Centenary Discourse : 2026
DEHATI
DUNIYA
An
Introduction
By BSM Murty
Dehati
Duniya is
the only novel written by Shivji. It is generally considered
to be the first ‘anchalik’ or regional novel or the prototypeof
this form of novel in Hindi fiction. But when this novel was firstcomposed
in 1921–22, such a well-defined genre of regional fictiondid
not exist in Hindi fiction. Also, it does not appear that Shivjihad
deliberately invented such a novel form that would herald a totally
new form of novel-writing in Hindi fiction. As he writes inits
preface, he did not compose this novel on his own volition, butdid
so on being spurred by the desire of his village folk, and only fortheir
‘entertainment’. He also clarified that he had not written it forearning
fame, but only on the promptings of his own creative self.
His
objective was only to write a novel that was closest to the life and
environment of his fellow villagers and in a language familiar to
them. For him it was clearly a daring experiment in the form ofthe
novel. “While writing this novel”, he says, “I had deliberately shut
my eyes to the dread of the high literary critics of my time.”
The
genesis of this type of novel lay in the unambiguous preferencesof
his village folk. This novel was not written as a comprehensiverealistic
depiction of a village environment for the entertainment andsatisfaction
of a cultured, educated urban readership. Instead, it was anew
experiment done exclusively for a rural class of people, depicting problems
close to their village life, written in a language familiar to them,
with the professed purpose of their sheer entertainment and enlightenment.
In
future novels in this genre of the ‘regional novel’, a language peppered
with local dialectal words was the instrument used to achieve
a realistic depiction of the character of a particular region, though
the plot, delineation of episodes and the characterization was
generally done from an urban viewpoint. In other words, these future
‘regional’ novels were attempts to envision the life in the villages
with the tinted glasses of an urban imagination, delineated in
a cultivated rural language for a readership with an urban ethos. Doodhnath
Singh, in one of his articles has emphasized this point: “No
novel with similar content and novel technique was written in later
Hindi fiction. Just as there is no other model of Bahati Gangaby
Shivprasad Mishra ‘Rudra’ in Hindi, similarly Dehati Duniya alsois
a unique creation in Hindi fiction.” (KT, 13–18) Shivji
wanted to show a mirror to the village folk in which they could
see a depiction of their real life. The feudal system of society in the
Indian villages at the beginning of the 20th century, lorded over by
the British raj, constantly being crushed in the relentless mill of oppression,
beset with various social and economic ills, and forced to live
a hellish life with rampant penury, ignorance, superstitions – the novelist’s
objective was to depict and put into focus a realistic picture of
this rural society, and thereby (urge a change) change (in) this horrific
scenario. The real purpose
was to create an awareness among them about the malaise they
were suffering from, and this could best be achieved in a language familiar
to them. In the preface, Shivji has written that he wanted to
write his novel in a language that could be understood with totalcomprehension
and without anyone’s help by even the most illiterate,ignorant
villager, ploughman and labourer in the field. The intent of the language in the novel was to have a
direct communion with the readers (or audience) whose life was to
be recreated. Language was not used as an end in itself, but only
as a means to an end. It was not language that had created the regional
ambience of the narrative, it was the regional ambience in the narrative
that had crafted the appropriate language for itself. These words in
the preface bear testimony to this: “I
belong to an interior village where, perhaps, only a very faint
light of the modern civilization may have reached.And
I have only faithfully tried to record whatever I saw and
experienced there. Not a single word in my narrative is
a product of my mind or imagination. Even the flow of
the language has been kept exactly as it is spoken by my
co-villagers. I can firmly assert that we, the educated people,
do not use in our everyday parlance even a fourth of
the proverbs and sayings that the villagers use in their common
conversations.”
Obviously,
the nature and flow of the language in this narration was not
a ‘product of the mind or imagination’ of the writer but reflected the
shades of the use of language by the villagers themselves in their everyday
communication. And the ‘regionality’ of the language was not
obtained through the use of the local words or their sounds; on the
contrary, (in the words of Doodhnath Singh): “the particular flavour
in Dehati Duniya comes out of the folk mythology and local colour
that grow out of the language, the dialogues and the ruralambience
of the novel”.
In
an important editorial note of Sahitya (Jan., ’61) about the language
of regional (‘anchalik’) novels, Shivji had written about the ‘waywardness
of language’ and the deliberate ‘contortions of style’ in such
‘regional’ novels and admonished their writers in this respect. He
had further written: “the writers of such novels are generally only
story-tellers, without an eye for the nuances of language…. It’s difficult
for such writers to absorb the words of local dialects in their Hindi
language which comes only from great endeavour and many of such
writers evince a lack of such endeavour. It would be a hazardous exercise
to create a random mixture in Hindi of dialect words of different
regions and localities, and thus corrupt Hindi language…. Words,
proverbs and turns of phrases from local dialects may be used for
such purpose but only with due discretion. They must weigh the possibility
of such dialectal words, etc to be fully comprehensible among
the far-flung readers of Hindi. My appeal to such writers of regional
novels is that they should not consider themselves only as‘gadhias’(makers),
but also as ‘jadias’ (stone-setters) of regionality in Hindi
language”.
When
Shivji was editing Premchand’s Rangbhoomi in Lucknow, he
was also writing his own novel Dehati Duniya, though he lost that manuscript
in the riots there. By then Shivji was fully acquainted with
the style and fictional technique of Premchand whose three or
four novels had already been published. But in Dehati Duniya there
was an apparent singularity not only in its use of language, but
even in its structure, technique and characterization. And behind
this singularity was the well thought-out objective of the
novelist to create a fictional world that adumbrated the real village
and its truthful environment. It is in this sense that (in the words
of Doodhnath Singh) “Dehati Duniya is a unique fictional example
of its own kind”. Recognized in the canon of Hindi novels as
the prototype of the regional (‘anchalik’) novel, Dehati Duniya recreates
not only the regionality of a Bhojpuri-speaking rural belt, but
prefigures an unparalleled prototypical picture of an Indian village
at the beginning of the 20th century. When we look into the narrative
at some depth, we get in all its episodes and characters the
quintessential image of the Indian rural society. And in this sense,
we get a rare coalescence of regionality and universality in this
novel in that whereas, on the one hand, its language reflectsits
regionality, its structural and technical aspects establish itsuniversality.
With its narrative structured in the
autobiographical mode, its technique is of a highly original and
experimental nature.
The child character
‘Bholanath’ constitutes the vantage point of the narrative and the
village ‘Ramsahar’ is his maternal home. His maternal grandfather was
the dewan of the zamindar Babu Sarabjeet Singh who had got a Brahman killed for acquiring a piece of land belonging to him, and
being a Brahman-killer, Sarabjeet Singh was ostracised by the village
society. His son Babu Ramtahal Singh could not be married precisely
on that account and had kept Budhia, the house-maid, as his concubine.
From Budhia, he had three daughters – Sugia, Batasia andFulgenia.
Much later he got married to Mahadei, the ninth daughter of
a very poor person, Babu Manbahal Singh, on payment of a heavy amount.
For his livelihood, Manbahal Singh had earlier also married all
his eight other daughter by selling them for money.Ramtahal
Singh became the zamindar after his father’s death.
Soon
thereafter, the narrator Bholanath’s maternal grandfather also passed
away, and consequently his father with his family had to move
to Ramsahar called by his maternal grandmother to look after the
dewanship. Squabbles between Ramtahal Singh’s concubine, Budhia,
and his newly wedded wife, Mahadei, had now become a regular
affair in the household. The mother of Ramtahal Singh paid the
village priest Pasupat Pande 1,000 rupees and asked him to go to Kamroo-Kamachchha
(the ‘Kamakhya’ deity) for the ritual worship for
the expiation of the sin of a Brahaman’s murder by her husband, Sarabjeet
Singh. Meanwhile, Pasupat Pande’s son, Gobardhan, had started
an amorous affair with Mahadei under the guise of expiatory rituals
at home. Afflicted
by the ‘brahmpishach’ (evil spirit), Ramtahal Singh now
remains continually ill. In the mean time, Manbahal Singh, his father-in-law,
gets an opportunity to cajole Budhia away with him and duping
her, too, sells her eldest daughter, Sugia, to a decoit, Gudari Rai.
Sensing Manbahal’s evil designs on her daughters, Budhia flees from
Manbahal’s clutches with her two other daughters and lodges a report
against Gudari Rai in the police station. On her way, Budhia meets
one Sohawan Modi who takes them to Gazipur with himself, where
Sohawan has a grocery shop. Budhia now starts living with Sohawan
Modi. Earlier, on the basis of Budhia’s report, the police sub-inspector
had conducted a raid on the house of Gudari Rai in which
the latter was killed, and Sugia, his widow, had been forced to
sleep with the sub-inspector in his police station living quarters. Meanwhile,
Pasupat Pande, after his travels of pilgrimage, returns to
Ramsahar, and arranges for a ‘puja’ at home for the propitiation of
the ‘brahmapishach’. At this time, in a brawl in the village, the ‘khalihan’
(harvest store) has been set to fire and the same subinspector arrives
in the village to investigate the case. The villagers give
him the welcome like a veritable son-in-law! Two days before the ‘chaura’
(platform for the propitiation of the evil spirit) is to be set up
for the ‘puja’, suddenly the ‘brahmpishach’ rides over Gobardhan. His
maternal uncle, Jurjodhan Tiwari, along with many other village exorcists
arrive to rid Gobardhan of the ‘pishach’ and there is a very interesting
mock-fight among the exorcists in which they get a sound thrashing.
In the last chapter of the novel, the narrator, Bholanath, is
going with his father in a ‘barat’ (wedding party) of his co-villager, Moosan
Tiwari’s nephew, and we get here a very hilarious picture of a
village wedding ceremony. Bholanath, the narrator, returns from the
‘barat’ to his father’s village for five-six days and on the day when he
is to go back to his maternal village, Ramsahar, the barber comes with
a sensational message from Ramtahal Singh. When Bholanath and
his father reach Ramsahar, they find Ramtahal Singh bewailing and
shedding tears to say that Gobardhan has eloped with Mahadei.
The
novel is divided into 11 chapters, each chapter beginning with
a local saying or proverb relevant to the content of that chapter. Every
chapter also has the completeness of a story, although all chapters
are intertwined like the strands in a rope. In the first chapter the
narrator gives an enchanting description of his childhood days spent
in his village. In the second chapter, he describes the household of
the zamindar Sarbjeet Singh of Ramsahar which forms the main locale
of the novel. In the third chapter, the narrator again returns to
his childhood days in his own village, and tells us that soon he is
to go with his father to Ramsahar, his maternal village, where his father
is going to serve as the dewan of Ramtahal Singh, the son of Sarabjeet
Singh, and where they will now start living in future. It is thus
that the narrative in the second chapter gets interwoven with the
main strand of the story of the first and the third chapters. The narrative
in the fourth chapter then takes forward the story of the second
chapter in which Sugia, the daughter born to Ramtahal Singh from
his concubine Budhia, is a witness to the killing of her decoit husband,
Gudari Rai, in the police raid, and consequently Sugia is forced
to sleep with the police sub-inspector. In the fifth chapter, the story
returns to the narrator’s childhood experiences in Ramsahar, his
maternal village, and ends with obvious insinuations about the romantic
liaison rapidly developing between Pasupat Pande’s son, Gobardhan,
and Mahadei, the newly-wedded wife of Ramtahal Singh.
In
the sixth chapter the story turns to the travels of PasupatPande
on a long pilgrimage. But in the seventh chapter, again, the story
returns to the narrator’s account of the religious discourses at the
‘Panchamandil’, the platform near the village temple, where the discussions
soon led to hot exchanges and breaking of heads, and then to
a fire in the harvest field. The eighth chapter again takes forward the
story of Pasupat Pande narrated in the sixth chapter. Similarly, the
ninth chapter takes up the story of the fire in the harvest field and
the coming of the police inspector for an investigation of the case
and his elaborate welcome by the villagers as narrated in the seventh
chapter. The tenth chapter also advances the story-line built up
in the sixth and eighth chapters where Gobardhan is afflicted by the
‘brahmapishach’ and his maternal uncle, Jurjodhan Tiwari and the
other exorcists have a serious brawl. In the last, eleventh chapter, the
narrative finally focuses on the narrator who is returning with the ‘barat’
to his own village. After spending a few days there, he is back to
Ramsahar where they learn the sensational news of the elopement of
Gobardhan with Mahadei. Thus it is quite clear that the whole narrative
in the novel is an intertwining of two parallel strands as in a
strong rope, and Bholanath, the narrator, has artfully interwoven them
in the narrative. Significantly, it is quite befitting that the story
of a village, being narrated for the first time with such realism, employs
the technique of an interwoven structure in the narrative adumbrating
the intertwining of a rope, a common metaphor for arural
setting.
Dehati
Duniya is
apparently unique in its rural ambience and a distinctively
appropriate technique. As Doodhnath Singh has written: “Though
written in 1926, Dehati Duniya employs a strikingly,modern
technique. Even Premchand had not used such a technique in
his novels written till then or even later…. Dehati Duniya is the first
novel in Hindi written in the ‘flashback’ technique. There was no
tradition of the use of such an extraordinary technique in Hindi fiction
of the immediately preceding period.” In fact, Dehati Duniya was
the first novel that came to be discussed in the critical discourse as
a prototype of the regional novel. Dehati Duniya was first critically noticed
only when the trend of regional fiction suddenly burst forth in
the decade of the ’50s, and the critical tools of analysis of such fiction
were subsequently forged for the purpose. The tradition of fictional
technique that had evolved in the novels of the Premchandera was
further re-defined by some critics from the point of view of
the newly-discovered genre of regional fiction for the revaluation of
Dehati Duniya, as an early exemplification of the new genre of the
regional novel. And it is amply recognized today (particularly, in
an observation by Bhrigunandan Tripathi) that “being such a game-changer
in the genre of the regional fiction and an unrivalled example
of an entirely new trend in Hindi fiction, Dehati Duniya has
not been accorded the kind of sharp and incisive evaluation that it
still deserves.”
Some
critics of Dehati Duniya have pointed out some technical flaws
in the novel, like general technical slackness, looseness of narrative
structure, and lack of appropriate diversity in the use of language
by the different characters. But such flaws are to be seen only due
to the application of inappropriate and biased critical criteria to the
novel. Besides, the observation also does not appear to be tenable that
the radically new technique employed in the novel has been achieved
inadvertently, or that the novelist was, perhaps, unaware of
the new technique being employed in the novel, due to its being significantly
new and different from the traditional form of novel writing.
Contrary to this, two facts from the writer’s personal life appear
to emphasise his developed sense of fictional art and his high technical
virtuosity. The writer had reiterated the fact in the prefaces of
the novel right from its first to its sixth edition that he wanted to
write another similar novel Hamara Gaon which he intends to complete
soon. Although he could not write this projected second novel,
but he published in 1950, in a children’s magazine Chunnu-Munnu, an
autobiographical account of his childhood days. It was later
published as a children’s book Mera Bachpan and was finally included
as the initial part in his autobiographical memoirs Mera Jeevan. And it is quite
remarkable that the portrait of Bholanth’s childhood
in both places remains almost identical; even the name ‘Bholanath’
also remains unchanged. That the writer did so purely coincidentally
is hard to believe.
Shivpoojan Sahay c. 1926
There
is another aspect of the writer’s personal life that casts ashadow
on the technical structure of the narrative in Dehati Duniy which
cannot be seen as purely coincidental. The writer’s genealogy is generally
thought to originate sometime towards the early decades of the
18th century. About seven or eight generations back, the writer’s first
ancestor had come with his parents from the Sherpur village in Gazipur
district of U.P. to his maternal village Unwans (south of Buxar
in Bihar) and settled there since. Another relevant fact in thiscontext
is that his ancestors had acquired all their landed property over
the decades as managers of zamindars. When all these factual details
are taken into account as we consider the use of technique and
the narrative structure of the novel, it is becomes almost impossible
to think that the writer has achieved such suggestiveness and
complexity and technical virtuosity in the structuring of the narrative
of the novel purely coincidentally. If Dehati Duniya is the first
Hindi novel written in the ‘flashback’ mode, then in the light of
the above facts it must be conceded that the writer must have made
such a complex and artistic use of fictional technique with full
knowledge. The novel from beginning to end is a pre-conceived, tightly
structured work of fictional art. And the writer in his work has
fully succeeded in achieving his objective of creating a fictional picture
of a real interior village of India.
The
contribution of Shivji to Hindi novel and short story has generally
been under discussion in the academic realm, but in the field
of literary criticism they have not received the attention they deserve.
The true import of the experiments made by him in respect of
language and technique in his short stories and his singular novel can
only be realized when his fictional output is evaluated in its proper historical
perspective. Most of his writings, barring these two books of
fiction – Vibhuti and Dehati Duniya – are a by-product of his long
career in journalism. Even these two books were written when he
was editing monthly journals like Marwari Sudhar, Matwala and Madhuri. He had taken to
journalism as the ideal path to the service of
the motherland. At the same time it also served as the sole means of
livelihood for him. His resignation from a job as a government school
teacher was also prompted by his zeal to serve in the freedom movement.
And journalism of a nationalist kind could serve both the
ends for him – service of the nation and earning a livelihood. In fact,
in those days of the freedom struggle serving the cause of Hindi was
synonymous with service to the nation. These were the reasons that
had prompted him to abandon fiction writing to devote himself to
nationalist journalism.
(C) Sahitya Aademi
[Excerpted fom SHIVPOOJAN SAHAY (literary monograph published by Sahitya Akademi, 2018, Rs.100. More articles on DEHATI DUNIYA can be read on vibhutimurty.blogpot.com ]
