 79 St. Stephen’s College, 147
Partition, 57, 64 Strindberg, August, 41, 43, 81, 84
166 INDEX
T Viśva Hindu Pariṣad, 3

Ṭhaṇḍā Gośt, 62–4, 74n6 Vı̄ratā, 9, 116, 123
theatre, Hindi, 78–80, 81, 83, 89–90
theatre, Parsi, 79
Tod, James, 112, 128 W
Twilight of an Era, 40, 48, 50n3 women, poets, 25, 27, 31, 33
U Y
untouchability, 3–4, 28 Yadav, Rajendra, 58–9, 65, 69–73,
Urdu court drama, 79 75n9
Us kā bacpan, 100, 102, 104, 106–7 Yashpal, 64–5, 73, 75n8, 160
V Z
Varma, Nirmal, 7, 9, 35–52, 147–62 zero degree of writing, 151
Ve din, 159, 161

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Imagining Indianness

Edited by Diana Dimitrova

More information about this series at

Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016957710

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover illustration: © Robin Chittenden / Alamy

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology publishes explorations of new

Buffalo, NY, USA Deborah Reed-Danahay

1 Introduction: On “Indianness” and Indian

Part I Indianness, Literature and Culture:

2 Of Many Indias: Alternative Nationhoods

3 Reviewing Nirmal Varma, Jaidev and the Indianness

4 Indianness as a Category in Literary Criticism

5 Imagining “Indianness” and Modern Hindi Drama 77

Part II Indian Cultural Identity and the Crisis

6 The Indian Contexts and Subtexts of My Text 95

7 Kishorilal Gosvami’s Indumatı̄ 111

8 Indianness, Absurdism, Existentialism, and the Work

Diana Dimitrova obtained her Ph.D. in Modern and Classical Indology

Dharma in the Twentieth Century: A Radhasoami Perspective” The

Thomas de Bruijn studied Indian languages and culture at Leiden

Martin Christof-Fuechsle obtained his Ph.D. in Indology at the

Hans Harder is Professor of Modern Indian Languages at Heidelberg

Mariola Offredi is a former associate professor of Hindi Language and

K. Satchidanandan is a Malayalam poet, essayist and translator and a

He retired in 2011 as director and professor, School of Translation Studies

G. H. Schokker was reader of Hindi language and literature, as well as

(Leuven: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 1980); with M.K. Gautam “The

Krishna Baldev Vaid obtained his M.A. (English) from Panjab University

Introduction: On “Indianness” and Indian

Imagining Bhāratıȳ tā (“Indianness”)

© The Author(s) 2017 1

and most importantly always “imagined” and conditioned through our

Bhāratıȳ tā (“Indianness”) and Hindutva

In Chapter 2 K. Satchidanandan studies contemporary Indian poetry

The system of transliteration in this work follows a standard system for

Indianness, Literature and Culture: A

Of Many Indias: Alternative Nationhoods

“Do you still love this land?” …

© The Author(s) 2017 15

(Kannada), Attur Ravivarma (Malayalam), Kamala Das, Imtiaz Dharker,

The Parable and the Lesson

The poets I choose here like hundreds of their contemporaries seem

A Cow Has Slopped Its Dung on the Map of India

In “Twenty Years after Independence,” Dhumil (real name: Sudama

Twenty years later

Only silence answers the poet. He finds it “almost dishonest” to follow

is the country’s greater misfortune: the former represents a mockery of

… is freedom only the name

There was work

A Wild Jungle Bear Has No Need for Your Gita …

My mother, black, prolific earth,

No, not Savitri, Janaki, nor Urmila

A wild jungle bear has no need for your Gita

To walk upright among equals

Her Fierce Hunger May I Put into the

the stump of a broom,

Not to the body of a woman

I Don’t Know Politics …

One Kind of Hunger Swallows Another

By night men are transformed

Buffalo, NY, USA Deborah Reed-Danahay

1 Introduction: On “Indianness” and Indian

Part I Indianness, Literature and Culture:

2 Of Many Indias: Alternative Nationhoods

3 Reviewing Nirmal Varma, Jaidev and the Indianness

4 Indianness as a Category in Literary Criticism

5 Imagining “Indianness” and Modern Hindi Drama 77

Part II Indian Cultural Identity and the Crisis

6 The Indian Contexts and Subtexts of My Text 95

7 Kishorilal Gosvami’s Indumatı̄ 111

8 Indianness, Absurdism, Existentialism, and the Work

How do we explain the breath-taking contrast between an extreme, India-

(folk) literary traditions. Therefore all schools of Hindi drama—neo-