The Progressive Realism of Premchand, Manto and Chughtai A
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Magic, Madness and Mud: The Progressive Realism of Premchand, Manto and Chughtai A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Emily A. Durham IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Simona Sawhney December, 2018 © Emily A. Durham 2018 i Acknowledgements There is an almost innumerable list of people and institutions without whom this dissertation never would have existed, and I’m afraid I can only begin to list them here. However, first among them has to be the American Institute of Indian Studies for their generous support through the Urdu Language Fellowship in Lucknow, India, which played a huge part in introducing me to the joys and complexities of Premchand, Manto and Chughtai. In particular, I would like to thank just a few of the amazing instructors who helped to open for me many of the works discussed here: Ahtesham Khan, Zeba Parveen, Sheba Iftikhar and Shehnaz Ahmed. I still remember many of the lively discussions I was privileged to have in their classrooms along with the brilliant scholars who continue to influence and inspire me, among them Francesca Chubb-Confer, Christine Marrewa-Karwoski, Charlotte Giles, Elizabeth Thelen and Megan Robb. I also must acknowledge the profound impact from that year in Lucknow of the reading group organized by Maheen Zaman and Aaisha Shaikh and the discussions we had over steaming cups of chai and scattered pistachio shells with Christopher Taylor, Mohsin Malik Ali, Iris Yellum and Raphael Susewind. I must also thank the steadfast support of the Department of Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Minnesota. I would like to acknowledge department chairs past and present, including Joseph Allen, Paul Rouzer, and Christine Marran, who often bent over backwards to see this work come to fruition through many ups and downs. Thank you, also, to Jason McGrath for his honest yearly chats, which made the difficulties of writing a dissertation seem much more surmountable. I was also extremely fortunate to have entered the University of Minnesota at the same time as a number of very talented South Asianists who continue to forge new paths in the discipline and beyond, and remind me that my work is hardly over: Nadim Asrar, Sucheta Kanjilal and Joya John were all directly responsible for expanding the worlds of Hindi and Urdu for me, and Ani Dutta, Abir Bazaz, and Sravanthi Kollu continue to open new avenues of scholarship that I would not have otherwise considered. I was very fortunate in finding myself with such a distinguished and complimentary dissertation committee, which played no small part in helping me to shape my work into its final form. Michael Hancher taught me the importance of historical research in his course on English in India, and he continually reminds me of the significance of a grounded history in literature when I am most at risk of losing the context of my theories. Richa Nagar, who is intimately familiar with the literature of these three authors has helped me to bring out the stakes of these revolutionary works upon real people in real places, particularly in relation to contemporary India. Suvadip Sinha generously agreed to take up a place on the committee quite late in the process, and since that moment has been extremely charitable with his time and advice in all aspects of my work, not only the dissertation itself. ii I owe an enormous debt to my advisor, Simona Sawhney, who has been my champion, interlocutor and much needed motivator from the very beginning of my graduate career through the most difficult parts of writing. Her patience, goodwill, and well-timed honesty kept me going even at times when I couldn’t always see a way forward. Her advice continues to help me to bring nuance to my ideas and to question my assumptions in ways that, sometimes counterintuitively, brings more clarity to my work. Her constant reminders to return to the texts that I first fell in love with has also saved me many times from abandoning this project altogether when I found myself tangled up in my own thoughts or confounded by my own language. The members of my small but supportive writing group, Sarah Jones-Boardman and Lia Swope Mitchell, were invaluable to the completion of this project. I feel extremely proud to have been invited to share in their setbacks and successes, of which we have all had more than a few in the last couple of years. Whether we commiserated about writing, celebrated a breakthrough, or merely wrote and read silently alongside one another, their presence helped me to remember that writing is not as solitary a process as it might seem, and that all our work is, ultimately, by and for each other, which gave me a reason to continue. My husband, Gabriel Ramirez, has supported me in thousands of ways, both material and intangible. Without his encouragement, prodding, and chile colorado, I would have wasted away in both mind and body. Our long, rather heated arguments about art and politics have kept me interested and humble, which has been the most joyful way to work. And at the end of it all, he reminds me that it is our most intimate and ordinary connections that influence us the most, for which I am deeply grateful. My father, Lonnie Durham remains my greatest cheerleader, and his vast knowledge and seemingly boundless curiosity never cease to amaze me. He is always willing to sit down and entertain my most hairbrained ideas and even convince me that there might be some merit in them. I hope that our kitchen table intellectualizing will be a feature of my work for a long time to come. Finally, I would like to thank my mother and my sister, to whom this work is dedicated and both of whom passed away during the writing of this dissertation. Though they are gone, they both loom large in this work: Margery Durham, as both nurturer and academic, whose strong, principled guidance always inspired me to seek out truth and justice, and Alice Kate Durham McGrath, my partner in crime, whose wit and playfulness expanded the worlds of everyone around her, but perhaps most especially mine. iii Dedication For my mother, who taught me there is joy in seeking the truth, and for my sister who never let it confine her. iv Abstract This project takes up the question of Progressive Realism through the essays and short stories of three seminal authors: Munshi Premchand, Sa’adat Hasan Manto, and Ismat Chughtai, which circulated in journals during the years immediately preceding and following independence, a period of intense debate about the role of literature regarding the emerging nation. This dissertation explores the ways in which these three authors sought to engage new publics through their work while at the same time complicating some of the most prevalent ideas about nationhood and national belonging. Through close readings of these short forms which made up the majority of social commentary during this period in India, along with the work of critics like Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, Namwar Singh and Jean-Luc Nancy, this project seeks to look beyond the usual commentary on Progressive Literature as for or against leftist propaganda and instead focuses on the ways in which the devices of an innovative and unique realism brought into print social actualities that had never before been expressed, and which continue to have a profound impact on the social and political debates happening in India today. v A Note on Transliteration Even though most of the texts cited in this work are in Urdu, I have chosen to use the IAST system of transliteration for consistency across both Hindi and Urdu texts, with the minor modification of using “n” or “m” to phonetically represent the anusvar and candrabindu (ं and ँ ) instead of “ṁ” in all cases. For those instances where Hindi or Urdu sounds could not be conveyed by IAST, such as those represented by a “nuqta” or dot written below letters in Devanagari, (唼, 崼, 焼, 괼, ड़ and ढ़) I have used q, ġ, z, f, ṛ and ṛh. I have italicized most transliterated words unless they are proper names, such as Bhagat or Rām Avtār. Since other scholars of these works have not necessarily used the same system of transliteration I have preserved their spellings as they are written in my quotations. vi Table of Contents Acknowledgements .............................................................................................................. i Dedication .......................................................................................................................... iii Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iv A Note on Transliteration ................................................................................................... v Table of Contents ............................................................................................................... vi Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Faceted Realism in Munshi Premchand ...................................................... 15 Chapter 2: I Pick the Heart of God Like a Thorn ......................................................... 18 Chapter 3: Concrete Communities ................................................................................ 21 Faceted Realism in Munshi Premchand: from Cosmopolitan to Composite Vernaculars 25 Ways of Speaking and Ways of