“Trans-Asian Popular Aesthetics” the Reception of Hindi Popular Fiction in 1980S China

Journal of World Literature 4 (2019) 530–551 brill.com/jwl “Trans-Asian Popular Aesthetics” The Reception of Hindi Popular Fiction in 1980s China Yan Jia Peking University [email protected] Abstract From 1980 to 1991, seven titles of Gulshan Nanda’s Hindi popular fiction were translated into Chinese without Western involvement, and Kaṭī pataṅg alone spawned nearly twenty adaptations in both theatrical and picture-story book forms. This essay argues that Nanda’s popular fiction contributed to China’s cultural reconstruction in the 1980s by fulfilling the previously repressed need of Chinese readers for entertaining novels that conveyed a desired moral order, by enabling Chinese translators of Indian literature to engage with the literary debate about the re-evaluation of popular literature, and by helping revitalize Chinese theatre in a time of crisis. This paper shows the complexity of transnational flows of popular literature by presenting a Trans-Asian example that relies on the melodramatic appeal of the works, their relevance to local issues, and the scholarly engagement in the host culture, rather than the author’s global stardom or the marketing strategies of multinational publishing companies. Keywords Gulshan Nanda – Kaṭī pataṅg – Hindi literature – popular fiction – China-India literary relations 1 Introduction: Gulshan Nanda’s Transnational Popularity and World Literature When interviewed by a Chinese scholar in 1985, the leading Hindi author and a pioneer of the “Nayi Kahani” (New Short Story) literary movement, Rajendra Yadav (1929–2013), was appalled at the extraordinarily enthusiastic reception of Gulshan Nanda (1929–1985) – one of the best-selling writers of Hindi popular © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/24056480-00404005Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 07:25:25AM via free access “trans-asian popular aesthetics” 531 fiction in the 1960s and 1970s – in China. Labelling Nanda’s writings as “vul- gar” and “formulaic,” Yadav suggested that the “international recognition” the Chinese translations had given to Nanda was a “heavy blow to India’s literary circles” (Yin 134).1 The interview was published in a respected Chinese literary journal in 1987, but Yadav’s polemic on behalf of “India’s literary circles” did little to curb Nanda’s continued popularity in China. From 1980 to 1991, three novels and four novellas by Nanda were translated directly from Hindi into Chinese, among which Kaṭī pataṅg (The Severed Kite, 1968) alone sold 251,400 copies.2 Among Nanda’s works, Kaṭī pataṅg is partic- ularly noteworthy, not only because it marked his debut in China and had the largest sales, but also because it led to an impressive body of theatrical and comic adaptations, a rare phenomenon of textual contact in the history of Chi- nese reception of modern Indian literature. Set in contemporary North India, Kaṭī pataṅg has a tangled plot about a runaway bride who lives in disguise as another woman, and the story spawned at least 14 theatrical adaptations and five lianhuanhua (picture book) adaptations in China in the 1980s and 1990s. The theatrical adaptations included ten in various forms of xiqu (indigenous Chinese opera), three in the form of huaju (modern Western-style drama) and one in gewuju (song-and-dance drama) form. These adaptations, as I will show, were not discrete practices inspired directly by the translated novel but rather developed along three parallel strands, each based on a “core adaptation.” Before arriving in China, Gulshan Nanda’s novels had enjoyed great popularity across the Hindi hinterlands in the 1960s and 1970s. With over 50 titles to his name, Nanda was the most prolific and successful writers of Hindi popular fiction of his time, who redefined the notion of “bestseller” in the Hindi book market.3 However, world literature theorist Pascale Casanova would have hardly considered Nanda an author capable of gaining international influence given his lack of literary “consecration.”4 1 Translations are mine unless stated otherwise. 2 In fact, Nanda is the second most translated Hindi author in China, second only to Premchand (1880–1936), the father of modern Hindi fiction. The translation of Nanda’s popular fiction into mandarin Chinese has also led to the translation of a few titles into minority ethnic languages like Mongolian and Uighur. The intra-China translingual reception of Nanda further confirms the broad appeal of his writing to readers from diverse cultural backgrounds. 3 While previously a Hindi novel would qualify as a “bestseller” with a print run of 3,000–5,000 copies, the first print order for Nanda’s Jhīl ke us pār (The Other Side of the Lake, 1971) reached 500,000 copies, “a phenomenon unheard of in Indian publishing history” (A Staff Reporter 5). 4 For Casanova, “consecration” is an act of granting literary capital that allows a work from the “peripheries” to enter into world literature. She argues that “critical recognition and transla- Journal of World Literature 4 (2019) 530–551 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 07:25:25AM via free access 532 jia First, Nanda lacked the recognition of literary critics in India, let alone in the so-called “centers” of the international literary field, such as Paris, London, and New York. Yadav was not the only gatekeeper of contemporary Indian literature who viewed Nanda and the popular genre he represented with disdain. The noted novelist and journalist Khushwant Singh (1915–2014), echoing Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the cultural field as an “economic world reversed,” argued that although “monetarily successful,” Nanda had “no standing whatsoever in the Hindi-Hindustani world of letters” (Singh 268–69). As a result, Nanda does not appear in any literary history of India/Hindi, anthologies of modern Indian literature, noted literary awards, or other formal recognizing institutions that could bolster the cross-border transmission of his works. What also accounts for Nanda’s lack of national consecration – and hence his limited potential to go abroad – was the lack of effective translation and cir- culation. Although available in a few non-Hindi vernaculars, such as Urdu and Marathi, Nanda’s works remained linguistically and geographically confined to particular parts of India, especially in the north and west. Despite the fact that five of Nanda’s novels had been translated into English by the 1970s (English translation is supposedly an effective method of consecration) and four published in Delhi, these translations circulated poorly even locally.5 The limited impact of these English translations is perhaps because they were produced by obscure translators and published by small local publishers that did not have the same distribution network and marketing strength as Nanda’s Hindi publishers, such as the Hind Pocket Books (Mandhwani Chapter 2). The failure to target a local audience made it even less likely that these English translations would capture a foreign readership. However, the exceptional popularity of Gulshan Nanda’s novels in China from 1980 to the early 1990s defies Casanova’s theories on transnational textual flow.This was neither facilitated byWestern or Indian literary gatekeepers’ consecration nor enabled by the translation into English or other dominant Euro- pean languages. Rather, all the novels were selected on the basis of the Chinese translators’ own preference and interests, and they were translated directly from Hindi. It is equally striking that such a large-scale and multi-layered tion are weapons in the struggle by and for literary capital,” and Paris is “the chief place of consecration in the world of literature” (17–21, 23, 127). 5 The five translated titles are: Air Hostess (Ṭuṭe paṃkh, 1968), Frozen Lips (Patthar ke hoṃṭh, 1967), Love at Crossroads (Kaṭī pataṅg, 1972), Neel amal (Nīl kamal, 1968) and The Sinner (Kalaṃkinī, 1969). According to Ghosh (9), Gulshan Nanda was in fact the Hindi writer whose novels had been most frequently translated into English by the mid-1990s. However, an English-reading elite living in Delhi in the 1990s, who craved Nanda’s novels, was simply unable to find any of these English translations (Kesavan). Journal of World LiteratureDownloaded from 4 (2019) Brill.com09/28/2021 530–551 07:25:25AM via free access “trans-asian popular aesthetics” 533 transnational literary phenomenon thrived completely without government involvement or the capital operation of international publishing houses. Following David Damrosch’s definition, this essay treats Nanda’s popular fiction as having an undeniably “effective life as world literature,” because it was “actively present within another literary system beyond that of its original culture” (4; emphasis in original). However, I also intend to push Damrosch’s definition further by asking who decides what becomes world literature in a trans-Asian context – the host culture, the guest one, or the gatekeepers in Western Europe? If national and international consecration applied so little to Nanda’s case, what factors made his “afterlife” in China so “effective”? Does popular fiction become transnationally impactful for different reasons, compared to more “literary” genres? In order to draw a clear picture of the Chinese reception of Gulshan Nanda, this essay looks at two different sets of texts – that is, literary translations and theatrical adaptations of Nanda’s popular fiction – from different methodologi- cal perspectives. My analysis of the literary translations, on which the theatrical adaptations were based, focuses mainly on paratextual elements (i.e. translators’ notes) rather than the translations themselves.This is not only because the original Hindi works, as my comparative reading suggests, were translated very faithfully, but also because the paratexts provide key information about the rationale behind the selection of Nanda in the first place. By contrast, my dis- cussion of the adaptations pays primary attention to the adapted plays, because they contain distinct traces of textual metamorphosis that are not often explic- itly stated in associated paratexts.

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