Fiction as History

The Novel and the City in Modern North India

Vasudha Dalmia

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781438476070
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

Vasudha Dalmia offers a panoramic view of the intellectual and cultural life of North India over a century, from the aftermath of the 1857 uprising to the end of the Nehruvian era. The North's historical cities, rooted in an Indo-Persianate culture, began changing more slowly than the Presidency towns founded by the British. Dalmia takes up eight canonical Hindi novels set in six of these cities—Agra, Allahabad, Banaras, Delhi, Lahore, and Lucknow—to trace a literary history of domestic and political cataclysms. Her exploration of the emerging Hindu middle classes, changing personal and professional ambitions, and new notions of married life provides a vivid sense of urban modernity. She argues that the radical social transformations associated with post-1857 urban restructuring, and the political flux resulting from social reform, Gandhian nationalism, communalism, Partition, and the Cold War shaped the realm of the intimate as much as the public sphere. Love and friendship, notions of privacy, attitudes to women's work, and relationships within households are among the book's major themes.

I

TOWARDS MODERNITY

1

Merchant Lives in Mughal Agra and British Delhi

THE NOVEL IN HINDI has a symbiotic relationship with its own modernity.1 From the late nineteenth century individual Hindi novels imagined, anticipated, and documented vast cultural and social changes in North Indian society era of which the beginning can be dated to the years after the great uprising of 1857—though there is also a strange amnesia: 1857 is nowhere mentioned in our novels. Did the literary production that began from the 1870s in opposition to the newly reinforced colonial presence signify a rupture with past traditions? Must the emergence of the novel be seen as a radical break with the literary modes preceding it? Lately, there has been a greater appreciation of the enduring influence of older literary modes, and it is the continuities that have been emphasized.2 The novel did indeed mesh, merge, and emerge from interaction with the narrative modes already current in the literary languages of the region—and here both the plurality of languages and the regional specificity need to be emphasized—in order to produce various ‘successful’ hybrids peculiar to their regional contexts. However, the novel also sought to do something new. Here I trace both notions—the continuity, i.e. the embeddedness of the Hindi novel in the multilingual Indo-Persianate literary culture that characterized North India, as also the rupture, brought about by the radical changes in social and cultural sensibilities after 1857.3 My focus here is Shrinivasdas’ Pariksha Guru (The Tutelage of Trial, 1882), the first novel of note in Hindi, which emerged from the merchant milieu of Delhi and its environs.4

Merchant tales had their forebears in more recent history, as we will see, though late-nineteenth-century Hindi writers themselves tended to classicize and cite the seventh-century Sanskrit prose narrative Kadambari as an important model for the novels they were attempting to write.5 In order to trace the links to the eras preceding the modern and explore both continuities and discontinuities in perspective and literary format I shall, instead of going back to the classical past, juxtapose Pariksha Guru with Banarasidas’ Ardhakathanak (Half a Tale, 1641), an early-modern merchant life story set in Jaunpur and Agra. By juxtaposing the two works I hope to trace and re-establish the links not only between the early modern and the modern, but also to show the intimate role of the novel in the unfurling of the modern.6

The first two sections of the four that follow engage the cultural matrix from which the modern novel in Hindi emerged. The first focuses on the language of the Delhi–Agra region and the modern Hindi literary idiom that sought to crystallize itself from within it; the second on the changes in the social structure of late-nineteenth-century Agra and Delhi and concurrent shifts in the merchant ethos. The subsequent two sections look at Ardhakathanak and Pariksha Guru, respectively. My concern in these later two sections is threefold. First, I pay particular attention to the genre designations the works themselves employ, the expectations they arouse, and the literary models they invoke, since these models bring with them their own form of experience and elaboration of reality. Second, I try to ground the notions of self and sociality in the two works, particularly as they relate to the merchant ethos, present and past, ‘taking them either as models or as foils.’7 Finally, as both works make explicit reference to the political time frame within which the action is set, I trace the relationship of particular moments in the given life story to these political frames.

By juxtaposing the nineteenth-century novel with the mid-seventeenth-century work I draw attention to the vulnerability of the merchant community, in particular to social and political change as it pertained to modernity, suggesting that the literary format offered by the novel seemed best suited to register the modernizing impulse as this found expression in the fate of the individual, even as it became tied to larger social, historical, and political forces.

THE SPEECH OF DELHI AND AGRA

In the past few decades there have been intensive debates about the Hindi–Urdu divide and the matrix from which they have jointly—or indeed separately, as some would have it—emerged.8 Revisiting this vexed terrain in relation to early prose narratives in Hindi, what most immediately strikes us is the remarkable consistency with which writers specify the Delhi–Agra region as the location from which they are drawing the standard of their speech. Lallujilal (c. 1747–1824) finds himself compelled to say a few words about his use of language in a brief Preface to his Premsagar (1810), a retelling of the tenth canto of the Bhagavata Purana which became a perennial favourite. A Gujarati Brahman originally from Agra, Lallujilal was employed by the Fort William College to produce instructional material for teaching Hindavi in the Nagari script. Of Premsagar, one of the first works written with this express intent, Lallujilal is at pains to point out that it has been written in Khari Boli, the ‘upright’ speech of Delhi and Agra, setting aside the language of the Yavanas (yamini bhasha chor dilli agare ki khari boli mem), marking thereby the moment in which the deliberate process of extracting a purer Hindi idiom from the speech of Delhi and Agra, cleansed of its Perso-Arabic elements, begins.9

The speech of the region is invoked again by Pandit Gauridatta (1836–1905) of Meerut in his Devrani Jethani ki Kahani (The Tale of the Elder and the Younger Sister-in-law; 1870), regarded as the first novel in Hindi. A short work of only forty-eight pages, in it once again it is the speech of the merchant milieu of the area around Delhi and Agra which provides the social grid. Pandit Gauridatta specifies in his Preface that the work is written in a new way—in the language of women as spoken in the families of Banias, the business folk of this region.10 Similarly, in Bhagyavati (1877), the second novelistic work of any note in Hindi, the author, Shraddharam Phillauri (1837–81), himself from the Punjab, specifies that he has chosen to write his work not in the somewhat rough (rukhi-si) speech actually current in Banaras, where the narrative is set, but in Hindi as spoken by the Hindus around Delhi, Agra, Saharanpur, and Ambala (extending it westwards), so that it will be widely understood and thus also be within the grasp of the men and women of Punjab.11 By specifying the speech of the Hindus of the region, he is setting it off from Urdu, also spoken in this region and which in fact in its spoken form exhibits no difference from Hindi. Once again, it is by the extraction of an idiom from this shared social net, reflecting the lived urban ethos of the twin Mughal capitals, through which the author sees fit to fashion his text. He is, clearly, seeking to shape and define it by delineating it thus.

With that we come to Pariksha Guru (1882). Its author, Lala Shrinivasdas of Mathura and Delhi, has an easier task, for his narrative is set in Delhi. The Preface to his Pariksha Guru begins by proclaiming that though by now a great many good books have been written in Nagari (he speaks of the script rather than the language) and Urdu, there has been none of the kind that he is putting before readers. It will be in the everyday speech of the people of Delhi:

In this book a picture of an imaginary rai’s of Delhi has been drawn and in order to show it as it is (that is, in its actual form) instead of a language made up of difficult Sanskrit or Persian-Arabic words, care has been taken to use the everyday speech of the inhabitants of Delhi. However, it has become necessary to use stray words from Sanskrit etc. where some branch of knowledge is being addressed. But for the ease of those who could have some difficulty in understanding these matters, such sections have been marked with the sign of a cross, so that they can be omitted and the narrative sequence still remain coherent.12

Whatever the location of the writer, whether Lallujilal in Calcutta, Pandit Gauridatta in Meerut, Phillauri in Punjab, or Shrinivasdas in Delhi, it is the speech of the Hindus, and the Hindus alone, of Delhi and Agra and their immediate vicinity that is employed as the grid. This geographical designation is all the more notable given that modern Hindi literature was to go through its first intense period of creativity not in Delhi and Agra—the sites of Persian and Urdu literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—but in Banaras and later Allahabad, in the eastern part of the broad stretch of North India that is today seen as the Hindi belt. Banaras and Allahabad writers were to use a more Sanskritic idiom, perhaps influenced by the example of Bengal,13 and facilitated by the fact that they were employing a language that was not spoken locally. We could then well ask why the emphasis on Delhi and Agra in this early writing. There are surely several reasons: the political and social prestige that had so long been associated with these two cities, the standardization of the language for which they could now provide the measure, and—given the dissemination of such speech in the rest of the subcontinent—the wide comprehensibility the authors could reckon on when using it.

The intimate link of this Hindi literary idiom to Urdu was a matter of geography, history, and culture. Even as the two were deliberately made to part ways, Urdu continued to have bearings on the literature of Hindi, the two remaining closely intertwined till well into the twentieth century.14 We need only think of Hindi’s best-known author Premchand (1885–1936), who for the greater part of his life wrote his novels first in Urdu and only then in Hindi.

AGRA, DELHI, AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY SHIFTS

The reputation of Agra has been so reduced to the image of the one monument that its rich political and cultural history has tended to recede in the public imagination. Here I briefly rehearse some wellknown facts about Agra, recalling the moments of glory rather than intervals of decay, in order to call to mind the prestige it continued to enjoy till well into the twentieth century.15 After its foundation in 1506 by Sikandar Lodi (1489–1517), who shifted the capital there from Delhi, Agra, known for its spectacular architecture and layout, became one of the twin capitals of the Mughals. Babur had laid out the first of its great Mughal palace gardens on the left bank of the Yamuna, designed on the fourfold Persian pattern. Akbar built the massive Red Fort which spawned further building activity, a moment Abul Fazl was to mark in his Akbarnama: ‘The City within a short time became an ornament of the seven climes … The soil is congenial to the growth of the trees and fruit of Khorasan and Irak … The river Jumn … flows in the midst of the city. On either side of it nobles and servants of the state have constructed edifices of such beauty and elegance that they surpass description.’16

The new impulses generated by the intellectual ferment of the seventeenth century, the prolific cultural activity at Akbar’s court, and the religious literature—not to speak of the theological debates of the adjacent Braj region with its many devotional communities—could only have added to the glitter of the city and the court. With its location at the intersection of the busiest trade routes of the time (between Bengal and Gujarat) and as host to powerful merchant families, bankers, and traders with connections to the court, the c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: North Indian Cities and the Hindi Novel
• I. Towards Modernity
• II Modernist Conundrums
• Epilogue
• Index
• Back Cover