by Akhilesh
Exile
AKHILESH
Translated from the Hindi by Rajesh Kumar
In memory of
Shrilal Shukla, Rajendra Yadav and Parmanand Srivastava.
&
Amma and Babu
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
1. THE DEATH GAG
2. PPP
3. THE FEAR MONSTER SHOOK ITS MANE
4. A TIME BYGONE AND THE LOTTERY
5. THE LIGHT WAS EITHER THE CREMATION GROUND OR THE MOON
6. HAULI HOOCH AND GRAM FRY
7. I AM FIRE; LOVE, YOU WILL BURN
8. THE FOG-FILLED NIGHT
9. IT IS THE BICYCLE RIDER WHO CRASHES IN THE BATTLEFIELD
10. A UNIQUE SCRIPT
11. FORGIVE EVERYONE BUT YOURSELF
12. NIGHT-WAKE
13. THE SILHOUETTE OF A WOMAN IN WRINKLES AND NERVES
14. PANACEA
15. LIKE HIND SWARAJ
16. GOSAINGANJ SAGA
17. HE ALWAYS SLEPT HALF-HUNGRY AND STAYED AWAKE HALF-HUNGRY
18. HATHA YOGA
19. THE FACE WITHIN THE FACE
20. LABYRINTH OF RELATIONSHIPS
21. THE WANING MOON OR THE PARED SUN
22. AS IF A DEVICE HAD BEEN DAMAGED
23. THIS LETTER IS NOT A WICKED EMAIL OR AN SMS
24. SATYUG DREAM
25. STORM OUTSIDE, MAELSTROM INSIDE
About the Book
About the Author
Praise for Exile
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
In the 1980s, with the rise of little magazines, novellas and long short stories also started to become popular in Hindi. In this context, the short stories of Uday Prakash and Shivmurti are particularly important. Akhilesh’s short stories are, in a way, an extension of those narratives which established the Hindi short story as the equal of the Hindi novel. These narratives were woven around characters or incidents in which an individual appears dwarfed by the system, which reflected how the political, economic and social realms of India were changing. More than the novel, it was the short story that was better able to analyze these changes.
But there’s a difference in Akhilesh’s stories that make them stand out. He is primarily a writer of disillusionment. In the 1990s, the Mandal Commission, the Babri Masjid demolition, as well as the policy of economic liberalization caused a great deal of disillusionment among the youth, especially in the Hindi belt. Suddenly a new kind of education was required. The demand for management graduates grew. The youth of the Hindi belt began to see their futures becoming dim. In an era where English language communication became the very basis for employment or social mobility, they felt themselves getting left behind. They could not see possibilities anywhere. It is against this backdrop that Akhilesh’s most famous story, ‘Chitthi’ published in Hans in 1989, is remembered. It became the representative story of its time, in the way it turned the era’s unemployment into a larger metaphor. The friends in the story promise one another that whoever finds happiness first will write the others a letter. No one ends up writing to anyone.
Whereas Uday Prakash’s stories have characters falling victim to sprawling metropolises, and Shivmurti’s stories touch upon the changing social texture of the village, caste issues and strong women characters emerging amidst them – Akhilesh’s stories depict the struggle of small-town life. In them, he established the small town in opposition to both the metropolis and the village. Set amidst the socio-political struggle of small-town India in the 1990s, his stories gave the Hindi short story a new idiom. ‘Biodata’, ‘Oosar’, ‘Yakshagana’ and ‘Grahan’, among others, served to establish this new language and Akhilesh as one of the foremost storytellers of the decade.
All the major magazines and journals of the time published Akhilesh’s short stories very prominently, and as a writer of Hindi fiction he won many awards. But since 2000, he has been known more as an editor. From Lucknow, he started publishing the journal Tadbhav which soon became one of the most active creative spaces for new Hindi writing. No discussion of the Hindi short story could be complete without Akhilesh’s work being mentioned, nor could any discussion about new creative work be complete without mentioning Tadbhav.
Nirvasan (Exile) is Akhilesh’s second novel. His first, Anveshan, was published in the 1990s and should be read in juxtaposition with his story ‘Chitthi’. Like the story, the focus of the novel is also unemployment. In the era of capitalism, while one generation had to face a huge problem of unemployment, the next became terribly careerist. Using the story of an unemployed young man, Akhilesh also comments upon the education system which suddenly begins to seem inconsequential. Although ‘Chitthi’, an affecting story about unemployment, still ends on a slightly hopeful note of the letter coming, in the novel Anveshan, the theme of disillusionment reaches its peak.
Nirvasan, published in 2014, can broadly be said to deal with the theme of displacement. It is interesting to note that several folk songs of the Purbiya community of India remember people who left their homes to go to foreign lands in search of livelihood. For instance, one song curses the railway train which the man of the family boards to leave for distant lands, it curses the city of Calcutta where he has gone and forgotten all about his home. Coincidentally, one of the main characters of the novel, Pandeyji is obsessed with his ancestral roots and his Baba, who had gone to Calcutta in search of employment and disappeared. After that, no news of him was heard. It is evident that, for the Purbiya community, displacement for employment is a very old pattern. In the polyphonic structure of Nirvasan, this theme runs like a river – leaving home to earn a livelihood.
In Hindi and English literatures, the story of the Girmitiyas in the nineteenth century has been written about extensively. The Mauritian Hindi writer Abhimanyu Anant has written a sprawling historical novel, Laal Paseena (Red Sweat), and more recently, the English novelist Amitav Ghosh has written the Ibis Trilogy. Giriraj Kishore’s novel Pehla Girmitiya (The First Girmitiya) should also be mentioned here, which is set against the backdrop of Mahatma Gandhi and the Girmitiya community in South Africa. At first, Akhilesh’s Nirvasan gives the impression that it will follow the plot about Pandeyji’s search for his roots in the Girmitiya community from Surinam. But that is not all that the novel is about. Instead, as a reader progresses through Nirvasan, it seems as if this is a text about the displacement of even those roots. Meaning, one doesn’t want to be wherever one is.
Akhilesh’s short stories dealt primarily with disillusionment that was spreading amongst young Indians in the 1990s, but the theme of displacement is also a recurring one. After the 1990s, there was a big migration from the east for employment and education. Akhilesh’s story ‘Jaldamrumadhya’ talks about that. In the story, Sahayji’s son settles down in Delhi and wants to sell the land in their hometown, whereas Sahayji wants to hold on to his land. But ultimately, the house gets sold and he cannot do anything. Throughout the story, there’s a struggle between reality and idealism. Reality is displacement, idealism is the stubbornness to not let go of one’s roots, one’s soil.
This struggle between the real and the ideal continues in Nirvasan, as does the theme of displacement. The blurring of identities is taking place in a consumerist society on the one hand, and on the other, the struggle for identity is becoming more intense. In the novel, the theme of displacement unravels on two parallel narrative strands. From Surinam there comes Ramajor Pandey whose Baba, Bhagelu Pandey, in the year of the Great Famine, leaves his village Gosainganj and goes to Faizabad then to Calcutta and from there boards a ship to some unknown land to earn a livelihood. After going to Surinam, he settles down there and never seeks news of those he’d left behind – his home, wife and children. He changes his surname Pandey and forever leaves behi
nd his past identity. With this new surname and caste, he remarries and starts a lineage of Pandeys. He doesn’t reveal to his family members anything about himself beyond the name of his village, Gosainganj. This faint thread is all that Ramajor Pandey had as he began to search for his ancestors’ village when he comes down from the United States and decides to get in touch with his long-lost relatives in Lucknow.
The question begs to be asked: why would someone independent and successful travel back to the land of their ancestors, generations later, in search of their past? Why would they begin to hunger for a soil that they have never even lived on? The writer Manohar Shyam Joshi had raised these very questions in a letter to the writer Vishwanath Prasad Tiwari. Tiwari had sent Joshi a letter in relation to the latter’s novel Kasap. And in response, Joshi had said, ‘While writing Kasap I was searching not for a sense of self but for a sense of belonging. Why does belonging have to be, in the end, only in the same old and limited ways? Why do Ukrainian people, settled in the US for generations, send back money to build a memorial for their poet Taras Shevchenko? Why do they go to Ukraine and bring back the soil of their village?’ It is not easy to understand the psychology of the displaced.
The protagonist of Nirvasan, Suryakant, is struggling with both interior and exterior displacements. He feels insecure in his government job with the tourism directorate of Uttar Pradesh. He is from Sultanpur, but lives 130 kilometres away from it in Lucknow, and is displaced from his home and hometown, not just physically but internally as well. He has resolved to break all ties with his family. He only feels connected to his uncle (his father’s younger brother, who is referred to as Chacha throughout the novel), but the uncle feels uprooted, too, even though he lives in his own home. In Sultanpur, there’s also Suryakant’s grandmother, who has lived a long life, and feels displaced in her present. She is surrounded by the memories of the past and talks to long-dead people. As the novel progresses, we find out that no one is really where they are. Meaning, everyone is exiled from themselves.
When Suryakant starts searching for Gosainganj, he finds out that there are a number of villages by the name of Gosainganj in different districts of Uttar Pradesh. Going by the clues left in Pandeyji’s descriptions, Suryakant thinks that Pandeyji’s Gosainganj might be the one near his own hometown. Akhilesh has tried to use Gosainganj as a metaphor to illuminate the similar ways in which all villages have suffered from being abandoned by its people. Seen in this light, Nirvasan is an elegy of displacement, of saying goodbye to belonging. The novel also tries to answer if we have reached such a point in civilization where every human being feels displaced within themselves. As the life of each character is unravelled with the progression of the plot, we find that no one feels connected to their roots nor has any sense of belonging. When, with great difficulty, Suryakant finds Gosainganj and reaches there, he experiences only disappointment. When the villagers realize that he has come in search of the ancestors of a wealthy Non-Resident Indian, all the villagers gather in front of Suryakant and, with their tall tales, try to prove that they are related to Ramajor Pandey. First in that line of fabricators is the village headman himself. At this point in the narrative, readers know that Bhagelu Pandey had changed his caste more than a hundred years ago. He left behind his old identity and assumed a new one in Surinam. But out of greed for property and money, the people of Gosainganj have no hesitation in changing their identity. Each of them want, in one way or another, to escape from a life which has somehow been left behind in the nation’s race towards development.
Although Nirvasan follows the life of Ramajor Pandey, we never lose sight of the intricate inner life of its protagonist Suryakant. After he gets married, Suryakant begins to live in Lucknow, away from his family, after feeling betrayed by his father who insults his wife’s uncertain lineage. But when Suryakant, in search of Ramajor Pandey’s Gosainganj, reaches Sultanpur and goes to his family home, his family members see him in new light. From his brothers-in-law to his sisters, whoever finds out that he is working for a wealthy NRI falls upon him to get them opportunities of employment in the US. On one hand is the businessman living abroad searching for his roots after three generations, on the other are those who are fighting to free themselves of their roots. In other words, a person at the peak of success is trying to find his lost soul, whereas a large population wants to lose its soul in search of success.
In all this, the character that stands out is Chacha. First, he sells off his village property and procures all the modern amenities of life for his family. Then, when Suryakant meets him after several years, he has renounced that very modern life and lives a simple one. He cooks his meals over firewood, drinks water from a clay pot and writes letters by hand. Suryakant finds out that Chacha’s wife and children do not understand him and his eccentricities annoy them no end. Initially, Suryakant too is confused and asks his uncle, ‘What makes you despise everything that is new?’ In reply, his uncle says, ‘Now, this is incorrect. Who dislikes children, green buds or fresh blossoms? However, if a child starts abusing his elders, is he a decent human being or a subject of pity? I’m familiar with the law of nature – the old must decay, and the new will take on the old. But not even nature rules that a tree will be populated only by new leaves. Autumn does not pluck away all the old leaves at once. If you adhere to this ideology of power of the new, there will be no space for the backward in society or for those who are on the margins, their interests, their customs, their cultures. Suryakant, I do not detest every new thing. You know very well that I have always welcomed new ideas. But I find the haughtiness and coldness associated with novelty intolerable – I hate it. My most ardent desire was to exist in a time where the beauty of the new and the old would complement each other, but I have failed to locate such a period or a space in time. And so, I have reverted to a time long gone. It was impossible to travel to the future because no person can alone attain the future of his dreams. So, I travelled to the past. I acknowledge this past has been manufactured by me. It’s not natural, but what choice did I have? I could not mould the future!’
So, we have two characters who are nostalgic for the past in their own ways: there is Suryakant’s uncle who wants to go back to the old way of living, and there is Ramajor Pandey who has all the wealth in the world but no sense of belonging, which is why he wants to embrace the past and do something for it. He often wishes he could sit somewhere and drink country liquor the way his great-grandfather used to. Like Suryakant’s uncle, Pandey has also gathered all the amenities of the present, made all arrangements for the future, and then left everything to try and go back to the past. Leaving his entire business in someone else’s hands, he wanders around the Uttar Pradesh of his ancestors.
Chacha’s character is one that raises questions about the blind spots of post-liberalization India’s development. The way cities were being expanded without long-term plans, the way an entire generation seemed to be losing its collective memory – these thoughts are at the centre of Chacha’s concerns. Through the characters of Chacha and Ramajor Pandey, Akhilesh tries to critique globalization. Perhaps referring to this undercurrent of the novel, the writer Kashinath Singh called Nirvasan an ultrasound of the Indian development model – meaning a deep, internal examination.
Steeped as the narrative is in the internal landscape of a disillusioned protagonist, one wonders what is being made of the results from the examination. Only one person answers to the identifying features that Ramajor Pandey gives Suryakant about his family – Jagdamba Prajapati. But the problem is that he was not a Brahmin but a Kumhar. Pandey refuses to accept this because Sampoornanand ‘Brihaspati’ has told him that, ‘There are numerous legends, folktales, songs, tomes, opinions, magic, fantasy and miracles but none of them have the Shudra and the Brahmin interchanged. A Brahmin can transform into a tree or in a rock, he has become an animal, demon, mountain, river – everything – but it never happened that he became a Shudra. Such a marvel has never occurred.’
When Pandey asks Suryakant what he has to say to this, he has no answer. The lack of answers is ultimately the only truth of this novel, which the author has tried to look at in juxtaposition with the modern history of Awadh. In 1857, the people of Awadh too had revolted against the British Company Government. In the twentieth century, a Girmitiya, Baba Ramachandra, came back from foreign lands to start a farmers’ revolt in which Dhobi and Nai castes boycotted the landlords and feudal masters. And now, on that same soil, so much is changing but no one anywhere is revolting. Everyone is in a race to become part of it.
Sampoornanand Brihaspati appears at the start of the novel. He is very old but is the head of the state’s tourism directorate. He is shown to be a protector of Indian culture. At the end of the novel he appears as Pandey’s friend and mentor, as if he is a ‘yajamana’, or ritual patron, who starts the tale and comes back to end it. Through him, the novelist tries to depict the kinds of people who are trying to promote fanatic Hinduism.
Nirvasan is, of course, not the first novel to deal with the dreams of Indian society and its destiny in a post-globalization world. In the novels of the well-known writer Alka Saraogi, this tussle between the new and the old has appeared many times. Her novel Ek Break ke Baad looks at emerging corporations in a positive light in context of India’s development. Akhilesh’s Nirvasan picks up new themes in its narrative, follows characters as they search for their lost souls in a new era of rampant consumerism, but ultimately, its perspective is realist.
Nirvasan’s mode is primarily one of the traditional qissagoi, a form of oral storytelling in Urdu, although the author has tried to experiment with it. Akhilesh is known for his descriptive style. The strength of his stories lies in their powerful content. A good part of Nirvasan consists of Suryakant’s research notes. From his college days, Suryakant has been putting down his thoughts in Mayfair notebooks. Sections of the diaries are included in the novel, as interruptions to the main narrative voice. A number of characters seem to be represented through their long monologues, which is a post-modern technique for the ‘democratization’ of storytelling. If we take the progression of the plot, there are a number of digressive subplots. Akhilesh, who in his early writing career was known for making political statements with his stories, weaves a lot of political incidents into the novel, but in a subtler way. For instance, in the final part of the novel, Ramajor Pandey is shown as staying in a huge mansion in place of the Taj Hotel, about which the novelist says:
