MUCH OF MY READING over the past year has been of modern Hindi fiction, encouraged by the fact that this literature is now increasingly available in English. Remarkably, it is only in the last five years that several landmark Hindi novels have been translated: Yashpal’s voluminous account of Partition and its aftermath, Jhootha Sach; the first of Upendranath Ashk’s six-volume Girti Divarein; Dharamvir Bharati’s Gunahon ka Devta (described as “Hindi’s highest-selling novel”); Jainendra’s Tyagpatra; and Krishna Sobti’s Zindaginaama, which will be out soon. Along with these, I was able to read more recent Hindi works also now out in English translation, such as Kamleshwar’s Kitne Pakistan, Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Khilega Toh Dekhenge, and the fiction of Uday Prakash and Geetanjali Shree.
I belong to that class of Indian readers which has a shadowy relationship with Hindi, in that I read translations from that language without prior knowledge of the original, but with enough of a grasp of the idiom to be able to savour a good translation. But I have also been trying to form an idea of Hindi literature as a whole, not just judge individual works and their renderings. Do these recent translations create a faithful picture, or even a satisfyingly representative one? How can I, as a reader in English, fruitfully compare what the field looks like in the original to how it appears through the lens of translation?
To get the beginnings of an answer to that question, I asked a dozen Hindi writers, readers, translators and critics to tell me what they consider the most worthwhile fiction in the language. Shrilal Shukla’s Raag Darbari, which was first published in translation in 1992 and reissued in 2012; Nirmal Verma’s novels, whose translations too have been reissued; Yashpal’s Jhootha Sach; and the stories of Uday Prakash appeared at the top of several lists. But also prominent in these rankings were titles not available in translation, or whose translations are no longer in print—the iconic 1950s novel Maila Anchal by Phanishwarnath Renu, for instance, and Vinod Kumar Shukla’s famous Naukar ki Kameez.
Even if recent translations present a selective picture, they are creating the outlines of a decidedly modern genre, which took root at the same time as, and is a product of, the nationalist self-awareness of the early twentieth century. This link is best represented by the father of Hindi literature, Premchand, whose fiction continues to be the subject of translation. Other writers currently being translated, such as Yashpal, Jainendra and Ashk, were old enough to have known him and to have, one way or another, been influenced by this originary figure, even if their engagement with Premchand sometimes took the form of quarrels with him. Contemporary Hindi fiction is poorly served by translations. As readers in English, we do not yet know how the tradition created by these earlier writers was extended or broken by their successors, or how, for instance, post-liberalisation India is recreated in their writing. We have to, for the moment, content ourselves with older works.
Yet, reading them in English, the unsettling effect of these works is new. For those of us habituated to contemporary Anglophone fiction, with its largely individual and inward-looking concerns, what is unsettled here is our suspicion of the political as a credible element of the literary, and what is on offer is the possibility of re-examining this suspicion. It is not political ideology that underlies these novels, even if some of their authors have at one time or another professed such ideologies as Marxism and socialism, but a now-discredited notion: idealism. Their characters display a belief in the possibility of their actions leading to a better world, a belief that is sometimes displaced by its twin, disillusionment. Several modern Hindi novels thread this conjoined idealism and despair into bildungsromans featuring anxious, searching young men.
Take Chander and Sudha, Poonam Saxena's translation of Dharamvir Bharati’s 1949 Gunahon ka Devta, which appeared earlier this year, and in which the theme of idealism is dramatically captured in the tortuous love between Chander, a young Allahabad University student, and Sudha, his childhood friend and the daughter of his teacher. The historical context—the war front, ardent socialists dressed in khadi, pressing social and economic questions before the young nation—as well as the exhaustive, sometimes exhausting, discussions of the ideal relations between men and women poised between the new ways and the old, makes Chander and Sudha very much a novel of its time.
Love and the pursuit of the examined life are also the leading concerns of 21-year-old Chetan in Upendranath Ashk’s Girti Divarein, a six-volume epic, the first part of which appeared in 1947 and was published in English this year as Falling Walls, translated by Daisy Rockwell. The squalor of young Chetan’s life in a lower-middle-class Jalandhar mohalla, with an alcoholic father, an abused mother, and a ne’er-do-well brother, place him very far from the Parisian bourgeoisie in the novels of Marcel Proust, to whom he has been compared. One of the luxuries that the narrator’s expansive reflections in Proust’s novels presuppose is leisure, of which Chetan, like his fellow strugglers in Hindi and Urdu literature, has little. He is too busy making a living, however unsuccessfully and half-heartedly, even as he attempts to be a writer. Ashk’s account of the small-time dreamer’s life has little of the literary sophistication of Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Naukar ki Kameez and, despite its humour, none of the satirical force of Raag Darbari—another famous coming-of-age novel—but it is richer than both in local detail.
A young, newly-married clerk, is trying not to lose his footing in Naukar ki Kameez (published in 1979, translated by Satti Khanna as The Servant’s Shirt and currently out of print). Santu Babu, whose story takes place some 20 years down the line from the hopefulness of the Independence years, is bereft of illusions, even though he is not without hope. He is a figure clinging to the fringes of a debased society: the sahibs who will never feed their servants what they eat themselves, the miserly landlord determined not to repair a leaking roof, the employer bullying his staff so as to curry favour with the higher-ups. What enriches the novel is the author’s supremely poetic imagination, which invests the thoughts of a marginal, even superfluous, man with wit and pathos.
Lower-middle-class life, its meanness and charades sometimes making it seem harder than absolute poverty, is also the setting of Rajendra Yadav’s Sara Akash, originally published as Pret Bolte Hain in 1952. This slim, passionate novel, which has never gone out of print in Hindi, concerns a college-going youth’s search for self-expression while trapped in the confines of family life in Agra in the years following Independence. (Ruth Vanita’s English translation, Strangers on the Roof, was first published in 1994 and was reissued last year.) Samar, the hero, refuses to talk to the wife he has been forcibly married to, convinced that marriage is an obstacle in his path to greatness. This is a greatness only very vaguely imagined, and incarnated in heroes who might well be out of a schoolboy’s story-book: Napoleon, Shivaji and Rana Pratap, Gandhi, Nehru and Dayanand Saraswati. It is not their specific philosophies that are of interest here—Samar can at best be described as a confused idealist—so much as the conviction that the call of duty can elevate one beyond the mundane, material world.
In all four novels, redemption is sought in the relationship between the male protagonist and a female partner. This is more liberating than it sounds, because it is set against a background marked by a startling hatred of women. Wife-beating, the patient suffering or sudden suicide of abused married women, the torture of widows, frequent rape and molestation, women seen as objects of lust and at the same time exemplars of loose morals—all of this is the stuff of life, unflinchingly described, in these narratives. While the novels outlined above challenge this conservatism by making their male leads sympathetic to women, the results are not always completely satisfying. Even when women have relatively more say and are given equal space in the narrative, as in Chander and Sudha, it is the man’s crisis that forms the crisis of the novel, with the woman playing an attendant role.
Other writers shy away from these themes, however. Raag Darbari, often considered the most accomplished Hindi novel ever written, features almost no women. Set in the fictional Uttar Pradesh backwoods of Shivpalganj, this relentlessly funny satire from 1968 on the grotesque failures of modern India lampoons societal attitudes to practically everything—from politics to bodily functions, and the many points at which the two intersect. For instance:
A speech is really enjoyable only when both sides know that the speaker is talking absolute nonsense. But some speakers took their work so seriously that the audience occasionally felt that they actually believed what they were saying. As soon as this suspicion arose, the speech would begin to seem turgid and insipid, and have a very bad effect on the digestion of the audience.
In much the same spirit, Shrilal Shukla’s all-male characters discuss semen conservation (“if there was anything valuable in India, it was semen”) and the irrelevance of rape in the backward village where it has not so far “been accepted as a political hand grenade.” Raag Darbari is a deeply cutting novel. As Salman Rushdie famously said about another account of village life, VS Naipaul’s TheEnigma of Arrival, it is a novel devoid of love. The absence of women makes this lack even more chilling.
Nevertheless, many male writers from Premchand on have worried about women, and the breaking out of their female characters has tended to be a measure of the provocativeness of their fiction. The academic Nikhil Govind describes in his recent book Between Love and Freedom: The Revolutionary in the Hindi Novel, how:
Premchand had struggled to make the case through the 1920s for marriages based on the choice of the participants, and not on family, village and caste considerations. And yet in the novels … written from the 1930s, the desire of the protagonists exceeds the simple proprieties of companionship and choice, and extends rapidly into the forbidden, the extra-marital, the quasi-incestuous.
Govind analyses the figure of the revolutionary in the novels of Jainendra, Agyeya and Yashpal, showing how resistance to colonialism among young men and women in the 1930s and 1940s took the form not only of radical politics but also completely new, bold attitudes towards relationships and marriage. Yashpal wrote three novels with women as leading characters—Divya, Amita and Apsara ka Shap—each of which interrogated or revisited common historical narratives through the eyes of a woman. His great Partition novel, Jhootha Sach, which was published in two volumes in 1958 and 1960, just about a decade before Raag Darbari, is also remarkable for the range of its forceful women characters. The scholar Harish Trivedi, in his introduction to the 2010 English edition, This is Not That Dawn, translated by Yashpal’s son Anand, writes that the novel’s women “are nearly all distinctly attractive in traditional feminine ways,” but “turn out to be far more than that. Being women, they are, predictably, the main victims of the catastrophic events and they suffer the most, but then, unusually, they also pick themselves up.”
In his depictions of women, as in so many other ways, Nirmal Verma stands out. His 1974 novel Lal Tin Ki Chhat, (Kuldip Singh’s 1997 translation, Red Tin Roof, was reissued in 2013), closely follows the confused, restless consciousness of a young girl as she flits about in a forlorn Shimla. The novel is remarkable not only for its dreamlike, liminal quality, which seems to place the story outside time, but also for how Verma allows this character, Kaya, to be singular and unresolved rather than merely the sexualised and domesticated figure that female characters often are in the fiction of his peers and predecessors.
His 1964 novel Ve Din, translated as Days of Longing by Krishna Baldev Vaid in 1972, and reissued two years ago, features a similarly inscrutable and self-contained woman, Raina Ramon, an Austrian tourist in Prague, with whom the Nirmal Verma-like narrator, an Indian student moonlighting as an interpreter, falls in love. Many Hindi novelists have concerned themselves with what the woman ought to be—inside the home and outside it—but Verma’s female characters seem indifferent to these paradigms—liberatingly alone, but also lonelier than their counterparts in the other novels.
These complex, sometimes problematic, depictions of women in Hindi fiction by men makes the writing by women of even greater interest. Many have focused very keenly on female lives, most significantly Krishna Sobti, the grand dame of Hindi literature. I was struck by her celebrated 1966 novella Mitro Marjani (To Hell with You Mitro, translated by Gita Rajan and Raji Narsimhan and published in 2007), whose lead character, Mitro, a married woman in a joint family, flirts with her brothers-in-law and openly laments her husband’s sexual timorousness. Her relatives are horrified—the women clamp their hands over their ears, the men abuse and beat her—while Sobti deftly shows how Mitro’s insouciance gives her access to a deeper openness, one that exposes the ploys and evasions of the other characters. Because she is honest about sex, she can be honest about everything else, Sobti seems to suggest.
Her latest novel, Samay Sargam, was published in 2001, and appeared in 2013 as The Music of Solitude in a translation by Vasudha Dalmia. This is a wonderful evocation of the interior life of a single woman called Aranya, growing old in a Delhi flat, measuring out her time slowly and joyfully even as she reflects on the inevitable end. Aranya is fiercely independent, and declares that she is never bored of her own company. Both family and religion, she says, interfere with a precious sense of self. She is comfortably middle-class in the sense of that term before it became associated with the new millennium’s aspirational fever. While she is glad to have a house to call her own, and is proud of her ability to move with the times, her feeling for the atmosphere—sunlight, trees, mountains, air—and the seriousness with which she discusses imponderables while immersed in the daily rounds of life, make her highly endearing.
The woman writer who has found most favour with English translators in recent years is Geetanjali Shree, an established figure of the generation of writers succeeding Sobti’s. Shree has taken what she calls “the unstraight route,” reading widely in both Hindi and English before deciding to write in the former, and trying, in her compact, impressionistic fiction, to break away from the “realism-obsession of much of contemporary Indian literature.” Three of her four novels—Mai, Khali Jagah, and Tirohit—are available in English, the last recently translated as The Roof Beneath Their Feet by Rahul Soni. Much more than Upendranath Ashk, it is Shree who is Proustian in her constant, delicate parsing of memory. The Roof Beneath Their Feet is replete with observations such as “Things don’t really happen when they’re happening. They happen later. When a storm within links them up to the larger picture.” Shree is concerned with the elusiveness and enchantment of the past, and the personal meanings it holds for us, rather than recollection of a documentary nature, which distinguishes her project from a novel like Falling Walls, with its wide social canvas. Her novel is an extended reflection on the fissures in family life, and the secret friendship between two women: the married, respectable Chacho, and the single, free-spirited Lalna. Lalna does not fit into the pigeon-holes of wife, mother, and sister, and is, as a result, both consistently maligned and completely ignored, by her neighbours.
MANY OF THESE NOVELS were published in the 1950s and 1960s, if not earlier, so their translations are of historical interest. Having acquired prominence over time, they come with prior lives in Hindi, especially pertaining to how they related to the contemporary conditions of literature, publication and reception. This wider perspective is most likely out of reach for the lay reader in English.
Despite this limitation, one cannot fail to notice, as I’ve mentioned earlier, that the most pronounced leaning of this literature is towards the political. Anyone with even the most rudimentary familiarity with Hindi letters knows that politics—radically revolutionary, intrinsically progressive or broadly humanist—has been an inspiration from the early decades of the twentieth century. From then on, the question—and the debate—seems to have been how best to be political, rather than whether to be political. I’m using the word 'political' in a broad sense to describe a quality of the writing rather than an affiliation of the writer—that is, the political as an expression of the belief that literature addresses an idea of a larger good, even if its ultimate project is to question or dismantle this idea.
The Hindi novel came of age in an atmosphere of political ferment, and there are well-known landmarks via which one can map the infusion of politics into the literature. One of the language’s best-known poets, Nirala (whose real name was Suryakant Tripathi), broke away from the romantic-mystic free verse he had partly pioneered to write a more progressive poetry in the 1930s. The Progressive Writers’ Conference of 1936, under the chairmanship of Premchand, put out a manifesto urging writers to produce socially-informed literature. This progressivism would itself go on to be challenged, most notably by the legendary Agyeya, or SH Vatsyayan, the poet and novelist who launched prayogvaad, a liberal-humanistic school that favoured literary experimentation.
“It was not a formalist movement in the narrow sense of the term,” Sisir Kumar Das writes of prayogvaad in his History of Indian Literature. “It emerged mainly as a reaction against the doctrinaire approach of the progressive school and the pseudo-realistic and fanatical writings it encouraged.” Agyeya’s introduction to the famous anthology of poems he edited and published in 1943, Tar Saptak, reveals the continuing political bent of Hindi literature. In it he describes prayog as “A profound ethical concern, the quest for new value and searching examination of the basic sanctions or sources of value.” The modernism of prayogvaad seems to depart from its Western counterpart by combining the latter’s call for aesthetic adventurousness with moral urgency.
Reading these novels in English, decades removed from their original context, is a limitation possibly offset by the fact that their contrast with English-language fiction offers us a new perspective. To risk a very broad generalisation, the latter, especially post-Independence, is taken with national or individual identity, whereas the Hindi novel has been concerned with liberation, and not for the individual alone.
A work famous for its unique approach to the social question of liberation, and one which contends with Raag Darbari for the status of Hindi’s greatest, is Phanishwarnath Renu’s Maila Aanchal, a 1954 novel set in a village called Maryganj on the border between Bihar and Nepal. (Indira Junghare’s translation of Maila Aanchal,The Soiled Border, was published in 1991, but is now out of print.) Like Raag Darbari, The Soiled Border is a novel of rural life. Both authors feature other tongues alongside Hindi—Awadhi in the case of Shukla; Maithili, Bhojpuri, Santhali among others in Renu. Independence is part of living memory in Raag Darbari; the novel’s pious yet villainous moving force, Vaidyaji, once revered the British and is now smoothly adept at manipulating for personal gain the institutions—panchayat, co-operative union, local college—created in the wake of the Raj. The Soiled Border, meanwhile, is set in the critical years 1946 to 1948, and life in Maryganj is enchanting political theatre—from the rousing “land to the tiller” cry of the socialists, to an already fraying but self-righteous Congress, to the club-wielding black-capped Sanghis dreaming of an “everlasting Hindu kingdom.”
Despite Renu and Shukla’s common interest in the workings of power in small places, the two books are written in strikingly different tones. There is an unrestrained joy in The Soiled Border, seen in how the novel is carried along, almost entirely, by the voices of its many characters, women as much as men—their idiomatic styles, verbal tics, and even inner thoughts, as well as their songs, sayings, poetry and speeches. The author rarely cuts into this oral richness in his own voice, and so the novel speaks for itself. Raag Darbari is written as a series of bruisingly ironic vignettes on the workings of Indian politics, and it is Shukla himself making these observations. The microcosmic Indian village of The Soiled Border has become a paradigmatic one in Raag Darbari. The journey has been made by dispensing with the anthropology of village life and replacing it with an account of native cunning.
Rahi Masoom Reza’s Aadha Gaon or A Village Divided (translated by Gillian Wright, first published in 1994 and revised in 2003) belongs to the same terrain. This is Reza’s best-known work, a poignant, semi-autobiographical account of the lives of the Shia zamindars in the eastern Uttar Pradesh village of Gangauli, from the start of the Second World War to Partition and after. Much of the village’s social life revolves around the ten-day Shia festival of Moharram, which is described in loving detail. Alongside this, the complex, sometimes fractious relations among the Shias, and between them and Gangauli’s other communities, is the stuff from which Reza creates the rich texture of this novel. Of particular interest are the ties between upper-class Saiyids and lower-caste Hindus: a relationship of loyalty, friendship and even love, which defies the rhetoric of Partition and its votaries, who claim, when trying to convert the sceptical of Gangauli, that “If Pakistan is not created the eighty million Muslims here will be made, and made to remain, untouchables.”
A Village Divided lingers on the idea of home, and how attachment to the native place goes against the belief in politically imagined homelands. Reza, better known as the screenwriter of BR Chopra’s Mahabharat television series, was a poet as well as a novelist, who wrote in both Hindi and Urdu. In this novel, he is devoted to capturing the ways in which people speak. Much of the dialogue—about local politics, court cases, land reforms, the Muslim question, the gossip about relatives and neighbours—passes through the half-comprehending ears of the first-person narrator, a child, and creates a dreamy patchwork effect.
Reading Reza, I realised that the story of Hindi literature is incomplete without taking its Urdu counterpart into account, and vice versa. Premchand himself wrote in both tongues, and ever since, Hindi writers have treated the boundaries of these languages as fluid. They have often veered to that end of this linguistic spectrum which segues into Urdu, or brought affiliated local tongues into Hindi. Urdu literature, too, has been the recent object of translators’ interest, especially so with its short stories—such as those of Saadat Hasan Manto, Krishan Chander and Naiyer Masud—in which it has a richer tradition than the novel.
Reza, Gangauli, and Aadha Gaon make their appearance in a more recent Hindi novel, Kamleshwar’s Kitne Pakistan (translated as Partitions by Ameena Kazi Ansari and published in 2006) in which Partition has moved on from being a specific historical fact to an overarching metaphor for sectarian violence anywhere. Partitions is both a discourse on history and a reflection on the role of the novelist in it. The unnamed writer, or adeeb, is the central figure, holding court throughout its pages, to which seemingly all the world’s victims of injustice throng, as does “a visibly disturbed” Rahi Masoom Reza, whose characters are trying to resist the idea of Pakistan. This metafictional tableau completely undoes the form of the realist novel, which cannot, it suggests, encompass the madness of the twentieth century through its well-rounded tales, with their conventional beginnings and pat endings.
It is, however, a grandly realist novel that is the most famous imagining of Partition in Hindi—Yashpal’s This is Not That Dawn. “I am Gangauli,” says a character in A Village Divided, trying to deflect the visitors from Aligarh bent on convincing him that his true homeland is Pakistan. It is this same close identification with the beloved place that powers Yashpal’s novel, which he began writing in the mid 1950s, after a visit from India, where he lived after Partition, to his hometown of Lahore.
The figure of the cosmopolitan narrator who revisits, in writing, the distanced setting of his past—evident in Yashpal’s return to Lahore, in Reza’s nostalgia, in the defamiliarising asides in Raag Darbari, in Renu’s masterful and amused descriptions of village life—is also present in later Hindi fiction, such as Manohar Shyam Joshi’s charming 1995 novella T’Ta Professor, in which the narrator reminisces about his time as a village schoolmaster, or those of Uday Prakash’s short stories set in the Madhya Pradesh village where he grew up.
Prakash, who came to public attention in the 1990s, is perhaps the best-known Hindi writer today, and certainly the one most blisteringly critical of contemporary society. While most Hindi writers have moved with ease between the full-length novel and the short story, Prakash has brought the intermediate form to centre stage in works such as Peeli Chhatri Wali Ladki, which was translated in 2008 by Jason Grunebaum as The Girl With the Golden Parasol. Three of his long stories, also translated by Grunebaum, appeared in a 2013 collection called The Walls of Delhi, including ‘Mohandas,’ whose publication in Hindi proved a turning point in Prakash’s popularity.
‘Mohandas’ is a story both tender and terrifying about a man fighting a hopeless war against a caste- and influence-driven system. The author addresses urgent asides to the reader about the degradation of our world, interventions so bleak that they threaten to derail the already anguished narrative. As Mohandas, an intelligent but dirt-poor boy from a backward caste, goes about trying to reclaim the job that is his, but which a better-connected man has stolen by impersonating him, Prakash writes:
I bet you’re thinking that I’m taking advantage of the one hundred and twenty fifth anniversary of the birth of Premchand, the King of Hindi Fiction, to spin you some hundred-and-twenty-five year-old story dressed up as a tale of today. But the truth is that the account I am putting before you, in its old and backward style, manner, and language, is a tale of a time right after 9/11, in the aftermath of the collapse of the World Trade Center in New York; a time when two sovereign Asian nations were reduced to ash and rubble. It’s a tale of a time when anybody worshipping any gods other than the god of the US and Europe were called fascists, terrorists, religious fanatics.
This direct address, the locating of the stories in a political present, as well as Prakash’s frequent insistence that his tales are utterly true, even while breaking the illusion of realist fiction, gives them a forceful moral charge. In an era in which even the written word is suspect (he speaks in one story of the “impure, dirty money” that sustains recent literature), the writer apparently has no choice but to find other, more flagrant means of getting his point across. The cosmopolitan narrator here is the last living link between the many voiceless, subterranean Mohandases and the visible world.
Manohar Shyam Joshi’s young protagonist in T’Ta Professor (Ira Pande’s translation was published in 2008) is a less desperate figure. He has great literary ambitions, so when he lands up in a Kumaoni village as a schoolteacher, his bumbling colleagues seem perfect material for a comedy, especially the antics of T’Ta Professor who, with his shabby Western clothes and misplaced obsession with the English language, is easy to ridicule. The novella, set in the early 1950s, offers a glimpse of the literary possibilities then available to the Hindi writer. The school clerk writes “horrendous romantic verse” and “had never heard of T.S. Eliot, or of that avant-garde poetry journal, Taar Saptak.” The narrator dreams, in his own literary creations, of combining “DH Lawrence with Upton Sinclair, and Ageya with Premchand.” Bound to upholding the progressive principles of Hindi literature, even as he and his friends consume pornographic Western novels, Joshi’s master-sahib contemplates ways of writing about sex, as T’Ta’s story becomes less comedic and more about “lust and longing.”
Chekhov and Premchand might be expected names here; that Steinbeck and Sinclair were being read alongside them highlights the eclecticism of the era. In one scene, the narrator is in bed in his Kumaoni village reading Romain Rolland’s Jean Christophe. The Nobel laureate’s work appears again in Upendranath Ashk’s introduction to Falling Walls, where he mentions reading it over many sessions at a bookshop in 1930s Lahore because he couldn’t afford to buy it. “I liked its pattern,” he writes. Ashk’s reading—other than Rolland, he informs us that he has drawn on Turgenev, Galsworthy, Woolf, Sholokov and Premchand—convinces him, in just the same way that all this world literature acted on his contemporaries, to write about what he knows well: lower-middle-class life in Punjab.
BUT EVEN IF THE LIVES OF SMALL-TIMERS in the mohalla, village or kasba appears to be the natural subject of Hindi fiction, these writers, despite producing such rooted works, were often working , in the manner of most modernists, against the grain. Shrilal Shukla has said that when he was writing Raag Darbari in the 1960s, there was “no realistic description of the terrible condition of farmers in Hindi literature. Apart from a few works by Premchand, whenever the topic has been written about it has been so tear-jerkingly sentimental that one can hardly recognize the issue.” Similarly, The Soiled Border might seem, to the present-day reader, to emerge from a grand tradition of village narratives, but this was apparently the first time since Premchand that a writer focussed so closely on rural life.
Renu is known for having set off a new turn called anchalik, or regional, fiction and was associated with the Nayi Kahani, or New Story movement, his shorter fiction appearing in a magazine of the same name. This was started in the 1950s by writers such as Rajendra Yadav, Mohan Rakesh, Nirmal Verma and Kamleshwar, whose aim was to go beyond the social concerns of the progressives and explore individual experience more directly through urban angst and personal relationships.
It says something about the fascinating continuities in Hindi literature that radically different writers such as Verma and Renu could, striking out in new directions, find themselves under the same umbrella. To the reader in English, from her distanced vantage, these continuities stand out rather more than the differences. One reason these novelists were able to maintain a sense of tradition, even while challenging conventions, is their bond with a literary public sphere that went beyond their individual books—a sphere that consisted of movements, manifestoes, and a huge number of widely-read little magazines. Many Hindi writers also studied at the once famous Allahabad University; Agyeya, Bharati, Kamleshwar and Shrilal Shukla were all drawn to it in the 1940s and 1950s.
Writers in Hindi have tended to state their positions up front rather than leaving readers to infer them from their fiction, and magazine essays have played a critical part in this. “It is difficult to overestimate the role that Hindi literary journals—miscellanies, really—played in the early decades of the twentieth century,” says Gillian Wright, the translator of Raag Darbari, in her introduction to the novel. “They wove together a Hindi-reading public and a community of writers (both male and female) from across the wide expanse of north India that stretched for thousands of miles between Rajasthan and Calcutta, and instilled a taste for modern poetry and prose.”
Hans, the magazine started by Premchand in 1930, may be the only one today that remains from that era. Revived by Rajendra Yadav in the 1980s, it has in recent years been edited by the noted writer Ajay Navaria, and continues to be the best-known literary magazine in Hindi. Uday Prakash’s fame, for instance, grew with the publication of his stories in Hans.
It is striking how so many of the novels recently translated into English capture life at a modern, usually mid- to late-twentieth-century, juncture. The dodgy, if not outright corrupted, nature of this modernity is what gives these novels their charge. It could be argued that the first Hindi novels were products of this hit-or-miss modernity, and so reflect many of its tensions: the reading of Western literature combined with writing in an Indian tongue, the excitement of the new nation corroded by the horrors of Partition, the Nehruvian dream shot through with the awareness of wrenching injustices.
One response to the obvious markers of the modern—the English language, urban professions, Western clothes, liberated women and, of course, wealth—is to laugh at them or, at the very least, wryly consider them exotic and out of reach, as the narrator of T’Ta Professor does. This, too, is Santu Babu’s attitude in The Servant’s Shirt. He describes himself as looking in on the modern age through “doors as strong as vaults and as transparent as glass.” Peering through this obstacle, his wife and he acquire knowledge of things they will never experience themselves, such as air travel or fashionable clothes. “My method allowed me to be modern without great expense,” he declares.
A Village Divided captures the harsher modernity of the mid-twentieth century as it is suddenly visited upon Gangauli: the world war to which the village sends its unknowing young men, and the idea of a partition which is alien to a people whose worldview does not include abstractions such as the nation state. “Ba’ji, what’s Pakistan?” asks a young girl in the novel. “‘It’s a country that will be made for the Muslims,’ replied Sarwari like a great scholar. ‘What is a country, Ba’ji?’ This question completely stumped Sarwari as she didn’t know what a country was either.”
Raag Darbari can be read as one long loud laugh at the expense of the modern, embodied in Rangnath, a visitor from town with an MA in histor. Rangnath’s naive morals are of little account amidst the villagers’ complex machinations. Shukla jibes constantly at intellectuals “who occasionally become afflicted with a certain disease which is known as ‘crisis of conscience,’” and “whose intellect makes them deliver speeches on what others should and should not do and keeps them miles removed from the vulgar thought that they, too, have some responsibility for all the things which are left undone,” as well as at the farcical education system which produced them. This is very reminiscent of Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August but the perspective in that novel is here turned on its head—the cosmopolitan is still the figure watching the hinterland, but he’s also the leading idiot. (It’s interesting that these novels, though separated by 20 years, are both the products of their authors’ experiences as civil servants.)
All these accounts of modernity derive their edge from the fact that they are essentially stories of ordinary people for whom a certain kind of secure, complacent existence remains out of reach. There is no ready deliverance imaginable for these characters, and, as a result, many of their creators sidestep the conventional teleology of the nineteenth-century novel—the resolution in ultimate triumph despite much sorrow. “Renu presents a village which is rapidly changing under the forces of the modern age,” says his translator Indira Junghare in her introduction to The Soiled Border. The novel does end on a mildly optimistic note, but the modern age has not really altered the ground rules. When the Santhals—who have slaved for the zamindars for four generations despite the fact that “not even the land on which they built their huts was theirs”—are incited to revolt by the socialists, the other villagers involved in the conflagration are able to bribe the police to get away, while the Santhals get life sentences. The tehsildar has a mild change of heart, but his benevolent gesture at the end of the novel is only possible because he still rules the village, and over villagers who, as also in Reza’s novel, remain sweetly innocent of what it might mean to share the fruits of independence. (“Do you think independence is some kind of pumpkin you can slice up and distribute?” asks one character.)
Premchand set a high tragic note in his fiction about the rural poor, but there is nothing grandiloquent about the poverty described in modern Hindi fiction. “I did not want to excel at enduring sorrow and qualify for the town team of sufferers or the district team. No one’s father gained fame from his son being a skilled sufferer,” says the ever self-aware Santu Babu. Samar, in Strangers on the Roof, wearing patched trousers and unable to put together money for college books; or Chetan in Falling Walls, working at a newspaper for a pittance and living in a Lahore slum; or the nameless narrator in Those Days, hoarding empty liquor bottles for a few coins; are all moderate sufferers. But as the nature of the middle class changes and it becomes more obviously prosperous, these once ordinary characters of an earlier fiction are, as is evident in Uday Prakash’s stories, sidelined. They become not just aberrations in the landscape but invisible in it, as his story ‘Walls of Delhi’ shows.
The poor, the sick, the street corner prophets, the lowly, the unexceptional—all gone! They’ve vanished from this new Delhi of wealth and wizardry, never to return, not here, not anywhere else. Not even memories of them will remain.
There was a time, all these novels seem to say, when one might have been middle class, high-caste and poor. Poverty could transcend class and caste, but those disenfranchised by class and caste in addition to poverty are, it turns out, difficult to adequately speak of or for, even by these highly socially aware writers. Such figures do appear in these novels, but fleetingly. They live lives so peripheral and pared down that they become, bizarrely, more otherworldly in their outlook than the other characters.
In his essay ‘Lighting Out for the Territory,’ published in these pages in 2011, S Anand argued that our fiction in English does little justice to the Indian underclass. Writers either romanticise these figures or portray them as victims, and the history of Dalit resistance and protest, which goes back at least to the early twentieth century, is largely ignored.
In the Hindi fiction I have been reading, caste and its ingrained hierarchies are usually present but rarely operative factors.Caste makes nothing happen, other than reinforcing itself. Challenges to it are largely ridiculous. As is explained in Raag Darbari, “An untouchable is a kind of biped which, before the enforcement of the Indian Constitution, people used to not touch. The Constitution is a poem, in Clause 17 of which, untouchability stands abolished.” It is only in recent accounts by Dalit writers of their lives and milieu, such as Om Prakash Valmiki’s autobiography Joothan or the fiction of Ajay Navaria, both of which have been translated into English in this millennium, that we get to hear these “bipeds” speak.
TRANSLATED LITERATURE has an ambiguous status in India. There is a sense of national importance attached to the project of translating between Indian languages, evident in the Sahitya Akademi’s mission. That the translations put out by the Akademi are often weak and not widely available reinforces the perception that translation is usually undertaken out of a sense of obligation rather than engagement. The reader in English, having read too many unsatisfying translations and being repeatedly told by those in the know that the best Indian literature is “untranslatable,” tends to be wary. And then there is that other lingering concern: is one reading particular Hindi novels in English because they had a prior importance in Hindi, or is it the imprimatur of translation that has given them a new life?
The informal survey that I conducted among Hindi readers and writers brought up significant novels that are not available in English, such as Kashi ka Assi by Kashinath Singh, which the novelist Siddharth Chowdhury said is “a brilliant and ribald look at communalism and the Indian political scene around the time of the Babri Masjid demolition. Brave and politically incorrect. Untranslatable.” So also the famous Hindi writer Amrit Lal Nagar’s best-known work, Amrit Aur Vish, a mid-1960s state-of-the-nation novel which was apparently translated into Russian and several Indian languages, but not English. The historical novel Banbhatt ki Atmakatha, about the poet at the court of the seventh-century king Harshavardhan, by the savant Hazari Prasad Dwivedi, is another notable omission.
That some of the “great” books have been translated is no surprise, but these lone titles could obscure other, equally relevant works by the writer in question. The novelist Amitabha Bagchi said that Shrilal Shukla’s Bishrampur Ka Sant deserves more attention than Raag Darbari. He calls it “one of the most important Indian novels written about the relationship between the political and the personal, not in the sense that the women’s movement has used this phrase, more in the sense of the ‘public’ exterior and the interior. But unfortunately, the popularity of Raag Darbari has eclipsed other, possibly more important, works like Bishrampur Ka Sant.” The Hindi novelist Mridula Garg considered Manohar Shyam Joshi’s best novel to be one that has not been translated into English: Kuru Kuru Swaha. Garg herself, author of almost 30 works, has been very sparsely translated.
Even though younger writers such as Shree and Prakash have fared better where translations are concerned, the economy as well as the politics of publishing translations seems to favour authors’ best-known works, often leaving out very large bodies of work in different genres. Hindi still awaits dedicated translators, such as Constance Garnett for Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, or CK Scott Moncrieff for the novels of Marcel Proust. Remarkably, even the king himself remains to be translated comprehensively.Translator and professor of English M Asaduddin, at Jamia Millia Islamia University, has been overseeing a long-running Premchand translation project (which I’ve been involved in marginally, through my translation of two stories). Asaduddin told me, “We are translating his short fiction corpus, which consists of 300-odd short stories. Of these 300, about 70 are currently available in English translation—good, bad and indifferent.”
It’s possible that the haze through which we still view Hindi literature will clear once we can read all of Premchand in English, or the collected works of Hazari Prasad Dwivedi, Amritlal Nagar, Vinod Kumar Shukla or Mridula Garg. Despite recent publishing efforts, the meagreness of translations from Hindi (and from Indian literature in general, I’d hazard) is matched only by our alarming confidence in pronouncing on this literature and its shortcomings—as Salman Rushdie did, absurdly, in 1997, claiming that the best post-Independence literature has been written in English. More recently, in an article earlier this year in the New York Times, Aatish Taseer bewailed the ruin of Indian languages at the hands of English but paid no heed to the fact that many of these supposedly impoverished languages have created literatures that could be more varied and sophisticated than the one English has created.
If one assumes that translation is a good thing, then these polemics show why we need more and better translations, which are widely read and written about, to complicate the monochromatic understanding of what Indian literature is. So even if an argument is made, in the spirit of resisting the dominance of English, that translations have no inherent value for the original literature in question, or that Indian languages do not really need translation, it’s quite clear that we readers in English certainly do. Translators themselves are perhaps the best champions for this position. Some of those I interviewed uphold the importance of good translations, but also the impossibility of achieving them.
Rahul Soni, who is responsible for two excellent recent translations—Shree’s The Roof Beneath Their Feet, and Shrikant Verma’s collection of poems, Magadh—said he admired Krishna Baldev Vaid’s translations of Verma’s fiction, but is, on the whole, worried about the quality of translations from Hindi into English. Dharamvir Bharati’s Suraj ka Satvan Ghoda is high on his list of Hindi greats, but it “was translated very badly,” Soni told me, “by Agyeya of all people.” The translator of Upendranath Askh, Daisy Rockwell, echoed Soni’s concern. She said her top choices among Hindi novelists—Shrilal Shukla and Phanishwarnath Renu—are “exceedingly difficult to translate properly, but they have been translated.” This dissatisfaction, when expressed by translators, could be a good thing—it has certainly spurred Soni to try and translate Bharati’s novel himself. Rockwell is a highly adept translator as well, and her Falling Walls animates a great deal of what is in the original—the hero’s frustrations, the narrowness, literally and metaphorically, of mohalla life, and Ashk’s feeling for the vernacular.
Many of the translations I read are, in fact, a delight. Baldev Vaid’s translations of Nirmal Verma’s novels are highly readable and almost worryingly smooth—one can forget the presence of the Hindi behind the English, and not just because the setting is sometimes European. Jason Grunebaum’s supple rendering of Uday Prakash is a model of translation. Satti Khanna perfectly captures the anguished ironies of Santu Babu’s outlook. Gillian Wright, in Raag Darbari and A Village Divided, seems to do the absolute best a translator can with the hard job of communicating in one language the multiple tongues and registers of the originals. And Indira Junghare’s The Soiled Border, despite the consensus that Maila Aanchal is beyond translation, is a lively and spontaneous rendition (the occasional Americanisms—“ol’boy,” “buddy,” “chipper,” “heck”—notwithstanding), complete with the many songs and vocalisations of the music accompanying them that Renu is so partial to. Gita Rajan and Raji Narsimhan do an admirable job with Mitro’s bantering, buoyant voice in their version of Sobti’s Mitro Marjani.
Some texts—Vasudha Dalmia and Ameena Kazi Ansari’s, for instance— could have benefitted from a keener editorial eye. They sometimes lack euphony and cadence, and are marred by the Indian overuse of “had” and “would.” Ruth Vanita’s Strangers on the Roof is perhaps the most wooden among the translations I read, weighed down with far too many idiomatic cliches—“with a sinking heart,” “grows by leaps and bounds,” “die a thousand deaths,” “writhing in pain,” “shudder from head to foot,” “did not sleep a wink,” “the dam would burst,” and so on.
It was while reviewing the first edition of this translation in 1995 that Shama Futehally, one of our most discerning critics on translation, said, “Of late it has seemed to me that anyone approaching our regional literatures through English translation would be led to believe that all of Indian literature is written in a monotone.” Futehally continued with this theme in another essay, remarking that “we—the English-speaking generation—have still not developed a bilingual consciousness. In our minds, English and the Indian languages do not meet on equal terms; they meet in the spirit of a tourist meeting a craftsman.”
Twenty years is not a particularly long time in the life of a literary culture, but the idiom of translation nevertheless shows some evidence of “misbehaving” in the ways that Futehally wanted, by taking on a life of its own. Moreover, the collective effort she saw as necessary to improving translations appears to be in the making. This emerging plethora of translations, even if not all equally competent, and still only a limited reflection of modern Hindi literature, is nevertheless cause for cheer. If nothing else, it will help us turn away from stale debates about English versus Hindi and towards the medial, and therefore much more interesting, entity that is literature in translation.