The Progressive Realism of Premchand, Manto and Chughtai A

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

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.

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.

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 Seeing: Composite Language and Vision in “The Object of Literature” ...... 40

The Antinomies of Healing: The Composite Healer in “Mantra” ...... 64

The Composite Premchand: Ajay Navaria’s “Hello Premchand” ...... 78

I Prick the Heart of God like a Thorn: Actuality as Critique in Sa’adat Hasan Manto .... 90

“Bū”: Indiscrete Smells and Discrete Details ...... 107

The Realism of the Literary-Cinematic Space: “Why I Don’t Watch Films” ...... 119

Kuch to hai jis kī pardadārī hai: Incisive abstraction in Black Margins ...... 135

Concrete Communities: Chughtai’s Literary Interruptions of Myth ...... 146 vii

Towards a New Partition Genealogy: The Intercommunal Mohalla as Shajara-e Nasab in “Roots”...... 159

Foundations of Filth: “Two Hands” ...... 179

Secluded Spaces and Dangerous Games in “Genda” ...... 190

Conclusion ...... 205

Bibliography ...... 213 1

Introduction

In the year 1936 at the inaugural meeting of the Progressive Writer’s Association (PWA),

Munshi Premchand gave an address titled “The Object of Literature,” in which he would emphasize the importance of truth. Premchand said, “In order for literature to have an effect, it needs to mirror life’s truths. Then you can put it in whatever frame you like— even the story of the cock-sparrow or the tale of the rose and the nightingale can be appropriate [sahitya men prabhāv utpann karne ke liye yeh āvaśyak hai ki voh jīvan kī sacāiyon kā darpaṇ ho. Phir āp use jis chaukhaṭe men cāhen, lagā sakte hain—ciṛe kī kahānī aur gulobulbul kī dāstān bhī uske liye upyukt ho saktī hai].1 It may seem strange that Premchand should connect such well-worn Urdu poetic tropes with truthfulness, but this encounter between representational fidelity and themes that have their roots in oral storytelling—the mushāirah (poetry recitation) and the dāstāngoi (story recitation)— indicate the ways in which Premchand’s own work was often a negotiation between critical realism and older, more domestic literary forms, forms that remained in use throughout the nineteenth century.

In the same year, Walter Benjamin wrote his lyrical and melancholy essay on

“The Storyteller,” where he discussed the fact that the conditions of life in Europe were leading to the storyteller’s gradual, but definite, demise. What Benjamin saw as storytelling’s essential element—counsel—was no longer present in the realist novels being produced in the modern age. Benjamin claimed that “counsel woven into the fabric

1 Munshi Premchand, Sāhitya kā uddeśya (Allahabad: Hans Prakāshan, 1967), 10. All translations mine unless otherwise noted. 2 of real life is wisdom,” but, “the art of storytelling is nearing its end because the epic side of truth—wisdom—is dying out.” This death of storytelling was the result of “secular productive forces” which had “removed narrative from the realm of living speech…at the same time making it possible to find a new beauty in what is vanishing.”2 It is quite remarkable that both men were concerned with the subject of storytelling at the same time with such cultural and geographical distance between them. Perhaps that distance is the reason behind the stark difference in tone between these two meditations on the position and role of the storyteller: Benjamin sees this “new beauty” in storytelling from a great distance as it disappears from the secular world, where Premchand cites elements of South Asian storytelling long used for moral religious instruction in order to remark on their future potential.

Despite this difference, a similarity remains between the invocation of “life’s truths” in stories and Benjamin’s wisdom as “counsel woven into the fabric of real life.”

For one, these are both expressions of something within storytelling that goes beyond the realm of veracity: the idea that what is reportable, logical, and comprehensible, is in fact true. For another, Benjamin and Premchand are also both concerned with something that exists beyond the reach of the written text. For Premchand, these are “life’s truths” in stories, and for Benjamin “counsel” within “real life.” Benjamin observed that while the novel and its many narratives was able to gather together multiple complexities of the real world, it did not provide counsel. And when it did, that counsel had little to do with real life. Benjamin stated that “The Bildungsroman, by integrating the social process with

2 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), 3:146. 3 the development of a person…bestows the most brittle justification on the order determining that process. The legitimizing of this order stands in direct opposition to its reality.”3 In the Bildungsroman, the physical process of growing up is somehow linked both to the hero’s integration into society and the order of exposition to denouement: a teleology of progress constrained by the order of its pages. Premchand, who clearly had no opposition to the fabulous, insisted that it had to be reflective of life. Instead of a formal structure that justifies the experience, experience must inform the formal structure, and it must do so in a way that brings clarity to the former even if there is little veracity to the latter. It was no consequence, in that case, if birds could talk, or nightingales could fall in love with roses. Storytelling, what Benjamin mourned the loss of in Europe, Premchand now advocated as an essential element of a functioning public to a group of young, politically engaged writers.

In what guises did Premchand’s mandate for storytelling emerge, and where did these forms find their limits? Progressive realism, has become the term for this kind of storytelling, but what does that entail? The main concern of this dissertation are the ways in which the Progressive writers Munshi Premchand, Sa’adat Hasan Manto and Ismat

Chughtai—who were and remain some of the most influential writers of the subcontinent—try in their way to get beyond the constraints of form in order to bring into it both the life and counsel that form had thus far denied. All three writers are, then,

“realists,” in the sense that they were striving for the expression of an actuality located beyond the text, but as will become apparent, that realism at times bears little

3 Ibid., 146-147. 4 resemblance to the form as it has come to be understood in terms of a textual imprint of things as they are. In Premchand, actuality is conveyed through the possibilities of literature’s expansiveness, by the degree to which it can incorporate the language, form, and expressions of the “low” in Indian life, particularly that which had been deemed too humble for inclusion in existing textual forms. For Manto, who experimented the most with modernist devices among the three authors, it means breaking the form of realism altogether in order to express social realities that are ugly, uncomfortable, or otherwise incomprehensible. And for Chughtai, it means using the visceral elements of the real to posit a new reality, one that unhinges the unexamined hierarchies of Indian middle-class life and establishes a literary ground for new beginnings. In all of their writing, the exposure of the real is the beginning of a political process of undoing the constraints of colonialism, the violence of communalism, and the toxic assumptions of caste, class, and gender hierarchies.

But the question of realism among these three authors is a complicated one considering the progressive realism which they all practiced is a fairly curious proposition. The term suggests both an ideological bent—the progressive part—and a formal mode, which is realism. There is little to say that there should or even can be a correlation between the two. Roland Barthes, for instance, in his essay on “The Reality

Effect,” makes a fairly persuasive argument that realism in France was more about placing unsymbolic objects into narratives in order to prove the solidity and unchangeable nature of the versions of life presented there; it was a device, or “effect” that acted rather ironically as a denial of the devices used in the inherently mutable 5 medium of written expression.4 Fredric Jameson, in his recent work Antinomies of

Realism, says that the realist novelist of Europe “has a vested interest, and ontological stake, in the solidity of social reality, on the resistance of bourgeois society to history and change.”5 So much for progress.

But trying to establish a stable and identifiable form of realism by these aforementioned arguments in India becomes complicated. Meenakshi Mukherjee pointed out in Realism and Reality, her seminal study of the Indian realist novel, that the forms of realism that emerged in India in the twentieth century already begin to stretch the applicability of the term as a “solidity of social reality,” at least in part because the nineteenth-century realist fiction in English from which it drew inspiration was that which tended to be the least “real” to the colonized Indian reader. Mukherjee points out that the relatively restricted lives of Indian readers contrasted sharply with the expansive worlds of European characters, whose inner struggles in the modern secular world stemmed from freedoms that Indian subjects simply did not have.6

This distance is also augmented by the sheer variety of sources from various languages, movements and epochs that became more widely available in the Indian subcontinent around the same time. The writers discussed here read and translated from a range of texts from not only French and English sources, but also Russian. They read not only realists but also naturalists and romantics. Premchand translated the stories of

4 Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” French Literary Theory Today, ed. Tzvetan Todorov, trans. R. Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 16. 5 Jameson, Fredric, The Antinomies of Realism, (London: Verso, 2015), 5. 6 Meenakshi Mukherjee, Realism and Reality, (New Delhi: Ajanta, 1985), 6. For more on this discussion, see page forty-five in this dissertation. 6

Tolstoy, the dramas of John Galsworthy and George Eliot’s Silas Marner. Manto translated Oscar Wilde’s Vera as well as Victor Hugo’s The Last Day of a Condemned

Man. Chughtai worked her way through the library at Aligarh reading Dickens, Zola,

Gorky, Dostoyevsky and Hemingway.7 This diversity in available material further complicates the idea that realism was imported whole cloth from foreign forms, as those forms themselves varied widely in terms of both style and content.

What I would like to propose is that the loosened moorings of realism in the subcontinent did not ultimately result in abandoning a representations of the relatively constrained social conditions that Mukherjee describes, where the relative freedoms of

European realism were grafted on to a local Indian content, but rather that the constraining devices of veracity that were the “effect” of realism in the metropole were left behind, and a politically dynamic, stylistically diverse realism arose in its place as an attempt to grasp deeper, perhaps more controversial truths than those that might be immediately apparent. What this ultimately leads to, as will become apparent in the discussion that follows, are rather surprising contortions of the form where the reality being represented is clear, but the realism of the formal modes expressed becomes compromised.

I am not the first person to take up this problem in relation to these authors. In her

2005 study of progressive writers, titled Literary Radicalism in India, Priyamvada Gopal emphasizes political form over form in the works of Manto and Chughtai by pointing out

“the shared, yet differently articulated, commitment of these writers to emancipatory

7 Ismat Chughtai, Kaġazī hai pairahan, (New Delhi: Rajakamala prakāśana, 1998) 52.

7 politics broadly conceived.”8 By contrast, Ulka Anjaria emphasizes the importance of form in the realism of Munshi Premchand in her book from 2012, Realism in the

Twentieth-Century Novel. Anjaria reverses Gopal’s formulation of “literary radicalism” by calling the work of Premchand and others “radical literalism,” which she defines as “a metafictional mode by which authors not only represented the world around them but also considered the stakes of representation itself.” As such, she argues that a mode emerges where “Realism is deployed at arm’s length.”9

Accepting the fact that the Progressive Realism of Premchand, Manto and

Chughtai was part of a movement to create an anti-imperialist aesthetics—that of emancipatory politics—as well as the fact that any resulting aesthetic was a highly plastic form that challenged previous representational modes including that of European and

American realism, what if we take “realism” itself to mean more than a stable and defined set of aesthetics? Instead, what if Progressive Realism consists of leveraging a number of diverse and mutable literary devices in order to represent a material, social, and political actuality. I argue that this might explain not only the significant differences in form between Indian Progressive Realism and 19th century European and American realism, but also the range of aesthetic variation found between these three authors as chroniclers of key moments and places in Indian in the years surrounding Independence.

The stories of Munshi Premchand, who wrote during the rise of the Quite Indian movement and who died the same year he gave his address to the Progressive Writers, are

8 Priyamvada Gopal, Literary Radicalism in India, (New York: Routledge, 2005), 9. 9 Ulka Anjaria, Ulka Anjaria, Realism in the Twentieth Century Indian Novel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 15-16. 8 of a very different character than those of Sa’adat Hasan Manto, who write about

Bombay during the tumultuous years of the post-WWII boom and the unprecedented destruction of Indian life during Partition. In turn, Chughtai diverges significantly from both Premchand and Manto with her stories about the lives of women and children within the domestic interiors of the neighborhood, or mohallah, and the family compound, or havelī. “Realism” as a movement toward actuality then explains the differences between these works not just as a difference in content—though that too plays a role—but also explains the wide range of aesthetic devices that were utilized by these authors in order to break the representational silences that existed in their given contexts: for Premchand, his works had to find ways to articulate something that existed beyond the constrained social conditions under colonialism, which he did through creating a composite literary space that encompassed a variety of local and foreign forms. Manto needed to create entirely new ways of conceiving fractured social change in growing urban environments and the atrocities of communal conflict, which he did by breaking established narrative tropes through irony, juxtaposition and abstraction. Meanwhile, Chughtai’s device of visceral descriptions of home life address the relative invisibility of female subjectivity and desire in the realms of public discourse.

The complex and formally unstable dialectic between the aesthetic devices of realism and the presentation of a political actuality within the work of these writers is why I have made extensive use of Fredric Jameson’s exploration of the realist form in

The Antinomies of Realism to discuss their formal elements—elements which themselves exist in relation to and conflict with other impulses within the form. Jameson’s latest 9 endeavor to describe realism, a third volume to his Poetics of Social Forms, attempts to describe this conflict. Jameson’s central thesis is that even the realism which bourgeois authors attempted to use as a stylistic barricade against social change, what one could call the “effect” that Barthes invokes, ultimately disassembles into “literary representation of affect”.10 The center cannot hold. And this “center” is not limited to the conflict within texts, but also between them. Franco Moretti, in his own ruminations on World

Literature, explained Jameson’s doubts as to the validity of his observations in works on the periphery of the metropole when he said, “Jameson notices that in the take-off of the modern Japanese novel, ‘the raw material of Japanese social experience and the abstract formal patterns of Western novel construction cannot always be welded together seamlessly’; and he referred in this respect to Masao Miyoshi’s Accomplices of Silence, and Meenakshi Mukherji’s Realism and Reality.”11

As a necessity of conveying a content that is vastly different from that of the

European or American realist novel, the novel of the periphery must necessarily break the form as it appeared in those places if it is to do anything more than give its referents a dogmatically formal gloss. As Moretti continues, “the novel first arises not as an autonomous development, but as a compromise between a western formal influence and local materials.”12 But what has been noted by Namwar Singh, and which I discuss at more length in the third chapter, it arises from the coincidence of local forms and local materials conditioned by foreign forms of capitalist development: namely, that Indian

10 Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism, (London: Verso, 20 11 Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (Jan-Feb 2000), 58. 12 Ibid. 10

Progressive literature found its voice through the resonances between Indian neo- romanticism (chāyavād) and Marxist romanticism, along with the twentieth-century coincidence of the increased power of Indian labor unions.13

This negotiation of formal elements and local materials—which is not only a matter of the encounter between “western” formal innovations and local materials but is also due to the difficulties of conveying the political realities of the time—is certainly something that explains the very particular character of realism in the works examined here. Mukherjee noted that Premchand’s novel Godān is a text where “human values are never questioned and there is no ambivalence about ethical and moral issues, which are set forth with almost fable-like clarity.”14 Ismat Chughtai, despite her claims that her mind was “an ordinary camera that records reality as it is,” is often criticized for what some perceive as a commitment to ideology that over-determines her art.15 And there seems to be little consensus over how to categorize Manto, as the terms “real” and “more than real” are simultaneously applied to his work, usually to describe the same intensity of detail with which he renders the physical world.16

In other words, the relationship between the actual, aesthetic, and the political works itself out in these stories in complex and often unpredictable ways. This cannot only be explained by a “distant reading” of the world-literary as part of the world-system

13 Namwar Singh, Ādhunika sāhitya kī pravr̥ ttiyām̐ [Movements of Modern Literature] (Ilāhābāda: Lokabhāratī Prakāśana, 2013), 83. 14 Mukherjee, Realism and Reality, 148. 15 Quoted in Priyamvada Gopal, Literary Radicalism, 77. 16 See the discussion in Chapter 2 of Harish Trivedi’s “Manto, God, Premchand, and Some Other Storytellers,” Social Scientist 40, no. 11 (November-December 2012): 63-73.

11 of capitalism, nor by a “close reading” of the textual elements alone without addressing the social and historical contexts in which these works emerged. Moretti advocated for

“distant reading” by pointing out how it can be “a thorn in the side, a permanent intellectual challenge to national literatures—especially the local literature.”17 These stories, by virtue of the fact that they arose from a political situation where they had to confront the oppression, hypocrisy, and self-interest of colonial politics by signifying local conditions are already in conversation with international anti-imperialism. They are already global in the sense that they actively confront imperialist hegemony by bringing into print parts of the world that had been ignored or systematically silenced. It is also true that a close reading of these texts makes the conception of a homogeneous national identity impossible. The formal innovations of these stories create new and often unorthodox political possibilities through a representation and conception of social life that in many cases remained invisible to the political narratives of the years surrounding independence. These stories—all of them short stories, which became some of the main forums for social debate in twentieth century India (and eventually Pakistan)—were often in the form of an explicit critique of national politics. Social structures that otherwise would have been naturalized as belonging to a nationalist, communal identity are dismantled through the exposition of the often cruel and oppressive material realities that such structures are based on. In turn, new social possibilities are figured through concrete language and imagery that actively delineates the ephemeral and changeable nature of community and its negotiation with local materiality.

17 Moretti, “Conjectures,” 68. 12

The short form of these stories is significant to the way they act as interjections rather than the proposition of a universal. In Benedict Anderson’s Imagined

Communities, he uses Benjamin’s concept of “homogeneous empty time” as a way to describe the way that the novel and the newspaper create a conception of simultaneity that was indispensable to the creation of the modern state.18 The novel and the newspaper, by giving a sense to their readers of other people doing similar things in the same social space, on the same date, and, importantly, in the same language, created a sense of “meanwhile” that had not been possible in other forms.19 This horizontal conception of time, brought into being through the technical means of a national- language press and governed by clock and calendar, would then be a major component of nationalist thought: a people of a linguistically bounded space who then had a shared ownership of time as it was marked by the hour. As Anderson says, “a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history.”20

However, it might be more accurate to say that the resulting community was conceived as moving across history without the means to turn back: a timeline created by the structure of the novel where “we” were part of an inevitable and unstoppable progression. Anderson credits the concept of “homogeneous empty time” to Benjamin’s

“On The Concept of History,” where Benjamin describes it as “a conception of progress which bore little relation to reality but made dogmatic claims.”21 Although Anderson was the one who made the link between the novel and “On The Concept of History,” he does

18 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2016), 24. 19 Ibid., 25. 20 Ibid. 21 Benjamin, Selected Writings, 4:394. 13 not reference “The Storyteller,” which is where Benjamin discusses the rise of the novel and the newspaper and their effect on the community most explicitly. It would appear that Benjamin had much the same impression of the novel and newspaper’s correlation with homogeneous time. From newspaper founder Villemessant’s statement that “an attic fire in the Latin Quarter is more important than a revolution in Madrid,” Benjamin concludes that “what gets the readiest hearing is no longer intelligence coming from afar, but information which supplies a handle for what is nearest.”22 Time is linked again to events that accrue within a verifiable distance and on a verifiable date. Such immediate contiguity is in contrast to the storyteller’s use of “once upon a time,” or “far, far away,” which, “whether over spatial distance…or temporal…possessed an authority which gave it validity, even when it was not subject to verification.”23

The texts that I have chosen here emphasize the implicit connection between

Anderson’s use of Benjamin’s “Theses” and “The Storyteller,” and can potentially offer an alternative to Anderson’s “meanwhile” of literary and linguistic homogeneity by providing some clues as to the form a different imaginative source for a different kind of community might take. While Benjamin was deeply critical of the modern short story, what he called “abbreviated…storytelling,” the stories that he says are disappearing are, in fact, short ones. Their relative brevity in comparison with the novel lend themselves to re-telling and elaboration.24 Benjamin says that the storyteller has access to “a ladder extending downward to the interior of the earth and disappearing into the clouds: this is

22 Benjamin, Selected Writings, 3:147. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 150.

14 the image for a collective experience to which even the deepest shock in every individual experience—death—constitutes no impediment.”25 Such a vertical orientation of the story, as opposed to the horizontal time of the novel, much more closely resembles

“messianic time,” or, “the historical object…as a monad…a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past.”26 These stories, and my exploration of them here, are not forms that highlight an aggregation of linear time, one that leads to the development, printing, and proliferation of a distinctly modern short story, rather they are in their own time attempts to grasp the moment’s most singular aspects, and as a result their conclusions are as relevant to the present as they are indicative of the conditions of the past.

So, while their themes of caste, class and community were registrations of the material conditions surrounding Indian independence, they are no less relevant as interventions upon the current conditions of Hindu and Islamic nationalism—not to mention a particularly repugnant form of xenophobic, anti-Islamic American nationalism—that are at issue today. We find ourselves reminded in this moment that

“progress” as a term has no inherent value. Let us not forget that the press conference of

President Donald Trump for his administration’s infrastructure plan, which was to have brought the American people “much needed investments in their community,” was accompanied by the President’s defense of violent white supremacists in North Carolina.

And as Radhika Desai had pointed out as early as 2011, the heavy emphasis on development, or vikās within the Bhāratīya Janatā Party (BJP), was largely a result of

25 Ibid., 157. 26 Benjamin, Selected Writings, 4:396. 15 needing a platform that delivered votes more consistently than one based on the abjection of Indian Muslims and Dalits.27 Now is the time to return to these Progressive Writers who did not take progress as a given, nor even as an established plan, but instead as a subject of critique: What is a nation that does not have a language or formal conception of the “low,” that which is often the very foundation of its own society? What is a romantic vision of the future if it does not admit its deceit? And, what is the progress of the public sphere if it is built upon the neglect—or even the violent shaming—of its own members? These are the questions that I explore in these works, questions that arise from their profoundly innovative experimentation of their own recent past and present. What follows is a summary of the chapters of the dissertation and an explanation of some of the ways in which I have sought to examine these works and their formidable interventions.

Chapter 1: Faceted Realism in Munshi Premchand In the first chapter, I examine Munshi Premchand’s efforts to expand the purview of literary aesthetics, and the way in which he does this not only through the inclusion of the

“low” or quotidian as objects, but also through the integration of highly symbolic literary tropes in new contexts, often from a variety of sources that are dissimilar to or even in conflict with one another. Drawing upon the conditions of print capitalism in the twentieth century, where classical languages, local vernaculars, and the “cosmopolitan vernacular” of English were at once much more widely available and yet still confined to the assumptions and aesthetic parameters set by the colonial state and an emerging nationalist response, I refer to Sheldon Pollock’s formulation of the

27 Radhika Desai, “Gujarat’s Hindutva of Capitalist Development,” Journal of South Asian Studies 34, no. 3 (2011): 357. 16 cosmopolitan/vernacular dialectic in Indian antiquity to explain how even modes and vocabularies borrowed from hegemonic sources can be used to make visible new forms of vernacular expression and ways of seeing social existence.

Premchand’s speech to the PWA is often referenced for its exhortation to the writers of India to open the literary world to jīvan kī sachāiyān as realism, but there is much more at stake in this address even at the level of language. Premchand uses a highly

Sanskritized Hindi, the same language that would come to be associated with Hindu religious journals and the nationalist language of the state after independence, but he also refers to a number of Urdu literary tropes (the gulobulbul being one highly recognizable example) and intersperses his text with quotations in Persian from Muhammad Iqbal.

This crisscrossing of linguistic and literary terrain during the rise of Indian nationalism when there was significant political pressure to divide linguistic communities into Indo-

Persian Muslims on the one hand and Sanskritized Hindi speaking Hindus on the other resulted instead in a new and open aesthetic configuration capable of containing both metatextual references as well as the local vernacular objects to which these intertextual sources refer. This culminates in not only the innovation of new forms of writing, but also new ways of seeing as Premchand articulates a particular literary figuration at the center of each of these traditions: the sundar strī, or beautiful woman. He then places her in an entirely new context. Premchand’s sundar strī becomes the peasant woman putting her child to sleep on the edge of a field in which she works. This juxtaposition of an ideal archetype of feminine beauty and oppression in a space of unidealized toil makes possible expressions of beauty and oppression in the same literary space. 17

Such composite juxtapositions, where figures that are supposed to be in conflict actually supplement one another to emerge as a multi-valent figuration also manifests itself in Premchand’s use of highly symbolic literary figures in his short story “Mantra.”

In the story Premchand’s figure of the healer is registered through three difference characters with whom issues of local tradition, cosmopolitan modernity and national aspiration could all be aligned: an English-educated doctor; his son, who as a student looks to both English and local sources of knowledge, and a poor jute weaver who also acts as a traditional religious healer or mantrawālā. None of these characters are a complete sign in and of himself, as each one constitutes a symbolic lack: empathy, experience and the benefits of modern medicine, respectively. It is only in Premchand’s recursive return to the act of healing that an ideal of the healer can be conceived—both in who he is and what he does. Through this composite figure, Premchand examines a host of problems related to modernity and the colonial encounter, in particular those of science and nature, knowledge and wisdom, duty and justice.

Premchand’s composite narratives sought to challenge colonial, nationalist and casteist notion of what the Indian subject can and should be, but recent criticism of

Premchand by the Dalit community has brought up the fact that Premchand’s anti-casteist narratives can actually trap low-caste characters in their position as victims of an oppressive system. Characters that describe the dynamics of such a system fail in their own dynamism, and it becomes difficult to conceive of a Dalit character that is able to exceed the constraints of her condition. With this issue in mind I discuss Ajay Navaria’s

2012 story Uttarkatha (“Hello Premchand”) as a composite of several of Premchand’s 18 stories. This story, which radically reframes Premchand’s representation of Dalit characters through a radical re-arrangement of Premchand’s narrative timelines and the outcomes that result, is a critique of Premchand’s stories while at the same time it borrows some of the same techniques of multi-valent juxtaposition Premchand used to expand the scope of literary subjects. Navaria uses some of Premchand’s most recognizable characters who then work together to challenge the restricted fortunes of low and high-cast figures alike. Instead of emphasizing the gaps between characters that consist of the symbolic particularities in an oppressive system, Navaria’s story highlights the connections between characters that are able to reveal the cracks in that system, and ultimately the power of the Dalit subject which remains largely unfigured in Premchand’s texts.

Chapter 2: I Pick the Heart of God Like a Thorn While Premchand’s work often features an aggregation or amalgamation of linguistic and literary forms, Manto’s work is notable for the way in which he effectuates their attrition.

Often cited for the intensity with which he portrays physical detail, critics seem to be at odds over whether his work is only realistic or too realistic to be real. Often this then results in the charge that Manto’s work cannot be political, because it neither aspires to an emancipated future nor suggests a present, unmediated actuality. What I argue, however, is that Manto’s failure to elaborate these intense fulgurations of detail is actually a way to undermine the romanticized tropes of aestheticized politics, which is in itself a deeply political act.28 The undermining of romance in the generic sense is also, as

28 And deeply necessary, especially in the context of India’s independence and its subsequent partition.

Fredric Jameson has pointed out, one of the earliest identifiable functions of realism.29

Manto, through a combination of articulated and ineffable sense, creates a world where the progress of usual narratives is foreclosed, and aspects of reality that have yet to be expressed can find their beginning.

The first instance where I look at this undermining of romance as a function of

Manto’s work is in the short story “Bū” (“Smell”) which centers around the sexual exploits of an educated, middle-class Indian man, Randhīr, in the context of Bombay’s occupation by British soldiers during World War II. Manto’s story satirizes the call to duty, and thus other forms of nationalist pride, by placing the romantic notion of serving one’s country side-by-side with much more basic libidinal desires. In addition, however,

Manto also problematizes Randhīr’s own position and perception of self through the collapse of two of his sexual encounters: one with a lower-class woman from the ghats— an encounter that gives rise to the ineffable “smell” of the title—and his wedding night with his new bride, which is permeated by the smell of henna on her hands, a smell significant for tis association with socially sanctioned unions. The side-by-side comparison of the two encounters and their related smells interrupts even the romance of

Randhīr’s own mental narrative, instead leaving the reader with the distinct impression of two women, one who is denied respect and has been reduced to a fantasy, and another who has had her very real body forced into the trappings of a social fantasy of respectability. This collapse marks the pregnant space of their silence.

29 Jameson, Antinomies of Realism, 4. 20

Moving on from the undermining of a literature of romance to a literary satire of the visceral immediacy of film, I look at Manto’s essay “Main film kyon nahīn dekhtā,” or “Why I Don’t Watch Films.” Referencing Walter Benjamin’s essay on the potentials and difficulties of film as an intervention on nationalist narratives in “The Work of Art,” I address the ways in which “Why I Don’t Watch Films” both undermines film’s libidinal content and exposes the extent of its power. Written very soon after the creation of

Pakistan, and just as Manto had settled in Lahore with the promise of working for a

(practically non-existent) Pakistani cinema, he looks back on his time as a screenwriter for Bombay film studios. “Why I Don’t Watch Films” then creates a distinct literary- cinematic space that does more than merely decry films as pure artifice, but also visualizes the way that their creation is part of a distinctly social process beyond the confines of the cinema hall. In this way Manto opens the aperture of the camera lens and exposes to the reader all that it conceals, thus revealing its deceptions while at the same time inviting the reader into the process of filmmaking, letting her occupy the position of creator and spectator.

My examination of Manto culminates with a piece that threatens the category of realism most strongly, even though it is likely one of the most eviscerating condemnations of the political logic and pretentions that lead to Partition violence. Sīyah

Haśiye (Black Margins) is hardly a collection of “stories” at all. Urdu critic Muhammad

Hasan Askari instead applies to them a much more apt title, that of the latīfah, or witticism, because they resemble the formal structure of the short, joke-like anecdote. But

Manto effectively reverses the real and abstract content of the latīfah from jokes that 21 contain the names of real people and places to a complete abstraction of those in favor of a real critique of the cruelty and insanity of Partition. Such a reversal strips the joke of its humor, but their residual absurdity also removes all trace of logic from the violence of the period, as it had been based on the grievances of particular nationalities and/or religious communities. Also, Manto’s extreme abstraction of events removed the possibility of reading into these latife a condemnation of a particular group or their blamelessness, nor did it try to apply blame equally on all sides. Instead, the reader was free—in a terrifyingly existential way—to insert themselves as either a perpetrator or victim, highlighting both the violence’s actuality and its preventability.

Chapter 3: Concrete Communities As mentioned earlier, Namwar Singh pointed out the expanded vocabulary of interior feeling from neo-romantic poetry which made Marxist romanticism legible. In Ismat

Chughtai’s work, “interiority” takes on many meanings, both in the sense of deeply private feelings of sensuality and desire, but also in the sense of the private matters of the house and home as a neglected part of the language of public discourse. Bringing the vocabulary and subjects of the home into writing does not pose it in opposition to public and political language, but rather reveals the immense part that the former plays in the shaping of the latter. Ismat Chughtai’s use of sensual detail interrupts received notions of the ways in which communities are ordered and takes issues of class and caste oppression into the most private loci of internal desire and disgust, often re-arranging their presumed ordering.

In this Chapter, I look at the way Chughtai’s literary descriptions of private spaces create, following the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, “lacerations” in the repetition of inter- 22 communal and inter-caste violence by presenting metaphors of nature, bodies, blood and sex in new configurations that render established oppositions and hierarchies untenable.

In terms of Partition, I look at Chughtai’s story “Jaṛen” (“Roots”) as a confrontation of political discourses of violence through a depiction of its effects on the middle-class home. Chughtai’s “homely” narrative of inter-communal violence puts nationalist and communalist rhetoric in the background, and instead focuses on a world where it is actually inter-communal activity that enables survival: through marriage, medicine and food, a Muslim and a Hindu family become so intermingled that the act of Partition becomes more akin to surgery than an administrative act. Chughtai’s “roots” have by the end of the story grown around both families to such a degree that they serve as an inter- communal Shajara-e Nasab, or family tree, which establishes a visceral quality to the ties that bind mixed communities together.

Such visceral renderings of social space are also apparent in the story “Do

Hāth” (“Two Hands”), where Chughtai uses both literal and figurative renderings of filth in order to interrogate hierarchical notions of caste and respectability. Similar to

Premchand’s repetition of the moment of healing in order to establish all that is entangled in the role of the healer, the repetition of a domestic dispute as a mimicry of a public trial—where a mahatarānī, or sweeper woman, is repeatedly brought before her middle- class employers in order to shame her for her daughter-in-law’s perceived sexual indiscretions—questions ideas of respectability and justice in a fundamentally unjust and unequal social system. Ultimately, Chughtai literally grounds the narrative by connecting the mahatarānī’s illegitimate grandchild with the work he will perform in sowing the 23 earth, establishing the way that the very existence of middle-class life depends upon those whose labor brings so-called middle-class respectability into existence.

The short story “Genda” also centers around the issue of the illegitimate child, only this time it does so through the deeply symbolic figure of the child widow. Krupa

Shandilya looked at the way that the nineteenth-century reform novels of Rabindranath

Tagore and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee attempted to approach the subject of the young widow as an issue for reform, and with the colonial state’s banning of sati, or widow burning, the implications of both familial and national pride that attended it. Referencing

Homi Bhabha’s notion of the “unhomely,” Shandilya looks at the ways that these novels fail to re-integrate the young widow into the domestic sphere, even though they were ostensibly based on the reformist platform of widow-remarriage. This, Shandilya argues, collapses the divisions between home and the world, where the home acted as a sacred refuge from the incursions of modern secularity at the turn of the century. Chughtai’s story, on the other hand, makes homely that which had been deemed unincorporable by middle-class society. Her story uses the private hiding places and semi-grownup games of children in order to de-sensationalize the inter-connections between marriage and nationalism, and by doing so creates a space where those who cannot fit into such a space—such as the Muslim, the widow, and the illegitimate child—can be integrated into the interiors of friendship and acceptance. Through this process, instead of dislocating the home to the world, Chughtai expands the boundaries of domestic space to include all the world’s children, and to make their care a function of every home.

Already revolutionary for their time, each of these stories remains significant today for their contention with the unequal conditions today. This is not to say, however, that these stories are in and of themselves perfect, self-contained vehicles for revolutionary consciousness. Each, in its way, contains its own blind spots and silences. But they do remain rich for elaboration. A similarly composite form of Manto’s work has recently appeared as the film Manṭostān (2016) where several of his stories have been fused together to create a fragmented narrative of Partition. The film uses hyper-real sound effects, jump-cuts and a non-linear structure in order to duplicate much of the intense physicality and ineffability of Manto’s compositions. Chughtai’s story “Lihāf,” which brought Chughtai a charge of obscenity for its depiction of lesbian relationships, was referenced in a scene of the film Deṛh Ishqiyā (2014). In the scene, two lesbian lovers had just out-conned two conmen and were celebrating their victory through sex with one another, creating another, Chughtai-like visceral landscape where notions of power and respectability could be turned on their head.

In my discussion, I attempt to provide some insight into the ways in which these stories reformulate discourses surrounding fixed notions of the material world, both in terms of what this world has the potential to be, and also through finding new ways of elaborating upon what the world actually is.

Faceted Realism in Munshi Premchand: from Cosmopolitan to Composite Vernaculars Munshi Premchand, born Dhanpat Rai Srivastav in 1880, remains one of the most recognizable figures of North Indian vernacular literature today. A teacher, tutor, journalist and novelist, the monumentality of his position in Hindi literature is at least in part due to the sheer amount of work he produced. Premchand wrote nearly 250 short stories, several novels, and numerous articles and essays, most of them written in a modern north Indian vernacular he himself helped to define. Much of his work—which he produced right up until the year of his death in 1936—not only survives, but continues to be re-printed, adapted, and translated to this day.30 The abundance of this material means that Premchand’s work continues to play a part in a towering number of ideological superstructures concerning India’s cultural and linguistic national identity:

Hindi vs. Urdu, Hindu vs. Muslim, insider vs. outsider. Despite the apparent anti- imperial, anti-communal, and anti-casteist content of his work, Premchand’s contributions to the formation of a Hindi canon is often taken up by Hindi—and Hindu— nationalist causes in no small part because Premchand’s political commitments often implicated Urdu, the language of the recent former rulers of the United Provinces, as decadent and elitist. Snehal Shingavi, literary scholar and translator of the ground- breaking Progressive volume Angāre (Sparks), describes the problem of the author’s intentions and ideologies currently associated with his work this way: “Premchand, a novelist who set the standard for anti-communalism in South Asia…participated,

30 As recently as 2016, M. Asaduddin released an edited volume that discusses many of the adaptations and translations of Premchand’s stories around the globe. See Premchand in World Languages, (New York: Routledge, 2016).

26 wittingly or no, in the production of certain politicizable boundaries between the world of the Urdu ghazal and the world of the Hindi novel.”31

This politicization is not merely limited to a perceived marginalization of Urdu texts that are usually associated with the Muslim minority, but rather has extended in recent years to the rising political voice of Dalit communities that seek to define themselves against oppressive Hindu nationalist structures. Again, it is Premchand’s language, in particular his use of caste names to delineate Dalit characters, that some had found objectionable. In an incident in 2004, activists from the Bhāratiya Dalit Sāhitya

Akādamī (Indian Dalit Literature Academy) burned copies of Premchand’s novel

Rangbhūmi (The Arena). Though there is still considerable disagreement over whether the act was justified, the act in itself created a wealth of contemporary critical writing in which nothing less than the definition and development of Dalit cetna, or consciousness, in literature was at stake.32 This is but one example of the way in which Premchand’s work has continued to serve as a touchstone—sometimes a flashpoint—for the cultural identity of India and its constitutive communities.

Alok Rai, the grandson of Premchand and a well-known author and critic in his own right, has remarked that Premchand “has become part of [India’s] cultural shorthand,

31 Snehal Shingavi, “Premchand and Language: On Translation, Cultural Nationalism, and Irony,” Annual of Urdu Studies 28 (2013): 150. 32 Laura Brueck, “Questions of Representation in Dalit Critical Discourse,” in Dalit Studies, eds. Ramnarayan S. Rawat and K. Satyanarayana (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 183. As Brueck remarks, “For the BDSA to take on the monumental figure of Premchand in such public and literally incendiary fashion is a powerful testament to the identification of the group’s members with a sense of self- definition and purpose that has been constructed at variance with the normative northern Indian public imagination.”

27 the familiar and rubbed-down currency of our social imagination.”33 The metaphor of

Premchand as a rubbed-down coin, an object that is tangible and yet faceless, implies that

Premchand is so familiar as to have become, to some degree, less of an individual and more of a reference for national cultural identities. This is perhaps even more true beyond the boundaries of the nation itself: Premchand is ubiquitous as a representative Hindi writer in bookstores around the globe. He is central to the Hindi curriculum in India and also invariably present in Hindi literature syllabi in the United States. Due to the considerable influence of the American academy in global discourse, and the fact that

Hindi is often one of the very few South Asian languages offered for study at US institutions, Premchand’s position as representative of Indian literature becomes inflated indeed.34 For this reason, it is necessary to view the Dalit protest as being about the necessary disruption of a hegemonic cultural identity as it is about Premchand’s work itself. However, in the course of this chapter I would like to argue that Premchand’s status as one of the first realist authors in India is indelibly connected to his formal and linguistic interruptions of Indian literary traditions as he sought to create a new literary vernacular that could encompass a complicated, and thus far unarticulated actuality of life in India at the end of the colonial era.

33 Alok Rai, “Poetic and Social Justice: Some Reflections on the Premchand-Dalit Controversy” in Justice: Political, Social, Juridical, eds. Rjeev Bharga et al., (New Delhi: SAGE Publications India, 2008), 158. 34 David Goldberg, Denis Looney, and Natalia Lusin, “Enrollments in Languages Other Than English in United States Institutions of Higher Education, Fall 2013,” (New York: Modern Language Association, 2015), https://www.mla.org/content/download/31182/1452527/2013_enrollment_survey_pr.pdf. In this report, there were sixty higher education institutions reporting enrollments in Hindi, with an additional fourteen in Hindi-Urdu. The South Asian languages with the next highest number of reporting institutions were Sanskrit, with twenty-eight, and Urdu, which was tied with Tibetan at sixteen. 28

Premchand was, to a degree few writers of his time were, truly bilingual in Urdu and Hindi. He was the translator of several works from English. He was both journalist and storyteller. As the chronicle of a period of great economic and political upheaval,

Premchand’s corpus contains the materials of a composite vernacular of Indian life, one that opened, rather than foreclosed, forms of identity. In fact, despite the perception that

Premchand’s work in Hindi realism effectively extinguished the poetic Urdu literary culture of Indian Muslims for the purposes of Indian nationalism, some of Premchand’s most patriotic stories, such as “Soz-e Watan,” (“Dirge of the Nation”) and “Ek Anmol

Ratan” (“The Most Precious Jewel”) were written in Urdu. Still, the far-flung impression of Premchand as one of the most well-known Indian writers of the twentieth century, along with the particular emphasis on the fact that he was a Hindi writer, helps to fortify the mistaken impression that the rise of Hindi and the rise of Indian independence were an inevitable pairing. Worse, this elision of Premchand’s use of various languages and linguistic registers appears to support the idea that India can be understood through the lens of a single, universalized cultural and linguistic identity. As a result, this positioning of Premchand both denies the reach and variety of his literary subjects, as well as obscure the diversity and variety of linguistic and cultural communities in India as they currently exist. Urdu and English, for example, become the languages of the Muslim and Christian

Other, who are positioned in opposition to and in conflict with India as a nation of

Hindus.

At the same time, however, the recent expulsion of the 1936 novel Godān from the curriculum of the Kendrīya Hindī Sansthān, ostensibly because it was “replete with 29 colloquial language,” demonstrates the way that Premchand’s work is not so easily subsumed into nationally codified notions of literature.35 Premchand’s realism instead contains a variety of vernaculars from both home and abroad, including the formal vernacular of realism as a representation of “low” subjects, to bring shape and voice to a literature that was still very much in the process of being defined. In this chapter, I will look at two works by Premchand that are exemplary of this double gesture of trans- regionality and vernacular specificity: his 1936 speech to the Progressive Writers

Association (PWA), titled “Sāhitya kā uddeśya” (The Object of Literature), and the short story “Mantra.”36 These works demonstrate the juxtapositions of languages and forms— not to subsume them in a standardized national language—but as a demarcation of the varied articulations that exist within Indian identity even at the emergence of a movement that sought to define the cultural boundaries of India as an independent nation state.

Finally, I will look at Ajay Navaria’s recent short story, “Uttarkathā” (“Hello

Premchand”), which uses several of Premchand’s canonical short stories to expand these articulations to the voice and agency of the oppressed Dalit subject, and which produces both a new local vernacular as well as trans-temporal space of solidarity.

The adoption of new literary forms to expand the bounds of the written universe is by no means a modern phenomenon in India. In his essay on the vernacular turn in Indian

35 Ashutosh Sharma, “Holy Cow! Premchand’s Godaan Thrown Out of Curriculum,” National Herald, September 19th, 2017, https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/national/kendriya-hindi-sansthan-removes- premchand-godaan-from-curriculum. 36 Translated by Francesca Orsini as “The Aim of Literature” as an appendix in The Oxford India Premchand (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), I have chosen to translate uddeśya as “object” to highlight its referential as well as its aspirational valence.

30 antiquity, Sanskrit scholar Sheldon Pollock asserts that the move toward the vernacular— in this particular case study, Kannada—was a move away from Sanskrit that, nevertheless, was largely informed by the styles, or “ways” (mārga) of Sanskrit poetics.37

The choice to write in Kanada was most likely a politically conscious decision to create a form that Sanskrit had disallowed. Pollock says that those responsible for creating a vernacular literature “choose to write in a language that does not travel—and that they know does not travel—as easily as the well-traveled language of the cosmopolitan order.”38 However, part of what Pollock sees as Sanskrit’s appeal and the reason for its rapid spread through the Subcontinent, into China, and throughout much of Southeast

Asia, was precisely its ability to expand the limits of local space. The local specificity of the vernacular had to somehow contend with the literary expansiveness of the cosmopolitan language.

In order to emphasize Sanskrit’s unforced popularity, Pollock points out that “no colonization…can be shown to have occurred…. Nor were any ties of political subservience, of material dependency, or exploitation ever established. Sanskrit was not diffused by any single, unified scripture-based religion.”39 Instead, Pollock insists that

Sanskrit “gave voice to imperial politics not as an actual, material force but as an aesthetic practice, and it was especially this poetry of politics that gave presence to the

Sanskrit cosmopolis.”40 Sanskrit’s ability to take the ordinary and particular and to give it

37 Sheldon Pollock, “The Cosmopolitan Vernacular,” The Journal of South Asian Studies 57, no. 1 (Feb. 1998): 22. 38 Ibid., 7. 39 Ibid., 12. 40 Ibid., 12-13.

31 a literary gloss that joined it to an attractively far-reaching political space, or in Pollock’s words, “its ability to make reality more real,” was what drove its adoption across the globe, with surprisingly few modifications.41

It was this literary, or “workly” nature of Sanskrit that enabled this form of written expression.42 Despite its northern origins, Sanskrit’s literary flourishes were painstakingly catalogued by south Indian Sanskrit theorists, such as Dandin (7th-8th century CE) and Bharavi (6th century CE). It was that same literariness, via the descriptions of Sanskrit mārga by South Indian Sanskrit scholars, describe the features of their own literatures. that vernacular intellectuals would subsequently use to describe the uniquely specific features of their own literatures. This produced a form that Pollock identifies as the “cosmopolitan vernacular” of Kannada literature, where texts assert “at once the regionality and supraregionality of Kannada, and its literary value, by retrofitting a Sanskrit taxonomy.”43 Thus, the solidity of regional space through a language of local specificity becomes infused with the imaginative expansion of literary poetics, creating a vivid localization in which description of place is newly imbued with imaginative possibility.

Pollock also points out the ways in which this newly emerged vernacular literary theory finally made visible the attributes of South Indian poetics that had been subsumed into Sanskrit poetics through the work of South Indian Sanskrit scholars. He says, “The source of this organizing taxonomy of Sanskrit poetry would appear to lie not in anything

41 Ibid., 13. 42 Ibid., 4. 43 Ibid., 28.

32 to do with the nature of Sanskrit poetry as such, but rather in underlying inclinations of southern poets.” 44 Thus, it is only in the attempt to break with the grammar of Sanskrit poetics—the point at which critics began to describe poetry in terms of its own regional specificity rather than as attributes of the individual mārga of Sanskrit poetry—that

Sanskrit’s truly composite nature can be found within the cosmopolitan. It becomes clear for the first time that variations and stylistic preferences were not merely several options of Sanskrit poetic styles that a poet might choose to use in his or her work, but rather the contributions of regional innovations to the language of the cosmopolitan.

Premchand’s adoption of realist aesthetics in Indian literature mirrors some of the same effects of the vernacularization of Sanskrit aesthetics by South Indian writers.

Although the form of realism was adopted from English, French, and Russian texts,

Premchand’s realist stories in Urdu and Hindi made visible several elements of northern

Indian life that had not to this point been expressed in Indian literature. Sheldon Pollock’s differentiation of Sanskrit’s universality versus the cultural hegemony of colonialism cannot be understated, however. It perhaps goes without saying that the nature of vernacular movements in modern colonial states was quite different, especially if one considers that, unlike the aesthetic imperial politics of Sanskrit, the spread of English as cosmopolitan vernacular had very identifiable ties to all manner of exploitation and coercion.45 But it should be noted that the spread of print capitalism created new encounters between disparate (if unequal) literary cultures that resulted in new

44 Ibid., 24. 45 See Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 33 juxtapositions, translations and innovations. Premchand’s encounters with novelists and playwrights such as John Galsworthy, Tolstoy and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Life Among the Lowly may have opened the literary world to local subjects previously deemed too low for consideration, and thus Premchand created a form where local Indian life could be seen and celebrated.

And this appears as a feature across progressive literary movements in Asia, were not only content but also the elements of language emerged transformed. Andrew F.

Jones, a scholar of modern Chinese literature, explains that the increased availability of a broad diversity of print material, which included literary and scientific texts in classical

Chinese as well as translations of English, necessitated a process of adapting unfamiliar epistemologies and vocabularies into a workable local context. This culminated in the vernacular (baihua) movement, but also included the choice of using classical registers in vernacular texts when other options seemed less appropriate.46 For Munshi Premchand, this turn towards classical sources came in the context of the additional colonial pressure to move away from an established Persian and Urdu literary canon, which had been greatly maligned by the British and nationalists alike as languages of the elite, while still following a national impulse to define a language independent of English.47 This often appears in the form of Sanskritized Hindi in his own translations of Urdu works: “Soz-e

Watan” becomes “Yeh Meri Mātṛibhūmi,” “Pancāyat” (The Village Council) becomes

“Panc Prameśwar” and “Adab kī Ġarz-o- Ġhayat” becomes “Sāhitya kā uddeśya,” to

46 Andrew Jones, Developmental Fairy Tales (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 67. 47 Harish Trivedi describes the derisive attitudes of British officials towards Urdu in “The Urdu Premchand and The Hindi Premchand,” Revista Brasileira de Literatura Comparada, no. 30 (2017): 75-105. 34 name a few. Premchand’s negotiation of his own work between Urdu and Hindi was quite explicitly the work of translation, where Sanskritized words replaced the Indo-

Persian ones as an attempt to expand the literary flexibility of Hindi.48

Jones points out that vernacular texts in China cannot be read as either transparent translations from or direct responses to colonial sources.49 Rather, like the complicated dialectics between the cosmopolitan and the vernacular in Indian antiquity, all of the elements of new languages and ideals, the layers of translation and vernacularization, and the epistemological revolutions and reactions that were involved in this process, resulted in the May 4th movement: a new, leftist literary and cultural aesthetic that drew upon these new horizons in order to create a literature that could articulate the anti-imperialist sentiments of the interwar period.50 Specifically, Jones points to the way that the juxtaposition of newly available scientific and literary sources in the work of Lu Xun

“makes manifest the antimonies [sic] between hard and soft inheritance, zoology and sociology, animal ‘nature’ and human history, and in doing so, both appropriates and overturns much of the vernacular thinking about evolutionary theory that suffused the print culture of the era.”51

48 Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), 14, 29; Orsini argues that the project of specifically Khaṛī Bolī Hindi literature (Khaṛī Bolī having been a language of trade as opposed to Braj and Urdu, which had been the languages of poetry) was greatly impacted through its promotion by a “subordinate elite” of North Indian high-caste Hindus. Established Urdu literary traditions, which had long been in print in the United Provinces, were challenged as “a struggle for cultural self-assertion in which new cultural symbols were being created.” 49 Jones, Developmental Fairy Tales, 67. 50 Ibid., 68. Jones draws upon the work of film critic Miriam Hansen to describe the way that even the decidedly unequal relationship between cosmopolitan and vernacular forms can result in revolutionary ways of seeing that both reference and undermine hegemonic cultural forms. See Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Vernacular Modernism: Tracking Cinema on a Global Scale,” in World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, ed. Nataša Durovicová and Kathleen Newman (New York: Routledge, 2010), 295. 51 Ibid., 92.

In India, where colonial institutions, missionaries, as well as revolutions in print technologies “stimulated first of all the reproduction of works and genres belonging to the earlier manuscript and oral traditions,” the coalescence of old forms in new contexts at once refreshed old vocabularies for public use (Sanskrit in particular), as well as generated entirely new linguistic, literary, and ideological forms.52 This is why

Premchand’s use of Sanskritized Hindi cannot be interpreted as simply the Hinduization of language, but rather was part of an experimentation with form that sought to expand the horizon of comprehensible cultural forms. The Hindi of “The Object of Literature,” which also contains regular interpolations of Urdu words as well as couplets by

Muhammad Iqbal in Persian, emphasizes Premchand’s attempts to move beyond the

(colonially inspired) debates over language that set Hindi and Urdu in opposition as belonging to antagonistic Hindu and Muslim communities. Further, such a diversity of sources in a single text even in the last year of his life implies that Premchand’s approach to the language debates still entailed, at least to some degree, a mutual acceptance, rather that the promotion of Hindi at the exclusion of Urdu, or vice versa. In turn, the composite character of language and forms in Premchand’s work allows for a break in the established grammatical codes of description and observation for Hindi, Urdu, Persian and Sanskrit, creating new spaces of literary conception much in the same way Kannada literature brought the specificity of place into the imaginative space of Sanskrit.

What this amounts to, as we will see, is not simply a new way of writing, but also

Premchand’s advocacy of entirely new ways of seeing. Premchand’s expansion of the

52 Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere, 20. 36 literary linguistic space, and the naming and definition that are sometimes seen as the banishment of previous poetic forms like the Urdu ghazal, was at least in part an attempt to expand the purview of literary space to include that which had no voice under the semi-feudalist conditions of colonialism. By seeking additional alternatives to—not eschewing—the established literary tropes of Urdu poetry or the hegemonic presence of

English literature, Premchand is able to develop literary elements that those textual sources themselves could not articulate. In this way, even the narrow features of the

Sanskrit sringāram rasa (beauty aesthetic), once reserved for subjects of epic poetry, can then be correlated with the beauty of the peasant woman at work in her field.53

But even beyond the composite vocabulary of his speech, this approach to sources of knowledge also manifests itself formally and epistemologically in Premchand’s work.

In “Namak kā Daroġa” (“The Salt Inspector”), the influence of Persian romance and

English notions of civic duty combine when a young man educated in Persian refuses to be corrupted in his colonial government position. While the civil courts are ineffective, he earns the trust of the wealthy Brahmin landlord he tried to incarcerate.54 In “Baṛe Ghar kī Beṭī” (“A Well-bred Daughter”), the principled objections of an English-educated son are swayed by his more understanding, uneducated relatives.55 And, as I will explore later in this chapter, Premchand’s repetition of the figure of the healer in the short story

“Mantra”—a doctor of modern medicine, his medical-student son, and a mantrawālā, or ritual healer—sets up antinomies between cosmopolitan and local vernacular forms of

53 Premchand, Sāhitya kā uddeśya, 21. 54 Munshi Premchand, Premcand racnā sancayan (New Delhi: Sāhitya Akademī, 1994), 64-65. 55 Ibid., 57-58. 37 knowledge that allow for an expanded understanding of the healer’s social function. As

Arturo Escobar noted in the context of uneven development more than a decade ago, the periphery does not merely absorb, but encounters knowledge systems produced at the imperial core from the perspective of their own, if unequal, epistemological order, and it is apparent in these stories that the relationship of these epistemological spheres was a complex and highly negotiated one.56 What emerges in “Mantra” is a new idea of the healer in which neither knowledge system—the colonial nor the local one—is completely subsumed.

But there are also dangers to this naming and definition of figures that had in previous eras escaped characterization, as there is a fine line between the demarcation of composite identities and the writing of marked difference that circumscribes those identities. Frances Pritchett, for example, has described the implicit correlation of Urdu with aristocratic decadence in the short story “Śatranj ke Khilāṛi” (“The Chess Players”), and Premchand’s use of degrading caste names as character names in the novel

Rangbhūmi is in part what inspired the book burnings in 2004.57 Toral Jatin Gajarwala points out that “Premchand produced a vast canvas strewn with figures from various castes, classes, and communities,” a “democratization of the gaze” which would at first appear to be at odds with critiques that his work has casteist tendencies.58 But as

Gajarwala notes, “this critique is less about the elision of the Dalit, and pertains rather to

56 See Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). 57 Frances Pritchett, “The Chess Players,” Journal of South Asian Literature 22, no. 2 (Summer-Fall 1986): 65-78; Bruek, “Questions of Representation,” 180. 58 Toral Jatin Gajarwala, Untouchable Fictions (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 6.

38 the narrative mode of his inclusion—and even his celebration: pitiable, downtrodden, insulted.”59 In Premchand’s attempts at creating a literary representation of systemic caste oppression, he actually limited the active role of the low-caste subject in a way that did not correlate with the actuality of lower-caste political activity at all.60

Gajarwala says that contemporary Dalit literature, perhaps in ways quite similar to the regionality and supraregionality maintained in the development of Kannada vernacular literature, “is poised between a regionalism that revels in local dialect and the non-transferrable specificity of caste conditioning, on the one hand, and a broad universalism that invokes a certain global paradigm of protest (both politically and culturally), on the other.”61 The actual referent of Dalit literature is at once insistently specific, demanding representation that articulates all of the features of Dalit life through the direct description of realism, and yet allows for the radical re-imagining of Dalit life as something that can accommodate all of those aspects of the Dalit subject that have not yet found voice. In Ajay Navaria’s short story “Hello Premchand,” it is through the grafting of some of Premchand’s most recognizable short stories onto a contemporary

Dalit narrative that the Dalit subject is freed from what Toral Jatin Gajarwala calls in

Premchand’s stories “the circle of sympathy,” and emerges as a liberatory actor in his own right.62 And much like the way that theorists of Kannada aesthetics revealed the

59 Ibid., 8. 60 Ramnarayan S. Rawat, Reconsidering Untouchability (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011), 12-13; Rawat often references Premchand as a writer who successfully illustrated the complicated hardships of low caste agricultural farmers and laborers, but he also points out that castes such as the Chamars and Pasis of the United Provinces were hardly passive in their suffering. He says that “archival evidence demonstrates that Chamars and Pasis became active members in the Kisan Sabha (Peasant Association),” which he calls “one of the most important peasant movements in Indian history.” 61 Ibid., 3. 62 Ibid., 45 39 southern-ness of Sanskrit poetry, Navaria’s story reveals the active Dalit subject that was concealed behind Premchand’s low-caste characters. In certain ways this is an extension to Premchand’s vision of a democratized literature, and the ways that Premchand’s realism, which he described as “idealist realism,” reaches upwards to what may be even as it plunges ever more deeply into the depths of what is.63

At the same time, “Hello Premchand” is an active disruption of Premchand’s narratives through a dramatic re-ordering of narrative time that brings back into narrative the vernacular of Dalit resistance, one that had been actively excluded from public discourse because it did not always cohere with upper-caste nationalist aspirations.64 In the contemporary context where nationalism is still a threat to Indian social unity,

Navaria’s text is full of the pressures from an unequal system that remain a reality for his

Dalit characters. However, through the manipulation of timelines he also expands their possible responses, releasing them from the narrative logic that threatens to imprison them within a state of perpetual oppression. What results is a realism that is more expressive of the multivalent nature of his subjects, and also goes beyond the point of naming and definition. Navaria’s story attempts instead to convey both a present reality and the spaces of ineffable potential by re-arranging the composite parts of Premchand’s stories into a critique of his narrative direction.

63 Munshi Premchand, “Upanyās,” in Kuch vicār [Some thoughts], (Allahabad: Saraswati Press, 1982), 50. 64 Rawat, Reconsidering Untouchability, 161. Rawat writes that the Dalit voices which were in print at the time ran quite explicitly counter to the anti-Imperialist message Premchand and others were trying to promote. Members of the Adi-Hindu movement, for example, advocated for the continuation of British government as that which had dismantled caste hierarchy.

Ways of Speaking and Ways of Seeing: Composite Language and Vision in “The Object of Literature” Premchand’s address was delivered in “easy to understand Urdu,” at the conference, but as published in his journal Hans, it was written in a highly Sanskritized

Hindi.65 Such community-specific translation—the former for leftist Urdu writers who by and large belonged to an educated Muslim elite, and the latter as a contribution to the vibrant Hindi literary scene among a rising Hindu elite—demonstrates both the flexibility and range of Premchand’s linguistic practice and the breadth of his political commitments. Premchand’s literature was written for multiple audiences involved in the project of eliminating forms of social oppression, both foreign and domestic, though the audiences themselves remained fairly restricted. Premchand’s work was directed toward both those Urdu writers of the PWA who were committed to ending oppressive and exclusionary aesthetic practices at home as well as audiences more commonly associated with anti-British, liberal Gandhian nationalism.

The lines that delineated those communities were already at least partly a result of colonial epistemic violence. Orsini points out that Colonization of the Upper Provinces was “late and piecemeal,” and that the use of Urdu as a language of the former Mughal rulers remained the dominant vernacular in the Punjab, Delhi, and Awadh.66 Premchand’s intimate knowledge of Urdu arose from an era in which Urdu-language texts were much more common in North India, and much less communally aligned. In addition to the

Kendrīya Hindī Sansthān’s complaints of colloquial language in his Hindi-language

65 Sajjad Zaheer, The Light: The History of the Movement for Progressive Literature in the Indo-Pakistan Subcontinent, trans. Amina Azfar (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 67. 66 Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere, 2-3. 41 compositions, it is significant to note that Premchand describes a childhood in which he devoured books written in Urdu, both by Indian authors and books that had been translated from English.67 Having “no knowledge of Hindi,” he began his career by writing in Urdu under the name Nawab Rai.68 Alok Rai postulates that the switch to

Hindi was not solely out of nationalist fervor, but was in part a desire to attend to a neglected segment of Indian literature that could then address a neglected segment of the population, namely low-caste Hindus.69 However, this is not an uncontested view. Harish

Trivedi suggests that Premchand switched to Hindi because he was anxious about the shrinking Urdu market, and along with fears that, as a Hindu, he would never be accepted as an Urdu writer.70 Shamsur Rahman Faruqi attributes the source of these anxieties to

British attitudes that had categorized Urdu and Hindi along religious communal lines, where the former was the language of a supposedly foreign, Muslim influence and the latter belonged to a natrualized native Hindu population.71 But regardless of his motivations, and considering the particularly virulent Hindu nationalism that currently dominates contemporary Indian politics, the composite language of the printed speech provides evidence of Hindi as a language of mixed sources and influences that is quite distant from the exclusionary rhetoric of “Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan.”72

67 Premchand, Premcand racnā sancayan, 26. 68 Ibid. 69 Rai, “Poetic and Social Justice,” 157. 70 Harish Trivedi, “The Progress of Hindi: Part 2,” in Literary Cultures in History, ed. Sheldon Pollock (Oakland: University of California Press, 2003), 975. 71 Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, “Urdu Literary Culture: Part 1,” in Literary Cultures in History, ed. Sheldon Pollock (Oakland: University of California Press, 2003), 815. 72 For Alok Rai’s compelling illustration of the formation of this rhetoric as part of the Hindu reaction to the 1857 mutiny, see Hindi Nationalism, Tracts for the Times (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2000) 70-77. This ninteenth-century slogan of religious, linguistic and ethnic purity, was a phrase that was directed as

Such linguistic variation within the text also highlights the way that Hindi, even though it was promoted as an accessible national tongue, was still very much in the process of being written.73 This speaks to a broader sentiment within both Premchand’s speech as well as the national language he helped to define: in order for literature to remain relevant to the public that supports it, it must turn to what is, in terms of the daily practice of life, actually at hand. In the field of twentieth-century printed literature, this included a range of sources such as English novels, classical Sanskrit literature that had only recently become commercially available, and early twentieth-century Urdu works that were being published on a large scale. This final category includes works written by an extensive network of Muslim and Hindu authors who, belonged to “a powerful bureaucratic elite.”74 Harish Trivedi says of this community of writers at the turn of the century that, “At no time in the history of Urdu did it represent more of a ‘composite’ literary culture than just before that culture fell apart.”75

It perhaps goes without saying, however, that the new diversity of sources in colonial India came with their own restrictions. A large body of literature in Sanskrit,

Persian, and Arabic—as well as Urdu and Hindi—was distributed through a single press, that which was administered by the Fort William College. Thus, the literatures of North

India largely consisted of material that either encompassed the elite attitudes and

much toward the Urdu-speaking Indian elite as it was at English colonial occupiers, and as such was a reaction to cultural and linguistic bigotry as much as it was to serve as the foundation for new nationalist exclusions all its own. 73 Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere, 33. Orsini writes that “despite the rapid observable decline in Urdu publishing at the time new texts did not snuff out existing ones but required readjustments and often entailed inner tensions and contradictions that are the hallmark of this age of change.” Premchand’s stories are a vivid example of these tensions. 74 Trivedi, “The Progress of Hindi,” 971. 75 Ibid. 43 prejudices of an Indian educated class, or the prosaic and utilitarian motivations of a colonial government. Nevertheless, Premchand’s discussions of language within the speech do not constitute a rejection of those materials. Instead, the inclusion of Urdu literary tropes and Sanskritized vocabulary suggests that along with a rich existing Urdu literary tradition, the Persian poetry of Iqbal, and newly distributed Sanskrit works, future works in Urdu and Hindi can serve as a way to address the expansive silences that still existed regarding vast segments of Indian life. Although not mentioned within the speech itself, the cosmopolitan vernacular of English was a major influence upon Premchand’s own approach to literature, as he had translated several works from English into Hindi.76

Premchand also argued that finding sources for even the most specific and minute aspects of contemporary life could include literature that had outlived the circumstances of its creation. In his essay “Jīvan Men Sāhitya kā Sthān” (The place of literature in life), published in a collection that accompanied his speech to the PWA, Premchand remarks,

“The basis of literature is life. On this very foundation literature’s walls stand, its garrets, minarets, and domes are built; but the base has been buried in mud…. Whether life is answerable to the works of God we do not know, but literature is answerable before man.”77 As the location of language in the form of definite vocabularies as well as set conventions and devices, literature is something that we can turn to in order to make sense of the vastness of life, and through that find the source and effects of our own

76 Some of Premchand’s translations from English to Hindi include: Ṭālsaṭāya kī kahāniyām̐ [Stories of Leo Tolstoy]; several stories by John Galsworthy, including “Cān̐ dī kī ḍibiyā” [The Silver Box], “Nyāya” [Justice], and “Haṛatāla” [Strife]; and an adaptation of Anatole France’s novel Thais, titled Ahaṅkāra [Pride]. 77 Premchand, Sāhitya kā uddeśya, 27. 44 concrete activity upon our conceptions of the world. Life is not answerable to literature, for in the course of time it transforms, adapts and changes, and thus the written work remains as the skeletal architecture of the life from which it was built, the basis of

Premchand’s argument that the literatures of the past must be transformed. But even so,

Premchand argues that literature of the most distant times and places can carry the potential to exceed the limitations of its context. For instance, Stowe’s novel Uncle

Tom’s Cabin, Premchand says that “it is a composition of a heart disturbed by the practice of slavery; but today even though that practice has ceased there is an expansiveness that entrances us upon reading it. True literature is never old. It remains forever new.”78

Quite in contrast to the mere insertion of local detail, it is the expansiveness of a work of literature that is, in Premchand’s view, commensurate with its truth. In the essay that follows, “Sāhitya kā Ādhār” (The basis of literature), he continues to elaborate on the importance of this expansiveness, equating rather than contrasting a broad and fully encompassing view with an intimate knowledge of life. Literature that most accurately represents the world is one that does not limit it. He says, “Those expressions through which one can unite with another, that is a true expression…Life is intimacy with nature itself. The broader the purview of one’s love, the greater his life.”79 This intimacy with nature is not only the inclusion of local flora and fauna in narratives, but also a “love,”

(prem) which unites that which falls beyond definable boundaries. The ability to comprehend life, and to create a literature that accurately reflects it, also depends upon

78 Ibid., 31. 79 Ibid., 36. 45 the ability to find expression that lies beyond experience as it is commonly understood, to unite man with what exists outside of his conceptual landscape, and to find a way to incorporate those new elements into the old narrative.

This is what encompasses both the “minarets” of literature and its foundations: the acknowledgment of universalized, hegemonic pressures in their engagement with the specifically local features that support them in order to find the “true expression” of the varied and ever-changing parameters of experience. Such a composite structure does not deny the oppressive character of the former, but it does necessitate a recognition of the latter, and what comes of such negotiations is by no means a foregone conclusion.

Existing literature, built from the elite circles of patronage or the narrow utility of colonial pedagogy, did not have the capacity for such recognition, but that did not mean those works had to be abandoned. Instead, what we see in “The Object of Literature” and its accompanying essays is an insistence that there must be a shift in the language of literature, one that can describe both the structural changes in the world at large as well as the particulars of place within those global transformations.

Premchand insists that a writer must be one who “feels a deficiency both within himself and without. To fill this deficiency, he remains restless.”80 The restless and unbigoted writer, by drawing upon both local sources of knowledge and their ties to history, as well as knowledge from abroad that was available at unprecedented levels during this period, makes visible the horizons of the world in which he or she lives. This is the storyteller who is called forth in Premchand’s demand for writing to broaden the

80 Ibid., 17. 46 scope of objects suited to literary inquiry, and to include all that is high and low, near and far, insider and outsider, in an effort to bring into the circle of expression the realms of

Indian experience that remained unspoken, and to interrogate the circumscriptions of what had been written before. Premchand’s use of Urdu poetic tropes as well as the language of oral folk tales that would have been familiar to literate and illiterate audiences alike serves as a way for the writer to reach beyond the communities of defined aesthetics not only to reach new readers, but to expand the referential realm of existing ones.

Due to the rapid transformations leading up to the twentieth century—in particular the acceleration of capitalism and the spread and systematization of colonialism—there appeared in literature of the time to be little relationship between the worlds of circulated print and the “base” on which it rested. Meenakshi Mukherjee explains that the nineteenth-century realist fiction in English that gained the most popularity in the subcontinent was that which tended to be the least “real,” since, “for the nineteenth-century Indian it was not very easy to distinguish precisely between fictional modes when the life depicted was so unfamiliar.”81 And, as Mukherjee notes, the influx of nineteenth-century texts in India created a wide and elaborate expanse from which a storyteller could begin his construction of new worlds, worlds that were not conceivably possible within the constrained atmosphere of colonialism: “Colourful, expansive, free— the characters in the work of these novelists seemed to lead lives of infinite possibilities, while life of the nineteenth-century Indian—politically servile, economically deprived

81 Mukherjee, Realism and Reality, 6.

47 and socially circumscribed—seemed limited in comparison.”82 Once again, this encounter with a world that had followed one particular path of development from a space where development that remained restricted and constrained by the forces of colonialism created a conceptual conflict that had to inspire novel solutions. The formation of realist literature in India, therefore, was much more than a mere substitution of local languages, subjects, and spaces that could then replace these unfamiliar landscapes from abroad. In Premchand’s story “Sohāg kā Śav” (“A Wedding That

Turned into a Funeral”) which was set in part in Premchand’s imagined version of the metropole, he places Indian characters into new symbolic contexts that enabled—or sometimes forced—their behaviors to change.83

That is why Premchand’s address to the PWA was not only a challenge to colonial power but was also a challenge to the national literary and linguistic boundaries that were beginning to develop with the advent of independence. The Association, made up of young leftist writers several of whom had begun their collective activities while abroad in London, was already something of a problem in the formation of a nationalist literature as Urdu writers were by far and away the largest majority. Organizer and writer

Sajjad Zaheer’s appeal to Premchand to serve as president for the inaugural meeting was an important move in establishing local solidarity, not just because Premchand was a

Hindi writer, but because he was someone who could be considered the Hindi writer of

82 Ibid. 83 Munshi Premchand, Strī jīvan kī kahāniyān [Stories of the lives of women]. (New Delhi: Bharatiya Janpith, 2012). The character Subhadra from “The Wedding That Turned into a Funeral” reflects Mukherjee’s statement about the relative constraints on Indian colonial subjects when she says, “How [the English] love pleasure, as if they have no worries, as if they’re all successful...and then there’s us, who neither laugh nor cry…as if our people’s lifeblood has become nothing” (297). 48 the moment. Premchand was by then well known, not only for his seemingly inexhaustible pen, but also for his support of younger authors. To have such an established figure at their conference would do much for the general profile of the organization. At first, Premchand declined, explaining that he would be in Wardha at the same time for a meeting of the Bhāratiya Sāhitya Pariṣād (BSP), an organization that had been criticized for a perceived partiality for Sanskritized Hindi at the expense of Urdu literature.84 But either by a stroke of luck or a change of heart, Premchand agreed to attend because he would be in Lucknow at the time of the conference to translate a speech of Nehru’s into “common language.”85 As such, he would be “willing to serve as president.”86 Premchand gave the address in what would be the last year of his life, on

April 9, 1936.

Perhaps in light of the charged nature of his appearance at a meeting of Urdu, not

Hindi writers—writers who were also leftists, with an ambiguous relationship toward

Gandhian nationalism—Premchand begins his address by talking about the heated linguistic debates of the time. He had already contributed significantly to a body of work in Hindi that would be inclusive and accessible to the widest possible public sphere, and his translation of Nehru’s (English) speech is one concrete example of that. But despite his clear involvement and attentions to a “common language,” he insists that the true

84 Asha Rani, “Languages as a Marker of Religious Difference,” in Lived Islam in South Asia, eds. Imtiaz Ahmad, Helmut Reifeld, Konrad Adenauer-Stiftung (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004) 152. 85 Carlo Coppola, “Premchand’s Address to the First Meeting of the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association,” Journal of South Asian Literature 21, no. 2 (1986): 23. By “common language” Coppola assumes he meant a mixture of Hindi and Urdu, or “Hindustani,” that would be more broadly comprehensible than Nehru’s English. 86 Ibid.

49 work of literature has yet to be done: he says, “Language is a means, not an end [bhāṣa sādhan hai, sādhya nahīn].”87 The mixed language of the published speech appears to be a reiteration of this argument at the level of form: Sanskritized Hindi and Persian poetry, along with the general mix of colloquial Hindi and Urdu words that characterizes spoken discourse across North India, are all relevant to the exchange of ideas that literature enables.

In the next moment, however, he appears to single out that more ordinary, conversational language as that which has been most effective at eliciting sense from its listeners. He explains that although there was an ordinary and spoken language in existence in previous eras, the language that was in the process of being developed for mass consumption was reserved specifically for writing.88 Spoken language, or bol-cāl kī bhāṣa, with all of its connotations of spoken, ordinary, and unpremeditated language,

“makes manifest our ideas to our friends—paints a picture of our experiences of joy and grief. Writers must do this very work through writing.”89 What is more important here than what may be a privileging of spoken language over written is the idea that

Premchand is trying to pull into the printed universe a tradition of oral storytelling. That is, a literature that draws upon not only the traditions of the qasīdah (panegyric) or the

87 Premchand, Sāhitya kā uddeśya, 9. 88 Ibid., 10. The writers he invokes are Mir Amman and Lallu Lal, nineteenth-century writers who are sometimes described as the fathers of standardized Urdu and Hindi, respectively. Both authors wrote textbooks for the purposes of instructing British officers at Fort William College. For more on this and its implications in the division and classification of language along sectarian lines, see Aamir Mufti, “Orientalism and the Institution of World Literatures,” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 3 (2010), 481-482. 89 Ibid.

50 mahākāvya (epic), but also the qissah (tale) and the sangīt (song).90 The suggestion is that these forms, despite their neglect in the realms of official literary classification, represent valuable cultural sources that were being broadly accessed in print. Premchand suggests that literature must experiment with everything at its disposal in order to “paint” emotions (citra khīncnā), and “make manifest our ideas” (vicār prakaṭ karnā).91

Premchand advocates for a move beyond the standardized terms of public discourse to a use of any and all languages, regardless of source, as a conductive medium that enables an exchange between the writer and her reader.

But it also must be capable of including the world that lies beyond the emotional landscapes created between author and audience. It is notable that some of the literature that Premchand invokes as an example that fails in this regard is some of the most sensuous and ornate writing then being circulated in the subcontinent. In particular, he mentions the work Fasāna-e Ajāib, which was written as a response to the

“conversational and pedestrian” Urdu literature that was published and distributed by the press at Fort William College.92 Premchand says of this literature that, “The object of these legends was to entertain or satisfy our taste for fantastic romance. A story is a story, life is life. Each was considered contradictory.”93 It seems contradictory for Premchand to advocate for literature that can attract readers, but against forms that were known for their rhetorical flourishes. But this is, of course, a perfect example of the problems that

90 Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere, 73. Orsini says that “it was largely the oral genres of songs and storytelling, catering to well-established tastes and requiring only elementary literacy…that constituted the [printed] literary market…yet these are totally absent from literary histories.” 91 Premchand, Sāhitya kā uddeśya, 10. 92 Mufti, “Orientalism,” 486. 93 Ibid., 11. 51 develop when the writing of literature is tied to the complicated and historically burdened arguments about public language—Urdu or Hindi, Persian or Urdu, Arabic or Persian— that had been taking place in the subcontinent for at least two hundred years and still, consequently, are happening today. Premchand was at once a writer and appreciator of

Urdu, but within his work are visible the prevalent tensions that arose from rhetoric of the time that described Urdu as decadent and out of touch. It was, in the context of the speech, one among many traditional literary sources that had to be reformed. Literature must be able to break the boundaries of linguistic categorization popularized by the Fort

William College, and it must also be attentive to the extraordinary that dwells within the perfectly ordinary. It is perhaps for this reason that Premchand turns to bol-cāl as one of several overlooked sources of discourse that lie beyond the referential circles of the very language in which he learned to write.

But bol-cāl is by no means the only source that Premchand relies upon to create an alternative framework to colonial-era texts. Much of what lies behind Premchand’s thoughts on literature and attraction in “The Object of Literature”—both what informs his vision and part of what he argues literature must then supersede—is the long history of

Sanskrit aesthetics in India as presented through rasa, the categorization of various dramatic, poetic and literary tropes that were thought to bring about particular emotional states. The fact that Premchand singled out spoken language appears at first glance to condemn this long-used classification of tropes as academic and ineffectual. Premchand stops short of saying that bol-cāl is somehow more suited to an expression of authentic or universal feeling than the printed word of classical languages, which already had their 52 own significant corpus of commentary and criticism. But Premchand does warn that far from appearing outdated and stale, it is the deep and reliable satisfaction that springs from established literary forms, an appeal to emotion without connection to the ordinary emotional landscape of lived experience, that concerns him . Borrowing from the aesthetic vocabularies of Urdu poetry, Premchand says:

The contrivances of the āshiyānah (bird’s nest), qafas (bird cage), barq (lightning) and khirman (heap stack), conveyed the despair of various states of separation and agony so well that people clasped their bosoms….Can a literature whose themes are confined to the emotional states of love and the pain of separation and despair that spring from it, a literature which believes that escaping from the problems of the world is the meaning of life, answer our needs for thoughts and feelings?” 94

For Premchand, the answer is clearly no, however it is significant to note that he does not suggest that the aesthetics of Urdu poetry are lacking because of their interiority, but rather because of their limited vocabulary. Premchand suggests that “our needs for thoughts and feelings,” consist of a much broader range of emotion that remains untapped, and literature must find ways of affecting what remains untouched.

Urdu literature isn’t the only site of his critique, however. He also cites the refined titillations of Sanskrit poetry: “śringārik* feeling is merely one part of human life, and the literature that consists only of this is not able to be a thing of pride to its age or its class, nor is it evidence of its elegance.95” Premchand suggests that the Sanskrit literary tropes of the past were also of a broader world, and narrowing the literature of the moment to fit

94 Premchand, Sāhitya kā uddeśya, 11. * An adjective used to describe the sringāram rasa, which carries strong connotations love and eroticism, but which in early Sanskrit commentary was used to denote an aesthetic of “beauty” or “attraction” in a general sense. 95 Ibid. 53 within a single aesthetic window risks undoing even the range of emotion and craft that was available to the poetry of the Mughal era or to classical Sanskrit literature in its age.

The attractiveness of these “universal” emotional sentiments cannot be denied, but the narrowed understanding of literature from previous times as mere figures of speech for a conventional set of emotional landscapes forecloses a negotiation with the world that brought those tropes of nests and cages into existence in the first place.

Sanskrit scholar B. V. Srinivasacharyulu confirms that the modern equation of

Sanskrit rasa with set conventions was a shift from earlier interpretations, and that

Sanskrit theoreticians of the first millennium were quite well aware of the interplay between description and literariness. As Srinivasacharyulu states, “To the poeticians of the Alankar school, the Alankara means the attractive element, the central beauty of a literary work. [Acharya] Vamana defines Alankara as beauty. It is only during the period of the later Rasa school that Alankara came to mean a mere embellishment, and svabhāvokti [realism] and vakrokti [idealism] were reduced to two among several figures of speech.”96 Srinivasacharyulu also points out that the Kashmiri theoretician Bhamaha is careful to distinguish svabhāvokti from mere reportage, or vārta, which contains no affecting element.97 Instead, Srinivasacharyulu says that the nature of svabhāvokti in

Sanskrit literature is perhaps best defined by Mahimabhatta around the eleventh century, when he says that svabhāvokti is “The description of [the] essential nature of things,” where the writer brings out both the apparent characteristics of an object as well as that

96 B.V. Srinivasacharyulu, “The Indian View of Realism in Literature,” Indian Literature 26, no. 5 (September-October 1983): 5. 97 Ibid., 6.

54 deeper, less visible reality that is the special facility of literature.98 Sanskritist T.

Nanjundaiya Sreekantaiya goes even further in interpreting the complex interplay between object and expression in his translation of the same passage, when he says that, rather than the genius of the writer being that which brings out the hidden nature of the object, it is “the intuition which springs up suddenly after touching the real nature of the thing,” emphasizing even more the importance of the object in creating the “thoughts and feelings” of the writer who ponders it.99

But while Premchand warns writers of the problems of repeating popular conventions for the purposes of satisfaction and commercial entertainment, he also warns of the dangers that arise from a complete rejection of fantasy in favor of the verifiable.

“The tendency of a fixed portrayal is growing so much in modern literature,” he says,

“that stories won’t go beyond the limits of firsthand experience…. At the same time, we also wish for the writer to awaken us with the expanse of his knowledge and ideas, to expand the limits of our vision.100” Premchand’s emphasis is on truth (satya or saccāī) rather than on a stable or given reality, and it is the role of the writer to express truth by expanding the conception of what that reality could be. Reality is plausible, verifiable, and narrowly understood. It is not only the expectation, but the necessity, that the storyteller can draw upon a less immediately available, if no less real, alternative. It is, it could be said, a sense of purpose. In his address Premchand advocates quite strongly for a literature of purpose, which is notably different from literature that is written to serve a

98 Ibid., 9. 99 T. Nanjudaiya Sreekantaiya, Indian Poetics, trans. N. Balasubrahmanya (New Delhi: Sāhitya Akademi, 2001), 137. 100 Premchand, Sāhitya kā uddeśya, 15. 55 purpose, as with propaganda. Instead, literature is that which can make the possible visible, even in moments when the deck is stacked. Importantly for this particular address to young, social justice-minded, aspiring writers, this call includes the writer as well as the reader.

Part of what is striking about Premchand’s address is that he insists that the combination of varied linguistic forms breaks through the grammatical structures of each tradition and allows the writer to seek counsel from the world around them. It is an opportunity that he suggests did not exist in the previous century. Certainly, the conception was that the activity of nineteenth-century poets, because of the relatively narrow networks of artistic patronage, was circumscribed by convention.101 The administrative requirements of Fort William College, always defending its usefulness in order to retain its funding, demanded a language that could easily be taught to British officers, and resulted in the pedantic language of Baġ o Bahār.102 The indignant reactions of the Mughal elite resulted in the densely elaborate Fasānah-e Ajāib.103 As much as people were not being served by the literature, literature was not adequately being served due the narrowness of subjects deemed appropriate. Premchand says, “For poets, their work itself was their livelihood…. [They] never had a chance to encounter ordinary life and its truths and to be influenced by it. Great and small were subject to such mental

101 This was a perception certainly held by many members of the PWA. One example comes from Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s portrayal of Ghalib, one of Urdu’s most famous and enduring poets from that time, as a revolutionary, but insolvent, outsider. See Sohrab Modi, Mirza Ghalib (Bombay: Minerva Movietone, 1954). 102 Modhumita Roy, “The Englishing of India: Class Formation and Social Privilege,” Social Scientist 21, no. 5/6 (May-June, 1993): 31-62. 103 Mufti, “Orientalism,” 487.

56 pressure that there was no mental or intellectual life left.”104 The demands put upon language by colonialism and the literature formed from it meant that it was by no means freer than a politically-minded literature that breaks codes in order to wrestle with the varied and ungainly subjects of mundane life.

As he continues, referring to the age of Urdu poets as the “age of degeneration”

(patan ke kāl), bemoaning its ascetic nihilism as well as the “erotic feeling” (śringārik bhāv) of Sanskrit rasa, Premchand claims such work was a product of its time and could not be faulted for its content.105 But, after a while, he appears to rescind even that concession as he draws delineating lines around that which deserves to be described as literature and that which does not: “A literature that does not awaken our good taste

(suruci), meet with our spiritual and mental contentment, make us aware of our love of beauty—that which does not bear true determination and true resolve to overcome our difficulties, that is useless (bekār) to us today. It does not even possess the right to be called literature.”106 The literature that is not purposeful, and also does not have the potential to create in the reader her own sense of purpose, is not literature at all. This suggests a worrisome logic according to which any literature that does not immediately and obviously meet the rather loose standards of beauty and usefulness loses its legitimacy and, therefore, its right to existence.

It is because of the perils of hindsight that we can see in these words the beginnings of a divide, and then conflate them with a culture war that would come to a

104 Premchand, Sāhitya kā uddeśya, 12. 105 Ibid. 106 Ibid., 13. 57 head in India and Pakistan in later decades. It was a war between taste and purpose that pitted “progressive” literature against “reactionary,” where one would be labeled

“decadent” and the other “propagandist.” Already T. S. Eliot had been critical of the

“extra-literary,” the attempt to incorporate the most mundane aspects of human experience into the sacred realm of poetry as a pollution of the “purely literary.”107 Many of the writers in attendance at the PWA conference would have been aware of this. Mulk

Raj Anand, one of the architects of the Progressive Writers’ manifesto when the

Association was conceived in London, had worked with T. S. Eliot on a monthly radio magazine program for the B.B.C. Eastern Service.108 But also, there were increasingly contentious debates regarding what constituted true literature already happening in both

Hindi and Urdu, and they would only get more heated over time. Ultimately, prayogavādī

(experimental) literature came to be pitted against pragtishīl (progressive) literature, thereby denying purpose to the former and innovation to the latter.109

As can be seen from the fact that Premchand’s mention of suruci is in the same sentence as the call for literature to find “true resolve to overcome our difficulties,”

Premchand was making his speech at a moment of initiation, where tensions between global market pressures and nationalist ones, and even the tensions of the Cold War itself, remained largely in embryo. Similarly, the full possibilities of literature to serve as a

107 Ashley Marshall, “T. S. Eliot on the Limits of Criticism,” The Modern Language Review 100, no. 3 (Jul. 2005): 610. 108 A photograph of Anand, standing with T.S. Eliot, George Orwell and others appears in George Orwell’s book about his work with the B.B.C World Service. See E. M. Forster and George Orwell, Talking to India (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1943). 109 For more on this discussion, particularly with regard to this divide in Urdu literature written after Partition, see the following chapter.

58 location of ideological conception and debate were still being explored, and

“propaganda” hardly carried the same connotations as it does today.110 Premchand’s speech has the energy of the moment, and part of the declaration of that moment was to demonstrate the ways in which it was possible to cut some of the aesthetic ties of the past.

The former ties of patronage that had bound the hands of the poets and other writers who were largely responsible for defining the languages of public debate were no more. New forms of institutional patronage, which had their own limiting effects, had yet to emerge.

This led to both the urgency and possibility of considering literature in a new way, and in a new light.

It is also important to acknowledge that the nineteenth-century Urdu literature which Premchand describes as one of circumscription and fancy had already made its way into Premchand’s own aesthetics. It appears most clearly as the nationalist Urdu romanticism of Premchand’s early work, written as Nawab Rai.111 And he appears to abandon his more stringent criteria for judging the worthiness of literature in the essay

“The Basis of Literature” when he says, “Often, when we critique an author, we do it according to our own taste…but the test of good literature is that which we have come to cite (ullekh kar ānā). There is no criterium besides this.”112 While Premchand criticizes

110 Anne Rasmusson “Mobilizing Minds,” in The Cambridge History of the First World War, ed. Jay Winter, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 3:390. Rasmusson said in her essay of cultural production on the cusp of the First World War that “to claim to be…a scholar or an intellectual at the start of the twentieth century was not merely to practice a profession and social function, it was also to share and express values that forged codes of individual conduct and collective commitments.” One can see how this sentiment could be easily transferrable to a country that was poised on the cusp of the struggle for independence. 111 See Toral Jatin Gajarwala’s account of the disappearance of Nawab Rai, the Urdu fabulist, and the emergence of the Hindi realist Premchand in Untouchable Fictions, 13. 112 Premchand, Sāhitya kā uddeśya, 38. 59 the circumscription and perceived arbitrariness of previous literary modes, it is the citation of those modes in combination with one another that enables new forms and approaches, even within Premchand’s own literature. But it is not only through a use of old forms within the new, but rather through the integration of those old forms with sources that are from beyond their aesthetic circle, creating an expanded space of literary expression that is capable of reframing the subjects under contemplation.

The ornate and fanciful, as well as the affective desire of the erotic and degenerate, are always potential sources of expression and relation. Sometimes it is actually through this very language that the storyteller lets sense, rather than sermon, convey meaning. And in fact, by letting the historical obscurity or regional particularity of a phrase stand without elaboration, it can be the component upon which the reader will enact her own, fuller understanding, imbued with her own experience. In the context of the Indian subcontinent this could mean using Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian as the former cosmopolitan languages of religion and government administration, as well as any number of regional vernaculars that influence and contribute to bol-chāl as a language of spoken social interaction. In Premchand’s speech, it means delivering a speech in

Hindustani, publishing it in Sanskritized Hindi, and using the Persian poetry of Iqbal to illustrate his most salient points.

The ability to access and accept this seismic shift in ideas requires a certain honest engagement with material both from abroad and at home, and may help to illuminate why

Premchand’s notion of a “progressive” (pragtishīl) is synonymous with the artist, broadly understood. Rather than hedging his political commitments towards those of the leftists in 60 attendance, Premchand’s speech indicates the recognition that there is always an undiscovered element to the manifest materiality of life, both those imbued with authority from abroad and the unexplored minutia of present, local experience. What can appear to be useless at first glance can be the very thing that yields the most vivid and dynamic results. And it is to emphasize the sometimes-hidden nature of these unfamiliar or too familiar features that Premchand says, “Those conditions which one community can consider progressive (unnati), another community could understand as certain degeneracy

(avanati); therefore writers should not consider any object (uddeśya) as inferior to their art.”113 The scope of art should be broadened to include not only the insignificant, but also that which is actively derided. Thus, perhaps despite Premchand’s anti-Imperialist leanings as well as his ambivalence towards Urdu literary texts, this must include those foreign objects which may appear hostile to a nationalist cause, as well as those mundane particulars that seem unworthy of aestheticization.

Premchand argues, in fact, for an entirely new definition of beauty, one that exceeds the limitations of the known literary world. Quoting Iqbal in Persian, a language equally derided by colonial governments and nationalists alike, Premchand says, “Like a wave, the humors of my life care not for the direction of the tide/ Do not think that in this sea I am looking for the shore.”114 He interprets the couplet thusly: “And we will reach this condition when our beauty becomes encompassing, when it obtains all of creation in its purview.”115 Looking for beauty assumes that everything is, potentially, beautiful. It

113 Ibid., 17. 114 As translated by Francesca Orsini in Premchand, “The Aim of Literature,” The Oxford India Premchand (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), unnumbered appendix. 115 Premchand, Sāhitya kā uddeśya, 21. 61 is not a narrow category of what the ideal consists of already, but the creation of a new ideal, taken from an immersion in the conditions and experiences of life. Premchand says this new ideal must include, among other things, “mud huts and ruins,” and “the poor and destitute mother whose sweat is flowing after putting her baby to sleep on the edge of the field.”116 But if Premchand’s idea of a new beauty does not exist in “the beautiful woman,” (sundar strī) it is only because that is beauty as it is conventionally understood, and a broadening of aesthetic sense means probing the borders of what is already conventionally defined.117

That Premchand’s vision for the storyteller does not end with a new inventory of objects that must be examined, but instead with his invocation of something as intangible as “beauty” suggests that there must be a shift in the way that the narrator relates those objects. It is part of the work of the storyteller to convey the full breadth of material in a way that engages and convinces the reader that there is a world of possibility beyond the one that appears manifest, but also beyond that which has already been described in established literary conceptions. It is an affect of attraction that allows for new perspectives of the familiar in a new light, but also points towards something not yet in existence—something that is suggested by, but still lies beyond, the pages of the work. It is what critic Ulka Anjaria has observed in the work of Premchand and other members of the PWA as “projective realism,” which “reorients the representational ontology of realism, suggesting that its primary commitment might not always be to the present.”118

116 Ibid., 9, 21. 117 Ibid., 21. 118 Ulka Anjaria, “Staging Realism and the Ambivalence of Nationalism in the Colonial Novel,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 44, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 188. 62

Far from seeing the social realism of Premchand as an overdetermined focus on projecting the conditions of life as they are and as they always will be, Anjaria identifies in his aesthetics a mode of representation that is always pointing towards what can and could be. In this sense, the realist form is merely a drop in Premchand’s never-ending sea, always flowing into and a part of something else. Instead of an insistence upon the stasis of social structures that become visible through representation, the sensibility of the composite always leaves room for shifts, elaborations, and even counter-currents.

Premchand’s realism of encountering and countering capitalist development in its colonial form then breaks the ontological stakes of a particular reality as an undisputed solidity in order to open the boundaries of something yet undiscovered.

Despite the metaphor of drift, however, Premchand follows his notion of aesthetics with an emphatic pronouncement of its place within concrete activity. For,

“when we can no longer tolerate such a condition where thousands are enslaved under the yoke of tyranny, then we will no longer merely create compositions on paper, but also legal compositions, which cannot exist in contradiction to beauty, thoughtfulness, self- respect and humanity.”119 The directionless embrace of composite, even contradictory elements within the work will ultimately lead to an understanding of the hypocrisies within contemporary existence, and that is what leads a concerted effort toward change.

For example, it is not simply a woman that becomes the new object of beauty, but also her in relation to the field, the sweat from her body, and her child. The depiction of people not simply as sufferers of oppression, but also the setting of their struggles and

119 Premchand, Sāhitya kā uddeśya, 22. 63 desires, offers to the reader a new way of conceiving things that might already be very familiar to her. This particular realm of realism, which turns to the superficial, the secular, and the obvious elements of life, animates them through a narrative of juxtaposition. This then creates a scene of tension and intolerability, where not only art has become real, but reality has become an object upon which the reader can act. The world depicted must also be a collection of articulations capable of moving the mind and heart, otherwise it is merely a catalogue or inventory—an interpretation of the world, without revealing the means to change it.

Premchand’s realism is novel not only because of his incorporation of previously undetailed mundane elements, but also because of the ways in which those elements appear in grammatical relation to each other in previously unseen ways. His address lays out a project of intense attention to the unexamined, and his own commitment to this kind of examination is apparent in his work, but it is not just for the purposes of creating a national identity and illustrating the realization of a specifically “Indian” landscape.

Premchand’s insistence upon the composite condition of existence also creates the space for examining the overlying structures of hierarchy and undercurrents of social oppression, and the ways in which such conditions remain untenable. As will become clear in the discussion of the stories that follow, Premchand frequently surrounds his subjects with a narrative commentary that serves not only to guide sympathies but also to create chilling cosmic ironies that create a visible alternative to immediate reality, one that reaches broadly into the contemporary moment and immediate past in order to suggest the intolerability of its continuation into the future. 64

The Antinomies of Healing: The Composite Healer in “Mantra” Premchand’s short story “Mantra” uses the idea of magic to illustrate the ways in which counsel can come in the form of the most ordinary, the most overlooked, and sometimes even the most derided sources. In the story a jute weaver, Bhagat, seeks the help of an allopathic doctor, Dr. Chaddha, when Bhagat’s son falls seriously ill. But Bhagat is refused service as he has arrived outside of the doctor’s office hours. The old man’s son dies that night, but when Kailash, the doctor’s son, succumbs to a snake bite, Bhagat returns to heal him through the administration of herbs and the reciting of mantras. Thus,

Bhagat transforms from a humiliated and marginalized figure to a crucial actor. Bhagat’s insignificance is illustrated as the disenfranchisement of local sources of knowledge that attends colonialism.

Even after the story’s triumphant resolution, it is possible to read “Mantra” as a tale about a new world order that threatens to foreclose the miraculous possibilities of the old world; it is an invocation of the colonial epistemologies that, in their diffusion, obliterate those less reliably documented arts with which they come into conflict. The two men are clear allegories of two very different epistemological universes, and they could be easily set in opposition with Bhagat representing local, “authentic” sources of knowledge extinguished by the intrusion of a hegemonic foreign power as embodied by

Dr. Chaddha. However, what Premchand does in the course of his telling is to demonstrate that it is the coincidence of the three characters—Bhagat, Dr. Chaddha and his son Kailash—and their interactions with each other that carries with it possibilities for the future. 65

In “Mantra,” Premchand’s realism is a literary device of faceted, composite enquiry, a multi-sided examination that is not necessarily an insistence upon a particular, plausible reality. With the repetition of the two healers as figures of a fragmented wisdom, a single story is being retold in an attempt to find an actuality that might otherwise go unnoticed in the course of narratable experience, like a study of perception itself. The objects of medicine, ritual, and health are all brought in at multiple moments in different constellations. These are central details of the story, all with symbolic weight that is cultural, historical, and literal. But it is the repeated appearance and disappearance of the healer that adds depth and dimension. This central figure, significantly, does not occupy a heroic role. Rather, through the characterizations of Bhagat, the doctor, and

Kailash, the healer is split into different iterations of men of the same cloth, each at points hindered by their particular perspectives and augmented by their relationships to one another. While none of these figures would be particularly remarkable on their own, in the layering of their appearances there emerges a trans-temporal picture of the doctor that is simultaneously educated in old and new forms, both knowledgeable and humane.

In The Antinomies of Realism, Frederic Jameson describes the temporal antinomies of “showing,” versus “telling,” of an eternal present of existential choice, and the powers of judgement and elaboration that are made possible with the recitation of an event from the past. For the present, he cites the example of the painterly instant of the ninteenth-century impressionists: “This new “pure present” of the visual data of paint and painting in reality harbors new kinds of narrative movement and awakens new trajectories in the movement of the eye and new conceptions of the visual event and its 66 new temporalities.”120 This new present is achieved not through an enchantment of the real, but rather through a representation of the ordinary in excess. The impressionist’s subject painted over and over in its each and every aspect refigures even the most insignificant detail from its role as simply a utility of plot or carriage of symbolism, much in the same way Monet’s depiction of light turns it from an enhancer of objects into the object itself. Jameson finds within the chromaticism of impressionist paintings and

Wagnerian music a “Heideggerian or Sartrean Stimmung,” which, “adds something like an object-pole to the subject-pole suggested by the word ‘affect.’”121 The objects themselves become carriers of affect as they act in relation to one another. Jameson notes, however, that “it would be wrong to see this development as the exclusion of narrative,” since, “this new ‘pure present’…harbors new kinds of narrative movement.”122 There is still an element of storytelling even within media which is typically understood as essentially non-narrative, and similarly, even within the descriptive passages of realist fiction, there is narrative movement along with affective representation.

And certainly, Premchand’s repetition of the healer in “Mantra” bears significant similarity to Monet’s haystacks: ordinary and unremarkable characters in and of themselves, the combined effect of layering, as well as the subtle alterations of their symbolic highlights and undertones, bring new awareness to the significance of each iteration of the healer. However, the combined presence of the three healers, unlike the

“pure present” of the Sartrean existential moment of choice beyond which other

120 Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism, 41. 121 Ibid., 38. 122 Ibid., 41. 67 alternatives are foreclosed, Premchand’s movement between the three healers creates a

“telling” where the event of treatment is revisited and revised. Particularly significant is his depiction of Bhagat and the death of his son in the opening pages of the story, which paints him as a marginalized and soon-to-disappear source of local knowledge. By the end, he instead becomes the conduit to new possibility, new counsel, when it is most required.

In the first appearance of the two main characters of the story, Dr. Chaddha and

Bhagat seem obviously marked as social types representing the disparities between an overly rationalized colonial education on the one hand and the traditional medicine that it replaces on the other. The opening paragraphs are saturated with symbolic value: the doctor has his motorcar—the modern machine—standing by when Bhagat arrives walking behind the palanquin that carries his dying son. Bhagat is intimidated by the sterility of the clinic compared with the dinginess of his own condition and is too afraid to even set foot on the clean floor. When the doctor refuses to see the son, Bhagat offers him everything he has, which is nothing other than promises that the doctor will, in the course of time, be rewarded by divine providence. “Āp kī baṛhtī hoye, dīnbandhu!” [Your good fortune will increase, friend of the poor/My lord].123

But predictably, since we have been reminded at every turn of the chasm of social class that lies between them, Bhagat’s pleading has no effect. Instead the doctor is given an internal monologue that is a tirade against the villagers he tends to and their superstitions, a complete rejection not only of the elderly man’s impassioned appeals to

123 Premchand, Premcand racnā sancayan, 125. 68 help his son, but also the invisible religious realm in which he puts his trust in a moment of desperation. “These kinds of uneducated yokels (dehātī) came here every day. The doctor knew their type well. No matter how many times you told them something, they would keep saying the same thing” [apnī hī rat lagāte jāyenge].124 Relegating the old man to kinds and types, the doctor had ceased to see Bhagat as anything but an endless and eternal string of villagers beyond help and encloses himself in his motorcar and abandons Bhagat in his helplessness.

This helplessness is intensified by Premchand’s description of the disbelief that envelops Bhagat as he watches the doctor drive away to play golf:

For several minutes, the old man stood as silent as a picture…That in the civilized world there could be such hard heartedness and cruelty, even now he couldn’t conceive it [sabhya samsār itnā nirmam, itnā kaṭhor, iskā aisā marmbhedī anubhav ab tak nā huā thā]. He was from an older time when people were always ready to put out a fire, offer a shoulder to lean on, patch a roof or settle an argument. For as long as the car remained in his sight, he stood leaning on his cane and looked. Maybe even now he hoped it would return.125

By leaving Bhagat frozen in his reverie, Premchand both deepens and complicates the contrast between the two figures by describing Bhagat’s world as “civilized,” but disappeared world of abundant assistance. But now hobbled by age, infirmity and despair, Bhagat doesn’t seek out treatment from other doctors. Inactivity is piled upon helplessness and creates a world of impenetrable despair. His last remaining son dies that night, and it would appear that any connection to the old world described by Bhagat’s nostalgic language has been lost.

124 Ibid. 125 Ibid., 126. 69

Through illustrations of mental and emotional impenetrability like the doctor’s tirade and Bhagat’s disbelief it becomes apparent that Premchand’s illustration of these characters and their separate worlds is less a delineation of types than commentary on a particular typology that was threatening to divide people occupying what was in fact a varied and connected social space. These typologies were arbitrary and, in the case of middle-class intellectuals like Dr. Chaddha, often self-imposed. For example, Dr.

Chaddha’s golf game is not simply a pleasant pastime, although the connotation of leisure makes his refusal to treat the old man’s son more grotesque. Rather, it is clear that the game is part of a strict adherence to a supposedly rational ritual of health. “The benefit of his disciplined (niyamit) life was that even at the age of fifty his vigor and energy (custī aur phurtī) outdid even young men. For every activity, there was a set time, and he did not stray from it one bit. Usually people follow a health regimen only when they have fallen ill.”126 The doctor’s health and vigor require a kind of blindness to the world in which Bhagat lives, a complete refusal of contingency. The strange overlay of empirical science with the “faith” of a health regimen shows the mental intractability of such systems of habit while at the same time showing their material effects on the world. One effect is the benefit of the doctor’s health, while the other is the death of Bhagat’s young son. The doctor’s reliance upon a closed prescription combined with the proscription of any kind of deviation means that he succeeds in his discipline but fails in his humanity.

His own isolated physical and intellectual life grows as his sensitivity diminishes.

126 Ibid. 70

The only way out of Dr. Chaddha’s hermetically sealed system is through alternate narratives. The faulty healer in the doctor and the helplessness of the old man are repeated in the figure of Dr. Chaddha’s son, Kailash. The “laughing, playing” son of

Bhagat is now gone, but Kailash, emerges as the figure of redemption.127 More than a corrective to this single failing on the part of Dr. Chaddha, Kailash also appears as if he is

Premchand’s ideal for the nation. Although he is a central focus of sympathy, Bhagat is poor, degraded and helpless, while the doctor is self-involved and apparently completely unable to relate to the environment in which he dwells. Kailash, on the other hand, is “a paragon of humility and modesty, very tasteful, very generous, the pride of his university, the shining light of youthful society.”128 He appears as the perfect combination of old and new, home and abroad. Kailash is a biology student at college, but his ties to local knowledge are highlighted as he incorporates the counsel of “an ancient snake charmer” into his studies, which includes the study of roots and plants for treating snakebites.129

All of this is a relatively transparent allegorization of nationalist aspiration, but it remains, much like Kailash’s study of snakes and herbal medicines, fairly theoretical.

There is no actual bridging of social divides, Kailash’s tutelage under the snake charmer excepted. The great inequity of the death of the young child at the beginning of the story remains unaddressed, and it is for this reason Kailash’s own life must be put in danger. If

Premchand were to have Kailash go out into the world to heal poor children as a curative of his father’s heartlessness, even aside from emptying the story of all its productive

127 Ibid. 128 Ibid. 129 Ibid., 127. 71 tension, it would only superficially address the problem of Bhagat’s helplessness and circumscription, a layer of hopeful wishful thinking overlaying a grievous failure. It would be an aesthetic leap that would leave Bhagat trapped in his inactivity, while it would also limit the affective power of the story to just these three characters. The inanimate counsel of place, which is so important in a story about locality, would be left behind. Instead, the movement between these characters takes on an importance no less than that of the shift in symbolism within the characters themselves, for without this awareness of externality, the drama would be reduced to a Sartrean struggle between competing subjectivities. Instead, Premchand opens the circle of subjectivity by subverting the characters’ intentions and desires through the intrusions of their own surroundings.

This circle of dependent symbolism between Bhagat, the doctor and his son is first broken, rather strangely, through the anthropomorphization of a snake. The story takes on a new depth when Premchand suddenly allows the narration to slip inside the head of a serpent that is kept by Kailash as a pet. Kailash is being teased by his friends for taking out the snake’s teeth, what they assume is a trick of the trade. In order to prove them wrong, Kailash squeezes the neck of the snake so that it is forced to open its mouth and reveal its venomous fangs. “The snake had never seen such behavior from these hands. It didn’t understand what they wanted from him. A fear came over it that perhaps they would kill him. Therefore, it became ready to defend itself.”130 The snake, of course, bites Kailash, who then falls gravely ill. This sudden switch from allegorized

130 Ibid., 129. 72 hopefulness into a fable with a rather moving and sympathetic treatment of the snake exposes Kailash’s fragility as the living, moving, and faulted body of the nation, but also adds another living layer from the ground up, as it were. The nation is not merely its chosen identity, but rather must be answerable to those that constitute it.

The privileging of the snake is more than a bland commentary on of the oneness of nature. It is the concession that in the performance of human activity peace is dependent on mutual understanding. In the snake, the motivations of nature are made clear and understandable, not in the sense of rationalization but in the emotional sense of a relatable reaction. The misunderstanding, in fact, is on the part of Kailash who acts rashly in order to save face, losing his careful respect of the power that the snake wields.

This is not George Orwell’s “Scorpion and the Frog,” which turns nature back into that mythical and incomprehensible realm of inscrutable perpetuity. Instead, it draws the snake closer as a sympathetic figure in its own right, as deserving of tenderness as it is capable of harm, with significantly unequal power relations in play: when it is the one with power who commits the violation of trust, the consequences of that action come from below. The snake is not that which must be respected because it represents a

“nature” that justifies the Brahmin’s place within it, but rather it becomes a participant that enters the social space from the outside, complete with its own sources of power.131

131 Ibid., 196-198. This re-ordering of social hierarchies also happens in “The Price of Milk,” when Mangal’s dog, Jabra, encourages him to seek food from the Thakur’s house even though Mangal had been cast out by the Thakur’s wife. The dog, who has a decidedly pragmatic view on this complicated social matter, allows Mangal to transgress the wife’s commands, thereby ensuring his survival.

With this entry, however, even the objective appeal to nature opens, rather than eliminates, the social dependencies of the three healers. Dr. Chaddha tries to amputate the finger. Kailash waives him off and attempts to save himself by preparing a poultice from the herbs given to him by the snake charmer. It has no effect.132 Self-study and self- treatment can only go so far. Without the relationship between the doctor and Bhagat, the viability of old and new forms of knowledge remains half-crafted and incomplete.

Premchand is careful to demonstrate that the material benefits of place can only be accessed by acknowledgement of its social conditions. It is the social exchange, the redress of past wrongs, that Premchand makes the essential element of national redemption, not the essentialness of the nation itself as a potentially pure object.

Dr. Chaddha, in his desperation, agrees to call in a mantrawālā, only because he feels the situation is hopeless after the first traditional remedy has failed and the time for him to be able to practice his own craft of amputation—the drastic, violent, but scientifically sanctioned intervention—is over.133 He is reaching, in other words, for something that lies outside of the institutionally “proven,” and is forced beyond the circle of his immutable faith in modern science. This, in contrast to his ritual of health, is an appeal to a different kind of ritual at a moment of crisis: the unproven practices of local magic men. Several of these men are called to the house to minister to Kailash. Each one pours water, applies herbs, and recites mantras, but this too has no effect.134 So far, the two modes of modern science and local magic are equal in their ineffectiveness.

132 Ibid., 129. 133 Ibid. 134 Ibid., 130. 74

Up to this point in “Mantra,” it seems to be a case of story vs. story. As in the beginning with Bhagat’s first tentative steps into the doctor’s surgery, we have type against type. But the way they appear equal in their stasis already complicates a simple anti-colonial narrative where so-called traditional methods trump those of imported medical knowledge. If it were merely a case of the evils of foreign medicine, and the superiority of local ritual and understanding, then the mantrawālās would triumph and

Dr. Chaddha would have to abandon his faith in contemporary systems of medicine.

Instead, by bringing Bhagat back into the tale, this time not as petitioner but as yet another reiteration of the healer, we are able to examine other parts of ritual and mysticism which further interrogate the relationship between these systems of knowledge and faith.

The story moves from a narrative of the doctor’s system of health as an assumed, but no less mystical authority—that which is to be believed—to Baghat’s mystical experience, that which is felt. The remainder of the story is taken up with Bhagat’s internal moral imperative to help the doctor, quite against his own will, and totally against his own intentions. “He had a feeling like people listening to a sermon when music falls upon their ears. Their eyes are upon the sermonizer, but they only hear the music.”135 The overt instruction is muted, and it is instead ineffable sense of something that stirs his emotions which moves him. Eventually, his own body is propelled by an invisible force:

He was like an intoxicated man whose body was beyond his control. He puts his foot in one place and it falls in another. He says something, and who knows what the tongue blurts out…Resentment was there. It burned

135 Ibid., 132-133. 75

like a fire. But it could not overcome his heart. He who had never thrust a sword couldn’t form the intention to do so. His hands shake. He cannot raise them.136

Something quite beyond his own conscious powers saves him from his resentment and leads him to demonstrate the force of his own power. Instead of the crippling, disabling anger that could have been what defined Bhagat’s old age, it is the many acts of his past, the embodied movements of his life’s work, that flow through him in the crisis of the present moment. This force drags him to the house of Dr. Chaddha, where, “the slave’s presence overwhelmed the master’s [sevak swāmī par hawī thā].”137 The power that exists within Bhagat to heal the doctor’s son animates his limbs against every rational argument that comes out of his mouth as he makes excuses to his wife, to a watchman he encounters along the way, but perhaps most surprisingly, even himself. It is as if the experience of the present, not Bhagat himself, unites with a deeply felt knowledge from the past. Bhagat is merely a vessel of an experience that describes more in its indescribability than that which is fully explained.

After all other mantrawālās have come and gone, it is only the one whose own son was killed by Dr. Chaddha’s adherence to ritual who can save Kailash. He is only able to perform this act because something inside him, something older and deeper than his resentment and consciousness compels him to do so. This is what ultimately enables the toppling of hierarchical boundaries. Bhagat enters the house imbued with a sensation of being driven by something not entirely of his own will, thus there is no room for self- doubt. He cannot examine the effectiveness of his procedure, cannot judge the

136 Ibid., 133. 137 Ibid. 76 plausibility of its effect in this particular case, does not have the ability to heed his own doubts about helping a man who was at least partially responsible for the death of his son.

He allows himself to be deeply affected by the immediacy of the problem. In the description of the ritual, none of the elements are new to the story, which is part of the emphasis on what lies beyond Bhagat’s activity itself. There is the mention of an herb, possibly the same as the one Kailash attempted to administer, and the chanting of the mantra, which many mantrawālās had done before. The new element is in the narrative culmination of what lies behind the healer himself: the force of past and place within the healer, much the same force as that which held him immobile as Dr. Chaddha’s motorcar pulled away from him and his dying son, as well as the larger coherence of the act with narrative justice.

Rather counterintuitively, this is perhaps where the limitations of Premchand’s composite narratives become most clearly visible. The story has a happy ending of sorts.

The doctor’s son survives, but Bhagat is still morally privileged above the rest and so must remain unsullied in his altruism. He slips away without the life of his own son, without remuneration for his deeds. The plausibility of form—the logic of selflessness which drives the redemption of the Bhagat character—takes over from the ambition of altering the visible material inequality between the doctor and Bhagat at the beginning of the story. Spiritual wealth begets little more than acetic superiority, and this man approaches a level of restraint comparable with the divine. The movement to resolve a contradiction in the stated oaths and actions of Dr. Chaddha is entirely undertaken by

Bhagat, proving his worthiness while at the same time leaving him with little of worth, 77 which makes the insistence upon the latter’s moral supremacy ring hollow when it is compared to the more mundane riches and happiness of the former. The sacrificial move where the loss of the weaker party acts to cleanse the wrongs of the privileged is a structural deficiency that is, in many ways, realistic. But, precisely because of

Premchand’s efforts to elevate the actions of the poor, traditional healer above all others, the narrative drift overwhelms Bhagat’s character and he is swept into an acetic obscurity by the altruistic force of his good deed.

The overwhelming force of Premchand’s sympathetic narratives—which drive the reader’s identification with the oppressed subject but at the same time dooms the character to failure—is something Gajarwala refers to in his narratives about Dalit characters as “the premise of whole-ism…that does an extreme disservice to the marginalized.”138 In her reading of Premchand’s novel Godān, Gajarwala describes the way that Premchand’s anti-casteist voice becomes obscured in the text by a novelistic holism that must account for a full range of ideological positions. She says, “Within that web, the discourse of sympathy occasionally throws into relief certain pitiable figures, and singles them out for our vision. Sympathy thus emerges as one, perhaps the only, plausible form of narrative justice between the formal demands created by holism and a logic of social type, stymied by caste.”139 In Godān, the protagonist Hori must die unfulfilled because the acquisition of a cow through socially appropriate means dispenses with the necessity for his life. His gentleness and fortitude bring us closer to him, but ultimately result in little change for the lot of himself and his family. Even his wife’s

138 Gajarwala, Untouchable Fictions, 42. 139 Ibid. 78 justifiable anger over having to marry her daughter to an old man for financial stability becomes softened by Hori’s resignations. In a gesture similar to “Mantra,” the seeds of change are there but only in nuce: the only hope lies in Hori’s son, Gobar, whose youthful aimless rebelliousness has been tamed, but whose vision has been broadened by his experiences beyond the villiage.

Despite the futurity which Anjaria has seen in Premchand’s work, many of the narratives with the ability to point to a new way forward are abandoned right at the point of their invocation. This demands a retelling in order for that crucial element of action to come into play. Premchand’s realism has placed within the text a full range of novel figures—the Dalit, the village, the arrival of new ideas that are often as inhumane as those of caste—but such a record preserves a sense of injustice within the pages of the work without opening up space for the crucial activity of the oppressed to exceed service to the oppressor. As a corrective, Premchand’s texts must necessarily be disrupted in order to resolve the apparent intractability of Bhagat’s loss. This is where Navaria’s

“Hello Premchand,” intervenes. The story both cites and radically re-orders the timelines of Premchand’s stories—and that of reality itself—in order to set into writing the potential for the Dalit subject’s liberation that in Premchand is only suggested by his presence on the page.

The Composite Premchand: Ajay Navaria’s “Hello Premchand” Premchand’s short story “Kafan,” which, like his address to the PWA, was also published in 1936, is described by Meenakshi Mukherjee as one of his most starkly 79 ambiguous stories.140 The low-caste characters Ghisu and Madhav begin and end in total inertness. The story opens with the two men listening to the screams of Madhav’s wife as she lies dying in a hut, and they spend the rest of the story scraping together what money they can to buy a shroud for her funeral. The process is demeaning and humiliating, where every gesture of charity is marred by disdain. The only moment of release is when, instead of buying the shroud, they spend the money in a mai khānah, a tavern.141

Although the story was written as a scathing and, for the time, a fearless critique of the inequities and humiliations of caste, Premchand’s unvarnished portrait of hierarchical caste structures renders them with a nearly unbreakable solidity. In order to escape the grinding oppression that surrounds them on all sides, Ghisu and Madhav have few choices other than the oblivion they ultimately seek. And aside from this brief but morally reproachable respite, within the confines of Premchand’s text Ghisu and Madhav lead a life utterly without life, where every action is undermined by its meaninglessness, as two men who cannot afford their own clothes must beg for money to buy a burial cloth for a wife whose death was also undoubtedly a result of the injustice and neglect of the system.

Gajarwala addresses some of the ways that Premchand has been criticized by

Dalit writers for his portrayal of Dalit characters, not because his alignment with their cause is in question but rather because, in the emergence of a growing Dalit public sphere, the debates of representation outgrow the bounds of a reactive, anti-casteist aesthetic. As Gajarwala explains:

140 Mukherjee, Realism and Reality, 146-147. 141 Premchand, Premcand racnā-sancayan, 220. 80

The new world has been educated in the subtle language of reservations and affirmative action, of casteist privilege and caste suppression; it is well-aware of the politics of interdining and intermarriage, and the persistence of caste-based violence and violation. Dalit literature has been forced to develop a subtler critique for more subtle forms of casteism.142

The deepening of the foundations of a literature that took caste as its subject required a deepening of the understanding and relating of caste experience. But even in the moment that Premchand was writing, Dalit communities were hardly as passive as Premchand made them to appear.143 Gajarwala then goes on to explain the ways in which

Premchand’s work often participates in a perhaps unwitting crystalization of casteist identification through the use of caste names as character names, and a collapsing of caste and class by a narrowing of the affective sympathies of his novels to the issue of poverty. Premchand may have been a pioneer in his exhortation to broaden the scope of literature to include caste as a subject, but Gajarwala claims that his writing may have had the unintended effect of making social stratification appear as the only possible reality, where his realism “forced him to abandon the transparent and carefully demarcated ethical world of the Urdu fable in favor of the hazy world of readerly interpretation.”144 As one of his final stories, "Kafan," would then be the ultimate culmination of that abandonment of radical symbolic demarcation, and thus a loss of the moral clarity achieved in his earlier work. Instead of mere symbols of greater moral conundrums, Gajarwala argues that Premchand’s later efforts to refine his realism left his

142 Gajarwala, Untouchable Fictions, 6. 143 See the previous discussion of Dalit political activity as described by Rawat in Untouchability Reconsidered. 144 Ibid., 15. 81 characters stagnate in their apparent veracity without the authorial interpretation that points to a specific affective direction, leaving juxtapositions as oppositions.

By contrast, Alok Rai reads “Kafan” not from the perspective of realism as that which represents things as must remain, but rather as a necessary calling-out of situations that, once they have become concretized, demand change that cannot come from within the pages of a book. As such, it is not what is conveyed in the story, but the cracks in social cohesiveness that it exposes that is the source of its power. The story cannot gesture towards anything beyond the cruel and unjust world it portrays as that would produce and aesthetic justice that renders social justice mute. Rai notes that “Kafan,” unlike other stories that would absolve what Rai calls “the would-liberal but essentially privileged readers” by dissolving the underprivileged character into a just and cohesive ending, instead “violates this taboo, crosses this threshold. The protagonists of

Kafan…are entirely human in their humanity: the violence that the unjust social order has inflicted upon them is registered in their damaged natures.”145

Premchand’s composite characters are illustrated with such vividness as to expose the enormous gaps that exist between them, which reveals the way their separateness and immobility isolates them all. The reader must make the connections, and that is the intention: to set them to work. The unsettling starkness of the ending of the story, where

Ghisu and Madhav are finally, mercifully numb in their drunken insensibility, leaves only the reader as the one who can think of the woman lying dead and abandoned in her hut, or the consequences that Ghisu and Madhav will have to face the next day, or the

145 Rai, “Poetic and Social Justice,” 163. 82 uncharitable derision of those upper-caste characters from whom Ghisu and Madhav were forced by their situation to seek charity. It is a story that carries the potential for the reader to have an experience that resembles the involuntary call to action that enabled

Bhagat to perform his rituals: a chasm between right and wrong that is so physically palpable that one’s body cannot resist acting as a bridge to restore balance, regardless of the hesitations of the mind.

But as Gajarwala points out, the requirement of the Dalit subject’s total subjugation as a catalyst for the privileged reader’s action means that within the realm of representation the Dalit can never exceed such oppression in the text, and as such the pathways to justice remain obscured.146 While the necessity of action on the part of the upper-caste reader is undeniable, there are also readers who are not upper-caste. The understandable longing for a more complete and, indeed, realistic depiction of Dalit characters remains unfulfilled. Thus, the capacity for action only belongs to the upper- caste reader, and never to the Dalit character, as showing such capacity for change would violate the negative space of a pure, unresolved injustice. Gajarwala raises the question as to whether the stark binaries of real oppression and unrealized justice must be left as they are in order to leave room for potential social change. Can not the Dalit character achieve greater fulfilment without being condemned for their ambition for equality, or as

Gaharwala says, “is there space here beyond what Rai characterizes as ‘prescriptive militancy,’ or what Fredric Jameson in the context of socialist realism reduces to

‘agitational didacticism?”147 Is it possible, in other words, to imbue the Dalit subject with

146 Gajarwala, Untouchable Fictions, 18. 147 Ibid. 83 the same kinetic energy that Premchand has reserved for Bhagat, but this time in a form that allows for Bhagat’s own liberation, and not just his selfless service to another?

The recent interpolations of Dalit activist and writer Ajay Navaria into

Premchand’s short stories through his composition “Uttarkatha,” (“Hello Premchand”) creates, instead of the “affective architecture of sympathy,” as Gajarwala has phrased it, a disaggregation of structures of oppression as they were exposed through Premchand’s writing, thereby creating entry-points for both the privileged reader and the central low- caste characters to act politically, not just emotionally, to transform social outcomes.148

The way he does this is through the creation of a composite narrative of several of

Premchand’s stories, but instead of illustrating the gaps that separate each character—the specificity and definition that Gajarwala sees in Premchand as a realism of limitation—

Navaria highlights their connections. In Navaria’s “Hello Premchand,” Savarna and Dalit characters alike are freed from the prisons of their prescriptive roles by Navaria’s emphasis on that which brings them together.

In the opening pages of the story, Navaria creates a frame story in which the narrator is approached by a man with a strong resemblance to Premchand. This

“Premchand” appears distressed by a line from Premchand’s story “Dudh kā Dām,” where the landlord Maheśnath says, “Whatever happens in this world, Bhangis will remain Bhangis. To make them human is difficult [duniyā men aur cāhe jo kuch ho jāye,

Bhangi Bhangi hī rahenge. Inhen ādmī banānā kaṭhin hai].149 Premchand hands the

148 Ibid., 67. 149 Munshi Premchand, Premcand racnāvali (Delhi: Jinvani Prakāśan Pvt. Ltd., 1996), 284. Bhangi is the caste name for a community traditionally restricted to cleaning toilets and handling the dead. 84 narrator a worn manuscript, which the narrator transcribes and we then read in the process of its typing. This revised story gathers together some of Premchand’s most recognizable characters from stories such as “Dudh kā Dām” (“The Price of Milk”), “Pus kī Rāt” (“A Winter’s Night”), “Sadgati,” (“Deliverance”) and “Kafan,” to name a few, who then work together to challenge the restricted fortunes of low and high-caste figures alike. In the main body of this reanimated Premchand story, the Dalit character Mangal from “The Price of Milk” does not end up alone and humiliated after the death of his mother, as he does in the original text, but rather as a successful civil servant. In the final pages of Navaria’s story, the narrator again encounters “Premchand,” who is accompanied by someone who resembles B.R. Ambedkar, the Mahar author of the Indian constitution and a famous advocate for untouchables and the abolition of caste. In a moment of impossible solidarity between past and present, between Premchand’s art and

Dr. Ambedkar’s social advocacy, the three stand together to sing the Indian national anthem in a triumphant re-imagining of the possibilities contained within the texts of the past and their continued resonances in the present.150

These solidarities weave themselves through Navaria’s text, at one time dissolving many of the narrative structures of oppression that appear in Premchand’s stories while also invoking much of their anti-castist sentiment. At times, this is achieved through reaffirming connections that already exist in Premchand’s stories, such as the fiercely intimate relationships between human and animal in “The Price of Milk” and “A

Winter’s Night,” and the protective generosity of the vegetable seller Devidin and his

150 Ajay Navaria, “Uttarkatha,” in Yes Sir (New Delhi: Samayik Prakāśan, 2012), 106. 85 wife from the novel Gaban (Embezzlement). At other moments, Navaria creates narrative avenues for Premchand’s characters that did not exist in the original texts, thereby deepening their narrative frameworks. Ghisu and Madhav, for example, in a reversal of their abjection in “Kafan” are able to give money to Mangal for his mother’s funeral.151

The Brahmin Pandit Ghasi Ram from “Deliverance,” who is in many ways an upper-caste mirror of Ghisu and Madhav’s inertness as he is himself nearly paralyzed by the proscriptions of his caste, is able to use his money and influence to further Mangal’s schooling and provide him with room and board.152 These newly etched lifelines do not merely provide an aestheticized justice, which Alok Rai saw as a cathartic release of privileged reader’s social responsibility, and instead illustrates opportunities for a cooperation that can ultimately threaten the differentiations that result in continued caste and class disparities.

The coincidence of our reading the story with its writing is not only a framing device, but also serves to bring the contemporary moment into the cultural material of

Premchand’s creations. The narrator is aghast at the anachronistic appearance of

Premchand and tells him in a rush that his presence is impossible by listing a series of contemporary events that could not have happened in Premchand’s lifetime. But while

Navaria points out that high-caste Congress politicians were now in the thrall of the Dalit president of the Bahujan Samaj Party, Mayawati Das, he also mentions the burning down of a Dalit neighborhood in Gohana, and the exploitation of Adavasi women in exchange

151 Ibid., 95. 152 Ibid., 100.

86 for salt.153 This Premchand has appeared in a world that is at once transformed, while at the same time it exhibits much of the same exploitation of the powerless by the powerful which his stories had railed against.

Navaria also expands the timelines of Premchand’s stories to reanimate the past and gesture towards future possibilities that may have seemed inaccessible in the originals. Ghisu and Madhav appear before the death of Madhav’s wife and speak in glowing terms of her contributions. This restores her role beyond that of a victim of death and emphasizes both the fact that the Dalit figure—and significantly, the Dalit woman— is one member of a whole community, and that her labor is responsible for a great deal of social wealth. “Take it, son, keep this money, what else is it for? This is all from the fortune of bahu’s footsteps—every corner of the house is a garden…You go home and make the funeral arrangements. We’ll gather four or five men and come there too, there’s no need to involve [the thakur].”154 The correlation of Dalit liberation and the emancipation of women again appears at the end of Mangal’s story: when the young, low-caste boy has grown up, assisted into a high government position by a combination of conspiring allies and his own hard work, he plots to meet Thakur Maheshnath’s daughter, who, behind the walls of her father’s house, “was also dreaming her own dreams.”155

Laura Brueck, who translated “Hello Premchand” into English, identifies this story, with its surreal appearances of long-dead characters, as "postrealism." In this form,

153 Ibid., 87. 154 Ibid., 95. 155 Ibid., 105. 87

"we can recognize the intersecting demands that Dalit literary aesthetics and certain meta-historically constituted Dalit subjectivities place upon dominant understandings of caste society."156 In many ways, however, the main text of the story does not try to break with realism so much as it rearranges Premchand’s composite aesthetics with the added benefit of a Dalit consciousness of the stakes for Premchand’s Dalit characters. This is not to say that Premchand is fufilled by Navaria. As I have argued, Navaria’s story builds upon elements from Premchand’s stories but also actively transforms them, sometimes in ways that reverses the nature of characters as they appeared in the original, which is especially the case for Ghisu, Madhav, and Pandit Ghasi Ram. In so doing, Navaria has taken away many of the blind-spots of the single author and has created a confluence of ideas from his time, ideas that can then be combined with the particularities of his own subject position as a Dalit author. In the same way that southern critics writing about

Sanskrit aesthetics were using the unique attributes of local poetry to describe the universals of Sanskrit literariness, “Hello Premchand” also demonstrates the ways in which Premchand’s Dalit characters were based upon people who had and have the capacity to exceed their condition—the imagining of Dalit existence that does not rely upon subjugation as its defining element.

The result is a picture of the world that is much more consistent with the realities of an existence in which multiple actors—with composite identities—dwell. Further, it moves away from an implication that the individual reader must be compelled to act alone, to instead show that the course of history can be, and often is, altered through

156 Laura Brueck, "Bending Biography: The Creative Intrusions of 'Real Lives' in Dalit Fiction," Biography 40, no.1 (2017): 78, Project MUSE. 88 collective involvement, even if that involvement is a refusal to participate in caste labor.

In the final pages of the story, Navaria quotes Dr. Ambedkar’s speech to the Bombay

Municipal Workers Union: “You do not seem to realize the tremendous power you have in your hands. You can, simply by refusing to work, spread more havoc and disaster in a week than Hindu-Muslim riots should do in three months.”157 By calling attention to the very real strength of a collective strike as well as the relative uselessness of communal division, Navaria’s rendition of Premchand’s stories puts the reader’s attention back into a correspondence with real events. Navaria’s incongruous narrative creates a break in time through which the collective action can emerge and give a greater sense of its real possibilities.

In many ways, both the burning of Premchand’s stories and Navaria’s text leverage the material reach of Premchand’s work in order to bring attention to the persistent marginalization of Dalit lives. Navaria has taken Premchand’s extensive corpus and has re-grafted the grammar of its Dalit characters—figures of oppression, neglect and humiliation—in order to create a world in which transformation is perceptible. Such a grafting allows for the specificity of representation that is essential to the recognition of

Dalit existence, while at the same time revealing the way that the representation is always only a small part of the possibilities of that existence. In order to circumvent the conventional articulations of Dalit subjugation, “Hello Premchand” re-composes

Premchand’s short stories in a way that resembles Premchand’s composite and faceted re-

157 As quoted in Ajay Navaria, Unclaimed Terrain, trans. Laura Brueck (New Delhi: Navayana Publishing, 2013), 154. 89 imaginings of Indian literary aesthetics, while at the same time greatly extending the reach of his imaginative world. 90

I Prick the Heart of God like a Thorn: Actuality as Critique in Sa’adat Hasan Manto It is difficult to categorize Manto as a realist or modernist writer merely in terms of formal analysis, but such a determination is made even more controversial given the ideological divisions that appeared between the Progressive Writers and their more liberal counterparts, and the terminology that came to be associated with the writing styles they endorsed. While the term taraqqī (progressive) had been roughly interchangeable with jadīdiat (modernism) among writers and critics in the early days of the Progressive Writer’s Movement, the pressures of independence (finding a place in a new world order) and the partition (a traumatic internal re-ordering ) acted to exacerbate disagreements over literary innovation and its relationship to political commitment.

Eventually, political commitment and innovation began to seem mutually exclusive, despite the profound influence of foundational works like Angāre (Sparks), the ground- breaking catholic style of Premchand’s stories, as well as pieces by other Progressive

Writers, which left the Urdu literary world forever changed. The progressives maintained a commitment to haqīqat (realism) as a form necessary for exploring the potential of literature to critique and transform society, but this turned into a dogmatic refrain to the point that the term became something of a pejorative among their critics.158

On the other hand, liberal writers, perhaps most notably those belonging to the literary group known as Halqah-e Arbāb-e Zauq (Men of the Circle of Taste),

158 Geeta Patel, Lyrical Movements, Historical Hauntings (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 84. Geeta Patel’s book on the life and work of Miraji, and his rather fraught relationship with the Progressive Writers, highlights how closely aligned these two aims once were, demonstrating that their eventual opposition was by no means inevitable. After falling out with the Progressives, Miraji used the term “haqīqat parast” (realism worshiping) to describe what he saw as style limited by mimesis.

91 distinguished themselves by becoming champions of form-breaking jadīdiat as a style that had loosened itself from the constraints of realism without regard to this move’s perceived political implications.159 The perhaps unintended consequence of these positions is that “modernist” critics and writers, such as Miraji, N.M. Rashid and

Mohammad Hasan Askari, have since been figured as champions of literary innovation and freedom of expression in opposition to a dogmatic, propagandist and limiting realism. Then by proximity Manto, who collaborated with Miraji and drew support from

Askari in particular, is often figured as the enfant terrible of the progressives, a thorn in their side which proves the assumed exclusionary totalitarianism of their politics.160

Manto himself said of this war over literary terms that “literature too changes with changes in the age…For those people who want to finish off modern literature, new literature, progressive literature, obscene literature or whatever it is, the correct approach would be to finish off those circumstances that are responsible for it.”161 Literature that professed to observe reality must be modern, and literature that was modern was a reflection of the circumstances of its age. In order to depict the new realities of his time,

Manto’s stories contain formal influences from a variety of authors both foreign and domestic, including realists, romantics, futurists and symbolists. Manto’s admiration of

159 M. Farooqi, Urdu Literary Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) 4. 160 In Mohammad Umar Memon’s introduction to The HarperCollins Book of Urdu Short Stories (New Delhi: HarperCollins Publishers, India, 2005), he singles out Askari and Manto as writers who “elected to chronicle the events of the elusive and shimmering realms of individual consciousness,” rather than follow the formulas of ideology which he attributes to Ismat Chughtai, and others (11). Geeta Patel, on the other hand, places Miraji, Manto, and Chughtai in a category of writers who were exceptions to Progressive orthodoxy and who, “mark the limits of inclusion for literary communities that considered themselves central” (75). 161 Sa’adat Hasan Manto, “Modern Literature,” in Manto My Love, trans. Harish Narang (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2016), 200.

92 and frequent use of Ghalib’s poetry is well-known by the many stories and essays that contain Ghalib’s couplets as epigraphs, but he also read, translated and commented upon the works of Tolstoy, Hugo, Pushkin, Mayakovski and Bryusov.162 For Manto, reality broke open recognized modes of writing and resulted in a distinctly modern realism.

However, it does not help to moderate the opinion that Manto had given up on the project of realism, and had ultimately rejected the idea of its transformative capacities, that he was publicly and vociferously denounced by the Progressives for his association with Askari, and that he just as publicly and vociferously defended himself.163 Then there is also the fact that the stakes of these cultural conflicts were raised considerably after the partition of India, when world powers began to fight for ideological control over the new political entities of Pakistan and India. New journals were started with money from both the Soviet Union and the United States, each with their own ideological strings attached, and writers were patronized—or arrested or blacklisted—for their perceived adherence to one side or another.164 It is no surprise, then, to find that the discussion of the form and political content of Manto’s writing—to say nothing of the slippery and ultimately inaccessible realms of his intentional commitments—remains colored by these conflicts:

Manto was bucking a tendency toward formal crystallization within the PWM, and thus it is assumed he must also be an antagonist to the movement’s emphasis on realism. But what I aim to show here is that the form of Manto’s writing, even with its frequent use of

162 Several of these translations can be found in Sa’adat Hasan Manto, Navādirāt-e Manṭo [Rarities of Manto], ed. Muhammad Sayed (Lahore: Adah Firogh Mutale’ah, 2009). 163 Aisha Jalal, The Pity of Partition, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 164. 164 Rakshanda Jalil, “Loving Progress, Liking Modernity, Hating Manto,” Social Scientist 40, no. 11/12 (2012): 49. 93 stream-of-consciousness, limited third person narratives, and word-play, breaks through established aesthetic practice in order to get closer to a social, political, and even physical actuality. Manto’s work pricks at the boundaries of consciousness and conscience in order to expose us to the world and to ourselves.

While Manto’s work was censured by some Progressives for its violation of form and lack of political vision in his own time, more contemporary accounts have merely inverted this judgement while preserving its content. Kamran Asadar Ali summarized the discussions of Manto's work in the meeting minutes of the Progressive Writers thusly:

“[Manto’s] characters were deemed weak an ineffectual, and his plots, although acknowledged as realistic, were dismissed as pessimistic and perverse.”165 Although

Manto’s stories fulfilled the requirement of depicting a social reality, the consensus was that his work did not develop narratives of possible future growth and change, and thus did not live up to the greater political goals of the organization. Perhaps less encumbered by the Cold War arguments over decadent or propagandist art, Harish Trivedi has re- asserted the obvious artistic power in Manto’s work but has expressed doubt that Manto’s literature could be connected to a cultural project of social transformation.166 Trivedi disagrees with the Progressive Writers’ claim that Manto fails to point towards a future emancipation because he merely depicts what is. Rather, Trivedi argues that Manto’s work is characterized by a capacity to exceed realism by gesturing towards what isn’t, which makes it unsuitable to political realism as such. Trivedi says that Manto's writing

165 Kamran Asdar Ali, “Progressives and ‘Perverts’:Partition Stories and Pakistan’s Future,” Social Text 9, no.3 (1970): 9. 166 Trivedi, “Manto, God, Premchand,” 64-65.

94 contains “a surreal intensity of physical observation and description of detail,” with “an acuteness of sensory perception and representation that goes beyond simple realism.”167

Aamir Mufti, who has written extensively about the charges of obscenity that

Progressives leveled at Manto, says that Manto was driven by their critiques into “an equally ideological rejection of the ideas and affinities which only recently had seen him celebrated…in a Progressive mold.”168 But he agrees with the assessment by the PWA that Manto’s work demonstrates a tone of pessimism, saying that such a rejection of ideals “reveals the limits of [Manto’s] own ability to contemplate and welcome the possibilities of deep social transformation.”169 Between the PWA and these more recent evaluations, the consensus seems to be that Manto’s work is too real to serve as a catalyst for change. It is either only realistic, or, according to Trivedi, it is in excess of realism, which Trivedi observes, “does not show any radical inclination to plead for a change or reform in society…On the contrary, he seems content to deploy his art to show things as they are, but as we may not be able to see them without his illuminating artistic mediation.”170

Perhaps it is time to consider, however, the fact that Manto’s peculiar form of realism—be that too real or extra-real—is in fact a function of Progressive ideas, not their rejection. Ulka Anjaria argues that the political realism of the Progressive Writers was never based on a naïve assumption of their writing as “straightforward, unvarnished

167 Ibid., 63-64. 168 Aamir Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 208. 169 Ibid. 170 Trivedi, “Manto, God, Premchand,” 65.

95 representation,” but was instead involved a complex performativity.171 Countering the view that Manto’s frequent use of madness in his stories is a sign of Manto’s rejection of realism, Anjaria argues that Manto’s work is an extension of the “complex realist” writings of Premchand and other Progressives, and that Manto “[uses] madness as a way of representing social dysfunction and of imagining a political futurity that might transcend it.”172 While this is undeniably the case, it is necessary, however, to point out that such a transcendence is never articulated within the text itself. Instead, by writing about the upheaval of urban development during World War II and the mal-development of communal nationalism during Partition, Manto’s writing registers the scrambled, fragmented partiality of the present, always accompanied by an affective suggestion that the resulting future is as of yet unknowable: the concrete elements of Manto's stories remain broken, incongruous, and incomplete, while the affective excess that fills the gaps goes undescribed. The power of Manto’s work lies in a refusal to impregnate concrete elements with added significance while constantly gesturing towards an inarticulate sense. Manto acknowledges the desire for culminescence even as he points out the unsavory and inconvenient political truth of the moment. But what that culmination is or should be is something to be determined beyond the text and may have very little to do with the author's stated intentions.

As Anjaria has pointed out regarding his depiction of madness, insanity within

Manto’s stories acts a kind of bait-and-switch, where “madness is sanity and sanity is

171 Ulka Anjaria, "Madness and Discontent: The Realist Imaginary in South Asian Literature," THAAP Journal, (2015): 20. 172 Ibid. 21.

96 madness, which is simultaneously bleak and reassuring.”173 We begin with the exposition of a unique subjective consciousness only to find ourselves presented with an incisive representation of social reality. This is clear in at least two of his most well-known post-

Partition stories, where “mad” characters in fact have very little in the way of a recognizable, or even readable, inner-life. It is rather their world that is unmistakably, objectively broken. In the story “Toba Tek Singh,” the exposition of Bishan Singh’s insanity consists of no inner monologues—stream of consciousness or otherwise—simply the repetition of a single nonsense phrase: “ūpaṛ dī guṛ guṛ dī enaks dī be dhyānā dī mung dī dāl āf dī lālṭen.”174 But it is clear through his increasingly agitated repetitions of the phrase that he remains steadfastly attached to his land, and thus is the most

“grounded” character of all in an environment of mass migration and shifting borderlines.

In the end, Manto leaves the lifeless body of Bishan Singh on the border that split the

Punjab in two, the habeas corpus of the unconscionable division.175 In “Khol Do,” the narration of Sirajjudin’s senility does not consist of the fading memories of his past, but rather the fragmented present of a refugee camp.176 Manto’s rendering of Sirajjudin’s descriptions of his daughter as a list of isolated physical features (“big eyes, black hair, a mole on her cheek”) then fuses terrifyingly with the actions of men—of perfectly sound mind—who treat her as only so many usable body parts.177 While the context of “Toba

Tek Singh" may give us clues to Bishan Singh's emotional state, his confusion, anger, and

173 Ibid., 30. 174 Sa’adat Hasan Manto, “Toba Tek Singh,” in Phundne (Lahore: Makthabah-e Jadid, 1955), 12. 175 Ibid., 20. 176 Sa’adat Hasan Manto, “Khol Do,” in Mūzīl (K̲ h̲ ayābān̲ Publications, 1979), 108-109. 177 Ibid., 109. 97 fear all remain more or less unwritten. In the final lines of “Khol Do," Sirajjudin's joy at finding his daughter alive is entirely transformed by the horror of a doctor who realizes she has been serially raped. All that remains certain within the narrative is the presence of her battered and semi-conscious body.

Because of the way that Manto’s stories seem to grasp both the absurdity and terror of Partition, these stories have been used extensively by historians and other social scientists seeking to augment the narratives of newspapers and the testimonies of survivors.178 Of “Toba Tek Singh" and “Khol Do," Veena Das and Ashish Nandy have said, “We do not understand, and Manto cannot help us generate, the language whereby we can get direct insight into the inner world of the victims or perpetrators of the violence.”179 This is because, they argue, the stories represent a breakdown of signification within public consciousness, since “the frenzy of violence which accompanied the partition of India in the Punjab and Bengal left no doubt about the dissolution of the Manichean categories of good and evil. Violence at the height of the crisis became the subject, the object, and instrument and purpose of the action.”180 But at the same time, Das and Nandy chose these stories because they give voice to that breakdown of signification. Other Partition literature, they say, “remained inauthentic, because it tried to reduce the violence to the language of feud in which violence from one side was equally balanced with violence from the other.”181 They suggest, echoing the

178 See Partha Chatterjee, "Democracy and the violence of the state: a political negotiation of death." Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (2001): 7-21; and Gyanendra Pandey, "The Prose of Otherness," Subaltern Studies 8 (1994): 188-221. 179 Veena Das and Ashish Nandy, "Violence, victimhood, and the language of silence." Contributions to Indian Sociology 19, no. 1 (1985): 177-195. 180 Ibid., 187 181 Ibid., 189 98 sentiments of Manto’s contemporary and friend critic Hasan Askari, that a portrayal of the full scale of violence could not be a matter of symbolically balancing the scales, but rather had to be a recognition of how unreasonable the very first act of violence—and therefore every subsequent act—was in the first place.182 But that requires an articulation of the reality of violence along with a sense of its abnormality. The actuality of violence cannot be equated with its plausibility, otherwise the reality of such unimaginable acts is in danger of disappearing amidst their justifications.

That is why there is always a silence that accompanies the bits and pieces of information that Manto chooses to highlight. The written silence of affect is something that Jameson describes in The Antinomies of Realism, which he identifies as emerging in the nineteenth century as a “heightened representational presence,” something that exists outside of, and indeed often independently of meaning, and is part of the contingency of modern life.183 “Affects,” says Jameson, “are singularities and intensities, existences rather than essences, which usefully unsettle the more established psychological and physiological categories.”184 And certainly there is an affect within Manto’s Partition stories that brings the horror of the event rattlingly close, even despite the mute silences of trauma that surround it, or even the innumerable justifications and explanations that have come with our historical distance from it. However, Manto accomplishes this not through the depiction of its totality but rather through its contingent details: a body on the border, a mole on the cheek. The enormous stakes that are attached to such minor details

182 For more of a discussion on Hasan Askari’s comments, see the section on Black Margins below. 183 Jameson, Antinomies of Realism, 33 184 Ibid., 36. 99 is what gives Manto’s stories the attributes of appearing hyper-realistic and more than realistic at the same time, and what separates his writing from the more symbolic content of his contemporaries.185

Although certainly complex, as Anjaria has said, this focused contingency is a very different kind of realism from that of Premchand. Premchand’s work constantly broadens the field of vision, which, he said, had been limited by its heroic subjects.186 As he explains in “The Object of Literature,” the writer should seek to expand the legible universe in order to provide a lexicon for the vastness of Indian experience, one that incorporates but ultimately exceeds the aesthetic boundaries of rasa and Urdu court literature.187 But then, Premchand’s answer to a literature overshadowed by princes and courtesans was to pull back the lens of his characters’ subjective experience until even his protagonists disappear under the weight of their signification: the peasant woman, his new example of beauty, does not speak, and cannot be taken without her sweat, her child, and the field she toils in; Bhagat in “Mantra,” who cures the Doctor’s son, does so because he—rather against his will—becomes an agent of the power of medicine and mercy that he carries within him, and he disappears into thin air as soon as a wrong has been righted. Premchand opened an entirely new narrative world, but the weight of those narratives was often too great for his characters to be able to escape it.

185 Krishan Chandar, Ham wahśī hain [We are savages] (New Delhi: Asia Publishers, 2002), 76. Krishan Chandar’s story, “Peshawar Express,” describes Partition from the viewpoint of a train who witnesses the violent killings en route from Peshawar to Bombay. Chandar ends the story with the train’s vision of the future, where “there will be no Hindus and there will be no Muslims, rather all will be only workers and human beings [nā koī Hindū hoga nā koī Musalmān balki sabh mazdūr honge aur insān honge], XX 186 See the discussion in the previous chapter. 187 Premchand, “Sahitya kā uddeśya uddeshya,” 11. 100

Manto, on the other hand, frequently undermines the direction of his own narratives. Mad characters appear sane. Sane young men become capable of unimaginable baseness and cruelty. And the oppressed woman of Premchand’s new aesthetic of beauty becomes an exceedingly complicated figure in the work of Manto— not always to her benefit. This is, as Ismat Chughtai has pointed out in her essay

“Heroine,” at least partly the effect of “the cultural, economic, social and political phenomena of her time.”188 This means that in the era of a burgeoning national identity,

Premchand’s Subhadra from “A Wedding that Turned into a Funeral,” is an ideal of domestic piety, both in terms of home and nation, when she decides to commit suicide upon learning of her husband plans to take a second wife.189 Chughtai points out that the heroine of the 19th century Urdu novel was the “extremely cultured, educated and interesting tawāif [courtesan].”190 But Manto’s Saugandhi from the story “Hatak” (The

Insult) was a hard-drinking prostitute.

But even so, the sense of the ineffable sneaks through that makes Saugandhi untouchable. Though she rents only a small kothi and makes only enough in wages to keep her in booze, she also finds the voice to rage against the john who rejects her, declaring, “Whatever I am, whatever is hidden inside me, not you, not even your father could buy it [Jo kuch men hūn jo kuch mere andar chupā huā hai, voh to kyā, terā bāp bhī nahīn kharīd saktā].”191 In a similar vein, Premchand’s Anandi from “The Well-Bred

188 Ismat Chughtai, My Friend, My Enemy, trans. Tahira Naqvi (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2001), 26. 189 Premchand, Strī jīvan kī kahāniyān, 313. 190 Chughtai, My Friend, My Enemy, 26. 191 Sa’adat Hasan Manto, Manto rāmā (Lahore: Sang-e Meel Publications, 1990), 913.

101

Daughter” may well lose her temper once when treated badly by her brother-in-law, but by the end she is restored to the status of the ideal wife of the nation as she becomes the means for healing the family rift and maintaining the tradition of joint family living.192

Manto’s Radha, on the other hand, the actress protagonist in “Mera Nam Radha Hai”

(“My Name is Radha”), can barely contain her rage at the attempts of men to use her as either foil or fantasy for their own libidinal desires, which seek to frame her as either a sexless sister or a whore. The end of the story ends with an actual physical altercation, but she retains her right to be as she is, rejecting her stage name and claiming, “My name is Radha.”193 This is not to say that Manto’s work unfalteringly presents women characters in all of their complexity. As we shall see, the low-caste ghāṭin woman from the story “Smell” begins and end as a pure fragment of the protagonist’s imagination, and, similar to Premchand’s sundar strī, does not have a voice of her own outside of her use as a narrative device. But many of the characters in Manto’s stories appear unreadable not because they are unwritten, but rather their contradictions are always present to unsettle the narrative thrust, an aspect of reality that Manto continually returns to in his writing.

This is not to say that Premchand’s composite realism of taking figures from a range of foreign and domestic sources was necessarily inadequate to the task of finding

“true expression,” the task he set out for writers in “The Basis of Literature.” However, the rapidly changing conditions of post-war India and the changed character of national identity after Partition made the elisions required for such an expansive gloss all the more

192 Premchand, Premacand racnā-sancayan, 57-58. 193 Sa’adat Hasan Manto, Manto nāmah (Lahore: Sang-e Meel Publications, 1990), 313. 102 apparent. Manto’s work brings a microscopic clarity to the fissures that rapid and uneven development created in earlier symbolic frames. Prostitute Saugandhi and film starlet

Radha, for example, were not easily slotted into a symbolic role because of their representation of a social becoming that had yet to find a determinate, and therefore articulable, end. They were in many ways the articulations of Manto’s attitude towards

Bombay, which, he said, “had said to me…no one here will criticize you. You also won’t find any advisor. You’ll have to do all the hard work yourself. Only you will be able to make all of the important decisions in your life…It makes no difference whether you stay or leave. Where I am, I will be, and I will remain.”194 Manto places the world in his pages and lets it speak for itself, and it has much to say.

As Jameson has noted in the introduction to Antinomies, realism is “historically associated…with the function of demystification,” but as new subjectivities begin to emerge “the negative social function begins to weaken, and demystification finds itself transformed into defamiliarization and the renewal of perception, a more modernist impulse.”195 This renewal of perception is at the center of Manto’s work, and it is in part through his use of modernist devices. In “Saṛak ke Kināre” (The Sides of the Road), a story about a woman abandoned by her English lover who leaves the child of her illicit love affair by the side of the road, Manto uses a stream-of-consciousness narrative to highlight her anguish before the moment of her crime. In “Smell,” a small window to the objective world opens through a limited first-person narrative. But both stories use a

194 Ibid., 222. 195 Jameson, Antinomies of Realism, 4.

103 contracted time frame where “they were days just like these” or “they were monsoon days just like these.”196 This serves to fuse the consciousness of the reader with the protagonist, and the details of perception in the story—blue sky in “The Sides of the

Road,” and rain in “Smell”—appear immediate and fresh, while their objective characteristics appear vivid in their novel estrangement. In “The Sides of the Road,”

Manto breaks through the spell of our identification with the heroine with a news report about the child, which reveals the true tragedy of her madness. At the end of “Smell,” as I will discuss in detail, the sensory details of the true present begin to overwhelm the more dubious memories of the protagonist.

By contrast, in “My Name is Radha” as well as in the story “Janki,” also about an aspiring film actress, the narrator approaches his central figures almost as if they were studies: unable to penetrate their thoughts and yet minutely observant of their words and actions. Manto describes Janki’s sincere devotion to several different men with a distant narrative voice closer to curiosity than judgement.197 In both instances, there is little in the way of an easily identifiable commentary on what the structure of the society should be—which comes through strongly in Premchand’s illustrations of domestic fidelity— and more of a sense that the existing social order has already frayed, and has to be re- examined.

Jameson argues that the shift in function he describes between the narrative modes of realism and modernism in Europe accounts for many of the arguments both for and against realism as an ideological vehicle: demystification, say the “apologists for the

196 Manto, Manto rāmā, 176; Manto, Manto nāmah, 641. 197 Manto, Manto nāmah, 314-334. 104 realist novel as a form,” can potentially serve to engage a reading public with the world as illusions are brushed away and the truth of the moment emerges.198 But, “when the realist novel begins to discover altogether new kinds of subjective experiences…demystification finds itself transformed into defamiliarization…while the emotional tone tends toward resignation, renunciation or compromise.”199 This could be in part simply a matter of the movement of history. The moment of demystification inevitably changes, and resignation and renunciation result from the effect when the initial epiphany has worn off. The era and the ideas circulating within them change, and the “inherited psychic structures and values” that Jameson identifies as objects of critique in realism entrench themselves in entirely new ways.200 What seemed fresh and arresting at one moment reifies as mere convention in the next, and the whole process of social critique becomes to seem futile, or at the very least naïve.

But within the profoundly changed landscapes of Manto’s stories—with its examination of new capitalist expansion within the urban landscape, and the absolute destruction of familiar space during Partition—a realist mode that may have become fossilized in Europe finds new life in another. When it comes not just to form but also to matters of content, Jameson says, “it could also be argued…that realism inevitably gives way to modernism insofar as its privileged content has become extinct.”201 So, when discussing the realism of Manto, it is at the very outset a form shaped by a content very different from nineteenth-century Europe, with little investment in the many ontological

198 Jameson, Antinomies of Realism, 4. 199 Ibid., 5 200 Ibid. 201 Ibid. 105 exclusions that the construction of a nineteenth-century bourgeois subjectivity requires.

For if the force of realism comes from “the eradication of inherited psychic structures” by transforming a text through its content, but then the defamiliarization of modernism, as well as its tone of resignation and compromise, is characterized by that inherited content in a moment that renders it unrecognizable, the circumstances of rapid urbanization during World War II followed by the partition of India appear to give Manto’s stories both qualities at once.202 Manto’s work reaches for the small and often imperceptible actualities of life in moments of inarticulable change, at once exposing the fallacy of our perceptions while at the same time exposing the fractured edges of truth.

As Partition historian Yasmin Khan explains, “Grainy photographs of the

Partition era sometimes hint that it was a ‘medieval’ horror that occurred in a poor and underdeveloped landscape, but…urban India was in the midst of rapid change by 1946, change which had been greatly accelerated by the industrial spurt caused by the war.”203

Manto’s work—which takes the very modern forms of short stories, essays and radio plays—spans this time of upheaval, and his pre-Partition stories of the backstreets of

Bombay, though depicting a violence of a slower, more insidious kind, is no less about the casualties of modern life. What other Progressives, Trivedi, and Mufti have taken to be a rejection of the political potential of realist literature is still politically significant for its capacity to resist the fabrication of continuities that don’t and might not ever exist, like the glory of an ancient India, or the development of a future utopia. While it is clear from the work of Premchand and other progressives that one of the ways to break through an

202 Jameson, Antinomies of Realism, 4. 203 Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 14-15. 106 unacceptalbe present is to provide a glimpse of a possible future, it is also true that the urge to cast forward or backwards can obscure the realities of pain and suffering that needed to be addressed and could in fact exacerbate the conflicts arising from competing claims of authenticity, belonging or righteousness.

Manto’s “intensity of physical observation and description of detail” as it is named by Trivedi is indeed an extension of the project of literary innovation undertaken by the Progressive Writers to write new objects into their narratives, but it is perhaps most observable in Manto’s stories that this new content changes the form of narrative itself. Even what remains illegible in Manto’s stories—the representation of affect—is also a form of demystification, as it depicts old longings in an unfamiliar world. The cruelty and violence that Manto depicts is a critique of narratives which seek to explain the way the world exists—and thus to rationalize and aestheticize violence—and is not just a dispassionate record of its existence. As Anjaria has argued, this critique then allows for a more profound understanding of the conditions of the moment, and thus makes it possible to build on that understanding for the future. In Manto’s realism,

Anjaria says, “words have a materiality of their own,” and thus, “is realism not merely as a referential project but as an epistemic one as well.”204 Manto’s works, with their highly narrowed perspectives and a preference for contradiction and juxtaposition in place of naming or labeling, re-make the aesthetics of perception so that the radically altered worlds of modern Bombay and post-Partition India can be understood.

204 Anjaria, “Madness and Discontent,” 23. 107

“Bū”: Indiscrete Smells and Discrete Details Manto’s short story “Bū,” (“Smell”), first published in 1944, is an extremely limited third-person narration of the thoughts of its protagonist, Randhir. A young, educated man, he ruminates about his sexual partners both past and present, and in particular how his access to sex had been adversely affected by the conditions in Bombay during World War II. He sits and thinks these thoughts while watching his new wife sleep on his bed on their wedding night, though this rather unsettling setting is not revealed until the very end of the story. Manto spends the bulk of the narration describing a memory evoked by the rain falling outside. As a result, Randhir’s memories and observations become a comparison of two events: the wedding night and his observations about his new bride, and a rainy night sometime before that he’d spent with a ghāṭin launḍiya—a woman from the Ghats, who he assumes works in the factories that attracted a growing migrant workforce during the war boom. Most particularly what Randhir remembers is her smell. This smell is the bū of the title, which he then contrasts with the scent of henna that comes from his wife’s carefully adorned body. With the phrase, “they were monsoon days just like this [barsāt ke yahī din the],” the two days, two smells, and two women collapse into one, and all of the sensory experiences that accompany them— of sex, of smells, sights and even the weather—creates an atmosphere of amplified sensuality that at once enhances the affective representation of the present moment and undermines the symbolic significance of the two encounters as a comparison of class, status, and social mores.205

205 Manto, Manto nāmah, 641. 108

The smell itself remains utterly undefined. Although the translation of bū has appeared in various collections as “smell,” or “odour,” which captures the negative connotations of the word, bū has much more complicated connotations as a reference in

Urdu literature.206 In Muhammad Iqbal’s poem “Jibrīl o Iblīs” (“Gabriel and Satan”) from the collection Bāl-e Jibrīl (1935), Iqbal describes an argument between the two archangels, and the use of the word bū contains not only connotations of evil and corruption but also of pleasure and desire. In the poem, Jibrīl attempts to convince Iblīs to return to paradise, and he opens with the question, “Hamdam-e derīna! Kaisa hai jahān-e rang o bū [My old friend! How is the world of color and smell]?” Iblis replies, “Soz o sāz dard o daġ justajū o ārzū [Passion and plotting pain and grief curiosity and hope].”207

Iblis, describing the profane world of the senses, admits that there is suffering and pain, but there is also activity, hope, creation, and movement. The ambiguity of the interplay of pain and pleasure in the earthly world, and the relative stasis of its absence, is emphasized by the final line, when Iblīs chides Jabrīl for his efforts at bringing about a harmonious reconciliation. He says, “Main khaṭkatā hūn dil-e yazdān mein kānṭe kī tarah/ tū faqat Allah hū Allah hū Allah hū [I prick the heart of God like a thorn/ You say only ‘God is God is God is’].208 Iblīs is, of course, a representation of worldly suffering, but is also of the potential energy that comes into existence with free will, a cause of suspense even to the all-powerful. The pure certainty and affirmation that Jibrīl provides,

206 Sa’adat Hasan Manto, “Smell,” in Bombay Stories, trans. Matt Reeck, (New York: Vintage Books, 2012). “Odour,” in Bitter Fruit, trans. Khalid Hasan, (New Delhi: Penguin, 2008). 207 Sir Mohammad Iqbal. “Jabrīl o Iblīs,” in Bāl-e Jabrīl, (Amritsar: Azad Book Depot, 1969), 147. 208 Ibid. The final line is taken from the Sufi zikar (chant) which says, “Allah hu allah hu allah hu haq [God is God is God is the truth]. 109 on the other hand, assures that he exists only as an extension of God’s power. Thus, the world of rang o bū represents those sorrows and ecstasies that lie beyond the realm of the divine, and beyond the perfect unity and absolute assimilation that divinity requires. The world of rang o bū, in other words, is the world of the singular, sensual, and unrepeatable moment in contrast to the long arc of eternity.

The same interplay of pleasure and displeasure appears in Manto’s own description of this bū, which was “at one time a good smell and a bad smell…which came from her armpits, her breasts, her hair, her stomach, from everywhere came this smell which was also a bad smell and also a good smell [jo bek vaqt khushbū aur badbū thī…us kī baġalon se, us kī chātiyon se, us ke bālon se, us ke peṭ se, har jagah se yeh bū jo badbū bhī aur khushbū bhī].209 Through Randhir’s inability to define it, Manto squeezes multiple affective sensations into the limits of both space and time to make the smell “at one time” good and bad, to make it come from every place on her body, both those that are already charged with sexual connotations—like breasts, hair and stomach— and those that are not, like her armpits. It is a smell that carries with it connotations of her class as a factory worker, but it also implies an unquantifiable value that cannot be encompassed by wages or status. She is at once poor and abundant in this smell, a quality that is by its very nature beyond direct representation in any medium.

Manto’s visual aestheticizing of the ghāṭin woman’s body also challenges assumed notions of sensuality as Randhir’s observations combine the extraordinary aspects of desire with inanimate objects of ordinary world. As the ghāṭin woman

209 Manto, Manto nāmah, 644 110 undresses, Manto describes her breasts by juxtaposing phrases of sexual objectification with the literal objects of raw clay pots. “In her healthy breasts was that same plumpness, that same attraction, that same succulence, that same hot coolness that is in the raw, fresh pots that emerge from the potter’s hand [Us kī sehatmand chātiyon mein vahī gaḍgaḍāhaṭ, vahī jazbit, vahī tarāwat, vahī garam garam ṭhanḍak thī jo kamhār ke hāthon se nikle hue tāzah tāzah kace bartanon mein hotī hai.]”210 The ordering of the words builds sexual tension only to undermine it with the quotidian nature of the metaphor. It is almost the myth of Pygmalion in reverse: living flesh turned to clay. But in addition to literally grounding the trope of female beauty in the earth, it also adds a vivid sensuality to the tactile experience of molding pots.

The woman’s status is low, and yet she occupies the apex of Randhir’s desire.

This is a change from when he first sees her shivering under a tree from his balcony above, where the disparity between them finds an additional expression in their relative positions.211 Randhir, as opposed to the factory girl, is “cultured, educated, clean and handsome,” but in the pages of the story he does nothing but read newspapers and troll for women.212 In the juxtaposition of Randhir’s better qualities with his moral turpitude, his higher status is far from certain. Also, the mutual pleasure of the encounter further complicates the reduction of class differences into a narrative about the exploitation of a factory worker by a man of status. Randhir is consumed by her smell, and profound empathy develops between them: “a trembling arose in the ghāṭin girl’s entire body,

210 Ibid., 643 211 Ibid., 641 212 Ibid., 642

111 which for a moment sent a shiver through Randhir, too [is ghāṭin laṛki ke sare jism mein aisa irtāś pedā ho jātā kī Randhīr khud bhī ek lahze ke liye kapkapā uṭhtā].”213 Through his thoughts he disappears into the sensual experience of the woman, and few boundaries of class and status remain.

Muhammad Umar Memon reads the relationship as a total dissolution of class hierarchies where “Randhir represents purush (the masculine principle) and the Ghatin woman represents prakriti (the feminine principle). All other distinctions of class, education, et cetera, vanish the moment one meets the other.”214 For Memon, the ghāṭin woman is an anthropomorphized representation of nature. The comparison of her breasts with clay pots, he argues, is the metaphorical expression of this nature as she becomes earth, and thus woman-as-earth meets with man-as-action, and their union is the allegory of a timeless and infinitely repeatable one. Although directed at the instability of class in the story—especially, in Randhir’s case, its correlation with respectability—this interpretation also dissolves much of the critical power of the work, as it de- problematizes Randhir’s clearly unequal relationship to the woman, and all of her particularities become fused with a romanticized architype of woman as primal and authentic, as a thing that is missing from modern civilization which must then be somehow re-possessed.

Also, the moment of their encounter is in fact not repeated and is broken by

Randhir’s descriptions of his own frustrations over the unspoken inequalities that

213 Ibid., 644 214 Sa’adat Hasan Manto, Black Margins: Stories, edited by M. Asaduddin and Muhammad Umar Memon (New Delhi: Katha, 2009), 24. 112 characterized the last years of the Raj. Memon, too, suggests that, despite the erasure of class differences he identified at the moment of the encounter, the class of the ghāṭin woman isn’t entirely arbitrary. “The narrator,” he says, “contrasts Randhir’s sexual experience with the Ghatan with the experiences he had with Anglo-Indian prostitutes and with his newly wedded, sophisticated wife who is the embodiment of gilded artificiality.”215 But with this reading, the ghāṭin woman’s class becomes significant only in terms of the absence of an artificiality that she cannot afford, and she becomes simply a vehicle with which to criticize the ostentatiousness of prostitutes, who market themselves, and women of Randhir’s own class, who this reading suggests are complicit in markets of another kind.

A further contextualization of the story and the scandal it produced at the time of its publication brings an entirely different focus to the story than that of a poor and pure woman versus the “gilded artificiality” of Randhir’s wife. The obscenity trial that was held in response to this story, which came to focus especially on Manto’s descriptions of sex between Randhir and the ghāṭin woman (specifically his use of the word chāti, or breast), corroborates the sensual force of her character and its centrality to the rest of the story.216 However, the story is by no means complete without the other women that occupy Randhir’s thoughts. They are but are not only significant as symbols of prostitution and the hypocrisy of middle-class morality. They carry their own complicated particularities, which deserve to be part of the discussion given Manto’s preoccupation with the singular.

215 Ibid. 216 Ismat Chughtai, Kaġazi hai pairahan, 48. 113

Randhir ruminates on his own marginalization as a colonial subject during the war: the Christian prostitutes he used to patronize have all joined the Women’s Auxiliary

Corps (WAC), or have opened “dancing schools” that are only open to English soldiers.217 At a time when the great bulk of resources in India were all being directed to the war effort, and British soldiers were still a privileged class despite the many hundreds of thousands of Indian troops who served alongside them, Manto represents this looting and privilege through the somewhat odd example of the unavailability of prostitutes. A man whose main difficulty is his inability to acquire sex on the cheap is hardly a fitting flag-bearer for the nationalist cause, and yet his apparently petty complaints are hardly immaterial to the issues of scarcity and class divisions which were becoming all the more visible in this era of rapid urbanization.

As a picture of Bombay in the pre-independence era, it captures all of the complicated workings of national posturing, such as the moment when Randhir jealously watches Hazel, one of his former sexual partners, leave her apartment wearing her WAC uniform. She walks “as if all the people traveling on the footpath will roll themselves out like a carpet before her [goya fut path par tamam jane wale us ke qadamon ke aage tat ki tarah bichte chale jayenge.]”218 It is especially significant in the way the WAC recruit demonstrates the ambivalence of the uniform, that which already played a powerful role in British propaganda and would, perhaps inspired by the aestheticization of politics during World War II, continue to serve a central role in the rise of religious nationalism

217 Manto, Manto nāmah, 641. 218 Ibid., 642

114 during Partition.219 In the example of Randhir’s contemptuous description of Hazel, there is certainly a tone of entitled resentment: the idea that Hazel should somehow be his, but is just one supply line that has been re-directed toward the war effort. There is also the implication, however, that beneath efforts to erase the unacceptable qualities of the female body beneath the uniform—in this instance her body’s problematic sexuality—the uniform does not in fact erase the complex realities of the past. This extends the critique of this image from Randhir’s own personal feelings of deprivation, which is a strange sort of pairing of personal entitlement and nationalist resentment, to a critique of the national body itself, and the idea of war as a more noble profession to that of selling sex.

Randhir’s shaming of the self-important prostitute-cum-soldier is also tempered by his own pettiness when he calls the ghāṭin woman up to his room as revenge for the recruit’s newfound sense of purpose.220 This portrait of Randhir as a philandering hero with few altruistic motives, especially when it comes to inviting a poor woman to come out of the rain, allows for something quite rare in literature of this moment in time, even in so-called “critical realism”: a critique of the romantic heroism of the war—the fantasy of a united front against fascism which can and must put aside all other differences in the face of crisis—without creating an opposing romance of the socialist hero to take its place. This takes on particular significance when considering the shift of opinion toward

World War II within the Communist Party of India. What had largely been derided as an

219 Khan, The Great Partition, 54. 220 Manto, Manto nāmah, 642.

115 imperialist war suddenly became a “people’s war,” regardless of the devastating effects that the war had already had upon the subcontinent.221

And it turns out that is precisely the problematization of uniformed personnel that lead to the obscenity trial, as recruiters were concerned about the suggestion that the

WAC ranks were filled with prostitutes.222 The petitioner who brought the story to the attention of the British government, M.K. Khan, said that “unless immediate action to rebut the allegations is taken, the recruitment to the ‘W.A.C.’ will stop to great extent.” It was not the threat of corrupting young minds, but rather of a corruption of the image of military forces that was at stake. It is no question why the colonial government was quick to get involved since a story that is ostensibly about a timeless encounter with an anonymous woman was in its moment a very timely blow to wartime exploitation by attacking the sacred heart of a call to duty.

It is not hard to see why the story was caught in the crosshairs of both nationalist and Imperial interests since such a depiction undermines the romance of the call to duty as pure righteousness, as well as the idea that personal sacrifice to a cause can erase all of the confusion and moral ambiguity of existence. But historical context is not the only evidence of the fact that “Smell”—despite being the innermost, unuttered thoughts of a man as he gazes upon a woman’s body—is an experimentation with the function of realism to undermine romance. It is in fact the story’s most salient device, the collapse of time of two rainy days into one, which allows for a reading that is more than just the

221 Habib Manzer, “Community Party Policy During the Imperialist War (1939-1941),” Social Scientist 35, no. 11/12 (2007): 50. 222 Sarah Waheed, “Anatomy of an Obscenity Trial,” Himal Southasian, 21 Feb. 2014, http://himalmag.com/anatomy-obscenity-trial/. 116 opposition of a natural, unmediated and pure union of puruṣ and prākriti. It allows for a temporal interruption of Randhir’s fantasy, one that forces a reevaluation of Randhir’s thoughts regarding the ghāṭin woman and her role as the authentic basis for his perception.

Once the story comes full circle, through all of his various encounters to the present, Randhir again thinks, “barsāt ke yahī din the,” but, of course, these days were not in fact those days.223 That was then, and this is now. Comparison of Randhir’s memory of a natural, primal union as against the artifice of urbanized feminine coquetry and adornment is not just the exaltation of one over the other, but is also a comparison of the memory, in all of its intangibility, with the reality of the present. The bū, as a representation of indescribable and unrepeatable longing, is overtaken by the strong scent of henna, and despite the erotic nature of his thoughts, Randhir cannot bring himself to feel desire for his wife. He tries, and even says that she has been the object of fantasy for

“hundreds” of her schoolmates, suggesting that she should be able to exist as a mere fantasy for him, as well.224 But while Randhir is revolted by the smell of henna, and compares her beauty to “lifeless white clots floating in colorless liquid like spoiled milk

[Jis tarah phaṭte hue dūdh men safed safed be jān phuṭkiyān be rang pāni men sākin hoti], the narration sketches the details of the new wife’s body in a way that resists his judgement.

While Randhir had clung to the ghāṭin woman’s body, emphasizing the fact that his desire and the ghāṭin woman are one and the same, Randhir’s wife lies apart from

223 Manto, Manto nāmah, 645. 224 Ibid., 647 117 him, trying to keep herself warm by wrapping her own arms around herself. He compares her body to books or china, possessions that get damaged in shipping, and lists all of the ways his new possession has been damaged by her wedding apparel:

Randhir undid the strings of her tight and constricting blouse. It had made creases on the soft flesh of her chest and back and around her waist was a mark from her tightly bound drawstring. The heavy, jagged gems of her necklace had scraped her chest in several places, as if she had been scratched by nails with great force…His fingers felt the many vibrations that ran through her. He also found suppressed trembling in the many soft corners of her body, and when he pressed his chest to hers, he heard with his every pore the sound of the girl’s plucked strings—but where was the call? That call from the smell of the ghāṭin girl’s body?225

The inventory of small injuries creates an effect that is not equal to the fantasy of perfect union as expressed by Randhir’s yearning for the ghāṭin woman. She is, by contrast, to the ineffable smell, spoiled in very specific and countable ways. However, these marks also complicate her “gilded artificiality” as described by Memon. The desire for the call, the indescribable smell, are Randhir’s own deep yearnings for the absolute, a yearning that exists despite his rather cynical perspective towards the romantic aspirations of duty and service such as the former prostitute now in the Women’s

Auxiliary Corps. But here Randhir is prevented from that yearning by the present he shares with his wife, which, despite the similarities in weather, is stubbornly different from the scene he recreates in his mind with the ghāṭin woman. And what exists in front of him, and which is both present in and yet independent of Randhir’s revulsion, is an imperfect vulnerability that is neither abhorrent nor transcendent. What appears is a young girl who has been used as an object of fantasy and packaged for the respectability

225 Ibid., 646-647 118 becoming of her class, suppressing even the same fundamental pleasures that continue to haunt Randhir and his ideas of a perfect and unrepeatable romance.

Randhir’s sleeping wife becomes a foil for the dream, both of erotic union and nationalist or allied unity, in its present state of incompletion. There can be no unity, at least no more than a fleeting one, in the presence of so many inequalities: inequalities of gender between Randhir and his wife, inequalities of class between him and the ġāṭin woman, and also the racial inequalities between Randhir and the British Tommies, to name a few. Instead, we are left with Randhir in the present, which brings all of these indignities into sharp relief. Manto has undermined the propagandist front of the colonial state, but this analysis goes deeper when considered with Randhir’s own thwarted romantic fantasies, leaving him in a room with a woman whose physical presence, with the undeniable scent of henna, prevents him from remaining engrossed with that indescribable bū. The smell, which has “some sourness to it [us men kuch kaṭās thī]” forces him to lie awake, to reflect upon his basest motives for calling an unknown woman up to his room, to feel the frustrations and the artificiality of class divides, and also illustrates that other, more public call, the call to duty, as an all too human fragility dressed up in uniform.

In the end, there is no possibility here of returning to that first rainy night as the impenetrable curtains of class and hierarchy have again fallen into place: what became of that ghāṭin woman we will never know. She remains as a silence of class consciousness within the urban middle-class text. But despite Randhir’s yearning for completion, neither is there a possibility of his finding redemption as an uncomplicated socialist hero. 119

Manto does not look towards the future. There is only “barsāt ke yahī din,” and thus the various details of injustice are left to gather significance in the text’s journey through time. The silences get louder. Randhir’s disgust with his wife becomes incommensurate with the presence of her fragile body. And the absent voice of the ghāṭin haunts the contemporary reader much in the same way her bū permeates the spaces of Randhir’s memory.

The Realism of the Literary-Cinematic Space: “Why I Don’t Watch Films” Even the most incisive observations within realist literature cannot close the distance between the text and its referent. Film, however, often succeeds in the illusion of being real. As Theodor Adorno says, “fictional characters never resemble their empirical counterparts no matter how minutely they are described. In fact it may be due to the very precision of their presentation that they are removed even further from empirical reality; they become aesthetically autonomous. Such distance is abolished in film: to the extent that a film is realistic, the semblance of immediacy cannot be avoided.”226 Because literature cannot hide its means of construction, it considers reality from a distance.

However, as Anjaria has already indicated with her formulation of Manto’s realism as an epistemic project, while literature cannot imitate empirical reality, its capacity to construct and change narrative tropes remains on the surface, a capacity that becomes all the more important in times of political crisis. In the case of Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s satirical essay “Main Film Kyon Nahin Dēkhta” (“Why I Don’t Watch Films”), published very shortly after his move to Pakistan and in the midst of post-Partition violence, this

226 Theodor Adorno, “Transparencies on Film,” trans. Thomas Y. Levin, New German Critique, no. 24/25 (1981): 200. 120 aesthetic of distance is applied to the process of filmmaking itself. Through his literary representation of film, Manto interrogates not only the illusory narratives of commercial filmmaking within the culture industry, but also the broader narrative erasures that threatened to define empirical reality.

It is not difficult to understand why such a shattering of illusions was necessary in the context of Partition, where incendiary rhetoric regarding the division of Hindus and

Muslims threatened to overshadow centuries of peaceful co-habitation.227 If anything, the violence indicated the need for narratives that could re-complicate easy formulations of

“us” versus “them.” Similarly concerned with illusions and their relationship to mass media, Benjamin’s warning regarding the aesthetisization of politics in the essay “The

Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” was a response to the rise of Nazi propaganda in Germany.228 Both represent a critical intervention into the social function of media at moments of violence that threatened to destroy the very social fabric they were a part of. Benjamin’s essay strove to describe an art form which could penetrate through aesthetitized politics, while Manto’s distanced illuminations into the narratives of commercial film in “Why I Don't Watch Films” shatters the illusions of both the unalterable solidity of political life and the enchantments of shadows on the movie screens.

227 Sanjay Chaturvedi, “Process of Othering in the Case of India and Pakistan,” Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 93, no. 2 (2002): 150. Chaturvedi reminds us that Jinnah and the Muslim League are often given undue importance in the choice of Partition. He says, “What makes the partition of British India such an intricate and complex phenomenon…is the convergence…of several discourses of otherness…imperialists, nationalists and communalists alike. In other words, several competing logics of partition were simultaneously striving to arrive at ‘totality with oneself by separation from another self.’” 228 Benjamin, Selected Writings, 4:270.

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“Why I Don’t Watch Films” first appeared in 1948 in the journal Imroz, which was run by the noted Progressive poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz.229 Partition violence still raged in the streets across the subcontinent, and anxieties over lawless outbreaks merely lead to the government sanction of armed militias, many of which had participated in some of the worst atrocities.230 The choice to write about film at a time when destruction threatened to take over the most mundane aspects of daily life is not an unprecedented move: In “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” Walter

Benjamin wrote about the technologies of film in a context of wide-spread nationalist fervor and coordinated violence as an intervention into the cultural promotion of fascism.

Hitler had already come to power and was quickly building a totalitarian regime, and so unlike his ruminations on literature in “The Storyteller,” which retains a nostalgic tone for a literature that appeared to have lost its relevance, “The Work of Art” is an urgent attempt to critique new aesthetic technologies in order to find new possibilities within them.

Benjamin’s claim is that, “the concepts which are introduced into the theory of art differ from those now current in that they are completely useless for the purposes of fascism,” heralding not only a new venue for the expression of the masses, but also the perception of social actuality and material inequality.231 As the historian Susan Buck-

Morss has pointed out in her analysis of the essay, Benjamin set out to find a way to

229 Leslie Flemmin, Another Lonely Voice, Monograph Series 18 (Berkeley: Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, 1979), 17. 230 Khan, The Great Partition, 184. 231 Benjamin, Selected Writings, 4:252.

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“undo the alienation of the corporeal sensorium, to restore the instinctual power of the human bodily senses for the sake of self-preservation, and to do this, not by avoiding the new technologies, but by passing through them.”232 Benjamin does not spend much time mourning what has been lost in previous artistic modes of production, but rather focuses upon the way that the technology of mechanical reproduction “emancipates the work of art from its parasitic subservience to ritual” by abolishing the aura of unique authenticity.

233 The idol of the temple is now accessible everywhere to everyone.

In the first version of “The Work of Art” essay, Benjamin argues that film in particular contains the possibility for “immunization against…mass psychoses” because of its ability to appropriate the dream world of the individual and replace it with figures of the “collective dream.”234 Mass psychosis, brought on by a submission of the individual to the aura of religious or political aesthetics, gives way to a sharing of inner fears and desires through the mass media of film. He says that it does this “by means of certain films in which the forced development of sadistic fantasies or masochistic delusions can prevent their natural and dangerous maturation in the masses.”235 Film can remove the repressive tendencies of social existence and open new avenues of social behavior by exposing them to film’s penetrative power. Film’s ability to reach into the innermost libidinal realms of humanity, and yet at the same time allow for their collective

232 Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October 62 (1992): 5. For another account of Benjamin’s essay as an urgent re-assessment of film’s political potential in the face of fascism, see Miriam Hansen’s essay “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience,” New German Critique 40 (1987): 179-224; emphasis in original 233 Benjamin, Selected Writings, 4:256. 234 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility [First Version],” trans. Michael W. Jennings, Grey Room, no. 39 (Spring 2010): 31 235 Ibid., 37

123 expression and shared consumption, then undermines the work of art’s use as a means of social control.236

However, the line between collective catharsis and collective indulgence in mass psychosis remains thin. Along with film’s potential for a collective disenchantment, the collective experience bringing its fantasies into the sobering light of day, Benjamin notes the regressive nature of “the cult of the movie star.” 237 With the release of Triumph of the Will just the year before the publication of “The Work of Art,” the danger of placing the masses in their own starring role must have been readily apparent. Benjamin describes the lie of the aesthetics of fascism in terms of organization which replaces social re-organization, where, “in great ceremonial processions, giant rallies and mass sporting events, and in war…the masses come face to face with themselves…The masses have a right to changed property relations; fascism seeks to give them expression in keeping these relations unchanged. The logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life.”238 In the propaganda film, the masses become aesthetically organized—in uniform and in unison—which valorizes existing social structures and elides all distinctions, hypocrisies, and inequalities. Instead what was necessary was the collective realization of social actuality that could lead to organization for political change.

An aestheticizing of politics has its own severe implications in the context of

Partition, where the collective excitement of independence was often tempered by rising

236 Adorno, 202. Despite Adorno’s critique of Benjamin’s privileging of film in Dialectic of Enlightenment, it is this liberatory aspect, which exists despite the self-censoring of the culture industry that lead Adorno to concede, “the culture industry becomes as internally antagonistic as the very society which it aims to control. The ideology of the culture industry contains the antidote to its own lie.” 237 Benjamin, Selected Writings, 4:261 238 Ibid., 269. 124 inter-communal tensions. Thus, the celebratory spectacle of nationalism was also always in danger of becoming the celebration of one community’s victory over another.

Emerging governments had a stake in stoking these public displays of grandeur as people

“stood in vast crowds, dazzled by fireworks and illuminated buildings, not only in Delhi, but in major cities throughout South Asia,” witnessing the tryst with destiny that brought two nations into the world.239 Manto described it thus: “Bombay, always beautiful, now looked as gorgeous as a bride. It was glittering with lights, so many that I think the city had never spent so much on power as it did that night.”240

Unlike Nazi Germany, film in the subcontinent was not a participant in the narrative violence of aestheticized politics, so much as a victim of it. Prominent nationalists attempted to ban films on both sides of the border, both before and after independence, as a means to purify the cultural products of the new nations.241 Still, the aestheticization of politics occurred through other means: in the same year that “Why I

Don’t Watch Films” was published, a photograph appeared showing armed women, all in uniform, marching in formation along the recently formed Punjabi border.242 The aesthetics of the nation, both those that had been disallowed and those which were beginning to emerge, urgently required a critique.

239 Khan, The Great Partition, 150. 240 Sa’adat Hasan Manto, “Bombay During Partition,” in Why I Write, trans. Aaker Patel (Chennai: Tranquebar Press, 2014), Kindle. 241 Khan, The Great Partition, 72; Mushtaq Gazdar, Pakistani Cinema (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 24. * An eleventh century ruler, the first Sultan of Northern India, who was renowned for his inconoclastic raids on the Somnath temple. See Romila Thapar, Somnatha: The Many Voices of a History, (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2005). 242 Ibid., 185 125

It is in the context of these developments that Manto turned to literature, pulling from an “old” medium a new kind of narrative distance that would reimagine the forces at work behind the cult of the movie star, but he is careful to distance himself from the politicians who labeled cinema as culturally inappropriate. He says:

In my head there was a beautiful temple in which every evening I’d light lamps to my favorite actors…but what happened to extinguish all these lamps of faith?...Was I possessed by the spirit of Ghaznavi?...Not at all… Several people don’t watch films because…they think they are the games of demons and want to distance themselves from it…Deception and deception only turned my heart away.243

From the cult of the temple idol to the cult of the movie star, that which Manto has literalized through his metaphor of the mind’s temple is at once as attractive as it is deceptive. Commercial film fetishizes itself, for its illusions of reality remain hidden as illusions.

What happens in “Why I Don’t Watch Films,” however, is that Manto flattens in film that which unveils the collective unconscious even as it creates mass consciousness, its dialectical essence. In Manto’s essay, similar to montage, all of a film’s elements—its heroes, props, and language itself—exist in constellations without privilege or precedent, dismantling the ordered and hierarchical principles of commercial film. From the very beginning, the essay roils with activity, but gods and heroes alike are revealed as mere human beings. Describing the very first time he was allowed inside the gates of the studio, Manto continues the satirical comparison of himself with the iconoclastic Sultan

Ghaznavi and says, “About twelve years ago, I raided the Somnath studio.”244 Within his

243 Manto, Manto numā, 418-419. 244 Ibid., 419 126 first few steps inside the studio gates we hear the voice of God, which turns out to be a voice through a loudspeaker. Another “god” is accused of stealing costume props, but this deity demonstrates that the elaborate mustache in question is actually his own. A group of soldiers comes running into the scene clashing swords as if fighting to the death, until one of them drops his weapon and runs backstage. The frightening sword is made of wood.245 Taking what would be reduced to a flash of celluloid, left on the cutting room floor, or missed by the limiting lens of the camera altogether, Manto creates a space of chaotic creativity where much more than a commercial narrative is possible. This imagined process of filmmaking is rather more enjoyable than Manto’s condemnation of film, which undermines even his own narrative that film should be avoided or distrusted.

Manto’s literary-cinematic space challenges the established tropes of both realist literature and film and brings their aesthetics front and center in all of their illusion and malleability.

The timing of the publication of the essay is significant even beyond its role as call to truth at a time of increasingly fanatical rhetoric. It also reanimates a gentler time before Partition that had been displaced by crisis. By demonstrating the degree to which a history of inter-communal tensions and intra-communal purity has always been a myth, it once again brings into question an aesthetics of belonging that was increasingly narrowed by the process of national self-definition: Muslims against infidels, Pakistan against

India, Urdu against Hindi.

245 Ibid. 127

Manto’s “Why I Don’t Watch Films” brings in language as an actor as well, not just as a caricature of cinematic dialogues but also a satire of established literary tropes and conventions. Urdu, which was the language of the elite in the nineteenth century, emerges in a new form in the cinema of mid-twentieth century India. Manto’s essay reflects upon this new Urdu as a conveyor of aesthetic authority now leveraged for commercial value:

In those days even I didn’t have much affection for language. So when I met with the director every day to maul it I did not get offended. But one day the matter became grave when Seth Saheb shook the director’s hand and told him the good news: “Old man, today I’ve sold the rights to your thirteenth film.” The director congratulated Seth and asked him, “What name did you give it?” Mr. Seth smiled. “It’s really great. Phārj-e- Ādā.”246

Taking the very Urdu-sounding title Fārz-e-Ādā (Loyalty, 1936) through various permutations in which it becomes clear that not only is Mr. Seth’s pronunciation incorrect

(swapping the Urdu-specific sounds of “f” and “z” with the Hindi “ph” and “j”) but also his grammar (reversing the genitive and noun, as it would be done in Hindi), Manto pokes fun at Urdu literary traditions colliding with the new urban, multi-lingual landscape in Bombay. When Manto tries to express his objections, nothing can be done:

“You’ve lost your mind, Munshi! The title cannot be changed because I’ve already sold the film!”247 In the end, it is unclear if it is the literariness of Urdu in an entirely unfamiliar landscape or its thriving bastardization that emerges as the butt of the joke.

Manto creates a comedic imitation of literary majesty, plucking turns of phrase from the lofty idiom of the urban elite and reducing them to mere sounds and grammatical

246 Ibid., 420. 247 Ibid. 128 elements as so many movable parts. By using recognizable titles of real films, words that had been immortalized in print are suddenly, along with heroes and heroines, made mortal, struck down from the lofty authority of the printed page by their translation for and by a broader public.

In exile from the film world of Bombay, Manto turns his mind to his days there.

But instead of romanticizing the film studios and their productions, he makes visible scenes the studios work hard to obscure. Manto widens the lens to include the whole of the process before the film can is sealed. In doing so, he creates a new space for observing and recognizing the inherently social nature of filmic expression, not just its presentation of the mass to the masses, but also its involvement of participants in the creation of heroes, and the way that such cults of personality are always propped up by less glamorous means:

One actress was very famous for her horse riding. But when her time to ride the horse came, I saw a wooden horse being brought out. It wasn’t even a whole horse. Just the back and nothing more to which a saddle had been tacked on. Neither snout nor tail. Actress Sahebah saddled this strange horse with the support of three men. The lights came on. Director Sahib gave the order. “Go!” One man quickly put the reins in the hands of Actress Sahebah and another slowly began to shake this very strange horse of wood. The filming of this shaking continued on for a while. The next day there was an outdoor shooting. A skilled circus rider put on the actress’s sari and blouse and rode a touchy horse that kept rearing. His different riding poses were filmed. When all of these pieces were joined together and came on screen, it seemed to my astonished eyes that the actress was doing everything herself.248

The temporal effect of this passage is that literature’s malleable time, which covers three days within a single paragraph, draws out of the filmic instant and reveals it

248 Ibid., 421. 129 as a lengthy process. But also, word by word, it draws us along from the moment of the entrance of the wooden horse to our witnessing of the final product as the astonished spectator. Captive as we are to the linear flow of the sentence, the turning of pages, and the inescapable distance from the referent in the form of text, the literary medium re- assembles what has been lost to the cutting room floor in order to spark our wariness of the film’s manipulated contents. This extension of the immediacy of the medium provides a valuable critical function. One could well imagine the difference in an audience’s reaction to a political speech, for instance, if all previous drafts had been included, along with the interjections of politicians and speech writers. Suddenly the theatricality of the speech becomes transparent, and India’s tryst with destiny becomes less an inevitability and more apparent as the long, difficult, and entirely transformable process that it was.

Manto concludes his essay on the deception of film by revealing his susceptibility to the same deception: “The straw that broke the camel’s back was when, watching a movie that had been made before my eyes with the audience in the cinema hall, and the glycerine tears on the heroin’s false eyelashes made me cry more than once.”249 Manto implicates himself as a vulnerable spectator even with his role as a film writer, and the visceral depth of the manipulation is what he cannot stand in an environment of intolerable conditions. Partition cannot be the time for unquestioned cathartic indulgence, yet the strength of the experience within the cinema hall remains. In a context where so much violence was rationalized, the irrational empathy he feels for the actress exposes

249 Ibid., 423. 130 cinema as a valuable tool if taken beyond the expected parameters of commercial film and allowed to re-illuminate social realities that had been lost to communal rhetoric.

Film of the Bombay studies is, in Manto’s essay, ridiculous, and yet if it could touch someone like Manto, who knows all of its tricks and deceptions, it could also touch the hearts of even those who had been desensitized by Partition violence. The appearance of “Why I Don’t Watch Films” just a year before Manto published Black Margins, also demonstrates that the essay is a renegotiation of the aesthetic product’s emotional terms: it allows us to detach from the immediacy of film technology at a moment of social crisis, and to see the work of filmmaking at the distance that a literary form provides. Through that, the vivid power of film becomes a set of conditions and techniques to which the corporeal sensorium is no longer held hostage but can in fact be awakened.

Manto’s adaptation of the process of filmmaking to the essay form shows the world of filmmaking from a perspective entirely unavailable to the average filmgoer and expands the focus of the lens to include scenes outside of the mise en scène. “Why I

Don’t Watch Films” interrogates a technology that thrived in Bombay even as it languished in Lahore and explores how films participate in the construction of social fantasies. In the context of Partition, where the fantasies of the public were often nationalistic and communal, such a question was more than just an excuse for Manto to earn some much-needed cash, nor was it a simple object for pointed satire. Rather this kind of depiction was an inquiry into the modes of expression of social existence at a time when society was in total shambles. 131

By allowing us the critical distance to see the story as it unfolds, and all of the people and devices involved in its unfolding, Manto’s essay, in fact, expresses the transformational possibilities in film through the way that it has access to our libidinal responses, which, for the first time through this new technology, are ours to transform.

Still, Manto’s attitude regarding the deception of the film industry remains. In the case of the horse-riding actress, all of the amusing moments that Manto describes are excluded from the film itself in service of reproducing what the heroine was commercially known for. This exclusion goes far beyond mere creative playacting, since what the film can project is a picture of the natural world that far surpasses the interpretations of a theatrical set. This is an illusion of action, causality, and of seemingly natural ability. The actress mounts the horse, the horse moves around with her on it, and there is clearly a real horse with a real rider presented on the screen. Thus, she is clearly riding a horse, and a rearing horse at that, so she must be an accomplished horsewoman. Without access to all that has gone on in the making of the film, the heroine appears simultaneously imbued with all of her symbolic meaning as a central and meaningful figure, but the capacities of film to capture visual detail at an unprecedented level also makes her appear objectively heroic.

We have had it decided for us, and impressed upon us with no insignificant authority, that she is an excellent horse rider, not just the skilled handler of a wooden steed.

By showing the social processes behind film, the social can again become natural, and the complicated inter-communal negotiations of the subcontinent no longer have to be seen as compromising collective identities. Manto’s warning against the deception of the edited film can then be extended to the erasures necessary for the nationalist plotlines 132 that gained in frequency and force in the days of Partition. This is perhaps best illustrated by the historian Gyan Prakash, as he describes the changing social environment of 1947

Bombay:

The imperial cosmopolis was deeply hierarchical; it was underwritten by concepts of racial and cultural superiority and required subordination to imposed authority. But it did not demand a common, homogeneous identity among its subjects…Not so nationalism. In challenging imperialism, it pressed the nation’s claim as the most fundamental of all identities. This demand for loyalty to the modern nation-state over everything else left little room for those who took their other affiliations as seriously as they did the nation. 250

Thus, a Hindu identity had to be subordinated to a Hindu-nationalist identity, and a

Muslim identity had to be subordinated to a Muslim-nationalist identity. By contrast,

Manto’s Bombay film studio in “Why I Don’t Watch Films” challenges both the unity of nationalism and the hierarchies of imperialism. By re-framing— literally placing back into the frame— the way that any construction of a national or filmī hero depends upon the active participation of people and things considered extraneous to that subject, Manto gives the freed om of that participation back to film’s spectators, places the apparatus of this construction into their service, and thus allows for the choice of a different lens, a different series of events.

In his narrative, Manto himself embodies the complex identities that Prakash says were being denied. He says, “Maybe you think I’ve given up the world and become an acetic…No, I still draw breath in your world of rang o bu.”251 Once again, by invoking the famous line from Muhammad Iqbal’s poem about Satan’s rejection of paradise in

250 Gyan Prakash, Mumbai Fables, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 130-131. 251 Manto, Manto numā, 418. 133 favor of earthy tumult, Manto places himself among his readers and as a participant in the multiple negotiations between identarian demands. The complications of life cannot be abandoned but only critiqued. In the final line of the essay, Manto says, “Please God

(khuda), do not show me the day when I should watch films!” Given his ambiguous views on religion, his appeal to God to save him from film seems rather disingenuous, even ironic.252 But Manto does not, even in his impassioned plea to be saved from film, endorse banning them. In “Why I Don’t Watch Films,” Manto’s frustration is less a condemnation of film than an exposure of the way that certain narratives require editing out people, things, and concepts seen as marginal to the central action; and this is the focus, in its vividness and power. The narratives produced by a commercial film industry in the process of editing clears away much of what Manto brings to these pages, and the centrality of the movie star becomes the most important, if not the only reality.

This process was aggravated by the administrative and political expediency that became the driving force behind the creation of Pakistan, a process that by all accounts rode roughshod over contested principalities and ignored the complications of mixed communities.253 These are failures that Manto would regularly take up in his later work.

As historian Saadia Toor has pointed out, “Partition, far from being a simple affair of splitting the Muslim from the non-Muslims, actually underscored the impossibility of

252 Ibid., 423. 253 Ayesha Jalal, “Conjuring Pakistan: History as Official Imagining,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 27, no.1 (Feb. 1995): 75. “The selective uses made of history after the acquisition of state power differed in important respects from the creative imaginings that had sought to transform a minority community into a nation… the Muslim case for nationhood that was more nonterritorial than territorial in its imaginings came to be appropriated by a nation-state whose geographical limitations contravened the creative expansiveness of its ideological frontier.”

134 such a division.”254 But the division did happen, and in pieces like Black Margins and

“Tobah Tēk Singh,” Manto dragged back into view the incomprehensible destruction that nationalist ideologies work very hard to deny. The sense-less-ness of Black Margins exposed the emotionless cruelty of communal violence, and “Tobah Tēk Singh” the rationalized insanity of the division of the Punjab.

Manto’s examination of the riotous sensorium of the film stage reminds us to trust those same bodily senses in the context of Partition, a moment where, because of the tremendous uprooting of house and home, even one’s own conception of self was thrown into uncertainty. To do this, Manto disrupts the easy symbolism and continuous narratives of film in favor of its many fragments: a confounding and estranging portrayal of generalized and unedited sense whereby the inherent and preventable wrongs of

Partition could and must be confronted. Far from a dispassionate record of reality, and far exceeding a resigned acceptance of the inevitable, Manto’s work creates a critical distance by which even one’s own innermost longings are exposed in all of their fragility.

Through the interaction of filmic and literary space, Manto creates aesthetic distance that questions the social functions of film, and also demonstrates the collective power that film can, in the right conditions, provide. But fundamental to this is the film’s social character, which becomes obscured within the commercial film and can, in the worst circumstances, lead to the mere aestheticization of untenable social relations. Through his satirical essay on the work of film, however, “Why I Don’t Watch Films” demonstrates film’s ability to create new collective emotional experiences which were urgently needed

254 Sadia Toor, The State of Islam, (London: Pluto Press, 2011), 19. 135 in an atmosphere of increasingly rationalized violence. Manto’s “Black Margins,” on the other hand, demonstrates the degree to which literature can bring out the horror of

Partition even in an atmosphere of inter-communal antagonism and rationalized destruction.

Kuch to hai jis kī pardadārī hai: Incisive abstraction in Black Margins In her polemical essay “Communal Violence and Literature” (fasādāt aur adab), on the duty of Indian writers to address Partition violence in their writing, Ismat Chughtai says, “I’m at a loss of what to do about Manto’s Black Margins. Should I catalogue it as a work of literature or should I find an entirely new classification for it?”255 Indeed, the form of prose in this collection is of a very different type than many of the stories written about Partition violence, even among Manto’s own work. It was entirely different from anything he had written before or after. These stories are closer to what might now be called “prose poems” or “flash fiction,” consisting of at most a few pages of prose, but much more often just a few lines.

Not quite short stories, these fragments stretch the definition of story altogether.

Instead of carrying a single thread through from beginning to end, these notes—often conveying the blackest of comedy—remain true to their title as if they were an unelaborated and nonsensical list of death and destruction as it was observed in its most incomprehensible, irrational form. And yet, it is because of their penetratingly unsettling character, which does not let the reader escape the discomfort of violence even at as they sit at a remove from it, that the collection is so successful at invoking the urgency with

255 Ismat Chughtai, “Communal Violence and Literature,” Trans. Tahira Naqvi and Muhammad Umar Memon, Annual of Urdu Studies 15 (2000): 454. 136 which violence must be stopped. Black Margins takes a broken situation and breaks all narrative to convey it, and thus it reflects the context of its creation with unparalleled immediacy.

Of course, such contortions of form to reflect a time of crisis is not without precedent.

Fredric Jameson has said of realism’s radically varying attempts throughout history to depict the terror and confusion of war that they all “may also be reduced and simplified by the…consideration which cuts across all of them—namely the suspicion that war is ultimately unrepresentable.”256 Jameson develops an adaptation of Burke’s dramatistic pentad—act, actor, agency, and scene—with which he reads a set of categories certain representations of war might fall under, and the more horrific the narrative, the more acutely scene emerges as the dominant perspective.257 Jameson’s category of the “atrocity narrative” seems to fit accounts of Partition most accurately, a category particularized by the marked absence of act, actor and agent, where scene is “a heterogeneous element as much Stimmung or affect as it is a mere stage or context of human gestures.”258 Note, for example, the striking coherence between Jameson’s description of the atrocities of the

Thirty Years’ War with the equal indistinguishability of actors and agency during

Partition as described by Khan.

Jameson: On the one hand, the great strategic trajectory of the armies…on the other, a well-nigh optical enlargement, an eyelash-brushing approach in which seemingly intelligible units of the official armies disintegrate into minute

256 Jameson, Antinomies of Realism, 233. 257 Ibid., 234. Jameson leaves out the category of “purpose,” stating that “narrative semiotics, by re- identifying Burke’s first three categories with each other…suggests a different ordering of these perspectives, in which purpose somehow withdraws (as a feature of interpretation rather than representation), which scene begins to emerge as a whole new element in its own right.” 258 Ibid., 240.

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bands of individual marauders spreading across an everywhere identical landscape.259

Khan: Even by the standards of the violent twentieth century, the Partition of India is remembered for its carnage, both for its scale—which may have involved the deaths of half a million to one million men, women and children—and for its seemingly indiscriminate callousness…Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus suffered equally as victims and can equally be blamed for carrying out the murders and assaults…Militias, armed gangs and members of defense organizations went on the rampage. All this both preceded and accompanied the migration of some twelve million people between the two new nation states of India and Pakistan.260

Because of the massive scale of the violence and a complete inability to find within it a single motivating source, attempts to represent Partition break down, as Nandy and Das have already observed, into either an essentialization of violence as natural and inevitable, or as a complete collapse of signification altogether.261 Overdetermined scene or undefined silence seem to be the only ways to approach the tragedy so as not to assign blame unjustly or minimize suffering.

In “Hashya ārāi,” (“Marginotions”), Mohammad Askari’s introduction to Black

Margins, the difficulty of writing Partition is a central theme. Askari remarks that much of the emerging adab-e fasādāt (literature of the riots) would take the form of corrective narratives, which he saw as a misuse of its potential.

[Partition] literature wants to make accusations of cruelty, stone-heartedness, and barbarity. But it isn’t given the power to call cruelty what it is. It wants to be saved from this responsibility. We don’t ask from literature the kinds of true falsehoods that we demand from books on history, sociology, or politics. We don’t want a writer to tell us the truth about an ideology or the external world so much as the truth about ourselves.262

259 Ibid., 242. 260 Khan, The Great Partition, 6. 261 Veena Das and Ashish Nandy, “Violence,” 189. 262 Sa’adat Hasan Manto, “Hashiya Arai,” by Muhammad Hasan Askari, Manto numā, (Lahore: Seng-e mil publications, 1991), 747. 138

Yeh adab zulm sangdilī aur bahamiyat ko mata’un karnā cāhtā hai. Magar zulm ko zulm kahane kī tāqat nahīn rakhtā. Is zimedārī se bacnā cāhtā hai. Adab se ham qisim ke sach jhūṭ kā mutālibah nahīn karte jo ham tarīkh ya mo’aśrāt yā siyāsat kī kitābon se karte hain. Adīb se ham kisī nazāre ya khārjī duniyā ke bāre men sach bolne kā itnā mutālibha nahīn karte jitnā apne bāre men sach bolne kā.

Partition narratives cannot merely be called upon to depict a better world or even moralize about the inhumanity of the current one, but instead must be a penetrating reflection upon one’s own role within the continuing violence. It must, he continues, find a way to convey what is at stake to a traumatized populace, one to which many of the atrocities “are so fresh, some that they have already seen with their own eyes, or heard from a close friend, that merely adding to the list of cruelty has no effect [itna tazah hain log apnī ānkhon se itnā kuch dekh cuke hain apne qarībī doston se itna kuch sun cuke hain kī mahez zulamon kī faharist ab un ke upar koi asar hi nahin karti].”263 Art can depict the gruesomeness and terror of Partition violence in great detail, but this can also overwhelm an already strained sensual capacity, creating caricature out of traumatic experience. Creating melodrama from communal violence would fail to awaken the subtler spectra of human sense blunted for survival. It would do nothing, in other words, to awaken the corporeal sensorium, and to deliver a tangible sense of what had happened in order to prevent it from happening again. Nor would it approach the essential, but terrifying prospect of confronting “the truth about ourselves,” which would necessarily involve questioning one’s own complicity in the violence, and the capability—or unwillingness—to stop it.

263 Ibid., 748. 139

Nor would mere pedantry. Askari says that the difference between Manto’s work and other narratives about the riots is that, “here people are presented as oppressor or oppressed and in the particular conditions of the riots. Manto does not pick fights with the aims of society, for if men could be set right by instruction, Mr. Gandhi would not have lost his life [yahān insān ko zālim ya mazlūm kī haisiyat se peś kiyā gayā aur fasādāt ko makhsus hālāt men samājī maqsad kā to Manto ne jagaṛā hī nahīn pālā, agar taluqīn se admī sadhār jāyā kartā to Mister Gandhi kī jan hī kyon jātī].”264 The pieces in Black

Margins emphasize contingency and particularity, and by the absolute refusal to follow a narrative, also foreclose the possibility of further justifications of violence. The organization of a temporal narrative, where something must always have been caused by something or be leading to something else, requires a reasonable beginning. Either the violence emerges as an inevitability, or it is necessary to assign blame to a particular (yet, because of its mass character, still abstract) actor. Instead, Manto undermines the attempt to connect the violence he depicts to reasons for its existence at every turn.

Take, for instance, the example of the piece “Sorry,” in which Manto writes an attenuated version of the tragic catharsis of the Partition testimonial. In his English- language autobiography, Indian filmmaker, reporter and novelist K.A. Abbas writes his account of an event:

It was a “Hindu” area, and a goonda spied a man in a kurta and pajama walking by the side of the road. He followed him, and taking him to be Muslim, stabbed him in the back. The knife pierced some vital spot and the man lay dead. The goonda wiped the blood on the knife on the clothes of the victim, and as he was doing it, a doubt seemed to cross his mind. So he tugged on the pajama cord, unfastened it, saw that the man was not

264 Ibid., 749.

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circumcised, and then clasping his knife, uttered two words that would haunt me for years. He said, “Mistake ho gaya.”265

Whether or not Manto was influenced by Abbas’s story or vice versa, the account bears a striking resemblance to the episode described in Manto’s “Sorry,” included here in its entirety:

Churī peṭ chak kartī huī nāf ke nīche tak chalī gayī. Azarband kāṭ gayā. Churī mārne vāle ke munh se achānak kalimah tasaf niklā. “Ch ch ch ch ch. Mishtek ho gaya.

The knife sliced through the navel. The drawstring was cut. Suddenly an expression of regret came out from the knife stabber’s mouth. “Ch ch ch ch ch. A mistake happened.”266

While Abbas’s account retains some of the sign-posting of melodrama—a naming of existential dread that is supposed to unite the emotional response of the reader with the subjective experience of the witness—Manto’s almost mechanical version is completely absent of the same prompting elements. The modest gore of blood on the knife in

Abbas’s version contrasts with Manto’s bloodless violence. The charged label of the perpetrator, goonda, indicates one who is capable of or even regularly engages in destruction and intimidation, but this judgement is nowhere to be seen in “Sorry.” In a reversal of the overwhelming sublimity of scene described by Jameson, the scene becomes the actor, as the act is assigned to the knife, and the anonymous, unmarked man is not even in control of the words that escape his mouth. They simply “came out,” unbidden, just as the mistake just “happened.” In Manto’s scene, it is not a “’Hindu’ area,” though there is the slightest indication that the killer may be Muslim through his

265 K.A. Abbas, I Am Not an Island: (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1977), 277. 266 Manto, Manto numā, 770. 141 choice of the word “kalmah,” the Muslim profession of faith. In this sense, it is significant that Manto has chosen his own community as perpetrators of such an act instead of casting it as the work of a goonda. But still, the indeterminate nature of the violence refuses to haunt us in the same way it haunts Abbas. It is chilling for its complete disengagement from anything resembling a social act. It is a moment isolated in its absurdity. And for this reason, no retaliation is necessary, much less desired. A retaliation against whom, and for what? The incident becomes idiosyncratic, existing only as violence, not as a motived attack, retaliation, or defense.

Because of the way the pieces in Black Margins dismantle plotlines rather than build them, Askari eschews the term afsana (short story), and settles on the word latifah to describe them, a word which roughly translates to “joke,” or “witticism.” It may seem incongruous to use such a term for such gruesome events, but the latifah already had a long history in Urdu literature which is not insignificant to the effect these notes create.

The latifah, which literary historian Christina Osterheld says reached the zenith of its popularity in the nineteenth century, was a form of early realism in the sense that there was a “presentation of human characters in real-worldly environments. There are no miracles, no supernatural actors or settings.”267 And for this reason, Osterheld says, early forms of modern realism in the latter half of the nineteenth century often took the form of short anecdotes. But Manto’s revival of the form in the mid-twentieth century, where the names of people and places are elided in order to emphasize the act itself, has quite the opposite effect from that of producing an ordinary and recognizable landscape. For

267 Christina Oesterheld, “Entertainment and Reform,” in India’s Literary History, eds. Stuart Blackburn and Vasudha Dalmia (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), 173. 142 instance, in the piece “Nigrani mein” (Under Supervision), the erasure of any sort of demarcation creates the unsettling sensation that one is surrounded by peril.

A, by declaring his friend B as his co-religionist, set out for an encampment with a military unit. On the way, B had prudently changed his religion. He asked of the military men, “So, there haven’t been any incidents in this area?” He received the reply, “Nothing special. In one neighborhood or another some dog died.” He asked in anguish, “Any other news?” He received the reply, “Nothing special. Three bitches were found dead in the canal.” A expressed B’s thoughts when he said to the military men, “The military doesn’t sort this out?” He got the answer, “Of course. All of this happens under its supervision.”268

The removal of identifiable communal groups and place names underlines the extraordinary nature of state institutions complicit in the violence. What is named instead is the anguish of the participants. Their communal affiliations, upon which all of the violence of Partition had been based, has been effaced in order to foreground a rationalized brutality. A and B are not Muslims, Sikhs or Hindus but are the individuals who are constantly implicated as both the cause and solution to suffering. The moment of empathy that they share is a reminder of the bonds of friendship that were suddenly erased by Partition riots, though with the erasure of their names and their absolute abject position in relation to the military men, the power of this inter-communal friendship seems like something viewed through the wrong end of a telescope: distant and voiceless.

A massively complex situation is thus reduced to a few simple sentences, and while names are elided, the raw emotions of fear and helplessness are vividly portrayed.

268 Manto, Manto numā, 768. 143

All of the pieces in Black Margins display the same characteristics of discrete events while simultaneously addressing a much larger whole. However, the comedic Stimmung of the latīfah, because of its refusal of an unalloyed tragic catharsis, also prevents the reader from merely engaging in a passive and easily dismissible sympathy. The distressing irony seems, instead, almost “flippant” as observed by critic Leslie Flemming.

But while Flemming attributes this tone to Manto's own attempts to distance himself from the violence through humor, it also has to be observed that his gruesome jokes invoke an acknowledgement of the seriousness of the crisis even if it inspires confusion and rage towards Manto’s own illustration of it.269 Far from an explanation of Partition which rationalizes and naturalizes the event, placing the blame for violence on the shoulders of other people, Manto’s Black Margins demonstrates the absurdity of violence at the same time that it presents its horror.

Manto’s Black Margins was the catalyst for much of his falling out with the

Progressive Writers. In his essay “Jeb-e Kafan” (Pocket of the Shroud), he says, “I was angry at [the Progressive’s] manifestos, long-winded resolutions, at their many explanations, whose ingredients came straight from Russia’s Kremlin to Bombay’s fields and gardens…Why did these people not talk about the land on which they lived and breathed?”270 Despite charges of political apathy, even at the point of his break with the

Progressives he was terrifically concerned with the situation in his own surroundings. It is his attempt to get closer to that situation—one of rapid development, wartime exploitation and destructive nationalism—that demonstrates the political power of his

269 Fleming, Another Lonely Voice, 74. 270 Manto, Manto nāmah, 223-224. 144 work. The realist and modernist devices within the pieces presented here are attempts to present a social actuality that readers may have been unfamiliar with or even resistant to, and that required breaking certain aesthetic conventions in order to bring the reader into contact with some of the most unsavory aspects of social activity.

Despite—or perhaps because of—Manto’s experience and engagement with

Romantic authors such as Pushkin and Hugo, Manto’s work displays an aspect of realism in which certain irreducible details break open established literary (and even cinematic) tropes and conventions, and yet at the same time undermine cognitive leaps toward an untethered Romanticism, that which Peter Brooks calls “the genesis of the modern...postulating meanings and symbolic systems which have no certain justification because they are backed by no theology and no universally accepted code.”271 Instead,

Manto’s work focuses on the ephemera of new urban spaces to illustrate some of the hidden possibilities of the aporia, the places where meaning can yet be created, because it has not yet been fully posited. Manto infuses these spaces with new sensual data that carries all of these inarticulate possibilities at once, often resulting in conclusions that may even run counter to the ones he explicitly lays out.

While Manto’s frustration with the Progressive Writers toward the end of his career is unmistakable, what cannot be discarded is that way that Manto’s work did then and now continues to open up avenues to realist literary expression that are capable of penetrating a superficial and often temporally contingent political aesthetics. But at the same time, the unsettling of aestheticized politics is only one aspect of making art

271 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 21. 145 political. Where Progressive critics may have been right in their criticism of Manto is that at some point there must also be the articulation of a ground upon which a society can conceive of itself, can lay claim to its hopes and aspirations, a foundation upon which a different future can be imagined in which the silenced, marginalized and oppressed can also find voice. 146

Concrete Communities: Chughtai’s Literary Interruptions of Myth Throughout Ismat Chughtai’s long career, her work was a locus of controversy.

Perhaps the most well-known example is the obscenity case that was brought before the

Punjabi court in 1942 for the short story “Lihaf,” ostensibly because of its depictions of a sexual relationship between two women. After its publication in the journal Adab-e Latif, the journal’s editors received a deluge of letters from both conservative and progressive critics alike who complained about the story’s subject matter, letters the editor did not deem it appropriate to send to Chughtai until she became a married woman later that year.272 In contrast to the vulgarity that may have been contained in those letters, the story was cleared by the court of any illegality because the plaintiffs were unable to point to any obviously pornographic vocabulary. As Priyamvada Gopal, a literary critic and post-colonial theorist put it, “The lawyer’s argument worked because ‘Lihaf,’ in fact, makes no explicit reference to sexual activity or, indeed, to lesbian relationships. Yet the story contains some of the most suggestive and sensual representations of homoeroticism in modern Indian fiction.”273

In the case of this now well-known sensational episode, Chughtai’s writing managed to spark the fury of her readers even as she made the very physical act of sex intangible. But even now, Chughtai’s stories are infused with a sensuality that exceeds the unexamined, yet powerfully restrictive mythologies of sex as the performance of social hierarchies. Chughtai’s stories are at once concrete and in motion. They are real, but also suggestive. They are deeply felt, but as a means of transformation. In Chughtai’s

272 Gopal, Literary Radicalism in India, 76. 273 Ibid. 147 narratives, she builds embodied realities upon which entirely new frameworks of social relations can stand. These concrete literary communities, in their indelible solidity, topple some of the most intractable hierarchies of gender, caste and class by writing a space for the marginalized and oppressed. They create a ground upon which new conceptions of social life can be built. By doing this, Chughtai’s stories demonstrate what

Jean-Luc Nancy identified as literature’s essence, “composed only in the act that interrupts, with a single stroke—by an incision and/or an inscription—the shaping of the scene of myth.”274

Writing, in this process of laceration/interruption, creates new possibilities for the expression of the singular being within and apart from collective lived experience, and

Chughtai’s use of concrete details re-orders sensual experience so that what was invisible in literary discourse becomes immanently tangible, creating a new place of understanding for the collective imagination. But the collective is, crucially, not based on undifferentiated unity. Nancy says, “In writing’s communication…the singular being…becomes nothing that it is not already: it becomes its own truth, it becomes simply the truth.”275 Chughtai’s stories allow the singular to speak in ways that exceed the possibilities of communal identification. In “Jadein,” (“Roots”), the singular takes the form of the Muslim matriarch, who carries in her somatic memory centuries of corporeal inter-communal relationships that stand in the face of divisive, post-Partition rhetoric. In

“Do Hāth” (“Two Hands”), this truth is most visible in the figure of a mahatarāni, a

274 Jean-Luc Nancy, “Literary Communism,” in The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 72. 275 Ibid., 78. 148 sweeper woman, who demonstrates to her supposed superiors that their respectability only exists because of the work of her two hands. And finally in “Genda,” Chughtai writes the evident, singular truth of the illegitimate child of a young widow, whose own presence is a testament to all of the potentials and failures of domesticity and love, and through a representation of quotidian childhood desire, threatens to topple long standing and intimately held mythologies of women’s sexuality and widowhood. In these exemplary stories, Chughtai’s work reveals the way that people, places and things of our everyday experience can penetrate not only our world views but also our most intimate feelings and change them, even when it comes to the most mundane, normalized violence of middle-class respectability and domestic work.

Chughtai’s pervasive sensuality was what critic Aziz Ahmad found most objectionable in Chughtai’s novel Teṛhi lakīr (The Crooked Line) when he said, “Ismat has just one way of experiencing the body and that is through fondling.” Her longtime friend and fellow progressive Sa’adat Hasan Manto responded to this by saying, “It’s wrong to call it fondling…Ismat is extremely sensitive. A gentle caress is enough for her.”276 Chughtai’s writing is hardly coy, in “Two Hands,” for example, Chughtai refers to the atmosphere of relief after a tense situation as the “pus that came out of a boil”. 277

But as Manto’s comment suggests, the physicality of her stories extends beyond scintillation into a more ambiguous narrative excess: the worlds of mentions, whispers, allusions that inevitably arise from more concrete sights, smells and sounds. Chughtai’s

276 Sa’adat Hasan Manto, “Ismat Chughtai,” trans. M. Asaduddin. The Annual of Urdu Studies 16 (2001): 212-213. 277 Ismat Chughtai, Liḥāf aur dīgar afsāne [The quilt and other stories] (Delhi: Saqi Book Depot, 2002), 32. 149 work examines sense from all angles, especially those that were often overlooked or underdeveloped in existing literature, in order to expose what exists under our noses as well as what may yet have the chance of coming into being. It is as much an

“unworking,” of central cultural figures, to use Nancy’s term, as it is a matter of figuration.278

These literary invocations of the physical are not only employed by Chughtai to examine the unremarked upon workings of the physical world, but also to use the physical to get at that which is conceptually intangible; it is a sensual world constructed to elicit and examine the deep interiority of desire and disgust that are, despite their inexplicable nature, at one with social existence. As the “Lihaf” episode demonstrates,

Chughtai is not a writer simply of sounds and smells, but a writer of unarticulated somatic responses from the ether of memory and desire. Chughtai’s stories construct a deeply affecting and intimate world that both invokes and interrogates those visceral reactions, which in their descriptive use, often carry a heavy moral significance. But

Chughtai’s work brings these literary interiors into play in surprising ways, often subverting, or at the very least shifting, their qualitative direction.

The sensual universe created in Chughtai’s stories stretches from the unnoticeable to the unmentionable and back again, and the sexual suggestiveness of “Lihaf” is only a small sample. As Gopal pointed out, it is but one instance in a career filled with moments of such palpable significance: “’Lihaf’ has become one of Chughtai’s landmark works, heralding the emergence of her distinctive literary style with its attention to the sensual

278 Nancy, “Literary Communism,” 79.

150 minutiae of everyday life,” though her other works escaped the notice of the courts. 279

The obscenity trial was simply one among many such meditations on the nature and expression of the senses, but it does serve as an example of the way that Chughtai uses sensuality (with all of the connotations that word implies) in order to transform the way that intimacy has been encoded into social life. “Lihaf” does not depict sex in so many words, but the “rocking” (ḍolnā), shaking (hilnā), “pressing” (dabānā), “lapping” (capaṛ capaṛ), and “swaying” (jhūmnā) that are mentioned allude to a female desire more nuanced and complex than that which could be achieved by the most explicit depictions.

The language in “Lihaf” also demonstrates the way that Chughtai’s work uses certain continuities of Urdu literature only to unwork their assumptions. While

Chughtai’s expressions in ‘Lihaf” borrow from a rich language of homoerotic play as described in pre-modern Rekhti poetry for fun and profit, it begins to chart new territory by bringing that language into the hands of a child.280 The narrator is an observer who is uncertain of her own erotic investments and brings few judgments because of the limits of her understanding, and in this way begins to integrate desire into the sheltered spaces of home life. Thus, that which had been privileged in art but repressed in life begins to exceed the borders of the kothā (brothel), and begin infiltrating the guarded interiors of the ordinary kamrā (room). Such an integration begins to make female desire, which remains something of a mystery in Manto’s stories, visible and ordinary. It is not merely

279 Gopal, Literary Radicalism, 77. 280 For detailed descriptions of Rekhti and its social contexts, see the work of critic and queer activist Ruth Vanita, in particular her book Gender, Sex and the City: Urdu Rekhti Poetry in India 1780-1870 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 151 a subject of titillation for the male reader, but is presented as a fact of life which must be reckoned with.

Like Manto, Chughtai’s stories take a rather satirical approach to romance, but her narratives expose its less glamorous, more ordinary aspect. Where romance in “Smell” is merely the veil through which the reader eventually conceptualizes the truth of female suffering, romance in Chughtai’s work is often the mutually agreed upon fiction that sets into motion the very important work of human cooperation, reproduction and survival. In her essay “Kahani,” (“Story”) Chughtai remarks upon the ridiculous hurdles to fulfillment that is often the conceit of the romance genre, and the ways in which female desire is actively denied or even punished:

If she is unmarried, some unattractive relative of hers is standing guard over her. If she’s married, her good-for-nothing and useless (yes sir, useless) husband threatens to walk in and surprise our hero. And if she’s a prostitute then she sells her body she doesn’t distribute it free of charge. She bargains, she doesn't satiate everyone's thirst as if she were a river or a stream. If by any chance she agrees to distribute the merchandise freely, the lady of the house creates a terrible commotion. If the beloved is a village damsel, she's left with a child in her womb which society regards as an unwanted guest or a foreigner without a valid permit.281

In the stories presented here, all of the characters violate this code in some way: Amma in

“Roots” is a central heroine who is no object of fantasy, Gori in “Two Hands” violates the taboos for married women by being both desirable and available, and her illegitimate child is embraced and celebrated. The eponymous Genda, a child widow, walks a line between the married and unmarried woman, and gives birth to a child that is so

281 Chughtai, My Friend, My Enemy, 66. 152 surrounded by the narrator’s delight that he is protected from the scorn that circulates around him.

There is always an uncanny quality to Chughtai’s familial and familiar spaces, not simply because of their capacity to change the ordinary (though Chughtai does not refrain from pulling at the edges of the unremembered past), but more because the intimate character of her work chronicles that which happens every day but is rarely spoken aloud.

When it is, it is usually not within the realm of official public discourse. She accomplishes this partly through her unique use of language, a mix of Persianized Urdu, regional Hindi and the idiomatically rich begamātī zubān, a language by and for women first popularized in print by the Muslim educational reform novels of the previous century.282 What distinguishes Chughtai’s work from earlier examples, however, is that the mixed language of her stories includes “the flowery and polite phrases of Persianized

Urdu” that were considered to be the realm of public discourse, and in so doing brings formal registers down to earth while underlining the weightiness of topics discussed in the zubān. 283 These topics, those that are reserved for tête-à-têtes with close relations behind closed doors, inside the havelī (family compound), or the narrow streets of the mohalla (neighborhood) determine lives and livelihoods, belonging or exclusion, and often part of the formative experiences of Chughtai’s young narrators, and the suggestion

282 Gail Minault, Gender, Language and Learning (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2009), 119. These novels, such as Pas-i Pardah by Agha Haider Hasan Dehlavi and Majalis un-Nissa by Khwaja Altaf Husain, were intended as pedagogical tools for instructing women on how better to serve their households, but historian Gail Minault has pointed out the ways in which begamati zuban, which thrived in the zenanas of 19th century Delhi, was a free and unchecked discourse for women who do not need to be concerned that men will be listening and therefore chasten their behavior. 283 Ibid.

153 in these mix of registers is that they, at least, understand that the walls dividing these realms are porous.284 Chughtai’s work has a deeply private character, but those private interiors—both literal and figurative—often mirror, subvert, or and at times dictate the character of public affairs.

As is evident from the sensational episode of the “Lihaf” trial, these private interiors are somewhat startling to see laid bare upon the page, but despite the oftentimes unsettling intimacy of her stories, Ismat Chughtai has also been singled out by critics as adhering too strictly to political ideologies of form—in particular, the ideology of Soviet

Socialist Realism, considered by many (including Manto, especially in his later life) to have had undue influence on the cultural products of the Progressive Writers during the

Cold War. Even as recently as 2005, Muhammad Umar Memon remarked in his preface to The HarperCollins Book of Urdu Short Stories that Chughtai and other progressive writers “churned out story after story according to a formula forged in the crucible of

Marxist ideology.”285

A connection with Marxist ideology is not a charge that Chughtai herself would have readily disavowed. In fact, when the critic Ibadat Barelvi listed the principles of the

Progressive Writers’ Association, stating that, “It is not necessary to be a communist to join the Anjuman-e taraqī pasand mussane-fīn,” Chughtai retorted, “Excuse me sir, you

284 To name a few of the more obvious examples: in “Lihaf,” Chughtai writes, “In winter when I shake out the quilt and its shadow lumbers on a nearby wall like an elephant, the world of my past begins to run through my brain” (Liḥāf aur dīgar afsāne, 17); in “Profession,” she says, “This childhood hatred [of prostitutes] is dancing in my blood even today” (Ibid. 77); and in “Childhood,” “When I was tidying up in the library, I chanced upon some old issues of Asmat. I glanced at one of the titles, and my mind raced back in time.” See Lifting the Veil: Selected Writings, trans. M. Asaduddin (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2009), 48. 285 Memon, The HarperCollins Book of Urdu Short Stories, 11.

154 have us recite the kalimah, and then you tell us not to be Muslim.”286 The clear and committed political content of her work was something that Chughtai never shied away from, and it would be dishonest to claim that the political liberation that Chughtai’s stories envision is somehow not Marxist. However, it is also necessary to acknowledge the ways that Chughtai’s stories added to and shaped understandings of Indian social life, and was not merely a reproduction of Marxist structural ontologies.

This is perhaps especially true at the level of form. For Chughtai, experimentation with form is part of the social role of the craft, a role which drove innovation rather than proscribed it, which is the implication of Menon’s commentary. For instance, in the essay

“Fasādāt aur Adab” (Partition and Literature), Chughtai defends the partition stories of writer Krishan Chandar from criticism that he sacrificed an elegance of form for the awkward angles of an ambitious political message. Framed by the idea that literature after

Partition must change in response to it, Chughtai said, “even if Krishan Chandar throttled literature, trampled on the refined elements of art, and created phony writing, he certainly did not remain unaware of his duty. He engaged in propaganda and became a rectifier of wrong.”287 Chughtai’s exaltation of duty over art is polemical, certainly. What is more important within this passage than a defense of propaganda is the idea that to deny a political purpose to literature would be to deny it a powerful animating force. To claim anything less would be to rob literature of its possibilities, to leave it stagnating in the

286 Ismat Chughtai, Chūī mūī (Mumbai: Kutub Publishers Limited, 1952), 108. The kalimah is the term used in South Asian Islam for the Muslim profession of faith: lā ilāha illā -llāh, muḥammadur rasūlu – llāh (There is no god but Allah, Muhammad is the messenger of Allah). 287 Ismat Chughtai, My Friend My Enemy, 9. 155 straightjackets of a form that had outlived its reason for creation, as well as to abandon the audience to which literature is always implicitly indebted.

It would appear, then, that Ismat Chughtai is one of those Third World writers who straddled the divide that Frederic Jameson identified between the individual psycho- sexual consciousness of the modernist novel and an overtly political public one in realism, or as Jameson describes the split, “Freud vs. Marx.”288 Though Jameson’s very general statements regarding “Third-World” literature as the global representative of collective ideology are by now much debated, a look at the work of critic Namwar Singh, one of Chughtai’s contemporaries, reveals a quite grounded explanation for this complex mixture of private and public vision. Singh argues that the Indian progressive writers owed as much to Indian neo-romanticism (chāyavād) for a newly expanded vernacular of self-expression as the borrowed light of Marxist understandings of social relations.289

Using an earthy language that sounds very much like Ismat Chughtai, Singh points out that within the context of twentieth-century literature movements in India, Marxism was enabled by both local political movements as well as this new emancipated sensorium of brought about by the neo-romantic poetry of the early twentieth century:

If the mother of progressive literature was only Marxism, then Progressivism in Hindi should have been born in the 19th century itself…as communication between Europe and Indian peoples was good. But the reality is that the birth of Progressivism in Hindi was after 1930. This clearly means that Progressivism in Hindi was born in its own time—

288 Fredric Jameson, “Third-world Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1986): 69. 289 I’m using the term “borrowed light” here as it has been employed by Timothy Brennan as “a motif in the anticolonial imagination…taken up by anticolonial thinkers outside Europe and returned to Europe once more, via that influential detour.” It is a term intended, then, to “perturb the expectation that comes from this image: the colonialist cliché of the light of Europe brought to the world’s benighted peoples.” See Borrowed Light: Vico, Hegel, and the Colonies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 3.

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the time when the ground of the Hindi community and literature had been well prepared.290

Singh uses this language of birth, cultivation and growth not to suggest that progressive literature had certain immutable filial origins in Indian neo-romanticism, nor to suggest that progressivism is the product of an impersonal, natural telos of political activity, but rather to point out the ways in which the Marxism was adapted in progressive literature and transformed by the materiality of Indian literary and political life.

The works of Ismat Chughtai are therefore an understandable—though not inevitable—outgrowth of forms which were both the yearnings of collective expression and previously inarticulate shades of internal desire. As Singh further explains of the lexicon of the preceding movements, “only romantic sentiments were predominant in neo-romanticism, and the patriotic poems among them could not satisfy people’s political sentiments. In this way, because of the country’s particular political contexts the pervasive socio-cultural awakening of the previous twenty-five or thirty years now became focused exclusively on politics.”291 It is neither a contradiction that Chughtai’s work is at once so internal and external, nor is it the inevitable result of the pressures of global forces upon the colonized world, which might be one problematic reading of

Jameson’s critique. Instead, the new language of an emotional interiority from neo- romanticism is in part what contributed to the legibility and appeal of the Marxist anticolonial sentiment that would become a feature of progressive literature.292

290 Namwar Singh, Ādhunika sāhitya kī pravr̥ ttiyām̐ , 83. 291 Ibid., 87. 292 This is not to suggest that larger global forces aren’t at play. My argument is less with Jameson’s article, which was written at a time when narratives of interiority and political commitment were indeed seen as

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Even with progressivism’s indebtedness to neo-romanticism, however, what is distinct in Chughtai’s work are the ways in which sense and sensuality create concrete disruptions in the social continuities of her moment. These interruptions make it possible for her community of readers to encounter—or rather, feel—themselves anew. While

Jean-Luc Nancy’s theory of “Literary Communism” is, by its very nature, not applicable to any single work, or even body of work, as exemplary (for it is all texts in their various states of incompletion which makes them open to community), it does provide a way to understand the degree to which literature makes entrenched attitudes vulnerable. By its interruption—writing’s laceration and division from lived communal practice—literature alone can make possible a sense of the “singular being,” which, “by definition, the fact of being exposed at this limit leads to the risk—or the chance—of changing identity in it.”293 Chughtai’s literary evocation of the material singularities of her characters—the womb of the matriarch, the bent waist of the mahatarani, the awkward desires of a young girl—open interiority to new political possibility, where community itself can be thought and re-thought.

Chughtai’s deeply private stories draw upon the energies of an emancipated expression that then finds new potentialities of form in movements of political emancipation. Material and political realities grounded the romantic sensibilities of Hindi

mutually exclusive in a popular discourse still largely driven by the Cold War. Rather, it is to provide some additional nuance to a rather mechanistic picture of anti-imperial writers in postcolonial states. Given all that the unique perspective of the colonized subject can provide, Ahmed Aijaz, among others, remind us that it is important to remember that each came from a particular context with its own attributes, and that there were also within these contexts many possible alternatives which were in opposition to anti- imperialist movements. See Aijaz Ahmad, “Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory,’” Social Text 17 (1987): 3–25. 293 Nancy, “Literary Communism,” 78. 158 and Urdu progressive literature, and literature in turn made possible the embodiment of new subjectivities. The stories presented here play with the conditions of caste, class and gender of their moment to necessitate their eventual dissolution. But at the same time,

Chughtai’s stories do not merely rearrange socially constructed categories, a major component of European romanticism’s critique of Enlightenment rationalism. The palpable physicality of Chughtai’s stories creates a grounded reality of anti-capitalist resistance while interrupting a hypostatization of the concrete which haunts nineteenth- century European romantic thought. 294 Chughtai’s exploration of women, their knowledge and desire, is not dissimilar to the realism of Premchand, which gives structure to a vernacular mode of expression that had previously been excluded from literary texts: the language of bol-chāl, the peasant woman, and local knowledge systems of faith and healing. But Chughtai’s work penetrates those structures even further, suggesting that social transformation must begin in even the most intimate places. Her reincorporation of the categorically invisible and marginalized into an underlying reality—the domestic particulars of birth, sex, and childhood games—is a reminder of the ways in which even the smallest and most insignificant aspects of daily life are essential parts of larger social undertaking. As Qurratulain Hyder said, Chughtai’s work contains:

The quips of college girls and the bickering of relations and in-laws, mothers-in-law, brides, brothers’ wives, and all the contradictions, beauty, ugliness (less beauty, more ugliness) from which a middle-class home is built are in those stories…Whether or not they contain the expanse of the sea, the means to ford the ocean are certainly there.295

294 See Moishe Postone, Anti-Semitism and National Socialism. Chronos Publications, 2000. 295 Chughtai, Liḥāf aur dīgar afsāne, 15. 159

Chughtai claims Communism for herself, which cannot be cast off as the misguided commitments of her generation, but her female embodied singularities demonstrate an incorporation of the subjective interiors of Indian neo-romantic literature into an ideology that acknowledges those who continue to live and work almost in spite of established social systems that deny their existence. In these stories, Chughtai’s realism makes visible not just the vague outlines of international Marxism, but also details the darkest corners of the zenānā to which some Marxist ideologies may have been blind. With this,

Chughtai’s work brings to the forefront one of Marx’s most fundamental assumptions:

“that the present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and is constantly changing.”296

Towards a New Partition Genealogy: The Intercommunal Mohalla as Shajara-e Nasab in “Roots” In Bearing Witness, Sukeshi Kamra’s cultural history of the collective trauma of the partition, there is a chapter devoted to fictional and non-fictional contemporary accounts of the event. It begins with an epigraph from Ismat Chughtai’s short story,

“Roots.”297 I have provided the Urdu from one of the earlier publications of Chughtai’s story in the 1952 collection Chuī Muī:

As regards those who had been living in these regions for generations, they had neither the sense nor the ability to understand what the real problem between Pakistan and India was.298

296 Karl Marx, “Preface to the First German Edition,” in Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I, Marxist Internet Archive, 1999, accessed June 21, 2017, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867- c1/p1.htm. 297 Sukeshi Kamra, Bearing Witness (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2002), 165. The epigraph comes from Alok Bhalla’s translation in Stories About the Partition of India (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 1999). For additional discussion of many of the source materials for this chapter, please also see Kamra’s 2006 article “A ‘Messy’ History and its Many ‘Messy’ Texts” Literature Compass 3, no. 5 (2006): 1160- 1185. 298 Qtd. In Kamra, Bearing Witness, 111.

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Rahe riyāsat ke qadīm bāshande to nā hī in meṃ itnī samajh aur nā hī inkī itnī haisiyat kī Pākistān aur Hindustān kā raqīq masalah inhen koī baiṭh kar samjhātā.299

In the Urdu version, Chughtai not only emphasizes that people didn’t understand, but also that people who had lived there for generations didn’t have the status (haisiyat) to have the intricacies of the problem explained (samjhātā) to them. The word samajh, then, which Bhalla has rendered as “sense,” is not a judgement of a people’s intelligence or even a commentary on a lack of “common sense,” which Kamra demonstrates in her chapter has become merely the normalized “commonsense” of Communalism in narratives of Partition. Rather, it portrays a process that has left these residents entirely excluded, both in terms of their present participation in local governance, as well as their own past experiences as a source of knowledge.

The disconnect between the events of Partition and the continuities of inter- communal life emerges as a common theme in Kamra’s examination of post-Partition narratives. Kamra finds in testimony after testimony a representation of communal divisions as an unpredictable disturbance of long-standing inter-communal harmony within the Mohalla. These remarks even went so far, she says, as to preserve an idea of community that minimized the existence of other kinds of disunity. Kamra says,

“acknowledgement of a ridged social and economic register does not make testifiers abandon the concept of community they hold so dear...Their assurance and certainty at

299 Ismat Chughtai, Chūī mūī, 156.

161 the very least require us to rethink the given of communalism,” for it had significantly made itself absent in their remembrances.300

But as the inequities already apparent in Urdu version of Chughtai’s epigraph make clear, the question remains as to whether there is a way to remember the mohalla that does not memorialize it as a lost Eden, and to find a kind of recollection that does not rely exclusively on erasure. This is something “Roots” does. It is an example of how things might have gone if the ties of community had trumped those of communal violence, but in this process, it also examines the way that Partition always favored established elites. Chughtai’s story not only questions the parameters of samajh as the

“commonsense” of communalism, but also creates a much more expansive sensual field that integrates private realms of community interactions into public political discourse.

“Roots” creates the grounds of commitment denied by the logic of communalism, restoring a greater sensibility not only of what was disturbed by the violence of Parition, but also the erasures that enabled it. “Roots” portrays something that emerges from

Kamra’s testimonies as an unshakable truth: that day to day life in the mohalla was made up of (sometimes contentiously) negotiated, but functional and constantly adapting, networks of interdependence between Muslim and Hindu families.

Chughtai’s “Roots” features a Partition that is less immediately recognizable as the tragic moment in history we have all come to expect from such narratives. The story chronicles the violence of the streets as it was observed inside drawing rooms and behind walls; they are in ways second-hand reflections on the chaos and incomprehensibility of

300 Kamra, Bearing Witness, 114. 162 the atrocities. Manto returned again and again in his writing to the scenes of Partition’s most public violence—refugee camps, trains, even the borderline between India and

Pakistan itself—while “Roots” remains confined to the haveli and the narrow streets of neighborhoods. But Chughtai’s narrative distance from the violence does not render the violence of Partition mute, or even, in its mediation through the lens of private family homes, less embodied. On the contrary, these byways of partition are places where the ties that bind communities are concretely visible, and thus the stakes are high, if not higher, than more generalized accounts of destruction. Here, violence loses its anonymity, that chilling aspect which seems to be such a necessary element of the

“thingification” of people who were once known and cared for, an aspect illustrated to great effect in Manto’s Black Margins.301 Real people become merely the physical stand- ins for abstract communal identities.

But even though the power of those more shocking scenes of border violence, street massacres and refugee camps is undeniable, Chughtai’s illustrations of the effects upon the more familiar spaces of the mohalla have their own heart-rending qualities.

Partition did not take place in a battlefield removed from the goings on of the everyday, nor were the boundaries that formed the two new nations of India and Pakistan already liminal borderlands without domestic associations and beyond social connections. This is partly what contributed to Partition’s unprecedented and unpredictable horror: even within the private spaces that Chughtai’s writing probed, Partition violence was there. It

301 Which demonstrates another way that the violence of Partition was about more than mere factional disagreements. It was part and parcel of the same “thingification” of non-elites that was such an important part of the rationale of colonialism. See Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 42. 163 appeared as normal life distorted and transformed, where the most sheltered spaces are suddenly the locations of threat and terror. The mohalla was the site where one could also see and feel the extent of the destruction that Partition had wrought most clearly— ordinary life forever changed—even if the violence itself happened beyond its immediate geographical or temporal boundaries.

As Kamra has observed, a general desire to keep up the myth of such sheltered spaces resulted in Partition violence being actively written out of the mohalla in non- fictional, eye-witness accounts. Kamra says, “Almost without exception, these voices register a continuing bewilderment over the discrepancy between what they have been told—their communalism was responsible for the carnage—and the remembered reality, with which it does not equate.”302 There was nearly always a gap between the reality of the violence versus the remembered reality of neighborly relationships. What is of particular importance is that when it came to determining which of those realities it was important to accept and relate, reports resolved the apparent contradiction by indicating that those who committed violence had to be from elsewhere, and whatever violence was done was not done by one’s own. Kamra notes, “The same descriptions, the same explanations are to be encountered everywhere. When collected, they reveal a consistent and clear differentiation between the mohalla and its participation in minor atrocities, and

‘external forces’ that ‘violated’ and ‘polluted,’ thus forever tainting the concept of the mohalla.”303

302 Kamra, Bearing Witness, 118 303 Ibid., 122 164

Even at the cost of other truths, the inter-communal connections that had existed prior to the massive geographic, social, and political upheaval of the partition were invoked and re-affirmed, but the difficulty lay in how exactly to bridge this important narrative while acknowledging the realities of the division: how could the violence become cognizable, when the first instinct of traumatized populations was to erase conflict for their own survival? Kamra notes that this is an area where fiction had a special role to play. Fictionalized narratives—again, the writing of lines that extracts the event from lived experience—could discuss aspects of involvement that would otherwise have been absent from publicly remembered events. Kamra says, “While they testify to many of the same details and effects—being polluted by history, for instance—they testify to many more and more freely especially to difficult facets of the partition experience.”304 “Roots” addresses the problem of how to approach the still delicate subject of an inter-communal network that was terribly wounded by Partition but not irreversibly harmed, demonstrating the necessity of a shared convalescence.

In Chughtai’s story, which takes place entirely within the narrow, often crossed spaces between two houses, two families, and two communities, it is not the mohalla that seems like a distant and abstract ideal, but rather the high-flying nationalist rhetoric that surrounded Independence and the creation of Pakistan. The focus of the story remains quite specific to the mixed communities that had lived, and continue to live, in ordinary, uninteresting cacophony with one another. It is through the small joys and tragedies of everyday life that they can and will remain intertwined.

304 Ibid., 116 165

The story revolves around the lives of two neighboring families, one Hindu, one

Muslim, with significant ties to their communities and one another. The Muslim head-of- household, simply referred to as Father (Abba), is a civil servant, while Roopchand, from the Hindu family, is a doctor. Through both his friendship with Abba and his profession,

Roopchand becomes involved in the most intimate affairs of the Muslim family, especially following Abba’s death.305 But the crux of the story is the Muslim matriarch, the character referred to as Mother (Amma). The narrator remains closest to Amma in her detailing of internal as well as external dialogue. When she refuses to leave for

Pakistan with the rest of the family, she also remains as the unmoving symbolic anchor of the mohalla. Roopchand, unable to reason away seeing the wife of his longtime friend abandoned and alone, is eventually driven to a crisis of conscience, and tracks down the rest of her family so that he can return them to their house, the mohalla, and to her.

“Roots” is first staged with local specificity by focusing on the particularities of the ethnic, religious, and political space of Southwestern Rajasthan.306 Chughtai describes a space where Muslim and Hindu identities exist alongside one another without external signs of distinction apparent in other parts of India, and this becomes a major problem for the project of differentiation that the partition required.307 But Chughtai does not, as do some testimonials, shy away from the way the partition exacerbated existing inequalities.

305 Chughtai, Chhuī muī, 162. 306 This is an area that remains complicated for the communal narratives of India and Pakistan, as Krishna Kumari Kholi, a Hindu Dalit woman has recently been elected to the Senate on the Pakistan side in Sindh. On the India side, the BJP, a Hindu-Nationalist party, suffered a decisive defeat following the murder of a Muslim cattle-trader and migrant laborer. Amulya Ganguli, “Outcome in Rajasthan: Is the Modi Magic Fading?” India West, February 12 2018, http://www.indiawest.com/blogs/outcome-in-rajasthan-is-the- modi-magic-fading/article_aa999422-1047-11e8-92c0-8b6a43b55de4.html. 307 Chughtai, Chūī mūī, 157. 166

Chughtai instead illustrates the conscious and unequal othering that lay behind much of the administration of Partition, where borders drawn by those in power determined the fates of those who did not have the status or means to determine their own. Again, those who did not have the haisiyat to speak or be spoken to:

So when it was openly decided to throw out the minorities…The landowners explained clearly that, “Sir, the tenants are so intermingled that in order to identify the Muslims to throw them out an administrative staff will be necessary, which is an excessive expense. If you need to buy some piece of land for refugees, that can be cleared. Only animals remain when you say that you shall clear the forest.

Lehezā jab khulim khulla ilāqon se aqliyat ko nikālne kī rāy huī…ṭhākuron ne sāf keh diyā ki Sāhib raya aisī ghulī milī rahetī hai kī Musalmānon ko bīn kar nikālne ke liye baqaida istāf ki zarurat hai jo ki bekār zaid kharch hai vaise āp agar koī tukaṛe zamin ke śaranarthy ke liye kharidnā cahen to voh khāli karāe jā sakte hain. Jānvar to rahete hī hain jab kehiye jangal khāli karā diyā jāe. 308

The dehumanization of those without material power as well as those who cannot be leveraged by the existing elite for political power—which refers to Muslims but is significantly left open to any disenfranchised population, whether it be through caste or class—begins by establishing a distinction between refugees (śaranarthy) and animals

(jānvar). The disruption of “having land cleared” (khāli karana) in the name of making space for those who have been designated refugees demonstrates the way the passive, naturalized language of crisis dissolved not only those more ordinary bonds of community, but also the ability of segments of the population to be recognized as living beings worthy of consideration.

308 Ibid., 156-157. 167

This passive language as expressed by local elites and the dismissive use of the term jānvar is juxtaposed with the concrete activity of arbitrating the use of land, which identifies the roots of violence not as the actions of insensible communal hatred, but the conscious decisions of administration, which makes a distinction between communities necessary and necessarily in conflict. In “Roots,” the divisions of the partition begin as an invisibility, because communities have become so interdependent that there is no differentiated minority that can be identified and removed. Through the course of the story, this and other violent acts of Partition reveal new fault lines, but Chughtai’s concrete metaphor of roots established through social and physical intermixing makes a division a near impossibility. By a constant juxtaposition of social and familial ties with the mundane realities of community interdependence—sharing food, birthing children, and tending to illness, as well as the visceral experiences of attachment and its attending resentments—Chughtai’s roots grow around the social and geographical space between two communities until a separation from these entanglements becomes unthinkable.

The story of the families begins at a moment of high tension when members of the Muslim family are packing their belongings to leave for Pakistan, believing themselves to be in grave danger. Roopchand’s family has ceased any interactions with them, holding them vicariously accountable for communal atrocities that had befallen other members of the Hindu family. This is the moment when the contours of partition in

India are most recognizable: a Muslim family under threat, doors locked against imminent danger, and a cold and conspicuous silence from neighbors belonging to the

Hindu majority. 168

But this schematic understanding does not last for long. The play of children is barely suppressed, and the catalyst of the Muslim family’s decision to leave is precipitated not by an act of violation, but by a child’s prank. Chabba Miyan, a child of the Muslim household, writes “Pākistān zindebād” (long live Pakistan) on the school walls, while Roopchand’s grandchildren write “akhand Hindustān” (undivided India) over it.309 These are slogans that had come to be associated with opposite sides of roving communal mobs with murderous intentions.310 The use of these charged phrases for a situation where the stakes of the fight are significantly lower emphasizes the preventability of Partition politics as well as their relative insignificance compared to the daily work of raising families. They are only playing at nationalism, after all. At the same time, using the incident to spur the family to action demonstrates the very real fear that grew out of this atmosphere, as even a child’s prank can be used to further inflame inter- communal conflict. “If it had been any other day,” the narrator explains, “and Chabba had come home after fighting with Roopchandji’s children, Dulhan Bhabi would have dressed his wounds with slaps until he cried for mercy, and then sent him over to

Roopchandji to administer castor oil and quinine mixture [Koi aur din hotā aur

Roopchanjī ke baccon se cabbā laṛ kar ātā, to Dulhan Bhābī us kī voh jutiyon se marham

309 Ibid., 157. 310 A contemporary illustration of the weight these words still carry can be found in Deepa Mehta’s film Earth (1998), an adaptation of Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel Cracking India, where the words of Nehru’s famous midnight Independence speech are accompanied by the sound of crowds shouting “Pakistan zindebad, Hindustan murdabad!” (Long live Pakistan! Death to India!).

169 pattī karten kī tobah bhalī aur uthā kar unhen Roopchandjī ke pās bhej diyā jātā kī pilāye use arandi ka tel aur kwāinan ka mikscar].”311

Chughtai continues this theme of nationalism as child’s play in a flashback to the political debates regarding Partition between the two families as a “football or cricket match”.312 Such a diminution of the stakes of the argument reverses the hierarchical ordering of opinion generally assumed under Partition—general community over particular neighbor—while also charting its development.

Over here Abba was Congress and on the other side Doctor Sahib and Bade Bhai were League, so Gyan Chand would be for the Mahasabha and Manjhale Bhai Communist, and Gulab Chand Socialist…The Communists and Socialists would take insults but then end up slipping over to Congress. Those remaining with the League and Mahasabha would always cooperate. Though they were each other’s enemy, still they would both attack Congress. But for several years at our house the strength of the Muslim League had grown and over there that of the Mahasabha. Congress had completely fallen. Under the leadership of Bade Bhai the entire new generation except for one or two undecideds had left Congress and firmly stood with the National Guard, and over there under Gyan Chand’s leadership they stood firmly under the small hearted Sevak Sangh, but there was no infirmity of love or friendship.313

Idhar Ābba Kongresī the to udhar Doctor Sāhib aur Baṛe Bhāī Līg the to Gyan Cand Mahāsabhāī idhar Manjhale Bhaī Kamunist the to udhar Gulāb Cand sosalist…Kamunist sosalist bhī gāliyan khāte, magar Kongres hī men ghus paṛte. Reh jāte Mahāsabhāī aur Līg yeh donon hamesa sāth dete. Go voh ek dusre ke dushman hote. Phir bhī dono mil kar Kongres par hamlā karte. Lekin idhar kuchh sāl se Muslim Līg kā zor baṛhātā gāyā aur udhar Mahāsabhāī kā. Kongres kā to bilkul paṛā ho gayā. Baṛe Bhai kī sipah sālāri men ghar kī sārī nāī pod sewāye di ek ghair jānibdār qisim ke Kongresīon ko choṛ kar Neśanal Gārd kī tarah daṭ gāyī idhar Gyān Cand kī sardārī men Sevak Sangh ka choṭa sā dil daṭ gāyā dostī aur mohabbat men futur nā āyā.

311 Chughtai, Chūī mūī, 158. 312 Ibid. 313 Ibid. 170

While the rationalization behind their party affiliations are not elaborated on, justified, or in any way shown to be essential, Chughtai implies that opinion along communal lines was beginning to solidify amongst younger members of the family, especially as an attraction to the clear, firm (as suggested by the phrase dat jana, to stand firmly or against) ideological poles of the Muslim National Guard and the Mahasabha. In all of the political uncertainty of independence, Partition, and all of the mundane complications of daily life in a mixed community, the aesthetically uniform image of communal solidarity emerges as an ideological certainty within the two most militaristic of the nationalist parties.314

But then the narrative proceeds not to explain the development and incremental degradation of the Muslim family’s relationship with their Hindu neighbors, but rather to describe the ways in which they became ever more physically entangled. The Hindu doctor, Roopchand, who has for years overseen the delivery of Amma’s children, becomes even more inextricably involved with the Muslim family when her husband and his longtime friend, dies. “At the time of Father’s burial not only familial love but also a sense of responsibility [came over Doctor Sahib] [Jis vaqt se voh Abbā ko dafā kar āye

314 Rakesh Batabyal, Communalism in Bengal (New Delhi: SAGE Publications India, 2005), 386. Batabayal draws parallels between paramilitary forces in Bengal during partition and the ideological underpinnings of Fascism. Despite the relative arbitrariness of political affiliation that Chughtai demonstrates through the breakneck speed with which family members change political parties during the course of a single argument, the drift towards paramilitary forces in the advent of partition was, as Batabayal explains, a visceral attraction. He quotes Zeev Sternhill’s formulation that Fascism provides a worldview where “man as an integral part of an organic whole.” Thus, the Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha put a great deal of emphasis on the connectedness and, crucially, the uniformity of their respective constituents, which included “propaganda on a massive scale with rhetoric which catered to emotional rather than national aspects of politics.”

171 khāndanī mohabbat ke alāwa unhen zimadārī kā bhī ehasās ho gayā.”315 The doctor

Roopchand’s involvement with the family is solidified by his position as healer even more than advisor, as he does everything from birth children to cure children. His “fees” for these services are in the form of food that Amma has prepared, food he eats despite the admonitions from his wife to maintain the purity of his caste.316 This constant exchange not just of favors and advice but also of food and fluids both corrupts the idea of the pure community while it shows how essential these exchanges are for the continuation of life. These compromises of inter-familial love also avoid the pitfalls of romanticizing social relations as a “true” or “pure” love by infusing care with the common pollutions of vitality.

It becomes clear that Chughtai’s interiors, as places that are beyond the usual reach of public rhetoric, are not a denouncement of sociality in a general sense. They are instead an affirmation of the way in which social commitments can and must exceed political rhetoric in order to assure the care and well-being of those close to us in a very physical sense, tending to the living organism in a different way from the unified communal body. The same social pressures of affiliation and belonging that could force a declaration of support for one’s own community can also, in different circumstances, result in a sense of commitment to those from the “other” side. Here the accepted patriarchal structure of the family is reformed by a death into a joined family of friends and neighbors, rather than the retaliatory opposition that appears as one community is held responsible for all of the deaths within a community of one’s own. The “affiliation”

315 Chughtai, Chūī mūī, 162. 316 Ibid. 172 of family structures over that of nationalist communalism does not demonstrate the indelibility of belonging, but rather highlights the degree of mutability and intentionality in these commitments.

Sukeshi Kamra has pointed out in her reading of “Roots” that the foregrounding of family matters in the story shows the ways in which the magnitude of Partition violence was a matter of traumatic denial, since, “Partition, as a forcible disruption of communities, is the subject of jokes for the longest time.”317 However, these moments also demonstrate the way that the disruption of quotidian life has to involve a conscious suppression of a state of peaceful, if not always tranquil, co-existence. Even at in the midst of the crisis, adults are annoyed at the mischief of children, as usual. Husbands argue with their wives, as usual. The business of cooking and cleaning pervades even the act of packing up belongings when Bare Bhai’s wife insists on bringing envelopes of herbs “clutching them to her bosom as if they’d affect the sterling balance of Pakistan.”

318 These seemingly insignificant details populate the abstract fear of the unknown with the concrete materials of home, grounding loss rather than foregrounding the dangers of remaining.

As the family prepares to leave, Amma, as the embodied reminder of connections to the past, sits at the center of all of it, mute and immobile. Chughtai’s narrator then appears to momentarily abandon her third-person distance from Amma. “If my quiet

Amma had a sharp tongue,” she says:

she certainly would have said, “What is this strange bird called a homeland? … If itis not the earth where one was born , in which one was brought up rough-and-

317 Kamra, Bearing Witness, 119. 318 Chughtai, Chūī mūī, 164. 173

tumble, then how can you call a homeland a place where you go to stay just a few days? ... I am not interested in this game of uprooting and settling homelands. There was a day when the Mughals left their homeland to settle a new homeland. And today again we leave to settle a homeland. A homeland is not a pair of shoes that you can toss as soon as they become a little tight and put on another.”319

Agar meri kam sukhaan Amma ki zuban tezi hoti, to voh zurur kaheti “Apna vatan hai kis chiriyan ka nam? Apna vatan jis mitti mein janam liya jaise main lot pot kar barhe pale, vahi na hoa to phir jahan char din ko ja kar bas jao voh kaise apna vatan ho jaega? Aur yeh vatan ujarne aur basane ka khel kuch dilchasp bhi to nahin. Ek din tha Mughal apna vatan chor kar naya vatan basane aye the. Vatan na hua pair ki juti hogi zara tank pari utar phainki, dusri pahen li.

In this moment, Chughtai’s narrative slips from that of an observer to a facilitator and interpreter of Amma’s voice. The ability to let Amma remain silent while the narrator speaks for her is an illustration of the gap in sense and status evoked at the very beginning of the story: Chughtai, the privileged and educated storyteller, speaks for a woman who was not instructed to speak in such terms, which allows Chughtai to give voice to the weighty symbolism of Amma’s presence without breaking the deep, rooted, and meaningful silence that the figure of the Muslim matriarch provides. The counterfactual tense suggests that Amma’s thoughts may be like this, but whatever her thoughts may be defy description.

Chughtai continues to use the unique perspective of Amma to provide a particular and contingent view of partition and its violence very different from descriptions of the fast-moving and ungrounded political games in the initial pages. Family members declare that “Amma has become senile. At this age, her sense has left her. [Amma to sathian

319 Ibid., 165

174 gayin hain. Is umar mein aqal thikane nahin.]320” The use of thikane nahin (not fixed) implies that her thinking is not rooted in reality, but Amma’s continued preoccupation with the growing distance between Roopchandji’s house and her own brings out the centrality of the ground on which the two houses stand as a foundation of identity and feeling for Amma. The old woman is moved not by the charged sense of danger, but rather rooted by the deep sense memory of her existence in her place through times past.

But quite significantly, the evocation of the migratory past of the family’s ancestors prevents Amma from becoming naturalized to that space. Ties to their location are historicized and established as is an activity of basna (settling), and so leaving must also be a decisive process of rejection of the world in which they had lived, a rejection Amma has no interest in entertaining.

Chughtai’s illustration of an attachment to the mohalla through Amma’s internal pull, brought out by the continual juxtaposition of social life through the physical parallels of food, medicine, and the quiet embodiment of Amma herself, makes the social bonds of the two families inseparable. These sensory entanglements only grow when

Amma refuses to leave her home with her family when they leave for Pakistan, and we are left alone with Amma and her thoughts as the narrator once again takes on her memories as she roams throughout the house. The events that took place in the now empty home are described in both biological and religious terms to emphasize the

320 Ibid.; The additional meaning of “habitat,” or “whereabouts,” also implies that her mind is not present, not at home, though all of her thoughts are concerned precisely with her home and its immediate surroundings.

175 grounded and sacred aspects of what is a stake, defying the homogeneous, empty time of seemingly unstoppable political events321:

There, in the corner, her [eldest daughter’s] umbilical cord was buried…Not one, ten umbilical cords buried, and ten souls took their first breath right here. Ten images of flesh and blood, ten human beings were born in that sacred room. From this sacred womb, which they left behind today, like it was an old skin that got tangled in thorns, just like that they left.322

Voh kone mein is ka nal gara tha. Ek nahin das nal gare the aur das ruhon ne yahin paheli sans li thi. Das gosht o post ki muratiyon ne, das insanon ne isi maqdis kamre mein janam liya tha. Is maqdis kokh se jise aj voh chhor kar chale gaye the jaise voh purani kinchli thi jaise kanton mein uljha kar voh sab sata sat chale gaye.

The intense focus on the process of birth behind closed doors is a shift from the expected trajectory of the Partition story. The image of childbirth presents “flesh and blood” (gosht o post) not in the moment of Partition violence, but rather at the moment of its vitality.

The persistent and undeniable demands of corporeal life are connected inextricably to

“sacred” (maqdis) realms, which replaces the elevation of national belonging as a true unity of thought and purpose within a single community. But it is also particularly important to note that it is Amma’s singular isolation that allows these details of an intimate reality to take on an urgency equal to that of widespread death and dislocation.

The interruption in the homogenous time of “meanwhile,” where hundreds of such families were leaving their homes on both sides of the border, in favor of foregrounding the unique particularities of Amma’s internal memories, brings out the fullness of history within those abandoned rooms where she wanders alone.

321 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, 4:394. For more on Benjamin’s concept of sacred, or “messianic,” time in contrast to the culminating telos of political goals in relation to literature, see Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. 322 Chughtai, Chūī mūī, 167. 176

Since the very beginning of the story, Amma is portrayed as distant from the greater fluctuations of Partition politics and is instead tied to more intimate and immediate concerns. The narrator presents this distance as a set of tangible and familiar household concerns: “far from politics [Amma] talked about coriander, turmeric and the daughters’ dowries [siyāsat se dur dhaniye, haldī aur betiyon ke jahezon ki bāten kiyā kartīn.]”323 The physicality of birth furthers her status as the archive of family minutiae, and these tiny but instantly recognizable materials become the solid ground on which she is able to stand, terrified though she is, in a place that political circumstance has made her family abandon. Even in Amma’s deepest despair, time does not stretch out inevitably forward; rather, the depth of the ordinary past is contrasted with the dire situation of the present to show that there has been a drastic and avoidable move away from the rooted ordinariness of the past.

The mere act of remaining, of staying rooted in place and allowing the narrative space to again experience these scenes of family life, provides an irrefutable location for

Roopchand to work through the conflicting demands of community and familial affection. The rage and pain this process engenders for him reveals how difficult such reconciliation can be, but the palpable form of the connection also makes it necessary.

Unable to solve the contradiction of his rage at the violence committed against his community and his affection and concern for Amma, he “wanted to rip it out and throw it…Enraged that the existence of those things had collected like roots, he was pulling with all his strength, but his very flesh would be ripped out with them [apne dimāgh men

323 Ibid., 159 177 se jhatak denā cāhte the…Kīna kī jaṛo kī tarah jo cīz un ke vajud men jam cukī thī voh use purī tāqat se khīnc rahe the magar sāth jaise un ka gosht khīncta calā ātā ho, voh karah kar choṛ dete the.]”324 But here, unlike the social body as a uniform organism that must be purified and purged, Roopchand’s interior consciousness has become a network of roots that cannot be extracted without uprooting the entire social structure that gave his life meaning—the ground beneath his feet, or to stay with Chughtai’s metaphor, the roots that support his being and give him form.

Although Chughtai’s use of roots also serves as a concrete metaphor for the ties between the two families, it does much more than make the bonds of family—loosely defined—comprehensible to the reader. The emphasis on the rootedness of the mixed and negotiated space of the mohalla as a social reality reminds us that such relationships can only be undone through conscious and concerted effort. Rather than the hypostatized roots of a nationalist body which reach into a mythical past and act as grounds to defend that body against an invading Other, Chughtai’s roots, developed within a recent past of mixing, sharing, and relating create a visceral barrier to violence that otherwise appears inevitable. Through her use of a metaphor that by its nature both migrates to new spaces and becomes a stabilizing and integral part of the ground on which it lies, Chughtai destabilizes the mechanical rehearsal of retaliation or ritual purification that is used to justify such attacks. Instead of the Muslim family as the “root of all evil,” these shared roots belong to the shajara-e nasab—the tangled family tree—which grows beyond blood and soil to encompass the whole of the mohalla.

324 Ibid., 168 178

In the end, Roopchand follows Amma’s family and persuades it to return. It is a happy ending that, in many ways, seems to be an aestheticization of the relationships between religious communities that continues the practice of eliding the more difficult problems of life in the mohalla before the partition. For instance, what was it that happened to those janvars or, indeed, the saranarthi? The unperturbed equality of the two families in “Roots,” and the fact that both make it to the end without being dispossessed of house and home—or perhaps more relevant to the denials that Kamra speaks about in her study, without having to confront the violence enacted by their own kin and communities—renders it more difficult to comprehend the dynamics of inequality that lead to violence. The consequence of the unity of place and purpose within

Chughtai’s story is that it obscures the rumblings of injustice she gestures towards at the very beginning of “Roots.” Partition violence and inter-communal hatred was preventable, but the part played by the strict and increasingly untenable hierarchies of the mohalla in furthering strained relationships remains to be confronted.

These remaining questions point out some of the blind spots of family interiors where the goal is to illustrate closeness rather than the chasms of betrayal and broken trust that characterized much of Partition violence. What Chughtai’s happy ending does provide, however, is a form for a working-through of forgiveness. Roopchand and his rage against the universe reminds us that forgiveness is difficult work, and it is not merely a matter of bestowing compassion upon another, but rather of discovering the ways in which rage eats away at the conception of the self. If the ending is to be satisfying in any way, it must be taken not as a snapshot of the days of crisis, but rather 179 how the crisis must be weighed against those everyday material realities that are lost in crisis: the packets of spices, Amma’s voice, the birthing and rearing of children. These things which are least significant to Partition itself are indications of a familial and familiar reconciliation that, in “Roots,” appears more tangible and more real than the violence itself. Chughtai has re-grounded communal strife and demonstrated its near certain demise in the face of daily work, a grounding she has also used to dismantle the powerful, but ultimately temporally contingent structures of gendered, casteized, and class labor in “Two Hands”

Foundations of Filth: “Two Hands” The key to building concrete communities that interrupt the nationalist mythos, is that in “Roots” Chughtai’s roots grow throughout a diverse, negotiated and changing space: from Amma’s nomadic Mughal ancestors to Amma herself, and from Amma and her children to Roopchand and his children, and then back again as Roopchand gathers the family back from their journey to Pakistan. And the moment when these roots are most palpably felt is not in a time of relative harmony, but rather at the height of

Roopchand’s resentment to Amma and her family as her material presence contrasts with

Roopchand’s ideas of Muslims in the abstract. What is refigured with these roots as the growth of a social history is not the reclamation of a homeland from invaders, but the connections that develop over time and through space, aided by social tending. What then results is the shared visceral memory of Amma and Roopchand, which takes on a form that is more knowable and stable than the knowledge and desires of their families or communities. This grounding allows for their refusal to fuse their bodies with that of a national body politic. Amma remains rooted, and Roopchand is unable to tear out the 180 roots that have grown between him and his neighbor, and this enables a movement where the doctor must heal the damage done to the mohalla by inter-communal violence.

However, there is danger in the description of Amma as “the root of a banyan tree that remains standing even in the gusts of a storm.”325 With the metaphor of Amma as a tree rooted in place, the matriarch herself can be essentialized as the natural, true, and authentic heart of the household, and thus reified as a location of filial pride, a thing to be protected rather than a complicated figure with her own agency, including her own prejudices and failings. Similarly, there exists a danger that the cacophonous private spaces which are Chughtai’s focus could become valorized as the only place where authentic expression is possible, with politics demeaned as irrelevant, utilitarian, or disingenuous. The danger lies in the way in which “the personal is political” can be understood to mean that a focus on individual interiority is already enough, without the extrapolation to broader consequences of that position as a part of social relationships.

The story “Two Hands,” perhaps partly because it was written before Partition and the constriction of identities that such a crisis entailed, provides something of a critique of the supposed unperturbed authenticity of mothers and homes. In “Two

Hands,” the recursive repetition of home interiors serving as the setting for “public” court trials, and the changing positions of characters within these interiors in different contexts and roles, do not allow for the distillation of women into metaphorical archetypes. In

“Two Hands” Amma appears again, but this time she is very different from the figure of mute, natural authority who occupies the pages of “Roots.” Here, Amma is in a position

325 Ibid., 166. 181 that mirrors that of her civil-servant husband. She serves not as the embodiment of family history, but instead serves quite literally as a judge of household matters and holds court to dispense justice in cases of private scandal. Far from serving as the immutable truth of ties that bind across all social barriers, the judgements of Amma and her peers are heavily influenced both by Hindu casteist notions of purity as well as modern middle-class prejudices of respectability.

In this story, which turns its focus away from inter-communal debates to focus on divisions that are present even in the inner-sanctum of the haveli, Chughtai takes on questions of gender and caste oppression within communal spaces, while also interrogating the arbitrary values of domestic social life. Though the religious makeup of the characters remains mixed, Chughtai’s figuration of the Muslim matriarch as judge serves as a critique of the way that systemic oppression can be replicated in all social forums, including the complicated social structures of the multi-family compound. But this mimicry of a legal court fails when tested against the material foundations of sex, child rearing and labor that Chughtai lays down as the hidden foundations for such structures. Chughtai’s exploration of private realms in “Two Hands” is less a description of the home as an inner sanctum separate from civil society than it is an argument for the pragmatic compromises of the home to be acknowledged beyond those enclosures. This makes systematic oppression based on the prejudices of respectability less justifiable.

In the story, an old sweeper woman (mahatarānī) is thrilled to find out that her son, Rām Avtār, will be returning from the army. The rest of the house, however, is more excited to witness the spectacle they are certain will occur when Rām Avtār finds out that 182 his wife has given birth to another man’s son. The events that surround this scandal are exposed through a series of trials which begin with a complaint filed by the “shāgird peshe kī mahilāon ka baqā’aida vafadāmān [council of women of the working class],” where the women argue that the daughter-in-law’s flirtatious, unattached presence is a danger to the sanctity of all their homes. A series of trials and appeals finally end with

Abba, again as the household patriarch, confronting Rām Avtār with the truth of what has surely occurred in his absence.

In this structured confrontation of the assumptions of power, Amma is not the silent soul of the household as she was in “Roots,” but is merely the first judge in a series of hearings in which the relative positions of the home’s individual members are being worked out. Existing familial and professional roles, which are at the heart of gender and caste delineations, are taken into account in the way in which these trials are ordered. The old mahatarānī makes her first appearance as a defendant to other, more respectable women, while it is Abba who hears the last testimony from Rām Avtār himself. But women regularly take on the roles and language of men, while the actual power of these relative positions shifts suddenly and radically upon the presentation of the pragmatic realities of home-life as evidence. The solidity of these realities are produced by

Chughtai’s use of sensual metaphors and begamāti zubān in the form of idioms rich in household metaphors, which are then juxtaposed with the vocabulary of public life. The baqā’aida vafadāmān, is the organization which brings the suit to the courtyard durbār 183

(court), and the decisions of the arbiters are based upon serious discussions of ikhlāqiyat

(morals), and iqtasādāt (economics).326

These household hierarchies are presented as existing, but ultimately unstable.

The sensual objects of everyday life serve as a location against which their essential power can be checked—the concrete metaphors serve to reveal exactly what is not fixed within these arrangements. This introduces a palpable reality of class relations but also renders them mutable. The interior spaces of this story, as well as the women within them, become the locations of secrets and shame but also tenderness and shared experience. Made visible is the messy, complicated and often invisible world that ensures the continuation of generations, where the principle that life must be worth living is the only principle of importance and coming to terms with this foundational truth is the inevitable responsibility of even the loftiest social ideals. In the process of building awareness of the reproduction of class structures, the recursive structure of the court scenes in “Two Hands” serves to establish social hierarchies in order to show how the last word must always belong to those given the least consideration. Chughtai manages this not by creating an awareness of the shared power of the proletariat, per se, but rather by pointing out the ways in which respectability and virtue are nearly always created by the work of those who are deemed unworthy of it.

Though labor is central to the concrete particulars of “Two Hands,” it is not labor in itself that provides a cognizable structure of caste divisions within the haveli. Such a correlation would ignore that caste politics is unique in its relationship to Marxist

326 Chughtai, Liḥāf aur dīgar afsāne, 32. 184 formulations of class. It is not just a matter of public class structures but also one of deeply interiorized belief—the problem of purity and pollution which serves to reinforce hereditary class structures even from within, as it were.327 It has already been noted by labor and Dalit Studies historian Juned Shaikh that leftists in India found themselves faced with the difficult problem of “translating” the truth of Dalit oppression into a scientific language that was not built to accommodate them. 328 The resulting categories,

Shaikh argues, were “unstable” with “multiple meanings.” This instability created the opportunity for a new class awareness while simultaneously erasing the specificity of the problem of caste.329 Marxism alone, in its utility as a scientific method for understanding the economic structures of history, could not fully articulate all of the internal psychic barriers to identification with class movements that caste imposed, and its efforts at creating tangible structures of empathic understanding resulted in abstraction rather than contextual particulars.

This was especially a problem for realism, as it is generally understood as a genre of mundane details rather than an illustration of internal consciousness. Toral Jatin

Gajarwala, in her book Untouchable Fictions, suggests that Anglophone writer Mulk Raj

Anand had to break the genre of Soviet Block socialist realism altogether in order to

327 B. R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste (Pune: Ssoft Group India, 2014), chap. 4, https://books.google.com/books?id=Eio8BQAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PT21#v=onepage&q&f=false. “I can’t see how a Socialist State in India can function for a second without having to grapple with the problems created by the prejudices which make Indian people observe the distinctions of high and low, clean and unclean…turn any direction you like, caste is the monster that crosses your path. You cannot have political reform, you cannot have economic reform, unless you kill this monster.” 328 Juned Shaikh, “Translating Marx: Mavali, Dalit and the Making of Mumbai's Working Class, 1928- 1935,” Economic and Political Weekly 46 no. 31 (2011): 65–73. 329 Ibid., 66.

185 make the Dalit experience readable, choosing instead the modernist conventions of a

“Joycean representation of subjectivity” for his novel Untouchable.330 But while the intimacy of caste as explored through this subjectivity created an emergent interior voice that would provide entirely new avenues of expression for the specificities of caste, the attempt to unite casteized labor with traditional Marxist conceptions of Labor as the central and transcendent aspect of modern life was less successful in describing the particular struggles of the Dalit.

Anand describes Bakha, his protagonist, cleaning a latrine as “a wave sailing away on a deep-bedded river.”331 Gajarwala says that, “this can be understood as part of the traditional Marxist adulation for the working body, suggesting a beautification and aestheticization of the labor process.”332 Gajarwala goes on to explain that in the particular context of the Dalit in South Asia, the metaphor of water is particularly useful as an indicator of caste because it carries the double meaning of natural beauty—as employed by Marxist romanticism—and purity and pollution.333 As such it is uniquely capable of carrying the symbolic weight of caste relations.

However, the comparison of Bakha with a wave while he is in the midst of cleaning latrines also beautifies a process that is not at all beautiful, and carries with it,

Gajarwala argues, the ambitions for worker solidarity that are pointedly unspecific. The implications of the non-specificity, Gajarwala goes on to explain, is that it threatens to

330 Gajarwala, Untouchable Fictions, 72. 331 Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable (Bombay: Kutub-Popular Book Depot, 1933), 7. 332 Gajarwala, Untouchable Fictions, 73. 333 Ibid., 74-76.

186 bury the problems of caste-specific oppression under the appealing but uncritical calls for unity within Gandhian romanticism.334 Gajarwala points out that writers of contemporary

Dalit realism, by contrast, “have chosen the language of specification over abstraction.

Cleaning a latrine cannot be like riding a wave, not only because of the ideological impetus of the text, which is to eradicate such forms of labor on principle, but also because metaphor is resistant to specificity, precision, and localization.”335

“Two Hands,” perhaps aided by the specificity of vernacular Urdu in contrast to

Anand’s English novel, creates a subjectivity rooted in visceral language that does not make much space for romantic notions of natural unity. In “Two Hands,” Chughtai makes ample use of metaphor--the aforementioned “pus from a boil” being just one such example--but the effect is far removed from Anand’s comparison of latrine cleaning with riding a wave. Instead, Chughtai allows for the difficulty and stigma of casteized labor to exist concurrently with aspects of each character that exceed such associations. The well- respected mahatarānī, for instance, is described as doubled over, having been entirely disfigured by her years of service.336 Her daughter-in-law, even as the object of rampant sexual desire, is nearly always depicted with her “basket of filth.”337 Even Rati Ram, the relative who helps the mahatarānī with her work and whose presence disarms the daughter-in-law of her dreaded, unattached sexuality, arrives in the compound because he was deemed unnecessary elsewhere and was otherwise “awarah,” astray.338 Through

334 Ibid., 79. 335 Ibid., 83. 336 Chughtai, Liḥāf aur dīgar afsāne, 31. 337 Ibid., 30. 338 Ibid., 33 187 these semi-unflattering descriptions, where subjects of caste oppression are shown as victimized by their labor, beautiful despite it, and cast off for lack of it, Chughtai circumvents the valorization of labor as the only objective indicator of worth and reminds us that even those who have been made invisible as full human beings by structures of caste, class, and patriarchy are present, active, and essential to the pragmatic goings on of everyday life.

“Two Hands” instead focuses upon the necessity and value of those who are marginalized by caste, even within the invisibility of that marginalization itself. This value is perhaps most clearly articulated at a climactic moment during the second reiteration of the shāgird peshe kī mahilāon ka baqā’aida vafadāmān, when Amma serves as the “session” judge.339 Presented with the “eyewitness” accounts of her daughter-in-law’s indiscretions, the mahatarānī responds:

[The daughter in law] is everyone’s confidant, even today she hasn’t burst anyone’s pot. What use is it to her to twirl her foot in anyone’s faults? What isn’t there behind these rooms? No filth is hidden from the mahatarānī. Those old hands have buried the sins of great people. Should they care to, these two hands could overturn a queen’s throne. But no. She bears no one a grudge. If a knife should be held to her throat then maybe there will be a mistake, otherwise no one’s secret will emerge from her old heart. Seeing her rage, the hands of the knife-holders became slack.340

Voh sab kī rāzdār hai, āj tak us ne kisī kā bhandā nahīn phoṛā. Use kyā zarūrat jo kisī ke phaṭe mein pair uṛati phire? Kothiyon ke pichvāre kyā nahīn hotā? Mahatarānī se kisī kā mailā nahīn chuptā. Un buṛhe hāthon ne baṛe logon ke gunāh dafan kiye hain. Yeh do hāth chahen, to rāniyon ke takhat ulṭ den. Par nahīn. Use kisī se baghaz nahīn. Agar us ke gāle par chhurī dabayi gaī to shāyad ghalatī ho jaye, vaise voh kisī ke rāz apne buṛhe kaleje se bāhar nahīn nikālne degī. Us kā teha dekh kar fauran chhurī dabānevalon ke hāth dhīle par gāye .

339 Ibid., 34. 340 Ibid., 35 188

The marked language of begamāti zubān, which I have chosen to render here as literally as possible, is in sharp contrast to the language of councils, morals, and economics that filled the trial before this. Such abstractions are set aside in favor of the physical metaphors that make up the idioms of the caste subject, firmly aligning her with the physicality of her work, the grounded pragmatism of her position, and the relative solidity of her claims against those of her accusers.

But perhaps the most important metaphor of all—which, when discussing the hereditary occupations of caste is just barely metaphorical—is that of the maila, or filth, that it has been her life’s work to remove from the rooms of her employers. In the same way that the roots of the story discussed earlier do not belong to any one religious community, this filth is not the sole property of the lower-caste worker who has been stigmatized by association with it. Rather, it is the common denominator of every class and caste, even that of queens. It is because of this filth that the mahatarānī can effectively disarm her opponents. She literally has dirt on everyone, and this position gives her two hands great power.

The revelation of the power of labor resembles the “epiphany of the proto-

Marxist” that Gajarwala similarly identifies in Anand’s Untouchable, but it is of a very different character.341 Gajarwala explains that in Anand’s novel, Bakha had fetishized the relative freedom of the British military, where caste was not overtly practiced. However, an incident of touching presents Bakha with the limits to his own access of emancipation in the form of existing caste prejudices.342 But where Bakha comes to understand his

341 Gajarwala, Untouchable Fictions, 89. 342 Ibid., 78. 189 position as an untouchable, thus shadowing “the moment when the working-class subject becomes conscious of his class position and his revolutionary potential,” the mahatarānī already knows the power that she holds.343 It is the foundation of filth on which her claims to justice rest. The epiphany instead belongs to her would-be oppressors when they realize that the mahatarānī’s power lies in the fact that her labor is consistently overlooked: the fact that she is so entirely taken for granted means that the family’s secrets are laid bare before her. Her profession as “worker” is not valorized, nor does it rely upon a sense of unified class solidarity at the expense of specificity. On the other hand, it does serve to invade the most intimate prejudices of her employers as it calls into question the very basis of cleanliness respectability upon which their class assumptions rest.

As in Anand’s Untouchable, the British army is also a present in “Two Hands,” though it is in the background, beyond the havelī walls. Musing on this distant impression of power, the residents of the compound believe that Rām Avtār will assume the rights of his position as a colonial soldier and take revenge on his adulterating wife and her lover when he returns.344 But he does not. Instead, he brings the child gifts and takes great pride in showing him off.345 Abba, in fit of frustrated rage, tries to prove the child’s illegitimacy to Rām Avtār, but once again the epiphany happens in reverse: Rām Avtār describes the way in which the boy’s labor will provide for him once he is old, much in the same way the labor of the daughter-in-law and Ratti Rām provided for his mother’s

343 Ibid., 89. 344 Chughtai, Liḥāf aur dīgar afsāne, 29. 345 Ibid., 37.

190 much-needed retirement.346 With this long look at the reproduction and transformation of roles through time, Chughtai provides concrete evidence of caste labor in providing comfort for others, but she also affirms the value of those who are no longer capable of performing such labor. The story points to the power of the caste subject while ultimately directing our attention to a place where the strict codes linking caste labor with particular professions is no longer a factor.

This understated vision of future generations ends with Chughtai’s image of the hands that sanctify the earth: “these tiny, mud-smeared black hands are adorning the part of the earth with sindūr [yeh nanhe mane miṭṭi mein lithare hue saiyah hath dhartī kī māng mein sindūr saja rahe hain].”347 Here again the hands are covered in filth, even though they are engaged in a sacred act. The image of the earth as a bride receiving her sindūr points not only to the ways in which social relations are reproduced—although that, too, is certainly invoked—but the way in which those responsible for its continuance are the smallest (nanhe mane), dirt-smeared (miṭṭi lithare hue) and black. Chughtai creates an ending that is not final but forward-looking, and identifies the lower-caste, black bastard child as a venerable subject. Again, it is dirt—black, ordinary, usually beneath consideration—upon which futures are always built and have the potential to emerge transformed.

Secluded Spaces and Dangerous Games in “Genda” In “Two Hands,” the reality of the illegitimate child’s value rests upon and is reaffirmed by the earth-as-bride. However, the problems with this highly gendered metaphor—the

346 Ibid., 39. 347 Ibid. 191 earth is merely the recipient of the blessing, while the boy, through his concrete labor, bestows it—are quite apparent. Just before this final scene, however, there is another moment of hierarchical metamorphosis brought about by the incorporatio of the marginalized subject, still physical but not as dependent upon established tropes of man’s dominion over nature as the benediction of sewing the soil. When Abba interrogates Rām

Avtār in the final iteration of the court, he stands as a representative of the institutions of civil society, male pride, and also the final bastion of household respectability. But eventually, even he must bow his head as if “thousands, millions of hands spread over his mind…hands that are neither pure nor impure, but merely living, waking hands that are washing the filth from the world’s face [zehen par lākhon, karoṛon hath chā gaye…yeh hāth ḥarāmī hai na ḥalālī, yeh to bas jīte jāgte hāth hain jo duniyā ke chahere se ghilazat dho rahe hain].”348 Despite Chughtai’s important assertion that the hands themselves are neither pure nor impure, it is also important in this tale of dirt and the ways it becomes metonymically contiguous with caste and respectability that Abba, as an Ashraf Muslim, be touched. Even more significant is that as an implicit part of an unjust social order, he is held by those hands specifically for the purposes of cleansing. His own complicity in unequal relations can only be absolved by those who are its victims, not by the judge himself as an arbiter of institutional justice. Hence, there is an added significance to the fact that these courtrooms can only exist within the boundaries of the home.

But rather than a further justification for the enclosures of the zenana, the touch of hands is an important violation of the boundaries that separate positions of power from

348 Ibid., 39. 192 the rest. In addition to the implications of caste, this demonstrates a moment when a representative of middle-class life—in other words, Chughtai’s reader—is moved. Abba is touched so that his internal prejudices and beliefs, his zehen, can be shifted. Within the context of the story, the act of washing suggests not only a deconstruction of hierarchical legitimation as invalid, but also something perhaps more painful and more permanent: the recognition of the middle-class reader as soiled, as an active participant in the normalized shaming, persecution, and denial of others.

It is perhaps because of Chughtai’s systematic dismantling of all levels of authority and respectability in “Two Hands” that the blow is then softened by the metaphor of a boy’s work upon the earth. At least the ground beneath one’s feet, then, appears to be in the same relative place. That is the platform where the many hands may begin to enact their work, re-instilled with the force that hierarchical social structures had stripped from them. In “Genda,” a, much earlier story by Chughtai, these many hands appear again, but without the romanticized positioning of the worker of the soil as the foundation of all society, and the earth that yields to him. Instead, Chughtai leaves these little hands floating in space, with only the intimate interiors of recognition left to embody them and solidify their importance:

In a dream that night, children and only children. Hundreds of children…ones that looked like Genda, ones that looked like me, ones that looked like older brother. Even ones that looked like the dead Mewa Ram…tiny little hands. Like grains of sand spread across the entire universe.

Rat ko khwab mein bache hī bache. Saikaṛon bache…Genda kī shakal ke, merī shakal ke, bhaiyā kī shakal ke. Yahan tak keh mare hue Mewa Rām kī 193

shakal ke…zarā zarā se hāth. Rīt ke be shamar zaron ki tarah sari kaiyanāt par bikhare hue the.349

Every pair of hands touches some intimate connection to the narrator and, by extension, the emotional centers of her readers. Mewa Ram was the house gardener and the object of the narrator’s childhood crush, who, it is implied, passed away from overwork. Another child looks like her older brother, banished at the time of this dream to a boarding school to keep him away from Genda, which whom he had an affair. And most importantly,

Genda, the narrator’s playmate, a child widow and a Hindu servant in a Muslim household, was at the moment of the story’s publication a character at the very center of ideas in conflict regarding the nation’s burgeoning self.

“Genda” takes issues relating to the greatest anxieties of the time—Hindus and

Muslims, class and caste, belonging and marginalization, sexuality and piety—and through constructions of enclosed space and the limited experience of child characters, interiorizes them, bringing these problematic figures into the familiar, secret spaces of childhood play and adolescent desire, making them “homely” once again. However, instead of re-asserting the boundaries between the home and the world, this is an interiorization of dangerous games that perforates the delineation between public areas of debate and the home. “Genda,” through the framing and settling of young, unsettled youth, interrupts South Asian anxieties that “homes are disappearing,” and must be sanitized as place refuge from colonization, communalism and corruption.350

349 Ibid., 175-176. 350 Basanta Koomar Roy, Rabindranath Tagore (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1916), 124. This phrase, taken from one of novelist and poet Rabindranath Tagore’s letters, was written to describe his impressions of the European homes under the conditions of modern life, where, “It is impossible for a woman in a European family to attain the varied perfections which a woman can in a Hindu home.” 123. 194

First published in 1938, the story describes the development of fifteen-year-old

Genda’s relationship with the older brother of the narrator, Bibi. The relationship results in the birth of a child, and what is at stake is not only the family honor—the embarrassment of a son from a middle-class household fathering the child of a servant— but also the communal tensions agitated by a Muslim boy’s relationship with a young

Hindu girl. However, what elevates this story to a penetration not just of class and communal divides, but also the foundations of an oppressive nationalism, is Genda’s status as a young widow. Many scholars, most notably Gayatri Spivak and Tanika Sarkar, have discussed the ways in which widowhood in the late nineteenth century became the ideological ground on which nationalist battles were fought against British imperialism by both Hindu traditionalists and reformers, with little regard to the actual needs and desires of widows.351 Recently, Krupa Shandilya has addressed the ways in which the reform novels of that period ran into difficulties once the authors turned their attention to the subject of the widows themselves. “Both the widow remarriage movement in Bengal and education of women movement in northern India were ostensibly invested in recovering women as ‘respectable’ subjects for the Hindu and Muslim nation,” Shandilya says, “yet the domestic novels that emerge from these movements are ideologically fraught texts that grapple with…women’s sexuality. Thus, no widows are remarried in the Bengali widow remarriage novel, while education enables the respectable wife of the

351 Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism, (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), 36. Sarkar quotes Chandra Kumar Bhattacharya’s thoughts on the uncorrupted home at a time when the indignities of colonialism were especially high: “’That household is our motherland, that family is our India,’ affirmed a tract on marriage, referring to the network of intimate human relationships into which lost independence had been folded back.”

195

Urdu novel to circumvent the codes of veiling even as it enables the immodest courtesan to observe them.”352 “Genda,” however, does not elaborate upon these anxieties, but familiarizes them. “Genda” assumes the widow’s sexuality and domesticates it, thus making it not a question of how the new nation can possibly incorporate the widow, but rather how a society will respond to the widow’s (and her child’s) corporeality.353 This acts to re-integrate the more ethereal realms of honor and respectability with the interior somatic realms of desire, and to allow for crystalized social codes to grow and change.

Although all the stories discussed in this chapter are first-person accounts to some degree, as is apparent by the narrator’s address of the characters by their familial relationship to her, in this story, the narrator is named and inserted as an actor, not just a witness. This lends an immediacy to the story’s perspective while providing a more explicit prompting of emotional responses, as well as an additional interpretive layer in which the scenes can take place, which mediates the charged nature of events. Tellingly, this is the same perspective that Chughtai uses in “Lihaf,” another story where the subject is a child’s first encounter with sexuality, as uncomprehending as she is of what she sees.

In this story, however, Bibi’s own desires—not just her embarrassment and confusion— receive much more attention. At various points Bibi is described as “burning with jealousy [rakś se tarap kar]” or “envious [hars mein]” of Genda, and her awkwardness acts as a foil to Genda’s grace and beauty.354 But further, Bibi’s desires act as an

352 Krupa Shandilya, Intimate Relations (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017), 4. 353 Genda can also be translated as “marigold,” a flower imbued with national and religious significance for its use in Hindu rituals, and thus it is sacred, but also beautiful, resilient and ordinary, much like the character herself. 354 Chughtai, Liḥāf aur dīgar afsāne, 165, 169, 170. 196 additional layer of interiorization and protection of the relationship between Genda and

Bhaiya (Older Brother) as Bibi yearns to be like her friend, and her limited understanding of the consequences of their relationship strips it of its status as a family catastrophe. Bibi is equally delighted at the birth of Genda’s child, and what she doesn’t—or refuses—to understand is her own family’s cruelty and neglect, justified in the adult world as the preservation of family status.

The story is then further enveloped into the interior spaces of children and their games, far from the judgements of adults and thus also free from their prejudices. The story opens with a game, dulhan dulhan (bride bride) played by Bibi and Genda under the shrubbery in the garden. The weight of the significance of the game is substantial given its connections to sanctified sex, as is Genda’s position as the child widow, but within the confines of this play she is just a child and is allowed the childhood pleasure of being married and then not being married, of playing the blushing bride but then passing the role off to her friend. The two children mimic the universe of the adult world with glee and curiosity, pushing at the boundaries of vital consequences while occupying the dusty, hidden corners of an afternoon’s play. They are not wholly ignorant of or unconcerned with the game’s proximity to taboo subjects, but that is part of the excitement and attraction. Caught playing by her older brother, Bibi suggests that they have some inkling as to the game’s larger implications, and therefore it must be played in secret: “Our hearts began thumping. Not just Bhaiya—if anyone came to know we were playing dulhan, certainly we’d get a beating. If we wanted to play we always played in secret. [Hamare dil dhak dhak kar lage. Bhaiya kya kissi ko bhi malum ho jata kih ham “dulhan” ka khel 197 khel rahe the, to yaqinan ham par mar parti. Yeh par shauq khel to ham hamesha chup kar hi khela karte the].”355

The forbidden nature of sexual desire in the widow is also taboo in the Bengali widow remarriage novel of nineteenth century reformers, Shandilya argues, but contemplation of the status of widows in Bengali middle-class, or bhadralok society had to contend with a number of contradictions. The colonial ban of the practice of self- immolation (sati) for widows combined with the practice of marrying young women to much older men meant that “a large number of widows were young women in their reproductive prime who lived in their deceased husband’s home…where they looked upon marital relationships but could not enter into any themselves.”356 In the Bengali reform novel, Shandilya explains that the desire of the widows manifests in the transformation of a symbolic sati—self-sacrifice as a way to transform desire into religious piety—into satita, or wifely devotion.357 But because of the unresolvable nature of female desire itself, this results in the removal of the widow from the parameters bhadralok society altogether. In Tagore’s novel A Grain of Sand in the Eye, the widow tears herself away from the attentions of a married man and becomes an ascetic. In

Bankimchandra’s Krishnakanta’s Will, the widow is settled in a second home by her lover.

In Krishnakanta’s Will, Shandilya suggests that the possibility of the widow’s re- entrenchment in domesticity is even more impossible given that the description of the

355 Ibid., p. 165 356 Shandilya, Intimate Relations, 21. 357 Ibid., 24. 198 home and the woman within it fails to contain the sexual energies suggested not only by extramarital desire, but also the problem of the unsettled, unrooted Muslim. “The woman of the house is beautiful,” Shandilya says, “but sinful because she has replaced devotion with sensuality and housekeeping with music, which in late nineteenth-century India was associated similarly with the Muslim courtesan.”358 Shandilya draws upon Bhabha’s concept of the “unhomely” to suggest that this unsettling space disrupts the patriarchal ordering of bhadralok society, thus “rupturing the dichotomy of the home and the world.”359 But it also reveals anxieties over preserving the Hindu home as a nationalist refuge, and both the woman and the problematic Muslim cannot be incorporated into the original home, as much as they are there to play house in a second one. In Krishnakanta’s

Will, as much as it is a novel about the reform of Hindu households, both the woman’s sexuality and the Muslim musician must remain separate and unincorporated, leaving the bhadralok home they left behind relatively unchanged.

Genda, however, is very different from the high-caste widows of the bhadralok, and thus her horizons are necessarily more limited than those described by

Bankimchandra and Tagore. As a servant, she does not have access to the world of art and education described in such destructive terms in Krishnakanta’s Will. Nor does she have the option of the heroic renunciation undertaken by Tagore’s widow. Thus, Genda’s existence as a living, desiring young girl can only be contained by the very ordinary household that contains her. And Bibi, the child of Genda’s middle-class Muslim employers, is a far cry from the threatening sensuality of the Muslim courtesan, and in

358 Ibid., 33. 359 Ibid., 31. 199 her own home cannot be painted as a rootless interloper. Both girls are perpetually surrounded by the enclosures of domesticity, even in the “unsettling” moment of Genda’s sexual encounter with Bhaiya:

Genda quietly made her way to Bhaiya’s room with his laundry wrapped in a towel. My heart was pounding, and I tiptoed after her like a cat, and started to peer through a crack in the door. Sitting on the floor, Genda was counting the clothes, separating them. Bhaiya stood in a corner, scratching his head. “Move. You’re counting wrong,” Bhaiya said, grabbing both her hands…Bhaiya tickled her waist and she squirmed. 360

Genda chupke chupke Bhaiyā ke kamre mein tauliyah mein lapete hue kapaṛe rakhne jā rahi thī. Mere dil mein khadbadī huī aur dabe paun bilī kī tarah mein bhī pahunchī aur darar mein se jhānkne lagī. Genda farsh par baithī kapaṛe gin gin kar alag kar rahī thī. Bhaiyā kone mein khaṛe sar khujā rahe the. “Haṭ. Ghalat gin rahi hai.” Bhaiyā ne us ke donon hāth pakaṛ kar kahā…Bhaiyā ne us kī kamar mein jo gadgadī kī to taṛap uṭhī.

Aside from being surrounded by laundry, Genda is viewed only by Bibi, a vision further narrowed by a crack in the door. Thus, when Genda and Bhaiya enact a transgression of religious and class boundaries through sex, they are still enclosed within the domestic setting of the home, and the de-sensationalized, curious but confused gaze of the child.

Through her gaze, their relative positions are not completely leveled—when Genda slaps

Bhaiya, Bibi assumes that her older brother will “throttle her” (galā ghonṭa)—but what follows instead, indicated only through the vague language of Bibi’s shock and surprise, is something quite different.361 The result is a shift of Bibi’s childhood worldview, certainly, but the walls of the room remain in place. There is never a moment of dramatic exposure, where the consequences of such an action become inevitable, nor is there the

360 Chughtai, Liḥāf aur dīgar afsāne, 172. 361 Ibid. 200 ideologically transparent horror of the language of exploitation, which Bibi at this point does not have access to. Afterward, Genda shares her experience with Bibi under the same trees where they played, and then will once again go off to prepare the starch. 362

The children of the household remain children, and the home itself retains its stable enclosures, but something within the children themselves has changed. There has been a shift, a growth, which the home maintains.

In fact, even Bibi’s shock at what she sees is re-incorporated into the setting of the compound, which acts as the ground upon which she can work out an intense desire to experience what Genda has been through for herself. Her admiration for Genda does not diminish, but rather increases, as she “yearned to see a dream behind closed eyes in which there was a tiny little bride, and to be immersed in the world of that idea [jī chāhtā thā chupkī ānkhon band kiye hue koī khwāb dekhtī rahun, jis mein koī nanhī munī dulhan ho, aur phir isī khyāl kī duniya mein gam ho jāoun].363 Hearing the gardener approaching, she lies down on the ground and hopes that he would “tickle her waist,” but he does not, and instead scolds her for getting her clothes dirty.364 Again, Chughtai transforms a discourse on dirt and respectability by pairing dirt and desire, and by bringing filth into the middle-class home rather than banishing it. The gardener Mewa

Ram, on the other hand, “carelessly” whittles a stick of bamboo, and there is no agony of attraction.365 Bibi is the one crossing lines, because she is a child and it is her unique ability to do so. The situation diffuses the dynamics of power between the child and

362 Ibid., 173. 363 Ibid. 364 Ibid. 365 Ibid. 201 gardener as Mewa Ram’s ordinary tenderness towards her allows her desire to exist without consequence. It is ensconced within the care of adults who have larger concerns, but it also disrupts the ordering of Bibi as the entitled member of a well-to-do family as against the employee. Bibi’s yearning, the raśk to be in Genda’s place, allows desire to cross the implicit boundaries of social order while maintaining the ordinary safeties of childhood and home.

Bibi is sent away from home and thus is not there to witness whatever drama may have ensued due to the birth of Genda’s child, and this appears again to maintain Bibi’s youthful innocence regarding the harsh punishments that accompany such violations of class and communal boundaries.366 When she returns home, and after her dream about the universe of children, Bibi visits the mother and her child and Chughtai focuses on

Genda’s youth and vulnerability. “Hearing my footsteps, she startled, and began to look at me with fear…How thin Genda had become.”367 They discuss, uncomprehendingly, why it was that Genda didn’t receive the extra food and care usually accorded to a woman who had given birth. This was not the widow who threatened the household with her youth, but rather the same young girl who grew up with its protections, and it is in part the limitations of Bibi’s own youthful understandings that offer an ordinary, un- sensationalized location to grow with and around Genda.

It is implied, with Bibi’s return, that it is the home that must change. And yet,

Bibi’s dream of children floating in space promises something that is, at the same time, much greater: it is an internal transformation in which Bibi sees all children as familiar,

366 Ibid., 174. 367 Ibid., 176. 202 all children as related, and all can be recognized in their differences. In the space of

Bibi’s mind, the enclosures of the home thus expand to universal proportions, and the lives within it—even those that appear from beyond death, like Mewa Ram—fill the empty space of the void with their embodied potential. Each child individual with their own distinctions, and yet each child part of an endless common space. These figures— articulations of the lives that have touched Bibi and have played their part in her formative years, are not the dissemblance of home, but its articulations. “By itself, articulation,” says Nancy:

is only a juncture, or more exactly the play of the juncture: what takes place where different pieces touch each other without fusing together, where they slide, pivot, or tumble over one another, one at the limit of the other—exactly at its limit—where these singular and distinct pieces fold or stiffen, flex or tense themselves together and through one another, unto one another, without this mutual play—which always remains, at the same time, a play between them— ever forming into the substance or the higher power of a Whole.368

The play of these young girls alongside one another creates a space for the mutual transformation of each, without allowing Genda to become Bibi’s own project or subject of ideological solutions. Ending with the two girls sitting together where the illiterate

Genda dictates a letter for Bibi to write and send to Bhaiya, the extant fissures of Bibi’s privileged position regarding Genda has not been turned into an artificial unity. 369

However, as Bibi sits and plays with Genda’s baby, Chughtai brings the Muslim girl and child widow into a delicate intimacy that has the potential to grow beyond the categories that have enclosed them, to introduce an ambiguity to their relative positions and its

368 Nancy, “Literary Communism,” 76. 369 Ibid., 178. 203 potentials. Disparaged and mistreated, yet still figured within the domestic space, Genda and her child can be the beginning of an answer to the questions posed by Bibi’s dream.

Demonstrated here is a progressive internalization of embodied social life. Chughtai uses in her sensual descriptions of domestic relationships concrete metaphors that grow, pervade, and transform the assumptions of identity rooted in caste, class, and community, along with their concurrent associations with social and national belongings. In

Chughtai’s “Roots,” the bonds of inter-communal commitments grow and develop through time between two houses. In “Two Hands,” it is within the havelī walls that

Chughtai uncovers the filth of every household member, implicating the most principled and objectively rigorous social structures in the participation of caste and class oppression. Then, with the acknowledgement of the somatic desire that dwells there, in

“Genda” Chughtai reincorporates the problematic figures of the widow and the Muslim into the inner sanctum of domestic space.

Chughtai creates movement not only in the conceptions of social structures, and a de-naturalization of identity and status, but also begins to re-animate the divisions between the objects of realism and the internal spaces first placed before the Urdu- speaking public in neo-romantic Indian literature. In so doing, the objective world is again figured as capable of responding to the incorporation of the marginalized subject and is not frozen in a hypostatization that has no other solution than a “final” one in the form of direct action upon the bodies of vulnerable minorities. The Muslim matriarch, the 204 low-caste woman, and the child widow become part of a space of literary embodiment that must change with their inclusion.

Of course, the change that must happen did not begin, nor does it end with

Chughtai’s short stories. The child narrator that is capable of surprise and horror at

Genda’s treatment must one day grow up. It is also quite clear that Genda is left to live in a precarious state, despite her presence on the family compound. Her vulnerability, which operates in this story to justify sympathies for her condition, also renders her unable to claim her right to existence. These are areas where Chughtai’s worlds of recent past, the enclosed spaces of the havelī, must necessarily open up to the world, and her middle- class homes must necessarily give way to the active and resistant voices of the present. 205

Conclusion

The political realism of Munshi Premchand, Sa’adat Hasan Manto and Ismat

Chughtai varies quite widely in language, content, and form, but this is in part due to the specific concerns they each explored within their moment. One thing that connects them all is that their work interrogates notions of national identity and belonging through new aesthetic strategies that present India as the location of many different contexts, identities and communities and their negotiation of social oppression and conflict. These innovations acted to politicize art in a period defined by aestheticized politics, where communal and national identities were conceived through incendiary rhetoric regarding

Muslims and Hindus, India and Pakistan, Communism and Democracy. The work of these three authors continually shifted the purpose of aesthetics from one of superficial justification to a questioning of the concepts of progress, development, and belonging.

In the decades preceding Indian independence, Premchand expressed a desire to expand the aesthetic universe to include elements of Indian life that had been left out of the realism of Europe and the United States, but also those elements that had been missing from Indian texts written by and for elite Indian audiences. In particular,

Premchand sought to bring into print a literary world which depicted not only love and beauty, but also oppression and struggle. Premchand’s deep familiarity with Persian and

Urdu literature, his translations of English, French and Russian texts from English, as well as his participation as a creator of Hindi language texts, enabled him to write a corpus which made use of all these elements: a composite vernacular from which a faceted picture of various Indian communities could emerge. Such a picture included the 206 national identity of an independent India, and so Premchand’s texts contain the visible tension between the project of Hindi as a supposedly native language and Urdu as the vernacular of North India’s former ruling elite. Premchand’s representation of low caste, or untouchable characters also edited out much of the language of actual Dalit political movements because their rhetoric often did not cohere with the anti-imperialist thrust of

Premchand’s work. But Premchand’s work still contains elements of these contradictions rather than eliding them altogether. The literary spaces of Indian Muslims, the classical

Indian texts made available through the work of English Orientalists, and the modern realisms contained in English novels are all present as elements of an expansive and novel literary universe.

It was not only registers of language which enable Premchand to create a composite of Indian literature, but also his use of composite figurations that interrogated both domestic and foreign beliefs and practices. Much in the same way his arrangement of different South Asian languages created a textual linguistic community of a diverse

Indian literary space, his recursive figurations of characters explore the limits and possibilities that resulted from the colonial encounter. This again destabilizes nationalist notions of “tradition” as those practices which have always been done and therefore must always be continued by focusing on ways in which tradition can fail in its goals as much as those beliefs that are viewed as belonging to the modern colonial state.

However, Premchand’s placement of new languages and subjects in the same literary space for the first time also resulted in a literary structure where it was very difficult for the victims of oppression—particularly Dalit characters—to exceed their 207 narrative boundaries. In order to demonstrate the realities of caste oppression, Premchand ultimately re-produced it in literary form, and there were few indications as to ways that his Dalit subjects could ultimately escape from their abject position. This where Ajay

Navaria’s writing has stepped in to once again break apart the narrative structures of

Premchand’s stories to bring into literature the ways that the Dalit subject herself exceeds the limits of sympathetic narratives.

While it was Premchand’s practice to build up narrative structures that could include multi-faceted aspects of Indian life, Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s stories almost indiscriminately tear them down, depicting the social and political upheaval of the post- war and Partition eras. Manto consistently focuses on fractured and unstable realities that gesture towards the hypocrisies of national duty and belonging. By undermining narratives—even, sometimes, his own—and by failing to let his narratives end in resolution, conclusion or culmination, Manto succeeds in figuring the chaotic present was actively elided by imperialist and nationalist politics. The imperialist call to duty of

World War II, the nationalist and communalist rhetoric of Partition, and even the romantic leaps of established aesthetic tropes themselves are all targets of Manto’s critiques.

Not only did Manto create a profoundly innovative aesthetic that undermined socially determined notions of beauty, respectability and duty, but he also interrogated the aesthetic technologies of film that could be used in the service of nationalist and communal narratives. This was not the iconoclasm of art versus truth, but rather a demonstration of truth within art that could expose the process of creating cultural 208 aesthetics and, through that, reveal the means of transforming the focus of aesthetic power to one in service to its audiences rather than in service to nationalism. By using the distant aesthetic qualities of literature to critique the immediacy of film, Manto creates a literary-cinematic space that acts to intervene in the social investment in the highly charged rhetoric of national belonging and communalism.

Manto then pushes the boundaries of aesthetic distance into outright abstraction when he takes as his subject the atrocities of Partition. It is because of this abstraction, rather than despite it, that Manto can implicate the actors involved in Partition violence, even when other Partition narratives participated in denial and justification. By using multi-valent language, the elision of places and names, and an almost bloodless depiction of violence, the residual focus of the narrative remains on the cruelty, absurdity, and ultimately the preventability of that violence. These depictions tear through attempts to

“other” the perpetrators by declining to identify both is victims and its perpetrators with particular religious or national communities, instead revealing the way that each act is an attack on one’s own.

But while it is fundamentally necessary to acknowledge the conceits of narratives that have aspirational claims but ultimately disguise more base intentions of self-interest, what Manto’s narratives do not do is present a clear location from which to build a notion of community that is capable of containing reality’s more ordinary truths. As a result,

Manto’s abbreviated narratives can easily be cast as belonging to an interior space that is disconnected from the very social and political realities he had been trying to convey.

Rather than tearing down narratives and relying upon the language of the ineffable, Ismat 209

Chughtai takes subjects that were considered too private to be part of public discourse and couches them in a visceral language of sensuality and physicality that makes their conception possible, while at the same time disassembling oppressive hierarchical structures that deny the existence of Muslim and Dalit women and the illegitimate child.

Chughtai’s private interiors actively question public and political discourse by pointing out the ways in which its logic is often at a great distance from the reality it adjudicates. In Chughtai’s depiction of Partition, her focus on the internal space of the home demonstrates how entirely foreign to those spaces the concept of national and communal belonging was. By describing the sharing of physical space, food, bodily fluids as well as the emotions of love, rancor, and reconciliation, Chughtai creates a picture of belonging based on the careful tending of families and neighborly relationships rather than communal affiliation or naturalized claims to a homeland. Chughtai uses the metaphor of “roots” to describe these social entanglements, thus refiguring the idea of blood and soil as that which determines the validity of nationalist claims to the idea of the sociality of life, birth, and death as that which determines the interconnectedness of community.

At the same time, Chughtai does explore soil as the “dirt” of social relations. She points out the ways in which the freedom from filth or a life spent in it are the result of highly unstable and socially determined structures. Chughtai uses both literal dirt and its more metaphorical connotations as she points out the ways in which respectability is created by the labor of people who are not afforded the same social status. She reveals this hierarchical structure in ways that signal its arbitrariness. Ultimately, Chughtai uses 210 the metaphor of soil as a ground upon which the subjects of domestic caste labor can stand to build a vision of a more just arrangement, one where the difficulty of hard and unpleasant tasks can result in the respect it deserves.

Despite charges that Chughtai unquestioningly followed the dictates of Socialist

Realism, her stories do not only center around narratives that glorify the worker and that take labor to be the essential element of human value. Chughtai also explores the themes of widowhood, adolescence, and female desire, and she places them in a domestic space that removes much of the nationalist anxieties that surround those figurations. Chughtai encloses these issues in the limited narratives of girls who are only just coming to understand the tumult of their desires—those that are contradictory to their own thoughts and assumptions as well as those that are contradictory to the logic of class, caste and communal belonging—and by doing so removes the melodrama of shame and redemption that often accompanies such narratives. By introducing the illegitimate child into childhood conceptions of the adult world, Chughtai shows the ways in which the he is already the result of ordinary, intimate desires, and therefore as much a part of the social fabric as any child. This incorporation of the illegitimate child also makes it impossible to view the domestic space as a nationalist refuge from the encroachments of colonialism and modern capitalism, since it is never depicted as a pure, unadulterated area of sexless female domesticity. Instead, the shelter of the home becomes the promise of social belonging within the world, expanding the domestic space to encompass the acceptance of all of those at the margins of political space. 211

While close readings have revealed the way in which the writing of these authors challenges notions of national progress and social hierarchies, it would still be useful to look at their work even more broadly, and to determine the transformations and contradictions that are contained even within their own careers. In addition to the work explored here, all these writers have written extensively about art and writing itself.

While such commentaries may never solve the riddle of intention—that problem which lurks behind any exhibition of a “committed” literature—they could at the very least indicate the ways in which their own writing fulfilled or conflicted with their own narratives of what literature should or could be.

The particular time period of these works coincides with an explosion in new visual technologies, and the ways that these writers interacted with or even created visual media remains understudied. Although Premchand only briefly wrote for film to try and earn enough money to stabilize his literary press ventures, Premchand’s writing took place at a time when the possibilities of film and lithographic printing were transforming the aesthetic landscape, and several of his stories have since been adapted to both the big and small screen.370 Manto and Chughtai both wrote quite extensively for films, but in addition films continue to be made that reference their literature and their lives. Although it has been more than half a century since the Progressive Writers Association disbanded, their influence clearly persists, and plays a role in the political debates of our own time.

The implications of the works discussed here continue to have a strong relevance today. “Progress” must both be an aspiration and, also, a subject of critique if we are to

370 Ashok Raj, “Pen and Camera,” India International Centre Quarterly 36, no. 1 (2009), 16. 212 find a way to politicize art in a meaningful way. We cannot simply build imagined futurities but must also find ways of conceiving the present in a way that accounts for the oppressions of the past. And perhaps most importantly, we must continue to listen to the ways in which the marginalized and excluded finds her voice in the contemporary moment: something that is not a “project” of aesthetics per say, though it could entail an ethics of reading which seeks out the voice of the future in the silences of the past.

213

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