Allahabad Posts

“A for Prayagraj: A Short Biography of Allahabad” by Udbhav Agarwal

‘It must have been five or ten years ago,’ Akshat began, unprompted, ‘when Holi fell on a Friday.’ If Chowk ki Holi was famous for its booming processions and rowdy play, then the Chowk Masjid delivered the most teeming morning prayers in Allahabad. The Holi procession was to pass next to the masjid at midday for the muezzin’s call. On the day of, a sea of white kurta’s hesitated as they approached the masjid. From the other end, a colourful brigade staggered forward. A handful of gulal and there would have been blood.

‘It was such a beautiful sight,’ Akshat declared proudly, ‘for the ten minutes, as soon as the azan began, all song-band was immediately halted. People … all people stood in silence. They came, went in for the prayers, came out, the songs began at once.’

One story followed another, as if they were waiting to be summoned. Akshat told me about the parade of horses (‘Duldul ke ghodhe’) that is taken out during Muharram, and the uneventfulness with which a Hindu family (Bachaji’s) paid for it. I learnt that if Muharram and Dussehra fall on the same day in Allahabad, the Muslims don’t lift the bad taziya ( a procession carrying a giant replica of the tomb of Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Hussain) that year. Akshat’s great-grandfather was the only Hindu landlord in the Muslim neighbourhood of Chail. He had such a good relationship with the residents that they gave him the title of Asharfi Lal. Even Akshat grew up referring to him as Asharfi Lal. When his great-grandfather passed away, Akshat remembered, his Muslim neighbours didn’t let his family light a stove in their household. They brought all the food. In fact, for most of his life, Akshat had seen Hindus and Muslims playing Holi together. Even on that fateful Friday years ago.

‘And now?’ I asked him.

These days …’ Akshat snapped in anger, ‘Jai Shri Ram slogans are shouted like a rallying call in the same celebrations.’

What were these stories about? And how had they disarmed Akshat?

In his treatise Awadh Symphony, Aslam Mahmud describes the cosmopolitan fabric of Allahabad under the Mughal empire:

Ganga-Jamuni culture [was] the culture of the plains of Northern India, especially the Doab region of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, regarded as the cradle of the fusion of Hindu and Muslim cultures. […] While the diversity came with the migration of different groups who settled in this region, the unity came from the peaceful coexistence of these varied communities and cultures. There [were] no fault lines and the mixed social fabric [was] not brittle or fragile. […] Festivals were shared and there was mostly an atmosphere of conviviality.

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Allahabad or Prayagraj as it has now been rechristened is going to the polls on Sunday, 27 Feb 2022, in the fifth phase of the Uttar Pradesh state elections. It is a crucial election since it unclear whether the present chief minister will return to power with a simple majority or will he and his ruling party, the ultra-nationalist espousing Hindutva politics, the BJP, be given a decent fight at the polls by the opposition especially the Samajwadi party? Will caste be a significant factor or will the rise of communalism affect polling? Will the rising prices of basic commodities be a key factor or will the construction of the Ram temple at Ayodhya surpass all other considerations of daily existence? No one knows. Uttar Pradesh is India’s largest state. It sends the largest number of members to Parliament. It has tradionally been a state that is keenly watched by politicians, psephologists, journalists and of course by Indian citizens themselves. The idea of Indianess is a conundrum. The sub-continent is known for its syncretic culture. Can a hegemonic narrative tear this intricate social construct called India apart? Again, no one can tell.

Allahabad is a city known for hosting the mahakumbh mela, every twelve years. It is also considered to be the site of the confluence of three rivers, triveni sangam, of the Ganga, Yamuna and the mythical river Sarasvati, mentioned in the Rig Veda. It is also known for being the city of rich cultural tradition, a centre of learning, literary stalwarts, origin of many schools of poetry and literature, language and much else. But today, the emphasis is increasingly on its Hindu characteristics, which as political scientist Udbhav Agarwal points out in A for Prayagraj: A Short Biography of Allahabad is only aspect of this incredible city, “…this place, a centripetal force that spools you back?…Yeh shehar kasturi re.”

Read A for Prayagraj: A Short Biography of Allahabad, published by Aleph Book Company. Like the book title itself, perhaps this slim biography will give insights into the syncretic culture that is the soul of our Indianness.

24 Feb 2022

An extract from “Indian Genre Fiction”

Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Present Futures (eds. Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani and Anwesha Maity) is a fascinating collection of essays. There are articles on popular fiction in late colonial Tamil Nadu, to novels of Urdu, 19th-century Bengali chapbooks, science fantasy of Leela Majumdar and Sukumar Ray, Hindi pulp literature, retelling of the Mahabharata in Krishna Udaysankar’s The Aryavarta Chronicles and Amruta Patil’s Adi Parva. But the essay that I read and re-read was Ira Pande’s tremendous “Hearts and homes: A perspective on women writers in Hindi”. Being the daughter of the very popular Hindi writer Shivani and a fluent speaker in English and Hindi, Ira Pande shares her fascinating perspective on inhabiting the Hindi literary world and what it means being bilingual.

With the permission of the publishers, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, here are two extracts from this brilliant essay. (pps. 94-95 and 96-97)

Allahabad in the ’60s was home to some of the greatest writers of those times. Harivansh Rai Bachchan had left Allahabad for Delhi by then, but there were other more famous chhayavad poets still around (Sumitranandan Pant, Mahadevi Verma and Nirala), Firaq Gorakh-puri, Amrit and Sripat Rai (Premchand’s sons, both writers and publishers), Ilachandra Joshi, VDN Sahi and Usha Priyamvada, to name just a few. And of course, there was Shivani. However, along with others of her tribe, such as Salma Siddiqi and Mannu Bhandari, her kind of writing was passed off as romantic fluff or domestic sagas that housewives ordered by mail as part of a gharelu (domestic) library scheme. The very popularity of these women writers became a weapon to use against their literary output. To the supercilious self-styled critics who pronounced judgment on what was to be considered accept-able as literature, this space was only meant for those who wrote for a different audience, one that had a sophisticated palate developed on the ‘modern’ fare of European and contemporary American fiction. Certain subjects were taboo in this high-minded world: romance and bourgeois lives headed this list.

Somewhere by the ’70s, then, the small town became an object of ridicule: it was valourised in romantic literature and cinema but actually hated and mocked at in the real. Small wonder then, that its inhabitants (who suffered from a crippling form of low self-esteem since birth) ran into hiding and tried to ape the big-city culture by writing, speaking and dressing like the metropolitan sophisticates they yearned to become. When this happened, the country lost all those delightful rivulets that fed the creative river of the Grand National Dream. The homogenisation of culture took over: slogans replaced feelings. The joy went out of fun as its definition changed into something wrought by high-minded nationalist agendas. Political correctness has a lot to answer for.

Upon reflection, it appears to me that Shivani’s most prolific literary output and some of her most memorable and popular novels date to the years when Hindi magazines were avidly read across North India. Among these, Dharmyug (edited then by the formidable Dharmvir Bharati, a widely respected novelist and dramatist) occupied pride of place. Published by Bennett and Coleman (referred to henceforth as B&C), its owners (Sahu Jain and Rama Jain) promoted creative writing and later endowed the Gyanpeeth Award, the first privately endowed prestigious literary award for writers in various Indian languages. The Bennett and Coleman Group (later known as the Times of India group) also brought out a clutch of other magazines. Among these were Sarika (contemporary Hindi writing, edited by Kamleshwar) and Dinaman (a political and economic weekly, edited by Agyeya), both respected for their content and editorial gravitas. Filmfare, a film magazine, and the Illustrated Weekly of India were their popular English-language publications. The Hindustan Times group, owned by the Birlas, published Saptahik Hindustan (as a rival to Dharmyug), Kadambari (as an alternative to Sarika) and vied with each otherto publish serials by the most popular Hindi writers of those days. Throughout the ’50s and ’60s, there was not a single library or reader in North India that did not subscribe to these magazines.

Almost all of Shivani’s novels – certainly her most popular ones – were first published as serials in one or the other magazines mentioned above. Her most well-known novel, Krishnakali, published as a serial in Dharmyug in the ’60s, was later published as a novel by Gyanpeeth (the publishing house run by the B&C group). In addition to these magazines, two others (Navneet and Gyanoday) I can recall from then were modelled on the popular American publication, Reader’s Digest. Shivani’s travelogues, essays and memorial tributes were regularly published in these Hindi digests.

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Naturally, the serialised novel had its own effect on the writing it spawned. Fans wrote furious letters to Shivani when she betrayed their hopes (such as by killing off a character) or when she did not spend enough time on a particular strand of the narrative. This close bond between writer and reader was perhaps what contributed to the intimacy that readers developed over the years with their favourite writers. My sister Mrinal Pande (who edited Saptahik Hindustan in the ’90s) recalls how typists vied with each other to type out Shivani’s (always) handwritten manuscript when she sent in a fresh instalment so that he/she would be the first to read it! The circulation of magazines jumped by as much as 55 per cent when her novels were being serialised and siblings fought with each other to grab the magazine to read it first when it was delivered to private homes. Often they tore the pages out so that they could share it among themselves.

What gave this genre its enormous reach and popularity was that these stories were significant documentaries. I would say that that it was reality fiction based on real-life characters and episodes and invisible to the writers based in our up-and-coming metros who consciously distanced themselves from these provincial lives to become more acceptable to a wider, international literary world. This is a fact often overlooked when tracing the evolution of Hindi writing. As Vasudha Dalmia’s book on fiction and history reveals, novels located in Allahabad, Agra, Aligarh, Banaras or Lucknow give us an insight into the social landscapes that were shaping middle-class lives in the ’50s and ’60s.2 Beneath the romantic tales of young women and men were rich subplots that reveal the gradual breakup of orthodox joint families, the effect of education on the emancipation of women in provincial India and the effect of migration from small towns to industrial cities. The language of everyday conversation in middle-class homes and amongst families, the social terms of exchange between men and women, workers and employers are important markers of a world we seek today and cannot find because it no longer exists. What are often dismissed as kitchen tales and romantic fiction stood firm on a foundation because it was supported by religion and ritual, food and taboos, folk remedies and aphorisms that nourished clans and villages. In the tightly packed houses of our old shahars that were separated by narrow lanes, the smells and sounds that travelled across neighbours became rich lodes of narratives that had the authenticity of real lives. The bonds between Hindu and Muslim homes, or between upper- and lower-caste settlements were strong threads that wove the fabric of our social communities. A deep suspicion of the other community was balanced by an equally strong love for individual men and women. Look for these common narrative strains and you will find them in all writers who lived and thrived in little India.

3 Feb 2019

Ashim Choudhury’s “The Sergeant’s Son”, Review, publ in The Hindu Literary Supplement

Ashim Choudhury’s “The Sergeant’s Son”, Review, publ in The Hindu Literary Supplement

The Sergeant's Son, Ashim Choudhury( My review of Ashim Choudhury’s The Sergeant’s Son has been published in the print edition of the Hindu Literary Supplement today. Here is the link: http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-literaryreview/narrow-little-lives/article5080469.ece . The review is also given below.)

There came a time when the Biswas children were tired of living in Miltry Camp, particularly after Ashok and Nimmi moved out to another part of the camp, far away from where they lived. After that Major Xavier was posted out, taking with him Peter and Benny, the only officers’ children whom they played with. … By now they were among the oldest residents of the camp, but with so many newcomers they sometimes felt like strangers.

The Sergeant’s Son is exactly what the title suggests; the story of Kalu, Sergeant Samar Biswas’s son. Narrated by Kalu, the third of four brothers, the book details his life from his birth in Barrackpore till his departure to Kanpur to join the Air Force as a Radio Telephone Operator. The book, set between mid-1960s and 1977, is about an ordinary life in the Air Force. The children study in the nearest school; their mother, Basanti imposes a strict routine supervising their grooming, meal times, and homework every single day and insisting on prayers every Thursday evening. Their dour father is the disciplinarian whom they dread since he is not averse to beating the sons mercilessly, especially the renegade eldest Taposh or Borda, with a “shoe that was handy or a leather belt that been specially ordered for the purpose.”

The story documents the narrow little lives that the Biswases share with the other “migratory birds” of the Air Force station. A bunch of characters waft in and out of the book, never to appear again — many of the playmates at the station, other personnel like Corporal Dhar and his wife, Kakima, Mathew Uncle, the Vermas, the Anglo-Indian family called Sampios or the teachers like “Blanch teacher” and “Karachi teacher”, and the women who clean the bathrooms. Kalu even describes the few early sexual encounters with Bimla Devi, the maid who seduced him when he was alone at home and with his classmate Amit. Later the Std. IX geometry teacher, Mr. Shankar, assaults Kalu in a drunken stupor.

For someone who speaks and writes English well, a fact acknowledged even by his teachers, Kalu’s obsession with the language is trying. His discomfort presumably stems from the fact that his competence at the language masks his social class but his origins still make him insecure. In Bombay, Kalu and his siblings feel inferior to the five Sampio children even though they never went to school. Since they “spoke the Queen’s Language no one could think poorly of them.” In Allahabad, Kalu “was never truly part of the English-speaking gang. He hovered on its periphery — a low-caste pretending to be a Brahmin; or more appropriately, a soldier’s son trying to mix with officers’ children. The gang mostly consisted of defence officers’ children.” But he realises that his ability to speak fluent English “gave him a passport”, probably to improve his status in life.

A first novel tends to have autobiographical elements in it but the preoccupation with that seems to be the trademark of much Indian fiction in English, with the writer inevitably getting absorbed in minute details. The Sergeant’s Son is no different but it is a story told competently.

1 Sept 2013 

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