A Suitable Boy

Vikram Seth will do a sequel to A Suitable Boy. It’ll be called A Suitable Girl. Seth will get – hold your breath – 1.7 million pounds from Hamish Hamilton.

A Suitable Boy is a masterpiece. It’s a book that you never wish ends, and the writer almost grants you your wish.

It’s the nearest to reading Premchand in English.

I read it many years after it was first published. The reason for the delay was its daunting size; it’s supposed to be the longest novel in the English language.

But once you begin to read, there’s just no way you can put it down.

All through the book I wanted Lata Mehra to marry Amit Chatterjee, but she marries the straightforward and boring Harish Khanna.

It's a prudent choice, I guess. Girls who marry interesting guys suffer.

I wanted Mann Kapoor and Saeeda Bai to be together. But she refuses even to see him in the end, preferring agonizing loneliness.

Again, a prudent (though heart-wrenching) decision. Tawaifs and young lovers don’t have a future together.

Even Jawaharlal Nehru is a character in the book. The author doesn’t have him speak. Nehru, while spending a night alone in a dak bungalow, reminiscences of his pre-independence era affair.

The book creates images of the fictional Brahmpur that to me brought back memories of Bahedi, a small town on the Bareilly-Katgodam railway line where I had extended stays in the early 1980s. And, once while I was at the guesthouse, ND Tiwari, who was passing through, came and camped for the night in the next room.

The novel brings to life a young nation’s phoenix-like rise from the ashes of partition. It weaves several complex themes that a nascent nation grappled with often unsuccessfully and yet never wavered from the chosen path. In so many ways, A Suitable Boy is an accompaniment to Ramchandra Guha’s India After Gandhi.

The book is an epic and Seth is a master. A Suitable Boy can effortlessly translate into a blockbuster Hindi movie. Ashutosh Gowarikar, with his talent and attention to detail, can easily turn the book to celluloid.

I had tried reading The Golden Gate (an imitation of Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin written in iambic tetrameter verse), but couldn’t move beyond the initial phase. Pet iguanas didn’t appeal to me then; they don’t even now.

Image: http://www.brokenenglish.com/dickss/portraits/images/vikram%20seth.jpg

Premchand & Manto

I was at a meeting earlier this week, where one of the topics discussed was the several languages of the South Asia. Hindi and Urdu are the main (and official) languages of India and Pakistan.

Shorn of the excesses of linguistic Puritanism and zeal on part of the establishments in India and Pakistan to distinguish the languages (and force officialese on the people), there really isn’t any substantial difference between the two. The word Hindustani captures the true essence of how hundreds of millions of people speak Hindi and Urdu language in large swathes of South Asia.

Munshi Premchand (1880-1936) and Sadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955) wrote in Hindustani. Manto used the Urdu script. Premchand alternated between Hindi and Urdu. I don’t know whether they ever met. I would imagine they must have met considering they were contemporaries and both wrote in Urdu. Both were tremendously influenced – their works indicate this in ample measures – by humanism. Both were overtly political but used literature to voice their views.
Not for them the empty rhetoric of form versus content or the argument of whether art should be for art sake or should art be a catalyst for socio-political change. They were firmly believed in using art as means to highlight the ills in the society they lived in. Both were briefly involved with the Hindi film industry as writers.

It’s perhaps my misfortune that I’ve read both only in English translations. I can’t read Urdu, and though I can read Hindi, I prefer to read fiction in English; I guess that’s because of habit and nothing else. I have read Premchand’s Godaan and a few short stories by Manto’s – Toba Tek Singh, Thanda Gohst (Cold Meat), among others.

Manto immigrated to Pakistan after the Partition of the subcontinent, and died soon thereafter. But before his premature death – triggered I think by the acute depression caused because he had to leave Bombay – created masterpieces of prose form.

Toba Tek Singh is one of them. I’m no literary expert, but I can’t think of too many parallels in world literature that can match Toba Tek Singh’s stark brutality. It evocatively depicts the lunacy of the Partition of the subcontinent through the experiences of the lunatic Toba Tek Singh.

This is how the story ends: “After fifteen years on his feet, he was lying face down on the ground. India was on one side, behind a barbed wire fence. Pakistan was on the other side, behind another fence. Toba Tek Singh lay in the middle, on a piece of land that had no name.” (Translated from Urdu by Richard McGill Murphy, available at the Words without Borders website: http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article.php?lab=toba

Premchand is said to have brought realism to Indian literature. Godaan’s simplicity hides the inherently unjust nature of the traditional Indian society. For a scholarly exposition on the novel, please take a look at the Literature section of Indianetzone website. The URL is: http://society.indianetzone.com/literature/1/godan.htm. The anonymous author of this piece emphasizes the new introduction to the book by Vasudha Dalmia.

Dalmia’s introduction to Godaan states: “Premchand presented in his fiction an understanding of the social reality decades before academic scholarship could “squarely face it”. She suggests the use of some essays from the volume of Subaltern Studies published in the early eighties for a greater comprehension of Godaan through political and social history of Awadh.”

Premchand’s international fame is also because the foremost Indian film-maker Satyajit Ray turned two of Premchand’s works – Sadgati and Shatranj Ke Khiladi (The Chess Players) – into memorable movies. Also, several short stories of Premchand (most memorable of these was, undoubtedly Kafan) have been turned into television films by Doordarshan. Also, while researching about Premchand on the internet, I discovered an absolutely amazing blog called Munshi Premchand’s Stories.

Manto's sketch from: http://www.urdustudies.com/auinfo/auphotos/Manto.jpg

Premchand's sketch from: http://munshi-premchand.blogspot.com/2006/03/blog-post_114178765150842259.html