AGYEYA
Shekhar: A Life
Translated by Snehal Shingavi and Vasudha Dalmia
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Translator’s Note
Author’s Introduction
Prologue
VOLUME 1: DEVELOPMENT
Part 1: Dawn and Divinity
Part 2: Seeds and Sprouts
Part 3: Nature and Man
Part 4: Man and Circumstance
VOLUME 2: STRUGGLE
Part 1: Man and Nature
Part 2: Bondage and Curiosity
Part 3: Shashi and Shekhar
Part 4: Threads, Ropes and Nets
Footnote
Author’s Introduction
Notes
Also by Agyeya
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
Shekhar: A Life
AGYEYA (1911–87) was the pen name of S.H. Vatsyayan, regarded as one of the foremost figures of Hindi literature who was instrumental in pioneering modern trends in the realm of poetry, fiction, criticism and journalism. As a young man, he joined the movement for India’s independence alongside Bhagat Singh and Chandrashekhar Azad, and was even arrested by the British authorities. His monumental novel Shekhar: Ek Jeevani, widely regarded as his masterpiece, was drawn from his own experiences in prison and has now been published in Penguin Classics as Shekhar: A Life. Prison Days and Other Poems, a collection of his verses, has also been published in Penguin Classics. He has also been awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Jnanpith Award for his poetry.
SNEHAL SHINGAVI is associate professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin, where he specializes in teaching South Asian literatures in English, Hindi and Urdu. He is the author of The Mahatma Misunderstood, and has translated to wide acclaim the iconic short-story collection Angaaray as well as Bhisham Sahni’s memoir, Today’s Pasts. He is currently translating Joginder Paul’s novel Ek Boond Lahu Ki (One Drop of Blood).
VASUDHA DALMIA is professor emerita of Hindi and Modern South Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her monograph, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu Harischandra and Nineteenth Century Banaras (1997), studies the life and writings of a major Hindi writer of the nineteenth century as the focal point for an examination of the intricate links between politics, language, culture, religion and nationality. She has edited and co-edited several works. Her book on the Hindi novel, Fiction as History: The Novel and the City in Modern North India, appeared in 2017.
Advance Praise for the Book
‘In the 1940s, Agyeya’s biographical novel, the two-part Shekhar: Ek Jeevani, took the Hindi literary world by storm. It challenged the moral universe of the Hindi world, and attracted approbation and severe criticism in equal measure. It is a travesty that Shekhar, among the most iconic Hindi novels of the twentieth century, has been unknown to the non-Hindi–reading public. Justice has been done by two remarkable scholars, veteran Vasudha Dalmia and young Snehal Shingavi, in a masterful translation that recreates Shekhar’s magic—its passion and restraint, its conflicts, currents, undercurrents and emotions. A must-read for everyone. A publishing landmark.’
AKSHAYA MUKUL
Translator’s Note
Translating Agyeya’s monumental novel Shekhar poses certain interesting challenges, pleasures and impossibilities.
First and foremost, Shekhar is a watershed moment in the development of the Hindi novel. Not only is it one of the first formally experimental novels but it has also been an exceedingly important one to so many people. Perhaps no other novel other than Premchand’s Godan has produced so much secondary critical work, with dozens of monographs devoted to the singular innovations that Shekhar produced. As a result, being attentive to both the formally innovative aspects of the work as well as the long tradition of scholarship on it meant juggling quite a few things in the air at the same time.
Secondly, and unsurprisingly, Shekhar is the product of a polyglot imagination. The novel freely relies on allusions to English, Sanskrit, Bengali and other languages. Part of this is because the main character travels the length and breadth of colonial India, but part of it is also due to Agyeya’s own multilingual interests. Moreover, despite the fact that the main character insists on retaining and even building upon Hindi and its attendant cultural traditions (usually because they are being encroached upon by a colonial English), the novel does not hold on to the same political impulse. It was one thing to be able to work in what is already a highly challenging Hindi that Agyeya so deftly deploys, but quite another to be able to track down all of the other literary traditions that he was utilizing. This was made even more difficult by the fact that in a number of places, Agyeya’s narrator (perhaps Agyeya himself) incorrectly remembered certain poems. It was something of a translator’s dilemma whether to retain the errors in memory that were likely the result of the novel’s composition in prison or to clean them up. In most places, I have opted for correcting Agyeya’s lapses in memory as I could not find any literary reason to retain the errors. Wherever possible, these emendations have been noted in an endnote for any enterprising scholar.
Thirdly, Agyeya and his critics all refer to the ‘missing’ third volume of the Shekhar series. Two volumes have been translated here, but the third was never published. As Agyeya hints in his own preface to the novel, he believed that the purpose of the third volume had evaporated. Drafts of this third volume probably exist somewhere, but it seemed to me a mistake to try and track them down for the purposes of this project for a few reasons. Notwithstanding the author’s own desires that the volume not be published (which is important enough), the third volume was never an event in Hindi literature. No one saw it and clearly no one read it. Thus, to have it translated into English and brought in that form for the first time did not seem warranted.
Fourth, as the endnotes will demonstrate, I worked from two different editions of the novel: the Mayur edition and the Saraswati edition. Having both was useful because errors in one would often be resolved in the other.
Fifth, I have tried as much as possible not to rely on transliteration of Hindi nouns for which there are no good English equivalents. While there are clearly cultural and historical values to retaining some words, there is also the danger that this shirks the responsibility of a translator to try to take one world view and make it stretch to accommodate another. In this, I have been guided by Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Task of the Translator’. Benjamin makes a rather novel argument that what good translations are doing is not flattening out the perspectives of another language or culture but rather pointing always to the places where the destination language (in this case, English) has to grow, evolve and change to be able to understand another. In that sense, a good translation ought to be able to defamiliarize the familiar language. That’s only really possible, in my opinion, if one tries (and fails, inevitably) to find new ways of making English evolve to deal with experimental Hindi fiction.
Finally, this translation would not have been possible were it not for the tireless work of Vasudha Dalmia. Vasudha was not only a marvellous collaborator in this translation project, but in many ways its inspiration. I discovered Shekhar in one of the many Hindi seminars I took with her at the University of California, Berkeley, and ever since then she has gently nudged this project along. She has also been over each inch of this translation, editing and emending it, noting all of the text’s infelicities, until it was polished. It bears underlining that while no translation is the work of a single person, this translation in particular bears her imprint on it in a marked way.
In saying all of this, I mean to point to the places where I faced the most challenges; these were not always the moments of my suc
cesses. In those places where my language skills (especially in Sanskrit and Bengali) were not adequate, I relied on the work of other scholars and translators to help me out. Those have also been indicated in the endnotes. This work has been years in the making and several people have given feedback and support for which I am ever grateful; the mistakes in this text, it bears repeating, are, of course, my own.
Austin, Texas
March 2018
Snehal Shingavi
Author’s Introduction
1
There is a power in pain that gives sight. A person in torment can be a visionary.
‘Shekhar: A Biography’, which is the product of ten years of my effort—it’s actually not quite ten years yet, but then again the ‘Biography’ isn’t finished either! An attempt to put into words a vision seen in merely one night of intense pain.1
You might think this arrogance. I’m not trying to say that I completed this massive manuscript in a single night. No, read my words again carefully—‘Shekhar’ is an attempt to put into words a vision seen in merely one night of intense pain.2
It’s possible that you might want to know what that night was like. But it’s not possible to explain such intimate details, nor would it be of any use to you. The only thing that could have an explanation and a meaning for you is that I saw this particular vision. All I can tell you about how I came to regard that night is that when the police hauled me away in the middle of the night, like bandits, and made me a prisoner, and then shortly thereafter—after I had spoken to, and then yelled at, and then got beaten up by senior police officials—it seemed to me that my life was quickly coming to its end.
I didn’t think of myself as someone deserving to be hanged, and I still don’t; but it didn’t seem impossible on account of the circumstances then and my state of mind. Rather, I was firmly convinced that I was staring directly at my fate. I said earlier that serious torment can make someone a visionary; I can say here that grave hopelessness makes one dispassionate and thereby readies one to be a visionary. It was as if my condition escaped the bounds of feelings and presented itself to me in the form of a problem—if this was going to be the end of my life, then what was the value of that life, what was its meaning, what did it accomplish—for the individual, for society, for humanity? . . . My life slowly opened up to the dispassionate heartlessness of this curiosity and the omniscience of torment, not in the shape of a personal and irrelevant anomaly, but in the shape of a phenomenon, in the shape of a social fact; and gradually the formulas of cause-and-effect disentangled themselves and began to come to hand . . .
As dawn broke, the picture had changed entirely. I had a hold of several meaningful truths, but it was as if my body was spent, had turned to dust. I fell asleep exhausted but having found peace and remained asleep for two or three days.
That’s all I can tell you about that night. For a month after that, nothing happened. A month later when I was transferred from Lahore Fort to Amritsar Jail, and I obtained things to write with, I wrote down in four or five days the meaning and purpose of life that I had understood on that night. The three hundred or so pages written in pencil are the foundation of ‘Shekhar: A Biography’. I’ve spent more than nine years forming a body for that life-spark. To form a body—because that kind of intensity3 cannot be reproduced solely in the imagination, and when it is found in life, the imagination can only restrain it, straitjacket it.
*
If you have studied the lives of revolutionaries, you will notice that a hard determinism lies hidden beneath all of the works of those tireless, energetic souls. Revolutionaries, ultimately, are a breed of determinists. But this determinism is not the sterile fatalism that makes one powerless or useless, rather it makes them more dispassionate and inspires them to action. In this, it is one step ahead of the karma yoga—or the dispassionate fulfilment of one’s duties—of the Bhagavad Gita, because it does not reduce the actor to a mere instrument. And if you think of it this way, that a revolutionary’s determinism is not satisfied with an unchanging destiny, that he has a firm (but amorphous) faith in the scientific chain of cause-and-effect that governs life, I believe that the majority of the scientists today are determinists in a similar way.
So the hero of ‘Shekhar: A Biography’ has attempted to understand the formulas of this destiny in his life. Because to understand them is to understand life itself, to understand its meaning. Whatever God does is good, and so each event is its own purpose—that’s one way to see things; but this can be another solution to make life bearable for the individual who cannot accept this line of reasoning. So you will find in the first part of ‘A Biography’ that Shekhar also recalls small episodes from his childhood. The study of childhood has its own importance, and several foreign artists have studied and sketched portraits of childhood, but a study is not feasible in ‘A Biography’. It is only the means to discover the formulas, which exist in every life, but which we never have the ability to see—which is only possible when life is illuminated from the wound of some event, or when a person becomes all-seeing through the intensity of suffering . . . I don’t have the right to speak about my composition, but bearing in mind the relation between ‘Shekhar’ and me, it seems to me that this is what is great in his life and at the same time what is wretched. Great because his curiosity possesses passion, faith; wretched because this intensity keeps him from becoming a true seeker and leaves him a mere sophist and his sophistry (rationalization)4 begins to seem pitiful and pathetic . . .*
So in a nutshell, this is the story of the origin of ‘Shekhar: A Biography’. You might say that this is not a vision, it’s a system of logic, a philosophy. But I believe that philosophy is ultimately a revelation, a vision—and to strengthen my case I will take recourse to the Hindi name for philosophy—darshan, or vision!
2
Is this ‘Biography’ an autobiography? This question will certainly be asked. Or perhaps it won’t even be asked, since a reader will march ahead with the notion fully formed. In Hindi, where every poet apparently uses his wife as inspiration for his writing, where a poem about separation seems to provide incontrovertible proof that so-and-so wrote it after his wife’s death, it seems pointless to hope that ‘Shekhar’, which is not only a biography, but a biography delivered orally by an individual, will not be seen as the autobiography of its writer. I remember, three years ago when I had published a poem ‘Second’, several readers wrote me sympathetic letters and one went so far as to write, ‘I am totally sympathetic to you; as someone in the same situation, I can completely understand what you are going through.’ The editor of the paper, too (although as a joke), asked me, ‘You have never been married, so how could you quarrel with your second wife so?’ If such people are offered proof that I have written about a second marriage without ever having been married a first time, they will think that they have been deceived. It pains me to say it—but it is still true—that the majority of Hindi literature and criticism is built on a misconception; that the narration of self-formation (and not self-realization, because you can have realization without formation) is the best and truest kind. Few writers in Hindi seem to understand or accept that the proof of a writer’s power is to be able to use the imagination or sensibility to enter into another’s experiences, and while doing so, to be able to suspend the assumptions and ideologies of self-formation, to be objective. On the contrary, you will find several such writers who will call such realization (and I repeat that self-formation alone is not self-realization but that formation can be self-realization if we are able to be open to the possibility) foreign, second-hand, and therefore, shoddy and untrue. For such people, T.S. Eliot’s phrase, which is really the only response, would have no meaning: There is always a separation between the man who suffers and the artist who creates; and the greater the artist the greater the separation.5
*
But this has become a long digression, and I have to admit that I could become an important artist by relying on the thing
s Eliot has said. There is not a single character in ‘Shekhar’ who is not by and large a composite character,6 although my experiences and my pain are irrigating Shekhar. And the irrigation is such that saying, ‘ultimately, all literary fiction is at its root autobiographical, if not a sketch of one’s own life then a projection,7 the story of one’s own possibility’ will not free it from the charge. There is too much of me in ‘Shekhar’; I was unable to follow Eliot’s example (whose importance I concede). ‘Shekhar’ is doubtlessly one individual’s record of personal suffering,8 although it is simultaneously a reflection of that individual’s life struggles. It is not so personal or peculiar that you could dismiss its claims by saying ‘this is the personal matter of a single man’; it is my insistence that my society and my age speak through it and announce that it is a symbol of mine and Shekhar’s age. But even after all of that I know that if the beginnings of this novel had happened under different circumstances and in a different way (and perhaps by different, more capable hands!), then this introduction would be unnecessary . . . Nor could a reader completely disregard it and have the occasion to say: forget about the events that happen in ‘Shekhar’, even the settings are uncannily similar to the writer’s own journeys (although to say that, a reader would have to be especially familiar with me).
Let me say something about this last equation. In order to preserve the truth of the picture of the child-man, I took scenes from my own life for the early parts of ‘Shekhar’, and then gradually the life and emotional world of a maturing Shekhar drifted apart from my life and emotional world, so much so that I felt as if I were the witness and chronicler of an independent human being, I had absolutely no power over him. Whether it is appropriate for the creator of a character to say that or not, whether a character can really have that much of an independent existence or not, whether a character can ever not be a puppet in a writer’s hands but also make a writer dependent on him or not, those who are interested in such esoteric questions can consult Pirandello.9
Shekhar Page 1
