Premchand’s Fantasies and the Nation as Allegory
Paresh Chandra I This essay comes after, and is an attempt to rethink, parts of a longer study of Premchand’s novels that I had completed (after a manner) almost a year ago. In that study, I had suggested that the processes at work in these novels produced certain ideological constellations (in the pejorative-bourgeois-lying sense of the term). If I were to stay with those conclusions – whose validity I continue to be convinced of – then even the most avowedly nationalist-myopic films of the 1950s and 1960s, which bear an immediate and palpable relationship withfantasies of Indian statehood, were only fulfilling Premchandian possibilities. I feel the need not so much to qualify those conclusions as to complete them by stripping them of their seeming finality. The way I see it, in order to be completed the argument must be restated against its grain. This essay is a preface to this restatement. The questions that concern this essay have as much if not more to do with literary history as with Premchand; in particular, the question of periodization. For instance: Is Premchand a kind of vanishing moment between two bourgeois fantasy formations – the one that preceded the independent Indian state (Bhartendu Yug reformist novels, the Indian Ideology), and the one that declared and strengthened its hegemony (a significant portion of 1950s/60s Hindi cinema)? II Premchand as realist. A key quality common to various realist styles associated with the 19th century novel inEurope (the kind of realism we are concerned with) is the injunction that space and time must both be specified. If such preoccupation with specificity is an important marker of realism, the short story’s claim may be stronger than the novel’s. In “The Storyteller”, Walter Benjamin emphasizes the specificity of experience from which stories germinate – experience that leads to wisdom which can be communicated to the community through the story; it is sign of community, it consolidates community. The Premchand short story, in its conjoining of realism and particularization, presents a paradox: What gets symbolized, and communicated to the reader, is the impossibility of ever being able to symbolize the singularity of experience. “Kafan” and “Poos ki raat”. At first glance, both stories seem to explore how human beings respond to extreme physical duress. “Poos ki raat,” with its freezing peasant protagonist clutching his dog for warmth, reminds one of Jack London’s “Making a Fire” stories; London too was fascinated by extreme physical conditions that reduce a human being to a condition where s/he is capable only of animal responses. Such conditions force a suspension of the self’s fashioned-regularity, the normal self, constituted of ethical/social habits and responses. The immediate is so overpowering that thought of the future and of the other is momentarily suspended (“species-being” really seems like an idea only philosophers could cook up). In “Poos ki Raat” Halku sleeps in his fields to protect his crop. Come the moment, however, he, refuses to wake up from the hard-fought for stupor of sleep even as his crops are destroyed. The story begins with Halku giving up his only chance of buying a blanket just so he can pay a debt. He is constructed in a few strokes – a hard-working peasant who is unable to escape his poverty (exactly what Ghisu and Madhav refuse to become in “Kafan”) – and because he is so constructed, his inefficiency is not enough to deduce indolence. Having been given access to Halku’s consciousness, to his experiences, the reader is able to explain his (in)action, and since you can explain, you do not condemn. In “Kafan”, it is the clause of “responsibility” toward the other that is bracketed in the face of hunger; in the background Premchand paints for Ghisu and Madhav’s tale he achieves an effect similar to the one in the previous story. For characters in the story the only available truth is that Halku, Madhav and Ghisu shirk their duties, perhaps their most important duties; Halku in order to sleep, and the other two to eat and drink. Those who judge them (Halku’s wife at the end of “Poos ki Raat” and the benevolent landlord in “Kafan”) are never entirely dismissed by the narrative; they could not understand and they cannot be blamed for not being able to understand. The rhythm of the everyday differs from the one which these individuals inhabit; it is incomprehensible to those who are outside it; the reader has momentary access through the story. His moment of empathy is the product of an aesthetic intervention. The story, acting like Henri Lefebvre’s little window that opens onto the street[ii], allows the reader to be insider enough to experience this rhythm, and outsider enough to comprehend it. If realism begins with the particular, then to explore the particular is to explore it in terms of its internal logic. The explanations that Premchand’s realist representations achieve are objective insofar as they accept the objectivity of every subject-position – the implication being that these explanations are historical, not moral. An individual’s actions are not wrong; they are always right when understood as responses to specific conditions. If Kant’s Copernican Revolution was a result of turning the gaze inward, and exploring the subjective constitution of the object, Premchand’s historical gaze is interested in the objective constitution of the subject. It circumvents the deification (and reification) of ethics and the “ethical self” (that can make the world better by bettering itself) which, though it may not have been the Kantian enterprise, is certainly one of the many bourgeois ideologies that fed off it. The first lesson of Premchand’s realism is quasi-structuralist in nature – the self is not responsible; the first cause is external. In a short story called “Nasha,” we witness a friendship between a young clerk and a zamindar. The clerk, also the narrator, is very critical of zamindars, likening them to violent beasts (“hinsak pashu”) and parasites (“khoon choosne waale jonk”). But after spending a few weeks with his zamindar friend at his familial abode, he becomes so used to its comforts that he quite forgets himself, and while returning to his older town life, pushes a man who is standing too close to