Sadan Jha - IESHR - Visualising A Region - Phaniswarnath Renu and The Archive of The 'Regional-Rural' in The 1950s

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Visualising a region: Phaniswarnath Renu and the archive

of the ‘regional–rural’ in the 1950s
Article in Indian Economic & Social History Review · April 2012

DOI: 10.1177/001946461104900101
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Visualising a region: Phaniswarnath Renu and the archive of the 'regional−

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Sadan Jha
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DOI: 10.1177/001946461104900101
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Visualising a region: Phaniswarnath
Renu and the archive of the
‘regional–rural’ in the 1950s
Sadan Jha
Assistant Professor, Centre for Social Studies, Surat
Vir Narmad South Gujarat University campus
Udhna–Magdalla Road, Surat, Gujarat
Email: sadanjha@gmail.com
Anchored in the decade of 1950s, this article focuses on the writings of Phaniswarnath Renu
to understand ways in which he represented the rural life of Kosi region. Also known as the
old Purnea district of Bihar, this region has been historically visualised as unhealthy and
backward. Following Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, the article argues that Renu’s
craftsmanship renders the backwardness of this region in a manner that highlights what
Edward Soja calls ‘instrumentality of the space’. Unlike the dominant constructs of village
life in India, Renu’s villages are neither empty of their geo-cultural specificities nor devoid of
placeness. Instead, the landscape of a backward region is densely imbued with particulars
that cannot be translocated to any other setting. Renu’s ‘regional–rural’ craftsmanship
depended on three mutually connected factors. These include his innovative use of language
forms distinguishing him from his predecessors like Premchand; his mobilisation of an enor-
mous amount of information, which I shall call the cultural memory of the region; and third,
his technique of storytelling. Together these three produce an archive for the reconstruction
of the region at a particular historical juncture. This archive draws our attention to the
apathy accrued to the dynamics of space by a large section of litterateurs as well as social
scientists otherwise obsessed with the time.
Acknowledgement: I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer, Biswaroop Das, Awadhendra Sharan,

Amruth and Dilip Menon for their comments. Remarks and suggestions from the audience present
at presentations in Cape Town, CSS (Surat), Goa, Delhi University and IIAS, Shimla were equally
helpful. I am indebted to Kathryn Hansen and Christopher Hill for sending me their works and to
Girindranath and Gaurinath Jha for their help during my Purnea visit.
The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49, 1 (2012): 1–35
SAGE Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DC
DOI: 10.1177/001946461104900101

2 / SADAN JHA
Introduction
The 1950s witnessed an unprecedented attention to the problems of rural life in

India.1 The period also marked a noticeable change in the orientation and focus of
social anthropology in India, which was no longer restricted to tribal cultures.
Increasingly, a large number of anthropologists started looking at village com-
munities nearer their homes and therefore discovering fresh challenges in theor-
etical as well as applied social science research.2 The study of the village as a unit
of documentation and analysis actually went back to the aspirations of the East
India Company for political power over India. It was also reflected in the efforts
of Francis Buchanan’s surveys and in the historical setting of the Indian National
Movement when the mass movement of the 1920s led by Gandhi ensured en-
hanced focus on the rural question, resulting in a series of ‘village studies’ carried
out in different parts of India.3 However, since the 1940s more focus was laid on
economic life. Ramkrishna Mukherjee rightly remarked that till the 1950s, the
primary objective was to expose ‘the pressing problem of rural society’.4 By the
1950s, the focus of these studies shifted massively to highlight problems of rural
life that needed ‘priority in the context of the planning for the countryside’.5 Back-
wardness of the villages was the most dominant trope (though not the only one)
in a majority of such studies that fed into planning discourse. Unlike the Gandhian
model of Swaraj, with villages forming the core, Nehruvian planning considered
villages as ‘backward’ and hence transforming them was a pre-condition for the
development of the nation.6 It is worth noting that in the accounts of contem-
porary sociologists, anthropologists and planners, the village as a unit was only
located along a scale of time, with spatial dimensions playing a subservient role.
To paraphrase Heidegger, villages were mere positions between which there lay a
measurable distance; a distance—stadion or a spatium—‘an intervening space or
interval’.7
1
For some of the important signposts for the development of anthropological literature on village
life in 1950s, see Majumdar, ed., Rural Profiles; Srinivas, Religion and Society among the Coorgs
(though Srinivas carried out the study in early years of 1940s, the book came out in 1952); Dube,
Indian Village (a path-breaking work on Shamirpet in the region of Telangana published in 1955);
Marriott, ed., Village India (1955); Bailey, Caste and the Economic Frontier (1957), Mukherjee, The
Dynamics of a Rural Society (1957).
2
See essays by M.N. Srinivas, S.C. Dube, Yogesh Atal and Ramkrishna Mukherjee in Desai, ed.,
Rural Sociology in India.
3
Mukherjee, ‘On “Village Studies” in India’, p. 805; Inden, Imagining India, pp. 131–61.
4
Mukherjee, ‘On “Village Studies” in India’, p. 807.
5
D.N. Majumdar cited in Mukherjee, ‘On “Village Studies” in India’, p. 810.
6
For the difference of opinion between Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru on the issue, see
their correspondence in Gandhi, Collected Works, pp. 319–21; Nehru, Selected Works, pp. 554–57;
Jodhka, ‘Nation and Village: Images of Rural India in Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar’, pp. 3343–353.
7
Martin Heidegger, ‘Building, Dwelling Thinking’, p. 155.

Visualising a region / 3
In the historical context of the ‘high noon’ of the Nehruvian regime, it may be
a coincidence that an iconic Hindi film Mother India (directed and produced by
Mehboob Khan), and a Hindi novel Parati Parikatha (henceforth PP) written by
Phaniswarnath Renu (henceforth Renu) were both released in 1957.8 India’s inde-
pendence was already a decade old and the spectacle of Nehruvian modernity
was everywhere: from cinema screen to planning documents and from anthro-
pological accounts to fiction. The film Mother India begins and ends with the
opening of a dam, in other words, a celebration of the idea of dam as ‘temples of
the nation’. Both Mother India and Parati Parikatha are stories of transformation
of the rural landscape.9 In the case of Mother India, individual and family his-
tories are woven together to tell this saga. Similarly, in Parati Parikatha, the
novel starts with the suffering of the landscape— ...dhusar biran anthin prantar...
(barren, uninhabited endless region)—and ends up with the construction of dam
and the barren land getting transformed into rainbow colours. In the closing para-
graphs of Parati Parikatha, Renu narrates the last sequence of a drama that is
being performed in the village Paranpur. The deployment of sounds, imagery and
colours in this description produces a picturesque field:
Fifth Cycle: The voice of the anchor—frustrated, down, in the suffering com-
munity of Kosi, people’s awakening whistled the revolutionary spirit...dhu-tu-
tu-tu-tu.... The sound of war trumpets. Kosi is flowing, waves are dancing. A
big group of half-naked people! Break the mountain, haiyo! Assemble stone!
We shall tame this Kosi...children have died, hai re (lament)! Wife died, hai re
(lament)! The world is shattered, hai re (lament)!...we have become helpless.
Away from home. Months–years put together! Sweat and blood, put together!
Lost strength put together! Crush the stone-mountain. Tame this witch. Those
who lost will be rehabilitated... thakkam-thakkam, thakka, thakka! Ghatam-
ghatam, ghat-tirrik-tirrik! ( sounds)...the roaring of tractors and bulldozers!...
waves are subsiding. Laughter! The stage trembles...the audience is awestruck.
Who will win—fight soldiers, haiyo! A shadow, a dam emerges on the back!
Gar-gar-gur-gur garr-r-r-r-r!...the colour of the barren land is changing gradu-
ally, slowly...green, red, yellow, velvet...green fields! 10
8
The phrase ‘high noon’ is borrowed from Inder Malhotra, a political commentator, who termed
1957 and 1958 as years constituting ‘the high noon of Jawaharlal Nehru’s unforgettable reign as
Independent India’s first prime minister’. Malhotra, ‘High Noon of Nehru Era’.
9
I draw upon Mitchell’s idea of ‘landscape aesthetics’ as ‘a field that goes well beyond the
history of painting to include poetry, fiction, travel literature, and landscape gardening’. See Mitchell,
‘Imperial Landscape’, pp. 1–34; Hirsch, ‘Introduction: Landscape Between Place and Space’,
pp. 1–30.
10
Renu, Parati Parikatha, in Bharat Yayawar, ed., Renu Rachnawali, Vol. 2, pp. 645–46 (my
translation).

4 / SADAN JHA
The film Mother India may be read as a generic representation of the 1950s, a
period marked by Nehruvian vision having immense faith in heavy technology.
The power of the film to attract a pan-Indian viewership may partly be explained
by the fact that it narrated an epic story of the nation’s sufferings, struggles and
progress as located in a village (potentially identifiable with any village of north
India). In Mother India, the markers of ‘place’, the supposed site of ‘being-in-
the-world’ was erased. In the previous paragraph drawn from Renu’s novel, on
the other hand, we find both a universal language of struggle (between nature and
man, between the machine and the witch and between the river and the dam) as
well as location-specific markers (namely, the Kosi and the barren land) making
it impossible to translocate the scene anywhere other than the region of Kosi.
The barrenness of this landscape is in the core of Renu’s writings. He begins
Parati Parikatha by delineating the contours of this landscape:
Dhusar, viran, antheen prantar.

Patita bhumi, parti jamin, bandhya dharti...
Dharti nahi, dharti ki laash, jispar kafan ki tarah phaili hui hai balucharon ki
panktiyaan.11
This was Renu’s second novel and a large portion of it was first published in
the form of reports titled ‘Eklavya ke Notes (Notes of Eklavya, 1954–57)’ in the
Upendranath Ashk edited ‘Sanket (Indication/ Pointer)’ from Allahabad. Renu by
this time was already a familiar name in the Hindi literary sphere.
Both Maila Anchal and Parati Parikatha are stories of the transformations
taking place in villages, namely Meriganj and Paranpur. While Meriganj is
depicted as a symbol of backwardness, Paranpur is described as a large and de-
veloped (unnat) village with a population of seven to eight thousand. The devel-
opment is further defined in terms of the village having a library, permanent stage
for theatre, office of all major political parties, abode of many religious leaders
and three visits by Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru.12
In both cases, the narratives move back and forth describing elements and
processes of change not merely in the respective villages but in the entire region.
Malaria, poverty and lack of education are underlined as major factors contribut-
ing to backwardness of Meriganj. In this background, a bright, young and com-
mitted doctor (Prashant) arrives in the village searching for the root cause of
11
‘Barren, uninhabited endless region/Disgraced land, fallow land, infertile land./Not even land
but its dead corpse over which is stretched the chain of sand mass like a shroud’. Parati Parikatha,
p. 311 (my translation). Prantar is translated as tract and dharti as earth by Hansen who writes that
‘the use of Sanskritised vocabulary brings religious and mythical associations into Renu’s text here,
so that the tract of fallow land is perceived as personified earth mother who has become defiled by
wrongdoing and perhaps cursed with infertility’. See Hansen, ‘Renu’s Regionalism’, p. 275.
12
Parati Parikatha, p. 323.

malaria. In the case of Paranpur, the focus is on the changing dynamics of the
land itself, from a barren sterile land to agriculturally fertile tracts. This is an
outcome of the construction of a dam and the sheer willpower of one individual,
the protagonist Jitten Babu. In this manner, these novels might be read as linear
narratives of modernity and Nehruvian development. However, this linear frame
was broken at regular intervals through parallel stories and descriptions (of events
from the past or descriptions of land, to name a few). These parallel stories do not
contribute to the linear progress of the narrative, breaking one of the most import-
ant norms of modern novel writing. Along with the technique of storytelling,
Renu carries out a number of experiments both at the level of language as well as
content, making him a unique literary craftsman of Hindi.
With the publication of his first novel, Maila Anchal in 1954 Renu heralded a
break in the dominant literary tradition identified with the iconic figure of
Premchand. Maila Anchal and Parati Parikatha started a new literary genre in
Hindi, called ‘regional novels’. These two novels were very soon recognised for
the profusion of ethnographic details of the locality. What was new and caught
the attention of literary critics was the manner in which the subject of these
novels was represented, a point discussed in detail later.
Writing in Hindi in the aftermath of India’s Independence, Renu depicted the
story of a territory, a marginalised region of a newly born nation. Introducing
Maila Anchal, he sets up the agenda:
This is Maila Anchal (shadowy border/dirty region), a regional novel. The

setting is Purnea. Purnea is a district in the State of Bihar; to one side is Nepal,
to the other Pakistan and West Bengal. Its outline becomes complete when we
draw the boundaries of Santhal Pargana in the south and Mithila in the west.
For the field of this story, I have selected one of its villages as a symbol of the
backward villages.13
The task was how to make sense of these images of a region rendered as
rural, as backward, as a disgraced land and as an unhealthy territory of the nation
undergoing transformation in 1950s.
A popular proverb of the region says, Na zahar khao na mahoor khao marna
hai to Purnea jao (do not consume poison, do not consume mahoor, if you wish
to die, go to Purnea).14 Till recently Purnea was known as kalapani (land of black
water), a one-way journey, a cul-de-sac. Bernard Cohn used this term for regions
of relative isolation which ‘because of their geographic ecological characteristics
(which prevent easy access), have tended to be bypassed by processes and events
13
Renu, ‘Preface to the First Edition’, Maila Anchal, in Bharat Yayawar, ed., Renu Rachnawali,
Vol. 2, p. 22.
14
Mahoor or Mahur: a poisonous bush grown in abundance in the region.

6 / SADAN JHA
which have affected the nuclear and route regions’.15 Broadly following this frame-
work, Christopher V. Hill studied the Kosi region as ‘an early testing ground for
the implementation of an imported Eurocentric land revenue policy’.16 In the writ-
ings of Dinesh Mishra, the region constituted a case study of faulty environmen-
tal measures adopted by colonial and post-colonial states leading to devastating
and long-term ecological consequences.17 For Praveen Singh, conflicting regimes
of interests between colonial engineering establishment, the revenue administra-
tors and zamindars ultimately resulted in the persistent environmental problems
of this region.18 Though extremely helpful in tracing the historical roots behind
the backwardness and unhealthiness of this region, these works offer very little or
nothing on what Hugh Raffles calls ‘local theory’ of a locality, ‘the local points of
entry to an understanding of locality’.19 This would also mean a move away from
social, economic or environmental history to an emphasis on ‘embodied and nar-
rated’ distinctiveness of a set of relations ‘in which places are discursively and
imaginatively materialised’.20 This shift in perspective would help open up fresh
perspectives for the study of rural landscape as the agrarian environments of South
Asia are studied primarily as constellations of historical processes involving geo-
physical features, social relationship and political economy.21 Scholars have paid
little attention to what Edward Soja calls ‘instrumentality of space’ leaving spa-
tial dimensions ‘almost entirely outside the purview of critical interrogation’.22
The significance of Renu lies in his capitalisation of this instrumentality. Thus,
the embodied distinctiveness of the region came alive when he deployed three
different words (bhumi: tatsam, jamin: videsaj and dharti: tadbhav) for land in
the same sentence. Without going into the linguistic roots of these differences, it
may be safe to argue that these three terms produce multiple images of the land in
the mind of a reader. Soon after declaring this land as barren and infertile it is also
narrated as kachhapprishtasadrisa bhumi which he immediately translated in desaj
15
Cohn, ‘Regions Subjective and Objective’, p. 111. For a recent collection of essays, see Vora
and Feldhaus, eds., Region, Culture, and Politics in India.
16
Hill, River of Sorrow, p. 5.
17
Mishra, Trapped Between the Devil and Deep Waters.
18
Singh, ‘The Colonial State, Zamindars and the Politics of Flood Control’, pp. 239–59.
19
Raffles implies ‘an analysis generated from the ground of ethnographic specificity from something
distinctive about this particular place. Such distinctiveness always and ultimately reside in people.
Locality is both embodied and narrated... It is, rather, a set of relations, a ongoing politics, a density,
in which places are discursively and imaginatively materialised and enacted through the practices of
variously positioned people and political economies’. See Raffles, ‘“Local Theory”’, p. 324. I use
‘local points of entry’ to mean a search for such voices in literature (of Renu), reports, folk songs and
sayings.
20
Raffles, p. 324.
21
Agrawal and Sivaramakrishnan, ‘Introduction: Agrarian Environments’, pp. 1–22.
22
Soja, Postmodern Geographies, p. 34.

as kachua-pitha jamin, meaning a land like the back of a turtle. He went on to

explain the religio-cultural meaning of it—an ideal place for tantriks to do medi-
tation. These different ways of seeing pulled a reader in different directions to
perceive and portray the backwardness of the region. The writer kept returning to
this essential feature of land in Parati Parikatha. This repetition, in close reading,
points to different narrative orders: sometimes to foreground a well defined point
of view and sometimes as a tale of migratory birds.23 These layered ways of look-
ing at the land (as kachua-pitha, ‘an ideal place for tantriks’, as patita or dis-
graced and as bandhya dharti making a direct equation between the land and the
infertile womb) reminds us of the formulation of ‘profane places’ by Michel
Foucault.24 Foucault in his lecture on heterotopias argued that modernity deci-
sively influenced our understanding of spaces both in terms of production of spaces
as well as in terms of lived experiences. Charting out a rough outline of the his-
tory of space in western experience, he noted that modernity redefined the rela-
tion between space and place as a ‘thing’s place was no longer anything but a
point in its movement’. Foucault also referred to the incompleteness of this pro-
cess and argued that despite all these techniques for appropriating space, despite
the whole network of knowledge, contemporary space perhaps remained not en-
tirely desanctified. He accepted the influence and hidden presence of the sacred
in everyday life, particularly in terms of experiencing spaces. Using Bachelard’s
work on intimate spaces, he claimed that ‘we do not live in a homogeneous and
empty space, but on the contrary in a space thoroughly imbued with quantities
and perhaps thoroughly fantasmatic as well.... We live inside a set of relations
that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not
superimposable on one another’.25 Keeping in focus the ideas central to Foucault,
Soja and Raffles, this article will try to analyse Renu’s rendering of the region of
Purnea as heterotopic in character. Unlike his predecessors in Hindi literature or
unlike his contemporary practitioners of village studies, Renu made sure that in
his portrayal, villages were neither empty of their geo-cultural specificities nor
devoid of placeness. Instead, the landscape of a backward region was densely
imbued with particulars that could not be trans-located to any other setting.
Phaniswarnath Renu and the Emergence

of a New Sub-genre in Hindi
With the publication of Premchand’s Seva Sadan (1919), novel writing came to
be recognised as an independent genre in Hindi literature. The major thrust of
writers like Premchand was towards discharging their social and national duty.
23
Renu, Parati Parikatha, pp. 317–18.
24
Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, pp. 22–27.
25
Ibid., p. 23.

8 / SADAN JHA
In Premchand, we find this commitment in terms of his deployment of ideology

and imageries of Gandhian nationalism on the one hand and his advocacy for
characters coming from socially oppressed and economically exploited sections
of the society (suffering women in Seva Sadan, Nirmala and Gaban, indebted
peasants in Premashram, Kayakalp, Rangbhumi and Godan ). The task was to
portray the society in a realist mode by exposing social problems. Premchand’s
characters came from the nationalist politics like Surdas of Rangbhumi (1925).
Like a true Gandhian, he reinvented the place of the rural in Hindi literature de-
picting the story of village life by drawing the life-sketch of a small peasant Hori
in Godan (1936). This vast kaleidoscope had seamless patriotism, socialism and
the economic critique of bourgeois nationalism too, but it always centred on the
concept of presenting the social realities in critical fashion.26 He called it
adarshonmukh yatharthawad or ‘idealistic realism’.27
This approach prepared the ground for the formation of the Progressive Writ-
ers Association (PWA) in 1936 under the leadership of individuals like Sajjad
Zahir, Mulk Raj Anand and Faiz Ahmad Faiz. Unlike the major trend in Bengali
literature, that had also dominated the scene of Hindi since the late nineteenth
century, the move was clearly to go against the universal man and to discover the
ordinary and socially rooted figures struggling against an exploitative social en-
vironment.28 The PWA in this manner had definite connections with the Kallol
movement of Bengali literature. Named after its mouthpiece journal, this move-
ment (1923–1936) was probably the first conscious literary movement to em-
brace modernism in Bengali literature.29 It was primarily aimed against the
humanist impulses of Tagore and the idea was to bring intellectuals closer to the
harsh living realities of rural Bengal.30 These twin waves of realism (the idealist
realism of Premchand and the creation of a socially and regionally rooted man by
Kallol writers) highlighted the need to document the social and cultural back-
ground of storyline in detailed manner.
26
See Pandey, Between Two Worlds; Sharma, Premchand aur Unka Yuga; Chandra, ‘Premchand
and Indian Nationalism’, pp. 601–21; Gopal, M., Munshi Premchand: A Literary Biography. Delhi,
1964. Sudhir Chandra argues that Premchand’s writings oscillate between the ideology of nationalism
and his close observation of class dynamics in Indian society. He says that unlike his novels,
Premchand’s short stories are quite uncritical of patriotic causes.
27
Premchand, ‘Upanyas’, pp. 33–38; Geetanjali Pandey, Between two Worlds, p. 4.
28
The impact of the Kallol movement on the Indian literary scene is not properly documented.
However, we frequently come across references of writers writing in Devanagri involved in translating
works and ideas from Bengali literature in this phase. See Kumar, ‘Debates on Authorship’.
29
See Kaviraj, ‘The Two Histories’, pp. 503–66.
30
Gokulchandra Nag, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Tarashankar Bandopadhyaya, Premendra Mitra,
Vibhutibhushan Bandopadhyaya and Manik Bandopadhyaya are some of the leading names asso-
ciated with this movement.

Considering the overall historical milieu of the Hindi literary sphere since the
1920s, which was informed and influenced by Gandhian ideas and experiments,
the portrayal of rural landscapes was not surprising.31
Godan is the classical example representing this literary phase. Considered
widely to be a complete portrait of Indian rural life, the villages are provided with
vivid details of relationships and everyday life in north India. However, these
villages and rural characters are portrayed as devoid of political consciousness
along caste lines. Like in Mother India, it was difficult to identify characters
aware of their caste identities. This must not mean that Premchand ignored caste
or did not leave traces of exploitation around caste lines in his stories and novels.
For example, in the opening of Premashram, he introduced Lakhanpur, the vil-
lage of the novel as a settlement of Kurmis and Thakurs having houses of few
more castes. However, caste specificities influenced neither the narrative struc-
ture nor the language of the novels. In most of the cases, castes operated merely
as background information, a passive setting for plots. In one of his most ironical
and complex stories, Kafan, the two unforgettable protagonists, belonging to a
community of an untouchable sub-caste of leather-workers, spoke a language,
inhabited a religious world and danced on the tune of a song (thagini kyon naina
jhamkavai, thagini: Temptress! Why do your eyes flash, temptress?) which were
all devoid of any social bearings.32 Written in Khari Boli, Godan had villagers of
Uttar Pradesh speak a language with few inputs from Awadhi, Bhojpuri or Braj
that continued to dominate the spoken universe of north India but were pushed to
the margins by the Khari Boli movement since the late nineteenth century. It may
be claimed that in Premchand’s world, the region remained devoid of its own
multi-lingual practices, villages emptied of their caste specificities and the peas-
ant world without their regional cultural moorings. Regional writers like Renu,
Rahi Masoom Raza (Adha Gaon, 1966) and Amrit Lal Nagar (Bund aur Samudra,
1956) intervened at this level providing us with characters and places in a multi-
lingual environment with different sets of morality and cultural practices.
It has been pointed out by literary critics that Nagarjuna (also known as
Baidyanath Mishra Yatri) preceded Phaniswarnath Renu in terms of introducing
regionalism in Hindi, though unselfconsciously. Renu himself addressed Nagarjuna
as his elder brother. Both of them come from the cultural region of Mithila in
31
See Bhalla and Bumke, eds., Images of Rural India in the Twentieth Century; Kumar, ‘Desh-
Pardesh ka Dwanda’, pp. 25–36.
32
This is Pritchett’s translation, ‘The Shroud (Kafan)’. Pritchett also points to the ‘casualness
about detail’ in Premchand’s realism leading to a flattening of social and moral distinctiveness of the
characters. In the context of another story, Pritchett argued that various luxurious pursuits (like music,
dance, opium-smoking, poetry, clothes, cosmetics, cuisine, quail fights, games) are lumped together
as Lucknow’s total, universal vilasita, an abstract moral concept. See also, Pritchett, ‘The Chess
Players’, pp. 65–78.

10 / SADAN JHA
north Bihar.33 Chronologically, Nagarjuna’s novellas Rati Nath ki Chachi (Rati

Nath’s Aunt, 1948), Balchanma (1952) and Varun Ke Bete (Son of Varun, written
in 1954 and published in 1956) made him a precursor to Renu. Similarly,
Rambriksha Benipuri’s Maati ki Muratai (Earthen figurines, 1941), Nirala’s
Chaturi Chamar (Clever Cobbler, 1945) and Billesur Bakriha (1945) or even
earlier writings like Brindavan Verma’s Gadh Kundar (Kundar Fort, 1929),
Kundalini Chakra (Kundalini Cycle, 1932), Virata ki Padhmini (Padhmini of Virata,
1936), Jhansi ki Rani (Queen of Jhansi, 1946), Premchand’s Godan (Gift of Cow,
1936, as mentioned earlier) and Shiv Pujan Sahai’s Dehati Duniya (Village World,
1926) were well recognised for their regional–rural flavours. These writings were
framed by their specific regional cultural backgrounds. However, it was the pub-
lication of Maila Anchal (1954) by Renu and later Rahi Masoom Raza’s Adha
Gaon (1966) that started the debate around anchalik sahitya
(regional literature) in Hindi.34
Widely known for his innovative techniques and for depicting the subjectivities
of his region in prose, Phaniswarnath Renu (1921–1977) is recognised, appre-
ciated and criticised for propagating a new genre in Hindi—anchalik sahitya
(regional literature).35 He was born in the village of Aurahi Hingna in the district
of Purnea (now under a separate district, Araria) in Bihar. He has 26 books to his
credit if his posthumous publications are included.36 His oeuvre consists of nov-
els, stories, katha–reportage (story–reports), poems, essays and interviews. He
tried his hands at all forms of prose though he wanted to be a poet in his early
life.37 He started writing stories by around 1936 and in 1944 his first ‘mature’
story titled Bat Baba was published after his release from the Bhagalpur Central
Jail. He wrote his last story Bhitichitra ki Mayuri in 1972.38
33
Renu and Nagarjuna came from two different parts of Mithila, separated by the river Kosi.
Nagarjuna came from village Tarauni in the district of Madhubani. Purnea, on ‘the other side of
Kosi’, was recognised as a periphery of Mithila. Nagarujna’s is the ‘standard’ Maithili unlike Renu’s
that varies with characters.
34
See Pandey, Hindi ke Anchalik Upanyason Main Jivan Satya.
35
Critical works on Renu are too many to be cited here. A selection would include: Hansen,
‘Phaniswarnath Renu: The Integration of Rural and Urban’; idem, ‘Renu’s Regionalism’; Pandey,
Hindi ke Anchalik Upanyason Main Jivan Satya; Yayawar, ed., Renu Rachnawali (5 vols.); Yayawar,
ed., Renu ka Jivan; Yayawar, ed., Maila Anchal. For a list of Hindi literary criticism on Renu see
Hansen, ‘Renu’s Regionalism’, p. 273, fn. 1.
36
Those published during his life time include: Maila Anchal (1954), Parati Parikatha (1957),
Thumri (1959), Dirghtapa (1964; published as Kalank Mukti in 1972), Juloos (1965), Kitane Chaurahe
(1966), Aadim Ratri ki Mahak (1967) and Agnikhor (1973). Soon after his death Krinjala-Dhanajala
(1977), Nepali Krantikatha (1977) and a novel (earlier published in episodes) Paltubabu Road were
published (1979), see Bharat Yayawar, ‘Prastabana (Preface)’, Renu Rachnawali, Vol. 1, pp. 11–13.
37
Renu was influenced by Pandit Ramdeni Tiwari, a nationalist poet with whom he was in the
Bhagalpur Central Jail in 1942. The latter advised him try prose forms: stories, novels, plays, satires
but not poetry. See Renu, ‘Dwijdeni ji ki Smriti (The memory of Dwijdeni ji)’, pp. 5–6.
38
Yayawar, ‘Sampadkiya (Editorial)’, Renu Rachnawali, Vol. 1, p. 15.

Renu’s career as a writer was not isolated from his commitment to active poli-
tics and his participation in social life and communitarian village activities. He
spent his few years of schooling by staying with the well-known Koirala family
of Nepal. His exposure to nationalist poetry as a child, his participation in the
1942 Quit India movement and his regular involvement in agrarian activities like
sowing left their mark in his writings. He believed in close integration of writers
with politics and socially constructive activities. He even contested in an election
to translate his belief into concrete action. This conviction regarding an active
dialogue between society and the writers—where the writer is not merely re-
flecting upon social realities and his surrounding environment as a detached
observer but also contributing towards the betterment of the social and political
life—distinguishes Renu from many a contemporary Hindi litterateurs. The
litterateurs contemporary to Renu and identified with the tradition of ‘Nayi Kahani’
(New Short Story Movement of the 1950s) had emphasised a certain distancing
from their individual participation in everyday life.39 Lothar Lutze, the famous
German literary critic once sent him a postcard seeking an appointment. Renu
replied, ‘I am sorry, I can’t see you on that day. I have to go to my village for the
katai, the cutting of the paddy.’ When probed, ‘...what difference does it make if
a writer goes to village to watch the katai’, he criticised his contemporary Hindi
writers for not even knowing ‘where rice would grow’.40
Renu’s socially embedded self and his belief in the role of the writer in the
nation-building endeavour was reflected in two major ways in his literature.41
First and foremost, a reader is struck by his remarkable care for details. Unlike
writers of the Nayi Kahani movement, the detailing in Renu’s works is not so
much obsessively oriented towards the interior lives of characters. Rather, they
reveal the richness of the social and cultural landscape of his characters, as we
shall see in this article.
Here, we need to distinguish between Renu’s profiling of interiority and the ap-
proach of his contemporary writers like Jainendra Kumar (1905–1988, best known
for his novels, Sunita and Tyagpatra) and Satchidananda Vatsyayana ‘Ajneya’
(1911–1987, known for his novels Shekhar Ek Jivani and Nadi ke Dwipa). Unlike
the internal journeys of Jainendra Kumar or Ajneya’s characters, streams of thoughts
39
Some of the leading figures identified with Nayi Kahani Movement include Mohan Rakesh
(1925–72), Bhishm Sahani (1915–2003), Jainendra Kumar (1905–88), Nirmal Verma (1929–2005),
Kamleshwar (1932–2007) and Rajendra Yadav (born, 1929).
40
Lutze, ‘Images of Rural India’, pp. 247–48.
41
See Renu, ‘Rashtra-Nirman main Lekhak ka Sahyog (The Contribution of Writers in Nation-
Building)’, Renu Rachnawali, Vol. 5, pp. 267–72. This essay was published in October 1957 shortly
after the release of Parati Parikatha. Literary critic, Namwar Singh observed that the peasant-like
quality in Renu was due to the division of labour presumably between peasants and those who wrote
about them. Singh’s essay came soon after the publication of Maila Anchal in 1954. See Singh,
‘Samaj, Sahitya aur Lekhak’, pp. 37–45.

12 / SADAN JHA
or internal profiling of Renu’s protagonists (like Lakshmi Kotharin or Baldev)

remained strongly tied to the cultural moorings of the region. Hence, Sunita of
Jainendra Kumar or Rekha and Bhuwan from Ajneya’s Nadi Ke Dwipa (1952)
can be placed in any cultural or geographical context without much difficulty.
These are reflections of universal men and women identifiable with no particular
cultural milieu. Lothar Lutze writes that Renu as ‘a new story-teller’, strives for
authenticity and a different technique. Interestingly, the ‘shahariwale’ (urbanists)
accused the ‘anchalik’ (regional) ones, ‘of catering to some Binnenexotik, as the
Germans would say, interior exoticism, something romantic’. The real literature
was being written, they argued, about contemporary cities, about the am admi
(ordinary man), ‘the person who stands in front of Regal Cinema at Connaught
Place—Kamleshwar—and waits for somebody to take him inside. That’s where
reality happens now’.42 However, we should note that he wove the memories and
flashbacks of significant characters into the stories and converted them into dra-
matised scenes. As a narrative technique, he frequently switched into a character’s
mind creating ‘an opportunity for a play within a play’.43
Examples of this can be found in many of the character profiles of the novels,
such as that of Lachmi or Baldev in Maila Anchal, or Tajmani and Bahadur in
Parati Parikatha. A beautiful and painful demonstration comes from his stories
like Samwadiya (The messenger, 1926) and Raspriya (A musical ragini, 1955).
In this technique, voices of characters, dialogue with important personages from
their previous lives and the re-enactment of remembered scenes draw ‘the reader
into the action than an indirect statement of recollection’.44 The following couplet
from Maila Anchal is a good example of how he evoked individual consciousness
in the manner described above:
...Gangaa re jamunwa ki dhaar nayanwa se nir bahi.

Phutal bharathia ke bhag bhaarath maata roi rahi.45
The couplet is invoked to mark the sleeplessness of one of the important char-
acters, Baldev, a well respected local Congress volunteer living within a Gandhian
moral universe. One evening, Baldev returns late from the math after reciting the
Bijak (scared book). As Baldev is reciting, Lachmi, the caretaker of the math
42
43
See Hansen, ‘Phaniswarnath Renu: The Integration of Rural’, pp. 156–212.
44
Ibid., p. 197.
45
‘Tears flow from (her) eyes like the waters of the Ganga and Yamuna’. Bharat is in a fallen state,
(Bharat Mata) Mother India is crying’, Maila Anchal, p. 48 (My trans-lation; the word nir has been
translated here as tears; nir is the holy/sacred water that flows from an idol’s feet—charnamrita. Nir
literally means water).

enters the scene and places a lantern near him. Letters become clear (visible)—
‘santo, saare jag bauraane’ (‘O Saint, the whole world has gone insane’). An
omniscient narrative voice that is closely identified with the perspective of Baldev,
informs the reader:
A very specific body odor comes from Lachmi. Even in Panchayat, Lachmi
used to sit close to Baldev. Baldev feels the fragrance coming out of Durga
temple of Ramnagar fair—charming fragrance! Pious odor!... (Normally) the
female body exudes the odor of turmeric, garlic, onion and sweat.46
It is this sexual reverie enmeshed with the sacred fragrance that continues in
the mind of Baldev and leaves him in a state of sleeplessness and restlessness
after he returns from the math. Early memories return as images and as frag-
mented experiences. The absence of a female body in the present paves the way
for the entry of memories of a maternal figure—a childhood memory of depriva-
tion and struggle. But the simple progression from scarcity to a summoning up of
the primordial/oedipal ties with his mother is ruptured by different agencies and
experiences: prison-blanket, khadi dhoti, childhood sufferings and the lost figure
of a caring beloved, Rupmati.
The mother-figure returns. This time, it is not his own mother but a mother
produced in and through colonial struggle: ‘... yaad aati hai maye ji ki! Maye ji—
Raamkishun babu ki istiri! (I remember the mother—wife of Ramkishun babu)’.
The mother invoked here is the wife and companion of Ramkishun Babu, a
Gandhian freedom fighter. She is a figure of sacrifice personifying the cause of
freedom struggle and Swaraj. Her pain, the speech of Ramkishun Babu and the
song of Taiwariji create the condition for the sentiment of nationalism and it was
impossible to resist that pull. This is the moment when Renu mobilises the cou-
plet which then also acts as precondition for the enlistment of three volunteers
(suraji): Baldev, Babandas and Chunni Goshain. The couplet mobilised by Renu
in Maila Anchal is not his composition. The novelist himself provides the clue for
historical investigation. The figure mentioned in the novel giving voice to lines of
the couplet, Taiwariji, is not a fictional figure but, like some of his other charac-
ters he too is a real life character, poet Pandit Ramdeni Tiwari ‘Dwijdeni’.
In Maila Anchal, he narrated the marginalisation of Gandhi in nationalist poli-
tics at the time through the character of Baban Das. Baban Das was a true Gandhian.
Having achieved prominence for his social work during the pre-independence
period, he was recognised in the region as a living legend in the field of commu-
nity service, social welfare and the fight against any kind of immoral activities.
However, all his correspondence with Gandhi were stolen by Baldev (a fellow
disciple of Baban Das) who used them to project himself as a leader of the region.
46
Renu, Maila Anchal, p. 46.

14 / SADAN JHA
Baldev was rewarded with a post in the newly formed government. Baban Das
kept fighting the black marketers and smugglers and was killed by them in the
forest one night. His corpse was disposed off but his bag (jholi) was found hang-
ing on a banyan tree. One of his murderers even took that away. But the lace
(belt) of the bag remained there hanging on the branch of the tree. Very soon the
village women folk started worshipping it as Chetharia pir.47 The belt of the bag
acquired ritual status and became an object of worship, a medium of wish
fulfilment.
The first example illustrates Renu’s interweaving of interiority of a character,
political culture of nationalism and his mobilisation of different literary forms.
The doha or the couplet is one among others; unfortunately this literary form and
its potential to generate sharp bhavvyanjana or emotive gestures in condensed
and powerful pictures or laghu-chitra (an aspect that made doha a popular liter-
ary device in patriotic propaganda) has not attracted desirable attention of literary
critiques and historians. The episode of Baban Das takes a reader to the degenera-
tion of the Gandhian moral universe in a fashion that brings politics and custom-
ary practices together at the site of a Chetharia pir.48 Thus, we find Renu going
deep into the interiority of a character on the one hand and on the other, he is able
to describe a contemporary social–political practice where a Gandhian figure is
eliminated and placed in the world of symbols, rituals and reverence.
The second major outcome of his socially embedded self, which distinguishes
him from his peers of Nayi Kahani, comes before us in the celebration of what
I shall term as ‘physicality’ in his writings. Physicality is not intended to imply
the celebration of the body but a deep investment in the potential of human body
to usher social change. This is about privileging physical labour, the glorification
of human nature and not merely a depiction of suffering or the exploitation of
individuals by the system. The protagonists in Renu’s novels and stories often
appear committed to bringing change for the betterment of society. At the same
time, they display remarkable sensitivity towards human emotions, often raising
questions about social relationships. Dr Prashant from Maila Anchal (1954) and
Jitten Babu of Parati Parikatha (1957) are both invested with qualities to act as a
catalyst for progress and hence acquire heroic traits and masculine attributes.
Both in Maila Anchal as well as in Parati Parikatha, a reader will observe male
figures siding with forces of modernity and progress and women at the domain of
47
Chetharia pir: a sacred tree that could supposedly fulfil wishes; to worship the tree in terms of
a saint.
48
William Crook wrote that this widespread custom is ‘probably based on more than one line of
thought’. Sometimes it is an offering of respect to the true spirit, at dangerous places such as river-
crossings or cannon bridges in the lower Himalaya. Here the offering may be intended to win the
support of a kindly tree spirit. In Berar, it is ‘Chindiyadeo’ or ‘Lord of tatters’. In the United Provinces
while we have ‘chithariya bir’ or ‘rag hero’, in the Panjab we find ‘Lingri Pir’ or ‘rag saint’. See, the
section ‘godlings of disease’ in Crook, Religion and Folklore, pp. 138–39.

wild nature, custom and at times, merely as passive bodies either helping their
male counterparts or observing the dynamics of change unfolding before their
eyes. In Maila Anchal, we find Dr Prashant arriving in a village, Meriganj in the
malaria-prone region of Kosi and dedicating his life to treating malaria patients
and searching for a permanent cure for this dreaded disease.49 Though Prashant
along with the two women he loves, Kamli (daughter of the local tehsildar) and
Mamta (an urban educated lady), is in the centre of the story line, the narrative is
actually geared towards unfolding the changing dynamics of a backward village
as a whole. In this manner, Prashant is quite different from Mr Mehta, an urban
educated middle class intellectual in Godan of Premchand. For Mr Mehta, village
is merely a temporary place for stay, a kind of welcome change from the city life.
In Parati Parikatha, Jitten Babu or Jitendranath, son of the local landlord is simi-
larly invested with an obsession to seek a solution for two core issues—land and
water. He is a revolutionary of 1942 Quit India movement and also a columnist
for newspapers and magazines. Like Dr Prashant, he also returns to the village
without caring much about a prospective bright future elsewhere. He too is steeped
in a moral world where his zeal for improving conditions of life in a backward
region is remarkable. Both of them are selfless and dedicated not merely to the
cause of their respective villages but to the problems of the entire Kosi region,
notorious as it was for malaria, floods and barren land. Both these figures are
packed with all the romantic stereotypical qualities of a male body: deprived
past, arrival in the narrative as a single male outsider, an iconoclast in terms of
their attitude towards old customs and superstitions but attentive towards the cul-
tural and religious resources hence complicating the zone of rational scientific
outlook and an organic personality equally open to non-western pursuits of knowl-
edge and heritage.50 Equally, the protagonists are shown to be caring and protec-
tive. Last but not the least, they are presented as lonely individuals.
Lonely and sensitive characters are scattered throughout his stories too. These
characters often come from the margins of peasant society. Sirchan, a mat-maker
(shitalpati maker) from Thes (Knock/blow, 1957), Panchkauri Mridangiya from
Raspriya (the name of a particular musical Ragini, 1955) or Hiraman, a bullock
49
The character of Dr Prashant is based on the life of Dr Alakh Niranjan who died in 2004 in
Forbesgunj ‘after serving the suffering humanity of the most backward area of the state for 71 years’.
Eighty-one year old Md. Sadique, a daily labourer, said that thousands of poor people in his funeral
procession wanted to touch his feet. Malti Devi, a scavenger, said that his selfless service had made
him a legend and people treated him as a symbol of God. Popularly known as Alakh Babu, he started
his carrier as a doctor in 1933 from a tin-roofed hospital jointly run by the district board and Forbesgunj
municipality. He was the first person to introduce modern medicine and surgery in the area and was
the only qualified doctor in the area. See, Agrawal, ‘Renu’s Dagdar Babu is dead’, p. 5.
50
Renu, on the other hand, claimed that Maila Anchal’s novelty as a novel lay in breaking the ex-
isting moral universe and presenting a novel that had no hero. See, Yayawar, ‘Sampadkiya (Editorial)’,
Renu Rachnawali, Vol. 2, pp. 9–18.

16 / SADAN JHA
cart driver from Teesri Kasam urf Mare gaye gulfam (Third Vow or end of a rosy
romance, 1956) are few examples who, though an integral part of a village cos-
mos, are not directly involved in the act of tilling the land. These figures and their
deprived pasts broaden the social/historical base of rural landscape and compli-
cate the dominant frame of class analysis. Unlike the protagonists of the novels,
these characters of stories are rustic. They come from economically and socially
downtrodden backgrounds and they are endowed with the mastery of certain crafts.
As such, they are portrayed as extremely self-confident beings who do not suc-
cumb to economic and social pressures. This boldness is further accompanied by
extreme tenderness and their vulnerability to emotional demands cross-cutting
the stereotypes of relationships. Thus, Hiraman in Teesri Kasam enters into a
bond with Hirabai, a company nautch girl, and this relationship falls in between
the usual portrayal of romance and friendship.51 In Raspriya, the attraction of an
old Mridangiya (those who play the musical instrument Mridangam) and the child
Mohna is woven around a number of themes like music, a dying performative
tradition, vulnerability of peripatetic subaltern musicians, affectionate bonding
between a teacher and his disciple, and finally, a realisation that the boy is his
own son.
These portrayals were often set in a time of a fast-changing value system. The
characters in question often struggled to respond to the changing times. The no-
velty of Renu’s storyline lay in his treatment of conflicts between individuals and
their times. He wove the cultural resources of the land in his plots in such a
fashion that at the end even when modernity and its agencies triumphed (as in
Parati Parikatha), the complexity of the narrative did not allow any easy general-
isation. The reader remained grounded in the narratives and in the multiple par-
ticularities of the regional dynamics, a point we shall return to later. To render the
plurality specific to the geo-cultural setting of his writings, Renu carried out a lot
of experiments at the level of the craft of literary writing itself. Thus, he used an
innovative language to capture dense cultural pasts in changing times. The result
was a unique aesthetic experience for the reader on the one hand and inauguration
of a new sub genre of regional literature (anchalik sahitya) on the other.
I shall explore this aesthetic experience at two levels: first, in terms of his
articulation of the pasts of this region which are contested, fluid and incomplete;
and second, his innovative use of language.
Narrating the Past
A distinguishing but ignored feature of anchalik upanyas is the way it draws

heavily on the history of the region. In MA, for example, the name of the village
51
We find that this ambivalence has been flattened out considerably in the film Teesri Kasam
(1966) where Hiraman and Hirabai are played by Raj Kapoor and Wahida Rehman respectively.

Meriganj itself carries traces of its history. It is named, we are told, after Mary,
wife of an indigo planter W.G. Martin (she died of fever before reaching Meriganj).
The second chapter expands on the theme: ‘There are many villages and kasbas
in the district of Purnea which bear the weight of neelhe sahibs (Indigo planters)
on their names even today’.52 Frequently, pasts of the region acquire an active
presence in the plot. Thus, when a newly-wed kaniya (bride) arrives in the village
she is shown rubbles, the remains of the kothis (palaces) and the tank used for
the cleaning of indigo (neel mahane ka hauj). Even more pertinent is Renu’s skil-
ful deployment of the centrality of the river Kosi in the historical making of the
landscape. Both Maila Anchal and Parati Parikatha are in this sense, stories of
this landscape and its changing past where fictitious narratives are interwoven
with the district’s distinctive features: primarily its heterotopic characteristics.
The name of the district Purniya/Purnaiya/Purainya means the country of the
lotus (derived from its local name: Purain). It is also said that the word is derived
from Pura Aranya or forest land as tradition asserts that the district was full of
dense forest. Even in late nineteenth century, the indigo and rice districts of Purnea
and Bhagalpur were a ‘sportsman’s paradise’. In 1892, James Inglis wrote:
...the face of the country is split up into an infinitude of islands, and reticulated
everywhere by a network of dry channels and shifting sandbanks; and over all,
wherever there is an inch of soil, the stately elephant grass spreads its feathery
mantle, and when the light, silvery, filmy reeds are in flower, the landscape
seems like a vast swaying sea....53
The eastern part of the district being drained by the Mahananda has tradition-
ally been a fertile tract while western portion remained a sandy grass country
watered by old channels of Kosi, a river constantly changing its bed and annually
covering the land with a thick deposit of sand due to recurrent inundations. Reach-
ing up to Nepal, this was the vast stretch of land that formed the field of imagina-
tion and creativity for Renu.
Apart from Phaniswarnath Renu’s writings, probably the most detailed de-
scription of the region comes from Francis Buchanan. Writing in 1809–10, he
noted that Purnea was ‘one of the best country towns of Bengal’.54 His survey
became the basis for a number of subsequent descriptions of the district including
52
53
Inglis, Tent Life in Tigerland with which is Incorporated Sport and Work in Napaul Frontier,
pp. 7–8.
54
Buchanan, An Account of the District of Purnea in 1809–10, pp. 58–59. For some notable
fictional descriptions of life in Purnea, see Bhaduri, Dhoday Charitmanas; Ray, Marichika (two
volumes); Mukhopadhyaya, Koshi Pranganak Chitthi. Renu was also accused of plagiarising from
Dhoday Charitmanas, a charge dismissed by Bhaduri himself. See Yayawar, ‘Sampadkiya’, Renu
Rachnawali, Vol. 2, pp. 9–18.

18 / SADAN JHA
Walter Hamilton’s in East India Gazetteer. Hamilton, in 1828, noted, ‘Purneah

having many advantages of soil and climate has always been considered one of
the most productive in the province (of Bengal)’.55 Yet, ‘continued unhealthiness
of the towns of Purneah and Dinagepoor’ led to an ‘unavoidable’ decision in 1815
on ‘the necessity of removing the civil authorities to more healthy stations’.56
In the eighteenth century, northern Purnea was reported to have been partly
forested and partly cultivated.57 Another report claimed that the region in pre-
1765 period was a ‘well watered, cultivated flat, rich in produce of rice, oil, pulse,
wheat, with almost all other ordinary grains for home consumption....58 On the
other hand, a contemporary account Riyazu-s-Salatin pointed in 1788, to its ‘in-
salubrious and uncongenial’ climate causing tumors of the throat in men and women
as well as in wild beasts and birds.59
The district suffered under the great famine of 1770, crop failure in 1783, and
again on account of epidemics in 1791 and 1817. It seems that almost every alter-
nate year since 1863, the district witnessed one or another calamity. However, the
Bengal Administration Report 1872–73 remarked that though the population was
sparse in Purnea, its people were better off than elsewhere in the Bhagalpur
division.60
O’Malley also provides a very interesting remark made around the late
nineteenth century by a Bengali civilian.
‘Ask,’ says a Bengali writer, ‘any one leaving the railway train at Sahebgunge
what place he is coming to and it is ten to one he will say he is going to
Purneah. Ask again something of the place, and he is sure to change colour and
turn pale. This is no doubt ominous to you, if you are going to a penal settle-
ment, where life is death and death a positive relief’.61
In 1870, a long article in a magazine called Chundrika blamed the epidemic

fever on the embankments.62 Except for a brief period of population growth
(1881–91) when Kosi’s westward movement (1850–75) created an extensive area
fit for reclamation and led to a large influx of immigrants from other districts,
55
Walter Hamilton, East India Gazetteer Vol. II: Containing Particular Description of the
Empires..., p. 430; Edward Thornton, A Gazetteer of the Territories, Vol. 4, pp. 219–27.
56
Hamilton, East India Gazetteer Vol. II, pp. 434–35.
57
Mahalanobis, The Report on Rainfall and Floods in North Bengal 1870–1922, p. 21, f.n. 3.
58
O’Malley, The Gazetteer of the Purnea District 1911, p. 231.
59
Ghulam Husain Salim, Riyazu-s-Salatin, p. 38.
60
Bengal Administration Report 1872–73, p. 139.
61
62
Report on the Native papers for the week 28 November to 3rd December 1870, p. 15. Also see
Report on the Native papers for the week ending 4th June 1870, p. 1.

Purnea remained a region haunted by epidemics (mostly attributed to issues of

drainage and embankments) till the third decade of twentieth century.63 Malaria
continued to occupy a considerable part of popular imagination even down to the
1950s. The fight against malaria in Maila Anchal was thus anchored in a his-
torical context.
Throughout the colonial period, the Purnea region was also notorious for a
very high incidence of criminal activities. Criminals from across the Nepal bor-
der, predatory troops of Sannyasis (mendicants),64 and the infamous Shershabadia
gangs (named after the mercenary troops of medieval ruler Shershah)65 were re-
ported to have been very active in the district.
With unhealthiness and wilderness at its core, in this discourse, we also find
enmeshed both the history of colonial measures to control the river Kosi and folk
memory of failed attempts to tame her wildness. Thus, the relation between river
and the flow of population was not merely confined to the logic of agrarian ex-
pansion/contraction. For a long time, the belief was prevalent among Brahmans
living east of Kosi that ‘in Kali Yuga the famine stricken Brahmans will take their
children in their arms and cross the Kosi’.66
Historians have noted the changing course of the river since the last quarter of
the nineteenth century. Large-scale construction activities (especially building
railway embankments) and irrigation measures adopted by the colonial state in
the second half of the nineteenth century are cited as possible reasons behind
change in the Kosi’s direction leading to destructive floods.67
63
For fever see Risley and Gait, Report On The Census of India, 1901, p. 51; Report on Sanitary
Measures in India in 1893–94, Vol. 27, pp. 7–8; for malaria see Lacey, The Census of India 1931.
Vol. 7 (Bihar and Orissa Part I) , p. 30; For ecological background of this region and its changes in
c 1900–1930 see Chakravarti, ‘The Unfinished Struggle of Santhal Bataidars in Purnea District,
1938–42’, pp. 1847–65.
64
‘Report of Bahadoorganj Darogah respecting Dacoities committed by the inhabitants of Morung
Territories’ and ‘Morung Inhabitants Dacoities in Purneah’, Foreign/25 Nov. 1830/71 P.C. (Delhi:
National Archive of India (henceforth NAI), Foreign/3 Dec. 1830/61 (Delhi: NAI), also see, Foreign/
Pol/ /Letter from Court of Director/3 March 1858/10 (Delhi: NAI); ‘Nepal Durbar’s Measures for
Investigating the charge against the Morung Inhabitants accused of committing Dacoity in Purnea’,
Foreign/6 April 1835/46–47 (Delhi: NAI); ‘Misunderstanding by the Magistrate of Purneah Regarding
Extradition of Prisoners under the Treaty with Nepal’, Foreign/Political/Dispatch from Court of
Directors/40/11 Nov1857 (Delhi: NAI); ‘Letter dated 18th August 1794’, in Bannerjee, ed., Fort
William India House Correspondences, Vol. XX, p. 485. The situation remained the same till the first
decade of the twentieth century, when in 1914–15 the government claimed ‘a satisfactory decrease
in the numbers of dakaits owing largely to the special measures for preventing this form of crime in
Purnea and Jamtara subdivisions of Santal Pargana’. See Report on the Administration of Bihar and
Orissa during 1914–1915.
65
Roy Chaudhury, Bihar District Gazetteers: Purnea, pp. 13, 151.
66
67
Harrison, Bengal Embankment Manual; Shillingford, ‘On changes in the course of the Kusi
River, and the probable dangers arising from them’, pp. 1–14; Captain Hirst, ‘The Kosi River, and

20 / SADAN JHA
For generations, Kosi has been the cause of great suffering and devastation.
Recently in August 2008, the river again unleashed a reign of havoc resulting in
‘a war-like exodus’ of more than three million people in north Bihar. With the
annual flooding of the Kosi come epidemics, malaria and the heavy silt. It often
takes ‘one, or even two, generations to get the land back to fertility’.68
In various accounts, like that of John Houlton, the river is also visualised in
anthropomorphic form: ‘The Kosi is an impudent hussy who leaves her bed at
night and seeks strange beds, and that is why no engineer will willingly have
anything to do with her, for fear of his reputation’.69
In popular memory, she appears as a teenager threatening the reputation of an
engineer, a witch devouring her own children, a goddess and as a generic mother:
Kosi maiya.70 In a folksong, she is described as a gorgeous teenager whose hair is
long and waist so thin that it can be grabbed in a fist. PP narrates the story of Kosi
tortured by her mother in-law (saas) and sisters in-law (nanads). She revealed
her witch (dayan) identity and acquired destructive form when she finally es-
caped one night and rushed to inundate whatever came on her path. She eventu-
ally got united with her younger sisters—Dularidai and Kamala (the first is the
name of Kosi’s old channel and the second is another river to the west of Kosi).
An annual fair is also held to worship her on the auspicious day of Paus Purnima.71
It is important to note here that such fairs and river worship have been reported
way back by Buchanan also. This is one of the rare stories depicting Kosi as a
married woman.
In another legend, a besotted demon called Rannu Sardar proposed marriage
to Kosi who would marry him only if he could construct a dam, in one night, from
the Himalayas to Ganges. Failing the task the demon was to be beheaded. The
demon agreed but, as his work progressed through the night, Kosi got nervous
and requested her father in the Himalayas to help her. Her father, God Shiva dis-
guised as a rooster, went to the place of demon’s work and started crowing. The
Some Lessons to be Learnt from It’, pp. 463–88. There are in-depth studies available on British
measures related to dams and embankments in this region and in different parts of India. See, D’Souza,
Drowned and Dammed; Mishra, ‘Bihar Flood Story’, pp. 2206–217; Mishra, ‘The Embankment
Trap’, pp. 46–51; Mishra, Trapped Between the Devil and Deep Waters; Singh, Taming the Waters:
The Political Economy of Large Dams in India. We also have references of the practices of fishermen
damming up small rivulets which were most probably dry/left out beds of Kosi causing fever in late
eighteenth century. See a letter dated 17 April 1792, in Bannerjee, ed., Fort William India House
Correspondences, pp. 284–85.
68
Houlton, Bihar: The Heart of India, p. 122; Shillingford, ‘On changes in the course of the Kusi
River’, p. 18.
69
Houlton, Bihar, p. 121.
70
Prideaux, ‘Mother Kosi Songs’, pp. 61–68; Mallick, Kosi; Lal, Maithili Lokgeeton ka Addhyyan,
pp. 301–02.
71
Sharma, ‘“Sonmanki Mela”: Preventing Erosion’, pp. 2223–224.

demon got nervous on hearing the rooster and thought that morning was approach-
ing. He had by that time already built quite a long dam but, hearing the sound
became terrified and fled away. Kosi remained free and untamed.
Even today, the boat people on the Kosi believe that Rannu Sardar is trying to
achieve his task in the hope of marrying Kosi one day. That is how they explain
the continuous erosion of the sand banks of the fast flowing river.72 This is how
this landscape has been transformed from a land of forests (Purna Aranya) to
what Renu describes as ‘dhusar biran anthin prantar’(dusty barren endless
region...).
Renu deploys different narrative strategies to render this past. MA, for ex-
ample, revolves around the fight against malaria and the black fever. Renu enters
into the interiority of the region at various levels: through events, by plotting
characters and social practices and also in the voice of an omnipresent narrator.
MA opens up by locating the reader in the middle of a chaotic moment of the
village enabling the reader to penetrate inside the internal politics, caste confir-
mation, historical setting, distinct language use, moral universe of his language
and the plurality of perception.73 At another level, the past of the region is inter-
woven in such a fashion that in PP, the region itself appears in the shape of a char-
acter whereas the story unfolds at three levels, through three different agents and
in three different styles.74 The central story, with its focus on Paranpur and with
Jitten Babu as the protagonist is told by the author-narrator in linear progression.
Another story, with its focus on the barrenness of the land and Jittu as a central
figure is told by migratory birds. Jittu (note the similarity with Jitten) dies in his
childhood. The story line is highly abstract and fragmented. The third story is a
tale (prose–poetry) of the river Kosi and her sufferings at the hands of her mother
in-law and sister in-law. This tale is narrated by an old cowherd (bhainswar).
Both in this as well as the second story, the author deployed disjointed and ono-
matopoeic words to achieve specific effects.75
While the first story is focussed on events of the village Paranpur, the other
two relate the memory of land at the level of the entire region. Through the com-
plex narrative structure and frequent references to shifting river course of Kosi,
water-logged areas as breeding ground for mosquitoes and bountiful fields turn-
ing into non-fertile tracts, the sufferings of the region is marked. Still, Renu’s
72
Vania, ‘Engineered Chaos’.
73
See ‘Medical Branch/Local Self Government/Bihar and Orissa/November 1942/ 276–78’ (file
name not mentioned), Patna: Bihar State Archives (hereafter PBSA). This file also lists names of
Kala-azar centres (8) and sub-centres in Purnea district. Also see, Working of the Kala-azar centres
in North Bihar (Extension of the Epidemic Diseases Act, 1897 in North Bihar): Experiments in the
Kanti Area, Medical Branch/Local Self Government/Bihar and Orissa/4A/2/1941, PBSA.
74
Renu, Parati Parikatha, pp. 317–18.
75
For example, ha-ha-ha-r-r-r-r...! guramguram—aan-aan-si-e-e-e-aan-gar-gar-guram’. Renu,
Parati Parikatha, p. 315.

22 / SADAN JHA
novels are not aitihasik upanyaas (historical novels), a separate literary genre.
For, the descriptions of the past are oriented to give density to the contemporary
and invoked at the moment of the present. Myths, sayings and songs carry moral
messages, not judged for their ‘authenticity’. His references of Jeevat Pokhar or
wells of Rannu Sardar in PP and search for indigenous herbs in MA are two good
examples to cite here.
The protagonist of MA, Dr Prashant tries to find a cure for malaria which he
believes lies in the locality itself, in the plants and herbs found in the same local-
ity. The Purnea region emerges as a research laboratory for him in the novel. His
scientific training and modern outlook are not shown to have come into conflict
with his belief that a solution to the disease may be found in local traditions and
lore. Interestingly, the novelist does not suppress this ambivalence in his attitude.
The scientific, modern and socially deprived individual self is not separated from
his non-modern and non-scientific features.76 At another level, he gets married,
integrated into the social fabric of the village and refuses to return to the state
capital. When Prashant declares his failure in finding a solution for malaria, it is
his humanist impulse that is brought to the foreground by the author. The beloved
of the hero, an educated urban figure Mamta consoles him, ‘Research never fails,
doctor! You have at least recognised the soil. Love for the soil and the human
being. It is not a small thing.’77
The belief in the potential of a modern man to bring about progressive change
survives alongside the faith in local lore in PP.
The protagonist Jitten Babu is a man of letters and leader of a radical political
party. Fascinated with the ‘Damodar Valley Corporation project’, he returns to
his native village, Paranpur, in the hope of finding a solution for the problems of
the barren land. But, beyond the realm of modernity his search also makes him
obsessed with a mysterious manuscript, its cryptic language, folktales and tantrik
knowledge system. In short, all these non-modern knowledge systems are mobil-
ised as a solution to the ‘barren land’. A local belief in the actual existence and
sacredness of nine mythical ponds mentioned by Buchanan is an important part
of the plot in PP. Equally important is a tale about another sacred and ancient
pond called the Jeevat Pukhar (pond).78 These sacred ponds are further linked
with the tale of Kosi and Rannu Sardar in Parati Parikatha. Renu brings together
scattered pieces of this knowledge from various sources (folk songs about ghats
or river banks and manuscripts which are collected by a researcher, songs and
76
Bauman writes, ‘The typically modern practice, the substance of modern politics, of modern
intellect, of modern life is the effort to exterminate ambivalence: an effort to define precisely—and
to suppress or eliminate everything that could not or would not be precisely defined’. Bauman,
Modernity and Ambivalence, pp. 7–8.
77
78
Buchanan, An Account of the District of Purnea in 1809–10, pp. 25, 61.

people’s perception about Kosi and her sister rivulet, Dulari Dai) to help the pro-
tagonist revive this dry rivulet by building a small embankment and diverting the
main channel of Kosi. The application of local lore thus resulted in improving the
fertility of two and a half thousand hectares of land in the tract of Dulari Dai and
in reclaiming seven to eight thousand hectares of parati (uncultivated/barren)
land for cultivation. Moreover, water was now available in all the five ponds
(kunds) of Dulari Dai around the year.79
In this way, we can safely argue that these local knowledge and belief about
the past anchor Renu’s plot exclusively in the Kosi region. At another level, the
rich profusion of ethnographic details becomes a recognisable element in his
novels. However, what caught the attention of literary critics was the manner in
which the subjects of the novels were represented.
Experimenting with Language, Chronicling the Region
Renu wrote in the manner in which people of the region spoke.80 Kathryn Hansen
pointed out that the use of non-Hindi speech or varieties of Hindi speech was pri-
marily a technique for characterisation in Renu. Each character had his/her own
type of language making him/her socially identifiable in the diverse socio-ethnic
structure of Purnea region, each with his/her own fondness for phrases and ex-
pressions, his/her own brand of humour or discourse making the person a unique
individual. She further writes, ‘Renu’s real talent lies in attuning his ears to these
fine differences in speech and being able to transcribe them and use them to par-
ticularise his characters’.81 He did not seem to care much for the standard main-
stream Hindi—the national language. Preparing an advertisement of the novel,
he wrote, ‘Maila Anchal? That novel in which there is not even a single correct
line of Hindi?’82
In Premchand’s corpus, this polyphonic world was absent. Khari boli flat-
tened it out and the spoken universe was erased. Renu does the opposite and the
79
Renu, Parati Parikatha, pp. 618, 632.
80
The District Census Handbook lists eleven languages as mother tongue in the Paranpur anchal
in 1956. These are Arabic, Assamese, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Dhangari, Hindi, Kurukh Oraon, Maithili,
Marwari, Santali and Urdu. Ranchor Prasad, District Census Handbook: Purnea, pp. 78–79; also see
entries for Paranpur anchal and village in the revenue thana Kathihar in Prasad, Census 1961: Bihar
District Census Handbook 11 Purnea, pp. 236–37. This is probably the closest to Renu’s village in
Parati Parikatha where he mentions Paranpur under Thana Ranigunj, Pargana Haveli, Renu, Parati
Parikatha, p. 321. In administrative records we find more than one village with the name Paranpur;
see Thana Lists, District of Purnea: List of Revenue Mauzas as Demonstrated and Surveyed in the
Survey of 1903–1904. Also see Village Directory of the Presidency of Bengal, Vol. 35 (Purneah),
compiled by the Postmaster-General of Bengal, Calcutta, 1885. The idea here is neither to contrast
Renu’s fictional register with administrative documents nor to validate the authenticity of Renu’s
claim but to appreciate the richness of Renu’s account and his care for details.
81
Hansen, Phaniswarnath Renu: The Integration of Rural, pp. 136–43.
82
Yayawar, ‘Sampadkiya’, Renu Rachanawali, Vol. 2, p. 11.

24 / SADAN JHA
linguistic territory of the mainstream Hindi was broken into its polyphonic prac-
tices. Even in small passages and within one chapter one got a spectrum of lan-
guage usage ranging from words that were pure Maithili, tatsam, ardh-tatsam,
tadbhav, Nepali-Hindi (hum aega), Sanskritised Hindi and pure Sanskrit verse.83
Chapter 18 of the second part of MA provides an example. This is a section that
also has some semblance with the first chapter of the novel. Both these chapters are
about the chaos caused by the presence of the army in the village. In Chapter 18,
it is not the usual police force identified with the red turban but the Gorkha Mili-
tary which is crueller than even the British (gora) Military. The police arrived in
the village and were searching for Kalicharan or Kalia who had fled from jail. We
have sentences like Kalia ghaskantowaach: ho gaya. The word ghaskantowaach:
is a mixture of the Sanskrit words waach: and desaj maithili word ghaskant (flew
away).84 Kalicharan’s mother asks first in pure Hindi, ‘arre Kon bhaag gaya beti?’
But a few lines later she responds to the Superintendent of Police in Maithili,
‘Hazur... hamra kuchh nai malum’. Even here the word malum is not pure Maithili
but at best can be recognised as videshaj. The word normally used for it in Maithili
is bujhal (known, informed). We have sentences like lachchhan lagta hai, samuche
gaon ko kurukk karega (lachchhan from Sanskrit lakshaan and Kurukk from Nepali
and possibly having roots in British legal term Kurki–Jabti implying the confis-
cation of property) and a pure Bhojpuri sentence ‘are! Hum ka hokum se baahar
baani!... chalin, hum aabatani’ (‘Am I outside the rule of law! You proceed, I am
following)’. This Bhojpuri sentence is followed by a Nepali one when Gorkha
maletari says ‘hum paisa teerkar churut lega...why should I? (Would I buy
cigarettes by stealing money...why should I?)’ We have ardha tatsam words like
bhagmaan (from bhagwaan) or dhanna (from dhanya). The chapter ends with the
news of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination and Geetapath on the radio in chaste
Sanskrit verses.85 One can read this experiment with language also in terms of
the puncturing of the gendered understanding of the national language. The de-
velopment of Hindi khari boli in fact highlighted the need for a masculine lan-
guage for the service of the masculine nation in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century. Charu Gupta commented on this process of gendering:
83
Lutze wrote that Renu delegated the storytelling to his characters similar to German erlebte
Rede, resulting in something like ‘experienced speech’ in the sense of ‘lived-through speech’. In this
technique, the speech is in the third person, but identifies itself entirely with the character present.
84
It may be noted that the District Census Handbook differentiates between Maithili and Tirhutia.
See explanatory notes in Prasad, District Census Handbook: Purnea, pp. 63, 78–79. Grierson has
also distinguished between Standard Maithili and Gaonwari Maithili and lists both along with Sirpuria
or Kishangunjia as spoken languages in Purnea. See, Grierson, comp. and ed., ‘Indo Aryan Family
(Eastern Group), Bengali or Banga Bhasa (no. 30)’, pp. 138–39.
85
Renu, Maila Anchal, pp. 278–84.

Khari Boli introduced a symbolic order whereby the nation was to be distin-
guished from a past in which the language of the erotic and feminine was Braj
(another regional language of north India). The regional languages in this his-
torical development (of late nineteenth and early twentieth century) were
recognised as different parts of this body hence reduced to the status of dia-
lects. These regional ‘dialects’ and their bodies were considered as feminine
hence potentially dangerous for the purity of the (masculine) body of the na-
tional language.86
In this process of defining ‘Hindi’, the literary heritage of regional dialects
was recognised as a cultural resource. However, this heritage was rejected for
literary creations for contemporary and future purpose. ‘Because they added lus-
tre to Hindi’s past’, Christopher King argued, ‘written traditions in these dialects
at least merited attention. On the other hand, because they were presumably con-
sidered too vulgar and unrefined, oral traditions, such as the biraha of the ahirs of
Bhojpuri-speaking area, received no notice’.87 Renu, as shown earlier, not merely
used these languages (Awadhi, Braj, Maithili, impure Sanskrit in the garb of ardh-
tatsam) but also showed that these forms interacted closely and smoothly in the
life of a village and a region. Thus, what was forbidden for the writers of Khari
Boli since the late nineteenth century as vulgar, rustic and impure was glorified
and relocated by Renu in 1950s. His misspelled words may appear humorous, but
for Renu, it was a play with the standard nationalist construction of Hindi. This
play capitalised on the gap between the way a word was spoken and the way it
was written. His loyalties operated towards matching the pronunciation of words
as they were practiced in the area. In spelling words as they sounded, he trans-
gressed the norm of modern Hindi prose that replaced ardh-tatsam by pure
Sanskrit or tatsam.88
The frequent shift from one language to another also imparted a lyrical tone to
his prose. Equally effective was his careful use of non-human sounds, including
animal noises as well as sounds of machines and musical instruments, creating a
soundscape and imparting even greater aural richness to the texture of his prose.89
These experiments with the language, to produce a polyphonic rural world and to
achieve musicality could upset readers. Renu, as Kathryn Hansen points out ‘makes
the reader leave the security of the printed page and enter an oral universe’.90
86
Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu Public in Colonial
India, p. 213; Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere: 1920–1940, p. 26.
87
King, ‘Forging a New Linguistic Identity: The Hindi Movement in Banaras, 1868–1914’,
p. 146.
88
Hansen, ‘Renu’s Regionalism’, p. 277.
89
Renu demonstrated his passion for musical forms on a number of occasions. Introducing his
collection of stories titled Thumri, he claimed that all the stories in that collection bore the spirit of
Thumri. See, ‘Thumri ki Bhumika: Swarlipi (1959)’, Renu Rachnawali, Vol. 1, p. 579.
90
Hansen, ‘Renu’s Regionalism’, p. 278.

26 / SADAN JHA
Yet, the novelist’s preference for the oral texture and anthropological details
did not treat the folk domain with a purist impulse. The folk was neither static nor
detached from its milieu which was both contemporary and political. Along with
the example of Chetharia Pir that we discussed above, a good number of songs
also bear witness to this fantastic amalgamation of the folk with the political.
An Archive of the Regional-Rural in 1950s
The very first sentence of Maila Anchal contains words like maletari (for ‘mili-
tary’) and giriff (standard form giraftar, or arrest). These variations are consistent
with the investment in the oral circulation of information in the village. The event
is the setting up of a malaria centre. The presence of government staff is per-
ceived in multiple ways and becomes the occasion for invoking local memory of
atrocities perpetrated by the British military during the 1942 movement. The play
on words and information serves a twin purpose. Multiple interpretations of the
event declare that the narrator is trying to capture multiple moralities and mean-
ings rather than ‘objective’ and singular truth of the event. In the very first sec-
tion, we find that the village is divided along caste lines and the writer has not
censored the use of slang and foul words. Sale (brother’s wife), one of the most
popular slang of north India comes in the very first page. In the second chapter we
have a saying: teen aane ki labani tari, rok sala motar gar (a pot of toddy comes
for three aana, stop that motor car)—a saying of protest against the elitist and
authoritative presence of a motor car in the village.
The very first chapter lays out the caste configuration and caste-based segre-
gation of localities (tolas) in the village. These include Malik tola, Guartoli, Rajput
toli, Kayastha toli, Tatma toli and Yadavtoli. Yadavtoli and Guartoli are sepa-
rately mentioned but they are two different names of the same-caste locality.
While Yadav derives from the surname of the caste, the word ‘Guar’ carried a
pejorative sense. The author explained that the Yadavas had emerged recently on
the political scene of the village and nobody dared to refer to their neighbourhood
as Guartoli’ anymore.91 Dhanikdhari toli or Santhaltoli and Dusadhtoli are added
later to the list.92 Interestingly, the narrator attributed each caste with a unique
linguistic and political consciousness.
But politics in the village also marked itself out along ideological lines. There
were Gandhians (Bamandas and Baldev) and Congress party workers who start
off as committed young men only to end up as corrupt leaders. The division along
ideological lines gets thicker in Parati Parikatha where we get a full list of all the
major political parties of that period active in the village. Political messages are
scattered throughout the novel in the garb of cultural voices: songs ( fagua: Holi
songs), jhumars, couplets and slogans.
91
Renu, Maila Anchal, pp. 23–25, 29.
92
Ibid., p. 31.

As Hansen points out, in Maila Anchal alone there are twenty different Maithili
song types that inclulde Sohar (birth songs), Samdaun (mourning), phagua (Holi
songs, also known as fag), Batgamni (songs of the road), Barsaati (rainy season
songs), Bhaujiya, Jogiras, Vidapat, etc. Nepali folk songs like jhaure and song–
stories like Lorik and Kumar Bijjaban also add to this richness. In PP, a song–story
of mother Kosi, as a parallel narrative, complicates the main prose narrative itself.
Detailed information about lifestyles, habits and sayings of specific places in
this region are also related. Apart from numerous references to different types of
hats (maletari topi and Halwahi hat), there are stories about Indigo planters (in
both MA and PP) and an interesting tale of five mysterious ponds (Parati
Parikatha). Such information did not occur out of context but are woven into
insightful descriptions. Describing the Halwaahi hat made of taal-patra and
bamboo, for example, he wrote that these were popularised by eastern Bengal
peasants like Maldahiya (from Maldah) and other Pakistani refugees.93 Songs
and sayings of the ghat were also nicely integrated into the narrative.94 In PP, he
mentioned ghat tax as also an interesting saying about ghats: ghat baradiya ka
wyawhaar, karo begari utaro paar (the ghat behaves such/work without wages
and cross the river).95
Equally interesting are his meticulous descriptions of relationships and par-
ticular communities. An insightful account, for example, of the occupation of the
Dusadh community (one of the very ‘low’ and understudied communities of land-
less agrarian/artisanal labourers of Bihar) is to be found in Maila Anchal.96 Again,
the domain of the folk is opened up to reflect on the contemporary and the politi-
cal. Thus, the occasion of Vidapat Naach in Maila Anchal provides a satirical
comment on the exploitative character of land survey.97 Similarly, the Holi epi-
sode of Maila Anchal or Samdaun (mourning song) on the death of Mahatma
Gandhi are two fascinating examples of the manner in which contemporary events
and political perceptions are rendered in folk forms.98 In this manner, one can
conclude that Renu’s writings create an archive of contemporary cultural prac-
tices of the Kosi region. However, his role as an ethnographer or a reporter docu-
menting the region must be qualified on at least two grounds—his approach to
the information and his technique of rendering them in his prose. These two quali-
fications also shape the nature of above mentioned archives.
93
Ibid., p. 344.
94
Ghat: particular locations by the river side used for bathing and for the landing of boats.
95
Renu, Parati Parikatha, p. 324. ‘Ghat tax’ was a kind of transport tax in colonial times. This
saying which is mentioned in Parati Parikatha is further explained in his long story Teesri Kasam urf
Mare Gaye Gulfam (1956) which has a painful ghat song associated with a suffering woman figure
of Mahua ghatwarin. See, Renu, ‘Teesri Kasam’, Renu Rachnawali, Vol. 1, pp. 137–63.
96
97
Ibid., pp. 86–94.
98
Ibid., pp. 130–36, 284–86.

28 / SADAN JHA
As a fiction writer, his success lay in weaving information into the experi-
ential dynamics of his characters. For him what mattered more in his stories was
‘the search for his own self (himself) implying the search of a human being’.99
His story, Samwadiya (The Messenger, 1962) for example, explored the moral
dilemma of a messenger caught in a difficult situation. Hargobin (ardha-tatsam
of Hargovind), apparently a dull and lazy man, is a traditional messenger, a
samwadiya, in an age when the state run post-offices had made the institution
rather obsolete. One day he is summoned by bari bahuriya (elder daughter-in-
law), a poor widow of the local landlord. After the death of her husband, the
property was divided by younger brothers leaving her penniless. Fighting against
poverty and indebtedness, she decided to inform her mother and brothers of her
plight. She narrated her suffering to Hargobin and asked him to convey it verba-
tim to her family. The narrator describes the delicate nature of the duties of a
messenger. He is expected to deliver the message with precision, word for word,
tone for tone. Hargobin faces a moral dilemma, since he does not want to demean
the widow and by extension the pride of the village. He finally decides not to
perform the assigned task ‘truthfully’ and returns back to the village with a deter-
mination to serve the widow wholeheartedly. He believes he has failed in his task
only to be surprised to find that the widow welcomes his decision.
The story thus examined and archived a dying art and an institution at the
verge of extinction.100 One can also interpret this story as self-reflexive, convey-
ing the difficult choice that a chronicler like Renu himself has to make between
‘objectivity’ and ‘authenticity’ on the one hand and remaining loyal to the larger
task of attending to the suffering of the village on the other. Like any other archive
then, this one is also not without omissions and glaring gaps. However, as we
saw, there is a wider moral universe within which he archived the cultural memory
of the region.
In an essay titled Rashtra-Nirmaan main Lekhak ka Sahyog (The Contribution
of Writers in Nation-building) and published in October 1957, soon after the pub-
lication of Parati Parikatha, Renu reflected upon the Utopian vision with which
he was obsessed at that point of time. He seemed, at this point, unmistakably
charmed by modernity and ‘the strong zeal of new-construction...giving excite-
ment to a farmer’s son’. He invoked images of an old ironsmith in a remote vil-
lage getting youthful pangs by the sound of roaring tractors and bulldozers and a
sick youth recovering by the sight of the furnace towers (chimni) of a thermal
power station located 50 miles away from his sanatorium window.101 Clearly the
99
Renu, Renu Rachnawali, Vol. 1, p. 580.
100
He also provides a song related to messengers: painya parun dadhi dharun... hamaro samwaad
le le jaahu re samwadiya-ya-ya (Maithili; I will fall on your feet, catch your beard... take my message
O messenger [my translation])!
101
Renu Rachnawali, Vol. 5, p. 271.

historical context of his cultural archive was to draw the attention of the nation
towards the sufferings of the region he identified with.
Conclusion: From Heterogeneous Time to Other Spaces
At one level, we can safely conclude that Renu attempted to portray the maladies
of backwardness in the most authentic manner and thus participated in the life of
the region to acquire the closest possible observation of his subject. In addition,
one may also argue that his deployment of the past, of social and cultural nuances
and his tedious labour of piecing together messages coming from legends and
sayings was a synchronised effort directed towards the development of the vil-
lage, the region and the nation. At this level, Renu appears to be charmed by the
dominant imagination of 1950s—Nehruvian modernity and the mammoth task of
nation building in the first decade of India’s independence. One might even argue
that his archive was extremely limited and hardly offered fresh insight that could
distinguish his work from other imageries and registers of the period, whether
Mother India or the villages as they appeared in the ‘Village Studies’. As in other
contemporary accounts, villages in Renu’s accounts also needed science, plan-
ning, machinery and dams to come out of backwardness. He did not offer any
criticism of big dams or the Nehruvian idea of development either. In this sense,
Renu’s villages were mere locations, geometric units of time and capital.
Yet, the depth and interiority of Renu’s description of village life, with their
strong rootedness in a unique past also represented the region of Purnea unlike
any other. In fact, the past has twin shades in Renu’s corpus. Firstly, it is about the
heterotopic character of the region, historically constructed as a cul-de-sac, as
kalapani, as a place no outsider wished to visit and a journey to which was simi-
lar to committing suicide. This past, in turn, was itself an outcome of the histori-
cal development of the region during colonial period when colonial measures to
control Kosi converted it into an area prone to malaria and black fever. There is,
in other words, a history to the saying, na zahar khao na mahoor khao marna hai
to Purnea jao. One is reminded of Foucault’s assertion about ‘incomplete moder-
nity’ that fails to de-sanctify spaces and rid them of the hidden presence of the
sacred in day-to-day life.
These traces reappear in condensed forms in contemporary practices of the
folk. Thus, Kosi is both a bountiful mother as well as a witch. She stays free as
neither Rannu Sardar nor colonial engineers (as noted by Houlton) is able to tame
her. Renu articulates both the encounters. Renu’s folk come in vivid forms: in his
technique of storytelling, in his deployment of songs and sayings, in the way he
put in stories within stories and in his rendering of colonial memory of land turn-
ing sterile. Interestingly, the author weaves all of these within a prose narrative—
in novels, reports and stories where he is equally concerned with authenticity.

30 / SADAN JHA
On a different plain, we can conclude that Renu was exploring modernity from
within. Hence in his ‘laboratory’, Prashant decides to experiment with herbs and
plants, along with chemicals and medicines. Jitten’s search for water in kachhu-
pitha land leads him to the mysterious tantrik manuscript and its diagrams point-
ing to the Jeevat pond and underground wells. Can we dismiss these descriptions
as mere additions to a tale of backwardness? Should we ignore these and focus
exclusively on his literary craftsmanship? Should we place these experiments in
a series of such endeavours whereby the third world practised modernity in its
own terms attracting labels like ‘our modernity’, ‘hybrid modernity’, and the like?
A better appreciation of Renu’s ‘archive’ is possible, however, within Foucault’s
notion of heterotopia which asserts that the discourse of modernity is time-
centric, where space is accorded a subservient status.
Godan, Mother India and accounts of ‘village studies’ all engaged with back-
wardness but without reference to the past of the regions they were set in. Land
remained a form of property, a resource and a factor of production. In Renu, land
is surely a resource but it is also endowed with a character and a history. In Renu’s
works, time appears in different registers. The tale of migratory birds, the legend
of mother Kosi, the description of the land as a shroud, and the promise of Nehru’s
vision of India run parallel to each other. In the framework given by Walter Ben-
jamin (and borrowed by Benedict Anderson) this could be easily interpreted as
another case of ‘simultaneity of past and present in an instantaneous present’
giving us ‘homogeneous empty time’.102 Following Benjamin, we can argue that
tour d’horison, different layers of stories are actualised only in the experience of
reading Renu’s writings. We have seen that the novels of Renu, their characters
and plots are both imagined and fictitious, yet they inhabit a real historical world
in a manner that characters are real life people from the region. His landscapes
are filled with historical references and anthropological details and the narratives
enter into a dialogue with the historical time of the 1950s. This combination of
historical time, heterotopic space and the immense hope in the Nehruvian dam
produce a unique picture of the landscape of Purnea in Renu’s writings. Do these
characteristics point to heterogeneous time as suggested by Partha Chatterjee?
Chatterjee rejects Anderson’s thesis on time by terming it as a one sided view of
modernity or capital having only one dimension of the time-space of modern life.
For him:
People can only imagine themselves in empty homogeneous time; they do not
live in it. Empty homogeneous time is the utopian time of capital. It linearly
connects past, present, and future, creating the possibility for all of those his-
toricist imaginings of identity, nationhood, progress, and so on that Anderson,
102
See, Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,
pp. 22–31.

along with others have made familiar to us. But empty homogeneous time is
not located anywhere in real space—it is utopian.103
Drawing upon Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, he argues that the real
space of the modern life is heterotopia where time is unevenly dense.
In Foucault’s heterotopia, the decisive element is the influence of modernity
on our understanding of the spaces both in terms of their production as well as
lived experience. It is ironical that Chatterjee replaced ‘space’ in the Foucauldian
concept with ‘time’. This minor reshuffle of words may be a Freudian slip in his
otherwise insightful oeuvre. Yet, it is also symptomatic of Soja’s remark when he
accuses critical social theory for its oblivion to spatial dynamics. Renu’s writings
are useful for pointing to this generic lag. In sum, an appreciation of Renu’s vil-
lages, his region, his craft, requires that we move out of a time-centric discourse
of modernity. Here, we need to ask new questions on the relation between village
and literature. We ought to replace time with space and its variants. We need to
shift attention from the abstract space of the nation to the dynamics of placeness,
of region where land is not merely a property or another agent of capital. The
attachment with the land is not simply because it is an agricultural field of peas-
ants. Rather, the land (jamin) is earth (dharti), both mother as well as sterile.
Renu’s poetics lead us to this movement: from nation to a region, from time to
space. This is a region which aspires for modernity but also cherishes its memory
of sacred ponds, mysterious manuscripts and Mahua Ghatwarin’s songs. The as-
piration for science and development does not rule out the memory of its open
past. They are geared towards an open future.
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Acknowledgement: I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer, Biswaroop Das, Awadhendra Sharan,

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The 1950s witnessed an unprecedented attention to the problems of rural life in

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Dhusar, viran, antheen prantar.

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This is Maila Anchal (shadowy border/dirty region), a regional novel. The

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as kachua-pitha jamin, meaning a land like the back of a turtle. He went on to

Phaniswarnath Renu and the Emergence

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In Premchand, we find this commitment in terms of his deployment of ideology

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north Bihar.33 Chronologically, Nagarjuna’s novellas Rati Nath ki Chachi (Rati

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or internal profiling of Renu’s protagonists (like Lakshmi Kotharin or Baldev)

...Gangaa re jamunwa ki dhaar nayanwa se nir bahi.

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Narrating the Past

A distinguishing but ignored feature of anchalik upanyas is the way it draws

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Walter Hamilton’s in East India Gazetteer. Hamilton, in 1828, noted, ‘Purneah

In 1870, a long article in a magazine called Chundrika blamed the epidemic

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Purnea remained a region haunted by epidemics (mostly attributed to issues of

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Experimenting with Language, Chronicling the Region

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An Archive of the Regional-Rural in 1950s

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Conclusion: From Heterogeneous Time to Other Spaces

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Agrawal, A. and K. Sivaramakrishnan. ‘Introduction: Agrarian Environments’, in Arun Agrawal and

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Pandey, G. Between Two Worlds: An Intellectual Biography of Premchand, Delhi, 1989.