Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories 9781138559981, 9780429456169

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‘Genre fiction, particularly but not only in English, has been growing in popularity in India. This anthology is significant and necessary . . . It maps overlaps and contrasts between genre fiction in seven major Indian languages, and well combines literary exegesis with theoretical and historical readings . . . Drawing upon both Indian and non-Indian theoretical texts, the book does not just test Western definitions of genre fiction against the hard reality to genre texts from India, it also opens up space for a re-definition of such Western perceptions . . . A pioneering study that is interesting and well-timed’. Tabish Khair, author and Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Aarhus, Denmark

STUDIES IN GLOBAL GENRE FICTION Series Editors: Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, University of Oslo, Norway and Taryne Jade Taylor, EmbryRiddle Aeronautical University, USA

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

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

Abhijit Gupta (Jadavpur University, India) Suparno Banerjee (Texas State University, USA) Isiah Lavender III (Louisiana State University, USA)

Book in this series INDIAN GENRE FICTION Pasts and Future Histories Edited by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani and Anwesha Maity For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Studies-in-Global-Genre-Fiction/bookseries/SGGF

INDIAN GENRE FICTION

This volume maps the breadth and domain of genre literature in India across seven languages (Tamil, Urdu, Bangla, Hindi, Odia, Marathi and English) and nine genres for the first time. Over the last few decades, detective/crime fiction and especially science fiction/fantasy have slowly made their way into university curricula and consideration by literary critics in India and the West. However, there has been no substantial study of genre fiction in the Indian languages, least of all from a comparative perspective. This volume, with contributions from leading national and international scholars, addresses this lacuna in critical scholarship and provides an overview of diverse genre fictions. Using methods from literary analysis, book history and Indian aesthetic theories, the volume throws light on the variety of contexts in which genre literature is read, activated and used, from political debates surrounding national and regional identities to caste and class conflicts. It shows that Indian genre fiction (including pulp fiction, comics and graphic novels) transmutes across languages, time periods, in translation and through publication processes. While the book focuses on contemporary postcolonial genre literature production, it also draws connections to individual, centuries-long literary traditions of genre literature in the Indian subcontinent. Further, it traces contested hierarchies within these languages as well as current trends in genre fiction criticism. Lucid and comprehensive, this book will be of great interest to academics, students, practitioners, literary critics and historians in the fields of postcolonialism, genre studies, global genre fiction, media and popular culture, South Asian literature, Indian literature, detective fiction, science fiction, romance, crime fiction, horror, mythology, graphic novels, comparative literature and South Asian studies. It will also appeal to the informed general reader.

Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay is a researcher at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo, Norway. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Fafnir: Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research (Finfar, Finland) and Editor at the Museum of Science Fiction’s Journal of Science Fiction (MOSF, Washington, D.C.). He has formerly taught at the Universities of Oslo and Delhi, and has been visiting researcher at the Science Fiction Foundation at the University of Liverpool and the Evoke Lab (Calit2)/Department of Informatics at the University of California-Irvine. Aakriti Mandhwani is a researcher at the Department of South Asia, Faculty of Languages and Cultures, SOAS, University of London, UK. She works on North Indian middle-class reading practices through the archive of the post-1947 commercial magazine and paperback in Hindi. Her areas of interest include book history, popular literature, intellectual history and urban studies. Her works include articles in Modern Asian Studies and a volume on Hinglish edited by Francesca Orsini and Ravikant Sharma (both forthcoming in 2018). Anwesha Maity is a researcher at the Department of Comparative Literature and Folklore Studies (CLFS), University of WisconsinMadison, USA, from where she also obtained her doctoral degree. Her research interests include science fiction and genre fiction, postcolonial criticism, translation studies, and Sanskrit aesthetics. She has published in Science Fiction Studies, Studies in the Fantastic and Jadavpur University Essays and Studies.

INDIAN GENRE FICTION Pasts and Future Histories

Edited by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani and Anwesha Maity

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

CONTENTS

List of contributorsxi

Introduction: Indian genre fiction – languages, literatures, classifications

1

BODHISATTVA CHATTOPADHYAY, AAKRITI MANDHWANI AND ANWESHA MAITY

PART I

Emergence of distinctions

15

  1 Literary and popular fiction in late colonial Tamil Nadu

17

PREETHA MANI

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

38

C.M. NAIM

  3 A series of unfortunate events: natural calamities in 19th-century Bengali chapbooks

57

ARITRA CHAKRABORTI

  4 Explorers of subversive knowledge: the science fantasy of Leela Majumdar and Sukumar Ray DEBJANI SENGUPTA

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73

C ontents

PART II

Postcolonial reassertions

87

  5 Hearts and homes: a perspective on women writers in Hindi

89

IRA PANDE

  6 Genre fiction and aesthetic relish: reading rasa in contemporary times

103

ANWESHA MAITY

  7 Community fiction: Mamang Dai’s The Legends of Pensam and Temsula Ao’s These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone121 JEETUMONI BASUMATARY

PART III

Genres in the 21st century

139

  8 Post-millennial ‘mythology-inspired fiction’ in English: the market, the genre, and the (global) reader

141

E. DAWSON VARUGHESE

  9 Expanding world of Indian English fiction: The Mahabharata retold in Krishna Udayasankar’s The Aryavarta Chronicles and Amruta Patil’s Adi Parva159 CHINMAY SHARMA

10 When Bhimayana enters the classroom. . . 

175

ARATRIKA DAS

11 From the colloquial to the ‘Literary’: Hindi pulp’s journey from the streets to the bookshelves

189

AAKRITI MANDHWANI

Index203

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CONTRIBUTORS

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

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

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INTRODUCTION Indian genre fiction – languages, literatures, classifications Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani and Anwesha Maity

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

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

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readership. The juxtaposition of Anglocentrism with Anglophonism, a problematic identified in the aforementioned manifesto, is thus apparent both while discussing Indian genre fiction in relation to its global counterparts and within Indian literatures themselves. This is also related to portability, as literature in English finds a broad pan-Indian readership, while bhasha literatures generally remain untranslated and unread outside their linguistic – geographical spheres, even if the latter may have the advantage in numbers. This volume addresses this challenge for the first time by mapping overlaps between genre fiction in several different languages: Tamil, Urdu, Bangla, Hindi, Odia, and Marathi, in addition to English. It highlights examples of different genre classifications that are used for different kinds of literature; classifications that are based at times on form, sometimes on the theme, sometimes geography, and sometimes on the place and manner of production. While this seems to be too remarkably varied to hold any real meaning for the term genre, our contention is that the term ‘genre’ itself functions as a container.4 The container exists irrespective of what is put into it, but it is relevant only to the extent that something is put into it, and its identity depends on what this something is. Drawing upon the work of Alexander Klose, this ‘container principle’ determines how we classify what we see and see what we classify. 5 An alternative is provided by John Rieder in his 2017 work Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System, which builds upon his earlier work on genre.6 Rieder argues that genre fiction, including science fiction, fantasy, detective fiction, and horror, describes an entirely new phenomenon, which the ‘genre as narrative form’ usage/category does not capture. These new genres are part of a ‘mass cultural genre system’, produced by new ways of publication and distribution, and appealing to a different readership, which also engages with the text in different and new ways. Rieder argues for a historical interpretation rather than a formal one, which would also explain the similarities between the production and distribution methods between these genres, as well as overlaps in readership and audience. Considering the emergence of new technologies of visualisation and a shift towards a culture of mass reproduction, such a historical interpretation would also explain the formulaic ways in which many of these genres recycle and share plots, tropes, and motifs. For instance, plot generators such as William Wallace Cook’s Plotto (1928), or genre formula descriptors such as S.S. Van Dine’s ‘20 Rules for Writing Detective Stories’ (1928) provided early genre writers guidelines on what to write and how, and what to avoid in constructing narratives in a particular 3

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genre, thus forwarding real or imagined surface similarities in genre fiction – hence also the use of ‘popular’ or ‘mass cultural’ as a sufficient alternate label for genre fiction. Printed on pulp paper with often lurid covers, appealing to the sense of the comfortable and the familiar rather than to highbrow literary values, offering a vision of – often illicit – possibilities of vicarious pleasure: that is the image of the mass cultural genre system projected by Rieder’s analysis. Notwithstanding the general correctness of Rieder’s analysis of early genre fiction production in the Anglo-American context, its limited applicability to and significant divergences within the Indian context must also be recognised. Reading science fiction in India, for instance, under the rubric of the ‘popular’ and the ‘mass cultural’, may not always yield the patterns Rieder observes. Unlike the appeal of, for example, soft-pornographic literature, which resonates with much genre fiction and which is likely to have a universal appeal, science fiction emerged from the practices of a highly select, even exclusive, authorial and readerly network, whose members were generally well educated, often with advanced science and technology degrees. As Fredrick Pohl describes in his autobiography The Way the Future Was (1978), in their worldview, technology and science offered ways to think through global problems differently from what had been thought before.7 It was not seen as continuity of the past as in fantasy, but as a breach, as something inherently new. This trend is particularly noticeable in the work of the American Futurians, the society that played a leading role in establishing the genre of science fiction. Genres such as detective fiction were ostensibly perceived as yearnings for restoration of lost innocence and return to a possible idyll, while fantasy offered a nostalgic return of magical possibilities in a world that was overrun with science and technology, culminating in the world wars. In contrast, emergence phase science fiction writers offered a vision of possible utopias forged through the intervention of scientific ideologies rather than theological ones, opening up the future as a dimension overriding the present, rather than any nostalgic return to a past, however idyllic. However, in Indian science fiction broadly, generic markers/tropes such as forays into distant future or alternate/alien-space are relatively rare; the utopian vision of a better possible future is realised first by negotiating with history and the present. Thus, science fiction was never ‘popular’ in the same way as other genres in India, even though it emerged from the same crucible of the mass cultural genre system and its periodicals and pulps. Neither was it ‘mass cultural’ in the way that detective fiction or fantasy could be, because of the limited 4

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nature of its production, distribution and readership network. Science fiction’s appeal was to a supra-educational project that was not shared uniformly by pulp production in other genres, and neither did it share the same project even where the readership overlapped. Science fiction in Bengal emerged predominantly in young adult magazines and literature in the late 19th century, whose goals were a combination of ‘sentence and solas’, i.e., aimed to offer instruction as much as entertainment. While detective fiction was primarily read by an adult audience due to its adult (read: sexual relationships) themes, science fiction, or kalpavigyan, was a subset of young adult and children’s literature from the beginning. Part of a nationalist exercise and positivist to the core, it intensified the European dream of progress through the adoption of new knowledge, aimed at a pliable, younger audience.8 This not only changed the future possibilities of the genre – science fiction is now considered predominantly children’s and young adult literature in India, as opposed to the more mature genre it is in the Anglo-American world – but it also changed what could be written, and how. What further complicates the ‘mass cultural genre’ proposition and other such frameworks in genre studies framed predominantly by European and American literary production is that a purely historical framework cannot work satisfactorily outside its conditions of production. The emergence of genre fiction in India shared the exigencies of production processes described by Rieder, which were in many cases similar, and led to similar outcomes vis-à-vis Anglo-American contexts; but Indian production processes also had divergent formal characteristics. For instance, it drew upon different traditions of storytelling, such as popular and performative/oral traditions, aesthetic traditions with classical roots such as rasa that created a concordance between teller and audience in terms of emotion, or even in the various traditions of folklore that would determine what made sense within a specific genre. The impact of these indigenous roots and traditions have, from the beginning, also engendered different expectations from specific genres that are divergent from their Anglo-American counterparts. One such expectational outcome in the intersection of the historical and the formal is offered by the ubiquitous use of myth in genre fiction from India. Several essays in this volume show the presence of myth from 19th-century chapbooks to 21st-century mythological fiction. This tendency, dubbed ‘mythologerm’ by Chattopadhyay, may be read as a constraint on Indian genre fiction, making at least some of its meaning less (globally) portable, but it also accounts for a unique 5

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flavour that may be found in texts across languages and genres.9 The use of myth is rarely uncritical or unmediated. There are three main ways in which myths are generally activated in genre fiction in India: to draw parallels and continuities between the present and a mythical past, to satirise or critically appraise the mythic as a repository of cultural values, which in turn can be used to satirise the culture itself, or to bolster cultural/national pride by turning myth into pseudohistory or reading myth as history.10 In terms of genre fiction, myth, specifically drawn from the entire body of religio-cultural literary texts identified as ‘Hindu’ and less commonly from Islamic lore, provides a formal convergence for literary themes and motifs across genres, and serves as culturally and politically inflected reference points, differentiating these genres from their counterparts elsewhere.11 Myth thus serves as a means to initiate both formal and thematic shifts across the genre system, but also serves as a point of inception for genre itself, as noted by Emma Dawson Varughese’s contribution to this volume, which traces the activation of myth in 21st-century English-language texts. In bhasha literatures, too, mythological fiction may be found at the moment of inception of the genre system, in classic works such as Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay’s Damarucharita (1910–17) in Bangla (Bengali), a hybrid text that moves between science fiction, fantasy, science fantasy, tall tale, and mythology fiction. In terms of narrative form, it is a collection of short stories loosely connected by the eponymous Damarudhar’s deeds, and an early landmark of the short story form in Indian genre fiction; simultaneously, as a charita, it also references the epic tradition of Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas and delineates a trajectory of heroic action, continuity and growth through epic tales. A mock epic drawing upon the Indic epics only to caricaturise them in a tongue-and-cheek manner, Damarucharita explodes the itihasa-purana tradition by positing a ‘pseudo-history’ laced with real historical events. It is also, unsurprisingly, a parody and critique of realism itself, but the parody is not directed outwards beyond India (for the most part), but is channelled inwards, to an intense questioning of nationalism. Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay, as a pioneer of genre fiction in India, was a staunch critic of nationalism, even though he was arguably one of the foremost social reformers of the colonial period. Aiming for the upliftment of craftsmen communities by championing traditional arts and crafts, he fought for their economic development and inclusion into the colonial network of commercial exchange. Patriotic yet critical of nationalism, Mukhopadhyay was well aware of the problems of appealing to the popular, and in choosing to write genre fiction, he was 6

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signalling to his elite readership the contemptible ways in which the masses were exploited by political demagogues and rich landowners. Mukhopadhyay’s genre fiction is unique in its cultural referents, placing folk deities and mythology right beside high Puranic and epic lore, juxtaposed with a scathing indictment of the use and abuse of power by Hindu godmen and the toxicity of pseudo-nationalism. If his peer, the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, represented ‘high’ literature through his realist critique of swadeshi ideology and religio-cultural divides, then Mukhopadhyay represented its popular face. Deliberately adopting a popular idiom and a blend of realism and fantasy to communicate with his audience, his fiction alerted them to the plight of the lower classes, making the text relevant even a century after it was composed. This brings us to some of the central methodological principles behind this volume. We use the term ‘genre fiction’ in this volume in a critical sense. We hold, as the essays in this volume demonstrate, that genre fiction is not simply a literature fostering escapism. It is not something that is read purely for entertainment or as a means to escape from the strictures of reality. While genre fiction does invoke certain clusters of tropes, they are also often critical of the same. Pleasure in genre fiction comes from the dialectic of similarities and differences between texts belonging to the same genre, and sometimes these differences also become transgeneric as tropes are shared; for instance, when mythology fiction, folklore, and fantasy slip into each other or when detective fiction and romance become aligned. The volume also questions the gendered category of genres. Romance is not fiction for women alone, just as detective fiction is not for men alone and science fiction is not only for scientists. Genres also continuously reshape the boundaries of the real and the fantastical, especially in the genres that ostensibly appear most divorced from any realist purpose such as fantasy or science fiction. Indeed, genre fiction is directly political: it politicises what is taken for granted, bringing the unquestionable such as the sanctity of myth into a space where it can be questioned for relevance and critiqued for social, ethical, and moral values. Genre fiction maintains its political relevance through a healthy use of satire and other comedic devices, challenging authority accorded to figures of power and influence. Far from reading the popularity of genre fiction as a drawback, we argue that it is this popularity itself that can make genre fiction a fecund site for articulation of mass resistance and disillusionment with the status quo. Yet its popularity may just as easily be a political tool for distributing problematic ideas of 'nation', even creating new myths to replace the old ones. These 7

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myths may be myths of science (national science or ‘Vedic science’), of progress (how English may serve as a facilitator in the upwardly mobile aspirations of poorer classes), and of new national identities built on mythical pasts (the idea of a great, rejuvenated Indian nation). The study of Indian genre fiction across different languages and genres reveals a vibrant site where one may locate multiple contestations of politics, including identity politics, revealing patterns unavailable to someone who consumes literature in English alone, or in only one of the bhasha literatures. And yet, Indian genre fiction is varied enough for one to argue that in spite of thematic continuities, such as the mythologerm, there are also significant divergences that make any strict association between genre fiction and other conceptual categories such as the 'popular' or the 'lowbrow' impossible to sustain. For instance, in terms of book history, other conceptual categories such as ‘middlebrow’ might arguably become more useful. Histories of Indian literatures, especially single-language bhasha literatures, have often disavowed genres such as detective fiction and the romance as 'lowbrow', whereas a more nuanced reading based on circulation and distribution methods reveals that a markedly middle-class, 'middlebrow' readership was avidly consuming them.12 A nuanced reading also reveals that apparently similar networks and patterns of distribution and consumption have wide variance across genres, languages, and regions. For instance, while science fiction may appeal to an audience so small as to remove it from the category of the popular, mythological fiction, which often blends elements of science fiction, fantasy, folklore, and epic, it may allow science fictional tropes and themes to travel to audiences who are not otherwise keen on the genre. Further, this also throws into relief new publication networks and strategies and the emergence of new audiences. While any number of works may be designated as mythology fiction owing to the presence of similar tropes across more than a century of genre fiction writing in bhasha and English, its contemporary usage to refer to a narrow band of widely-consumed English language texts in the last two or three decades shows how genre labels come into existence for marketing purposes, allowing people to work with new containers, finding new things to see, to classify, and to say. The essays in this volume engage with the above questions from several perspectives. If there is an incredibly expanding genre in the genre fiction market today, it is Indian Writing in English (IWE) mythological fiction. Writer Amish Tripathi’s success with The Shiva Trilogy is often cited as the high-water-mark of the coming-of-age 8

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of the IWE mythological: the publishing house Westland paid an advance of 5 crore rupees or 1 million dollars to Tripathi in order to secure rights to his future series of novels, which he later decided was to be focused on the Hindu God Ram. Sita: Warrior of Mithila is the second of the series, published in 2017. Chinmay Sharma’s essay in the volume is a much-needed intervention in understanding this sway towards the mythological. He compares two retellings of the Mahabharata, Krishna Udayasankar’s science fantasy Aryavarta Chronicles (2012–14) and Amruta Patil’s graphic novel Adi Parva (2012), and discusses how they capture what he calls the ‘mythological wave’ in IWE. While Sharma’s essay discusses Adi Parva, a graphic novel, this is only one of the many kinds of graphic novels that have overtaken the publishing and reading landscape in recent decades. Corridor, Sarnath Banerjee’s first graphic novel, was excitedly and somewhat erroneously hailed as the first graphic novel in India when it was published in 2004. Some critics, however, prefer to cite Orijit Sen’s River of Stories, published in 1994, as the first graphic novel. However, not many critical interventions have been made regarding what definitionally constitutes the graphic novel in India per se. One such intervention in this volume emerges from the point of view of institutionalisation of genre fiction. Indeed, academic histories and syllabi in India have recently come to recognise genre fiction as a dynamic category that deserves attention, and detective and crime fiction are now often included in the syllabi of central universities. The fiction that has gained entry can be termed the ‘international canonised popular’; for instance, an undergraduate course at Delhi University’s Department of English now includes Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. However, one finds bhasha detective fiction entirely absent as a category of consideration. In this volume, Aratrika Das engages with that rare Indian graphic novel in the classroom, writing about the difficulties of teaching Bhimayana at Delhi University. The volume also problematises IWE and how a language can unlock one’s understanding of regional worlds. Jeetumoni Basumatary’s essay revisits our understanding of ‘North-East Literature’ or ‘Literatures from North-East India’. She focuses on Mamang Dai’s The Legends of Pensam (2006) and Temsula Ao’s These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone (2006), arguing that the worlds we see in English writings from the ‘North-East’ are tribal worlds rooted in their traditional cultures, instead of a pan-Indian, sanitised representation of elite metropolitan culture, as found in IWE novels such as those by Chetan Bhagat. The origins of theory on genre fiction also emerge 9

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from folk, and Basumatary’s articulations undercut any ubiquitous relationship between language, region, and folk culture.13 This volume also engages with another perennially successful genre of writing, i.e., romance, which has yet to find its way into institutional reckoning. Historically, commercially successful romance writers have been dismissed by both academic and mainstream reviewers. Indeed, this dismissal is not merely directed at the writer of romance; the reader of romance too has been an oft-rejected category. Ethnographic research on American readers, such as Janice Radway’s groundbreaking Reading the Romance (1984), has paved the way for book-historical studies of romance as genre, and Francesca Orsini’s edited volume Love in South Asia (2006) has recently sought to address that lacuna in the Indian context.14 In this volume, Ira Pande’s essay focuses on Gaura Pant, more popularly known as Shivani, who wrote in Hindi about the intricacies of living in mofussil provincial towns. Shivani's literary career is an apt example of how a renowned and well-loved writer of the 1960s–70s was dismissed in academic reckoning as a ‘female writer of romances’. In terms of the market itself at large, detective and crime fiction have always managed to make a name for itself. C.M. Naim’s essay on Urdu translations of little-remembered G.W.M. Reynolds’ novels in the early 20th century is a good example of how certain authors and kinds of fiction found strange and fascinating afterlives in the Indian subcontinent. Reynolds was not only well known in his Urdu avatar but, as A.R. Venkatachalapathy15 (2012) and Sucheta Bhattacharya16 (2008) argue, gained immense popularity in Tamil and Bangla, respectively. C.M. Naim’s essay, then, adds another dimension to a hugely successful phenomenon of ‘mistriz’ or ‘mystery’ novels in India. It is also imperative to understand how market and publishing concerns acutely intersect with changes in readership profiles and their subsequent needs which, in turn, dictate crucial questions such as paper quality, pricing, and branding strategies. Aakriti Mandhwani’s essay on Hindi crime fiction king Surender Mohan Pathak, for instance, illustrates how a change in paper quality, publisher, and pricing of the pulp novelist’s offerings transformed his previously ‘cheap’ novels to respectable collectible objects. While she discusses the shift in Pathak’s image through publication by Raja Pocket Books, the broader market effect of such image shifts has ultimately resulted in Pathak being signed to Harper Hindi, the Hindi division of Harper Collins, thereby finding a firm footing in ‘respectable’ mainstream imagination. While Mandhwani deploys the methodological principles of book history, Preetha Mani’s essay in the volume contributes to a nuanced 10

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understanding of the significant intersection of magazine history and literary history. Mani focuses on Maṇikkoṭi and Aṉanta Vikaṭaṉ, Tamil magazines launched in the 1930s, that carried differing viewpoints of what she calls ‘high-quality’ literary writing and ‘comedic writing’ that, she argues, laid the foundation for the divide between modernist and ‘entertainment-oriented’ literature, creating distinctions between ‘literary’ and ‘popular’, that continue to this day. Even as this volume focuses mostly on genre fiction in the 20th century, it has sought to provide a wide overview of genres across time, as well. For instance, Aritra Chakraborti’s essay on ‘calamity chapbooks’ issued in 19th-century Bengal is an example of a hugely successful genre, i.e., the chapbook, and how natural calamity, rather than being viewed in terms of objective, linear time, was represented in the chapbooks in terms of the ‘Hindu’ time of ‘Kaliyug’, inflected with the decadent morals of the then-contemporary milieu. Scholarly work on almanacs and chapbooks by Sumanta Banerjee17 and Anindita Ghosh,18among others, situate these genres at the centre of public sphere debates on colonialism and the manifestation of anti-colonial sentiments. Debjani Sengupta’s essay on Bangla kalpavigyan also engages partly with an early context, providing further insights into colonial processes of construction of a ‘scientific temparament’ and its impact on genre fiction. Bridging the old and the new is Anwesha Maity’s contribution on how an ancient aesthetic theory remains relevant in reading contemporary genre texts, revealing, on analysis, also how it shapes fundamental expectations of plot and emotion even today. Forwarding a somewhat polemical proposal that Indian genre fiction must be contextualised and read vis-à-vis not only western but also indigenous aesthetic criticism, she employs classical Sanskrit rasa theory to analyse how different aesthetic states arise, are subsumed or led towards fruition, in three genre examples with widely different flavour profiles: Marathi science fiction, Bangla horror/weird, and Odia detective fiction. The volume, even as it covers a span of languages, realised its shortcoming with regard to genre fiction in other major languages such as Malayalam, Bhojpuri, Marathi, Gujarati, and Punjabi, where vibrant print cultures exist and have done so since the late 19th century. The volume only partially addresses the divide between languages and genre fiction in marginalised languages, particularly in the context of the colonial and postcolonial linguistic hegemony of Hindi and Bangla.19 Hindi’s hegemony is also being challenged by genre fiction in Hinglish, a dynamically developing area, and is thus ripe for investigation.20 Similarly, genre fiction in marginalised languages around 11

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Bangla, such as Ahomiya and Odia, requires further investigation. In addition, while the essays in the volume problematise IWE’s position in the hierarchy of Indian languages, it cannot be denied that IWE offers many avenues of exploration. For instance, Jerry Pinto’s 2016 novel Murder in Mahim follows the murder investigation of a homosexual man who was found dead in a toilet near a Mumbai local railway station. The story is then not merely one of a murder investigation. It also seeks to unravel the underbelly of the spaces where men seek pleasure with other men, what constitutes homosexuality, and how it is socially and legally defined. Genre fiction arguably comes of age through just this kind of narrative unravelling in a whodunit form. A second shortcoming of this volume is, perhaps, not representing contemporary romances in IWE, possibly the most ‘visible’ genre to the reader of this volume; these quick reads catering to a pan-Indian audience are best exemplified in the work of Chetan Bhagat. Since his overwhelming success with Five Point Someone, Bhagat branched out into writing for films as well as taking to Twitter and speaking for Hindutva. Other writers, such as Anuja Chauhan and Sakshama Puri Dhariwal, cater to the well-heeled reader of romances and are published by mainstream giants such as Random House and Penguin, respectively. There is also a large cross-section of romances available at Wheeler stores and from pavement sellers, by authors such as Ravindra Singh, whose novels have amassed a huge fan following, prompting Penguin to launch ‘Metro Reads’ in 2012 with a nifty subgenre titled ‘Romance@Work’. These new subgenres also await further investigation. In addition to written genre, the volume hopes to create more curiosity around visual cultures. While the volume does cast new light on the graphic novel form, comics and cartoons in bhasha literatures in particular are another important genre that has not been amply represented here. Indian Genre Fiction: Past and Future Histories is the one of the first academic engagements on a field that deserves deeper investigation and, in doing so, brings many languages, genres, and perspectives together. The volume maps the domain of Indian genre literature across seven Indian languages and nine genres, serving a three-fold purpose. It contests academic criticism’s continued denigration of Indian genre fiction as a reductive, normative, pleasure-seeking, and/ or escapist category. It shows that Indian genre fiction, far from being a monolith, transmutes across languages, time periods, in translation and through publication processes. Within the Indian subcontinent, a multitude of languages and their individual, centuries-long literary traditions co-exist in contested hierarchies; contemporary 12

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postcolonial genre literature too partakes of these tensions. This volume hopes to provide an equitable platform for discussion of diverse single-language genre fictions and come to terms with these manifold tensions.

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

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

14

Part I EMERGENCE OF DISTINCTIONS

1 LITERARY AND POPULAR FICTION IN LATE COLONIAL TAMIL NADU Preetha Mani

The literary and the popular An unprecedented distinction between literary and popular writing emerged in debates published in Maṇikkoṭi and Āṉanta Vikaṭaṉ, two well-known Tamil magazines that were launched in the 1930s. Through short stories and critical essays, the writers who contributed to these magazines attempted to create new lenses through which to view the purpose of literature in society. Maṇikkoṭi writers championed ‘high-quality’ literary writing (taramāṉa ilakkiyam), which they considered necessary for examining everyday reality and creating social change. Conversely, Vikaṭaṉ writers – particularly writer and editor R. Krishnamurthy ‘Kalki’ – promoted ‘comedic writing’ (nakaiccuvai ilakkiyam or hāsiya ilakkiyam) as the most appropriate medium for addressing Tamil readers’ contemporary needs. These differing viewpoints created a steadfast divide between high modernist and entertainment-oriented literature in the late colonial literary sphere that continues to impact writing trends in Tamil Nadu to this day. The Maṇikkoṭi-Vikaṭaṉ literary debates took shape in the context of significant developments in the Indian independence movement as well as a moment of heightened contention over regional language and caste politics. Gandhi’s Salt March (1930) had incited unprecedented nationalist fervour in a young generation of Tamil writers, but his retraction of satyagraha in 1933 left many of them disillusioned and in search of political alternatives. The Pure Tamil Movement (Taṉi Tamiḻ Iyakkam) and the Self-Respect Movement (Cuya Mariyātai Iyakkam) – which had already gained traction in the Tamil-speaking region in the 1920s – advanced staunchly anti-nationalist positions in 17

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opposition to Gandhi and the growing influence of the Indian National Congress (INC). These movements pitted Dravidian ethnicity against the dominance of Brahminism and North Indian Sanskritic culture, which they regarded as foreign and imperialistic.1 When the INC came to power in the Madras presidency in 1937, its pro-Hindi position further incited Dravidian activists, who advocated for a pure Tamil language and culture unadulterated by Sanskrit and English influences. Unsettled by such political divisiveness, Maṇikkoṭi and Vikaṭaṉ writers – most of whom were Brahmins – turned to literature as a means for cultivating new forms of Tamil community on the basis of shared humanistic values. This essay explores critical writings and short stories from Maṇikkoṭi and Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ to illustrate how Tamil writers created new genres of ‘literary’ and ‘popular’ modern fiction during the 1930s. Scholarship on Indian modernism has outlined its chronological development in relation to international modernist movements, social changes wrought by colonialism and nationalism and other pan-Indian literary trends such as realism and progressivism. Recently, Supriya Chaudhuri has marked 1922 – when the first Bauhaus exhibition was held in Calcutta – as a formative moment for Indian modernism. She argues that the inclusion of Bengali artists’ works in the exhibit, and not the Bauhaus paintings themselves, ‘ini­tiate a modernist idiom’, which ‘must be seen as a radical liberation of narrative art from naturalistic representation’ in the Indian context.2 Similarly, Vinay Dharwardker has described 1922 to 1945 as a modernist phase of ‘nationalism and experimentation’, during which Indian writers – most of whom were familiar with European modernist trends – explored urban-rural relations and the place of the individual in the future nation.3 While Chaudhuri and Dharwadker note that ‘local and communitarian’ aesthetic and socio-political concerns fundamentally shaped modernist trends in various Indian languages, they sideline these concerns to present a more general ‘panoramic survey’ of Indian modernism.4 The Maṇikkoṭi-Vikaṭaṉ debates demonstrate, however, that extremely localised, intimate conversations profoundly influenced the trajectory of Tamil modernism. The literary/popular distinction that these debates established situates Tamil modernism at a tangent to Chaudhuri’s and Dharwadker’s characterisations of late colonial Indian modernism as preoccupied with anticolonialism and nation building. The politics of modernism in Tamil Nadu centered instead on inculcating readers with new aesthetic sensibilities that were aimed at diffusing regional contentions regarding linguistic and caste affiliations. 18

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The national-modern dialectic Geeta Kapur’s 1991 theorisation of Indian modernism, still the most widely accepted model in contemporary scholarship, informs Chaudhuri’s and Dharwardker’s nod to the role of local social landscapes in the development of Indian modernisms.5 Responding in the early 1990s to scholarly representations of Third World modernism as peripheral to European modernism, Kapur argued that the discourse of modernism in India is marked by a dialectic between the national and the modern. In her view, the national, represented in art through references to local landscapes and ‘folk’ (indigenous, tribal, or village) issues and motifs, draws from and celebrates Indian ‘tradition’. The modern, which references Euro-American modernist trends, stands, in contrast, for an international style that is transnational and universal in scope. Constantly shifting between the two, Kapur’s understanding of Indian modernism manifests as a paradoxical ‘double-take’, which sometimes ‘serves to make indigenous issues and motifs progressive’ and other times ‘seems to subvert . . . nationalism’.6 Seemingly at odds, the national and the modern converge, according to Kapur, ‘on the question of self-determination’.7 Indian modernist works imagine the subject through an intricate confluence of references to Indian tradition and international style, through which they ‘answer an emergent [postcolonial] society’s need for renewed selfdescription and radical assessment’.8 The contradictory ways in which these convergences manifest – for example, by anachronistically positioning an ‘indigenous preindustrial realm’ as a contemporary possibility – integrate the specific social and economic circumstances of the Indian context with the globally recognisable ‘rebel figure’, the privileged subject of international modernism.9 In doing so, Indian modernism offers, in Kapur’s view, a structurally distinct counter-practice to the elitism of Anglo-European modernism. Kapur valourises the national – as opposed to the local or regional – because she wishes to challenge the centre-periphery model of international modernism, which subordinates regional aesthetic criteria to Western artistic ideals. She contends that ‘from the point of view of cultural resistance to global pressures . . . the discourse of national culture is preferable to that of regional culture for the reason that nationalism is not a devolving concept – though indeed it can be a bigoted one’. Unlike regions, nations ‘cannot easily be swallowed whole, only tribe by tribe – which leaves the question begging how nations themselves swallow their own peoples tribe by tribe’.10 Thus, while Kapur acknowledges the drawbacks of nationalism as well as 19

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

The emergence of Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ and Maṇikkoṭi By the 1920s, Pure Tamil and Self-Respect Movement activists had effectively tapped into the power of journals to build new constituencies around their Dravidianist agendas. Maraimalai Adigal, Saivite reformer and leader of the Pure Tamil Movement, worked closely with the South India Saiva Siddhanta Works Publishing Society (established in 1920) and wrote prolifically in recently established Saiva Siddhanta magazines of the period to propagate his vision of Tamil language, history, and culture.11 Similarly, Periyar ran several Dravidian magazines connected with the Self-Respect Movement as well as the Justice Party, which he led from 1938 to 1944. He also wrote about the importance of establishing Dravidian magazines to counter Brahmin hegemony of the Tamil press, supporting all non-Brahmin magazines that emerged during the 1930s and 1940s – even those not affiliated with his movement.12 According to Periyar, Brahmin publishers, magazines, 20

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and newspapers ignored non-Brahmin concerns and skewed the reading public towards Hinduism and Brahmin patriarchy and politics. Creating a Dravidian-run press was necessary, he believed, for cultivating and politicising a counter non-Brahmin identity. As greater alliances developed between Pure Tamil activists and Self-Respecters in the 1930s – especially regarding language politics – Saivite and SelfRespect journals combined their efforts to promote essays on their shared anti-Hindi and anti-Brahmin viewpoints and to support each other’s cultural and political activities.13 Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ and Maṇikkoṭi emerged in this atmosphere of shifting power dynamics within the Tamil publishing sphere towards non-Brahmin social and political interests. When S.S. Vasan bought Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ in 1928, it was a fairly new and rather unsuccessful magazine that featured comedic writings about mother-in-law/daughter-in-law relationships, minors visiting courtesans and devadasis, domestic mishaps in Brahmin households, and humourous incidents that poked fun at various caste and religious communities. These largely stereotypical scenarios were paradigmatic of comedic writing that was published in specialised magazines from the 1880s onwards and garnered a relatively small audience. Vasan’s cardinal accomplishment was the creation of new columns and sections, such as ‘Vikaṭaṉ Talk (vikatan pēccu)’, ‘Small Amusements (ciṉṉañciṛi tamāṣ)’, ‘Women’s Talk (peṇ moḻikaḷ)’, and a column for readers to send in their own experiences entitled ‘Readers’ Comedies (nēyarkaḷ vikatam)’. These features enabled Vasan to appeal to a wider audience, transforming Vikaṭaṉ into the most popular magazine of the period. In 1930, Vasan hired R. Krishnamurthy ‘Kalki’ (1899–1954), whose short stories and essays brought even greater renown to the magazine.14 Vasan’s business savvy and openness to new genres enabled Vikaṭaṉ to gain popularity. However, it was Kalki’s witty approach to and deep investment in the journal medium that established hāsiya ilakkiyam, or humourous literature, as a major genre of contemporary Tamil writing. Several of his essays used comedy to explain how magazines operate. For example, in ‘Poṭu Pattirikai! (Go Ahead, Start a Magazine!)’, published in Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ in 1934, Kalki offered advice to an imaginary inquirer wishing to start a magazine of his own. Ironically suggesting that the inquirer’s circumstances made him a less-than-ideal magazine editor in the journal world, Kalki impressed upon readers how prolific and effective for amassing readers the journal medium was: You wrote and sent a hundred essays to magazines, and all of them were returned without being published . . . Brother! At a 21

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time when a new era of journals pervades Tamil Nadu, I have to say that you’ve achieved something rare . . . Usually some editor or other publishes the essay, whatever it might be. In such an age, it’s no small feat that you’ve received rejections from a hundred editors. No wonder you feel it’s necessary and appropriate to run your own magazine.15 In his typical tongue-and-cheek manner, Kalki conveyed that anyone possessing the right resources and a handful of essays and stories ready for publication could launch a magazine. At a more fundamental level, however, he implied that most editors approached language and literature without possessing the discerning eye necessary for shaping a successful magazine. Offering an absurd list of possible topics for publication, such as ‘The Secrets of Tripping and Falling’, ‘Is Death Necessary?’, ‘Is Blood Red? Or White?’, ‘Don’t Sleep!’, ‘Churchill Has Been Hit on the Head’, and ‘Rabindranath and the Cat’, Kalki joked that ‘the topics on which the essays are written aren’t important . . . it’s the writing style (eḻutum muṛai) that matters’.16 He advised that an editor should include some essays that are written in ner naṭai, or a straightforward style, which, according to Kalki, any idiot (mūḷai illātavar) can understand. Other essays should follow a marma (confusing) and uyartara (high-quality) naṭai (style), one so intellectual and philosophical that it makes readers’ heads spin. Kalki also sarcastically insisted that a magazine should always include short stories that are selected solely on the basis of whether they are interesting, rather than on the basis of their content or form.17 Through such quips, Kalki obliquely ridiculed existing magazines. He intimated that literary magazines that used a ‘high-quality’ style, such as Maṇikkoṭi, took themselves far too seriously to address readers’ needs and interests, while religious and political ones, such as SelfRespect and Saivite journals, failed readers by abandoning literary standards altogether. Subtly critiquing these existing approaches with humour, Kalki highlighted his own expertise and artistry in writing and editing for Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ. Running a magazine for the general public was, in his view, an important and highly skilled endeavour. Like Kalki, the founding editors of Maṇikkoṭi – T.S. Chokalingam (1899–1963), K. Srinivasan (1904–2001), and V. Ramaswamy Iyengar (1889–1951) – also perceived a lacuna in the Tamil journal world, and they launched their magazine in 1933 to address it. Whereas Kalki viewed comedy as a means for readers to escape their everyday lives, the Maṇikkoṭi editors believed literary discernment could transform readers’ perspectives on life altogether. As B.S. Ramaiah, who was 22

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involved with the magazine from its inception and later became its most well-known editor, recounted in his memoir, Maṇikkoṭi was more than just a magazine. It was a movement (iyakkam) ‘launched with the intention of inciting a new awakening . . . within the hearts of the people and elevating their literary taste [ilakkiya cuvai]’.18 In an environment in which classical Tamil was the only literature that politicians and activists celebrated, and in which magazines presented comedy as the only alternative to writing about social reform, religion and politics, Maṇikkoṭi focused on developing modern prose through a more philosophical and aesthetic lens: [Maṇikkoṭi] published ‘high literary’ [ilakkiya taramāna] writing in new genres. . . . To some extent, Kalki first demonstrated that it’s possible to express anything in Tamil. But, he believed that developing people’s taste and ideas required saying things humourously through ridicule and mockery. Maṇikkoṭi was the very first to show that humour wasn’t the only way that it was possible to say anything in Tamil and to express ideas firmly with depth and significance [āḻum kaṉam keṭṭiyākavum].19 Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ, and Kalki in particular, provided a counterpoint against which Maṇikkoṭi writers defined their literary project. They maintained that ‘in Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ, Kalki advanced merely trivial, pass-time literature’.20 Focusing mainly on the short story, they directed their literary energies towards experimentation with language and style and the exploration of individual desire and emotion. The reason why serious-minded Tamil writers had previously experienced difficulty getting their stories published, these writers pointed out, was that no appropriate literary venue existed for their work until Maṇikkoṭi.21 Refusing to send their work to popular (potujaṉa) magazines such as Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ, the Maṇikkoṭi kuḻu (clan), as they came to be called, loftily maintained that ‘if life is the earth . . . literature is the blossom that grows out of and stands above it’, rising up like a lotus out of the mud.22 Maṇikkoṭi writers argued that Kalki and other Vikaṭaṉ editors published writing based on what they believed the general masses desired to read. For this reason, they exercised little, if any, discrimination in selecting essays and stories or in improving them editorially. Ramaiah, by contrast, purposefully shaped Maṇikkoṭi submissions with a firm hand after he took over the magazine in 1935. Ramaiah’s editorial modifications were so influential that, as P.G. Sundararajan 23

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

The purpose of literature One reason that Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ and Maṇikkoṭi writers were so successful in constructing such a firm distinction between literary and popular fiction is that they explicitly and deliberately expressed their views on the purpose of literature. Through essays and short stories, Vikaṭaṉ and Maṇikkoṭi writers critiqued and parodied one another, 24

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while also defining the meaning of literature and its significance in everyday life. Doing so enabled them to instruct readers on how to read their work and appreciate their novel approaches to writing. Kalki impressed on his readers that humour offered them respite from the stress and disillusionment induced by the independence movement and related events. He perceived that the political writings that dominated most periodicals disheartened readers, leading them to angrily ‘rebuke editors and toss down their magazines’ in frustration.29 According to Kalki, Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ used humour to divert readers’ attention from their anxieties and burdens. In the tumultuous political environment of the 1930s, comedy allowed them to cull simple lessons about life, while also providing the escape necessary for revitalising themselves to endure their everyday struggles. Kalki also elaborated on the inner workings of comedy. For example, in an essay titled ‘Hāsiya Vipattukaḷ (The Dangers of Comedy)’, published in Vikaṭaṉ in 1932, he responded to critics who alleged that humour was dangerous because, too often, readers took jokes as truth instead of fiction. Demonstrating through various examples that a sense of humour is crucial for overcoming troubling circumstances, he ironically concluded: Of course, there’s a danger in taking something humourous as truth. But it’s even more distressing to consider a situation in which there’s no humour at all. The name ‘vikaṭaṉ’ [which means ‘jest’] is an aid against this kind of mistake. Other magazines have a separate ‘comedy section’. . . . [But] we don’t use such headings in Vikaṭaṉ. We also don’t separate things into a ‘tragedy section’, an ‘entertainment section’, and a ‘horror section’ [etc.]. Therefore, is it possible, when you see the name Vikaṭaṉ, to take everything humourously and to laugh at those moments when you want to cry? You might consider that this is the most formidable danger of all.30 Kalki distinguished Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ from most magazines, which directed readers to understand humour as exceptional, rather than integral, to the human condition. This, in Kalki’s opinion, was the most harmful of all approaches to daily life. He furthermore contended that those who took life too seriously perceived humour as threatening because it unsettled their established norms and modes of existence. Through this critique, he implicitly suggested that comedic literature enabled individuals to consider their circumstances from fresh, more advantageous perspectives. 25

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Kalki brought this point to the fore in his short story ‘Cirañcīvik Katai! (A Timeless Story)’, which appeared in the 19 April 1936 issue of Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ. Although the story contains no mention of Maṇikkoṭi, Kalki clearly aimed it as a taunt towards Maṇikkoṭi writers for investing too much literary significance in use of language and form and the depiction of individual desire and intention. According to Ramaiah, Kalki’s story poked fun specifically at his column ‘The First Chapter (Mutal Attiyāyam)’, which Ramaiah inaugurated when he became editor of Maṇikkoṭi in 1935. The column introduced those stories appearing in each issue that Ramaiah felt were timeless (cirañcīvi) and noted their unique features such as unusual plot lines, descriptive details, character development, and formal or linguistic innovation. Kalki’s critique of the column, writes Ramaiah, was that it immortalised the stories that it featured before time could prove their literary worth.31 Mocking Ramaiah’s overbearing editorial direction, the narrator of Kalki’s ‘A Timeless Story’ began: I’m not going to ask you not to be alarmed when you read this title because you will do the opposite of what I ask. Therefore, I request that you please be afraid when you hear this title. Yes, the story I’m about to write is not a timeless story. In truth, it’s not even a long-lived story. For those who read quickly, its lifespan is three minutes. Even if you read the story letter by letter, it would last only five minutes. Actually, the title ‘A Timeless Story’ appeared in another humourous magazine. In that story, how a woman took revenge on her sister-in-law by killing her three children and then herself, and how her husband shut down after these events and was run over by a tram were described in a surprising manner and wondrous style. The title of the story was ‘A Drink of Immortal Nectar’. Above the title, the magazine editor had expressed his particular thoughts on the story in a highlighted box. The first mistake my protagonist Mister Markanda Mudaliar made was to read the first sentence in that highlighted section. . . [which read] ‘This is a timeless story. . . ’.32 Toying with the story’s title, the narrator cleverly highlights his deliberate orchestration of the narrative to guide his readers’ reception of the story. No story, he suggests, is truly ‘timeless’, as it endures only as long as the time it takes to read, regardless of editorial intervention. Appropriating the title from another magazine, the narrator points sarcastically to the undue emphasis that ‘A Drink of Immortal Nectar’ 26

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gives to developing a ‘surprising’ and ‘wonderous’ literary style rather than to the mechanism of humour. This was Kalki’s way of alluding to Maṇikkoṭi, which was clearly not a ‘humourous magazine’, as evidenced by the overly dramatic plot of the imaginary ‘timeless story’ to which Kalki’s story refers. The narrator of ‘A Timeless Story’ thus critiques the Maṇikkoṭi writers’ efforts, while also calling attention to his own equally laughable experimentation with the idea of a ‘timeless story’. ‘What, indeed, makes a story timeless, and what are its merits?’ he prods readers to ask. And more importantly, ‘Is there a place for humour in a so-called timeless literary work?’ Contrary to the narrator’s view, the story’s protagonist Markanda Mudaliar finds the idea of a timeless story irresistible. The magazine editor’s comment leads Markanda to wonder, ‘Is it possible to be everlasting (cirañcīvi) in this world? . . . Must a man die?’33 Markanda immediately decides to change his daily habits to ensure his own immortality in some way or another. He makes a plan to eat better, exercise more, challenge himself intellectually and philosophically, and even to explore the idea of remarriage after having been widowed several years earlier. After trying his hand at several physical tasks unsuccessfully, he finally resolves to take a walk on the beach to benefit from the fresh sea breeze. Unbeknownst to Markanda, however, crowds have gathered at the seashore to support Gandhi’s Salt March and protest the arrest of several enthusiasts who had set up portable stoves to make their own salt. As Markanda approaches the beach, the crowd begins to pelt the police with stones, and the police open fire in return. Determined to follow through on his new plan and oblivious to his surroundings, Markanda pushes through the crowd only to be shot dead instantly. The narrator dispassionately steps back into the narrative to conclude: To commemorate Mister Markanda Mudaliar, who gave his life in the shootout at the beach, the Municipal Corporation decided to replace the name of Abdullah Jamvanth Lala Lane in Pudupettai – where Markanda lived most of his life – with the name Markanda Mudaliar Street. The decision was unanimously supported. This is the life history of my protagonist Mister Markanda Mudaliar, who by the age of fifty acquired the title of being an immortal [cirañcīvi], just like the ancient rishi Markandeya.34 Ironically, the Municipal Corporation views Markanda’s walk on the beach as a great act of nationalist bravado, while Markanda’s will to 27

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change his life and desire for self-improvement – which he himself had held most dear – perish along with him. The narrator wittily references the protagonist’s namesake, the mythic Hindu sage Markandeya who defeated death by performing extensive penance to Lord Siva. The comparison accentuates Markanda Mudaliar’s rather inconsequential existence and highlights the self-serving nature and triviality of his actions. The story’s message is both poignant and cynical: seemingly extraordinary political sacrifices are, in fact, driven by mundane motivations, while seemingly powerful personal ambitions become impotent in the face of broader social circumstances. Long-lasting literary renown, furthermore, is fundamentally meaningless. Markanda Mudaliar’s death is an absurdly comical twist to an otherwise ordinary story. The narrator uses it to inspire readers to consider the nature of human mortality and the value of literary fiction. A humourous perspective, he suggests, offers much more fodder for thought than any rhetorical turn of language or philosophical exploration of aesthetics.35 The Maṇikkoṭi writers, however, understood literature altogether differently. The casual, almost disrespectful, manner in which Kalki wrote, the ‘pass time’ content of his fiction, and the polemical life lessons he often expounded were, in their view, antithetical to the primary function of literature. They argued instead that literature provided a more intuitive and evenhanded perspective on life than could otherwise be obtained – a perspective that was rooted in yet also elevated above everyday experience. According to Maṇikkoṭi writers, comedy distracted readers from understanding the underlying enigmatic nature of life, which literature illuminated, and which enabled readers to find solace and meaning where there otherwise seemed to be none. For example, in the 28 October 1934 issue of Maṇikkoṭi, Pudumaippittan – perhaps the most widely read of the Maṇikkoṭi writers – elaborated on the unique function of literature in an essay titled ‘The Secret of Literature (Ilakkiyattiṉ Irakaciyam)’. For Pudumappittan, the secret of literature was no different than the secret of life: What is the place of literature in life [vaḻkkai]? . . . There is no opinion more wrong than thinking that literature is a ‘means for accumulating desirable things.’ Literature is the elaboration [virivu] of the self [uḷḷam], the awakening [eḻucci] of the self, its blossoming [malarcci]. A writer examines life with all of its complexities and problems [cikkalkaḷ], subtleties [nuṇukkam] and twists [piṉṉalkaḷ]. On their behalf, he begets a feeling [uṇarcci] deep within us. Literature is the very thing that governs over that stream of emotion [uṇarcci]. It could 28

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be the name of a flower that he [the writer] doesn’t know, a detested political scheme, or the severity of human cruelty that catches his attention. Regardless, as soon as he notices a particular feature, his heart and mind grow weary. Literature is the representation of this arousal of emotion [calaṉam]. . . . The pulse of literature is emotion [uṇarcci]. . . . The sheer truth [uṇmai] of emotion leads to a new state of consciousness [viḻippu]. Truth is the very secret [rakaciyam] of life.36 For Pudumaippittan and other Maṇikkoṭi writers, uṇarcci (feeling, emotion, sentiment, or sensibility), which arose out of the writer’s everyday life and inspired his creative production, formed the essence of literature. It was what the writer transferred to readers through his fiction, kindling a transformation of selfhood within them. In the Maṇikkoṭi writers’ view, experiencing uṇarcci enabled readers to develop heightened aesthetic sensibilities for encountering the world in new, unconventional ways. Pudumaippittan thus suggested that literature is the very truth (uṇmai) of life, the primary basis of human knowledge and community belonging. He expanded this idea in his short story ‘Ciṟpiyiṉ Narakam (The Sculptor’s Hell)’, published in Maṇikkoṭi in the 25 August 1935 issue. The setting of this unusual story is an unspecified moment in the ancient past when Tamilians, Northern Aryans, Greeks, and Africans lived together in the coastal region of Tamil Nadu. As the story opens, Phylarkkas, a young Greek man, watches the sun set upon a bustling harbor town while sitting on the steps of a bathing ghat. A Tamil religious pilgrim whom Phylarkkas knows well interrupts Phylarkkas’s contemplative mood to explain the scene before him: ‘Everything is the sacred game of original divine power, [everything is] its manifestation!’37 Phylarkkas good-humouredly responds that religion and philosophy are nonsensical and would be better replaced by hedonism, wine, and women. The two agree to present their debate to Sathan, who best ‘understands the secret of creative production (ciruṣṭi rakaciyam)’.38 An old and humble sculptor, Sathan invites the two men to his home to see his latest and greatest work, which he has prepared for the king’s temple. Versed in sacred scriptures and teeming with life experiences due to his travels, Sathan tells Phylarkkas and the pilgrim that he has put all that he has learned – particularly about the existence of the divine – into making his new sculpture. It is a statue of the god Siva with one leg raised in an artistic dance pose, locks flowing, and hands held in a gesture of grace. Phylarkkas is stunned by the statue’s beauty, exclaiming, ‘This is real art! This is true creativity!’39 He begs 29

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Sathan not to install the statue in a religious setting, where its artistic significance would be diminished, and dismayed by Sathan’s refusal, he angrily walks away. ‘The Sculptor’s Hell’ then abruptly shifts to a second scene, when Phylarkkas is no longer alive and Sathan’s sculpture has been installed in the king’s temple and consecrated. Sathan has slipped into a bewildering dream-filled sleep, in which he sees his statue lit up before him and then completely enveloped in darkness. As Sathan makes his way into the depths of the temple, he finds the statue no longer has any life. ‘Everything is a delusion [maruḷ] . . . a delusion!’ he cries. He watches a stream of devotees – mere shadows in his dream – begging God for salvation without ever glancing at the statue: ‘Give me release [mōṭcam] . . . this was the chorus, the song, everything!’40 In a rage, Sathan breaks the statue to pieces, cursing it for losing all meaning in the eyes of its beholders. Covered in the statue’s blood, Sathan suddenly wakes, and here, the story concludes: ‘ “Oh, what a terrible dream . . . if only poor Phylarkkas were here”, [thought Sathan]. Sathan’s mind could find no peace’.41 Initially, ‘The Sculptor’s Hell’ sets up a dichotomy between Phylarkkas’s valourisation of individual desire and the pilgrim’s and Sathan’s reverence for the divine, through which it investigates the meaning of art. Despite the story’s historical setting, Phylarkkas represents a more ‘modern’ outlook – one that elevates individual pleasure and rationality above religion, culture, and tradition. The pilgrim and Sathan embody an opposing ‘Tamil Saivite’ outlook, which considers all worldly aspects to be materialisations of inexplicable divine power. In their conversations, Phylarkkas holds that ‘true’ art gives form to the universal nature of beauty, whereas the pilgrim and Sathan consider it to be a revelation of divine essence. However, Sathan’s dream gives him a different view of the relationship between life and art by allowing him to glimpse the way in which rote religious beliefs and customs overshadow artistic meaning. When he wakes, the uneasiness and confusion that Sathan experiences evoke similar feelings (uṇarcci) in readers. These emotions offer readers insight into the nature of art and its place in daily life, suggesting that Phylarkkas’s individualistic approach might be more appropriate to the modern human condition than they may have believed. ‘The Sculptor’s Hell’ awakens a new artistic sensibility within readers by asking them to reflect upon Phylarkkas’s foreign perspective, thereby drawing them together within a shared, creative-minded community. While ‘The Sculptor’s Hell’ focuses specifically on the meaning of art and takes no heed of Kalki’s more popular style of writing, other 30

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

Repercussions of the new literary–popular continuum Through such short stories and essays, Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ and Maṇikkoṭi writers formulated their distinct literary projects by responding to and critiquing one another’s aesthetic worldviews. Doing so enabled them to train readers to recognise the differences between ‘popular’ and ‘literary’ fiction, both of which were relatively new genres in the 1930s Tamil publishing sphere. Yet, what led Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ and Maṇikkoṭi writers to focus so intently on fashioning these new genres and developing readerly interest in them? In their work, these writers often explained their views on the meaning and purpose of literature, but they much less frequently (if at all) discussed why they felt these 31

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views mattered. In the opening passages of this essay, I suggested that understanding what was at stake in the Maṇikkoṭi and Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ debates about literary and popular fiction requires viewing their endeavours in relation to contentions surrounding language and caste identity in late colonial Tamil Nadu. Let me conclude by briefly elaborating this argument to consider how these writers’ establishment of a literary–popular continuum of modern fiction helped to consolidate a uniquely Tamil modernist tradition in the face of growing Dravidianist dissension. It was no secret that Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ and Maṇikkoṭi were aligned with Gandhian civil disobedience and the anticolonial objectives of the INC – both of which Self-Respecters and Pure Tamil activists considered to be dominated by Brahminism and therefore rigorously opposed. Nonetheless, Vikaṭaṉ and Maṇikkoṭi writers were discreet and diplomatic in those few instances when they articulated their political views.45 As I demonstrated above, they eschewed politics in their fiction, contending that it misled readers, increased their daily troubles, and impeded the development of literary taste. In principle, Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ and Maṇikkoṭi writers agreed that readers needed less political discourse and more literary appreciation at a moment when politics pervaded their lives. Despite this perspective, however, Vikaṭaṉ and Maṇikkoṭi writers did not refrain from discussing their perspectives on Tamil language and literature – two issues that lay at the heart of Dravidianist politics. By limiting their discussion to language and literature rather than the broader politics of caste and ethnicity to which these elements were linked, Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ and Maṇikkoṭi writers fashioned a ‘pure’ literary sphere in which literature, seemingly freed from the confining shackles of politics, became the preeminent concern. For example, Kalki and Pudumaippittan mourned the backward state of modern Tamil literature due to the grip that purists held on the use of Tamil language. Both writers contended that because scholars and activists cared solely about classical Tamil, no properly modern Tamil literature existed compared to other Indian languages. They pointed out that the majority of new publications in Tamil consisted of premodern cultural histories, that the drive to rid Tamil of English and Sanskrit influences was misdirected and detrimental to literary production, and that the paramount duty of Tamil writers was to develop Tamil prose in a flexible and modern style.46 Kalki and Pudumaippittan formulated these arguments without overtly discussing the Dravidianist agendas driving the scholars and activists they critiqued, but the political implication of their outwardly ‘literary’ message remains 32

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clear: in their view, the hold of anti-Brahmin politics on contemporary Tamil culture prevented Tamilians from modernising and adapting to the rapidly changing conditions of the late colonial period.47 Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ and Maṇikkoṭi writers therefore used literature to highlight individuals’ shared values, as opposed to their caste and religious differences. They argued that literature brought readers together on the basis of their common experiences of pleasure and lighthearted entertainment (in the case of Kalki and other Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ writers) and artistic inspiration and emotional suffering (in the case of Maṇikkoṭi writers). Despite these writers’ intention of building greater inclusivity, however, the unfortunate consequence of fashioning such an exclusively literary sphere – which, as I demonstrated above, ranged from high literary writing to purely popular entertainment – was that modernist experimentation became largely the province of Brahmin and upper-caste writers. Until the interventions of Tamil Dalit writers in the 1990s, not just Dravidian literature, but rather all literature expressing a political slant, has been considered outside the realm of respectable literary production. In this sense, the caste dynamics of the Tamil literary sphere reflects the scholarly characterisation of Indian literature more generally, that it is shaped by ideas of literariness that cohere around ‘a High Textuality of the Brahminical kind’.48 Still, I want to underscore that in spite of the pan-Indian resonances between these writers’ humanistic themes and those of modernists in other Indian literatures, the establishment of the literary/popular distinction in modern Tamil literature emerged in response to local circumstances as much as (if not more so than) pan-Indian discourses of nationalism, tradition, and anticolonialism. While Markanda Mudaliar and Sathan are certainly modern individuals who push back against social norms in the ‘rebellious’ sense that Geeta Kapur elaborates, these characters’ engagements with Indian nationalism and tradition are ultimately ambivalent and debauched. Neither ‘A Timeless Story’ nor ‘The Sculptor’s Hell’ takes a clear position on these issues. Read in light of the late colonial disputes surrounding ethnic identity and caste oppression in Tamil Nadu, Kalki’s and Pudumaippittan’s stories illustrate instead how Ananta Vikaṭaṉ and Maṇikkoṭi writers targeted their efforts towards developing modern Tamil literature into a medium with which all Tamilians could identify and in which all Tamilians could take pleasure. Local disputes surrounding the authority of the pan-Indian nationalist agenda, the role of Tamil Saivism, the place of Tamil literature, and the use of Tamil language preoccupied Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ and Maṇikkoṭi writers, just as much as their Pure Tamil and Self-Respect contemporaries, and these were the issues that 33

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

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

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Mulk Raj Anand’s English-language novel Untouchable (1935) requires placing it in conversation with Premchand’s Hindi-language theorisation of idealistic realism (ādarśonmukhī yathārthvād). The comparison enables Dharwadker to explain how Anand’s novel moves between (typically European) modernist experimentation with style and form and (characteristically Indian) realistic description of the protagonist’s casteised life experience. See Dharwadker, ‘The Modernist Novel,’ pp. 112–118. 6 Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India. New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2000, p. 292. 7 Ibid., p. 294. 8 Kumkum Sangari, ‘The Politics of the Possible,’ Cultural Critique, vol. 7, Autumn 1987, p. 162., quoted in Kapur, When Was Modernism, p. 295. 9 Kapur, When Was Modernism, pp. 293–294. 10 Ibid., p. 291 (emphasis in original). 11 The main Saiva Siddhanta journals in which Maraimaial Adigal published were were Navacakti, Cittāntam, Civanēcaṉ, Centamiḻ, and Centamiḻ Celvi. See Venkatachalapathy, In Those Days There Was No Coffee, p. 123 n. 40. 12 The magazines Periyar ran were Kuṭi Aracu, Revolt, Puraṭci, Pakuttaṛivu, and Viṭutalai. In addition, he regularly provided introductions to newly arising non-Brahmin magazines in Kuṭi Aracu, promoting their endeavors and discussing their importance for giving voice to non-Brahmin perspectives and raising awareness about non-Brahmin issues. See, for example, Periyar’s writings in the section ‘Ceytikaḷ (News and Information)’ in E.V. Periyar Ramasami, Periyār Ī. Ve. Rā. Cintaṉnaikaḷ [Thoughts of Periyar E.V.R.] ed. V. Anaimuthu, vol. 3. Tiruchirappalli: Cintanaiyalar Kazhagam, 1974, pp. 1889–1981. 13 See Venkatachalapathy, In Those Days There Was No Coffee, pp. 128–136. 14 R.A. Padmanabhan, who was a sub-editor at Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ in the early 1930s, describes some of Vasan’s and Kalki’s accomplishments at Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ. See R.A. Padmanabhan, Tamiḷ Itaḷkal, 1915–1966 [Tamil Journals, 1915–1966]. Chennai: Kalachuvadu, 2003, pp. 77–90. 15 R. Krishanmurthy Kalki, ‘Poṭu Pattirikai! [Go Ahead, Start a Magazine!],’ in Kalki Vaḷarttta Tamiḻ [the Tamil That Kalki Developed]. Chennai: Vikatan Prachuram, 2007 [1934], pp. 131–132. 16 Ibid., pp. 133–134. 17 Ibid., pp. 134–137. 18 B.S. Ramaiah, Maṇikkōṭi Kālam [the Era of Manikkoti]. Chennai: Meyyappan Pathipakam, 1980 [1969–1971], n.p. 19 Ibid., p. 64. 20 Padmanabhan, Tamiḷ Itaḷkal, p. 93. 21 See, for instance, the editorial in the 29 April 1934 issue of Maṇikkoṭi, quoted in P.G. Sundararajan and Cho. Sivapathasundaram, Tamiḻil Ciṛukatai: Varalāṛum Vaḷarcciyum [the Tamil Short Story: History and Development]. Chennai: Crea, 1989, p. 99. 22 Ku. Pa. Rajagopalan, ‘Maṛumalarcci [Renaissance],’ in Maṇikkoti Itaḻ Tokuppu [Collected Writings from the Journal Maṇikkoṭi], ed. P.G. Sundarajan, Ashokamitran, and Pa. Muttukumarasami. Chennai: Kalaiñan Patippakam, 2001 [1934], p. 153. Although many writers published in Maṇikkoṭi, the key figures that most literary histories consider part of the

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Maṇikkoṭi kuḻu (clan) include B.S. Ramaiah, C.S. Chellappa (1912–1988), C. Viruthachalam ‘Pudumaippittan’ (1906–1948), Ku. Pa. Rajagopalan (1902–1944), Na. Piccamurti (1900–1976), and P.G. Sundararajan ‘Chitti’ (1910–2006). 23 Sundararajan and Sivapathasundaram, Tamiḻil Ciṛukatai, pp. 104–105; Ramaiah, Maṇikkōṭi Kālam, p. 159. Sundararajan was part of the Maṇikkoṭi clan. 24 Ramaiah, Maṇikkōṭi Kālam, p. 61. Kennedy notes that T.K.C.’s discussion group – of which Kalki was an active member – was involved in revitalizing classical Tamil literature, something that Maṇikkoṭi writers resisted. Kennedy also describes a dispute that broke out in the pages of Maṇikkoṭi and the Tamil newspaper Tiṉa Maṇi between Kalki and Maṇikkoṭi writers over Bharati’s literary merit. Maṇikkoṭi writers argued that Bharati should be considered a world literary figure, whereas Kalki viewed his work as pedestrian. See Richard Kennedy, ‘Public Voices, Private Voices: Manikkoti, Nationalism, and the Development of the Tamil Short Story, 1914–1947.’ unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, 1980, pp. 137–139. 25 In the first issue of Maṇikkoṭi – published on 17 September 1933 – the founding editors noted that they named the magazine after a verse in Bharati’s poem, which praised the jeweled banner (maṇikkoṭi) representing the strength and glory of the Indian nation. See Sundararajan and Sivapathasundaram, Tamiḻil Ciṛukatai, pp. 95–96; Kennedy, ‘Public Voices,’ p. 123. 26 Ramaiah, Maṇikkōṭi Kālam, pp. 158–159. 27 Sundararajan and Sivapathasundaram, Tamiḻil Ciṛukatai, p. 86. 28 Ibid., pp. 96–97; Ramaiah, Maṇikkōṭi Kālam, p. 37. 29 Kalki’s editorial in the 19 November 1933 issue of Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ, quoted in Sundararajan and Sivapathasundaram, Tamiḻil Ciṛukatai, p. 95. 30 R. Krishanmurthy Kalki, ‘Hāsiya Vipattukkaḷ [the Dangers of Comedy],’ in Kalki Vaḷarttta Tamiḻ [the Tamil That Kalki Developed] (Chennai: Vikatan Prachuram, 2007 [1932]), p. 59. 31 Ramaiah, Maṇikkōṭi Kālam, pp. 182–183. 32 R. Krishanmurthy Kalki, ‘Cirañcīvik Katai [a Timeless Story],’ in Kalki Vaḷarttta Tamiḻ [the Tamil That Kalki Developed] (Chennai: Vikatan Prachuram, 2007 [1936]), pp. 358–359. 33 Ibid., p. 360. 34 Ibid., p. 366. 35 Kennedy argues that ‘Kalki’s message [in “A Timeless Story”] is that action is the only true “immortal story”.’ I view the story, conversely, as an illustration of how individual action is often futile and how ‘timeless’ literary narratives are based in misconception, falsehood, and undue acclaim. See Kennedy, ‘Public Voices,’ p. 105. 36 Pudumaippittan, ‘Ilakkiyattiṉ Irakaciyam [the Secret of Literature],’ in Putumaippittaṉ Kaṭṭuraikaḷ [Pudumaippittan’s Essays], ed. A.R. Venkatachalapathy (Chennai: Kalachuvadu, 2002 [1934]), pp. 118–119. 37 ‘Ciṟpiyiṉ Narakam [the Sculptor’s Hell],’ in Pudumaippittaṉ Kataikaḷ [the Short Stories of Pudumaippittan], ed. A.R. Venkatachalapathy. Chennai: Kalachuvadu Pathippakam, 2000 [1935], p. 326. 38 Ibid.

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9 Ibid., p. 329. 3 40 Ibid., p. 330. 41 Ibid. 42 Ki. Rajanarayanan, ‘Hāsya Pattirikāciriyaṉ [the Comedy Magazine Editor],’ in Maṇikkoti Itaḻ Tokuppu [Collected Writings from the Journal Maṇikkoṭi], ed. P.G. Sundarajan, Ashokamitran, and Pa. Muttukumarasami. Chennai: Kalaiñan Patippakam, 2001 [1937], p. 429. 43 Maṇikkoṭi writers accused Kalki of plagiarising English magazines in order to produce new material for Ānaṉta Vikaṭaṉ. See Sundararajan and Sivapathasundaram, Tamiḻil Ciṛukatai, pp. 151–153. 44 Rajanarayanan, ‘Hāsya Pattirikāciriyaṉ,’ p. 435. 45 See Sundararajan and Sivapathasundaram, Tamiḻil Ciṛukatai, p. 69; Ramaiah, Maṇikkōṭi Kālam, pp. 68–69; Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai, Madras Studios: Narrative, Genre, and Ideology in Tamil Cinema. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2015, p. 156. Vasan, Kalki, and the founding Maṇikkoṭi editors all mentioned their support for Gandhi and the INC in various essays and editorials, although they generally dwelt little on this position. 46 See, for example, R. Krishanmurthy Kalki, ‘Eṅkaḷ Tamiḻ Moḻi [Our Tamil Language],’ in Kalki Vaḷarttta Tamiḻ [the Tamil That Kalki Developed]. Chennai: Vikatan Prachuram, 2007 [1933]; Pudumaippittan, ‘Tamiḻaip Paṛṛi [About Tamil],’ in Putumaippittan Kaṭṭuraikal, ed. A.R. Venkatachalapathy. Chennai: Kalachuvadu, 2002 [1934]. 47 Kalki was far more sympathetic to Tamil purists’ position on language and literature than Maṇikkoṭi writers, however. Influenced greatly by the Tamil journalist and littérateur T.V. Kalyanasundaram ‘Thiru. Vi. Ka.’ (1883–1953), who developed a classical Tamil oratorical style, Kalki stressed the greatness of classical Tamil language literature. He went on, in the 1940s, to write a number of popular historical novels based on Tamil mythology as well as to support the Tamiḻ Icai Iyakkam (Tamil Music Movement), which contested the domination of Carnatic music by Brahmins. Maṇikkoṭi writers had disbanded by this period and continued to refrain from taking overt political positions in their writing. See Kennedy, ‘Public Voices,’ pp. 107–108; Amanda Weidman, Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006, pp. 180–182. 48 Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures. New York: Verso, 1992, p. 244.

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2 HOMAGE TO A ‘MAGICWRITER’ The Mistrīz and Asrār novels of Urdu C.M. Naim

Between 1893 and 1923, the most popular novelist in Urdu across India was none other than George William MacArthur Reynolds (1814–1879), the now forgotten Chartist rabble-rouser, gargantuan journalist and novelist, and at one time the most popular author in English. In 1918, there were available in Urdu at least 24 of Reynolds’s novels, including the two sagas, The Mysteries of London (1848) and The Mysteries of the Court of London (1856). Also by then, many of the earliest translations had received two or more printings, while some novels had been translated more than once. Among his enthusiastic translators were such notables of Urdu letters as Sajjad Husain, Abdul Halim Sharar, Riyaz Khairabadi, and Naubat Rai Nazar. Urdu translators and publishers consistently referred to him as the ‘Magic-Writer Mr. Reynolds’ (Jādū-nigār Mistar Rinālds), and one bookseller/publisher in Lahore in 1914 not only proudly offered to supply all his translated books to the connoisseurs but also commissioned new and more complete translations of his two ‘mysteries’ and three other novels.1 Reynolds’s historical romances and ‘mysteries’ equally attracted Urdu translators across North India around the same time – i.e. the early 1890s – but curiously only his historical romances, appealed to the translators in Avadh – i.e. Lucknow, and the nearby districts. His ‘mysteries’, on the other hand, were translated into Urdu only by people from the Punjab. Was it because the admirer/translator in Lucknow or Delhi was still more traditional in his literary taste, and markedly preferred romantic and martial adventures that appeared closer to his own Urdu heritage of the dāstān, whereas his counterpart in Lahore, exposed to direct colonial influence for just a few more years – Lahore 38

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was taken by the East Indian Company in 1850; Lucknow in 1856 – had more rapidly accommodated a new taste in fiction? Or was it related to the popularisation of notions of ‘realism’ or ‘naturalism’ among the literati under the direct tutelage of certain colonial officers of the Department of Public Instruction, as happened in the emergence of a taste for ‘natural poetry’, in Urdu exemplified by Muhammad Hasan Azad and Altaf Husain Hali?2 These tempting questions cannot be answered here. What we do know for sure is that Reynolds’s The Mysteries of the Court of London made its appearance in Urdu in 1893, translated by Ghulam Qadir Fasih of Sialkot, while his The Mysteries of London found translators some twenty years later, one from Lahore and the other from Firozpur. To Fasih also goes the credit for introducing the word mistrīz in Urdu. * Ghulam Qadir Fasih was born in Sialkot in 1860.3 After matriculating from the city’s Scotch Mission High School, he started a printing business, ‘The Punjab Press’, and launched a successful career as a writer, editor, translator, and publisher. His civic activities also made him a notable person across Punjab. Though he died in 1912, when only 52, Fasih’s name remains significant in the history of Urdu literature due to his many translations. The authors he introduced to Urdu readers include, among others, G.W.M. Reynolds, Alexandre Dumas, Jules Verne, and Jonathan Swift. Fasih launched his literary career by translating Reynolds’s The Mysteries of the Court of London, serialising it in the monthly Nāvilist (‘The Novelist’) that he edited and also published. The serialised installments were eventually collated into a set of four volumes that came out in 1893. Two similar sets followed some years later. Together, the three are now commonly referred to as Darbār-e Landan ke Asrār (‘The Secrets of the Court of London’). The same year he also published two other translations, both from Reynolds: The Bronze Statue; or, the Virgin’s Kiss under the title Brā’un Istechu (‘The Brown Statue’), and Omar, a Tale of the War as Umar Pāshā (‘Umar Pasha’). Fasih translated and published nearly a dozen more titles from English, including three novels by Alexandre Dumas – Chicot the Jester, The Forty-five Guardsmen, and The Three Musketeers – put together into one volume, now called Darbār-e Pairis ke Asrār (‘The Secrets of the Court of Paris’), and the same author’s The Fencing Master as Darbār-e Rūs ke Asrār (‘The Secrets of the Court of Russia’), and 39

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a two-volume Urdu version of Eugène Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris under the title Shahr Pairis ke Asrār (‘The Secrets of the City of Paris’). I was not able to gain access to any of the above, and know them only as entries in old catalogues and advertisements, but it is safe to assume that, like all Urdu translations of English novels from that time, they too were freely abridged versions and not full translations. An entry in the WorldCat and an ad of the book in a later publication indicate that the book now referred to as Darbār-e Pairis ke Asrār originally had a longer title whose first part was in English, though written out in Urdu script: Mistrīz āf di Kort āf Pairis ya’nī Darbār-e Pairis ke Asrār (‘Mysteries of the Court of Paris, i.e. The Secrets of the Paris Court’). It suggests that the original title of Fasih’s first book could also have been a very matter of fact, Mistrīz āf di Kort āf Landan ya’nī Darbār-e Landan ke Asrār, and that its success urged him to similarly fashion the titles of his subsequent books, even if the original titles were quite different. Meanwhile, Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London had long been gaining its own countless admirers across India, including among the rapidly increasing Urdu-speaking readers of popular English fiction. Even ‘Deputy’ Nazir Ahmad (1831–1912), the famous reformer and novelist, was well aware of it, as is evident from an authorial remark in his 1891 novel, Ayāmā (‘The Widows’). Hadi Begum, the staunchly orthodox mother of the book’s heroine, unremittingly rejects all social changes that colonial public education and public health policies were instigating, while her husband, Azad, is exactly the opposite. The two argue all the time concerning their daughter, her education, and her future marital life. On one such occasion, Nazir Ahmad writes, ‘Hadi Begum tore into the mores of the English society as if she had memorised Mistrīz āf Landan word for word.’4 By 1899, Fasih’s translations had reached a wide and enthusiastic audience and made the word mistrīz (‘mysteries’) a marker of a certain kind of good read for many Urdu readers. Their popularity, and the popularity of Reynolds’s Mysteries, encouraged quite a few imitations. In the beginning years of the new century, several short novels came out that had titles modeled on Fasih’s bestsellers. Vastly meagre in ambition compared to what they sought to imitate, these books, nevertheless, deserve some consideration – they were also some of the earliest attempts in Urdu to write original crime fiction. * I have so far come across at least fourteen books with titles modeled on Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London. These are: Mistrīz āf 40

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Rāvalpindī (1901?); Mistrīz āf Pishāvar (pre-1904); Mistrīz āf Multān (pre-1904); Mistrīz āf Kābul (pre-1904); Mistrīz āf Kohāt (pre-1904); Mistrīz āf Amritsar; Mistrīz āf Fīrozpūr (pre-1904); Mistrīz āf Dehlī (pre-1904); Mistrīz āf Lakhna’ū (1918); Mistrīz āf Shimla; Mistrīz āf Panjāb; Mistrīz āf Āsām; Mistrīz āf Lāhor; and Mistrīz āf Ludhiyāna.5 Before discussing some of the above, it may be useful to take notice of the manner they were described to prospective readers in an advertisement in one of the books, for the blurbs strongly suggest that for contemporary readers, mistrīz was almost a specific literary genre that employed a mixture of fact and fiction to create its contents and carried a moral purpose. The author of Mistrīz āf Rāvalpindī, therefore, is commended for narrating the strange and frightening secrets of Rawalpindi in an elegant manner without sullying the actual events with falsity and gossip, despite making the true events and real facts a deal more interesting by using colorful imaginary names right from the beginning. The recommendation for Mistrīz āf Pishāvar includes: ‘If you have ever read any mistrīz then we would like you to know that no better mistrīz exists than this book.’ Mistrīz āf Kohāt is described as ‘a mistrīz in name, but in fact a strange and interesting tale, chock-full of moral advice. Every chapter leads to a fresh moral conclusion.’ The iteration that every mistrīz contained some implied moral purpose was, no doubt, a nod to the then prevalent ‘reformist’ trends in all aspects of life, including literary preferences. * Bihari Lal Shafaq’s Mistrīz āf Rāvalpindī (‘The Mysteries of Rawalpindi’) has a short preface in which the author states that he makes ‘no claim for his book of being interesting, even though it is so from the beginning due to [my] presenting true contemporary facts with imaginary names and additional flourishes.’6 However, he was happy ‘to take pride in the fact that the book’s contents [were] edifying (natā’ij-khez).’ It is a short book, only 77 pages long, curiously structured, but with a promising opening. An English police officer rides out into the countryside of Rawalpindi and quietly gives instructions to several plainclothesmen, led by a man named Jaimal, and sets in motion an undisclosed plan against certain criminals. The man, Jaimal, then finds 41

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little mention in the book except at the very end, where we are told that the preceding narrative contained only what the author had found in Jaimal’s confidential diary. We next meet the three criminals: two are low-level government employees in the ‘Commissariat’, while the third is the priest of a temple in Lahore. The former two, Azam Beg and Babu Lal, enriched themselves by taking bribes and cheating the government, while the pundit of the temple engaged in kidnapping and selling young girls. One of the latter, Jumna, is now a partner-in-crime with him. Soon after meeting these sinister characters, we watch the three being arrested by the police. They are then tried and sent to jail, but we never learn how the police discovered their criminal activities or what role Jaimal played in that effort. Instead, the author launches into the story of Halima, Azam Beg’s now destitute wife, who takes shelter with Jumna. But not for long, for Jumna presses her to satisfy the lust of one of Jumna’s patrons, and when Halima refuses, Jumna throws her back into the streets. Halima then kills herself by jumping into a well, holding her baby in her arms. Another, secondary tale is told in two chapters that are randomly inserted within the main narrative; it tells of what happened between Arjun, the handsome young son of a rich Hindu, and Firoz, a lustful Pathan, who is obsessed with Arjun – the two were once apparently quite close until Arjun drifted away. When Firoz kidnaps Arjun and tries to kill him in a fit of jealous rage, Arjun tricks him and manages to stab him with the ‘poison-dipped’ dagger that Firoz had used to threaten him. He then quietly walks away, never to be mentioned again. The attempt to narrate three separate tales within one encompassing narrative – the literary device so successfully employed in Reynolds’s Mysteries – does not quite come off, for nothing binds them together except the author’s belated claim that he had narrated only what was found in Jaimal’s diary. Though the eponymous, newly emerging cantonment town of Rawalpindi does not ever come alive to our sight, Reynolds’s influence is apparent in a few short ‘atmospheric’ passages. For example, at the beginning of the second chapter: It is about ten in the night, and the glamour of the bazaars has almost faded away. The shops of the milk-sellers, however, are still open, and here and there one can find a betelseller nodding over his wares. The only other people are the police constables strolling in their assigned chowks to pass away the hours of their duty. Otherwise, an utter silence 42

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grips everything. The night is dark – if we move away from the bazaar lights we would see nothing but darkness itself. The stars are out, and, yes, they shine brightly, but their meager light is ineffective against the overwhelming dark menace.7 While the physical reality of Rawalpindi is mostly ignored, the author makes sure to tell us his views on the city’s moral character. In describing Arjun, for example, the author adds: ‘He was a handsome boy, possessing superlative beauty, but it was impossible for him to remain immaculate in a city like Pindi, where the ‘good people’ of the city readily killed themselves even to touch his shadow.’ The author apparently had little love for either the place or its people. When the author first introduces us to Jumna, he describes her as a hasīn ‘aurat (‘beautiful woman’), but as he proceeds to describe her physical charms he is hardly complimentary. And this is how he concludes: ‘Now some might ask, amazed, “How was it that the people of Pindi, who are inherently connoisseurs of Love and Beauty, fell head over heel in love with such a woman?” ’ He then advises ‘Jumna’s lovers’ to venture out of Rawalpindi and travel – to Kashmir if not across India – and discover what true female beauty looks like. Shafaq wrote at least three other novels, but not another mistrīz. Sirdar Ghulam Haidar Khan, on the other hand, wrote three: mistrīz of Kabul, Kohat, and Ludhiana. He is described on the cover of his books as the son of Sirdar Nur Muhammad Khan, a notable person (ra’īs) of the three above-named places. The books show that he had a flair for quoting ghazal poetry in both Urdu and Persian, describing musical soirees and making his characters use an ornate language. His characters, however, are more stereotypical than individualised, despite a deliberate attempt to make the events historically ‘real’. In his preface to Mistrīz āf Kābul (‘The Mysteries of Kabul’), Khan asserts that the events in the book occurred in 1859, ‘a time when the blessed hands of Amir Sher Ali Khan held the reins of the state, and every man considered himself equal to, if not better than, the Amir of Afghanistan.’8 According to him, things changed for the better in 1880, in the reign of Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, when ‘all crimes stopped in Afghanistan.’ Khan builds his narrative with the help of three ‘mysteries’: the appearance of a ‘Son of the Prime Minister of Iran’ in Kabul; an unnamed woman who goes to any length to satisfy her lust; and the romance between a young nobleman named Mirza Ashraf and a young noblewoman named Sharafunnisa. The ostensible resolver of 43

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these mysteries is Ishrat Beg, the chief of Afghanistan’s secret service, who excels in disguises – as do the fake Iranian and Nazir Husain, a bosom friend of both Ashraf and Ishrat. The three flimsily-linked tales are told in just 63 pages, with most of those pages actually devoted to Persian and Urdu verses exchanged between lovers and friends or sung by assorted courtesans. The mysteries are resolved easily. Ishrat Beg, heavily disguised, sneaks into the fake prince’s residence to eavesdrop on him. On discovering that the man was behind several major crimes in the city, he informs the Amir. A query sent to Teheran brings the news that the real son of the prime minister was elsewhere. As the police surround the residence of the fake prince, he tries to escape but fails. Swift justice follows – the man is tied to the mouth of a canon and blown to bits. Meanwhile, the unnamed lustful woman kidnaps Ashraf, holds him prisoner in a cellar, and eventually getting her way with him before a friend of Ashraf rescues him. In the third story, Sharafunnisa, kept at home under close guard, disappears on the day of her marriage with the man chosen by her family. The would-be groom dies from the shock. But Mirza Ashraf always appears very happy in public; he is also often seen, the author coyly writes, ‘holding a baby boy in his arms who happens to have great resemblance with Sharafunnisa, and whom he calls Mirza Sharaf-al-Ashraf.’ Despite the presence of clever disguises and a scene in a cellar equipped with trick doors and windows, the story offers little suspense or mystery. The author instead seeks to entertain his readers mostly with artful verbal exchanges laced with Persian and Urdu verses. There is even a touch of salaciousness in two episodes, one depicting boy waiters in Kabul’s coffee shops and the other detailing how the mysterious woman overcame Ashraf’s resistance by feeding him sweets laced with aphrodisiacs! The book, however, must have found its readers, for my copy is a second printing. Muhammad Nisar Ali Shuhrat’s Mistrīz āf Dehlī (‘The Mysteries of Delhi’) not only employs multiple stories but even takes a peculiar stab at delineating a particular place where certain things happen that, according to him, do not happen elsewhere.9 Of the book’s five chapters, the first three narrate the adventures of three young men who separately come to Delhi because they felt jaded in their lives at home. All three are Muslim, and not more than 18 in age; they are also well heeled and well educated. In each chapter, the particular story is deliberately left unfinished, leaving the reader with a nice sense of suspense. The final two chapters bring the three narratives to their conclusions. While no attempt is made to bring the three stories together, 44

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the author asks the reader to draw some lessons that, to his mind, the three stories offer in common. In the opening story, Buland Akhtar – his name literally means ‘Rising Star’ – comes to Delhi from Kashmir, together with a servant, aptly named Wafadar (‘Faithful’). Their journey is described with some realistic details: Buland Akhtar starts out on a mule, which he sells off once he reaches Punjab, from where he takes a train to Delhi. Duly impressed, he tells Wafadar: ‘Prophet Solomon had the great good fortune of owning a flying throne of his own. But thanks to the wise men of England (dānāyān-e inglistān) this new transport is available to all, high and low alike.’ Reaching Delhi, he takes up residence in an inn and starts roaming the streets to enjoy what the city offers. Noticeably, he shows no interest in the ancient city’s history and monuments; his fascination is with the newly emerging urban sprawl, both within and outside the walled city. One evening, as he strolls in Delhi’s ‘charming’ Malka kā Bāgh (‘The Victoria Park’), a burqa-clad beggar accosts him. Moved by the beauty of her voice, Buland Akhtar wishes to know the woman’s story. She tells him that earlier she earned her living doing gold and silver lacework at home, but then her eyesight deteriorated from the strain of the intricate work. ‘I had no wish to become a housemaid,’ the woman said, ‘So now I come here as dusk sets in, and live on the alms I receive.’ Buland Akhtar gives her a silver rupee and asks her to meet him again the following day. He then returns to his inn, smitten by her elegant language and manners. When Wafadar learns what had transpired, he cautions his master to be more careful. Nevertheless, the following day, Buland Akhtar moves out of the inn and takes up a private suite of rooms in the main bazaar. When he meets the veiled woman again, the two converse at length, exchanging fine verses. He declares her to be a Mughal princess now fallen into dire straits, which the woman firmly denies. She accepts, however, the gold sovereign he offers and promises to come to his rooms the following evening. That night, Wafadar again begs him to be careful, telling him that Delhi was full of such sweet-talking women. To prove his point, he brings a woman who talks to Buland Akhtar from behind a curtain, and even corrects his Urdu a few times. Buland Akhtar, a Kashmiri, becomes convinced of the woman’s high pedigree, but when Wafadar pulls the curtain aside, she turns out to be none other than the sweeper who cleaned their rooms. Buland Akhtar is abashed, but his passion for the veiled woman does not diminish. Eventually Buland Akhtar and Wafadar are taken by the mysterious woman to a feast in a mansion, where they find a hundred or so young 45

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women, already enjoying themselves. Alcoholic drinks are offered and – after some slight hesitation – enjoyed. A dance performance begins, and Buland Akhtar lavishly rewards the performers. Then the two sisters go away – to perform the night prayers, no less – leaving the two men with the other women. As more drinking follows, Buland Akhtar flirts with another woman; soon both the master and the servant collapse on the floor in a drunken stupor. In the morning, Buland Akhtar wakes up to the sound of someone being thrashed. The victim is the woman with whom he had flirted at night, who is then cast out of the house. Next, the two men are also ordered to leave and never return. Thus ends the first chapter, reminiscent of several stories in The Arabian Nights, and similarly leaving us eager to know what happened next. The following chapter brings us the story of Danishmand (‘Wise’), who comes from Lahore to Delhi with some friends. The young men are fond of music, and believe that Delhi was ‘the city where one only needed money, since every luxury and pleasure of the world was already available there.’ When his friends return to Lahore, Danishmand stays behind in Delhi with his personal servant named Hamdard (‘Compassionate’). Danishmand had come to Delhi with 1500 rupees in his pocket; now he finds he had only 500 left. But he does not wish to leave Delhi, for he believes that in Delhi, ‘at the end of the day, even a two-penny labourer dresses up like a prince and goes out to enjoy the evening.’ In a long soliloquy, he enumerates the qualities the people of Delhi possess: they are not only excellent in their own ways but also possess a rare talent to imitate, and even improve on, anything crafted elsewhere. Lanterns and steel trunks used to come from Europe to be sold here at high prices. Now the same are made locally, equally excellent, and cheaper in price . . . the rich and the noble of England send their photographs to the craftsmen of Delhi to have them accurately reproduced in colour on ivory.10 The thought of leaving such a wonderful place brings tears to his eyes, and as he weeps, he falls asleep. When he wakes up, he knows what he must do. If there are 100,000 adult people living in Delhi, then half of them must be men, and the other half women. Of the latter, 48,000 must be married, and the remaining 2,000 must be 46

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widows. Of the latter, 1,000 must be without any desire for a new husband, while the remaining 1,000 must be looking for one, though restrained by modesty to communicate the desire to their elders. And of those one thousand, a hundred or so must also be quite rich.11 Having concluded that in order to enjoy Delhi permanently, he needed to marry a rich widow, Danishmand pursues his goal methodically. He gets himself a fine suite of private rooms; next, he talks to his sweeper, Champa, since she and her friends freely enter people’s homes and have the opportunity to observe the ladies of the households. A combination of flattery and bribe brings quick results: Champa informs him of a rich ‘Begum Sahiba’, who, widowed at 11 and now barely 18, was eager to take a husband. Danishmand promptly prostrates before God in gratitude – he never fails to do the same at every success in his plan. Champa tells the Begum about the rich man from Lahore who was looking for a ‘Delhi wife’. The Begum asks her to bring him for a meeting, and when the two meet, separated by a curtain, they exchange photographs. The effect is overwhelming: utterly silent, they adore each other’s beauty. When they recover, they exchange costly gifts. The following evening, the Begum visits Danishmand in his suite of rooms. Again they sit with a curtain between them, but Hamdard takes matters in his hands and tears the curtain down. The two lovers come face to face and collapse in a faint. Leaving us in suspense, Chapter 3 tells the story of Azad, who comes from Agra to Delhi to enjoy a good life – in particular ‘to hear the great courtesans of the city and find out how good they really were.’ Azad is also an eloquent speaker; he gives public talks and makes many friends, then proceeds to establish a society of like-minded young men. It is called Jalsa-e Ahbāb (‘The Assembly of Friends’) and has a building of its own – like a British club – where members gather every evening to smoke a hookah and chat, reclining against pillows on fine carpets. Alternatively, they enjoy fine dinners cooked by various chefs of the city or watch performances by the city’s finest courtesans. One evening, as Azad converses with a young courtesan, the discussion turns to a Persian classic and the feminine wiles it describes. The young woman declares that now a new book needs to be written, for the tricks that contemporary courtesans played on their customers are different and not known to any outsider. She then takes Azad to observe how in one courtesan’s house, two customers are simultaneously cheated through an elaborate scheme. 47

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The three stories, left dangling at the end of their respective chapters, are then serially, but hastily, concluded in the final pages of the book. Buland Akhtar discovers that the sweet-voiced veiled woman ‘was not only 40, but also had a very dark complexion and a broken front tooth.’ He hastily returns home to Kashmir and swears never to visit Delhi again. Danishmand and the Begum get married, have a son, and prosper, with Danishmand manfully managing his wife’s properties. Lastly, Azad, his eyes opened after witnessing the elaborate deception, closes his club, and starts a different life. As the author brings the three stories to their separate ends, he offers much moral advice, along with ‘insights’ into the habits and manners of women, particularly of the women of Delhi, underscoring his alleged reformative aspirations. The book must have met quite a few expectations of contemporary aficionados of mistrīz and other crime fiction. Though it does not contain a reference to any historical event, sensational or otherwise, its readers, particularly in the mofussil, must have found very exciting the use made in the narrative’s progress of such ‘wonders’ of the modern world as express trains, urgent telegrams, photographs, artificial gems ‘imported from Europe’, and chloroform. (The latter is used as a soporific!) As against all other mistrīz, Shuhrat’s book is notable for making an attempt to tell its readers something about its eponymous city. Delhi, Shuhrat would have us believe, is a place where strange things happen once the sun goes down. It is also a place to which people come from far and away, and many conveniently find temporary wives or mistresses. The women of Delhi, the author tells us, are different from other women. They work to support themselves; consequently, they are more independent, and hence, there are many more divorces in Delhi! Delhi women can be cunning too, and they are clearly not much afraid of men. Further, though they might speak elegant Urdu, out-of-towners should not let the elegance of their speech fool them. One can easily imagine a satisfied reader in some mofussil town closing the book and saying to himself: ‘That Delhi – it must be quite a place!’ The final mistrīz considered here, Mistrīz āf Fīrozpūr (‘The Mysteries of Ferozepur’), is something special, for its author was none other than Tirath Ram Ferozepuri (1885–1950), the most prominent name in Urdu crime fiction in the first half of the last century.12 Ferozepuri wrote very little original fiction, but over a span of some 36 years, he produced extremely readable and widely popular translations of crime fiction from the English – close to 150 in number. He also translated seven of Reynolds’s novels, including the two Mysteries sagas. Though the year of publication of Ferozepuri’s mistrīz is not known, it could have been the last book in Urdu to denote itself in that manner. 48

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The youthful author – he was probably in his early twenties at the time – prefaced the book with a short note that included the following: God forbid! How people have given ‘Mysteries’ a bad name! Anyone, who knows even a tiny tale related to some place, quickly turns that molehill into a mountain and becomes the author of a ‘Mysteries’ of that place – even when his tale has nothing that could be a mystery. The word ‘Mysteries’ does not mean that the author should place before his readers ‘the Springtime of Love and Beauty’, mixed with ‘the honeyed charms of a richly sweetened language.’ No, no! We should never call that a ‘Mystery.’ Only that story is a ‘Mystery’ that appears, from its beginning to its end, as a deep secret, and the truth of that secret is revealed only at some appropriate moment.13 Despite the young author’s brash mocking of his predecessors, his own book turns out to be only slightly different from theirs. It has plenty of ‘Love’ and ‘Beauty’, and also its patches of a ‘rich language’, though they are not much ‘honeyed’ with verses. The story involves two Muslim Pathan robbers, their friends, wives, and mistresses; one lustful Hindu ‘Banker & Jeweler’, his son, his assistant, and the latter’s younger sister; and a young Hindu lawyer. It has two villains: the robber Haidar Khan – he is caught and then hanged – and Vaishnav Das, the ‘Banker & Jeweler’, who kills himself in shame when his son finds out that he had harassed Lilavati, the assistant’s sister. The romantic element is provided by Lilavati and Dunichand, the lawyer, whose marriage concludes the book. There is hardly any mystery, and much of the suspense is created by telling two simultaneous stories in alternating chapters. They come together at the end, but only thanks to remarkable coincidences and authorial asides. The eponymous city of Ferozepur hardly makes any appearance; most of the action takes place far away from it, in the nearby woods and countryside, or in distant Lahore. Nevertheless, compared to the previously discussed authors, Ferozepuri is noticeably more successful in imitating Reynolds in certain areas. The device to open the book with incidents and characters that suggest two separate stories, only to have them form a single whole at the end, has been much better employed by him. More to the point are the passages where he describes the natural surroundings within which an incident takes place; these are as indulgent as 49

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anything in Reynolds. Consider this excerpt from the book’s opening two-page-long description of a foreboding night in the woods. Oh, this night, so terribly frightful! Darkness is entrenched all around. A man’s right hand is invisible to his left. Black clouds engulf the firmament. Towering trees of the woods appear like a line of giants. Only the rustling of the leaves can be heard – except when the sudden howl of some jackal, or the harsh screech of an owl or a bat, crashes on a listener’s ears, and his heart sinks as the hair on his body stands up. The clouds covering the sky are dark like some wretched man’s fortune; the moon and the stars have fled into hiding in sheer fear. Some poor bird asleep in its nest is attacked by an accursed owl, and its shrieks send a tremor of terror through one’s body. A bat flies by overhead, flapping its big wings, and one begins to believe in devils and ghosts streaking through the air. The flames of a funeral far away makes one wonder if it could be a fire around which the ghouls of the forest have gathered to bask.14 Ferozepuri also imitates Reynolds in interspersing a few short, but explicitly didactic, asides. The virtues and vices of women seem to be a favorite topic, and Ferozepuri, despite making some feeble attempts to praise the ‘feminine’ traits of chastity and fidelity, eventually comes down heavily against the ‘fair’ sex. He also makes a curious assertion concerning ‘the feminine nature’, putting it in the mouth of Khanam Jan, a woman victimised by several men. This is how Khanam Jan explains to Haidar Khan why she set free Dunichand: Modesty does not allow me to be explicit but let me give you a hint. A woman – any woman – when she shares her bed with a man and satisfies her sexual passion for the first time, a deep love for that particular man becomes a permanent part of her being – like a line scratched into a stone . . . It was Dunichand who first planted ‘the seed of love’ in me. Thousands came after him and told me how they loved me, but I now find no trace of any affection for them inside me. However, the special love I feel for Dunichand will remain with me till death comes.15 All in all, Ferozepuri’s youthful work is clearly superior to the other mistrīz considered above.16 It is plotted much better, contains more 50

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suspenseful moments, does away with long exchanges of verses between protagonists, and for the most part uses a language that is not extraneously burdened with colourful idioms or proverbs. And every once in a while, some trite rhetorical flourish takes on a ‘social realist’ edge – à la Reynolds – as in this version of sic transit gloria mundi near the end of the tale: It has been three months since the above events. Amazing inversions of fortune have taken place in that time. Hundreds of the rich are now indigent, while thousands of the poor have gained in riches. Hundreds of expatriates have come back home, while thousands of ‘dear ones’ have left us sad. Hundreds of beauties, too haughty to speak to the not so fortunate, now lie silent under dust, and thousands of children have replaced them to beguile us with their lisp and chatter. Hundreds of the sick and diseased have recovered, while thousands of the healthy ones are dead and gone. Hundreds of ill-fated lovers, wounded to the heart by their cruel beloveds, have perished, while thousands of lovelies have fallen prey to Death even as they indulged their tyrannical ways. Hundreds of men, gainfully employed, got divorced from their jobs and turned into pensioners, while thousands of new ‘hopefuls’ replaced them. Hundreds of students successfully passed out of schools and colleges and entered Life’s ‘field of struggle’, while thousands of fools shut themselves up in the ‘chicken coops’ of colleges merely to satisfy an urge to become a clerk (bābū).17 The above books, like those that will be discussed next, are obviously puny, in both size and ambition, compared to what lay behind Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London, whose subtitle described it as ‘containing stories of life in the modern Babylon.’ More disappointingly, none offers even a vignette or two that is palpable and distinctive and gives us a glimpse into the physical and social reality of the urban entity it is named after. * Just as Fasih owns the credit for introducing mistrīz into Urdu, so should he also be credited for highlighting in a distinctive manner an already existing Urdu word, asrār (‘secrets’), in the subtitles of his books – vide Mistrīz āf di Kort āf Pairis ya’nī Darbār-e Pairis ke Asrār 51

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(‘Mysteries of the Court of Paris, i.e. The Secrets of the Paris Court’). It too set off a short-lived literary trend in Urdu fiction. Asrār, a word of Arabic origin, is the plural form of sirr, ‘secret’. But in Urdu, the singular, sirr, would be hard to find except in poetry and some Sufi texts, where it evokes the sense of mystery one associates with matters of the spirit.18 When, in the final decades of the 19th century, Syed Ahmad Dihlawi prepared his great Urdu dictionary, Farhang-e Āsafiya, he did not include the singular form, and he listed only the plural, asrār, illustrating it with just one example, asrār-e ilāhī (‘Divine Mysteries’). Significantly, the now so common, pur-asrār (‘mysterious’, lit. ‘full of secrets’) finds no mention in Dihlavi’s dictionary. It would be fair, therefore, to aver that Fasih’s use of the word in the titles of his books made a significant difference in the word’s usage in Urdu. It also led to the appearance of another small set of books that employed the word asrār in their titles and possibly a shared literary ambition. A catalogue of books available for purchase in 1936 from the Siddiq Book Depot of Lucknow contains five titles that have asrār linked to a place name: Asrār-e Afrīqa (‘The Secrets of Africa’), Asrār-e Amrīka (‘The Secrets of America’), Asrār-e Angora (‘The Secrets of Ankara’), Asrār-e Misr (‘The Secrets of Egypt’) and Asrār-e Hind (‘The Secrets of India’).19 The catalogue describes them all as historical (tārīkhī) novels; however, the one I was able to find was anything but historical. Asrār-e Hind turned out to be an amusing book of crime fiction, with an English lady solving crimes in India, in a manner reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes. Be that as it may, if one or two of the above were similar in significant details to the two titles that were no longer available in 1936, but which shall be discussed below, then there was indeed, in the first and second decades of the 20th century, a brief literary fad in Urdu for asrār novels: that is to say, a piece of fiction that aimed to expose to the public’s sight – in the spirit of Reynolds’s The Mysteries of the Court of London – the depravity and hypocrisy of the high and the mighty. Our first book, Asrār-e Ma’ābid (‘The Mysteries of Places of Worship’), was also the first attempt at long fiction by Premchand (1880– 1936), the fiction writer now justly honoured in both Urdu and Hindi. He was still a budding author when in 1903, using his real name, Dhanpat Rai, he began to serialise in the Urdu weekly Āvāz-e Khalq (‘The Voice of the People’), published from Varanasi, a tale about the criminal ways of temple priests in an unnamed pilgrimage town. He was simultaneously working on two other novels, and when he succeeded getting one of them published, he abandoned Asrār-e Ma’ābid. It has survived only in its unfinished form.20 52

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Premchand had been an avid reader of the translations of Reynolds’s novels; he once wrote about his reading habits as a 13-year-old: ‘In those days everyone talked of Reynolds’s novels. Urdu translations were coming out right and left and handily sold. I too was in love with those books.’21 He was apparently enthused by the streak of iconoclasm that permeates several of Reynolds’s books, for in his first attempt at long fiction, Premchand, somewhat gleefully, attempted to expose to public sight the sordid happenings at a pilgrimage centre. Otherwise, however, the extant incomplete text shows much greater influence – e.g. in episodic narration, interspersion of comic relief, and snappy exchanges between characters – of Ratan Nath Sarshar (1846– 1902), who launched his illustrious literary career with the serialised picaresque, Fasāna-e Āzād (‘Azad’s Tale’), initially modeled on Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz. The other writer who was similarly inspired to expose in fiction the private devilries – the asrār – of the rich and the powerful was Abdul Halim Sharar (1860–1926), better known in Urdu for his historical romances. Unlike Premchand, Sharar had not only read Reynolds directly in English but also translated one of his many tales of turning fortunes into Urdu.22 Sharar did not use asrār in the title of his first exposé; he named it Husn kā Dākū (‘The Plunderer of Beauty’).23 But the book became a big hit when it came out in 1913, and when Sharar published a sequel a few months later, he titled it Asrār-e Darbār-e Harāmpūr (‘The Mysteries of the Court of Harampur’).24 The two books are about the debauched Nawab of Harampur, a fictional princely state in North India. People despise him so much that they change the name of his city from Ahmadābād (‘The City of Ahmad’) to Harāmpūr (‘The City of the Religiously Proscribed’), in contrast to Halālnagar (‘The City of the Religiously Allowed’), the neighbouring city in British India. The plot of the two interlinked novels is too complicated to abridge; only a broad outline must suffice here. In Husn kā Dākū, the unnamed Nawab is hell-bent to bed every young woman he comes to know of. Towards that end, he has agents, both male and female, who find victims for his lust locally as well as in other cities. A second villain is Maulana Sa’dullah, a religious dignitary; he abets the Nawab but is also one of his victims – his wife and daughter were both forcibly abused by the Nawab. The Nawab’s latest target is Mah-Laqa, a young woman from a prominent family in Halalnagar, who is already betrothed to Munir, her cousin. Despite knowing that she could be abducted on the day of her wedding, like so many brides before her, Mah-Laqa asks Munir to hurry the date – she has a plan to end the 53

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Nawab’s tyranny but does not disclose it to Munir. She only tells him that she wished to wage ‘a terrible and delicate jihad’ on behalf of all the terrorised women of the two cities.25 As expected, Mah-Laqa is abducted from her wedding procession; her elaborate and perilous scheme, however, eventually succeeds, with active participation not only from Munir but also from another young woman, Sukaina, who is disguised as a young Sikh man. The first book ends with the Nawab, and his agents, including Maulana Sa’dullah, being tried in a ‘court of Djinns’ and found guilty. While the Nawab’s abettors, male and female, are ostensibly sentenced to death, the Nawab himself is spared to live and suffer – he is forcibly made impotent. The sequel carries the story only a little forward. Sa’dullah miraculously returns to Halalnagar and takes revenge on the Nawab through his own elaborate scheme – it too involves ‘djinns’ and their court of justice. Husn kā Dākū is well plotted, fast-paced, and always suspenseful. The manly disguise and actions of Sukaina, the good-heartedness of a courtesan, the wickedness of the Maulana, and a bold mix of ‘sex and violence’ were sure to please the mostly male readership of Sharar’s novels.26 Sharar’s exposé of the Nawab’s depravity and the Maulana’s villainy was very much in the spirit of Reynolds’s attacks on similar pillars of the English society. Equally Reynoldsian was his disguising of a woman in a man’s garb and then showing her to be an equal to any man in purposeful action. Both books remained in print for many years, and the notoriety the two books gained in 1914 still remains alive among the aficionados of Urdu popular fiction.27 * To conclude: what do we have here? A score of books, some presented as mistrīz, the others as asrār. Did they come to form, together or separately, a new genre in Urdu? The answer must be in the negative. Not only was their number too meager, their formal attributes were not distinctive or exclusive enough. They, however, do deserve our notice as a particular cohort in Urdu literary history. They are noteworthy examples of what was considered popular in Urdu at the beginning of the 20th century. More significantly, they are among the first attempts in Urdu to write original tales of crime and suspense. From our vantage point, they no doubt fail, despite being identified with specific cities, to offer, even briefly, the experience of a space and time-specific urban ‘romance’ that Reynolds’s novels did, yet they clearly reflect the influence that Reynolds’s works had on many budding Urdu writers of the 54

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

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

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Extraordinary Translator: Tirath Ram Ferozepuri (1885–1954),’ The Annual of Urdu Studies, vol. 28, 2013, pp. 1–37. 13 Ferozepuri, Mistrīz āf Fīrozpūr, p. 1. I translate hairat-afzā – lit. amazementincreasing – as ‘suspenseful’ because, I am convinced, that was the word Ferozepuri had in mind. Urdu still does not have a precise equivalent for ‘suspenseful.’ 14 Ibid., p. 2. 15 Ibid., p. 50. 16 The title page refers to only one previous book by the author, Jafā-e Pidar (‘The Father’s Tyranny’). So far it has not surfaced in any library. 17 Ferozepuri, Mistrīz āf Fīrozpūr, pp. 122–123. 18 In Sufi texts, the word is used to refer to the innermost center of the human heart, its subtlest spiritual node. 19 A long story entitled ‘Asrār-e Lakhna’ū’ (‘Secrets of Lucknow’) was serialised in the weekly Intikhāb-e Lājavāb (Lahore) from January 1914 onward. Its author was Munshi Hamid Husain. Judging from what I could find, it was very much like the mistrīz above, and well written. 20 Asrār-e Ma’ābid in Madan Gopal, ed., Kulliyāt-e Premchand, vol. 1. New Delhi: National Council for the Promotion of Urdu Language, 2000, pp. 1–86. The serialization lasted from 1903 to 1905. 21 Manaktala, Premchand, Hayāt-e Nau. New Delhi: Modern Publishing House, 1993, p. 54. 22 May Middleton; or, The History of a Fortune; Sharar translated it as Khūbī-e Qismat. His son, Muhammad Siddiq Hasan, translated Reynolds’s Kenneth, a Tale of the Highlands as Pādāsh-e ‘Amal. 23 Abdul Halim Sharar, Husn Kā Dākū. Lucknow: Dilgudaz Press, 1913. 24 Abdul Halim Sharar, Asrār-e Darbār-e Harāmpūr, Lucknow: Dilgudaz Press, 1925, 6th printing. 25 Sharar, Husn kā Dākū, p. 71. 26 It is doubtful if the two books were ever popular with female readers or even reached their hands. The male heads of the households, for one, would not have allowed it. 27 In popular literary memory, the two novels were declared ‘obscene’ by the colonial government and then banned, expressly at the request of the actual Nawab of Rampur, a small princely state in U.P., whose other name was Mustafabad. I failed to find any firm evidence to support either claim.

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

During the middle of the 19th century, a large section of the native Bengali society found itself facing a tremendous catastrophe. For the majority of the natives, the world as they knew it – the quotidian life that they had come to accept as eternally and immutably true – was facing an impasse like never before. The crisis was a ‘monster’ named nabya – or ‘the new’, specifically in this case, the ‘new things and customs’ that arrived in the wake of colonial modernity, which threw centuries-old traditions off-balance.1 While the caste system was very much functional in all its dubious glory, the new rulers of the nation were not the savarna (upper caste) Hindus, not even the yavanic (foreigner) Muslims, but mlechcha (unclean) British. The natives were soon to realise that the new rulers had little respect for the customs and beliefs of the people they governed. They brought strange machines that built bridges over their sacred rivers and dug tunnels under their cities to create modern drainage systems.2 Introduction of English education created a major disruption in the caste-based professions; now even shudras (the fourth of the social categories found in the Hindu scriptures, traditionally berated by the upper castes as untouchable)3 could, theoretically, have a chance of progressing in life. As Western education and modern ideas permeated through the society, the socalled ‘lower castes’ started breaking away from their traditional, caste-defined professions and took up chakuris, or salaried jobs, in Calcutta; they no longer needed to serve their caste-superiors. John McGuire, in his ‘quantitative study’ of the bhadralok (urban gentry) class of 19th-century Calcutta, has shown that the reach of the English 57

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

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

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fairly small number of these ephemeral print-objects have survived. The remaining ones, however, present an extremely crucial picture of how the ‘lowbrow’ literary culture responded to the ‘present moment’. At times, the link between Kaliyuga and the natural disaster proclaimed as the theme of the tract was quite tenuous. Munshi Namdar’s Kashite Hoy Bhumikapma, Narider e ki Dambha (‘Kashi is rocked by an earthquake. Oh! What arrogance of women’, 1863), bypasses the titular earthquake entirely. Instead, Namdar talks only about the pains of the Bengali people who were now ruled by their wives, as well as a female monarch. This is merely a collection of rather stale caveats about catastrophes that may befall the Hindus in this terrible Kaliyuga if the women are not properly commandeered by the well-meaning and authoritative men of the society. Namdar says that the submissive Bengali men prostrating at the feet of their wives are an assured sign of social decay in an age when the entire nation is ruled by a female monarch: Women who have put their husbands under their spell, will go a long way. They can bend these men as they wish and make them do anything they want. Their husbands become slavish, and thus society is surely going to Hell! We are in enough trouble already; being a part of the British Empire, Indians are now ruled by a female Monarch. And on top of this, If Bengali women try to find their freedom, then all will come crashing down.15 Namdar’s umbrage is not merely directed at the housewives who have mastered the art of manipulating their husbands, but at the prostitutes who lure the ‘innocent upper-class men’ away from the path of righteousness: Shame on women, for I’ve understood now what sinners they are! Look at all the women at Mechhuabazaar, who stand on their balconies Trying to prey on the men who pass by . . . These whores dance for the men, Without shame or remorse. The women think they are clothed, but they are 60

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Naked in their shameless display. They sleep with their customers for Mere pennies and quarters. Why, then, are they so arrogant?16 Other authors, however, focused more on the actual natural disasters and incorporated substantial factual information in their tracts. Kailashchandra Bandyopadhyay’s Baapre ki bhayanak Ashwiney jhar (‘Oh! What a terrible storm in the month of Ashwin’) was published immediately after the disastrous hurricane that laid waste to Calcutta and its surrounding areas during the festival of Durga Puja (a five-day-long Hindu festival organised every year in the month of September-October to celebrate goddess Durga’s victory over the demon Mahishasura; this festival is the main yearly festival for Bengali Hindus) in October 1864. The magnitude of the storm attracted the attention of the international press: The New York Times gave a detailed description of the carnage and said that it would be difficult to give an accurate or connected account of the loss anytime soon.17 Various official reports, including one written by James Gastrell and Henry Blanford, were commissioned by the government.18 Bandyopadhyay’s tract gives a fairly detailed account of the damages caused by the storm. In a poem titled ‘Diamond Harbour’, he describes how James Atkins, an inspector of the river police assigned to a police station near a lighthouse at Diamond Harbour, was killed along with his family; how a large steamer called Bentinck was swept away by a tidal wave, with about 500 coolies still on board; and how the inmates of the Diamond Harbour prison managed to save themselves as the rising water washed away most of the buildings, et cetera.19 He describes everything in minute detail – the uprooted telegraph poles, the broken houses and the trees that fell on a train travelling from Kushtia to Sibadaha (now the Sealdah terminus in North Calcutta).20 This journalistic adherence to details, however, is offset by his conclusion that the storm was nothing but divine retribution. In another untitled poem, Bandyopadhyay reveals the real reasons behind the storm. Parvati, another name of Goddess Durga, goes to seek permission from her husband, the God Shiva, to go and visit her folks during the Durga Puja.21 Shiva, though, is unwilling to give his wife permission to go, as he feels that the immoral men of Earth have lost the rights to worship the goddess, and admonishes her for wishing to go there: “They spoil everything, and obey no laws; Don’t you feel ashamed to go there?”22 61

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Unwilling to accept Shiva’s injunction, Parvati grabs her children Lakshmi, Saraswati, Karttik and Ganesha and goes to Earth to enjoy the annual hospitality of men. Infuriated by her disobedience, Shiva unfurls his jata (dreadlocks) and from the coils of his hair a couple of monstrous beings are born. Shiva orders them to go and devastate Earth and rid it of the vermin-like humankind that pollute it. Kailashchandra, in the guise of the story of a domestic quarrel between two gods, clearly issues a caveat for disobedient housewives and reminds them of the terrible consequences of defying the orders of their husbands. While Kailaschandra presents a unique mixture of both evidentiary and mythological paradigms to tell the story of a natural disaster, other authors often glossed over journalistic details and concentrated more on fables. In Maheshchandra De’s Hai re ashwine jhar (‘The lamentable storm in the month of Ashwin’, 1864), Narada, the Vedic sage and companion to the gods, tells Brahma, the Hindu god of creation, about the plight of the inhabitants of Calcutta in the aftermath of a terrible cyclone. They disguise themselves as a couple of poor Brahmins and come down to Earth to inspect. Soon, they understand that the wicked humans have not learnt any lesson. They witness the terrible ignominy in which the Brahmins live in Kaliyuga. The boatmen at Hooghly’s ghat refused to take them aboard, thinking that they would not be able to afford the fare. Maheshchandra briefly mentions the boats at Chandpal’s ghat23 which were destroyed by the storm before explaining why such terrible incidents are occurring so frequently: Now Kaliyuga is at a very advanced stage, there is no end to the sinful practices. Nobody respects the Brahmins. They do not care for their parents and stay under their wives’ spell Who poison their minds with their vile ideas! They think their women are all-powerful and worship them as if they were gurus. They follow their every command. Men consume meat and alcohol and frequent the whorehouses. . . . Given how Earth is now overpopulated with sinners, How much shall the gods endure?24

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Similar stories of bellicose gods and goddesses sending natural disasters to teach humans their ill-earned lessons make repeated appearances in other chapbooks. The principal enemies of the righteous ways of life were the educated people who considered themselves superior to those who followed more traditional lifestyles and the babus (respectable wealthy men; in this context, 19th-century Bengali aristocrats with decadent lifestyles) who frequented brothels and spent their days in inordinate luxuries. In Maheshchandra’s Eki asambhab Karttike jhar (‘Oh what unbelievable storm in the month of Karttik’, 1864), Parvati starts crying after seeing the disgraceful state human beings have come down to: They do not obey respect their elders, harbour unholy ideas And no one remembers the path of righteousness. They drink alcohol every day; have no regard for the holy texts, As if everyone has become a Young Bengal!25 . . . The babu puts on a dhoti from Dhaka, and silken kurta. He puts stockings on his feet and takes the fashionable walkingstick in hand. . . . After adorning his finely waxed moustache with fragrance, Babu goes to meet his mistress in a whorehouse.26 Maheshchandra laments how the gods were punishing the entire human race for the sins of only a small number of wicked people: কেহ বলে ল�োকের হইল বহু পাপ। তে কারণে সকলেতে পাই মনস্তাপ।। একের পাপেতে যায় সবার জীবন। রাবণ নিধনে যেন সিন্ধু র বন্ধন।। (Some say that there are a few who have committed grave sins, And for their wickedness all of us suffer! Many get punished for the sins of a few, As though Rama was punishing the ocean in order to get to Ravana).27 Ishwarchandra Sarar in Karttike jharer pnachali (‘Song of the storm that came in the month of Karttik’, 1867) declares that the storm was

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sent because people of the lower castes tried to usurp the roles of the ‘social superiors’: The Brahmins are now neglected as the Chandals28 have stolen the idols. Negligent sons now no longer perform the last rites of their parents. The tasks of the Dwija (Brahmins) are now performed by Shudras, The babus are controlled by their mistresses. The children of Haris and Bagdis29 now speak in Sanskrit; The king has given up his kingdom, and the lower castes wear the finest clothes.30 Though the mythological stories were given precedence, writers of the ‘disaster-tracts’ did not overlook the plights of the victims of these natural disasters. Descriptions of survivors trying to negotiate with the aftermath of these terrible incidents can be found in various tracts. Haribandhu Chakraborti’s Baapre ki bisham jhar (‘Oh what a terrible cyclone’), published in the wake of a devastating cyclone that hit parts of Eastern Bengal on 29 October 1876, tells such a story. This storm lasted for almost three days.31 The resultant loss of life and property was massive. Haribandhu gives a chilling account of the depth to which human nature can go: After the storm, the rotting dead bodies of men and animals were spread Across the fields for as far as people could see. The putrid smell Was strong enough to make people’s eyes water and nostrils burn. Senseless, remorseless and greedy men were walking amongst those Dead bodies, robbing them of their earthly belongings.32 Often, catastrophic storms were followed by months of sparse rain. The loss of cattle meant that agriculture suffered in a major way. Corpses floating in water bodies became breeding grounds for various diseases which often turned into epidemics. Those who managed to escape from the fury of the storms had to deal with spells of hunger, starvation and the risk of infection by various waterborne maladies. In Karttike jhar khandapralay (‘The apocalyptic storm in the month of

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Karttik’), Gopalchandra Das gives an account of what people ate after during those months of shortage: মূলা আদি মুল আর মন�োহর মান। ইহাই আহার মাত্র যাক থাক প্রাণ।। ভ�োজনে ভরসা মাত্র রহিল কলাই। বালাই বিষম ঝড়ে ক�োথা বা পালাই।। (We could only afford radishes and taros, And we consumed them in order to stay alive. After they were finished, we only had a handful of beans left! Oh, how shall we escape this terrible storm?)33 These survivors, however, were the chosen ones: they were spared from the divine fury because they largely adhered to the path of righteousness. While the gods tried to eradicate the sinners by sending these terrifying storms, which resembled the Biblical scourges, the pious people who got caught in the crossfire tried their best to stay afloat. Through their voices, the writers of these tracts created their own ‘cyclone memoirs’: intimate stories of people trying to find their way through a world full of sinners and unfeeling, enraged gods and goddesses who were determined to re-establish their superiority over them. Like the storms, stories of virulent epidemics were also woven into the mythos of the Kaliyuga. Some of the diseases had pre-existing myths of their own. Although most of these disease-related mythological narratives originated with the indigenous people of Bengal, hack writers of Battala appropriated these myths to align them with their critique of human folly during the Kaliyuga. Calcutta in the 19th century was considered a hotbed of infectious diseases. British authorities repeatedly blamed the squalid living quarters of the native citizens of Calcutta for the uncontrollable spread of ailments.34 The depiction of the second most important city of the British Empire often swayed between that of a gorgeous city of palaces and a veritable cauldron of pestilence.35 The terrifying cholera epidemic of 1817 was one of the first major outbreaks of infectious diseases in 19th-century Bengal. English scientists placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of the natives, who they considered to be superstitious imbeciles without any modern medical knowledge and who tried to find a cure by offering sacrifices at altars of their indigenous deities.36 The pamphleteers, though, had other explanations to offer for these outbreaks. In the early 1870s, as dengue spread through a large section of the city’s population, the writers of chapbooks and pamphlets came

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out with a number of slender volumes to cash in on the hysteria. Though dengue had become a fairly well-known disease by the late 19th century, its mythology was unformed, and the ways in which the pamphleteers describe the workings of the fever betray the vague nature of the dengue-mythos.37 Maheshchandra Das’s Dengue jwarer pnachali (‘Songs of the Dengue fever’, written after a dengue outbreak in 1872) depicts Calcutta as a dystopic city ruled by the evil demon Koli, who has been hunting the remaining pious people of the city and punishing them for not participating in his sinful orgies. The wayward and mischievous people of Calcutta are using this as an excuse to commit all the sins that are normally associated with Kaliyuga: A few of them often go to Wilson’s Hotel to eat beef, compromising their religious identities. In the kingdom of Koli, the ‘Young Bengal’38 do not care for anyone; They spend their days eating kukhadyo (inedible or forbidden food, in this context beef), Drinking alcohol and thinking that they can take any woman to bed. They speak in an alien language, fuelled by the conviction That the few pages of English literature that they have studied in school Have enabled them to become more erudite than people who can memorise Hindu scriptures.39 By the 19th century, most diseases had attendant deities in the popular Hindu pantheon. Dengue was an exception, being a relatively new addition to the people’s vocabulary. Confounded by the alien nature of the disease, the pamphleteers often declared that this was a ‘Bilati jwar (foreign fever)’. Nabakumar Nath in Dengue jwar o daktar saheb (‘The dengue fever and the doctor’) describes it as a foreign demon sent by Koli himself, to torment the people of Bengal: From America I’ve come to Calcutta, the capital, a beautiful town. . . Though there is a fort here with lot of soldiers in it, along with the Viceroy and his deputies, I’ve given up all my fears. I capture the Bengali, English, Khotta40 Jew and the Mughal and spread fear in the town.41

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Similar myths were woven around new or unidentified diseases which did not have deities ascribed to them. During the outbreak of a mysterious disease in 1876, a few tracts came out, speculating if it was being spread by ‘a new kind of insect’ created by the demon Koli. Aminchandra Dutta in Nutan Roga (‘A new disease’) describes how stories spread through the city after the doctors failed to make a proper diagnosis: Some are saying that a man in Orissa had devised a cure. He has dried a goat’s stomach in the sun and turned it into powder. Those who drink infusions prepared with this powder are instantly cured of this mysterious disease.42 Eventually, though, Aminchandra deduces that the strange disease is spreading because the younger generation is no longer respectful to the older order of life. One deity who had a very established disease-related mythology was Sitala, a mercurial pre-Vedic goddess originally worshipped by the members of the Savara community. She was the attendant deity of infectious diseases such as smallpox. Her role in the entire mythology related to smallpox has been extensively researched, and I shall not get into that here. She also makes frequent appearances in various tracts published after outbreaks of unidentified infectious diseases. In Dwijabar Sharma’s Machher basanta (‘Pox of fishes’, 1875), Sitala comes across a river while taking a stroll in the countryside. She sees a few fishermen working in their boats, and she asks them to take her across. The fishermen mistake her for a promiscuous housewife going for a secret meeting with her lover. They flatly refuse to take her on board and, to their misfortune, insult her in the vilest manner possible, referring to her as magi hatobhagi (inauspicious woman). The goddess, naturally, becomes furious. She assumes a deadly form and curses them at that very spot. Let the land of Bengal be covered with poxy diseases. Let men and their cattle die. Let the disease also infect All the fishes that swim in the river Padma. Those who will eat this fish will also get infected in the same way.43 The crisis is resolved by a ‘poor, elderly Brahmin’ who chastises the lower castes and nabya youth for insulting the gods and goddesses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The introduction of science education and dissemination of science in colonial Bengal was fraught with ambiguities and much has been written on the way science education was received by the colonised subject marked by diffusion, subversion and contradictions. In this essay, I will look at the originary moments of one of the cultural byproducts of the spread and sway of science among the educated elite of Calcutta: the literary genre of kalpavigyan.1 I will try to explore the complex re-workings of the idioms of colonial sciences (like geography and cartography) to the kalpavigyan writings of Leela Majumdar (1908–2007) and Sukumar Ray (1887–1923) through their use of the intrepid figure of the explorer, a common speculative fiction trope in Bengal and in the West. Both Ray and Majumdar were products of an Anglicised colonial education and epitomised some of the ways in which the colonial subject, irrespective of gender but belonging to the elite, educated middle and upper classes, the bhadralok, assimilated, absorbed and reorganised the ideology of the techno-sciences of the empire. Neo-Enlightenment sciences, particularly maps, surveys and geographical measuring standards went a long way to territorially define British India, a land that was at once uniform in administrative arrangements and governed laws. The systematic geographical surveys that the British undertook from 1750s onwards went on to create a sense of the colonial territorial self as well as the borders that defined such a self. Sukumar Ray’s fragmented and playful narrative, Heshoram Hushiyarer Diary (1922), contends with all these ideas. Colonial science’s emphasis on the comprehensive archive and the experiential 73

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

Science education and the imperatives of the empire In nineteenth-century Bengal, Western science and the ideology of science went a long way towards the ‘institutionalisation of ‘modern’ education’ in the newly established colonial schools that in turn impacted the mentality of the emerging educated elites who played a critical role in developing and articulating ideas of citizenship and the nation-state. The firm consolidation of Western science had been taken in the nineteenth century in the colonial and capital city of Calcutta with the founding of the Hindu College in 1817 and the teaching of mathematics, including trigonometry. Earlier the Fort William College (established in 1800) taught the newly arrived, covenanted officers of the East India Company, but the Hindu College was meant to exclusively educate the sons of ‘respectable Hindoo families . . . to be taught, though not fed, together’ and whose curriculum would include ‘instruction . . . in history, geography, chronology, astronomy, mathematics, chemistry and other sciences.’2 Science education received another boost when the Calcutta School Book Society was established the same year and began publishing books on mathematics, chemistry, anatomy and geography. The earlier contribution of the Asiatic Society, established in 1784, cannot be denied 74

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in developing a scientific spirit among the people, though most of its members were Europeans.3 In its early years, the East India Company had an ambivalent attitude towards the uses of science and technology in the dominion, although many of its officials were keen amateur surveyors, geologists and botanists. The sporadic influx of missionaries, men of fortune and merchants who undertook the voyage to India in the 16th century became a veritable deluge in the 19th century. The new arrivals were employed by the Company and consisted mostly of army engineers, botanists, surveyors and medical men trained in European scientific establishments unlike their earlier counterparts. The imperatives of colonial rule meant that British men of science were also prompted by commercial and economic considerations, so much so that the study of a particular region and its geography was geared towards its commercial exploitation. For example, the appointment of William Roxburgh to the post of a naturalist in the Madras presidency was done on the basis of his discovery of indigenous pepper in Samulcotta in the Godavari district. To ensure the economic and military control of India, the East India Company undertook extensive trigonometrical, topographical, hydrographic, geodetic and geological surveys throughout the country.4 For the greater part of the 18th and 19th centuries, the Court of Directors of the East India Company ‘insisted on the secrecy of maps and surveys and restricted the art of surveying to their own covenanted or military servants.’5 Indians, sometimes employed as guides in rough terrain, in turn learnt the art of surveying from their foreign employers. However, the Company frowned upon such practices. On one occasion the directive was simple and forceful as in 1784, when the Surveyor General wrote to his officers that ‘the Government have notified me that they wish to throw cold water on all natives being taught, or employed in making Geographical discoveries.’6 However, with the increase of colonial commercial activities, science and scientific research had to be accommodated into practical policy especially in the agricultural sector. Such a shift in the East India Company’s tolerance of scientific activities could be discerned from the late eighteenth century with sponsored research in cotton, tea and spice cultivations. A similar thrust was also manifest in the sphere of education. Sporadically backed by utilitarians, evangelists or conservatives, science education increasingly came to be seen as an integral part of education policies in India. Within a hundred years, the Company’s commercial interests had altered under the logic of empire building and proportionately, colonial activities in the natural and physical sciences increased, mainly for military and 75

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

The interface between literature and science Two men who were responsible for advancement of the scientific temperament in Bengal were Mahendralal Sircar (1833–1904) and Satish Chandra Mukherjee (1868–1945). Sircar, a product of the best Anglicised colonial education, was responsible for the establishment of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science in 1876, the first centre of modern scientific research in India that was fully funded by Indians and ‘entirely under native management and control.’ Mukherjee founded an important journal called The Dawn Society Magazine in 1897. Influenced by Comtean positivist values, the journal had a strong nationalist impetus through discussions on science, technical education and industrialisation of the colony8 Despite the pedagogical deficiencies in teaching and research in schools and colleges, science increasingly gained popularity among the educated elite in Calcutta from the last decades of the 19th century. Largely perceived as a remedy against superstitious practices, it was a way in which colonial modernity could be mastered and deployed. The economic imperatives of imperialism and technological progresses interacted and interpenetrated in a variety of ways, especially in the book publishing and printing presses that began doing a brisk business in and around the city of Calcutta. The interface between science, technology and culture would soon be reflected in literature. Science fiction in Bengal has primarily been fiction written for children and young adults, not necessarily addressing their concerns but 76

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with a strong element of fantasy that would appeal to young readers. The pulp category of SF in the 1920s and 30s in the West, with its vulgarity of titles, covers and blurbs is absent in Bangla, probably because of the colonised Bengalis’ respect for Western science and technology. For many of the early practitioners of the genre, science fiction was ‘implicated in the rise and supercession of technical-industrial modes of production.’9 The first science fiction was written in Bengal in the last decades of the nineteenth century when the effects of the Industrial Revolution were beginning to be felt in the speedy rate of mechanisation of businesses and homes.10 Many writers of that period noticed in their lifetime the effects of the rapid urbanisation of Calcutta. For the urban elite of Calcutta, science stories became a kind of myth formation of this new industrial age. A number of children’s journals, like Mukul (first published in 1895 by Nagendranath Chakraborty), Sandesh (first published in 1913 by Upendrakishore Ray) and Monoranjan Bhattacharya’s Ramdhenu (1928), were full of essays and stories to inculcate a rational and scientific temper commensurate with the age. Similarly, scientist Satyendranath Bose’s Bangiya Bigyan Parishad’s journal Gyan O Bigyan (first published in 1948) brought the new marvels of science to the doorstep of its readers, young and old. Connected to the illustrious Raychaudhuri family of Calcutta, Leela Majumdar showed considerable talent in writing fantasy stories with underlying scientific ideas. These kalpavigyan (a term she uses herself) stories express a certain worldview that critiqued western Neo-Enlightenment notions of science prevalent in the Bengali public sphere. Many of her science fantasy stories use science in a doublebind: science is both a narrative of progress, a sign of modernity, but also a signifier of a space in which a critique of modernity can be articulated. In Majumdar’s fiction, science must always serve humanity. Western science, which has been a part of the colonial encounter and often an instrument of oppression, can then be a glorious opportunity for freedom and a means to understand an adult world of complexity and violence. The association between scientific progress and individual/collective human freedom is very close in Majumdar’s work. In many ways, this ideology is a distinguishing feature of SF writing in Bengal, making it essentially the literature of progress. Yet Leela Majumdar’s stories also retain an element of radical subversion embedded within them as they encompass the possibilities of science as the power to critique and change the wounded and disfigured world. Her stories deal with hunger, marginality, unhappiness, selfishness and stupidity – characteristics of the real world that many critics feel ‘children’s literature’ cannot and should not deal with. It is actually 77

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this combination of the ideal and real that makes Majumdar’s works so alive. Unlike a sanitised world without unhappiness, class distinctions and injustices, Majumdar’s stories carry an authentic flavour of the tangible world outside. Alongside, there is also a sense of wonder at the variety of the natural world, an appreciation of the delicious and the terrifying, and the writer’s wonderfully quizzical and joyous humor that is perhaps the best response to the inexplicability that is life. Majumdar’s kalpavigyan stories, like Akash Ghati (The Space Station, 1982), using ideas of automation in a space shelter, can be read as bridge texts between narratives that use formulaic SF tropes like explorations of other modes of civilisations (Premendra Mitra’s Piprey Puran (The Annals of Ants, 1931) and Professor Shonku’s interstellar journey in Byomjatrir Diary (The Diary of a Space Traveller, 1961) by Satyajit Ray.11 Majumdar’s story ‘Shortcut’ (the English word is also the Bangla title) first came out in her kalpavigyan collection Aajgubi that was published in 1983.12 In the story, the surveyor/explorer Haricharan Shamonto (allegorical in the sense that the word ‘shamonto’ means an underling or a subject), ‘an ideal student, an ideal son, not so ideal a husband but nonetheless an ideal householder’ (311), is the central figure through whom Majumdar explores the configurations of a landscape at once known and measured but still capable of yielding mysterious encounters. Haricharan was exceptionally good at his work that involved climbing, descending, weighing, measuring . . . photographing. He didn’t mind all that: he liked doing his job a hundred times better than many others. . . . If the diagrams and measurements were right, so were the conclusions. Not like married life where the sum never equaled the parts. (312) In the story, we are told that Haricharanbabu knew twenty-one tribal languages but often failed to understand the ‘tortuous paths of matrimonial life’ (311). An intrepid surveyor, he goes off to the north-eastern part of India, ‘where some bits of unknown forests still remained’ (311). He has all modern equipment necessary with him but he also knows that surveying demands exceptional skill and concentration; it entails careful observations, and even more careful enumeration of ‘how many kinds of trees, how many rivers, their directions, their contours, the kinds of stones in the river beds, their lengths and their

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depths’(312). The scope and structure of Haricharanbabu’s survey however contains within it its own marvel for he knew There was nothing impossible in this world. The wise men knew that whatever happened belonged to the realm of the possible; if they were supernatural then they would never ever happen. The boundaries of our knowledge were not the same that restricted the possible because in the world of Nature there can be nothing called supernatural. Whatever happened was governed by natural laws. If it was beyond our knowledge, we simply gave it the name supernatural. (314) During this survey deep into the jungles, Haricharan comes across a notice that said ‘Shortcut’ stuck on a tree. Curious, he keeps walking when he comes across an old man, ‘dressed in khaki shorts’ (reminiscent of colonial explorers) who seems to resemble ‘all the best scientists that the world has ever known’ (315). Haricharan thinks the old man’s face is like V.G. Mathai, who disappeared on a scientific exploration, or maybe like Mr. Standish, who was presumed dead at the North Pole. As he walks towards the stranger, Haricharan feels a trembling in his limbs; the man then turns to him to say that he is walking on time’s shortcut. From him Haricharan learns that: Nothing ever comes to an end, you know, signs remain strewn everywhere. To come here, you have crossed many cities, rivers, fields and mountains and they are behind you now, no longer visible. Does that mean they don’t exist? When you go back, you will see, they are exactly where you have left them. Time is also like that. People don’t know or understand Time. (316) Haricharan requests the man to take him back in time to a particular day when he had lost the last testament and will of his wife’s grandfather and for which he had never been forgiven by his family. The story ends with Haricharan finding the place where he had hidden the paper and his relief that from now on he would make his family happy and ‘keep exploring in deep forests each and every year’ (317). Haricharan Shamonto is an explorer who is part and parcel of an illustrious tradition in Bengali science fiction. Premendra Mitra’s Ghanada and later the character of Professor Shonku created by

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Satyajit Ray make up the other notable examples. The explorer figure is both driven by ethics and a love for science although there are substantial differences in treatment between these writers. It may also be fruitful to explore the richness of cultural differences that this figure has in Bengali science fiction as compared to its Western counterpart. If Western SF is often critiqued as a ‘quintessentially masculine genre . . . filled with muscle bound macho heroes swaggering and bullying their way through the galaxy,’13 Bengali science fiction/science fantasy heroes/explorers/scientists, although all men, are less aggressive in their love for food and compassion for the underdog. Ghanada’s tall tales are never complete without adequate nourishments and concern for humanity, while Professor Shonku is deeply attached to his cat Newton and to his servant Prahlad. Leela Majumdar’s explorers are mostly tenderhearted children-loving adventurers (like Akash Ghati’s Borokaka) or the old Lama in her novel Batash Bari (The House of Winds, 1974). Majumdar’s ‘Shortcut’ indicates the end of the surveyor’s knowledge but also a new beginning. Even if there are no more forests to survey, Haricharan’s encounter with the time machine indicates that the human quest for knowledge and happiness can never end. The known world can still yield the mysterious, and the forests that have already been surveyed can still hold secret possibilities. Classifications and enumerations, paradigmatic tools of colonial science and colonial subjugation, can never diminish the wonder of the natural world even though that world is tainted by human greed. ‘Shortcut’ then is a story that indicates a limitation of Western science without undermining its value. The figure of the Indian surveyor, so unlike his colonial counterpart, is on a quest not to subjugate the world but to learn about himself and his past. Sukumar Ray, Bengal’s first nonsense poet, was a prolific writer on scientific and technological subjects, contributing articles to Sandesh (in Bangla sandesh means both a sweetmeat and a message), a magazine first published by his father, Upendrakishore Ray Chaudhuri (1863–1915), a notable member of the Brahmo Samaj and a writer himself. Upendrakishore belonged to a family that was known for their scientific curiosity and open-minded intellectual and social interventions. Upendrakishore’s interest in printing technology and in children’s literature made him a pioneer of sorts in nineteenthcentury Calcutta. His four-part article Akasher Katha (All About the Sky, 1900) in the children’s magazine Mukul reveals the writer’s widespread interest in all things scientific. Upendrakishore’s son Sukumar inherited his interest and contributed many articles to Sandesh on a 80

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

publishers/printers): Can we see all the samples of plants and animals that you have collected? CHANDRA:  They are all lost. US:  What? All lost? How could you lose such things? CHANDRA:  Yes, I am thankful my life was not lost too. You have not seen the storms I came across in those regions: in one blast all our instruments, large tents and sample boxes were blown away like paper. I was blown away too, a number of times. Once I was close to death. God knows where my dog was blown away; I never found him again. It was such a terrible danger: compasses and needles, maps and plans, papers and books were all blown away. If I tell you how I managed to return, all your hair will stand up on end like a porcupine’s spines. (492) Ray pokes fun at the paraphernalia of science and geographical surveys that is used to order a new colonial territoriality. Heshoram and his surveyors, unlike the earlier kinds, are all Indians, including the two hunter brothers Chhakkar and Lakkar Singh and the coolies. They travel ten miles north of the Bandakush mountains, (a wordplay on banda: servant and kush: kurnish, to salute), whose nomenclature brings to mind the colonised status of the group. Professor Heshoram Hushiyar has traveled to the borders of the known territory of British India, beyond the Karakoram, where he encounters fabulous animals and plants: After travelling for two hours we came to a place where everything seemed strange. There were large trees, all unknown to us. In one of them large red fruits, a little in size like our bel, 81

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were hanging down; we saw a flowering plant with white and yellow flowers, each the length of an arm and half. In another tree, gourd like fruits hung whose sharp smell assailed our nostrils from twenty-five feet away. (491) This is the edge of the known world, where fantastic plants and animals challenge the extents and borders of colonial knowledge. Turning the colonial trope of exotic India on its head, Ray shows us the limitations of modern geography: nothing in this earth can be fully known and colonial scientific efforts to collect, specify and create an archive of flora and fauna are doomed to incompleteness and failure. The possibilities of knowledge then remain both fabulously tantalising and ephemeral. None of the creatures that Professor Heshoram finds are to be found in the annals of geography or physical sciences, including the two hundred kinds of butterflies and insects and five hundred new species of plants, fruits and trees. The team measures the Bandakush Mountain with their ‘survey instruments’. However, they come up with varying heights, so the measurements have to be done again and again because ‘maybe our instruments were faulty.’ The expedition team is certain that nobody has ever measured or climbed that particular mountain because ‘this was a completely new and strange land (desh), with no signs of human beings anywhere and where we had to make our own maps to determine and go our way’ (491). Heshoram Hushiyarer Diary pokes fun at Enlightenment sciences for naming things in long-winded Latin. Ray critiques the fact that scientists give names arbitrarily to objects for convenience and suggests that the name of a thing is intrinsically connected to its nature. So the first creature that Professor Heshoram meets in the course of his journey through the Bandakush Mountain is a ‘Gomratharium’ (gomra in Bangla means someone of irritable temperament), a creature that sported a woebegone face with an extremely cross expression. They also encounter a ‘Hanglatherium’ (hangla: greedy), a creature who devours a loaf of bread and jaggery and polishes off the explorer’s breakfast eggs.15 Soon the company stumbles upon a strange creature, a cross between a ‘number of kites and owls’ and find an animal ‘that was neither an alligator, nor a snake, nor a fish but resembled to a certain extent all three.’ Heshoram names him ‘Chillanosaurus’ (chillano: to shout), who is incapable of hunting even for his food.16 The list of fantastic animals keeps growing when one of Heshoram’s surveyors comes upon another strange creature whom they name ‘Langratharium’ (langra in Bangla means someone who is lame) because it walks 82

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with a limp. In a subversive act of linguistic flagging, Ray inserts Bangla words into Latin ones to create portmanteau words made famous by another writer whom he admired, Lewis Carroll. And like Carroll, Ray too plays with words to poke fun at the hegemonic contemporary scientific and cultural doctrines of the day. Sukumar Ray’s short text is remarkable for many reasons. Ray is famous in Bengal for his nonsense verses as well as his satirical plays, but few literary historians have taken cognizance of this text except in perfunctory ways.17 This fragment creates a new geography that counters the spatial geography that colonial cartographers created especially through the trigonometric surveys that tried to measure and scale the Indian landscape. Ray demonstrates that technology and knowledge are not unproblematic phenomena and the colonised subjects did not adopt them as a matter of course. Ray’s cultural conceptions of space and the politics of manipulating spatial representations create a cartography that is subversive, ambiguous and complex. He demonstrates a broad yet critical understanding of colonial science, particularly geography, to comment on the practices of surveys, maps and scientific practices where he gives racial stereotyping a satirical edge. So Chakkar and Lakkar Singh, who are from Punjab, are brave and courageous hunters while Chandrakhai is a lover of food and a teller of tall tales (a Bengali characteristic?). As he recounts his adventures in the Bandakush Mountain, one of the young men of the printing press asks him: ‘What -tharium are you?’ while another jokingly answers: ‘Oh he is a Goppotharium: he sits down to tell tall tales’ (goppo/golpo: tales/stories, also tall tales) (493). Majumdar and Ray exhibit a rare form of sardonic modernity that is both self-reflexive and ironic: by questioning the certainties of Neo-Enlightenment epistemology, they allow their young readers to chart new maps or new territories that would enable them to critically examine their self-identities based on alternate modes of viewing and chronicling. Using the form of the kalpavigyan where the explorer is the saviour and not an exploiter of the world, they create a distinct genre different to Western SF yet with some familar tropes. At once local and global, their writings display, as Chattopadhyay writes, how ‘a sensitivity to local context determines, rather than undermines, the concreteness of our planetary imaginings.’18 Although emerging from a dissemination of imperial sciences, the Bangla kalpavigyan stories of Ray and Majumdar produce ‘rich imaginative possibilities for empire’s anti-thesis.’19 Through parody and ironic humour, the narratives radically challenge the legitimising conception of the empire, its linguistic and territorial hegemony. The figure of Haricharan or Professor 83

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

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

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

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Part II POSTCOLONIAL REASSERTIONS

5 HEARTS AND HOMES A perspective on women writers in Hindi Ira Pande

‘Fun,’ says Bill Bryson recalling his childhood in Iowa, ‘was a different kind of thing in the 1950s, mostly because there wasn’t so much of it . . . You learnt to wait for your pleasures and to appreciate them when they came.’ Life was somewhat similar in the rest of the world as well, certainly in the small towns of mofussil India in the first two decades after Independence, when it had an unhurried, placid rhythm that bred in people a calm acceptance of the fact that not all pleasures were instantly available. My worldview to date is essentially confined within this globe of memories, of life in provincial India and its mofussil towns during the ’50s and ’60s. What is more, I grew up with a mother who was a writer and so quite a different breed from the other mothers of that time. I have written about this in a memoir.1 However, where that book was a sort of homage to an extraordinary mother I learned to love even more after she died, this article will be an enquiry into why women writers of her generation were often dismissed as mere producers of popular romantic fiction. Few women writers of her generation were given a place in the big boys’ club of serious writers or honoured by the Sahitya Akademi. National honours, such as the Padma awards, were rarely bestowed upon writers anyway and Shivani received a Padma Sri in 1982, almost towards the end of her life. Yet, even today, I meet fans who have read her books countless times and can quote reams from her novels to me to prove their undying love for her work. I have also encountered young girls who say they have been named after her because their mothers were diehard fans of Shivani. What I take this to mean is that popular women writers still continue to enjoy a readership that many ‘important’ male writers of that time no longer do. So to understand this strange dichotomy between Shivani’s 89

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

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

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and a music director, called (I think) Ghantasala, whose name used to have us convulsed with mirth and songs that sounded to us like: Andirittam chamaghadh, Chundi muttadi mutta gudh, chundi muttadi mutta ghud God knows what the original words were, but they have stayed with us to this day. If, by some happy chance, our parents were out on a walk or something, we ran to switch on the radio at 7.30 pm to hear ‘Fauji bhaiyon ke liye’ (for our brother soldiers), a programme broadcast specially for the Armed Forces. Once we even sent a request under our cook’s name and he joined us every afternoon until one day he finally heard his name on the radio and collapsed in ecstasy. No doubt this same desire prompted that paanwala from Jhumritalaiya to send requests every day, so that he was known all over the country. We went to English-medium schools but led Hindi-medium lives at home. Then, this was a fact that we hid from our posh, Anglicised school mates: today it is something that I am profoundly grateful for. We read Chandamama and Parag while ‘they’ read Schoolfriend and Girl’s Weekly. ‘Their’ mothers read Woman and Home and Woman’s Weekly: ours read Dharmyug and Sarika. It was considered stylish to know only English and pretend that you could not spell or speak grammatically correct Hindi, perhaps because we still carried the burden of the Raj then. Pride in our heritage, our languages and customs and in our simple but spartan lives was hidden from the taunts of our missionary teachers and fellow students. My brother and I were given private lessons at home in Sanskrit by an old Panditji, who came largely for the tea and snacks he was served every day by our mother. As he slurped his tea, he would place a greasy finger on the book in front of us and say, ‘Explain this.’ Naturally, we never could, so with another noisy slurp, he would start the explanation with, ‘To hum batlavain?’ (Shall I explain then?). We hated those lessons because we felt that exposure to Hum Batlavain (our cruel nickname for him) would – like prolonged exposure to deadly UV rays – dim the patina of the English education we were receiving in our schools. My brother discovered that if you learnt the rupa (scansion) of Sanskrit verbs in vertical lines, instead of horizontal ones, then the last line only had ‘bhyam, bhyam, bhya, bhya’. I am sure today such a crosscultural experiment would result in some kind of bipolar disorder, but we bore the schizophrenia this created in our childhood cheerfully oblivious of those mental conditions that then had no name and so did not exist. 92

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Naturally, nostalgia makes me look back at these memories fondly, erasing the unhappiness and the misery that was also so much a part of growing up in mofussil India. Our lives were light years from what happened in the Big Bad City. For instance, we only heard of the Beatles and flower children: to us in our provincial towns, these were a large generic lot called ‘the Hippie’. For years after – perhaps even now – the word ‘hippie’ denoted an evolutionary stage of being that is just above that of a cockroach. If I have faithfully conveyed to the reader the languid and unhurried pace of life in those days, then we can proceed to understand how hard-won, even simple pleasures seemed and how reading romantic serials became a rage all over India when a clutch of magazines in a variety of regional languages were published in the first decade after Independence. Remember that we were ferocious readers of print and bilingual to a degree that our reading speeds in both Hindi and English were roughly the same. I wonder how many bilingual readers there are living today: even among those who speak impeccable Hindi. A crucial fact was that Hindi magazines and books were freely available because they were far less expensive than English magazines and books. In an age of modest incomes, few households were able to buy their children books and magazines for entertainment. There was another unseen factor and one often overlooked by the people who bemoan the dying readership of Hindi publications. Up to the ’60s, there were three kinds of options in every field of creative endeavour so that every segment of the Indian population was offered a choice of films, music and reading matter. Thus there were the Satyajit Ray kind of films for the truly sophisticated and evolved minds, Bimal Roy and Guru Dutt for the literary-minded middle class and Dara Singh films of action for the hoi polloi. In music one could choose classical music, film music or a semi-classical genre that a few may remember as sugam sangeet. This was a genre that had some wonderful thumris and ghazals or lyrics by well-known poets by singers such as Lata Mangeshkar, Manna De or Pankaj Mullick for those who savoured good music and poetry. Similarly, there were Premchand and Hajari Prasad Dwivedi for the upper intellectual stratosphere; Shivani, Mannu Bhandari, Krishan Chander and other popular writers for the middlebrow; and Colonel Ranjit and Gulshan Nanda for readers of pulp fiction. At some point – largely I think under the influence of the socialist gangsters and the self-styled literary critic with an unswerving ideological loyalty to anything that came out of Soviet Russia and its satellite culture – state awards and renown were bestowed only on those whose work met with the approval and sanction of these red 93

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hearts. Popularity became suspect, a mark of low intellectual content that had to be rubbished at all academic fora. Today, when the same red hearts that bleed eternally for the aam aadmi moan about the vanishing readership in Hindi and the lack of any fresh bhasha writing, perhaps they should look into the smelly confines of the Sahitya Akademi and the National Book Trust, controlled by their clones since they were first set up, to find the answers they seek. Allahabad in the ’60s was home to some of the greatest writers of those times. Harivansh Rai Bachchan had left Allahabad for Delhi by then, but there were other more famous chhayavad poets still around (Sumitranandan Pant, Mahadevi Verma and Nirala), Firaq Gorakhpuri, Amrit and Sripat Rai (Premchand’s sons, both writers and publishers), Ilachandra Joshi, VDN Sahi and Usha Priyamvada, to name just a few. And of course, there was Shivani. However, along with others of her tribe, such as Salma Siddiqi and Mannu Bhandari, her kind of writing was passed off as romantic fluff or domestic sagas that housewives ordered by mail as part of a gharelu (domestic) library scheme. The very popularity of these women writers became a weapon to use against their literary output. To the supercilious self-styled critics who pronounced judgment on what was to be considered acceptable as literature, this space was only meant for those who wrote for a different audience, one that had a sophisticated palate developed on the ‘modern’ fare of European and contemporary American fiction. Certain subjects were taboo in this high-minded world: romance and bourgeois lives headed this list. Somewhere by the ’70s, then, the small town became an object of ridicule: it was valourised in romantic literature and cinema but actually hated and mocked at in the real. Small wonder then, that its inhabitants (who suffered from a crippling form of low self-esteem since birth) ran into hiding and tried to ape the big-city culture by writing, speaking and dressing like the metropolitan sophisticates they yearned to become. When this happened, the country lost all those delightful rivulets that fed the creative river of the Grand National Dream. The homogenisation of culture took over: slogans replaced feelings. The joy went out of fun as its definition changed into something wrought by high-minded nationalist agendas. Political correctness has a lot to answer for. Upon reflection, it appears to me that Shivani’s most prolific literary output and some of her most memorable and popular novels date to the years when Hindi magazines were avidly read across North India. Among these, Dharmyug (edited then by the formidable Dharmvir Bharati, a widely respected novelist and dramatist) occupied pride 94

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of place. Published by Bennett and Coleman (referred to henceforth as B&C), its owners (Sahu Jain and Rama Jain) promoted creative writing and later endowed the Gyanpeeth Award, the first privately endowed prestigious literary award for writers in various Indian languages. The Bennett and Coleman Group (later known as the Times of India group) also brought out a clutch of other magazines. Among these were Sarika (contemporary Hindi writing, edited by Kamleshwar) and Dinaman (a political and economic weekly, edited by Agyeya), both respected for their content and editorial gravitas. Filmfare, a film magazine, and the Illustrated Weekly of India were their popular English-language publications. The Hindustan Times group, owned by the Birlas, published Saptahik Hindustan (as a rival to Dharmyug), Kadambari (as an alternative to Sarika) and vied with each other to publish serials by the most popular Hindi writers of those days. Throughout the ’50s and ’60s, there was not a single library or reader in North India that did not subscribe to these magazines. Almost all of Shivani’s novels – certainly her most popular ones – were first published as serials in one or the other magazines mentioned above. Her most well-known novel, Krishnakali, published as a serial in Dharmyug in the ’60s, was later published as a novel by Gyanpeeth (the publishing house run by the B&C group). In addition to these magazines, two others (Navneet and Gyanoday) I can recall from then were modelled on the popular American publication, Reader’s Digest. Shivani’s travelogues, essays and memorial tributes were regularly published in these Hindi digests. Today, when we have lost the patience to wait for the instalment of a weekly serial and prefer reading our books in one gulp or bingewatch our favourite television serials, it seems incredible that readers would follow Shivani’s serials for months and savour them by reading them over and over again. Later, when they were published as novels, they were given a fresh lease of life and her publishers vied to get rights to publication even as it was still being serialised in a magazine. Although such publishing is now a part of literary lore and the subject of research papers, we must never forget the enormous role these serialised novels played in popularising quality literature. Just as our early television serials are now re-run on Doordarshan to recall and emphasise the depth of their narratives against the trivial pursuits of the eternal saas-bahu bilge that spawned a whole industry of hysterical emotional dramas enacted by over-dressed actors, the simple dignity of women in our small towns and their small world was the spine of those literary serials. Written by authors who had a firm grip on local languages with a strong sense of social responsibility, they gave rise 95

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to a genre that has since vanished. Vulgarity – whether in speech or character – was completely absent and whether this indicates a prudery or an acknowledgement of what constitutes ‘good and wholesome’ literature is for others to say. As a daughter who was brought up on whatever Shivani preached in her novels, I am no longer capable of giving an unbiased opinion. Naturally, the serialised novel had its own effect on the writing it spawned. Fans wrote furious letters to Shivani when she betrayed their hopes (such as by killing off a character) or when she did not spend enough time on a particular strand of the narrative. This close bond between writer and reader was perhaps what contributed to the intimacy that readers developed over the years with their favourite writers. My sister Mrinal Pande (who edited Saptahik Hindustan in the ’90s) recalls how typists vied with each other to type out Shivani’s (always) handwritten manuscript when she sent in a fresh instalment so that he/she would be the first to read it! The circulation of magazines jumped by as much as 55 per cent when her novels were being serialised and siblings fought with each other to grab the magazine to read it first when it was delivered to private homes. Often they tore the pages out so that they could share it among themselves. What gave this genre its enormous reach and popularity was that these stories were significant documentaries. I would say that that it was reality fiction based on real-life characters and episodes and invisible to the writers based in our up-and-coming metros who consciously distanced themselves from these provincial lives to become more acceptable to a wider, international literary world. This is a fact often overlooked when tracing the evolution of Hindi writing. As Vasudha Dalmia’s book on fiction and history reveals, novels located in Allahabad, Agra, Aligarh, Banaras or Lucknow give us an insight into the social landscapes that were shaping middle-class lives in the ’50s and ’60s.2 Beneath the romantic tales of young women and men were rich subplots that reveal the gradual breakup of orthodox joint families, the effect of education on the emancipation of women in provincial India and the effect of migration from small towns to industrial cities. The language of everyday conversation in middle-class homes and amongst families, the social terms of exchange between men and women, workers and employers are important markers of a world we seek today and cannot find because it no longer exists. What are often dismissed as kitchen tales and romantic fiction stood firm on a foundation because it was supported by religion and ritual, food and taboos, folk remedies and aphorisms that nourished clans and villages. In the tightly packed houses of our old shahars that were separated by 96

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narrow lanes, the smells and sounds that travelled across neighbours became rich lodes of narratives that had the authenticity of real lives. The bonds between Hindu and Muslim homes, or between upper- and lower-caste settlements were strong threads that wove the fabric of our social communities. A deep suspicion of the other community was balanced by an equally strong love for individual men and women. Look for these common narrative strains and you will find them in all writers who lived and thrived in little India. Of Shivani’s portraits, two remain my favourites: ‘Mera Bhai’, her loving tribute to her Muslim ‘brother’ Hamid Bhai, and ‘Ek Thi Ramrati’, a homage to her companion-maid, Ramrati. Short sketches they may be and often forgotten as a part of her literary legacy, to me they are moving accounts of how culturally liberal the Ganga-Jamuni culture of Lucknow – and indeed most of the Gangetic plain once was. Today, when we like to dismiss it as the cow belt, it may help to understand how its rich social history was distorted by vested political interests that manipulated its weaknesses. However, many self-styled critics were so busy raising the bar high that they forgot the earth they stood on. One by one, the magazines that transported an outer world to readers trapped in small towns were discontinued. Gradually, English was adopted as the language of trend-setting academic discourse and the ‘real’ debates shifted from cosy sahityik goshtis (literary soirees) in modest sitting rooms, where young and aspiring writers read out their work to senior writers. The new critical jousting spaces were now the seminar rooms of universities whose audiences had little interest in small towns and who viewed mofussil India as a petri dish in which to develop complex theories in meta-criticism. Such writers and critics wrote and spoke in coteries taking care not to pollute their pristine modern world with the smelly odours of spices that came from the kitchens of women writers who wrote of ordinary middle-class longings and desires. It was the ‘Hum Batlavain’ syndrome all over again. What such scholars were unable to register were the deepening social fault lines that would eventually separate little India from urban, metropolitan India. These imperceptible shifts in the cultural tectonic plates taking place all over North India were raising a generation that had aspirations beyond domesticity and a circumscribed social world. This restlessness is what later developed into the clear divide between Bharat and India, a phenomenon that has now become an insurmountable chasm. The social unrest of the last decades – our caste wars, our political and social activism, our unquiet educational institutes or the widespread anger against the entitlement of hereditary 97

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

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was to gather together the kind of writing that often nourished her fiction. As she herself mentioned in the preface she wrote to Apradhini: I saw, heard and experienced the pain of these characters in an environment that is impossible to convey in words and images. And what experiences they were! Among them was the pathetic request of a Kumaoni girl, whose story absorbed me so completely that I forgot where I was. For a brief moment, both of us became oblivious of the hot loo that raged outside and were transported from the cell to a land where cool breezes blew down mountainsides. It is one of the ironies of life that we are unable to accept the truth unless we can see, feel or hear it. And yet, whether we accept it or not, nothing can ever change the truth. However, there is another kind of truth: the sort that we accept simply because it is there. For a brief moment, I was back with Chanuli in her village and it was the hour when the cows come home – what we call godhuli in Hindi. The prison, its walls and the searing afternoon heat, all vanished before the truth of Chanuli’s story.3 In the same collection is an account of a small Kumaoni temple, dedicated to a local deity, Gwaladevta, where thousands of appeals written to the Gwaladevta flutter along the outer parikrama. Gwaladevta is the last court of justice for people who have lost all hope and come to beseech him, confident that he will give them the justice that the laws of the state have denied them. This is a letter Shivani quotes from there: The third letter was the most amazing of all. It was written in a childish, schoolgirl’s hand and on a page torn from a school notebook. I stiffened as I read the opening line: ‘Gwaladev, if there is any truth in your power, then make my daughter a widow!’ What mother was this, I thought, to ask for such a boon? Plead for her own daughter to be turned a widow? But as I read her impassioned appeal, I felt this was a boon that Gwaladevta would be forced to grant. Her only daughter, the mother wrote, was like a tender flower but the monster who had married her did not give her a day’s happiness. Along with his mother, he had tortured her, burning her with live coals. When she asked to go and visit her mother’s home, he

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had burnt her tongue so that her mouth was a mess of sores. Finally, he broke her legs. Her parents brought their half-dead daughter home and maddened with grief, the mother came with her appeal to the only true dispenser of justice she could think of: Gwala Devta. ‘I brought her home yesterday,’ she wrote and implored her Gwala Devta to do something. ‘I want justice, Gwaladev, Let the bastard suffer the same fate as my daughter. Don’t grant him an easy death, Gollu, let him inch towards his end in misery. The day my daughter becomes a widow, Gollu,’ she promised, ‘I’ll come and sacrifice a goat at your doorstep. Rather than have a husband like hers, I wish her widowhood my Lord!’ That childish scrawl contained the sorrow of countless mothers in Kumaon. That such women should have to seek justice at the court of Gwala Devta, rather than at a court of law, I thought to myself, was enough for all of us to lower our heads in shame.4 I find it strange that such a powerful cast of characters can be dismissed as romantic, escapist literature. Yet Shivani was not the only writer of her generation who faced this resistance from literary pundits. Writers who chose to write without a covert ideological agenda or those whose characters were outside the stereotyped peasant or Dalit lives that could be easily mined to evoke social guilt and pathos were not considered important enough to be taught in university courses or given any academic attention. However, as long as they had a huge readership attached to the magazines that published popular fiction and writing, they flourished. The death blow came with the rise of the television and the serials that the state-owned television, Doordarshan, beamed in its early years. Manohar Shyam Joshi (who straddled both literary and popular planes with consummate ease) was commissioned to create the enormously popular serial Hum Log, which presented the lives of ordinary middle-class families who lived in small towns or in the government colonies of metropolitan India. These were heady years for Doordarshan, as cable television had not yet captured the market and the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting was run by civil servants with a taste for educating India’s rising middle class with socially uplifting messages and themes (such as family planning or the perils of alcoholism and gambling). Reading was no longer the passion that it was even a few years ago and more and more people turned to the television for their daily fix of entertainment. 100

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As advertising revenues dried up, small magazines began to fold and up and, eventually, even the pioneers Dharmyug and Saptahik Hindustan were closed down by their owners. English newspapers and magazines became the new reading matter of the rising middle class and rock star editors were paid huge salaries to add glamour and glitz to weeklies and fortnightly magazines. Ironically, the disease that killed off several venerable Hindi magazines also choked many old literary English magazines (such as Encounter) while new gossip magazines (Stardust, Cine Blitz, etc.) that gave dull lives a vicarious peep into the hijinks of our film stars and high society became popular reading matter. Eventually, they chased away the little players. Till today, niche magazines that try to publish literary fiction or reports that highlight the social and cultural problems of our times can find few financial backers. As the decades rolled on, the small towns of North India were rapidly depleted of their thinkers, poets, writers and musicians. Old havelis and mohallas crumbled as their owners left one by one, either for the blue yonder or for the greener pastures of Bombay and Delhi. Many writers changed their persona as they became scriptwriters for films and television serials while poets were forced to write film lyrics in order to survive. Universities, such as Allahabad and Lucknow, which had once boasted of faculty members like Firaq Gorakhpuri and Harivansh Rai Bachchan, became the citadels of gangsters and bred the small town neta who would one day become a minister and spread his brand of Munnabhai toporidom across the region. Eventually, the Lucknowness of a Lucknow or the Allahabadi personality became defined by Muslim socials, with titles such as Mere Huzoor and Mere Mehboob, with imaginary cityscapes that were a cross between Shah Jahan’s Red Fort and the Taj Mahal. Filmi historical romances and nostalgia became our way of preserving an imagined culture that had died a long, long time ago at the hands of the very people who now extolled the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb and other such impossible dreams. I left my native state almost forty years ago. Today when I visit Lucknow or Allahabad, there is no landmark or person I can relate to. Something terrible happened when we abandoned our natal homes and towns. For some time, these waited for the exiles to return but when that did not happen, they gave up and quietly died. Hindi, Bhojpuri, Maithili, Purabiya, Bundelkhandi – to say nothing of Urdu – were denied the space they needed to grow and flourish. As ‘babuspeak’ and ‘Akashvani Hindi’ replaced the native sweetness of these tongues, they withdrew into the confines of homes and hearths. The easy exchange of words and phrases that enriched our local 101

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

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

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6 GENRE FICTION AND AESTHETIC RELISH Reading rasa in contemporary times Anwesha Maity1

Readers and scholars today will readily concur that bhasha (Indianlanguage2) genre fiction (encompassing, for the purposes this essay, detective stories, horror/weird fiction, science fiction [henceforth SF] and fantasy) is greatly indebted to colonial and postcolonial discourses and more-or-less influenced by western models. Critical analysis of Indian-language genres, while recognising the cultural peculiarities of Indian contexts/settings and characters, has, with rare exceptions, also utilised western models to analyse them. This essay takes a different approach and employs rasa theory to investigate how genre is an integral part of Indian-language literature – not merely an offshoot of western imitation/influence. Rasa, variously translated as ‘juice, taste, emotion, pleasure, essence’3 etc. – following Chari, I prefer ‘aesthetic relish’ – is the very soul of poetry – the end-goal and aspiration of any literary text. In this essay I have only considered precepts from the classical Sanskrit tradition, mainly those forwarded by Bharata (early centuries CE) and Abhinavagupta (c. 900 CE). Bharata’s Nāṭyaśāstra (Treatise on Drama, 200 BCE–200 CE), which considers rasa as the core component of theatrical performance, enumerates the characteristics of eight rasas. By the 4th century CE, rasa was accepted as the guiding principle of Sanskrit works also in meter and prose, leading, over nearly two millennia, to a proliferation of the number of rasas and commentaries and debates on its nature, location and processes whereby it may be made manifest. While rasa theorisation in the Sanskrit tradition declined after the Bhakti movement, rasa principles continued to inform courtly and folk poetry and performance, not to mention the 103

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other arts like architecture and sculpture, up until the colonial era. In the 19th century, print culture radically altered not only expectations of spectatorship versus readership but also what was to be expected from poetry/literature in the first place. In terms of content, the major shift from primarily mythological stories to the travails of the common person in new literary forms like the novel and the short story also meant that old literary parameters were no longer directly applicable. Even though colonisation created a fracture in the overt modes of colonial and postcolonial Indian-language storytelling, I argue that the old emotive structures continue to shape literary expectations even in contemporary examples.4 Rasa, configured in a formal and descriptive structure, allows for not only an unambiguous identification of discrete emotive elements in a text, but also an assessment of their greater or lesser impact within a framework or the failure thereof. Moreover, in my reading, these emotions are not primarily subjective, i.e. are not geared towards psychological character analysis of inner thoughts of fictional characters. Rather, Bharata’s Nāṭyaśāstra emphasises typological, even formulaic combinations of elements. Contemporary criticism has certainly emphasised the relevance and wide applicability of the rasa theory and explored rasa vis-à-vis western poetics/critical theories and literatures, stressing that the rasas and permanent states (bhāvas) discussed by Bharata may be applicable to the literary production of all human cultures.5 Scholars like Patnaik, Hiryanna and Chari apply rasa principles to examples from western literature, but Pollock in particular appears to be unconvinced by this trend and studies like ‘Rasa in Shakespeare’. Irrespective of which side of this debate one chooses to stand on, rasa, as I demonstrate below, remains useful for analyses of contemporary Indian genre fiction, perhaps much more than for highbrow, realistic literary fiction.6 However, no attention has hitherto been paid to Indian genre fiction vis-à-vis rasa theory (barring my own work on SF and rasa). This is surprising, because genre fiction (at least in Bangla, with which I am more familiar than the other languages) has invented categories like ‘adventure rasa’ and refers to ‘rasa’ and ‘rasika’ (i.e. ‘one who can savour rasa’) as frequently or more often than highbrow, canonical or mainstream fiction. Admittedly, this usage is casual; it is rarely critical or referring back to the classical Sanskrit tradition itself. However, the very retention of these old terms indicates a cognizance on part of both authors and readers of a shared set of cultural-aesthetic values, setting Indian-language genre apart from whatever processes of translation, adaptation or ‘borrowing’ from western sources that also shape it. 104

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

How rasa works: three principles The sahridaya7 audience/spectator (and later pāthak /reader) This is one of the central premises of the rasa experience and has retained some critical weight over the millennia. From Bharata’s evocation of the sumanā,8 one who has a pure/cultivated mind as the ideal spectator, it is obvious that not all spectators are possessed of this pure mind. Abhinavagupta links this older idea to the concept of sahridaya, i.e. ‘possessed of the same heart’ thus: ‘The faculty of self-identification with the events represented [the determinants, etc.] demands that the mirror of the mind should be made completely clear, by means of repeated acquaintance with and practice of poetry . . . ready to receive all the images which are reflected’.9 The reference to the ‘clear mindmirror’ necessitates that the ideal spectator should possess the mental fortitude to disassociate from his own current concerns or emotions, even as the performance stimulates the latent and stable emotional states/determinants innate in every person (sthāyi bhāvas), leading to the rasa experience. Thus, rasa experience does not only exist in the poet’s pratibhā (genius) but is directly experienced by the sahridaya spectator through the text, joining all three elements in a continuum.10 Being possessed of sanskāra (all cognitive or emotional experience) and vasana (tendencies of past lives), only a sahridaya can fully appreciate the vision of the poet and the text. As such the sahridaya, often also called the samājika, is simultaneously the ideal critic or bhāvaka who has 105

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successfully contemplated the poet’s vision; if he fails to do so, he is no more than a bhāvuka or unproductive thinker with no independent judgment.11 Of course, context-specific and material considerations of who could become a sahridaya remain largely unarticulated in terms of gender, caste and class, defaulting to the upper-caste (and/or) upperclass male in the classical tradition. In contemporary texts, genre or otherwise, the term ‘sahridaya’, retained from earlier usage, is usually combined with pāthak or reader, often in an authorial or narratorial appeal of sympathy towards controversial content. The term bhavuka, too, retains some of its old meanings as characterising unproductive thinkers and daydreamers in current usage. A related term drawn from later Bhakti terminology, ‘rasika’, or ‘one who can savour rasa’, also circulates in current usage, with particular reference to persons who are capable of appreciating wit or the comic rasa and in iterations like ‘rasika nāgara’, indicating a proclivity towards the erotic or śṛṅgāra rasa with or without Bhakti connotations.12 Sādhāranikarana Variously translated as ‘generalisation’, ‘transpersonalisation’, ‘communisation’ and ‘universalisation’, it is the process of the rasa experience. It is, for the sahridaya, ‘a self-identification with the imagined situation, devoid of any practical interest and . . . of any relation whatsoever with the limited Self, and as it were impersonal’.13 Without this generalising principle, a poetic treatment of the love between Shiva and Parvati, for instance, could be embarrassing/offensive on account of witnessing sexual escapades of revered gods, or generate indifference, as it has nothing whatsoever to do with the spectator, or make him jealous if he himself were sexually or romantically frustrated. None of these vighnas or obstacles would lead to the rasa experience. Instead the sahridaya must recognise the action/description to be subsumed under a ‘poetic universal’, as applying to characters like Shiva and Parvati and providing grounds for communication and commonality on the basis of universal human emotion, here love-in-union (sambhoga śṛṅgāra) between a married couple. The sahridaya not only apprehends this universal human emotion but also reproduces or actualises the emotion on his own, leading to the rasa experience, by transcending (temporarily) his own ego.14 Moreover, the contextual or temporal distance from events depicted, along with a lack of any direct impact of such events on our own lives, also aids this generalising process.15 Thus, sādhāranikarana can be interpreted as a two-way street – from 106

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the particular to the universal and back to the particular, where the first and second particular are not the same.16 Many of these observations hold theoretically true for contemporary literature. Despite the great degree of individualisation of character, reader-identification depends greatly on universal human emotions as shared ground for communication. In any case, as Chari argues, ‘Generic attributes cannot be apprehended unless they are exhibited in individuals’.17 For genre fiction specifically, much of the thrill arises from reader-identification with characters only superficially like us (the common man); their exceptional qualities, along with whatever peculiarities of setting or circumstance, arouse a mixed feeling of simultaneously wanting to be and not be in that particular character’s shoes. This is achieved by an evocative tone of narration; for instance, in a crime novel, dry details of court proceedings are narrated in a way that arouses responses of wonder, suspense, disgust, etc., even if it purports to be ‘objective’ and ‘empirical’.18 Moreover, the frisson between the general and the particular is another of the pleasures of many types of genre fiction: We know that typically the detective will not suffer death and the crime will be solved, but are thrilled to watch the mystery unfold. Universalisation also implies that the readership/audience has a certain level of familiarity with similar texts, the above-mentioned ‘repeated acquaintance with and practice of poetry’. For instance, in SF, the existence of an ever-expanding body of tropes and ideas, the ‘megatext’, can be likened to this common ground as circumscribing a ‘horizon of expectations’, whereas the specific innovations of particular ‘novums’ exist in a dialectical tension with it. Camatkāra This concept, argued strongly by Abhinavagupta and resonating with Advaita Shaiva philosophy, is the mode of the rasa experience; all rasas are inherently pleasurable and arouse a feeling of marvelous enjoyment (adbhutabhoga). Raghavan observes: originally the word camatkara was an onomatopoeic word referring to the clicking sound we make with our tongue when we taste something snappy, and in the course of its semantic enlargements . . . came to mean a sudden fillip relating to any feeling of a pleasurable type.19 Since the rasa experience is transpersonalised, this sense of marvelous enjoyment is also less of a subjective matter and more of a transcendent 107

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

Building blocks and combinatory schemes Bharata, in the sixth and seventh chapters of the Nāṭyaśāstra (Treatise on Drama) asserts that rasa arises from a combination of bhāvas. 108

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The eight rasas, namely erotic (śṛṅgāra), comic (hāsya), compassionate/pathetic (karuṇa), furious (raudra), heroic (vīra), terrifying (bhayānaka), disgusting (bībhatsa) and awesome/wonderful (adbhuta) are paired with their sthāyi bhāvas, the latent and stable emotional states innate in every person, enduring ‘in everyday life for an extended period, ranging from days to decades’.24 Insofar as the rasa experience is concerned, the sthāyi bhāvas are accompanied by 33 transitory states (vyabhicāri or sancāri bhāvas) and eight involuntary psychosomatic states (sattvika bhāvas).25 Included in the category of bhāva are also vivbhāvas and anubhāvas, which are descriptive of causes and results/responses, respectively, with some overlaps between them for particular rasas. However, without a fine-tuning of the sthāyi bhāvas’ potential within the processes/modes discussed above, there would be no rasa or aesthetic response. The erotic (śṛṅgāra), comic (hāsya), heroic (vīra) and wonderful (adbhuta) are concordant rasas, while the remaining four – the compassionate/pathetic (karuṇa), the furious (raudra), the terrifying (bhayānaka), and the disgusting (bībhatsa) – are discordant rasas. Further, a text can have a combination of rasas, but that does not produce a new compound or a ‘cocktail of emotions’;26 the stronger element (angi rasa) always asserts itself and the text in totality has a single dominant rasa.27 Rasas are also friendly or inimical to each other; for instance, with rare exceptions in Sanskrit poetry, śṛṅgāra and karuṇa are inimical, while śṛṅgāra and hāsya are friendly rasas. When combined without respect to propriety, the discordant rasas usually overpower the concordant. In the later Sanskrit tradition, we find lists of proper/desirable rasa combinations as poetry became increasingly formulaic28 and form was privileged over content.29 Genre in general utilises the positive associations of adbhuta rasa (wonderful/ awesome) as the dominant/enduring rasa in combination primarily with vīra, bhayānaka, bībhatsa and sometimes hāsya. Within the Sanskrit tradition, adbhuta was largely neglected as a primary rasa, perhaps because an overuse of the element of surprise was likely to alienate the audience and make the composition overtly unrealistic/non-verisimilar, which Abhinavagupta warned stridently against as a major dosa or impediment to the relishing of rasa.30 From Visvanatha’s 14th-century Sāhityadarpana, we find mention of his grandfather Narayana’s work on adbhuta rasa synthesis; i.e. that the end-result of all rasas is adbhuta. Unfortunately, that work is now lost and Visvanatha has only three lines about it.31 Beyond these, the few elaborations on the topic in the classical tradition are limited to its camatkāra aspect. 109

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

Marathi SF: ‘A Journey into Darkness’ Subodh Jawadekar’s short story ‘A Journey into Darkness’ (It Happened Tomorrow, 1993) is rather atypical of SF in that its governing rasa is not adbhuta, largely as its dominant novum remains unarticulated, relying on the reader to piece together scattered references to ‘Russia, America, war’, ‘bombs’, ‘dust haze’, ‘poisoned stream’, ‘cold outside’ etc.38 Further, none of the common tropes associated with the SF megatext, like technological innovations, futuristic/alternate storyworlds or extraterrestrial entities appear here. It is also atypical in narrative style, presented as a series of undelivered, one-sided correspondence from a young girl, Sanjyot, to her friend/classmate. While the epistolary style and embedding letters within longer narratives was 110

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common practice in early SF like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, such instances are relatively rare in SF today. The story opens with descriptions of a lush forest and sprawling colonial bungalow in the Andaman Islands, where Sanjyot and her parents have gone for a ‘holiday’ – evoking the positive associations of adbhuta rasa in the child’s wonder at an unfamiliar/exotic place and the opportunity to interact with strangers; here, a Bengali family (Kittu and his parents) cohabiting with them. The appearance of normalcy is underscored by the transitory state of smrti or remembrance/ nostalgia in such mundane matters as enquiring about school schedules and examination ranks. However, normalcy soon shatters when the radio stops broadcasting and they must relocate to the basement, drink stinking water from a well and subsist on a diet of curry and rice, shifting to another transitory state, dainya (misery, wretchedness). In the midst of this, Sanjyot’s mother informs her that she is pregnant, introducing two additional transitory states, cintā (worry) for the future and śaṅkā (apprehension) towards having a mentally disabled sibling. The stage is now set for bhayānaka and bībhatsa, in vivid descriptions of what the reader can only deduce is radiation poisoning – Kittu’s fever, rashes, stomachache, vomiting, bleeding and death, Sanjyot’s brother’s stillborn, deformed corpse and the Bengali lady’s hysterical suffering and death. Karuṇa rasa is then evoked in the fragmented grasp of the situation from the child’s perspective, in pleas like ‘Nobody talks to me . . . I feel terribly lonely’ or ‘Can you send me a telegram? If it is a telegram, the postman has to come even in the thick of the night to deliver it’.39 Finally, Sanjyot sneaks out of the basement into the (implied) nuclear winter and falls terminally ill. The transitory state of nirveda is then introduced by her confession that she knew what was happening all along and the dissociation from the recurring motif of the stinking well water: ‘So there is no getting away from [it], at least for a year. Of course, in my case it does not really matter either way’.40 While she holds out tenuous hope for the future of humankind, the realisation of her impending death finally brings the story to sānta rasa, here a peaceful acceptance of that fate: ‘I’m not at all scared of death. Coming to join you up there’.41 This story closely parallels ‘traditional’ emotive schemas/expectations in the configuration of supportive transitory states (vyabhicāri bhāvas) and rasas discussed earlier; it also illustrates how discordant rasas like bhayānaka, bībhatsa and karuṇa upend the positive associations of adbhuta with which the text opens. Even Sturgeon’s definition of SF favoured by the editor of this collection, ‘a story . . . with a 111

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

Bangla weird/horror: ‘Khagam’ Satyajit Ray’s much anthologised short story ‘Khagam’44 (Sandesh, 1968), in its emotive valences privileges adbhuta and bhayānaka to evoke a ‘marvelous flavour of sinister understatement . . . buttressed with prosaic detail’.45 The story opens with the first-person unnamed narrator having just completed dinner with a companion at a small forest bungalow, and being encouraged by the cook/caretaker to visit a migrant miracle-man, Imli-baba, who keeps a ferocious snake as his pet and feeds it milk every evening. The narrator’s companion, a chance acquaintance, is then introduced as Dhurjotibabu, a widelytravelled and well-read gentleman with a virulent ‘scientific mindset’ and noticeable peculiarities like green eyes and a hatred for snakes. Dhurjotibabu, on hearing about Imli-baba, proceeds to decimate widely-circulating superstitions and stories of irrational miracles performed by godmen. However, curiosity having gotten the better of them, the very next evening they visit Imli-baba. Imli-baba appears to be like any other sadhu-baba but something in his eyes makes the narrator curious and uncomfortable. He informs them that his pet snake Balkishen is ill and would not come to drink milk that day. Numerous popular narratives/superstitions of the ‘milk-drinking snake’ inform the framing of the story; that snakes do not drink milk is a credited scientific fact, but it goes unmentioned even by Dhurjotibabu (and likely functions as an estranging reference to western readers). This juxtaposition between the mundane details of a weekend trip and the 112

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points of surprise surrounding the mysterious Imli-baba structures the first third of the story; here, adbhuta rasa becomes prominent in contrast with realistic detail. Bhayānaka is then gradually introduced with its classic vibhāvas or causes like ‘hearing ghastly noises’ and ‘going to a forest’ when Dhurjotibabu insists on visiting the snake’s hole. In a show of perverse violence and cruelty, he throws clods of earth to annoy the snake, making it emerge, and crushes its skull with a stone. The description in this section moves between bhayānaka and bībhatsa, following closely Bharata’s paired formulation in the venomous kaal-keute (common krait) snake’s hiss and divided tongue, its annoyed but non-ferocious behaviour and later its crushed, bloody skull and extraordinarily long body, along with the many long snake-skins hanging in Imli-baba’s hovel. In quick succession, a classic vibhāva of adbhuta rasa is suggested in the trope of the ‘curse’.46 On viewing Balkishen’s murder, Imli-baba raises his arm and points his index finger at Dhurjotibabu, reminding the narrator of ‘[a] figure in a painting by Ravi Varma . . . It was the sage Durbasha cursing the hapless Shakuntala’.47 The words he speaks are however of malevolent understatement: ‘One Balkishen is gone; another will come to take his place. Balkishen is deathless’.48 Soon after returning from the snake’s hole, Dhurjotibabu starts exhibiting strange symptoms like losing his appetite, enquiring about the mythological sage Khagam,49 asking for milk and speaking with a hissing lisp. Diamond-shaped rashes blister his skin, his tongue shows a red line right down the middle and his body feels cold to the (narrator’s) touch, before he crawls under the bed. These details again foreground bhayānaka, this time in an anticipatory irrational fear, so that the narrator refuses to open his door when Dhurjotibabu knocks a second time. The next morning, Dhurjotibabu has disappeared and a neighbour’s dog has been killed by a poisonous bite. Thereafter, the story shifts again from bhayānaka to adbhuta with the intermediation of mundane detail. The narrator visits Imli-baba again to enquire and is pointed to a freshly sloughed-off skin marked all over with a pattern of diamonds . . . A snake was never that broad, and a snake didn’t have arms and legs sticking out of its body. It was actually the sloughed-off skin of a man.50 The tone of weird strangeness continues to the last lines, with Imlibaba calling out: ‘Balkishen . . . Balkishen . . . Balkishen. . . ’.51 While within traditional schema, bhayānaka would trump over adbhuta, the movement here is reversed as the narrator, with whom the 113

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

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

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

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

Conclusion The preceding analysis of these disparate examples from three different genres has, I hope, illustrated the usefulness of rasa in reading contemporary instances of non-mainstream/‘lowbrow’ bhasha fiction. Not only does rasa help identify the core emotive responses of these texts, but it also provides an analytical framework wherein their greater or lesser impact can be assessed. Identifying adbhuta as the dominant rasa in genres like detective stories, horror/weird fiction, SF and fantasy facilitates comparisons and family resemblances between them, helping us examine also other emotive states like bhayānaka and bībhatsa that accentuate or dampen the aesthetic response of wonder. In each of these texts, adbhuta is channeled differently, resulting in a different trajectory for the overall text; but it is this specific sense of wonder that keeps the reader engaged while also demarcating a (fuzzy) ‘horizon of expectations’ which circumscribes particular genres. Adbhuta rasa, in its specific sense of ‘surprise’, is however, bound to become lackluster on overuse, so the inclusion of other supportive or conflicting rasas helps the text retain repeated readability. In ‘A Journey into Darkness’, we see how the ‘negative’/‘discordant’ rasas overpower the ‘positive’/‘concordant’ valances of adbhuta, reflecting a reliance on classical Sanskrit emotive schema, while simultaneously challenging SF generic stereotypes and signalling new ways of reading dystopic fiction in particular. We also see how even small changes in combinatory elements (vibhāvas and anubhāvas specifically) can drastically alter the overall thrust of the text and its broad generic grouping: the supernatural, for instance, is evoked, channelled and explained/resolved differently in ‘Khagam’ and Rakta Golap, by small alterations in the combinatory schemas of adbhuta and bhayānaka. 116

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While genre can be prescriptive and formulaic, individual instances succeed, in my reading, precisely because they are able to affect small changes within expected combinatory schemas, so that while the destination may be known, the journey becomes all the more engaging.

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

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

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

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

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

Recent years have seen a growing interest, especially among scholars and academicians from the North-East of India (residing within the region and outside it), in literatures from the region. Apart from workshops, seminars and conferences organised by various institutes in Delhi and other parts of India, North-East India itself has seen a growing discourse on the region in its various universities and colleges.1 While writers from the region, like Robin S. Ngangom, Desmond Kharmawphlang, Mamang Dai, Temsula Ao and Indira Goswami (in English translation) have been made part of the English literature curriculum in certain universities outside the region from time to time; Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, set up a North-East India Studies Programme in 2006. Within the region, Gauhati University, Assam, set up the Gauhati University Institute of North-East India Studies in 2010, while the English Department of Cotton University, Assam, has been offering a paper on North-East Indian literature for the past few years. With such growth of interest in the region and its literatures, one can safely say that ‘North-East Literature’ or ‘Literatures from NorthEast India’ has come to be widely accepted and studied in India as a separate genre in itself. However, just as the diversity of the region defies the term ‘North-East India’ as a colonial construct, the above terms used for literatures of the region defy any uniform definition that could be used to describe the ‘genre’. Many writers like Temsula Ao, Harekrishna Deka, Mitra Phukan and others have expressed their reservations about the term, as it tends to homogenise an extremely 121

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heterogeneous cluster of people and their writings under one umbrella. The diverse people from the region have diverse histories and heritages and each writer writes from his or her own unique world.2 For lack of any other term, ‘Literatures from North-East India’ has been used to define the works of writers belonging to the eight states that are together called North-East India. If ‘Literatures from North-East India’ has to be defined as a genre, it would refer to writings from the region, especially in the English language, which mainly highlight major concerns of the region such as insurgency, the perceived or otherwise distance from the centre or ‘mainland India’3 and the resultant general sense of alienation and isolation, the various and diverse cultures and traditions as well as folklore of the region and concern for their erosion,4 and the scenic landscape of the region. Much of the major writings from the region that are categorised as ‘Literatures from the North-East’ are recent, and as mentioned earlier, in the English language. This is not to say that there has been no literary work produced in the region before this, or about the concerns mentioned above. Literatures in Assamese, Meitei (from Manipur) and Bengali (from Tripura) as well as works in Khasi and Bodo languages have a long history. English poetry had begun to be written in the North-East by the 1970s and ’80s. But then, the poets writing in English, namely Desmond Kharmawphlang, Robin S. Ngangom and Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih were recognised as the ‘Shillong poets’ primarily because they were all based in Shillong, the capital town of Meghalaya. Incidentally, despite writing in English, these early poets from the North-East have often been excluded from anthologies of Indian English poetry such as Reasons for Belonging (2002) edited by Ranjit Hoskote and 60 Indian Poets (2008) edited by Jeet Thayil or earlier anthologies such as A.K. Mehrotra’s The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (1992).5 Sumanyu Satpathy has pointed out this neglect in his ‘Locating Cultures: A Semi-Academic Essay on the English Poetry of the North-East’6 and says that the reason is because ‘it is not poetry but ethnic strife which comes readily to the mind of a ‘mainstream’ Indian whenever the North-East is mentioned’. Prasanta Das dwells on this exclusion elaborately in his essay, ‘Waiting to Be Taken Onboard: The Poetry of Robin Ngangom, Desmond Kharmawphlang, and Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih’7 and attributes it to the political and ‘regional’ nature of their works. According to Ananya S. Guha, ‘These poets brought a veritable revolution in the world of Indo-English poetry by breaking away from the mainstream tradition of city-based cultures and urbanised images which marked poets from Mumbai, or Calcutta’ (‘The Shillong Poets and the Poetry 122

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Society’).8 It comes as no surprise that the three Shillong poets were first championed by Jayanta Mahapatra, a poet who loved to be recognised as an Oriya poet first before being called an Indian English poet.9 In their ‘Editor’s Note’ in Anthology of Contemporary Poetry from the Northeast,10 Ngangom and Nongkynrih have highlighted the difference between North-East Indian English poets and the poets from the rest of India by saying, The writer from the Northeast differs from his counterpart in the mainland in a significant way. While it may not make him a better writer, living with the menace of the gun, he cannot merely indulge in verbal wizardry and woolly aesthetics but perforce master the art of witness.11 Much of the recent literature from the region (poetry and prose), despite catering to a wider and varied range of audience, are rather regional in character, and as some would like to call it, ‘ethnic’. It may be apt to point out that, it is probably and precisely because of the access to a wider and more diverse audience that the recent literatures in English from the North-East, are ‘ethnic’ and regional in character so as to provide a glimpse into the world, which, according to the general opinion of the people of North-East India, is highly under-represented. Unlike their counterparts from the rest of India, many of the NorthEastern writers in English do not write about the modern individual of the urban landscape dealing with the individual’s crises of identity, space or his struggles with his surroundings. Instead, they write from the spaces of the folk and the community where the characters are deeply rooted, or rather enmeshed, in their societies and their ups and downs. The worlds that we see in most English writings from the North-East are tribal worlds rooted in their traditional culture.12 Mamang Dai’s The Legends of Pensam13 and Temsula Ao’s These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone14 are two examples of works written from such spaces. In The Legends of Pensam, Mamang Dai portrays a world ‘where the life of a man can be measured in the span of a song’. Her ‘novel’, as she likes to call it, is a series of folk stories and the history of the Adi people of Arunachal Pradesh,15 linked into one narrative through the life of Hoxo, who had arrived in the community from the world outside and grew up to be an important member of the community. While Mamang Dai’s work provides a window to the rich folk culture of the Adis, Temsula Ao’s These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone 123

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is more an act of ‘bearing witness’ and finding newer methods and language to narrate the story of the new Nagaland shaped by years of political turmoil.16 In her epigraph to These Hills Called Home, Ao aptly dedicates the work to ‘those who know/ what we have done/ To ourselves’. Hers is a collection of short stories exploring questions of ethnicity and identity, concerning ordinary men and women and their lives shaped by politics. This paper will look at the way the abovementioned works use folklore, history and the politics of everyday reality in order to write a narrative of their respective communities. Analysing the manner in which communities and their lived lives are presented in these stories, this essay attempts to enquire the possibility of using the term ‘community fiction’ for works like The Legends of Pensam and These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone by Mamang Dai and Temsula Ao respectively. This is not to homogenise the two disparate works under one general category, but an attempt to see how the two, their differences notwithstanding, narrate the stories of their communities through their folklore, as well as through bearing witness to the consequences of the political upheavals of the region in the language of ordinary men and women. Much of the literary discourse of the North-East revolves around the political issues of insurgency, counter-insurgency, marginalisation and alienation from the centre, thus, creating a kind of a stereotype around the genre and making the term ‘Literatures from the NorthEast’ almost synonymous with ‘insurgency literature’ or ‘literature of violence’. While it is important for the writers of the region to highlight the above issues, and for the audience to understand the NorthEast in the light of its political turmoil, it is also pertinent to look at what lies beyond the political turmoil, struggle and the sense of alienation. One cannot forget the fact that the North-East is a region rich in folk culture and tradition, whose vibrancy only highlights the fact that there lies an entirely different world amidst, or beyond the popularly represented picture of the region. With the growing literary discourse on the North-East region, it is high time to look at some of the literary works of the region in a new light, by shifting the focus from the highly political and conflict-ridden content to the day-today lived realities of the characters where life, rooted in the folk and traditional cultures, persists. Of course, political conflict and folk culture in the North-East are not exclusive of each other, and works like Mamang Dai’s The Legends of Pensam, Aruni Kashyap’s A House With a Thousand Stories17 and Janice Pariat’s Boats on Land18 very well highlight this fact by interweaving the two elements in beautiful narratives. However, it may be possible to move away from enquiries 124

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that verge on the stereotypically political, towards the dynamics of community life and folk culture and look at some of the works as stories or narratives about the communities concerned and therefore use the term ‘community fiction’ to describe them. The term ‘community fiction’ is related to the term ‘narrative of community’ used by Sandra Zagarell in her essay titled ‘Narrative of Community: The Identification of a Genre’,19 where she identifies a category of story sequences or short story collections written mostly by women, but not entirely women-centred, and which belongs to a tradition focussing on society or community more than the self.20 Zagarell defines narrative of community as ‘a coherent response to the social, economic, cultural and demographic changes caused by industrialism, urbanisation, and the spread of capitalism’,21 and which is often inspired by ‘women’s culture’ of negotiations between different relations and spaces. Apart from the above-mentioned characteristics of narrative of community, community fiction also has the special quality of constantly moving in and out of myths, legends and other cultural folkloristic idiom that define a community. Both The Legends of Pensam and These Hills Called Home are short story sequences that record the respective authors’ responses to the social, cultural and political changes taking place around them. It must be pointed out right in the beginning, that, while this essay attempts to identify the two above-mentioned texts as community fictions, it does not exclude the possibility of these texts being categorised as, for example, ethnographic or folkloristic writing (in the case of The Legends), or political literature (in the case of These Hills). Mamang Dai’s collection of stories The Legends of Pensam are linked by the story of Hoxo, who is introduced to the readers in the first story as ‘the boy who fell from the sky’,22 and keeps appearing in the stories (which are actually episodes and not separate and disconnected stories) that follow till the last story ‘On Stage’ where, an old Hoxo waves his arm and asks the unnamed narrator to look at the beauty of the landscape that they call home. The stories or episodes in The Legends unravel several traditional beliefs and folklore, evoking the history and memory of the Adi community of Arunachal Pradesh, while using the lyrical softness of an Adi rhapsodist singing his song. In These Hills Called Home, it is the political history of postindependent Nagaland that links the individual stories into one great narrative of the people. Despite their individual nature, the stories appear to be episodic like the ones in The Legends, because, together, they represent the post-independent life of the Naga people. The narrative voice in the stories of These Hills may be attributed to one 125

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unnamed narrator who takes on the task of bearing witness and narrating to the world about ‘what we have done/ To ourselves’. While Mamang Dai unravels age-old Adi traditions and folklore in her text, Temsula Ao attempts to create new narratives with the repertoire available to her in the new Nagaland. Yet, the two texts are similar in being deeply rooted in the local and domestic lives of their respective communities. The folklore of a community is a storehouse of ancient and traditional wisdom, knowledge, beliefs and customs, and therefore provides one with a sense of rootedness. These stories remain in the collective memory of the community and are passed down from one generation to another to ensure that a connection and continuity is maintained with the past and social unity and cohesion is preserved. The Legends of Pensam, as told by the author to Ananya Guha in an interview, is based on stories she had heard from various people during her journeys to her ancestral village. Speaking about her aim in writing the text, Dai says that, ‘At the back of my mind I wanted to write about life in the bowl of the hills and record all its hidden histories, the beautiful landscape and way of life, even if only for myself’.23 The unnamed narrator in The Legends is both, an insider and an outsider, carefully mediating between her positions of a participant and an observer. The ‘Prologue’ tell us that the narrator is returning to her village after a period of absence and as the helicopter carrying her flies over the hills, streams and deep ravines she is filled with childhood memories of the home she had left. In the stories that follow, we see the narrator’s attempt to feel at home in her land, with all the knowledge and wisdom of her community, as she observes the people and their lives unfolding in front of her through stories, memories or her interactions with them. However, when her friend Mona ‘of ArabGreek extraction’ and a ‘proprietor of a glossy magazine, Diary of the World’, comes visiting, the narrator is transformed into an active participant of her community as she unravels her world to her observer friend.24 The world of The Legends of Pensam is one of myths, rituals, legends and beliefs central to the Adi way of life, and serves as a document of the rich oral tradition of the community. The lives portrayed in the stories have a timeless and eternal characteristic in which the politics of modernity and change are but momentary intrusions. Life moves on, no matter who comes and goes, and stories of men and women intertwined with the magical and fantastic are passed on from one generation to another for, as the epigraph to the first part of the book says, ‘We have long journeys in our blood’.25 Dai speaks about 126

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the ‘spirit of the place’ that had ‘this quality of absorbing visitors into a forgotten newness of things’.26 Despite the sense of timelessness, Mamang Dai does highlight the changes brought to her region by time. The narrator speaks about how the place gave one ‘a feeling of how things might have been, and a sudden revelation of why it was not so anymore’.27 It was not so anymore, because of the changes that came to the region. The author is quick to point out those changes, both old and new, brought by the colonisers, white priests as well as people from the rest of the country after Indian Independence. The arrivals and departures of these outsiders are not to be found in any recorded or written history, but in the stories of the community as part of its collective memory expressed through narratives and songs. The section titled ‘Songs of the Rhapsodist’, which includes stories like ‘Travel the Road’,28 ‘The Heart of the Insect’ and others, highlight the method of storytelling among many traditional societies. Among the Adis, the rhapsodist is the shaman who leads a group of dancers known as the ponung. In the above-mentioned section, the ponung dancers and the rhapsodist together, bring alive ‘myth and memory’ for the benefit of the narrator’s friends Mona and Jules, both observers as well as outsiders.29 The Legends of Pensam follows the lives of the Adis in the Duyang village from the early days of settlement to the post-Independence era, from the days of giant serpents and spirits to concrete buildings, pucca roads and English medium schools run by the missionaries. Such a text that narrates the changes coming into a region, contrary to claims by certain commentators who believe that The Legends is purely a folkloristic account of the Adi community, cannot of course be free of politics. The politics in Dai’s story are the politics of negotiation, of how the younger generation is constantly trying to negotiate between two different worlds, as they feel attracted towards the new and the modern life of city lights, sound of traffic and television sets, while being unable to sever their ties with their traditions and age-old practices that define their identity and belongingness. Unlike Mamang Dai’s Arunachal Pradesh, in Temsula Ao’s world, there is no rhapsodist to sing about the memories of the community. In a place like Nagaland, given its history of political turmoil and violence, it is not enough to recall ancient lore in order to feel the kind of rootedness to one’s soil seen in Mamang Dai’s narrator. The long struggle with powerful outside forces and for political independence, the ensuing conflict, the resultant permanent scars on land and man has probably rendered the ancient lore of Naga tribal warfare and glory redundant. It is pertinent that one must weave the act of 127

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bearing witness into the community’s narrative or folklore. Probably, it is with this aim that Temsula Ao follows the narratives of the new categories of people and class rising out of the ashes of the secessionist movements. The protagonists of her narratives in These Hills Called Home are not the legendary ancient head hunters and valiant tribal heroes. Rather, they are the young men who are drawn into the jungle with dreams of freedom, the informers and middlemen catering to the requirements of both the Indian Army and the underground militant groups, the contractors supplying rations to the Indian Army and sometimes the underground rebels, and the new breed of leaders and politicians. Her stories are about old men who carry a heavy burden in their hearts, pregnant with memories of atrocities faced and committed by them. They are also about old women hearing in the air on certain nights the last songs sung by girls as they were raped and burnt alive by agencies of the state and sometimes by militants of a rival faction. They wish they could tell folktales of ancient tribal glory to their grandsons sitting by the family hearth. But they cannot, for there seems to be a great disconnect between the era before the beginning of the Naga movement30 and the era after it. This disconnect with the traditional Naga way of life can be, in fact, traced even beyond the beginning of the movement, to the advent of the British colonisers and Christianity. The introduction of Christianity, followed by English education among the Naga tribes brought about tremendous changes in the Naga way of life and belief systems, resulting in a drastic shift in the socio-cultural system. The very nature of Naga folklore had been altered much before the beginning of the movement that gave rise to new ways of life and altered narratives. If the Naga men and women of the new circumstances have to pass down the memory of the community and traditional wisdom to their progeny, it will have to be stories of ambushes; burnt down villages; of young girls and women raped, mutilated and murdered; of men being maimed for life or killed; and of atrocities of the state as well as the underground revolutionaries. Set in the initial turbulent decades of the Naga insurgency, the stories in Temsula Ao’s These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone are inextricably fraught with the historicity of the Naga separatist question and the strategies of domination used by the state to suppress the uprising. Yet, despite the political crisis being the backdrop of the stories, what Ao attempts to capture is the voices and lives of the ordinary Naga men and women who are trapped and tossed around by the forces of the state and the Naga insurgency groups. As Ao shows us, no one in the Naga Hills, no matter how ordinary an individual is, is left untouched by the conflict. In ‘The Curfew Man’, 128

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Ao describes how ordinary men are caught between the state and the insurgent outfits. While the state looks at the insurgents as rebels fighting against the legitimate state, the insurgents look at the state agencies as illegal occupants of the region. ‘Young people spoke of the exploits of their peers in encounters with government forces and were eager to join the new band of patriotic warriors to liberate their homeland from “foreign rule” ’.31 Satemba is caught between these two forces as he is torn between his enforced duty of a spy for the state and his love for his Naga brothers who were fighting for the cause of freedom: ‘The real trouble was in his heart. For the first time in two and half years, he was beginning to question himself and his so-called “job” ’.32 Satemba couldn’t sustain his ‘job’. One night, on his way to the Sub Divisional Officer’s (S.D.O.) house with a piece of crucial information, he is accosted by a masked man in the dark who warns him, ‘Go back home curfew man, and if you value your life, never again carry tales’.33 Satemba reaches home in the early hours of the morning, his other good knee smashed and the crucial information not given to the S.D.O. His wife Jemtila nurses his wound, but feels extremely lighthearted now that Satemba will be of no use to the officer and won’t be betraying his Naga brethren anymore. But the narrator is quick to observe that ‘A new curfew man would be in place by evening and the man with two smashed knee-caps had already become history’.34 However, not everyone in the Naga Hills is seen torn between the two forces of state and militants like Satemba. While a man like Satemba had a troubled conscience because of what he is forced to do, there were yet others like Nungsang, the protagonist of ‘A New Chapter’, who managed to adapt and change his skin according to the demands of the times. The story alludes to the first assembly election held in Nagaland in the 1960s.The much-coveted assembly election did not just imply that Nagaland was to be an integral part of India, but more significantly, it brought Naga identity into the mainstream political scenario of the country. The narrator says, It was the mid-sixties in Nagaland and an uneasy surface calm prevailed. People were beginning to take stock of what had so suddenly overturned their quiet lives and changed every single man or woman in the land forever. Slowly and painfully Nagas were beginning to look at themselves through new prisms, some self-created and some thrust upon them. Those who survived learnt to adapt to the new trends and new life styles. Old loyalties became suspect as new players emerged and forged makeshift alliances in unfamiliar political spaces.35 129

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Nungsang, out to forge a new identity for himself in the changed socio-political space, moves from becoming a contractor supplying food and other items for the army to a local member of the legislative assembly. While successfully forging a new identity for himself, Nungsang forgets his cousin Merenla, who had begun to cultivate pumpkins after entering into an agreement with him. After his victory in the election, Nungsang had no use for the pumpkins, and Merenla did not know what to do with the large produce of pumpkins rotting away in her fields and house. She goes through an identity crisis, as her fellow villagers had begun to call her ‘Pumpkin Merenla’, replacing her old identity with a new one. This new identity had also shown her a promise of prosperity by entering into the pumpkin business. But ‘far greater than the financial loss was the ‘loss of face’ suffered by the widow in her community because of her cousin’s heartlessness and it was this which hurt her the most’.36 In order to regain her lost identity, she would have to go through a ceremony of cleansing by throwing away all the pumpkins in her house, which is symbolic of discarding the new identity that had been imposed upon her. Merenla’s or Nungsang’s identity crises are not the only kind seen in These Hills. In the story ‘Soaba’, Ao presents to her readers another kind of crisis stemming from the state’s grouping system.37 The word grouping had a much more sinister implication; it meant that whole villages would be dislodged from their ancestral sites and herded into new ones, making it more convenient for the security forces to guard them day and night.38 The result of such dislocation is the birth of people like Soaba who wander around the town, homeless and with no memory of where he belonged. The townspeople called him Soaba, meaning ‘idiot’ and he acclimatised himself to that identity, the only one available to him in his state of dislocation. As the likes of Soaba begin to put on the identity made available to them by the state, ‘a new vocabulary also began to creep into everyday language of the people. Words like ‘convoy’, ‘grouping’, ‘curfew’ and ‘situation’ began to acquire sinister dimensions as a result of the conflict taking place between the government and underground armies’.39 In such a world of redefined discourses, new vocabulary with sinister implications creeping into everyday language and acclimatised identities, it is imperative that new narratives are born, albeit in the told form of storytelling. In The Legends, we see a strong negotiation going on between spaces, of the kind which Elaine Showalter identifies as part of ‘women’s 130

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culture’.40 This kind of negotiation between spaces can be seen in the structure of The Legends of Pensam, which is styled as a collection of short stories but called a novel by the author, and therefore, lying in a place between the two genres. Apart from its genre there are several aspects within the book that show negotiations between spheres, and lie in such an ‘in-between place’. This is only apt; for the word ‘pensam’ in Adi language means an ‘in-between place’, suggesting the middle ground. The text not only highlights the liminal space that the narrator occupies vis-à-vis her community, but also the entire community that is caught in the transitional phase between progress and underdevelopment, between modernity and a traditional way of life, between the timeless continuity of tradition and a new uncertain future of modernity and progress. Tilottoma Misra, in her introduction to The Oxford Anthology of Writings from the North-East India: Poetry and Essays, says Mamang Dai’s The Legends of Pensam represents the predicaments of the sensitive young minds in contemporary Arunachal Pradesh, who too are at crossroads and find it difficult to come to terms with the inevitable break with the enchantment of the past and to re-model their lives according to the demands of the changing times.41 In the story titled ‘The Words of Women’, the narrator reveals her uneasy relation with her village and its ways when she lived there for a while after her mother’s death. As she participates in the day-to-day ordinary and routine chores of the Adi women of her village, she feels a certain sense of disconnect resulting from her years of absence. She ‘chafed under the weight of daily routine. I decided it was a mistake to cling on to my past in a village I had outgrown years ago. I decided I should be practical; I should leave’.42 But standing on the threshold of her ancestral village, desirous of leaving it for the outside world, she also feels the pull from within; for, she soon qualifies, that ‘the pull of old stones would not ease’.43 It is probably her concern about the dilemma of being caught in the crossroads of two worlds that makes the narrator say about Nenem, the girl who fell in love with Captain David Ferguson, in the chapter titled ‘River Woman’, that after knowing Ferguson, Nenem goes through an incredible desire for change. ‘It threw her into a panic and she questioned herself desperately . . . Why the longing to change everything, from the way she lived to the words she spoke to the thoughts that bound her?’44 She was ready to cross the threshold of her home and walk out into the open world where women like Arsi (from the ‘The Words of Women’) would like 131

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to be born in the next birth, and where she would have the liberty to ‘sing, fly’, ‘live properly’ and ‘speak English’.45 Nenem was courageous enough to speak to a miglun (a foreigner), fall in love with him, and give herself up to him. The desire for change in her was so strong that she could easily have gone away with her lover. But when the time came, like the pull felt by the narrator, Nenem too might have felt the pull of her old life, her village and her community. She remained in her village, married a man from her community, and lived with the memory of the man she had given herself up to. With India’s independence came newer developments to the region. The Duyang cluster of villages that appeared ‘mysterious and remote’ to the world till the coming of the road began to experience incidents like the theft of grain and precious beads and jewellery, that had never happened in living memory of the community. ‘The village had moved to its own quiet rhythm for centuries, with old certainties and beliefs, but the road was changing all that’.46 ‘The Road’ narrates the story of development and construction of a road, running through the mountains like a ‘red gash’ which had no use for the locals. They hardly took the road. But ‘progress’ was given to them nevertheless. Dai hints at how the road and its construction brought outsiders to the region and unheard-of incidents took place. ‘After the theft in the granary buildings, it was evident to Isaam that her fears were not unfounded. The road was bad news’.47 With the arrival of the road and promise of electricity, doubt and disgruntlement creep in among the young men of the community. They see their elders ‘fading’ away ‘sipping rice beer and wasting away’.48 ‘They had surrendered ancestral lands to the government and now the road and the things that came with it seemed to be strangling them and threatening to steal their identity like a thief creeping into their villages and fields’.49 While the elders waited for progress and development, a stubborn pride wrapped around the young men like a dark cloak that kept them screened from the rest of the world. They did not welcome strangers. They did not want to join hands with the government . . . We are not seekers of a new identity. Leave us alone.50 These are the thoughts of the Adi youth like Larik in ‘The Road’, who are filled with suspicion and doubt about the Indian state’s development projects in the region,51 while at the same time hoping for positive changes. This is the space from which Dai is writing her community’s narrative. It is a middle ground between adaptation and 132

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rejection, of forgetting and remembering, of desire for newness and love for the ancient. Trapped in this liminal space or ‘pensam’, the Adi people in Dai’s narrative move one step ahead and two steps backward, living their lives amidst the impenetrable mountains. There seems to be no such middle space for the Nagas who inhabit These Hills Called Home. From a precolonial existence of headhunting and tribal warfare, the Nagas are hurled first into the world of Christianity and ‘civilisation’ and a second time into a world where they are forced to deal with questions of identity, ethnicity and liberty, as well as the resultant conflict and its aftermath. For the Nagas, India’s independence in 1947 meant a shift from being reluctant colonial subjects of the British to reluctant postcolonial Indian subjects. Temsula Ao highlights this predicament of the Nagas in one of her poems titled ‘Blood of Others’ by talking about the ‘advent of the WORD’ when ‘strange intruders/Began scripting a new history’ in the minds of the Nagas. Towards the concluding stanzas, she refers to the ‘new breed of cultural heroes’ who ‘(a)rticulate a different discourse/And re-designate new enemies’. The poem ends with: In the agony of the re-birth Our hills and valleys reverberate With death-dealing shrieks of unfamiliar arms As the throw-back generation resurrects ‘Blood of Others’52 These Hills Called Home is about this very resurrection of the ‘throw-back generation’ and the outcome of their conflict with the ‘new enemy’. Just as the youth in Dai’s narrative are reluctant to be a part of the development project of the Indian state, similarly, the Naga youth were reluctant to be part of the new postcolonial India. The outcome is an incredibly long battle of armed rebellion against the Indian state. This rebellion is, unlike the perception of government machinery, not led by a few westernised Christian Nagas, but is ‘drawn from the traditional village councils’.53 This is a battle that has carved out the peculiar trajectory of Naga nationalism, touching each and every Naga life and changing the very hills that the Nagas call home. Community fiction then is built around the modes and procedures by which a community survives, and in doing so, moves seamlessly in and out of folkloristic idiom and repertoire. Both Mamang Dai and Temsula Ao tend to look into the interdependence and survival of their respective communities amidst a turbulent and capricious 133

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Part III GENRES IN THE 21ST CENTURY

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

This chapter focuses on fiction in English, written within and published from India since 2000, in the genre of ‘mythology-inspired fiction.’ In doing so it discusses the socioeconomic context out of which this continually expanding body of fiction has emerged. I am interested in what we might term as ‘genre’ fiction, its parameters and audiences, and thus what such a term means within the context of post-millennial India. After examining how mythology-inspired fiction is defined within the Indian marketplace, we look at aspects of three mythology-inspired novels from India: Pradyumna: Son of Krishna by Usha Narayanan,1 Scion of Ikshvaku by Amish Tripathi,2 and The Missing Queen by Samhita Arni.3 In examining the key motifs of these novels, I highlight how science, itihasa,4 and Hinduism underpin this particular genre through which narratives of ‘Indianness’ are crafted. In order to think further about mythology-inspired fiction in English as genre fiction in its own right, I consider Indian and non-Indian reader reception of these novels and in doing so, I concentrate on three core themes (science, itihasa, and Hinduism). Anchoring this enquiry in the spirit of Stuart Hall’s (1980) ‘Encoding/decoding’ model,5 I am interested in how a reader’s cultural background (broadly defined) might play a role in categorising and ‘reading’ mythology-inspired fiction in English from India. As a reader of fiction in English, accessing mythology-inspired fiction in English linguistically is reasonably straightforward – names of places, people, and specific cultural terms 141

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

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

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various outlets, including ‘bookstores’ (typically located in malls), airports (domestic and international), train stations, and through digital platforms such as Flipkart, Infibeam, and Amazon India. As I outline in detail in Genre Fiction of New India,10 we might import Westernoriented genre terms to understand and categorise ideas of ‘postmillennial Indian genre fiction in English’ but in doing so we are at risk of importing Western ideas of genre fiction only to impose them on the fiction that is being produced domestically. Hence, I refer to the term ‘mythology-inspired’ (or ‘mythology’) fiction as per the Indian market’s established use. It was during the mid-2000s that mythology-inspired fiction in English began to appear.11 Ashwin Sanghi (The Rozabal Line)12 Amish Tripathi (The Immortals of Meluha)13 and Ashok Banker (Slayer of Kamsa)14 are generally recognised as the authors who first published in this genre. Since then there has been a surge of mythology-inspired fiction in English hitting the bookshelves, all of which draws predominantly on narrative aspects and the protagonists of the Indian epics, namely the Mahabharata and the Ramayana as well as the Puranas and Indian folk traditions. These retellings and re-imaginings (the distinction is made below) have emerged not only from a fiscally empowered, post-millennial India but also from an India that is increasingly looking inward at ideas of Indianness while also looking outward at the global and the transnational. For academic and novelist Vamsee Juluri, the post-millennial moment is framing the production of mythology-inspired novels when he writes: They mark the beginning of a new journey in the modern Hindu imagination. They are rooted in the present, in the experiences of a new generation responding in the form of creativity and entertainment to very real, global, national, postcolonial concerns.15 Indian genre fiction in English might be described as popular fiction or according to academic Suman Gupta, as ‘commercial fiction.’ He writes: What is produced and consumed as Indian commercial fiction in English is generally regarded as a matter of internal interest. It is consumed primarily within India, seen to display a kind of ‘Indianness’ that Indians appreciate, and is not meant to be taken ‘seriously’ or regarded as ‘literary’.

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He goes on to say that [L]iterary fiction is the respectable public face of Indian literature in English abroad and at home, while commercial fiction is the gossipy café of Indian writing in English at home.16 Commercial or popular fiction has often been defined by thinking of what it is not in comparison with literary fiction. Gupta, however, reminds us that ‘[D]espite numerous efforts to describe these terms according to content – as if texts have immanent qualities of commercialness and literariness – both are plausibly understood as market-led categories.’17 Rather than defining popular fiction against the tenets of literary fiction, it is more helpful for our discussion here, I suggest, to consider the reach of commercial or popular fiction in terms of sales and distribution. The sales performance of mythology-inspired fiction in post-millennial India is significant through the advent of new cultures of consumerism and ‘leisure’ spending; therefore ‘sales performance’ offers a further avenue for the defining of this body of new writing. Joshi writes: ‘The previous ‘Hindu’ print run of 500 copies has now been replaced by 30,000 to 1 million-plus first printings for writers such as Chetan Bhagat and Anuja Chauhan.’18 Print runs testify to the ‘popularity’ of genre fiction in India and are often boosted by the hype, marketing, book trailers, and launches that accompany the release of the books.19 Mythology-inspired fiction in English has proven explosive in terms of sales and reception, with some books appearing with backing from popular film stars, music composers, and inventive marketing strategies. Amish Tripathi’s ‘Shiva Trilogy’ is an example of such and is reported to have been one of the fastest-selling book series in the history of Indian publishing. Genre fiction might be better understood in terms of its sales figures and distribution circuits, but we might also think about genre fiction in terms of its non-literariness following Gupta,20 and additionally for our interests here, its interface with the contemporary moment. Notwithstanding the anchoring of Scott McCracken’s critique in Westernorientated enquiry, I suggest it is helpful to consider McCracken’s insights into the interface between popular narratives and ‘now-time’ for our interests in the proliferation of Indian mythology-inspired fiction in English in the post-millennial moment. McCracken writes: Popular narratives play a vital role in mediating social change, informing their audience of new currents and allowing the 144

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reader to insert him or herself into new scenarios in a way that can be related to her or his own experience. Its engagement in the present, in now-time, means that the political nature of popular fiction is never in doubt.21 As India has undergone significant economic and social change since 2000, the idea of India, notions of Indianness, and India’s own philosophies of modernity have emerged as urgent and contentious topics of debate. McCracken suggests that popular fiction ‘can supply us with the narratives we need to resituate ourselves in relation to the world.’22 Many of the storylines of post-millennial Indian mythologyinspired fiction in English revise ideas of India and Indianness through narratives of both globalisation and older, more ancient eras of Indian civilisation, something I explore in the discussion of Tripathi’s and Arni’s novels below. McCracken suggests that popular fiction can offer a space for such ‘remaking’ to take place, stating that ‘[T]he reader of popular fiction is actively engaged in the remaking of him or herself and this act of remaking has a utopian potential.’23 The terms ‘commercial’ and ‘popular’ fiction are therefore employed here with the following understandings: ‘commercial’ is understood as pertaining to large print runs of paperback books with large sales and complementary marketing campaigns; ‘popular’ fiction is understood to mean fiction that is largely consumed by blue- and grey-collar workers, interfacing with the contemporary moment and ‘commercial’ in terms of its sales figures.

Defining Indian ‘mythology-inspired’ fiction The growing body of contemporary commercial fiction within India – whether crime fiction, crick lit or chick lit in English, asserts anew the identity of the Indian novel in English. It does this by a re-orientation of sorts, a move away from the ‘traditional’ postcolonial Indian novel in English and subsequently, a re-anchoring of the novel in an Indian readership (not a predominantly non-Indian one as has often been the case with postcolonial Indian fiction in English to date). Moreover, the mythology-inspired novel in English (and its subsequent translations into other Indian languages) has fostered an enhanced appeal to the domestic, mass market, and consequently, a reliance on the Indian or regional markets over more global ones.24 Mythology-inspired fiction in English is specifically yet variously anchored in the Hindu Indian epics of the Mahabharata or the Ramayana (as well as drawing on aspects of the Puranas and some folk traditions, although this is less 145

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compared with how the epics inspire the narratives in general). It is not, however, a homogeneous body of fiction; rather, I suggest, it differs through a set of modes of telling. These modes of telling include different kinds of historical or cultural contextualising, varied linguistic expressions, and the employment of the speculative, detective/crime thriller subgenres as examples. I propose that the body of post-millennial, mythology-inspired fiction in English to date is characterised by four distinct approaches of telling, which, in turn, find themselves on a spectrum of sorts; at one end lies a sentiment of ‘retelling’ while at the other end lies a sentiment of ‘re-imagining.’ These four approaches might be described thus: (1) Narratives that are faithful in their retelling of the ‘original’25 epic, with little or no author embellishment of plot or characterisation and minimal (or no) change of story arc. Examples include Narayanan’s Pradyumna: Son of Krishna. (2) Narratives that are recognisable by the ‘original’ epic inspiration, but where plot, characterisation, and story arc are developed anew by the author. Examples include Tripathi’s ‘Shiva Trilogy’ and his ‘Ram Chandra’ series. (3) Narratives that are recognisable by the ‘original’ epic inspiration usually through their characters and sometimes by the plot or story arc (or an aspect of it); they re-imagine the original epic (inspiration) often through the employment of contemporary subgenres or settings/locations. Examples include Pervin Saket’s Urmila and Samhita Arni’s The Missing Queen. (4) Narratives that take only a character or an aspect of plot from the epics through which they considerably develop the story away from the ‘original’ epic inspiration, moving further into the realm of re-imagining the epic (inspiration). These narratives usually employ contemporary subgenres such as detective/crime fiction or speculative fiction and devices such as the conspiratorial. Examples include the novels of Ashwin Sanghi, Shatrujeet Nath’s The Guardians of the Halahala, and Doyle’s The Mahabharata Secret. Through these four approaches of telling, various aspects of Indianness are expressed, challenged, and revised, but as ‘Indian’ as these novels are in terms of their content and expression, they are not exempt from global readings, especially as the publishers open these novels up to more global distribution opportunities. The reader reception to these novels – Indian and non-Indian – varies substantially. The discussion 146

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of certain motifs found in the three mythology-inspired novels below demonstrate how such varied and nuanced reader receptions are produced through the themes underpinning these novels, namely science, itihasa, and Hinduism. Focusing on the core themes of science, itihasa, and Hinduism, I consider how reader receptions to such motifs in the fiction invariably create very different reader receptions. This discussion in turn helps us consider what we might mean by a ‘global’ reader of postmillennial Indian genre fiction, a point I return to in the concluding section of this chapter. Usha Narayanan’s Pradyumna: Son of Krishna charts the life of Pradyumna, a son born to Lord Krishna and Rukmini. The novel is significantly faithful in the retelling of the life of Pradyumna, detailing his genealogy, his early years, and his own marriages and children. The style of the novel invokes an atmosphere of the epic through its depiction of many distinct characters, through its description of heroic battles, and thus through the struggle of good (dharma) over evil. The inclusion of battles of such epic proportions means the narrative might easily be read as fantastical. The use of celestial weapons in particular creates a sense of apocalyptic doom. These weapons range from mindaltering ones to more traditional weaponry of swords and arrows that take on fantastical capabilities. Describing these extraordinary weapons, Narayanan writes: Sandilya employed the Twastarastra that enveloped the asura army in delusions, causing them to attack one another; thousands died before Kaalasura could counter with his own sorcery. He invoked the Parvataastra that made mountains rise from the earth and rain down on the enemies, crushing them like ants under an elephant’s foot.26 And she writes of Pradyumna: It was now or never. Pradyumna invoked the divine parasu. It flew into his hand, its head glinting like a ferocious planet, its radiance swamping the occult forces. The young warrior let the axe fly towards the asura.27 Narayanan’s faithfulness in recounting the epic battles of the ancient Indian texts does not exclude readers with little or no knowledge of the texts, as the novel can easily be read outside of its dharmic context. Narayanan contextualises the story through careful paraphrasing or 147

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by offering direct translations of some of the more culturally specific terms such as the names of the various weapons (an example of this is given above). It thus transpires that the naming of the weapons, as with the naming of the protagonists, remains of little consequence to a reader with little or no knowledge of the original texts. Narayanan’s inclusion and foregrounding of other aspects of the Puranas (and of the epic texts) follow the same principle; thus her novel liberally includes: vimana and other ‘vehicles’ with the ability to fly,28 shapeshifters,29 and magical arts or occult skills.30 These facets of the novel all appear as fantastical tropes to the reader who has no (or little) knowledge of the original texts of inspiration. Such a position of reader reception is not only applicable to non-Indian readers, of course. It is important to remember that not all Indian readers – or those well-read in the Indian epics and Puranas – would read Narayanan’s novel as a retelling of Pradyumna’s life and consequently would not consider the story as ‘truth.’ There is a broad spectrum of responses to mythology-inspired fiction and such a spectrum exists in the responses to the more traditional ‘retellings’ as much as it does in the more liberal ‘re-imaginings’ of the Indian epics (see above for discussion on these different ‘types’ of mythology-inspired fiction). Narayanan’s novel differs greatly from those by Tripathi or Sanghi, and is different again from Arni’s reimagining of the story of Ram and Sita (see below), and this difference is manifest through the more fantastical motifs and tropes of her work. In the example below, the propensity for fantastical readings is demonstrated as occult magic summoned by the demon, to be countered by Lord Krishna. The monster seized the princesses and the offerings and vanished before the king’s troops could be summoned. The soldiers chased after them but could not keep up with the demon, who could turn invisible and fly at will. The king choked with fear and prayed to the Dark One for succour. ‘Go now, my son, to aid the king,’ Krishna said to his trusted Pradyumna. The prince used his sorcery to trace the princesses and whisked them away from the asura, creating lookalikes with his maya to take their place.31 For the reader who is acquainted with the fantasy genre, the tropes of ‘monster,’ ‘invisibility,’ ‘ability to fly,’ ‘a Dark One (or Lord),’ ‘sorcery,’ and the creation of ‘lookalikes’ are familiar ones. Narayanan writes in a way that keeps the original protagonists and events at the 148

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heart of the narrative, departing very little from the original text of inspiration; yet, in the foregrounding of the more speculative aspects of the text, by which I mean ‘speculative aspects’ in a Western sense of a fantasy/sci-fi/weird megatext, the opportunity for a wealth of reader response is created. Another example from Pradyumna: Son of Krishna exemplifies this: In another corner of the universe, the mighty asura Vajranabha was performing severe penances on Mount Sumeru to propitiate Brahma. The golden Sumeru was 84,000 yojanas tall and was the sacred centre of a gigantic complex of seas and mountains. A huge ocean formed a moat around the square base of Sumeru, and seven mountains and seven seas in turn encircled it. Beyond these was the outer sea, on which the continents formed small islands.32 Unlike some mythology-inspired fiction that operates on a more liberal re-imagining of the epics, I suggest that Narayanan’s work allows for a broad reader reception and one that permits (Western) speculative readings. Narayanan’s novel (potentially) engages a wide readership, indeed, a global one, despite the novel’s acute cultural anchoring in Indian history and Hinduism. Scion of Ikshvaku by Amish Tripathi starts from the birth of Lord Ram, and, charting his training with Guru Vishwamitra, explores his relationship with his brother Lakshman, how Ram evolves as a leader, and how he comes to meet Sita and the people of Mithila. The novel also presents the socio-political backdrop of Ayodhya and Lanka and, from this presentation, the narrative develops a backstory to how Ram came to know the Lankans and his relationship with Raavan. This novel is Book One in the ‘Ram Chandra Series’ by Tripathi and it ends with the abduction of Sita as per the Ramayana. Unlike Narayanan’s novel, where fantastical beasts, epic battles, and extraordinary abilities are aplenty, Tripathi’s novel works more keenly on the reimagining of the characters of Ram, Lakshman, and Sita (the story arc remains in keeping with the original). Tripathi continues in the Ramayana tradition to depict Lakshman as the brave younger brother of Ram and includes several incidents in the narrative where Lakshman saves Ram’s life; however, he gives Lakshman a lisp and develops him as an adviser to Ram, counseling him against his unconditional trust of people. As for Ram, Tripathi develops the idea of him as a leader, questions his blind trust in the people he does not know, and foregrounds the challenges of leading a nation in times of war. In the 149

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case of Sita, Tripathi draws on her famed archery skills, portraying her as a strong warrior princess, which departs from some of the traditional depictions of Sita that subdue that aspect of her character. By all accounts, Tripathi’s Sita is a strong woman, a leader in her own right, and the first time that Ram meets Sita, he witnesses her fight and is astonished at her ability and skills. Although Tripathi focuses on the re-imagination of the Ramayana characters in his novel, there are several moments in the storyline where extraordinary science plays out. Following Raavan’s attack on Sita’s homeland of Mithila, it is decided that a celestial weapon, a daivi astra, is to be used on Raavan and his forces since they are preparing to attack the city once again. We learn that Guru Vishwamitra has ‘some important material that was mined at [my] ashram by the Ganga.’33 It is from this mysterious ‘material,’ used in what Vishwamitra calls ‘science experiments,’34 that a specific celestial weapon has been crafted: the Asuraastra. Ram is immediately concerned at the prospect of deploying this weapon and asks Vishwamitra: ‘Isn’t that a biological weapon?’35 Vishwamitra tries to convince Ram to use the weapon, saying, ‘it is not a weapon of mass destruction, just mass incapacitation.’36 The ethical dilemma is made more difficult for Ram when he learns how Sita is fiercely opposed to the use of such a weapon. Here Tripathi weaves in a storyline of his own. Tripathi writes that in deploying the Asuraastra, Ram must enter into 14 years of self-imposed exile since ‘Lord Rudra, the previous Mahadev who was the Destroyer of Evil’37 banned the unauthorised use of daivi astra many centuries ago. Traditionally in the Ramayana, the reason for Ram’s exile is Kaikeyi’s request of King Dashrath (Ram’s father) that Ram be banished to the forest, putting her own son, Bharat, on the throne instead. Tripathi, however, layers the narrative with a new storyline; here Ram instigates the exile, telling his father that he must pay penance for deploying the celestial weapon that stunned Raavan’s forces. The addition of a new storyline challenges ideas of itihasa whereby established narratives of the Ramayana are usurped in order to accommodate contemporary ideas of ‘weaponry’ (in this case) and leadership decision-making. For readers with little or no knowledge of the Ramayana, this embellishment on the traditional tale would go unnoticed. A more lasting impression might be the combining of ideas of science and religion in such an ancient epoch – fantastical by these very motifs, if nothing else. The narrative structure attempts to culturally translate aspects of life in ancient India so that a reader’s understanding of the storyline is not compromised. He often includes translations of key terms and 150

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ideas through short paraphrasing or contextualisation, such as the following: ‘She’ll make a great bhabhi!’ Ram frowned, refusing to accept his brother’s unbridled enthusiasm in referring to the princess as his sister-in-law.38 * * * Let me get to the point straight away. The king of Mithila has organised a swayamvar for his eldest daughter, Sita. A swayamvar was an ancient tradition in India. The father of the bride organised a gathering of prospective bridegrooms, from whom his daughter was free to either select her husband or mandate a competition.39 * * *  . . . turned him into not just a Brahmin, but a rishi. A rishi was the highest status, below Godhood, that any person could achieve.40 There are also instances in the novel that resonate with current events and debates in Indian society. Tripathi raises questions around religion and tolerance,41 about caste,42 the ethics of biological weapons,43 urban planning,44 marriage,45 leadership and reform,46 and, most sensitive of all, he recounts the gang rape of Roshni, Ram’s rakhi sister. In a major departure from established Ramayana narratives, the description of the scene wherein Roshni’s body is found is gruesome, and the rape contains some of the hallmark characteristics of the Nirbhaya case (otherwise known as the Delhi gang rape of 2012). Tripathi writes how Roshni had been gang-raped and ‘had been beaten with a blunt object all over her body, probably a stick, a sadistic ritual.’47 He goes on to say how, out of the three rapists, the perpetrator, Dhenuka, ‘had been exempted from maximum punishment on a legal technicality: he was underage,’48 a frustrating outcome for Ram ‘the Law Giver’49 as he could not avenge Roshni’s death. Readers of this scene, Indian or otherwise, will make easy connections with current debates on gender violence and the infamous Nirbhaya case that received significant global media coverage. Tripathi’s decision to highlight such contemporary debate against a backdrop of ancient India underscores his commitment to re-imagining the epics in more nuanced ways. Although Tripathi’s Ram Chandra series to date remains fairly 151

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traditional in its story arc, his exploration of characters and situations offers new ways of reading both the epic texts and the Puranas, as well as the post-millennial moment. The Missing Queen by Samhita Arni is as anchored in the reimagining of the Ramayana as Narayanan’s Pradyumna: Son of Krishna is anchored in the retelling of Lord Krishna and his son’s lives. Beginning in the Ramayana where Sita has already been captured by Raavan, Arni questions where the ‘missing queen’ could be: what has happened to her, and what is the ‘truth’ around her abduction? The story is told by a journalist who is keen to uncover the truth but who struggles with censorship (on many levels), as a result of which her life is endangered at several points in the story. The novel is written in a speculative style, not least because of the dystopian society in which it is set. It is this particular setting that I suggest propels the novel into the debates of ‘truth-telling’ and into the realm of the ‘grand narrative’ and, thus, itihasa. The novel is clearly anchored in the story of the Ramayana, with the characters of Lord Ram, Sita, Lakshman, Hanuman, Kaikeyi, Raavan, Urmila, and others being familiar names, at least to those readers for whom the Ramayana is a cultural cornerstone; however, the epoch in which Arni crafts The Missing Queen is both familiar while being concurrently strange. Set in an undisclosed era, it feels near-future or somewhat speculative and through indirect references to New India, the post-millennium television and satellite boom, its relentless news reporting and its surging economy, Arni crafts a recognisable India whilst rendering it strange through motifs of utopia and fantasy worlds. This destabilisation of the narrative is of little consequence to those who are not familiar with the Ramayana; however, it is still possible to read The Missing Queen and understand its anchoring in India. Arni writes: television is the mouthpiece of the New Ayodhya. Ayodhya is booming, Ayodhya is shining. Images flash on screens in every household, speaking of progress and development. Ayodhya is poised to take the world by storm.50 A ‘global reader’ would have little difficulty in connecting Arni’s references of ‘shining Ayodhya’ to New India. Moreover, Arni helps the non-Indian reader by suggesting that the tale of Lord Ram and Sita is a fairy tale in its own right, which in turn conjures up ideas of good over bad – a princess, a king (or lord), and difficulty or battle – as part of the story arc. But Arni plays with this idea of the canonical ‘fairy tale,’

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writing: ‘It’s the greatest tale ever told, and better still, it’s true. Real.’51 Furthermore, she says: ‘It has crossed over the boundaries of the merely real and been spun into fantasy. It is a fairy tale now.’52 Here, Arni suggests that the Ramayana is projected as ‘real’ and that it can only have ventured into the realm of fantasy by virtue of being real in the first place. The challenge here is thinking about itihasa as fantasy per se due to the years, authors, and versions by which this literary (and cultural) monolith has been shaped. Consequently, through all this various shaping and moulding, the suggestion is that the Ramayana, in a certain sense, is no longer itihasa. The fact that The Missing Queen is written in a speculative style further problematises the idea of the real and the unreal. In her search for information about Sita, the journalist is standing outside a sari shop. The shop’s proprietor steps out onto the pavement and, somewhat bewildered, tells the journalist that there is a phone call for her. She steps inside, takes the call, and arranges to meet ‘someone’ in a basement parking lot nearby. Arni writes: The parking lot is dark and empty. I imagine assailants in every car, the Washerman’s crew waiting to mow me down. There’s a black unmarked sedan in the parking space the woman told me to be at. It’s empty but unlocked. I get into the back door as she instructed. A moment later, a woman dressed in black, her face covered by a veil, cautiously emerges from a van up ahead. She walks to the car and gets into the front seat. She slips off her veil and adjusts the rear-view mirror, so I can see her face. A familiar pair of eyes, a familiar moon-shaped face. My heart starts to beat wildly. Just like Sita’s.53 As Arni builds suspense in this passage, the idea of trust becomes as important as truth-telling. With the journalist’s life threatened (there have been attempts on her life already), she is very vulnerable meeting with this unknown woman. The woman in the car turns out to be Sita’s sister, Urmila. In the Ramayana, the traditional understanding is that Urmila and Sita were not blood sisters; rather Sita was adopted by King Janaka. Here Arni usurps the traditional ‘telling’ when she goes on to say: But not quite. She is not Sita. But there is an undeniable resemblance between her and her elder sister – which makes the field-and-furrow story suspect, unless King Janaka found this daughter, too, in a field.54

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

Conclusions: ‘mythology-inspired fiction’ and the global reader Throughout the examination of reader reception of ‘mythologyinspired fiction’ here, I have made reference to Indian and non-Indian readerships. This distinction has implied that the non-Indian readerships are ‘global’ in their reception of these texts in the sense that they do not necessarily have significant knowledge about dharmic practice and the Indian epics (and the Puranas), although they may well have some knowledge about India culturally and socio-politically. Clearly, a notion of the ‘global reader’ is a multi-layered and complex one that cannot be defined accurately through this paper.55 What is possible, however, is to understand more deeply how non-Indian readers or those readers with little or no knowledge of the Indian epics approach mythology-inspired novels in terms of them being genre fiction. The range of ‘receptions’ to this body of fiction, however, begins within an ‘Indian’ readership. Given the multitude of Hindu responses to the epic narratives of Valmiki and Vyasa, it is not surprising that the reception of mythology-inspired fiction is a complex one. As we read in the discussions above, in cases where the author moves considerably away from the ‘original’ epic (or inspiration) or where contemporary sensibilities are stretched, then certain Indian readerships may 154

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well consider the narrative as fantasy. A fine line exists in this debate, not simply in terms of cultural reception but also in terms of genre classification in how these narratives are crafted. Therefore, for some Indian readers, the references to the Hindu epics will mean references to spiritual beliefs, denoting that such texts are believed to be retellings or re-imaginings of itihasa and thus manifestly not part of a fantasy genre, but mythology-inspired fiction. Consequently, this suggests that non-Indian readers will most likely respond to mythology-inspired fiction in English outside of the itihasa rubric. Indeed, for non-Indian readers or readers with little or no knowledge of dharmic thought more broadly, mythology-inspired fiction is, as the genre name suggests, ‘myth’, and thus, in a Western, Anglophone sense, ‘untrue’ or a fiction. Malhotra says that the term ‘myth’ in the West is often seen ‘as the opposite of truth’56 and he details how the popular semantic of ‘myth’ is often expressed as being ‘imaginary, fantastical, fictional, or even superstitious, primitive or false.’57 We might surmise that readers of mythology-inspired fiction with little or no knowledge of the epics, ancient Indian history, or dharmic culture more broadly will almost certainly respond to this writing as ‘fantasy’ (or ‘speculative’ at least). This assumption helps shape how we might define the non-Indian or ‘global’ readers (see endnote 52) in terms of their knowledge of (Anglophone) genre fiction and thus their definitions of speculative fiction per se. The discussion above also suggests that the ‘global reader’ might approach mythology-inspired fiction through the contemporary lens of media coverage. Given that Tripathi’s and Arni’s novels presented above make connections with contemporary, indeed post-millennial, India and some of the defining events of the last 15 years (the Nirbhaya case, the election of a BJP government as examples), the ‘global reader’ will presumably make such connections through their knowledge of these events via the media, the Internet, and social media platforms. Indian mythology-inspired fiction, by the nature of its source material and inspirations, offers the field of global genre fiction an acutely culturally anchored body of writing as well as a body of writing that ‘travels’ due to its propensity for speculative reader reception. On the one hand, this is keenly evident in works like Narayanan’s Pradyumna: Son of Krishna, given their epic-style narrative arc and characterisation, while on the other hand, it is as evident, albeit differently, in those novels that more liberally re-imagine the Indian epics crafting a fresh storyline. It is clear that the opening up of distribution circuits and publishing opportunities will mean that Indian mythologyinspired fiction will continue to travel and, in turn, meet with new 155

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

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

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

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2 Ibid., p. 22. 5 53 Ibid., pp. 119–120. 54 Ibid., p. 120. 55 I am careful here not to suggest that Indian readers are not global readers themselves; rather I am trying to separate out, for the purposes of this essay, ideas of non-Indian readers (or readers with little/no knowledge of the Indian epics) and Indian readers as consumers of ‘mythology-inspired’ fiction in English. 56 Rajiv Malhotra, Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism. New Delhi, HarperCollins Publishers India, 2013, p. 63. 57 Ibid.

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

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

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effects and varying degrees in the works of Ashok Banker and Samit Basu.3 Despite their initial success, Banker and Basu moved away from mythological fantasy and the trope seemed to have fizzled out.4 It would be Amish Tripathi, a finance sector professional from Mumbai, who would force English publishers to reconsider mythological genre fiction as a profitable commercial fiction genre in the Indian book market, setting off a bigger second wave of mythological genre fiction in Indian English. A graduate of one of the top business schools in India, Amish self-published the first volume in his Meluha trilogy, The Immortals of Meluha, centred on the figure of the Hindu renunciate god, Shiva.5 In the initial run, distributed by Chennai-based Westland books, Immortals of Meluha sold 30,000 copies. By 2013, Amish had sold 350,000 copies – a number unheard of in the Indian English publishing industry.6 Intersections and overlaps between mythological retellings and genres like fantasy, science fiction (SF) and speculative fiction (spec-fic) have led to questions about how to define the genres themselves. Debates range over whether SF and fantasy are Western genres transplanted into India or can be recovered in South Asian traditions.7 Publishers’ classifications add a further layer of complication to this debate. Given the lack of comprehensible data about the publishing industry or its readership, classifying books into genres can be arbitrary. For instance, while Chronicles is classified as ‘General & Literary Fiction’ by Hachette India, separate from their SFF list, the Goodreads page lists the books under ‘Mythology, Fantasy and Historical Fiction.’8 To clarify these debates, it is important to note that both Emma D. Varughese and Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay argue for contextualising genres when analysing Indian science fiction (SF) and fantasy. Chattopadhyay argues that by situating these texts within the historical matrices of influences and production, opening the conversation to include both non-Anglocentric traditions and a dialectic between the local and universal.9 Varughese coins the term ‘Bharati fantasy’ to define Indian SF and fantasy that uses Hindu myths as their source stories. She argues that what is called ‘fantasy’ in the West, in the sense of otherworldliness – like the avatar cycle of the Hindu god Vishnu – would be ‘real’ for an Indian audience.10 Not only does the oeuvre tread the line between SF and fantasy but, according to her, could also be categorised as historical fiction.11 However, as Chattopadhyay points out, ‘one could also talk about how a term such as “Bharati,” meaning “Indian,” but which has its own genealogy . . . is now normatively tied to Hindu nationalism.’12 My concern with the term ‘Bharati fantasy’ is that it uncritically accepts the appropriation of Hindu mythology as Indian history, and locates the origin of these myths 160

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

The Aryavarta Chronicles Krishna Udayasankar’s Aryavarta Chronicles trilogy retells the central Pandava narrative of the Mahabharata by re-creating the supernatural elements of the narrative within a speculative world utilizing tropes and motifs from science fiction (SF) and fantasy genres. Such a re-creation is in marked contrast with popular retellings in television, calendar art and popular comic books which utilise devotional aesthetics to create the religious spectacle, as well as Hindi literature which seeks to rationalise the supernatural. Chronicles instead utilises 161

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the common impulse in these genres to astound along with the sometimes blurry and overlapping genre boundaries between SF, fantasy and speculative fiction (spec-fic) genres to frame the retelling. Genre definition of and boundaries between SF, fantasy and spec-fic are subject to continuous debates and dilemmas. A prescriptive definition runs the risk of becoming too restrictive, while an open-ended description opens up spaces for confusing overlaps between the different genres. As a result Farah Mendelsohn has argued with regards to SF that it ‘is less a genre – a body of writing from which one can expect certain plot elements and specific tropes – than an ongoing discussion,’ proposing that SF is a mode rather than a genre.15 Paul Kincaid similarly suggests that this ongoing discussion be seen within the framework of Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘family resemblances’, arguing that the process of delimiting SF is an ongoing process that goes through several iterations.16 Drawing from these suggestions, I would suggest that looking at retellings of Hindu mythology as an ongoing discussion between the source story and SF, fantasy and speculative fiction genres. As I mention above, one overlapping element of the three genres is the intention to astound, although this takes different forms. For instance, Darko Suvin, defines SF as a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.17 Suvin makes the point that estrangement is ‘both . . . underlying attitude and dominant formal device’ for SF and myths, but unlike myths (and fantasy), SF is aware of the norms of the age as mutable and contingent, and therefore is cognitive. Thus while SF and fantasy both work through estrangement, fantasy and myths do not include cognition. Furthermore, Suvin argues that SF shares the temporal horizons of naturalistic literature, while myth and folklore are located outside time. While the above typology might suggest rigid boundaries between the two, this might not always the case. The entry for ‘Fantasy’ on the online The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, begins by stating that, ‘There is no definition of SF that excludes fantasy, other than prescriptive definitions.’18 Instead, they define fantasy as First . . . all SF is fantasy . . . but not all fantasy is SF. . .  [S]econd is that, because natural law is something we come 162

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to understand only gradually, over centuries, and which we continue to rewrite, the SF of one period regularly becomes the fantasy of the next. What we regard as natural or possible depends upon the consensus reality of a given culture; but the idea of consensus reality itself is an ideal, not an absolute: in practice there are as many realities as there are human consciousnesses. A reader who believes in astrology will allow certain fictions to be SF that an astronomer would exclude. Although the point is seldom made, it could be said that the particular consensus reality to which SF aspires is that of the scientific community.19 However, as the above definition from the Encyclopedia hints, even within the age, consensus reality is rarely objective in its totality. Consensus reality can differ not just temporally, but from context to context within the same temporal point. If the boundaries between SF and fantasy can blur, spec-fic was even closer to SF, originally used in referring to fiction that ‘extrapolate[ed] from known science and technology “to produce a new situation, a new framework for human action.” ’20 However, since then spec-fic has de-emphasised the role of extrapolation of science and technology.21 Consequently Margaret Atwood writes that speculative fiction ‘invents nothing we haven’t already invented or started to invent. Every novel begins with a what if and then sets forth its axioms.’22 The Chronicles trilogy seeks to frame the Mahabharata in a contemporary sensibility, using that to speculate not about the future (like SF or specific), but about an alternative past. Udayasankar builds the consensus reality for Chronicles through research, by taking a step back in history. She imagines an alternative point in time when the events of the Mahabharata could have taken place and populates it with contexts extrapolated from known science, technology, history, culture and politics from her own contemporary consensus reality. Consciously blurring myth and history, Udaysankar calls this mythohistory. Expanding upon the concept, Udayasankar writes To the gathered scholars at Naimisha, that story [Jaya or Mahabharata] was neither ancient nor mythological. It was itihasa, or history. Jaya was undeniably a tale of its time, and just as posterity elevated the great men of that time and saw them as gods, so too was the story’s context adapted and its reality turned into metaphor. In order to go behind the metaphor, and to tell the tale as mytho-history rather than 163

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mythology, the essential question that came to my mind was: If Govinda and all the other characters of this grand narrative had walked the world as we know it today, bound by our language and constructions, our common perception of physics, psychology and politics, what might their story really have been? Surprisingly, at its core it may not have been very different from the one that took form millennia ago during the conclave of Naimisha.23 Udayasankar further clarifies in personal correspondence: My intent is to challenge the dominant view, not by setting up antithetical counter-stories, but by reconstructing plausible narratives. The difference is important to me: the former serves to deconstruct the beliefs and mores around us, it also helps argue that these mores may be outdated or inapplicable in today’s times but does not challenge the premise in its own time.24 Blurring mythology and history is not new to South Asian literary traditions. South Asian literary traditions in different languages and eras have tended to liberally blur genre distinctions between aitihasik (historic) and pauranik (mythological).25 Moreover, in colonial India, the act of blurring these genre distinctions was an intentionally political act. Sudipta Kaviraj notes that Indian nationalists saw ‘ancient’ Indic texts and corpora as historical and cultural archive of the Indian nation. For Indian nationalists in the colonial period, The history of India [was] inscribed in archives of a different kind, the archives of its intellectual history, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Buddhist scriptures, for these reveal[ed] the basic trends of Indian history: they [were] less factual records, as dominant and popularly accepted interpretations of what happened. They operate[d] not at the level of ‘mere fact’, but of historical ‘truth’.26 By blurring the lines between myth and history, Udayasankar seems to be paralleling genre conventions commonly found in Indian language literatures. Her intention in ‘rationalising’ narrative contexts also parallels modern pauranik literature in Indian languages. However, pauranik literature tends to delve into the psyche of the mythological characters, fleshing them out as realistic characters. Udayasankar does 164

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the same but only to an extent. Instead her rationalising approach rejects ‘supernatural events, interpolations and “events that can be proved to be untrue in any other way”,’ emphasising instead socioeconomic contexts, especially technoculture.27 Chronicles ‘extrapolates from known science and technology “to produce a new situation, a new framework for human action” ’ and construct its consensus reality.28 Technology and technoculture are the fulcrums of her text. An important crux of the plot is the hoarding of technical and technological expertise amongst the Firewrights. The first novel begins after an unspecified apocalyptic event caused by the Firewrights leaves the Matsya kingdom barren and divested of its former power. Since then smaller empires rise up, driven by exploiting fugitive Firewrights. Thus, the Firewright sect, bestowed with scientific knowledge, become the source of power. The first book, Govinda, focuses on Govinda Shauri’s machinations to break the control of emperors over the Firewrights and force the secretive sect itself to share their technical knowledge and its fruits. The iconic burning of the Khandav forest to clear the ground for the Pandava capital Indraprastha is reworked in Govinda to become an act of creative destruction. The forest burning is a statement of military prowess and innovation: Panchali noticed that these were not the usual arrows archers used – these were flint-tipped. The shaft of the arrow, too, was larger than usual, no doubt to give it greater thrust to reach its target. Her eyes narrowed as she realised that the metal itself looked different; it was a lot lighter and shinier than the dull iron that was mostly used.29 The focus of the narrative is not so much on the actual burning of the forest, but on the technology that made it possible and the political machinations that necessitated such an action. The burning of the forest is disclosed as Govinda’s ploy to establish a power-base for Dharma, while at the same time forcing the Nagas to migrate and barter their knowledge for livelihood. A similar exercise takes place with doctors in Kashi – razing Kashi to the ground leads to the doctors migrating and furthering the dissemination of medical knowledge. Technology, technological change and the desire to disseminate knowledge widely provide motivations to drive the narrative, while also grounding the more spectacular parts of the narrative within a consensus reality. At the heart of Udayasankar’s retelling is a speculative element: what if mythological figures were bound by the logic of our contemporary consensus reality, be it politics, economy or technology? Blurring 165

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history and mythology is not uncommon in South Asian literary traditions, especially if it is in the service of making ‘traditional’ stories relevant to new contexts and audiences. Udayasankar turns this around by using a ‘new’ context to contextualise the actual story itself. Breaking from ‘traditional’ stories means breaking from ‘traditional’ norms of re-presenting Hindu mythologicals, especially in screen cultures in calendar art, Parsi theatre, films, television and comic books. Breaking from these norms, Udayasankar uses the fantasy motif of basing her story in a time alternative to the real-world timeline, while also using the SF convention of cognition selectively to delve into imagined socio-political contexts and technoculture. Adi Parva Published by HarperCollins India, Amruta Patil’s graphic novel Adi Parva seeks to recover ‘marginal’ stories against the ‘dominant’ narrative of the Mahabharata. As an independent artist publishing with a large multinational publishing company, Patil experiments with creating story-worlds in retellings of the Mahabharata, with dense inter-textual, palimpsestic visuals which break with the popular iconographies of gods prevalent in commercial books. I should note before I begin, that in this essay I refer to commercial comic art as comic books, and to independent comic art as graphic novels. Comic books, an intermittently successful commercial enterprise in India, are no strangers to the business of retelling Indian mythology and history. The Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) comic book series, especially, was a dominant publisher of stories from Indian history and Hindu myths.30 It played a significant role in determining the dominant and popular iconography of gods, drawing on iconography that had already been circulating in calendar art, Parsi theatre and Hindu mythological films.31 Nandini Chandra, charting ACK’s historical and aesthetic journey, argues that while different artistes brought their regional and professional aesthetics into the making of the ACK comics, the in-house aesthetic style was homogenised into the ‘Raja Ravi Verma aesthetic’ under Anant Pai’s editorial leadership.32 While ACK’s slow demise in the 1990s left a gap in the Indian comic book market, it continues to exert a huge influence on the aesthetics and marketing of Indian comic books. Publishers like Campfire comics have undertaken a similar project of introducing myths and history to an Indian audience.33 In contrast, Liquid Comics, established as Virgin Comics by Sir Richard Branson, Deepak Chopra and Shekhar Kapur, was set up to create a collaborative system of production that focused 166

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on retelling Asian mythic narratives to a ‘global’ (read: American) audience. While both sell comics at slightly higher prices than ACK comics, the production value is much higher than ACK. The quality of art is more in line with the modern age of comic books published by Marvel, DC and Dark Horse, but the iconography of gods and mythological characters remains in line with the ACK aesthetic. Liquid Comics overlays the iconography of gods (and the narrative itself) with SF and fantasy motifs: series like Devi (2006), Ramayana 3392 AD (2006–07) and the aborted Grant Morrison’s 18 Days. Devi was a story about the Hindu female divine power/goddess and her modern mortal re-incarnation, Tara Mehta, written by Samit Basu, among others. Ramayana 3392 AD and its sequel Ramayana Reloaded retold the Ramayana in a post-apocalyptic world with futuristic weapons. However, neither Campfire nor Liquid Comics have succeeded in replicating the success and impact of the ACK comic books. The market for comic books and graphic novels in India thus remains niche and small. However, the entry of established publishing houses like Penguin India and HarperCollins India, along with newly established, ideologically driven publishing houses and institutionally funded projects, has led to the rise of a new kind of author: the independent graphic novelist. The economic security afforded to an established publishing house with profitable back and front lists allows them relative freedom to experiment with authors and genres they choose to publish. Ideologically driven publishing houses are less concerned about the commercial cost and more so with articulating specific social messages instead. Institutionally funded works are similarly unconcerned with revenue, and often distribute texts free of cost.34 As a result, graphic novels have a certain amount of freedom to be critical in their intervention and experimental in their art. Though often priced much higher than comic books, they focus on social issues and lived realities of India, often seeking to question established hierarchies and discourses of power, while also creating space for experimenting with author-artist collaborations as well as panel formats and narrative styles. Published by HarperCollins India, Amruta Patil’s Adi Parva is a 276-page-long book in hardcover with glossy paper inside, and significantly more expensive than commercial comic books and thus out of the commercial market. It sells at a before-discount price of around Rs. 800, more than four times the price of a single issue by Campfire (assuming a price of Rs. 195, though it varies with retailer discounts) and roughly sixteen times the price of an ACK single issue (priced at Rs. 45–50). 167

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Rather than a linear storyline, Adi Parva has two diegetic levels. There is the narrative retelling of episodes from the Mahabharata in no particular chronological or teleological order, and then there is the meta-narrative framing the Mahabharata narrative, as a woman, later revealed to be the divine Ganga, narrates the Mahabharata to a village audience. The Adi Parva moves back and forth between these two levels, progressing thematically rather than on the basis of action. The levels are visually distinguished by the use of lines and colours, emphasising the difference in tone and spatio-temporality of the story and the storytelling space. Adi Parva uses the first two chapters of the book to establish both diegetic spaces and levels – one, alive, internal, intertextual palimpsest filled with deep colours story-world, and the other, external, smudged, mundane and charcoal grey. The first chapter, entitled ‘Sutradhar,’ begins from the end of the Kurukshetra war (and thus the Mahabharata narrative), even though the narrative will then shift back to cosmic origins later. The first panel opens on a vulture, following it for four more panels before panning out to show white figures with ultramarine outlines (as opposed to solid black outlines) as corpses and mourners. Various shades of blood red fill the background. Page five especially resembles blood cells in a blood vessel. The white figures and the red background transform into blood platelets before we reach the last page of the chapter, a full-page panel. On the top left corner is the head and torso of a dead man, bleeding from his head. Patil visually establishes blood at the centre of her narrative. Throughout the rest of the chapter we see anchoring text bubbles from an unknown narrator, handwritten, with no emphasis. The chapter is influenced by Patil’s ‘reading’ of Paul Gaugin’s Vision after the Sermon, which inspired her to experiment with different shades of red and contrast them with ultramarine blues.35 The next chapter, titled ‘Ferry-point,’ shown above, introduces the narrator and her spatial setting – the temporal setting remains indistinct, it could be a thousand years ago, or conversely, it could be now, but it is night in an Indian village. The establishing panel is a full-page illustration of a man standing in front of the cow. In the background, we see a tree with figures around it and the moon shining in the sky. A friend in the second panel, contemplating stealing the cow, stops when a woman joins them in the next panel. The woman tells the men to listen to her instead as she sits beneath the tree and tells a story. The next panel is again full-page, showing us that this scene is set on a shore with beached boats, and the narrative speech bubble tells us that King Janamejaya’s snake sacrifice (where the Mahabharata is narrated) is underway in the distant horizon. The lines on both these 168

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levels are never strong black outlines common in American superhero comic books. Thick lines in the coloured panels are usually different shades of blue, ranging from the blue that verges on black to ultramarine.36 Shortly into the text the woman narrating the story is revealed to be Ganga, the divine mother of the Kuru patriarch Bhishma. A silent and marginal presence in the Mahabharata, Ganga’s re-working as the narrator in Adi Parva establishes the graphic novel as an alternative to the male-dominated recital for a royal elite in Janamejaya’s sacrifice. Ganga becomes, quite literally, the Sutradhara – the holder of threads – as she recovers stories and moments from the margins of the Mahabharata and reads them in tandem with and in contrast to the ‘big’ stories. The external world is grey, smudged, out of focus, but also at the same time, more irreverent. The irreverence establishes the subversive tone of narration as the narrative is set in contrast to the epic narration taking place at Janamejaya’s sacrifice. The inner world of the Mahabharata retelling, on the other hand, is a lush, intertextual palimpsest that breaks from the visual regime established by ACK and the calendar art for retelling Hindu myth. Patil’s experimentation with colouring and comic panels draws from different aesthetic traditions, mostly Western fine art, with a few Indian fine arts and folk art influences too. In her acknowledgements, Patil writes, Dead men taught me to paint . . . Odilon Redon, Paul Gauguin, Paul Cezanne, those anonymous hands at work in Rajasthani miniature painting workshops. Dead women flow in my veins as creative mothers: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Frida Kahlo, Amrita Sher-Gil.37 In her podcasts Gauguin, Matisse, Pierre Bonnard and Paul Sérusier are highlighted as major influences. However, these influences are not meant as works of simple imitation. Patil plays with her influences and materials in different ways, but most notably by creating palimpsest illustrations creating a dense intertextual play between her illustrations, original materials and/or visual allusions. For instance, she paints over magazine pages with the contents of the page still visible. Elsewhere in her novel, magazine pages are cut up and joined together before being painted over selectively. She also creates pastiche panels with allusion ranging from Boticelli’s Birth of Venus and Henri Matisse’s Dance, to the works of Vogue India photographer Prabuddha Dasgupta.38 The central motif of her work, the churning of the ocean, also known as the amrit-manthan, 169

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is a palimpsest of visual motifs from Taschen’s collection of Chinese propaganda posters and Egyptian iconography. In the image, Lakshmi emerges from the churning with Hathoric horns over her and the mythical snake Ananta transformed into a Chinese dragon.39 The surface in a sense is flat in that there is no deeper significance to the palimpsest than visual intertextuality. On the other hand, the surface itself comes alive with hitherto unseen combinations of visual images and allusions coming together in representing a mythological narrative. Patil thus seems to be visually enacting breaking from the ACK, calendar art and screen mythological visual regimes to come up with a visual regime organic to her own narrative. Patil’s break from the ACK visual regime is mirrored by and bolsters her narrative intent. Her Adi Parva is not meant to be an exhaustive retelling of the Mahabharata. It is, instead, a strategic recovery of marginal and marginalised characters from Mahabharata retellings in comic art and television serials. As Patil writes, All too often, the Mahabharat is reduced to the sum total of two things – the fratricidal battle between the Kuru princes and the battlefield dialogue between the avatar, Krishna, and his protégé Arjun . . . The real scope of the Mahabharat, however, extends a good distance either side of these events.40 Patil seeks to recover Mahabharata stories from a different focal point, and with a different aesthetic than what has become the norm in popular mythological retellings. She specifically seeks to zoom in on the ‘mahabharatan equivalent of “huh?” and “why me?” and “who is she?” ’ moments.41 Using both narrative and visual elements in tandem, she creates a vibrant internal story-world, set against a mundane and irreverent external world.

Conclusion The mythological wave in Indian English publishing seems to have subsided to the extent that it is no longer a wave to be remarked upon, but an integral part of the field of Indian English publishing. The surest sign of this is perhaps Amish’s continued dominance in book sales in the Indian English book market, this time with the latest iteration of his Ram Chandra series (retelling the Ramayana). As of June, Amish’s Sita: Warrior of Mithila (2017) tops the Amazon India bestseller book list, with Arundhati Roy’s second novel, Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) coming in at second.42 There are other signs too – apart from 170

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

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

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

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

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

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10 WHEN BHIMAYANA ENTERS THE CLASSROOM. . .  Aratrika Das

In Indian universities, most departments of English literary studies teach works of William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, William Wordsworth, and S.T. Coleridge alongside those of Kalidasa, Rabindranath Tagore, Kabir, Salman Rushdie, and Om Prakash Valmiki. The English literature curriculum in most Indian universities attempts to open itself to those genres of writing that critique the canonical Western ‘classics’.1 This shift in pedagogy, with an emphasis on the marginal, the subaltern, and the silenced voices, has been instrumental in incorporating a range of thematic, methodological, and aesthetic preoccupations within the English literary studies in contemporary India. Theoretically, this shift should destabilise the hegemony of colonial educational practices. However, within an Indian classroom, the relevance of Wordsworth’s poems is seldom dislodged by Kabir’s poems. This is because the critical tools and methods deployed are invariably Western. The prescription of texts and the interpretative and reading practices with which the universities function lend a canonical status to Wordsworth and consign an ‘otherness’ to Kabir. As Graham Huggan explains about African literature, the introduction of it is recuperative insofar as it conscripts the literary text into the service of a continually refashioned cultural identity: deconstructive insofar as it plays on and challenges Western readerly expectation, and in doing so works towards dismantling self privileging Western modes of vision and thought.2 For Huggan, the African texts fail to dismantle the dominance of western preoccupations because they tend to work with and appropriate western anthropological metaphors. In an Indian classroom, Kabir’s 175

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poems evoke an Indian-ness that does not dislodge Wordsworth because of a similar internalisation of colonial educational processes. Huggan’s reading, though on African texts, is important for purposes of this essay because it recognises the unique conjunction of textual reading practices and the ‘otherness’ that emanates from the regional location of the reader. This essay looks into the overt and embedded materiality of a text, in its specific location in an Indian classroom, to understand its influence in the formation of a curriculum. I teach courses in English at Ramjas College, University of Delhi. Since 2015, undergraduates student pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in English studies (Honours) in University of Delhi reads Durgabai Vyam and Subhash Vyam’s Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability3 as part of a compulsory course called ‘Popular Literature’. In the endsemester examinations, students are often asked to answer questions based on the nature of Bhimayana as a graphic novel, on the uses of Gond art to look into Bhim Rao Ambedkar’s life-story, and how effective graphic art is as a tool to address social and cultural issues. For students and teachers then, Bhimayana has two concerns: first, as a literary text that deploys Gond art and comic speech-balloons, and second, as a retelling of Ambedkar’s autobiography that introduces in an ‘authentic’ experience of caste atrocities into the classroom. Most teachers introduce Bhimayana to their students by referencing and chronicling the history of Gond art, the native tradition of storytelling by drawing on walls, and the entry of Gond artists into global market. The choice of a tribal medium of narrativisation (Gond art) within a global style of composition (graphic novel) to depict the caste-based atrocities on a Dalit (Ambedkar) becomes the lens through which to read and teach Bhimayana.4 But Bhimayana is part of a syllabus on ‘popular’ and not part of units such as ‘Dalit Discourse’ or ‘Dalit Voices’ – courses that look into the humiliation, indignity, economic and social exclusion caused by the caste-system in the Indian sub-continent.5 As part of ‘Popular Literature’, Bhimayana is taught alongside Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass,6 Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,7 and Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy8 – novels with no pictorial and visual element. The rationale to prescribe these novels together, it may be assumed, is that these novels are ‘popular’ and provide counternarratives to the canonical English literary courses taught to the undergraduates. The institutional assumption is that courses on British poetry and drama, Victorian fiction, nineteenth century, Shakespeare, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European classical, modern European drama are traditional English programs. A course 176

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

Bhimayana – the graphic novel Co-authored by Srividya Natarajan and S. Anand and illustrated by Pardhan Gond artists Durgabai and Subhash Vyam from eastern Madhya Pradesh, Bhimayana traces the life of Bhim Rao Ambedkar in three books titled ‘Water’, ‘Shelter’, and ‘Travel’. The three books correspond to three distinct phases of Ambedkar’s life and are borrowed from the section ‘Waiting for a Visa’ of Autobiographical Notes (1990). These three books are framed within a conversation between two young girls debating on the need for caste-based reservation. Following the Articles 340, 341, and 342 of the Constitution of India, caste-based reservation is an affirmative action programme to protect the oppressed castes against prejudices and social, economic, and educational discriminatory practices. This policy of reservation provides people belonging to Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST), and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) a representation in public education and employment. Because people belonging to these sections have been historically denied access to equal opportunity, this reservation policy seeks to provide social justice to the marginalised by allocating a specific number of ‘reserved’ seats for the SC, ST, and OBCs. This affirmative action, however, is vehemently critiqued and opposed by people belonging to the General category (Brahmins, Kshtriyas, and Vaishyas), who comprise about 31% of the population but represent 70% of higher educated workforce in the public sector.9 This discrepancy is a result of social, economic, and cultural capital traditionally bestowed upon people of the General category. Caste-based 177

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reservation is often perceived as a tool to perpetuate the system of caste for vote-bank politics, and as a threat to meritocracy. Bhimayana tells Ambedkar’s life-story in this context of debate for the need of caste-based reservation. The first book, ‘Water’, describes Ambedkar’s experiences as an ‘untouchable’ child in his school. The second book, ‘Shelter’, traces how despite a doctoral degree in economics from Columbia University and with a job, Ambedkar was denied shelter by Hindus, Parsis, and Christians in Baroda. The third book, ‘Travel’ looks into MahadSatyagraha, Ambedkar’s differences with Gandhi, and the evolving political demands of the Depressed Classes (the official term for the ‘untouchables’ during colonial rule).10 Details from Ambedkar’s life are interspersed with snippets of present-day newspaper reports on caste discrimination, and his speeches and letters. The framing narrative of the two girls’ debate on reservation ends with a realisation of the existence of the present-day reality of caste discrimination, violence, and social exclusion. The final section is an essay ‘A digna for Bhim’, where Anand discusses the need to use the Gond art.11 Bhimayana requires the teacher to be acquainted with graphic narratives such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus,12 Alan Moore’s Watchmen,13 Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986),14 and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis,15 and that the teacher teaches Bhimayana as a graphic narrative and not as traditional text-only narrative. The drawings are central to the words in every page. For example, in the first story ‘Water’, Ambedkar as a child is denied water in his school. His body merges with a fish yearning for water (Fig. 1).16 On the very next page, we see animals are allowed to drink till they ‘burst open’, but the village becomes a desert when a Dalit seeks water (Fig. 2).17 In both these drawings, thirst appears through animal imagery – a gaping fish and animals drinking water. Ambedkar’s corporeal frame is fish-like with scales, and the speech-balloons take on different shapes depending on the position of the speaker: those in favour of the system of caste have speech-balloons in the shape of a tail of a scorpion, and those who question the caste-system speak in a bird or cloud shaped speech-balloon. The brief moment when the familiar school compound becomes a site of oppression to a ten-year-old Ambedkar is an unsettling scene for most students in my classroom. School ought to be a safe space but is a constant source of pain for Ambedkar. Rather than a panel and sequential visual retelling, the blue colour in the second drawing (as opposed to a white page in the former) highlights Ambedkar’s thirst and subsequent denial. Colours, rather than words, embody the 178

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trauma of the ten-year-old Ambedkar. This productive representational strategy Bhimayana borrows from Gond art (it does not use rectilinear panels or boxes, and has the narrative dispersed over a whole page). Inhabiting the more diffused and open narrative mode of the forests, rivers, and animals that are painted across pages, Ambedkar’s pain flows – diagonally and horizontally. Gond art becomes an apt form to represent his pain (rather than rectangular panels) because caste as a discriminatory practise has obliterated logic, empathy, and rationale. Only a fragmented, half-fish, half-human frame can accommodate the thirsty Ambedkar’s body because the very structure of caste has created a dislocated subjectivity. This kind of contrapuntal reading (the blue colour and a fluid drawing spread across several pages as an embodiment of thirsty Ambedkar’s pain) is baffling and bewildering to most students because often they are not acquainted with the Gond art form. Bhimayana therefore repeats this expressive strategy as a recognisable trope. During the Mahad Satyagraha (Fig. 3),18 Ambedkar’s words are like sprinkles of water. The colour blue is a clue following which the reader traces continuity from the school compound to the Mahad Satyagraha – a site of denial that yields protest and reclamation. Further, the political event of protest is humanised by merging Ambedkar’s face with watersprinklers, his speeches and newspaper reports with fishes and water bodies. The private and personal history of trauma of a ten-year-old Ambedkar merges with the national struggle for access to water and Mahad Satyagraha through this merging of the visual and the verbal. Ambedkar, as the dalit who was denied water, food, and shelter, and Ambedkar, the Dalit who rewrites the national history by inserting caste dynamics into the colonial struggle are both embodied within the oozing blue colour spread across the pages. In this way, Ambedkar’s individual dalit-ness (a non-negotiable mark imprinted by the system of caste) and the political history of Dalit existence (systemic prejudice and injustice that perpetuates a vicious circuit of denial and violence) is represented through figures that surround Ambedkar – fish, beasts, water. These images (rather than the text) become the primary means of telling the life history of an individual and the history of caste. The frenzied movement of Ambedkar across these pages, from a ten-year-old who is denied water to an adult who becomes the spokesperson for the Dalits, reaches the readers through displaced blue colour that flows across the pages. The readers’ eyes are not drawn to any single figure to record this history of pain and denial, but at one glance, to a series of crowded figures: thirsty boy, an angry looking fish-shaped hand pump, a school compound like a desert, a man merged into a 179

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fish-like body, birds and beasts, a man who is both the pond and the drafter of the Constitution. The reader’s vision expands – the animate and inanimate objects in the pages are far more intricately drawn and integral to the story than the character of Ambedkar. In place of a realistic depiction, Gond art deliberately alters the scope of a biographical retelling. Instead of a pictorial analogue, the birds, fishes, animals, humans, and ponds coexist and speak in a vocabulary to presents the caste-system as a human affliction. There is nothing natural about caste. An unborn child and a dead man both have caste because caste is always predetermined and is nonbiodegradable. Nature (forests, rivers, plants, and animals) do not embody this discriminatory practise. Gond art that depicts nature and humans in a continuum does not have a vocabulary to represent the experience of caste except as an aberration. When Ambedkar is denied water, the water-pump has an angry face. Unlike the sharp-pointed human faces, the birds have benign faces. The lower half of Ambedkar’s body merges with fish, pump, and water-body to show a continuity of life-forces. Gond art relies more on the visual and the reader has to arrive at this social commentary through the detailing on the pages. This visuality is disruptive as it punctures a neat linear viewing gaze. Lurking in the corner of every speech balloon are images of fishes, trees, trains, animals, trains, and birds – animate and inanimate objects – that bear traces of the story and the reader ought to follow these images to comprehend the meaning of what is being narrated. It embodies simultaneity because human, sky, animals, trains, and trees coexist with the human. This specific graphic narrative in Gond art form functions as different languages within the same text and deploys what Pramod Nayar refers to as the ‘critical literacy’ of a graphic narrative.19 The non-sequential arrangement of drawings, images, text-boxes, speech-balloons, and Gond artwork does not present a gradual unfolding of a progression of events. Rather, the visual and the text coalesce to create perspectives in the readers’ minds. These perspectives are on and about the different aspects of being a dalit. We do not encounter a frail, dying, fragile, abject human as a dalit. Instead, Ambedkar as the dalit is far from being fragile. Laura Breuck asserts that ‘Dalit literature relies on the idea of Dalit chetna (consciousness) as the ideal for all Dalit literature . . . It is a principle of Dalit consciousness that writings are made authentic only through real-life experience of Dalit identity’.20 Dalit writing stresses the need for equal access and opportunity, and draws on actual life-histories to narrate episodes of pain. Ironically then, the utopian realm of equality of most Dalit literature is 180

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

Bhimayana and caste Charles Hatfield in Teaching the Graphic Novel argues that ‘comics shouldn’t be easy to define, as they are an interdisciplinary, indeed antidisciplinary, phenomenon, nudging us usefully out of accustomed habits of thought’.21 As a graphic novel, Bhimayana belongs to the trajectory of Marvel Comics and graphic novels such as Persepolis. Students reading Bhimayana then need to be acquainted with the trajectory of graphic writing as a popular form. Like most English undergraduate courses that focus on the evolution of the textual practice, a course on popular fiction necessitates a contextualisation. When students read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, for example, they are introduced to the ways in which modernist fiction shifts from Victorian literature and responds to the emerging experience of the colonial encounter. Students know this because of the other courses that they are doing concurrently while reading Conrad’s novel. To provide a similar historical context to the emergence of graphic novel, students ought to be acquainted with the canon of comic and graphic narratives, 181

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understand the nuances of a superhero comic, and read Bhimayana in juxtaposition with a similar graphic representation of Ambedkar such as Amar Chitra Katha. While this is a desired model of teaching, time constraints often prevent an in-depth analysis of the historical evolution of the graphic novel as a form. Rather than selecting and defending a particular definition of ‘graphic’, the more productive route in my class has been to look into the historical embeddedness of Bhimayana. The historical context of Bhimayana is, for me, debates on castebased reservation. The temporal and the spatial environment in which the words of the framing narrative of the two girls are delivered is important because we realise that Ambedkar, Gond art, and the form of the graphic novel are part of an appeal to highlight the need for reservation. And this appeal in a classroom with students from varying social and economic backgrounds makes it a discomforting site of contestations. Bhimayana presupposes the responses (that caste-based violence occurs only in underdeveloped small towns or that these are rare events) and presents factual details in the form of present-day newspaper clippings. Ambedkar’s individual experience is placed alongside present-day retellings so that the students recognise the ubiquity of caste-based violence. The framing of the words within the images makes it inevitable that the students ‘see’ the thirsty Ambedkar as the victim. In Figures 1 and 2, the fishes, beasts, and water bodies are arranged to fix the readers’ eyes firmly on the young Ambedkar, who appears with fish-like scales asking for water, hands stretched in demand. The relative absence of text here indicates that Ambedkar’s voice and speech are already silenced. Text boxes and speech-balloons appear abundantly in Figure 3 where Ambedkar is speaking for the Depressed Classes, demanding water, arguing with Gandhi, and eventually becoming the drafter of the Constitution of India. Here Ambedkar’s face does not dissolve into fish-like scales. His is a thoughtful, towering, full-page portraitsized face that is deciding the fate of all dalits. The diminishing size of other speakers, and later in the graphic novel the identical faces of Muslims, Parsis, Christians, and Dalits, remind the readers that this graphic novel gradually will be about Ambedkar and his role in shaping the national struggle. This gradual shift (from an insignificant common dalit boy to a man who has a doctorate from Columbia University but still sleeping in the park because of his caste) is important. In a panel-less and border-less graphic representation, this latter kind of Ambedkar provides a temporality, a historicity, unto which other narratives of displacement, pain, and death can be framed, and the newspaper clippings do precisely 182

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that. The students can no longer see caste-based reservation in terms of meritocracy, but as a violent historical tale of denial. History does not enter the classroom in terms of events (though Mahad Satyagraha and other nationalist struggles are marked prominently in the novel), but how it affects personal memories and lives. The objective history of caste and its subsequent debate on topicality and relevance are now reframed into a lived experience. As a text in the course ‘Popular Fiction’, Bhimayana deploys graphic and Gond art form to provide a fictive re-presentation of Ambedkar’s life, and tries to enter into conversations about nation, art, caste, and public education in urbanised English-speaking global setting. The text is responsive to contemporary signs that mark a dalit in urban India – educated, with a job, yet denied shelter and access to basic civic rights. Within its immediate literary landscape, Bhimayana carves out a new language for the ‘popular’.

Bhimayana as the ‘popular’ Bhimayana functions through the visible and visual, personal and historical, and creates a space of contact between these different registers of representations. The graphic novel seeks to represent Ambedkar’s vision for a caste-less society. This vision, however, reaches the readers though the visuality of Gond art and modern graphic novelwriting. The book Bhimayana calls attention to itself through its intricate drawings. These drawings are labyrinth of memories, time, space, dreams, and as Anand explains in the last section, a repository of tradition.22 The individual history of Ambedkar is drawn into patterns (specific colours and animal-imageries). These patterns become recognisable shapes to haunt and remind readers about caste atrocities. The reader is drawn to these elaborate patterns so that she can now school herself and learn about caste within urban existence. What the reader ‘feels’ on seeing Bhimayana is transposed onto what she thinks about caste-based reservation. Nandini Chandra sees this as an enabling strategy and argues that Gond art is ‘a tribal ecology of subsistence and communal life’ that provides the narrative with ‘a healing touch, since the tribal is (theoretically at least) totally removed from the Hindu anxiety of pollution and purity’.23 Nayar is wary of this importation of the local to the global and calls it ‘global-popular’: ‘Cultural legitimacy’, as I have defined it, is the popular acceptance of the norms, values and belief systems through 183

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the consumption of particular narrative. . . Bhimayana offers the human rights ethos this essential cultural legitimacy precisely because its register is the popular . . . The popular intersects very clearly with the commercial here. . . [Using Gond] an ethnic art form, they also shift it out of the realm of the ethnic – rooted in an ethnos or ethos – and into what can be termed the global-popular, with its own market share.24 The global connectedness that Nayar describes is a dialogic approach to texts – the familiar Western canonical format is made to bear upon the non-familiar text so that the latter is legitimised. Bhimayana, for Nayar, follows this route by inhabiting the domain of popular – the non-canon, peripheral, a cultural other. I agree that literary texts are not beyond the marketplace. The physical manifestation of a text is not a mere incidental but a crucial aspect of the experience of reading and interpretation. This is especially true for a book like Bhimayana that is sold in coloured format and good-quality paperback editions. At the same time, Bhimayana presupposes a target-audience – urban, literate, conscious of the caste-based reservation policy, and aware of the graphic form of storytelling. The target-reader then is not a passive recipient, but one who has both the tastes of reflection and of sense. Following Pierre Bourdieu, the ‘taste of reflection’ is an educated, objective, and detached form of reading, while the ‘taste of sense’ is an uneducated, subjective, wholly seduced by the pleasures of the text.25 Bhimayana seeks to appeal to the educated and discerning mind, arguing for caste-based reservation, but making the case within seductively beautiful pages. The torturous narrative of violence is composed in elaborate drawings with, as Chandra puts it, ‘a healing touch’ – this healing touch offers a catharsis, a peaceful dissolution, in representation, of inhuman social injustices, and motivates the reader to be attentive to the past. Bhimayana presents a past that fractures the ‘natural’ act of oppressing the dalit. The caste-based atrocities have a history. This history is in close nexus with the internalised and naturalised assumption that Wordsworth or A Heart of Darkness is knowable and readable, while Kabir or Bhimayana has to be interpreted. The situatedness of Bhimayana within a Delhi University classroom means that neither the teacher nor the students are reading to learn about an unknown figure. Rather the use of Gond art and the debates on the caste-based reservation function as means to open up pedagogical limitations. By situating Bhimayana within ‘Popular Literature’ (in place of ‘Dalit Voices’ and ‘Dalit Discourse’), the pedagogical aim is to inculcate in a student 184

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

Teaching Bhimayana The specific construction of Ambedkar within a past and a contemporary debate makes teaching Bhimayana into a site of contestation – contestation over who is a dalit; what it means to be a dalit; can an educated Mahad underpin dalitness when hundreds of dalits still continue to be hungry and homeless; should the experience of caste become a globalised condition of seeing India; is there any possibility of accommodating the rage against caste hierarchy without recourse to reservation rights. The classroom translates the ‘popular’ into the political. The populist and common understanding of caste rights is questioned. This enables a cultural legibility of otherness, and students often recognise the rationale for reservation policy. By reading Bhimayana with texts of Christie, Carroll, and Selvadurai, students also understand the necessity to be political in a historical continuum. If questioning imperial, colonial, modernist, and gendered narratives are 185

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

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

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8 Shyam Selvadurai, Funny Boy. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1994. 9 See 2011 Census Data of India. http://censusindia.gov.in/. 10 Mahad-Satyagraha or Chavdar Tale Satyagraha was led by Ambedkar on 20 March 1927 to allow untouchables to use water from the Mahad tank, Maharashtra. The untouchables were not allowed to use water from the same tank used by upper castes. The Municipal Board of Mahad in 1926 allowed the water to be used by all communities. When the uppercaste Hindus opposed this order, Ambedkar organised the Satyagraha and burned Manusmriti as a mark to end slavery and oppression of the untouchables. Every year March 20 is observed as Social Empowerment Day in India to commemorate Mahad-Satyagraha and its message of the collective protest. 11 Dignas or wall paintings are an inextricable aspect of Gond artwork. All beings of the natural world, from humans to plants and animals, figure as characters in Gond paintings. For a Gond artist, the larger social narrative of wealth, education, and employment coexist with the world of forests, peacocks, and gods. Anand in the last section explains that this repertoire of Gond art is an enabling device and allows Ambedkar’s struggle for social justice to be integrated with and recuperated within the tribal culture. This vocabulary of transforming Ambedkar from a dalit into a redeeming force through Gond art (figured as a heroic spirit that opposes both the global capitalism and state mechanisms of oppression) is contentious and will be looked into in the later section of the essay. 12 Art Spiegelman, Maus. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980–1991. 13 Allan Moore, Dave Gibbons and John Higgins, Watchmen. New York: DC Comics, 1986–1987. 14 Frank Miller, Batman – The Dark Knight Returns. New York: DC Comics, 1986. 15 Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis, Paris: L’Association, 2000. 16 Bhimayana, p. 20. 17 Ibid., p. 23. A dalit is the lowest member in the caste hierarchy based on ritual and occupational purity, is mostly identified with the Scheduled Castes, and is considered an ‘untouchable’ by the upper castes. Traditionally, a dalit was expected to perform ‘polluting’ occupations such as scavenging, sweeping, and leatherwork, and had to follow prohibitions such as denial of entry to temple or access to common tank, or even to cast a shadow in the path of an upper caste. They were seen as polluting subjects and were often subjected to harsh inhumane forms of existence. Though ‘untouchability’ has been legally abolished, it continues to oppress and victimise dalits and deny them basic civic rights. 18 Bhimayana, p. 48. 19 Nayar explains in The Indian Graphic Novel, ‘Critical literacy embodied in the graphic narrative enables us to see texts as situated within unequal social fields of caste, patriarchy, capitalism and demands that the reader becomes alert to the position he or she takes vis-à-vis not just the text, but the social domains represented by it’ (p. 8). 20 Laura Brueck, Writing Resistance: The Rhetorical Imagination of Hindi Dalit Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014, p. 65. 21 Charles Hatfield, Teaching the Graphic Novel. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005, p. 23.

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

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

In an interview, Surender Mohan Pathak, the bestselling author of crime fiction in Hindi, unapologetically accepts the charge that is ordinarily made against the Hindi pulp novel. In a matter-of-fact manner, Pathak defines ‘pulp’, stating, ‘It is the job of mass production, like assembly line, factory production . . . and profit per book may be little but overall profit is enormous’.1 Pathak explains pulp as massproduced novels that are made available to the readers at a cheap price. However, a third attribute of ‘pulp’ – as well as the source of its name – comes from pulp-quality paper, the paper that the novels are traditionally printed on (lugdi in Hindi). The term ‘pulp’ itself carries several moral and aesthetic connotations in Hindi. Since pulp novels are cheap, they are instantly consumable and just as instantly disposable. As quick reads, these novels are not just seen as sites of leisure, but because of their presumably racy, melodramatic, semi-pornographic and ‘illicit’ content, they are also judged morally as giving way to the readers’ suppressed ‘excesses’.2 In terms of language, too, the language of pulp has been deemed the language of the colloquial.3 As such, Hindi pulp particularly has also been articulated as a space where, in contrast to ‘literary’ Hindi publishing, the question of literariness in language has never arisen. Indeed, the charge against Hindi pulp fiction seems to be so well-established that it has needed little investigation thus far.4 In this essay, I do not use ‘pulp’ derogatorily but rather to refer to a genre of literature that is printed on lugṛi paper. I seek to question a discourse that condemns ‘pulp’ as a category before it is analysed.5 In 189

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

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

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

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It is later revealed that Lizaara is no ordinary villain. She plans to destroy India through her well-established drug distribution mafia. The nation is in crisis, new technologies of destruction are at play, and the nation must be saved. The super spy will ultimately step up to the challenge and destroy Lizaara. Reema Bharti re-visits the established, heroic narrative of the super spy and the iconography of the nation-in-peril. Another contemporary example, in an entirely different vein, can be found in Anil Mohan’s fiction. Raja Pocket Books and Ravi Pocket Books publish different titles from Mohan’s science fiction ‘Devraj Chauhan’ series. Babūsā kā Chakravyūh, or Baboosa’s Labyrinth (March 2013) tells the story of Devraj Chauhan, a king who has been expelled from his planet called Sudoor. He is currently undertaking to return to Sudoor with his subjects and two wives, one of whom, called Rani Tasha, he is besotted with. Incidentally, she is also the one who, as we learn through a flashback in the novel, got him expelled him in the first place. Baboosa, the character after whom the novel is named, is Chauhan’s trusted confidante who is waiting for the time when he can expose the queen’s machinations. The reading of this text reveals the author’s immense attention to detail. The spaceship that will transport the group back to Sudoor, as well as the functions of its control room, are described vividly. The mythic weapon of Sudoor and its many uses too are similarly detailed. The dramatic tension in the novel is provided by Rani Tasha’s efforts to cover up, which is juxtaposed against Baboosa’s intricate counterplot to expose her. Mohan too favours the use of only one language, that is, Hindi. The novel is devoid of the subtext of language politics. Significantly, though, the episodes in this novel too carry a melodramatic quality. For instance, Rani Tasha and Chauhan’s love is intensified because of the intrigue: as it turns out, Rani Tasha had been under an evil spirit’s control. Moreover, a significant part of the novel is dedicated to a largely superfluous sub-plot concerning three vacationing couples and their sexual encounters, which seemingly serves to titillate the readers. It could be argued that this borrowing itself is a function of all pulp fiction. Heightened melodrama, repetition and titillation are a range of pleasures that the pulp novel is expected to provide. Scott McCracken argues, ‘Popular fiction, from folk tales and fairy tales to popular ballads to modern best-sellers, has always provided a structure within which our lives can be understood’.15 ‘The liberal subject’, D.A. Miller suggests, ‘seems to recognize himself most fully only when he forgets or disavows his functional implication in a system of carceral 192

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restraints or disciplinary injunctions’.16 Additionally, Miller argues for a re-evaluation of reading pleasure in the novel: The enterprise of the novel would no longer (or not just) be the doomed attempt to produce a stable subject in a stable world, but would instead (or in addition) be the more successful task of forming – by means of that very ‘failure’ – a subject habituated to psychic displacements, evacuations, reinvestments, in a social order whose totalising power circulates all the more easily for being pulverised.17 This section has attempted not to censure, but rather to explicate the range of pleasures available in the pulp novel today. The average contemporary pulp novel needs to comprehended not as a ‘failure’, but an expression of a different kind. One writer in the group, however, seems to be actively re-formulating his novels, and is being received by the new re-formulated readers. That writer is Surender Mohan Pathak, who is discussed in the next section.

On the making of a pulp collectible The uncharacteristically good production quality of bestselling author Surender Mohan Pathak’s novels published by Raja Pocket Books since 2009 can be rightfully considered an unprecedented event in the history of Hindi pulp. This section focuses on its implications in the context of the Hindi publishing market in the 21st century. The first thing to note about Pathak is the scale of his success: Pathak has written around 280 books to date and has sold around 25 million copies.18 By the author’s own admission, his original fiction in the 1950s and ’60s was ill received.19 Instead, he found an easier market for his Hindi translations of James Hadley Chase novels, published by small pulp presses. At the peak of his career, an average Pathak novel had a first print run of 100,000 copies and ran into multiple editions.20 This, however, compared to popular romance writer Gulshan Nanda and Ved Prakash Sharma at their own peaks of first print runs, is miniscule.21 Today, however, Pathak is the frontrunner in Hindi pulp sales. As discussed before, a study of the average pulp novel in Hindi today reveals little difference, both in the kind of writing, in production quality and the style of book covers from what was produced in the 1980s. The production quality of these novels is indistinguishable from before. In terms of the covers, a similar ‘type’ of cover with its 193

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

The post-2009 Pathak novel and the rise of a new readership The readership that this market differentiation has created for Pathak’s ‘non-pulp’ pulp novels deserves attention. Mr Sanjay Gupta, the distribution office manager for Raja Pocket Books, revealed that even as they deemed it difficult to quantify the readership gradation at the distributor level, the overall market for Hindi pulp is shrinking, and that, even as the older readers are still reading these novels – and perhaps, newer pulp markets are being opened to retain those very readers – new readers of Hindi pulp are not forthcoming.22 The first half of Gupta’s statement finds support in figures: even as the average contemporary Pathak novel sells four times more than the average Hindi contemporary pulp novel, the average first print run of his novel today has been reduced to only 30–40,000 copies.23 Sudarshan Purohit, who provides these figures and is also the translator of Pathak’s only two novels available in English, explains Raja Pocket Books’ production 194

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and pricing strategy through another logic.24 He notes that the rise in production quality and price ensures that the profits resulting from the sales of the novels remain the same, since seasoned fans are evidently willing to pay even double the amount for a Pathak novel. However, though it could be one of the reasons, it is perhaps not quite as simple as this, where loyal fan cultures are solely responsible for the sales of the post-2009 Pathak books. Writing in contemporary times is increasingly governed by market considerations, and while Hindi pulp’s swaying to market mechanisms is in itself not new, the trajectory that Raja Pocket Books has taken with the newer Pathak novels requires new ways of theorising Hindi pulp. My findings suggest that, even as the market for pulp has undoubtedly shrunk, there indeed seems to be a new kind of Hindi reader who is willing to pay double or more for these newer novels on offer. This may indeed mean that there is an entirely new class of readers who invest in the new Pathak novel; however, that, again, like the seasoned fans, is not the focus of the essay. The next section centres, instead, on the pre-2009 readers of Pathak and their re-configuration of imagination of themselves as the ‘new’ post-2009 readers of Pathak. In other words, the next section turns to the old readers of pulp who imagine themselves as ‘new’, in the sense that perhaps they can think of the newer form of the already familiar book as a validation of their tastes. I term this subset of readers of Pathak – who appreciate the distinctiveness of the post-2009 Pathak book and are willing to pay more for it and who may or may not include the loyal fans of Pathak – as the middlebrow consumers of pulp. The people I interviewed unanimously agreed that this market gradation was brought about at the author’s own insistence.25 Pathak has himself indicated that he wanted to differentiate himself from other pulp writing because of a certain ‘literariness’ that he purports to bring to his audience’s reading experience. In the preface to Dhokhā, or Deception (2009), the fourth in the ‘Crime Club’ series of novels, Pathak wrote that he kept receiving letters from the readers of Midnight Club, the second novel in the series, even after the third novel Jāl, or Web, had been published.26 Usually, Pathak noted, he only received letters about a novel until the next novel was published: I cannot understand any other reason for this new trend – except that the new, improved, spruced-up trend of production that started in pocket books from Midnight Club affected readers very deeply and impressed even those readers who had started turning away from pocket books . . . The letters from 195

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new readers form hardly 5% of my fan mail, but the letters I received regarding Midnight Club – and am still receiving – almost half of them are from new readers. It is a very satisfying and encouraging thing for both the author and publisher that the new ‘beautification’ of Midnight Club succeeded in attracting new readers.27 One of the letters directly quoted by Pathak came from Narayan Singh, a reader from Shahdara in Delhi, who gushed: By publishing novels on high-grade paper, your publisher has taken a revolutionary step in the publishing world. Now this trend should continue so that, after I die, my son can read them, and after him his son – and this is possible only on highgrade paper, not on any other paper.28 Vishnuprasad Mehta, a reader from Bainswara, tellingly declared Midnight Club the ‘first vintage or quality paperback’ in the history of pocket books in Hindi.29 Rajkumar Pandav, a reader from Panipat, congratulated Pathak on publishing Midnight Club for as ‘little’ as sixty rupees but worried over the fact that the publisher might not be making any profits from the book, because that such an ‘umdā’ or ‘excellent’ book must have been produced at a cost higher than what it is being sold for.30 In other words, the change from lugṛi to non-lugṛi seems to embody a transformation in the value of the book itself: excellent, worth keeping. The book has shed the negative connotations of ‘pulp’ and has become respectable. What stands out most pertinently from this preface is Pathak’s own admission that the transformation from lugṛi to non-lugṛi carries its own particular value judgements. However, this formal transformation in value is celebrated by the writer and readers alike. In another preface, Pathak dramatically exclaims, ‘and that lucky day is not far when we all – writers, publishers and readers – will find that pulp fiction has been relegated to the pages of history of Hindi pocket book publishing’.31 According to Pathak, the word ‘pulp’ with its negative connotations itself needs to disappear. If we compare the above preface with the one that Pathak wrote for Mavālī in 1995, we can perhaps begin to understand the subtleties of shifts in the way Pathak’s books are consumed in comparison to twenty years ago. Mavālī’s preface sees Pathak being extremely apologetic about the future increase in his book’s price from fifteen rupees

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to twenty rupees. In response to the negative reactions of Pathak’s readers to the price of Stop Press, the novel that preceded Mavālī, Pathak wrote: I’d like to inform you that despite the fact that the dearness and scarcity of paper remain unchanged, the publisher has ensured that there is only a minimal difference in the quality of this novel and Stop Press, although it seems unlikely that they might be able to keep this up in the future. What I am getting at is that in the near future it is inevitable that the new novels will be priced at twenty rupees, which is a development that you should be ready for.32 Two things become apparent: first, that Pathak has always been aware of the reactions of his reading public who actively make their thoughts known to him particularly with respect to the pricing of the novels and, second, he has negotiated actively with these expectations in the past. What has changed is that, unlike the 1990s, when the writer offered justification to his readers, the post-2009 readers themselves are apologetic about contributing too little to the publisher’s profits. In terms of language of the post-2009 Pathak novels, all the people I interviewed in the course of this study stressed the ‘formal’, ‘serious’ and ‘literary’ usage of language by Pathak.33 One interviewee, an employee of Raja Pocket Books, said that the lexicon of Pathak ‘is beyond the reach of say, Ved Prakash Sharma’s readership of rickshaw pullers and lower classes’.34 In comparison to other contemporary writers, the readers of Pathak celebrate his investment in language. Yet another point of differentiation between Pathak and other Hindi ‘pulp’ novelists lies in Pathak’s plot constructions: the nature of his plots is described as ‘complicated’ and, significantly, ‘real’. If depicting and experiencing contemporaneity lies at the sensual heart of crime fiction, Pathak’s claim is that he makes his reader experience contemporaneity, technology and modernity in ‘real’ and, ‘believable’ ways. Indeed, crime fiction as a genre particularly functions on the basis of circumstances rooted in reality as experienced in everyday life, mysteries that people can engage with and find palatable, even as they cannot solve them in the way that the protagonists can. The idea of ‘believability’ in a Pathak novel, by contrast, is conveyed in terms of a highly exaggerated aim towards

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a truth-effect so that the reader can understand and, subsequently, agree with it. In the preface to Chembūr kā Dātā, Pathak mentions a reader’s letter: Narendra Malik, a civil engineer from Chandigarh, noticed a discrepancy in the salary of a police sub-inspector, which I had written to be 12–13 thousand. According to his letter, from 1.1.2010, the salary for a sub-inspector was 23,355 including basic pay and all allowances. In this context he also referred to the sixth Pay Commission according to which it is compulsory for a sub-inspector’s salary to be between 25 and 30 thousand.35 The reader is thus involved in the reading of a Pathak novel not merely with respect to consuming and judging it on the basis of how much pleasure it provides her/him. Quite relevant to our mapping of this impulse of the ‘new’ or middlebrow reader, Pathak’s reader is also an active participant in the formation of a ‘believable’ plot with Pathak himself, for instance, even educating him on the salary a sub-inspector actually gets. In the preface to Choron kī Bārāt, or The Procession of Thieves, Pathak himself acknowledges this shift in his, and the readers’, idea of the thriller. With respect to the ‘Sunil’ series of novels, Pathak says that he has to construct an appropriate storyline given the pace of the novel – the average ‘Sunil’ novel runs over a diegetic time of three to four days – and this particular pacing does not allow for the use of clues such as fingerprints, as: Reports are received after a long time. Some tests require samples to be sent to labs set up in Hyderabad, Chandigarh, etc. Now think for yourself: If a sample is sent to these places from Delhi, how long will it take to get the results?36 Pathak refuses to compromise on the plausibility of events, always giving primary importance to believability and reasonableness rather than plotlines that might be more exciting or thrilling. This insertion of the ‘believability’ clause – that is, moving the action into the world of the everyday – reduces the enterprise of the erstwhile crime ‘thriller’ in Hindi pulp of the ’80s and ’90s to something that is, affectively, not ‘thrilling’ at all. This new articulation of the thriller in India has a new audience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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INDEX

‘20 Rules for Writing Detective Stories’ (Dine) 3 – 4 Aajgubi (Majumdar) 78 Abhinavagupta 103, 105, 107 – 108, 109 adbhuta rasa 105, 109, 115 – 116; causes of 110; ‘Journey into Darkness, A’ (Jawadekar) 110 – 112; Khagam (Ray) 112 – 114; Rokto Golap o Rongin Sura (Das) 114 – 116 Adi community of Arunachal Pradesh 125 – 127, 131 – 133, 134 Adi Parva (Patil) 9, 159, 161, 166 – 170 African literature 175, 176 Agyeya 95 aitihasik (historic) 164 Akasher Katha (Chaudhuri) 80 Akash Ghati (Majumdar) 78 Allahabad University 101 Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) 166, 167, 169, 170, 182 Amazon India 143, 170 Ambedkar, Bhim Rao 176; see also Bhimayana American Futurians 4 amrit-manthan 169 – 170 Anand, S. 177 Ananta Vikatan 11, 17 – 18, 20 – 34 Anthology of Contemporary Poetry from the Northeast (Ngangom and Nongkynrih) 123 Ao, Temsula 9, 121, 123 – 124, 126, 127, 128 – 129, 130, 133 – 134

Apradhini (Shivani) 98 – 100 Apu Trilogy, The 114 Arni, Samhita 141, 146, 148, 152 – 154; see also Missing Queen, The (Arni) Arthur C. Clarke Award 2 Arunachal Pradesh 135n15; Adi community of 125 – 127, 131 – 133, 134 Aryavarta Chronicles (Udayasankar) 9, 159, 161 – 166 Asiatic Society 74 – 75 Asrar-e Darbar-e Harampur (Sharar) 53 Asrar-e Hind 52 Asrar-e Ma’abid (Premchand) 52 asrar novels (Urdu) 51 – 54; see also specific novel Assamese 122 Atwood, Margaret 2, 163 Austen, Jane 175 Baapre ki bhayanak Ashwiney jhar (Bandyopadhyay) 61 Baapre ki bisham jhar (Chakraborti) 64 Babusa ka Chakravyuh (Mohan) 192 Bachchan, Harivansh Rai 94, 101 Bandyopadhyay, Bhabanicharan 58 Bandyopadhyay, Chintamoni 68 Bandyopadhyay, Kailashchandra 61 – 62 Banerjee, Sarnath 9

203

INDEX

Bangiya Bigyan Parishad 77 Banker, Ashok 143, 160 Basu, Samit 160 Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (Miller) 178 Battala, Bengal 59 Bengal: bhadralok community 57 – 58; caste hierarchies in 57 – 58; cholera epidemic of 1817 65; dengue spread 65 – 66; education in 58 – 59; science fiction in 5, 73 – 84; weird/horror story 112 – 114; see also chapbooks Bengali 122 Bennett and Coleman (B&C) 95 Bentinck 61 bhadralok community, in Bengal 57 – 58 Bhagat, Chetan 12, 144 Bhakti movement 103 – 104 Bhandari, Mannu 93, 94 Bharati, Dharmvir 94 Bharati fantasy 160 bhasha literatures 8; mythological fiction 6 Bhattacharya, Monoranjan 77 Bhattacharya, Sucheta 10 bhayanaka rasa 105, 109, 110; ‘Journey into Darkness, A’ (Jawadekar) 110 – 112; Khagam (Ray) 112 – 114; Rokto Golap o Rongin Sura (Das) 114 – 116 Bhimayana 9, 175 – 186; books 177, 178; caste and 181 – 183; as graphic novel 177 – 181; historical context 182; as the ‘popular’ 183 – 185; teaching 185 – 186 bibhatsa rasa 105, 109, 110 Birth of Venus (Boticelli) 169 Blanford, Henry 61 blogosphere 1 Boats on Land (Pariat) 124, 136n18 Bodo language 122 Bose, Satyendranath 77 Bourdieu, Pierre 184, 199 Branson, Richard 166 Breuck, Laura 180 British India 73 Byomjatrir Diary (Ray) 78

calamity chapbooks 11 Calcutta Chromosome, The (Ghosh) 2 Calcutta School Book Society 74 camatkara 107 – 108 Campfire 167 capitalist society 58 Carroll, Lewis 176 caste: Bhimayana and 181 – 183; General category 177; reality of 181; reservation based on 177 – 178 caste-based violence 182 Chakrabarty, Arindam 108 Chakraborti, Haribandhu 64 Chakraborty, Nagendranath 77 chakuris 57 Chander, Krishan 93 Chandra, Nandini 166, 183, 184 chapbooks, Bengal 11, 57 – 69; caste hierarchies in 57 – 58; cholera epidemic of 1817 65; dengue spread 65 – 66; disease-related narratives 65 – 68; natural disasters in 60 – 65 charita 6 Chase, James Hadley 193 Chattopadhyay, Bodhisattva 160 Chaudhuri, Supriya 18, 19, 20 Chaudhuri, Upendrakishore Ray 77, 80 Chauhan, Anuja 144 Chavdar Tale Satyagraha 187n10 Chembur ka Data (Pathak) 198 chhayavad poets 94 children’s journals 77 Chokalingam, T. S. 22 cholera epidemic of 1817 65 Chopra, Deepak 166 Choron ki Barat (Pathak) 197 Christie, Agatha 9, 176 Chughtai, Ismat 98 churning of the ocean 169 – 170 Cirpiyin Narakam see Sculptor’s Hell, The (Pudumaippittan) climate change, literature dealing with 2 Coleridge, S. T. 175 comic books 166 – 167

204

INDEX

commercial fiction 143 – 144, 145; see also popular fiction community fiction 121 – 134; as narrative of community 125; see also North-East Indian literature compassionate/pathetic rasa 109 concordant rasas 109 Conrad, Joseph 181 Constitution of India 177, 181 contrapuntal reading 179 Cook, William Wallace 3 Corridor (Banerjee) 9 Cotton University, Assam 121 critical literacy of graphic narrative 180

Dickens, Charles 53, 175 Dihlawi, Syed Ahmad 52 Dinaman 95 Dine, S.S. Van 3 disease-related mythological narratives 65 – 68 ‘Disgust and Ugly’ 108 d’Mello, Melville 90 Doordarshan 100 Doyle, Arthur Conan 81 Dumas, Alexandre 39 Durga Puja 61 Dutt, Guru 93 Dutta, Aminchandra 67 Dwivedi, Hajari Prasad 93

Dai, Mamang 9, 121, 123, 124 – 127, 131, 132 – 134 dalit 180 – 181, 182, 184 – 185, 187n17 Dalit Discourse 176, 184, 186n5 Dalit literature 180 – 181 Dalit Voices 176, 184, 186n5 Dalmia, Vasudha 96 Damarucharita (Mukhopadhyay) 6 Dance (Matisse) 169 Das, Gopalchandra 65 Das, Kanduri Charan 114 – 116 Das, Maheshchandra 66 Das, Prasanta 122 Dasgupta, Prabuddha 169 Dawn Society Magazine, The 76 De, Maheshchandra 62 – 63 De, Manna 93 Deka, Harekrishna 121 Delhi University 9 Dengue jwarer pnachali (Das) 66 Dengue jwar o daktar saheb (Nath) 66 detective fiction 4, 5 Devi 167 ‘Devraj Chauhan’ series (Mohan) 192 Dharmyug 94 – 95 Dharwardker, Vinay 18, 19, 20 Dheeraj Pocket Books 190 Dhokha (Pathak) 195 – 196 ‘Diamond Harbour’ (Bandyopadhyay) 61

East Indian Company 39, 74 – 76 Eki asambhab Karttike jhar (De) 63 ‘Ek Thi Ramrati’(Shivani) 97 Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, The 162 – 163 English fiction: domestic literary scene in 142; fiction market in 142; post-millennial writing 142 – 145 English literature, in Indian universities 175 – 177; institutional assumption 176 – 177; North-East India Studies Programme 121 English newspapers and magazines 101 fantasy 2, 4 Farhang-e Asafiya (Dihlawi) 52 Fasana-e Azad (Sarshar) 53 Fasih, Ghulam Qadir 39 – 40 Ferozepuri, Tirath Ram 48 – 51 Filmfare 95 films 93 Five Point Someone (Bhagat) 12 Flipkart 143 Fort William College 74 forums 1 Frankenstein (Shelley) 111 Funny Boy (Selvadurai) 176 Gandhi’s Salt March 17 Ganga-Jamuni culture of Lucknow 97, 101

205

INDEX

Gastrell, James 61 Gaugin, Paul 168 Gauhati University, Assam 121 Gauhati University Institute of North-East India Studies 121 General category of caste 177 genre(s): as collection of motifs 2; as a container 3; as description of narrative form 1; nonAnglocentrism manifesto 1; usage as a term 1 – 2 genre classifications 2 genre fiction 1; emergence of 5; indigenous roots and traditions 5; major languages 11; in marginalized languages 11 – 12; Mukhopadhyay 6 – 7; myth in 5 – 6; political relevance 7 – 8; postmillennial writing as 142 – 145; Rieder’s analysis of 3, 4 Genre Fiction of New India (Varughese) 143 Ghosh, Amitav 2 Ghosh, Pannalal 90 Gond art/artwork 176, 178, 179, 187n11 Gorakhpuri, Firaq 94, 101 Goswami, Indira 121 Grant, Charles 76 graphic novels 2, 9; Adi Parva 9, 166 – 170; Bhimayana 177 – 181; market for 167 Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, The (Ghosh) 2 Guha, Ananya S. 122 – 123, 126 Gupta, Sanjay 194 Gupta, Suman 143 – 144 Gyan O Bigyan 77 Haider, Qurratulain 98 Hai re ashwine jhar (De) 62 HarperCollins India 166, 167 Harry Potter series 185 Hatfield, Charles 181 Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 181 Heshoram Hushiyarer Diary (Ray) 73 – 74, 81 – 84 Hindi magazines 101

Hindi pulp 189 – 200; authors 190 – 194; as cheap 189; golden age 190; language 189; market for 193, 194 – 195; overview 189 – 190; Pathak on 189; production quality 193 – 194; readers/readership of 194 – 198; small presses and 190 – 193; typesetting 194; see also Pathak, Surender Mohan Hindu College 74 Hindustan Times group 95 Hindutva 12 hippie 93 House With a Thousand Stories, A (Kashyap) 124, 136n17 Huggan, Graham 175 Hum Log 100 Husain, Sajjad 38 Husn ka Daku (Sharar) 53 – 54 Illustrated Weekly of India 95 Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science 76 Indian English publishing industry 159 – 160 Indian Newsreel 90 Indian science fiction 4 – 5; as children and young adult literature 5 Indian Writing in English (IWE) 8 – 10 Industrial Revolution 77 Infibeam 143 inimical rasa 109 itihasa 141, 147, 150, 152, 153 – 154 itihasa-purana tradition 6 Iyengar, V. Ramaswamy 22 Jain, Rama 95 Jain, Sahu 95 Jangalraj (Reema Bharti) 191 Ja re Ekaki (Shivani) 98 Jawadekar, Subodh 110 – 112 Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi 121 Joshi, Ilachandra 94 Joshi, Manohar Shyam 100 ‘Journey into Darkness, A’ (Jawadekar) 110 – 112 Juluri, Vamsee 143

206

INDEX

Kabir 175 – 176 Kadambari 95 Kalidasa 175 Kalikata Kamalalaya (Bandyopadhyay) 58 Kaliyuga: chimaera of 59; corruption of 59; see also chapbooks Kalki 59 kalpavigyan see science fiction (SF) Kamleshwar 95 Kapur, Geeta 19 – 20 Kapur, Shekhar 166 Karttike jharer pnachali (Sarar) 63 – 64 Karttike jhar khandapralay (Das) 64 – 65 Kashite Hoy Bhumikapma, Narider e ki Dambha (Namdar) 60 – 61 Kashyap, Aruni 124, 136n17 Kaviraj, Sudipta 164 Khagam (Ray) 112 – 114 Khairabadi, Riyaz 38 Khan, Amir Abdur Rahman 43 Khan, Amir Sher Ali 43 Khan, Sirdar Ghulam Haidar 43 – 44 Khan, Sirdar Nur Muhammad 43 Kharmawphlang, Desmond 121, 122 Khasi language 122 Kincaid, Paul 162 Klose, Alexander 3 Koli 59 Krishanmurthy, R. ‘Kalki’ 17, 21 – 22, 23, 24, 25 – 26, 28, 32, 33 Krishnakali (Shivani) 95 Lahore 38 – 39 Legends of Pensam, The (Dai) 9, 123, 125 – 127, 130 – 132, 134 liberalisation 159 Lihaf (Chughtai) 98 Liquid Comics 166 – 167 literature, and science 76 – 84 ‘Locating Cultures: A SemiAcademic Essay on the English Poetry of the NorthEast’(Satpathy) 122 Lost Worlds (Doyle) 81

Love in South Asia (Orsini) 10 lower castes 57 Lucknow University 101 Machher basanta (Sharma) 67 Machh khabo ki poka khabo (Bandyopadhyay) 68 magi hatobhagi 67 Mahabharata 9, 143, 145 – 146; see also Adi Parva (Patil); Aryavarta Chronicles (Udayasankar) Mahad Satyagraha 178, 179, 183, 185, 187n10 Majumdar, Leela 73, 74, 77 – 80, 83 Malhotra, Rajiv 155 Mangeshkar, Lata 93 Manikkoti 11, 17 – 18, 20 – 34 Marathi SF 110 – 112 market, for Hindi pulp 193, 194 – 195 Marvel Comics 181 mass cultural genre system 3 Matisse, Henri 169 Maus (Spiegelman) 178 Mavali (Pathak) 196 – 197 McCracken, Scott 144 – 145, 192 McGuire, John 57 – 58 Mehrotra, A. K. 122 Mehta, Vishnuprasad 196 Meitei 122 Mendelsohn, Farah 162 ‘Mera Bhai’ (Shivani) 97 ‘Metro Reads’ 12 middle-class homes 96 – 97 Midnight Club (Pathak) 195 – 196 Miller, D. A. 192 – 193 Miller, Frank 178 Ministry of Information and Broadcasting 100 Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Roy) 170 Ministry of Utmost Happiness,The (Roy) 98 Misra, Tilottoma 131 Missing Queen, The (Arni) 141, 146, 152 – 154 Mistriz af Delhi (Shuhrat) 44 – 48 Mistriz af Firozpur (Ferozepuri) 48 – 51

207

INDEX

Mistriz af Kabul (Khan) 41, 43 – 44 Mistriz af Kohat 41 Mistriz af Pishavar 41 Mistriz af Ravalpindi (Shafaq) 41 – 43 mistriz novels (Urdu) 38 – 51; see also specific novel Mitra, Premendra 78 modernism 18; Kapur’s theorisation of 19 – 20 Mohan, Anil 190, 191, 192 Moore, Alan 178 Mukherjee, Satish Chandra 76 Mukhopadhyay, Trailokyanath 6 – 7 Mukul 77, 80 Mullick, Pankaj 93 Murder in Mahim (Pinto) 12 Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The (Christie) 9, 176 music 93 Mysteries of London, The (Reynolds) 38, 39, 40 – 41, 51 Mysteries of Paris, The (Sue) 40 Mysteries of the Court of London, The (Reynolds) 38, 39, 52 myth and history 163 – 164 mytho-history 163 – 164 mythologerm 5 – 6 mythology-inspired fiction 8 – 9; Adi Parva (Patil) 9, 159, 161, 166 – 170; approaches of telling 146 – 147; Aryavarta Chronicles (Udayasankar) 9, 159, 161 – 166; global reader and 154 – 156; The Missing Queen (Arni) 141, 146, 152 – 154; post-millennial 142 – 145; Pradyumna: Son of Krishna (Narayanan) 141, 146, 147 – 149; proliferation of 144 – 145; retailing/sales 142 – 143, 144; Scion of Ikshvaku (Tripathi) 141, 149 – 152 Nagas 125, 127 – 129, 133, 135n12 Namdar, Munshi 60 – 61 Nanda, Gulshan 93, 193 Narayanan, Usha 141, 146, 147 – 149; see also Pradyumna: Son of Krishna (Narayanan)

‘Narrative of Community: The Identification of a Genre’ (Zagarell) 125 Natarajan, Srividya 177 Nath, Nabakumar 66 National Book Trust 94 national-modern dialectic 19 – 20 natural disasters, Bengali chapbooks 60 – 65 naturalism 39 Natyasastra (Bharata) 103, 104, 108 – 109 Nayar, Pramod 180, 183 – 184, 187n19 Nazar, Naubat Rai 38 Neelakanthan, Anand 171 Neo-Enlightenment sciences 73 – 74, 77 New York Times, The 61 Ngangom, Robin S. 121, 122 Nirala 94 non-Anglocentrism manifesto 1 Nongkynrih, Kynpham Sing 122 North-East India 122 North-East Indian literature 9, 121 – 134; as a genre 122; as insurgency literature 124; Legends of Pensam, The (Dai) 9, 123, 125 – 127, 130 – 132, 134; poets and poetry 122 – 123; These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone (Ao) 9, 123 – 124, 125, 128 – 130, 133 – 134 North-East India Studies Programme 121 Nutan Roga (Dutta) 67 Orsini, Francesca 10 Other Backward Classes (OBCs) 177 Oxford Anthology of Writings from the North-East India: Poetry and Essays, The (Misra) 131 Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets, The (Mehrotra) 122 Pandav, Rajkumar 196 Pande, Mrinal 96 Pant, Gaura see Shivani Pant, Sumitranandan 94

208

INDEX

Paramhamsa, Ramakrishna 58 Pariat, Janice 124, 136n18 Pathak, Surender Mohan 10, 189, 193 – 200; believability in novels of 197 – 198; career and success of 193; compared with other Hindi novelists 194, 197; middlebrow readership 198, 199 – 200; plot constructions 197 – 198; post-2009 novels 194 – 198; on pulp 189; readers/ readership 195 – 198; see also Hindi pulp Patil, Amruta 9, 159, 161, 166 – 170, 171; see also Adi Parva (Patil) Pattanaik, Devdutt 171 pauranik (mythological) 164 Penguin 12, 167 Persepolis (Satrapi) 178, 181 Phukan, Mitra 121 Pinto, Jerry 12 Piprey Puran (Mitra) 78 Plotto (Cook) 3 Pohl, Fredrick 4 Pollock, Sheldon 104, 108 popular fiction 143 – 144, 145; see also commercial fiction Popular Literature, University of Delhi 176; see also Bhimayana post-millennial writing, as genre fiction 142 – 145 Postone, Moishe 58 Pradyumna: Son of Krishna (Narayanan) 141, 146, 147 – 149 Premchand 52 – 53, 93 Priyamvada, Usha 94 production and distribution 3 production quality, of Hindi pulp 193 – 194 publishing industry, Indian English 159 – 160 Pudumappittan 28 – 29, 32 – 33 pulp see Hindi pulp pulp-quality paper 189 Punjab Press, The 39 Puranas 143 Pure Tamil Movement 17, 20, 21, 32, 33 Purohit, Sudarshan 194 – 195

Radway, Janice 10 Raga Piloo 90 Raghavan, Venkataraman 107 Rai, Amrit 94 Rai, Sripat 94 Raja Pocket Books 10, 190, 192, 193, 194 – 195, 197 Ramaiah, B. S. 22 – 23, 24, 26 Ramanujan, A. K. 161 Ramayana 143, 145 – 146; see also Missing Queen, The (Arni); Scion of Ikshvaku (Tripathi) Ramayana 3392 AD 167 Ramayana Reloaded 167 Ramcharitmanas (Tulsidas) 6 Ramdhenu (Bhattacharya) 77 Ramjas College, University of Delhi 176 Random House 12 Ranjit, Colonel 93 rasa: Bhakti movement 103 – 104; camatkara 107 – 108; compassionate/pathetic 109; concordant 109; emotions 104; overview 103 – 105; principles 105 – 108; print culture 104; sadharanikarana 106 – 107; sahridaya audience/spectator 105 – 106; Sanskrit tradition 103, 109; sthayi bhavas 109; types of 109; see also adbhuta rasa; bhayanaka rasa rasa, in contemporary times 5, 103 – 116 ‘Rasa in Shakespeare’ 104 Ravi Pocket Books 190 Ray, Satyajit 78, 93; Byomjatrir Diary 78; Khagam 112 – 114 Ray, Sukumar 73 – 74, 81 – 84 Reader’s Digest 95 Reading the Romance (Radway) 10 realism 39 Reasons for Belonging (Hoskote) 122 Reema Bharti 190, 191 – 192 reservation, caste-based policy of 177 – 178 retellings and re-imaginings 143 Reynolds, G. W. M. 10, 38 – 39, 40; see also Urdu translations of Reynolds’s novels

209

INDEX

Rieder, John 3 River of Stories (Sen) 9 Robinson, Kim Stanley 2 Rokto Golap o Rongin Sura (Das) 114 – 116 ‘Romance@Work’ 12 romance writers 10 Roxburgh, William 75 Roy, Arundhati 170 Roy, Bimal 93 Rushdie, Salman 175 sadharanikarana 106 – 107; see also rasa sadhvis 98 Sahi, VDN 94 Sahitya Akademi 94 Sahityadarpana (Visvanatha) 109 sahityik goshtis (literary soirees) 97 sahridaya audience/spectator 105 – 106 Saket, Pervin 146 sanatan dharma 68 Sandesh 77, 80 – 81 Sanghi, Ashwin 143 Sanskrit 92 Saptahik Hindustan 95, 101 Sarar, Ishwarchandra 63 – 64 Sarika 95 Sarshar, Ratan Nath 53 Satpathy, Sumanyu 122 Satrapi, Marjane 178 Scheduled Castes (SC) 177 Scheduled Tribes (ST) 177 science: East Indian Company and 74 – 76; education of 74 – 76; literature and 76 – 84; NeoEnlightenment 73 – 74, 77 science fiction (SF) 2, 4 – 5; American Futurians 4; Bengal 5, 73 – 84; as children and young adult literature 5; defining 162 – 163; emergence phase writers 4; Marathi 110 – 112; mythology and 159 – 163 Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System (Rieder) 3 Scion of Ikshvaku (Tripathi) 141, 149 – 152

Sculptor’s Hell, The (Pudumaippittan) 29 – 31 Self-Respect Movement 17 – 18, 20, 21, 22, 33 self-styled critics 97 Selvadurai, Shyam 176 Sen, Orijit 9 sentence and solas 5 serialised novel 95, 96 serials 100 Shafaq, Bihari Lal 41 Shakespeare, William 175 Sharar, Abdul Halim 38 Sharma, Dwijabar 67 Sharma, Ved Prakash 190, 193, 197 Sharma, Veena see Reema Bharti Shelley, Mary 111 ‘Shelter’ (Bhimayana) 177, 178 ‘Shillong poets’ 122 – 123 Shiva (lord) 61 – 62 Shivani 10, 89 – 90, 94; Apradhini 98 – 100; ‘Ek Thi Ramrati’ 97; female characters 98; Krishnakali 95; ‘Mera Bhai’ 97; serialised novel 95, 96; social outcasts and 98 Shiva Trilogy, The (Tripathi) 8 – 9, 144, 146 ‘Shortcut’ (Majumdar) 78 – 80 shudras 57 Shuhrat, Muhammad Nisar Ali 44 – 48 Siddiq Book Depot of Lucknow 52 Siddiqi, Salma 94 Singh, Dara 93 Singh, Narayan 196 Singh, Ravindra 12 Sircar, Mahendralal 76 Sitala 67 Sita: Warrior of Mithila (Tripathi) 9, 170 60 Indian Poets (Thayil) 122 Sketches by Boz (Dickens) 53 Small presses, Hindi pulp and 190 – 193 Sobti, Krishna 98 soft-pornographic literature 4 South Asian literary traditions 164

210

INDEX

Udayasankar, Krishna 9, 159, 161, 163 – 166, 171; see also Aryavarta Chronicles (Udayasankar) Urdu novels and novelists 38 – 55; asrar 51 – 54; mistriz 38 – 51 Urdu translations of Reynolds’s novels: Mysteries of London, The 38, 39, 40 – 41, 51; Mysteries of the Court of London, The 38, 39, 52; Premchand on 53 Urmila (Saket) 146

speculative fiction (spec-fic) 160, 162, 163 Spiegelman, Art 178 Srinivasan, K. 22 sthayi bhavas 109 Stop Press (Pathak) 197 Strange Horizons Readers’ Poll Award 1 subgenres 12 Sue, Eugène 40 sugam sangeet 93 Suvin, Darko 162 Swift, Jonathan 39 Tagore, Rabindranath 7, 175 Tamil literature 17 – 34; Krishanmurthy (Kalki) 17, 21 – 22, 23, 24, 25 – 26, 28, 32, 33; modernism 18; new publications 31 – 34; overview 17 – 18; Pudumappittan 28 – 29, 32 – 33; purpose of 24 – 31 teaching Bhimayana 185 – 186 Teaching the Graphic Novel (Hatfield) 181 technology and technoculture 165 Tehri Lakir (Chughtai) 98 television 100 Thapar, Romesh 90 These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone (Ao) 9, 123 – 124, 125, 128 – 130, 133 – 134 Through the Looking Glass (Carroll) 176 ‘Travel’ (Bhimayana) 177, 178 Tripathi, Amish 8 – 9, 143, 144, 160, 170; The Immortals of Meluha 160; Scion of Ikshvaku 141, 149 – 152; The Shiva Trilogy 8 – 9, 144, 146; Sita: Warrior of Mithila 9, 170; Westland and 9, 160 Tuchman, Barbara 68 Tuchman’s Law 68 Tulsi Pocket Books 190 Twitter 1 typesetting, Hindi pulp 194

Valmiki, Om Prakash 175 Varughese, Emma Dawson 6, 160, 161 Venkatachalapathy, A. R. 10 Verma, Mahadevi 94 Verne, Jules 39 vibhavas 110, 113 violence, caste-based 182 Virgin Comics 166; see also Liquid Comics Vishnu 59 Vision after the Sermon (Gaugin) 168 Vividh Bharati 91 – 92 Vogue India 169 vote-bank politics 178 vulgarity 96 vyabhicari bhavas 110 Vyam, Durgabai 176, 177 Vyam, Subhash 176, 177 ‘Waiting to Be Taken Onboard: The Poetry of Robin Ngangom, Desmond Kharmawphlang, and Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih’ (Das) 122 Watchmen (Moore) 178 ‘Water’ (Bhimayana) 177, 178 Way the Future Was, The (Pohl) 4 Western classics 175 Western science 74 – 76, 77, 80 women writers in Hindi 89 – 102 ‘Words of Women, The’ (Dai) 131 – 132 Wordsworth, William 175 WorldCat 40 Zagarell, Sandra 125, 136n20

211