Fiction as History

Vasudha Dalmia

Description

Vasudha Dalmia offers a panoramic view of the intellectual and cultural life of North India over a century, from the aftermath of the 1857 uprising to the end of the Nehruvian era. The North's historical cities, rooted in an Indo-Persianate culture, began changing more slowly than the Presidency towns founded by the British. Dalmia takes up eight canonical Hindi novels set in six of these cities—Agra, Allahabad, Banaras, Delhi, Lahore, and Lucknow—to trace a literary history of domestic and political cataclysms. Her exploration of the emerging Hindu middle classes, changing personal and professional ambitions, and new notions of married life provides a vivid sense of urban modernity. She argues that the radical social transformations associated with post-1857 urban restructuring, and the political flux resulting from social reform, Gandhian nationalism, communalism, Partition, and the Cold War shaped the realm of the intimate as much as the public sphere. Love and friendship, notions of privacy, attitudes to women's work, and relationships within households are among the book's major themes.
Preface

Introduction: North Indian Cities and the Hindi Novel

Part I. Towards Modernity

1. Merchant Lives in Mughal Agra and British Delhi

2. Wife and Courtesan in Banaras

3. The Holy City as the Field of Action

4. Lahore, Delhi, and the Bitter Truth of Independence

Part II. Modernist Conundrums

5. City, Civilization, and Nature

6. Culture Wars and a Cult Novel

7. On the Rooftops of Agra

8. Culture, Claustrophobia, and the New Capital of the Nation

Epilogue
Index

Sujets

• History of Asia

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 09 juillet 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781438476070
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

FICTION AS HISTORY
VASUDHA DALMIA

Fiction as History
The Novel and the City in Modern North India
Fiction as History: The Novel and the City in Modern North India by Vasudha Dalmia was first published by Permanent Black D-28 Oxford Apts, 11 IP Extension, Delhi 110092 INDIA, for the territory of SOUTH ASIA.
Not for sale in South Asia
Cover design by Anuradha Roy
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2019 Vasudha Dalmia
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dalmia, Vasudha, author
Title: Fiction as history : the novel and the city in modern north India
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, 2019 | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438476056 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438476070 (e-book)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
for
my mother
SARASWATI DALMIA
née Srivastava of Lucknow (1915–2010)
who so gracefully survived her share of struggles and equipped us to survive most of ours
Contents

Preface
Introduction: North Indian Cities and the Hindi Novel
I. TOWARDS MODERNITY
1 Merchant Lives in Mughal Agra and British Delhi
2 Wife and Courtesan in Banaras
3 The Holy City as the Field of Action
4 Lahore, Delhi, and the Bitter Truth of Independence
II. MODERNIST CONUNDRUMS
5 City, Civilization, and Nature
6 Culture Wars and a Cult Novel
7 On the Rooftops of Agra
8 Culture, Claustrophobia, and the New Capital of the Nation
Epilogue
Index
Preface
O VER THE YEARS I TAUGHT at the University of Tuebingen in Germany, my scholarly work focused primarily on the genesis of Hindi and Hindi literature in the late nineteenth century. At the University of California, Berkeley, where S.H. Vatsyayan ‘Agyeya’ had established the Hindi programme and taught in the 1960s and 1970s, I began to teach the literature of twentieth-century Hindi in a more consolidated way. The project that led to this book was conceived in conversation with my colleagues and students there.
My Indonesianist friend Sylvia Tiwon introduced me to the work of Pramodeya Ananta Toer, whose Buru Quartet brought home to me the peculiar nature of British colonialism. George Hart, a Tamilist of international renown, made me aware once more of how young Hindi was in comparison with Tamil. He also made me aware of the very different caste and social structures that prevailed in the various parts of the subcontinent and how they were reflected in the literatures that evolved there. Munis Faruqui, scholar of Mughal India, and Alexander von Rospatt, Buddhologist and Nepal specialist who joined us later, made me realize more than ever the plurality of religious and literary traditions in South Asia and their intense interaction over the centuries. My most sustained conversations were with my friend Raka Ray, a sociologist whose special focus is on gender studies. Her work on the emergence of the middle classes in India and the culture of servitude in Bengal exposed me to new thought. It was thanks to her that I read Bourdieu again and evolved a deeper interest in social history. A wide circle of friends offered warmth, sustenance, and counsel, for which I thank them warmly: Usha and Santosh Jain, Karine Schomer, Ralph Shevelev, Barbara and Tom Metcalf.
In the University Press Book Store next to the ‘Musical Offering’, the charming classical music store and café where we often spent our lunch break, I picked up many books almost incidentally; so many of them later became key to my work, amongst them Niklas Luhman’s Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, which provides the backbone of my analysis of changing intimacies in the novels discussed within the present book.
I thank my graduate students at Berkeley, most of them professors now, whose questions and range of research projects widened my intellectual horizons: Anita Ananthram, Sujata Mody, Shobna Nijhawan, Snehal Shingavi, Preetha Mani, Rahul Parson, Nikhil Govind, Vasudha Paramasivan, Gregory Goulding, and Sonal Acharya.
Later, I encountered the work of the students of the Berkeley architectural historian Dell Upton; Will Glover’s book on Lahore, Jyoti Hosagrahar’s on Delhi, and Swati Chattopadhyaya’s on Calcutta opened up new vistas on the history of the new and old cities of British India and the fraught relationship of the new to the old where the old existed, as in Lahore and Delhi. Preeti Chopra was to publish her work on Bombay later. Madhuri Desai’s book on Banaras will appear in 2017. Visits with Madhuri in Banaras mediated another kind of relationship to this city, in its present layout primarily a nineteenth-century creation. These young scholars added yet other dimensions to the wonderful work of Veena Oldenburg and Narayani Gupta on Lucknow and Delhi.
I was able to visit all the North Indian cities I engage with in my book and get a sense of the exact location of the novels I discuss here, of neighbourhood atmosphere and house type. And with that, inadvertently, I got a better sense of my own family history, of life in the narrow rooms of the courtyard-centred eighteenth-century haveli in which my father was born, of the extended family house presided over by my grandfather in which my mother grew up, and the brave new world she encountered as part of the first generation of literate women in her family.
Many, many friends and colleagues supported my project. In Chicago, when I presented an early version of my paper on Sara Akash that also discussed many other novels (since dropped from my project), the late Carol Breckenridge was the first to point out the connection between private and public in my novels, a public that penetrated the most intimate spheres.
Of my Berkeley friends and visitors there I thank Harsha Ram of Slavic Studies for the subtlety of his thought developed through long evenings spent together; Amita Baviskar for a long conversation after she heard the first presentation of my paper on Mohan Rakesh in San Diego; Ramya Sreenivasan for encouragement at a particularly low moment; Richa Nagar for providing me with material on her grandfather Amritlal Nagar—which then also provided insights into the Agra of his time.
In Banaras I thank the late Anandkrishna for answering my many questions and for his memories of the city going back into the late 1930s, when Dal Mandi still functioned as the courtesans’ quarter and when his family still lived in the heart of the city, not far from the house of their relative Bharatendu Harischandra; Shashank Singh of Ganges View on Assi Ghat where, on later visits to the city, I stayed so often and met so many interesting new people; Rakesh Kumar Singh of Harmony Book Shop for his hospitality and the stimulation provided by his wonderful collection of books; Inger Agger for the evening walk on Assi Ghat in Banaras in early December 2012, when she asked me to sum up my book in one sentence.
In Allahabad I thank Alok Rai for his hospitality, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra for taking Raka Ray and me around his city, and Manas Mukul Das for his presence. The conversation with all of them was a living reminder of the time when Allahabad was a centre of academic and intellectual life in North India.
In Lucknow a conversation with the late bookseller Ram Advani on the city’s coffee house will long remain in my memory. Anurag Gupta, formerly a student in my Hindi seminars in Berkeley, now Professor in IIT Kanpur, took a day off from work and came to Lucknow to show me around the city he loved, from Chowk to Hazratganj to the gardens of the Old Residency.
For the relationship I was able to acquire with modern-day Agra, I particularly thank Rajendra Yadav. He granted me repeated interviews from his sickbed in Delhi, giving me insights into the Agra of the 1930s and 1940s, alive then with creativity and cultural-political debate, long since lost, but also introducing me to Jitendra Raghuvanshi of the IPTA, who spent a whole day taking me around the inner city of Agra and to the cluster of havelis in Raja Mandi, which also included Rajendra Yadav’s own family haveli, where Sara Akash is actually set.
In Lahore I thank Madiha and Sheikh Ajaz, who took my brother and me around their wonderful city, driving us from one end to the other, from Anarkali to Model Town, when we spent some days there for the Lit Fest in 2014. I also thank Anand, Yashpal’s son, who does not live in Lahore, much more in Montreal and Lucknow, but whom I nonetheless connect with the city, for providing me with so much information on his father and on the writing of Jhutha Sach.
Of the long-time friends I made in Tuebingen, I thank Srilata Raman, now professor in Toronto, for her moral and intellectual support; as also Eva Warth, now film professor in Bochum. I thank Barbara von Reibnitz, now in Basel, for introducing me to the work of W.G. Sebald, from whom I learnt the importance of city space in an utterly novel way; and Henry von Stietencron who never forgot to ask when my novels book would get done.
Back home in D