Hopeful About Hopelessness: Gyanranjan Ke Bahane
Neelabh [This is an excerpt from Gyanranjan ke Bahane, where the writer gives us a unique sense of the Hindi literary world from the 1960s till date, by way of tracing it through the story of his friendship with Gyanranjan, writer and editor of the watershed literary magazine Pahal. Translation HUG.] As I have said, between Gyan and me, things were getting into a rhythm of sorts. But in this new chapter, our relationship would be more of a roller coaster ride, with its fair share of ups and downs. Once Gyanranjan got into the business of editing Aadhar, the pace and style of his own writings began to suffer. No one would really consider him to be a prolific writer, but at least there used to be regularity in his pen earlier. After 1970, there developed a kind of sluggishness in that evenness of output. The half-formed, halting tale which Gyan would narrate to us at leisure actually saw the light of the day as ‘Anubhav’, which got published in 1972. After that bit of writing Gyan had not written any short story. Perhaps a variation of that idea one might be able to detect in ‘Bahirgaman,’ which Ashok Vajpeyi had included in his Pehchan series. Since no edition of Pehchan had taken the responsibility of providing us with the publishing details, nor was there any bit of information about the date and year of the individual editions themselves, it is impossible to tell at this point which version of the story came out first. But yes, his story ‘Ghanta’ appeared in ‘Katha’ in 1968 and after that Gyan had written two other short stories. Of course, post-‘Anubhav’, Gyan had published a couple of sections from his proposed novel, but that too remained incomplete. Later, once his journey with Pahal began, and the way he got involved in that project, it was impossible to come back and write creative stuff systematically. Most certainly, an opportunity lost. We, I mean Dudhnath Singh and I, have often tried to ponder over this: why had Gyan stopped writing? I mean, what could be the reasons? Over a period of time I have come to my own personal conclusions about this matter. Gyan’s writings and concerns, having begun during the Nehrvian era and having felt the full impact of the illusory aspect of that era, had arrived at a new juncture. One of the first signs of a generation’s disillusionment with the Nehruvian era was possibly Amarkant’s—a man of the previous era—story ‘Hatyara’, published in Nayi Kahaniya. The disenchantment with Nehru’s time and ways had provided Hindi literature with some pregnant possibilities. The likes of Shrikant Verma, who gave us poems like ‘Bhatka Megh’, were rattling their twin-bladed sabres of distrust and rage. The fervour of Janwadi movements and much of the earlier streams of the left had already ebbed from the cultural scene. In these circumstances, the restless, self-centred ethos of Nayi Kavita was being demolished by the seething fumes of the directionless and anarchic poetry-movements like Akavita, which gobbled up even some old-timers and seasoned left activists. During these times, if we behold the stories of Dudhnath Singh, Gyanranjan, Kashinath Singh and Ravindra Kalia collectively, one would clearly notice signs of nihilism and negativity—a spiralling nakarvaad was in the air. Ravindra Kalia and Kashinath Singh were fully draped in the ominous chaddar of negativity—quite distinctly apparent if one reads Ravi’s ‘5055’ or Kashinath’s ‘Apne Log.’ But Dudhnath and Gyan, if you allow me a popular adage, were hopeful about hopelessness—astha ke saath anasthavadi. Dudhnath nurtured his own brand of negativity, which was nature’s gift—one that we can make out right from ‘Vistaar’ (published in Sarika), meandering past ‘Sukhant’ and ‘Dharmashetra Kurushetra’ and leading up to ‘Namo Andhakaram’ and ‘Nishkasan’. The difference was only this that while in his first phase of writing, the impulse of negativity was channelled through and coloured in the motifs of self-destructiveness and melancholy, gradually the same bent changed and got engaged into viciously tearing down others, along with paying repeated obeisance to self-centredness and self-glorification. In Gyan’s kind of negativity, on the other hand, since it had emerged from real social unrest and turmoil, the public-social nature was always at hand, in attendance. Even the beatnik wave could not deter him from his chosen path, though it did influence him a lot. ‘Amrud ka Pedh’, ‘Shesh Hote Huye’ and “Fence ke Idhar aur Udhar’—all bear testimony to how he had tirelessly exposed and torn apart middle class vacuity and other loose sensibilities. It is strange that recently, as I again sat reading his 1972 ‘Anubhav’, I felt that an unsuccessful story of his time was so prescient with truth of a different order. It was ahead of its time actually. I also felt rather wistful and wondered whether things would have been different if Gyan had tolerated a wee bit more the very structurelessness of his stories and wandered a tad more in the by-lanes of his thought world. Had he given such stories some more time to mature in his mind and had he nurtured them further with his developing experience, his work may have exhibited altogether different contours. But Gyan was of a different mettle—living life and literature on a knife’s edge. Maybe the terrain of his writings was middle class existence; but the way he would undo and lay bare each of its layers by his unique style and turns of phrase: that was his and his alone. And when one continues to exhaust all of one’s linguistic munitions with such energy in each and every bit of writing, at one point one may find the arsenal exhausted, empty. That is what transpired I suspect. Perhaps Gyan had lacked the patience and endurance to dismantle and recast his own mould afresh, the way Nirala, Sarveshwar and Raghuvir Sahay had done. Gyan’s art had gradually developed into a fortress and then into a prison-house of its own. There was yet another reason.