Book Review: Vasudha Dalmia’s Fiction as History: The Novel and the City in Colonial North India (2017)
The novel has transformed into a global genre so that there is hardly any living language or culture that does not produce novels. In recent years, critics, scholars, and even novelists have been fascinated with how this European genre has cast its deep roots in various parts of the globe. Vasudha Dalmia’s Fiction as History traces the sowing of the novelistic seeds in the fertile soil of North India and its subsequent growth in the Hindi language.
Vasudha Dalmia has been, for the past two decades, one of the most erudite scholars writing about Hindi literature in Western academia. Her reputation was built on a brilliant monograph on Bharatendu Harischandra, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions (1997), which combined rigorous archival research and close reading to raise crucial questions about the collusion between tradition and modernity, the convergence of nationalism and Hinduism, and the growth of Hindi print culture in colonial North India. Francesca Orsini, in her foreword to the second edition of The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions, declares the book to be a classic which “has not so much shaped our understanding of this period as having created the field, the discipline through which to study it” (xiii). Dalmia’s monograph also laid the groundwork for many subsequent academic monographs that chronicled book history and cultural studies of North India such as Ulrike Stark’s An Empire of Books (2007) and Francesca Orsini’s Print and Pleasure (2009). Therefore, it was with immense anticipation that I turned to Vasudha Dalmia’s new book on the Hindi novel which, unfortunately, failed to live up to the expectations.
In Fiction as History (2017), Vasudha Dalmia examines eight major Hindi novels covering almost a century beginning with the first Hindi novel, Pariksha Guru (1882), and ending with Mohan Rakesh’s Andhere Band Kamre (1961). All eight novels analyzed in the book are set in various North Indian cities such as Delhi, Agra, Banaras, and Allahabad. The book juxtaposes the narrative of these novels along with the cultural history of the cities in which they are set. Dalmia declares that she wants to change the perception — though she never tells us who actually holds such a perception — that the Hindi novels, following Premchand, are primarily set in rural India and depict the life of peasants. She, on the other hand, wants to looks at the Hindi novel in its relationship with the city.
Dalmia’s thesis on the Hindi novel is based on her argument that literary works are an embodiment of social history. She argues that literary works have the capacity to chronicle social history even before historians and social scientists. In an earlier article on Premchand’s Godan (1936), she had written:
Premchand presented what academic scholarship was to face squarely only towards the close of that century. Colonial taxation policies, peasant unrest and the failure of the nationalist leadership to respond to these issues were to be addressed from the peasant-subaltern viewpoint in the pioneering first volumes of the Subaltern Studies Collective which appeared in early 1980s (vi).
Dalmia implies that the current trends in historical writing, especially the engagement of Subaltern Studies with the figure of the peasant, has a pre-history in the works of Premchand who had chronicled the life of the peasants long before the historians. Premchand, like the subaltern historians, in his poignant novels portrayed the figure of the small peasant caught in multiple debt systems from which there was no respite. By extension, she argues that literature is able to inscribe the depths of social history onto a narrative long before the social scientists. Similarly, in her reading of Jhutha Sach (1958), a novel based on the partition of India, she claims:
Long before pioneering academic writings based on interviews with men and women who had suffered the brutality of Partition, this novel documented the deterioration of humanity at such climatic moments (229).
Jhutha Sach appears to have dealt with the Partition, paying heed to its complexity and brutality, before the historians could uncover the events of Partition. She consistently informs the readers that various novels weave their fictional narratives from accounts of newspapers, or they anticipate the events of the real world in their fictional landscapes. Premchand anticipates the exclusion of the courtesans in Sevasadan (1918) while in Karmbhumi (1932) he gives “greater autonomy for women than Gandhi” (157). In Dalmia’s reading, these novels either represent historical events, or they anticipate them.
Dalmia also claims that these novels are better chronicles of social history than the works of historians and sociologists. In the epilogue to her book, she declares that “through their attention to detail, their minute documentation of shifts in structures of feeling, novels are often a record of social history in ways that social history is not” (406). In other words, literature emerges as a better chronicle of social history than the works of historians. Underlying these arguments is the belief that the aim of both literature and history is to record the times in which they are set, and Dalmia is proclaiming fiction as a source of history.
Dalmia considers no other methodology of analyzing literature apart from the immediate social and historical context that produces it. For Dalmia, Hindi novels are an account of “colonial taxation policies”, “peasant unrest”, “a social history” and “an ethnography of violence”, and thus these novels can be read as history, sociology or ethnography and, in short as anything, but literature.
Each chapter in Fiction as History can be divided into two parts: the first part deals with the story of the novel, while the second part is concerned with the wider historical context of the city in which the novel is set. Dalmia juxtaposes two kinds of summaries in her book. She summarizes and puts together the arguments made by major scholars such as Narayani Gupta and Veena Oldenburg on North Indian cities. However, unlike these historians, the book does not aim to write a fresh social history of various North Indian cities. And, even more disappointingly, these theoretical engagements with Indian cities are juxtaposed with the summaries of Hindi novels without any serious textual analysis that might enable the reader to see the conceptual relationship between the space of the city and narrative of the novels.
The idea of space and time is the underlying premise of Vasudha Dalmia’s critical work. These two concepts are marked out in the very title of her work Fiction as History: The Novel and the City in Modern North India. The first claim is made about time, about reading fiction not as fiction, but as history. However, any attempt to read fiction as history is only possible when historical context has firmly entered the domain of fiction and dominates the fictional narrative. The book could have explored the relationship between the novel and history, of how these two forms are closely interrelated, but instead of such larger theoretical relationships, it only tells us about particular historical facts and how they were represented, evaded or anticipated within a novel. Thus, her work does not attempt to establish a relationship between novel and history, instead it only points out places where historical events manifest in fictional accounts.
The second claim is about space, the importance of the city in these novels, and that these novels have to be read in the context of urbanization, and the new kind of subjectivity it produces. The pre-novelistic genres such as the Qissas and Dastans did not portray the city realistically like the modern novel. The book never attempts to understand the crucial difference in the representation of space and time within pre-novelistic genres and how the novel form significantly alters those narratives. Dalmia evades the fundamental question of how and when the realistic representation of the city and its historical context enters the fictional narrative.
Dalmia’s book explores a literary period that marks out two major transitions in Hindi literature. The first transition is in the late 19th Century when there is a shift from pre-modern genres such as Dastaans, Kathas, Ghazals and Braj poetry to the narratives of early Hindi novels. The late nineteenth century is a significant period in Hindi literature when pre-colonial genres recede and give way to the modern realistic novel. A history of the novel, in the Indian context, has to take into account how the novel creates new possibilities of imagining and seeing at the world around us; and it needs to theorize on how this new ways of looking was a challenge to older genres and their ways of visualizing and representing the world. The significant ruptures in representation — and the wider acceptance of realism — lies at the core of the inception of Hindi novel. The book could have traced a conceptual history of space in pre-modern Hindi literature, and the ways in which the novel re-conceptualizes space within narrative.
The second transition happens in mid 20th Century when there is a shift from the social realistic novels of Premchand to the more modernist works of Agyeya, Dharamveer Bharti, Mohan Rakesh and Nirmal Verma. The strong social commitment of Premchand’s novels gives space to modernist voices that are more personal, alienated and often unsure about the relationship between literature and society. Although Dalmia acknowledges this transition, we rarely get a sense of the ways in which narrative alters at the end of these two major historical transitions. For a book that deals with the genre of the novel, there is hardly any sustained discussion on the form of the novel apart from few gratuitous quotations from Mikhail Bakhtin and Raymond Williams. Rather than highlighting the ways in which Hindi modernism was similar or different from European modernism, the book evades the question altogether through a quote from Raymond Williams and assumes that his comments on the 20th century English novel could instinctively explain the narrative shift in Hindi literature.
Dalmia’s book, with all its claims of history, records no significant shift in the representation of time and space across a century of Hindi literature. One wonders, how does the novelistic representation of the city change from Lala Srinivas Das’s Pariksha Guru to Premchand’s Karmbhumi? Is Premchand able to give a more solid texture to the cityscape in his novels than Lala Srinivas Das? Does the relationship of characters with history become more prominent in the case of Premchand? And, does this relationship recedes away with the novels of Ajyeya? Is the texture of Delhi in Ajyeya’s Nadi ke Dwip similar to that of the Delhi in Yashpal’s Jhutha Sach? Across a century, Dalmia’s book records no significant shift in Hindi novel’s engagement with time and space. Instead, we are left with snippets of historical details of various North Indian cities juxtaposed with summaries of various Hindi novels.
Similarly, despite all her focus on the spatial context of the novel, there is hardly any sense in which we can think about the differences in regional flavours among the Hindi novels. The book could have broken down the Hindi heartland into various regions creating the idea of a provincial novel. It could have suggested that the Hindi novel is not a singular unit; it has vast regional variety so that in terms of form, language and theme the novels written in Allahabad are different from the one’s produced in Delhi. It could have traced regional trends and created a theoretical conception so that we could speak of an Allahabadi novel which is different from the Delhi novel. But, such a creative imagination of the north Indian space is also missing from the monograph.
Dalmia’s monograph addresses some pertinent questions about Hindi literature, but her archaic methodology and broad conclusions hardly say anything new about the Hindi novel. In order to make sense of space and time in literature, Dalmia has to move away from the historical to the textual, from the city to literature, and the one thing that has to be avoided in the whole process is to read fiction as history.
References
Dalmia, Vasudha. 2017. Fiction as History: The Novel and The City in Modern North India. Ranikhet: Permanent Black.
Dalmia, Vasudha. 2002. “Introduction” in The Gift of a Cow by Premchand. Translated by Gordon C. Roadarmel. Ranikhet: Permanent Black.
Orsini, Francesca. 2010. “Foreword” in The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu Harischandra and Nineteenth Century Banaras. Permanent Black: Ranikhet.