वागीश्वरी

 

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 ]