विभूतिमूर्ति

 

DEHATI DUNIYA:CENTENARY DISCOURSE

 

The Cultural Traditions of Bihar and its Dehati Duniya

Dr Anamika

Delhi University

 I.

Tamil-speaking critics often use tinai or landscape as the standard for evaluating a cultural geography. Their belief is that literary traditions are shaped by landscape—and that there are five basic kinds: under the shadow of mountains (kurinji), in forest regions (mullai), by riverbanks (maruthal), by the seashore (neithal), or in desert stretches (palai).

 Now, in Bihar we do not really have mountains, sea, or desert. We only have some rivers, a few small forests—mostly toward Champaran. Otherwise there are broken bridges and damaged roads, like fractured lines on a palm, reminding us that something was meant to be built but remained unfinished. What we do have are memories and inherited echoes—oral traces and sub-traditions that splash around in the linguistic subconscious of our writers, lifting into new rhythms and melodious  songs like those of Mahua Ghatwarin.

 Yes, our linguistic subconscious is very deep and extraordinarily abundant. Therefore, the writers of Bihar are full of resonances: echoes of many linguistic rivers, and all of them flow across a broad philosophical plain.

 Maithili, Bajjika, Bhojpuri, Magahi, Angika; before them Sanskrit, Pali, Apabhramsha/Avahatta; and in later years, in their own distinctive ways, English, Persian, and Urdu too. Those surprised to hear English included should look at The Travels of Dean Mahomet, a Native of Patna in (then in Bengal). It is the remarkable travel account of a cook-barber-attendant employed by the East India Company. Writing letters in English to an imaginary friend, Dean Mahomet uses a language enriched not only by many Indian tongues but by Irish as well, since he eventually settled in Ireland with his Irish wife. Yet his childhood had been spent in Patna—which his book’s title still places in Bengal.

 Just as the moon may once have spun away from the earth in some cosmic dance of speed, so in 1912 Odisha and Bihar were separated from the fertile lands of Bengal and I am not clear in my head what expedited the separation:  people’s search of distinct identity or  the administrative convenience of ‘divide and rule’. Whatever may have been the latent cause,despite separation, their gravitational pull upon each other remained.

 Nevertheless, the Bengali renaissance and the Bihari renaissance can be clearly distinguished, especially on the question of women. Partha Chatterjee speaks of the ‘drawing-room presence’ of Bengali women. In Ghare Baire, Bimala’s husband wants to create in her a golden union of Savitri and Portia. He himself introduces her to his revolutionary friend—in the drawing room.But how many homes in Bihar even had such drawing rooms?

 The gatherings of Raja Radhikaraman Prasad Singh and others were mostly masculine assemblies. Occasionally the Raja Saheb would go inside and return after receiving advice from the women’s quarters. Elsewhere in the province, in places like Muzaffarpur and Darbhanga, where public awakening had begun and presses like Narayani Press were established, meetings were usually held either in libraries or in the front courtyard of homes, with a charpoy or low platform laid out. Often only a rug would be spread there, and the presence of women would be registered indirectly—through crochet work or embroidered cloth on the table.

 From the letters Shivpoojan Sahay wrote to his third wife, it becomes clear that although wives, sisters, and mothers were kept informed about the movements of the nation, the dramatic Ghare Baire-like crisis of female participation had not yet arrived here.

 That moment came in the post-Chhayavad era, when Universities came into being and all-night poetry gatherings and people’s theatre began creating an extraordinary spectacle of awakening in Bihar. In the wandering, ascetic-traveller spirit of Mahendar Misir and Bhikhari Thakur, poets and theatre troupes moved from village to village, town to town, spreading not only messages of social consciousness but also, through  love songs, teaching men how to understand the feelings of their partners and how to treat them as a buddy, a pal ( sangini) who could dream and work together towards the vision of a more equitable society (‘bhookha n rahe koi/ pyasa n soye koi/ tanha n hanse koi/ tanha n roye koi/ sabki jeet- haar ko hum bant len/ ansuon ki dhaar ko hum bant len’)

 I would like to read the finest lyric poets of that era in this light. How should one treat  women , what actually pleases their heart and  boosts their confidence,  grants them a say both in the private and public spheres : all the lyricists seem to be pondering over it.  The folk  theatre artists  too seem to be imparting  this kind of moral-spiritual training to men (especially Bhikhari Thakur through revolutionary works like ‘Gabarghichor’).

 Till this day, even among the  contemporary writers , the most moving are those whose folk consciousness is highly developed, a  consciousness that identifies with the poor, the deprived, and women,the most marginalised among  the marginalised . This empathy had an undercurrent of political awareness which only very few notice .

 Having taught and read world literature for many years, especially literature from conflict zones, one thing has settled firmly within me: the longer the history of political exploitation in a region, the richer its literature becomes—especially when the linguistic subconscious of the land carries deep cultural resonances from both classical and folk sources.

 This is true in Germany, Poland, Iran, Russia—and in India, especially Bihar, which in some sense is India’s prototype. The image that the world holds of India is often the same image India holds of Bihar: culturally rich, economically and politically shattered  ,a land with neither patron ahead nor tether behind.

 So I was saying: whether in prose or in poetry, the truly important contemporary writers of Bihar are those whose consciousness has been shaded by the sacred grove of local languages. Their poetic images, fictional characters, and locales come from there; so does the flavor of dialogue in poetry, fiction, and drama. Yet their outlook is universal, pluralistic, and many-sided. This has been  possible also  because of the peaceful—and sometimes conflict-ridden—coexistence of many philosophical systems.Because philosophy is the backbone of literature, the more philosophical traditions, life-ways, and literary inheritances a region contains, the more pluralistic it becomes.

 In Tirhut, the disciplined sharpness of Navya-Nyaya logic and the ecstatic emotion of Vaishnava devotion sit together on the same branch like the paired birds of the Upanishads—one eating the fruit, the other watching. Therefore the major poets and storytellers of that region reflect both visions.

 In Magadh, Anga, Rajgriha, Nalanda, Vikramshila, Pawapuri , Bodhgaya and elsewhere, the influence of Jain and Buddhist thought runs so deep that not only writers, but even the little birds seem bathed in the ashes of Nalanda’s library, set on fire by a crazy invader, which kept burning for years together. In a Magahi folk song an expecting woman hears a panduk bird  singing with sublime detachment:

 

Kuhu ku, kuhu ku, a son was born—he died.

A daughter born—survived (as if both the news bites

are bad news of the same magnitude)

 In the belt of Saran, Champaran, and Bhojpur, however, one sees less of Buddhist or Jain influence, and more of Nath yogis, Gorakhpanthis, Aghoris, and Sufis. Their presence is audible in the literature there.Among writers of Vaishali, Buddha remains alive—and so do the theris (Buddhist nuns). Yet alongside them live Naths, Gorakhpanthis, Aghoris, and Sufis too.

 My own childhood, and that of many contemporaries, bears witness to this. Every now and then wandering Gorakhpanthi mendicants or Aghori fakirs would appear at our door. We girls would be sent inside, but the older women of the household would gather around them and share with  them all their sorrows and joys. After a full meal, they would sing to the accompaniment of a one-stringed instrument. Many of those verses are still remembered. The priceless gem I received there in my early years is a line from Gorakh :

 Don’t speak  brazenly

do not ever walk with thumping feet

place your feet gently, tenderly

(habaki n boliba/ thapaki n chaliba/

dheere rakhiba panv)

 Besides this, sayings brought by minorities and migrants from other regions—especially Bengalis, Punjabis, Khatris, Sindhis, and Marwaris—along with folk plays, masquerades, dance songs, legends, and heroic ballads current among the Dalits, women, and Adivasis, have all helped writers create new counter-memory narratives of indigenous modernity.

 The westerly wind has also played a great role—especially Marx, who reached us through translations and academic circles. Once when I was teaching ‘Ode to the West Wind’ in class, it suddenly struck me that Marx too  touched Indian soil with the gusto of the West wind .  Shelley’s west wind reaches dry soil—stirring and caressing the earth till the mouths of newly planted seeds open. India was not a dry soil and the new plants here were growing in the space between huge trees of the native soil, still the West Wind in Marx did play a role. It scattered new seeds in academic circles and in remote areas at least where wholetimers held classes where they helped the peasants dream big , rise against the oppressors without minding the use of   weapons which Gandhijed had warned against .

 Yes, we must acknowledge that even Marx gave the soil of Bihar an intimate touch, a sense of collective power which made especially the landless labour walk tall in remote districts. But Gandhi—and before him Buddha and Mahavira—had influenced the land so deeply that faith in resolving issues through dialogue never broke.

 Rahul Sankrityayan angrily wrote in Dimaagi Ghulami that Bihar was Gandhi’s ‘sole empire’. But the matter goes deeper than Gandhi—it reaches the annals of Shastrarthas in the early years and the dialogic tradition of  Buddha and Mahavira in the later .The best thing about  Mahavira  and Buddha is that they engaged not only opponents but also people in general through open dialogue, sometimes vocal, sometimes silent, as literature itself does.The people remembered this tradition. Writers remembered it. Politicians forgot it completely.

Although Bihar was separated from the Province of Bengal only on March 22,1912 (with Odisha still attached, Patna serving as their joint capital), the spirit of ‘walk alone’ never became a part of its public consciousness. Whether due to peasant culture or Buddha’s monastic collectivism, people took decisions sitting together around fires and hearths.

 Joint families had not yet completely broken apart. The Bhoodan movement and the land consolidation and the small industry movement prompted by Lohiya and his men were still alive. Those who went away for work usually left wives and children under the care of parents or elder siblings.

 At Sonepur, a ‘Summer School of Politics’ was once held where students and teachers of the newly formed Bihar University could directly meet figures like Jayaprakash Narayan, Phanishwarnath Renu, and Sachchidanand Sinha.At the same time, in the fields north of the Ganga and the forest tracts of southern Bihar (now Jharkhand), workers of CPI and CPM were helping peasants and labourers understand the grammar of their rights.

 In short, the atmosphere was this: for the newly independent nation, freedom was not a picnic but part of an unfinished project, and all parties were trying in their own ways to complete it. The era of vulgar individualism had not yet arrived. The spirit of collective thinking—and of deciding on behalf of the most afflicted citizen—was still alive.

 Even in my own conscious years, people would read newspapers like The Searchlight ,the Aryavart, The  Indian Nation, and Aaj together, and magazines like Dharmyug, Saptahik Hindustan, Sarika, Dinman, and Ravivar too were shared by families in the neighbourhood. Their copies reached the reading rooms (vachanalayas / reading rooms of public libraries) Editorials were discussed  not only at crossroads but inside homes. Letters to the editor were regularly written by a literate public that may be called the Bihari bhadralok—though this Bihari elite was quite different from the Bengali one.

 Raja Radhikaraman Prasad’s Surajpur Estate, Darbhanga Raj, Shikarpur Estate, Dumraon Estate, and several other estates supported journals and magazines. Some Khatri landlords too contributed greatly to Bihar’s cultural awakening.

 The neighbourhood where our house stood had once been the land owned by a Khatri landlord named Bachcha Babu. My parents bought this land with their savings in the provident fund  and had a beautiful house designed by the civil engineer Ramchandra Babu, architect  of many famous cinema halls in Bihar.  My parents’s guru Pandit Hazari Prasad Dwivedi had come for the house warming ceremony . I was too young to remember his presence in the house but there  is still a photograph of my brother and me holding Dwivedi ji’s finger right in front of the newly built house that father chose to call ‘Aniket’.

 At Bachcha Babu’s bungalow lived the renowned classical musician, Sitaram Hariram Dandekar, whose radio broadcasts people heard with the same devotion with which they listened to dramas like Loha Singh and those all-night poetry gatherings.The lyrics sung  and the poems recited in  those poetry conventions were sketching the  shared dream of a new dawn for the country—in a ‘new Hindi’ very close to everyday speech.

 Besides this, the English-educated Biharis too formed part of this Bihari public elite—the very people whose efforts enabled Bihar and Odisha to separate from Bengal and establish a distinct identity. Among them were Sachchidanand Sinha, Mukesh Narayan, Syed Hasan Imam, Mazharul Haq, Deep Narayan Singh, Rajendra Prasad, and Shri Krishna Singh.Through their efforts Bihar University was later founded alongside Patna University. Many Oxford and Cambridge educated scholars were appointed there, including J. B. Kripalani.Patna University then had only four colleges in Patna itself; the colleges of district headquarters—from Muzaffarpur, Gaya, and Bhagalpur to Ranchi—were part of Bihar University, headquartered in Muzaffarpur.Because Muzaffarpur had long been Bihar’s largest cloth market, it had developed a cosmopolitan society. Large numbers of Khatri, Bengali, Punjabi, and Marwari families formed part of the broader social fabric there.

 It was here that Bihar’s Narayani Press stood, where Chandrakanta Santati first began to be printed. The Hindi enthusiast, Ayodhya Prasad Khatri also belonged to Muzaffarpur. This city of Sufi shrines had long cherished the dream of a shared culture.

 Therefore poets of that era—Kedarnath Mishra Prabhat , Gopal Singh Nepali,Dinkar, Janaki Vallabh Shastri, Shyamnandan Kishore,Poddar Ramavtar Arun , Rajendra Prasad Singh, Rajendra Kishore, Shanti Suman , Buddhinath Mishra, Gopivallabha Sahay and others—drew the moral geography of their poetry  from that shared cultural soil where women, backward castes, and labourers had already become central subjects of thought long before identity politics matured.

 ‘Be a farmer in body, an emperor in mind’

(tan se kisan aur man se samrat ban/ tulit rakh dimag-deh, admi virat ban) -says Kavi Kishore in one of his famous lyrics.Search for balance and equipoise was the hallmark of the day.

 II.

DEHATI DUNIYA : 2026

 Though Dehati Duniya was written earlier, it was published first in 1926 and remained in continuous publication, even as a prescribed literary text in the universities, during the fifties and sixties.This was the time when all over the world fiction had had a definite shift towards ‘metropolitan perception’. This shift, visible both on the national and international horizon, was a result of urban living that exposed writers to overwhelmingly lonely crowds and cosmopolitan connections.

 This was also the time when Hindi fiction too had acquired an inward glance at life, picking on conversations in coffee houses, drawing rooms, motels and bedrooms. While it had not rid itself of public commitments, the focus rested on forms and structures, as Stephen Spender comments: ‘The Moderns are therefore those who start off by thinking that human nature has changed; or if not human nature, then the relationship of the individual to the environment, forever being metamorphosed. This change, recorded by the seismographic senses of the artist, has also to change all relations within arrangements of words or marks on canvas which make a poem or novel, or painting.’(The Struggle of the Modern, University of California Press, Berkley and Los Angeles, 1963)

 Many of Shivpoojan Sahay’s and even Renu’s stories begin with real life characters’ requests to write and draft all that they have suffered. Can writing be the real empowerment of inner resources? Both Sahay and Renu leave us grappling with the big question and disappear among their  unforgettably charming characters.

 The array of their fictional characters includes the subaltern, some even from what had once been called ‘fuzzy communities’ like those of sadhus and tantrikas, faquirs, jogi - batohiyas ,indistinct groupings with neither internal cohesion nor well-known externalities. The Hindi spoken by them and even the inmates of the village  is the kind that thrives at the village chaupals, wrestling arenas (akhadas), public fireplaces (alaavs), shrines,  nearby railway stations, bus stops and fields extending to Panchayats, Primary Health Centres, nautanki and swang performances, and the village-haat even today . These characters live in an India that is both an idea and a reality or,  perhaps, a reality in the making—a poor country, bleeding and half-awakened, still rubbing its eyes, adjusting to light and freedom, to the ideals of equality and plurality, gradually coming to the realization that freedom matters! By now people seem to have come to realize that national pride is neither a dispensable thought nor an intangible proposition, and political and economic sovereignty is never showered from above, it blooms within the folds of constant struggle and sacrifice

 Nirmal Varma, a major Hindi author of the sixties,believed , quite in tune with Stephen Spender, that an author’s relationship to the word and to his chosen form, rather than his stated ideas on philosophy, most clearly reveals his morality, his system of values, and the integrated vision of the world…. Nirmal’s choice of words, his relationship with words, was entirely different. He was urbane and oblique and he did not opt for the kind of range and variety, opulence and strength of language that he credits writers like Sahay and Renu for, perhaps because his bit of experience was literally a ‘class’ apart! Temperament and language are offshoots of the moral geography that goes into one’s making. Heathcliffian gusto and Lintonian charm would definitely be worlds apart!

 The tilt that the characters of Sahay and Renu grant to idioms obstinately block the way of all who dare translate them. It is some kind of a picketing, I must say, a real Asahyog Andolan where words lie down flat to block the way of the translator artist. I always wondered how those deeply rooted ‘kavitts’ and limericks could be rendered in an alien tongue , but in translating Dehati Duniya , Dr BSM Murty has succeeded in retaining the idiomatic vigour of the sayings that give each dialogue in the novella a distinct flavour. To my mind, he has also done justice to the text because he is still in live touch with the twists and turns of the language that the subaltern in his part of the world speaks.

 Even a single word contains a world. On the same line of thought, Dehati Duniya is itself a world—not merely a microcosm, but a complete universe in its own right. As we enter the universe of this village-world, we realize that it is not even a ‘gram’ or countryside in the idyllic sense of the term:

 

Bharat Mata gramvasini,/ Mitti ki pratima udaasini.

 Pant had referred to India as a mother with a sad smile on her face. This mother does not look like one in flesh and blood, alive and beaming, but like her sad depiction in an idol of clay (‘mitti ki pratima udasini’) The women in this ethnographic novel are sad, no doubt, but not in the passive sense of the term. They know how to fight their way out, and despite repeated failures, they do not give up. They may appear to be ‘models in clay’, but they are not lifeless figures.

 This goes without saying that the Permanent Settlement, revenue imposition, and the cruel implementation of colonial administration in Bihar and the Central Provinces of British India had struck the village subalterns very hard. The organic community structure had crumbled completely, and human beings had been reduced to replaceable units in a vast feudal and colonially engineered network.

 Women in such an exploitative system are the worst victims, for they are caught in a triple bind—the bind not only of class and caste exploitation, but also of gendered violence. The fate of Budhiya and Sugia is in some ways worse than that of Tess in Hardy’s novel. Hardy gives Tess such a larger-than-life dimension that she ceases to remain merely a milkmaid. Especially in the second half of the novel she becomes a symbolic representation of womanhood. I shall refer to just one incidence where soon after the lonely burial of her child born out of the wedlock, Tess seems one with the universe:

 The same sun shone on her,the same stars winked at her.The green world was with her, not against her.She looked as though she belonged to the valley,and not the valley to her.

 In Dehati Duniya, Budhia and her daughter Sugia may be younger than Tess in years, but they have seen the rougher edges of the world. Though not ‘innocent’ in the Blakean sense of the term, they possess a clear conscience. Experience has not yet led them into moral degradation.

Both have endured incompatible marriages. They have been sold to older men—Budhia to a rich zamindar and Sugia to a thief. Yet they resist. At least they leave no stone unturned in articulating that they are not content in their imposed situations. Despite this discontent, when the local daroga throws hints at Sugia that she should betray her husband and turn to his favours, she comes up with a big ‘no’ and then, to win her over, the daroga sedates her by mixing ‘bhang’ in the ‘burfi’. Sahay depicts the whole scene with the tenderness of a poet.Yes, poetically, Shivpoojan Babu describes those tough moments when ultimately Sugia takes the right stand against temptations of all kinds proffered by the daroga.

 Adjusting her veil, in a choked voice, Sugia said – What can I say now? I have my hands pressed under a stone already. If it were not so destined, why would I be tied as a mute cow like this at the peg of a butcher. What does it matter for a hapless farmer, whether it’s a drought or if his bullock dies? I am a doomed, cursed person. God has given me beauty as He has given fire in wood. Just as wood burns with its own fire, I am burning in my own beauty. God decorated all the limbs of the peacock with His own hands, but ruined its feet so badly, that in despair of their ugliness it eats the poisonous serpent, and would yet not die! What is poison for the world becomes nectar for the luckless. I had taken poison and still death evaded me. My enemy had given me a poison he had bought for sixteen hundred rupees, but it didn’t even make me unconscious, or even give me the slightest headache! God has not written deliverance for me on my forehead.

 Earlier in the novel, when Budhia is not allowed by Ghooran Singh, the door keeper,  to enter into the main Haveli of the zamindar Ramtahal Singh, who had taken her as a ‘kept’, she  asserts her right by confronting the zamindar’s old mother:

 Making a weird face, Budhia said – Whatever you say, I’ll not get up from here. Only he, if he be the true son of his own father – only he’ll come here to make me get up. And then I’ll pluck out his beard. And if he doesn’t walk on a straight path, I’ll dishonour him before the entire village. I’ll drag him to the court, and make him take an oath before the hakim with gangajal in hand, and also holding a cow’s tail and a peepal leaf in his hand. When before a court full of witnesses, his turban will fall from his head, then he’ll remember the pleasures of having a kept. He’ll forget all the tricks he is playing now when, hands bound in hand-cuffs, the lal-pagdi constable will drag him to the darkness of the prison. And I will put a noose round my neck here! And then when the thanedar comes and starts counting coins like jhinga fish, then his eye-balls will blow out!

           Budhia’s words truly frightened Babu Saheb’s old mother. She thought –…if Budhia poisoned heself or drowned herself in a well, Ramtahal would surely be imprisoned.Wise it would be to settle things at this very stage! Otherwise it may become a mountain of a molehill, as they say – “From a pin-prick to a carbuncle”. And then it will become a big insoluble problem. Wise people must pull their hands out of such tricky problems as early as possible. When she is ready to play with her life, she can go to any extent. As they say - “What would a dying man not do to live, and a living man not do to survive?” Budhia could now do any nasty thing, so as to put us all to extreme disgrace and ruination. So,it’ll now be best to keep her in the haveli itself.

 Mahadei, zamindar Ramtahal’s wedded wife, on the other hand, is oppressed by her own people: her father Manbahal who sold her to the zamindar, her husband, her mother-in-law and the zamindar’s ‘kept’ woman Budhia - but then  she doesn’t take their oppressive behaviour lying down, and when she speaks, strange voices arise from the depth of her body and the recesses of her lungs like water gurgling beneath the ground . This language has the force of libido lying compressed in a life unperformed. Like Budhia and Sugia, Mahadei, too, draws strength from inner resources. Aggrieved of Ramtahal’s illicit relations with Budhia, a harried Mahadei refuses to enter into her sick husband’s room, at which the irritated old mother of Ramtahal Singh said with contempt:

 ‘Fine then—don’t go, don’t look. What difference will it make if you neither go nor see? Are there marks of Sudarshan Chakra on your feet, that merely by going there you would cure his illness? Is there some pitcher of nectar in your glance that will revive him if you make him drink it? Don’t go—perhaps the soles of your feet may get soiled! But tell me this instead: what great wrong has he done to you that you still cannot forget it? Rather, count yourself fortunate that you found a straightforward, decent man like my son. Otherwise, a woman of such bad fortune as you might never have been married at all.

 At this Mahadei barked - So, keep quiet now, and stop your babbling. I can see the fire of love burning so furiously in your heart for your son. But then why not you go yourself and get the bhabhoot ritual done there? Why do you want me there? And if I’m so fallen and mean, what are you, a goddess?

 

Just then Gobardhan came out of Babu Saheb’s room and entering into Mahadei’s, he said – Let it go, Chachi, be quiet. I myself will go and persuade bhauji. Now, it’s not necessary for her to go into that room.

 Shivpoojan Babu does not convert Budhiya and Sugia into larger-than-life heroines, nor are they idealized embodiments of womanhood in the Tessian sense. But they possess the dignity of women who survive against odds.

To my mind, if Tess has the luminosity of the singular woman in the paintings of Raja Ravi Varma, Budhiya and Sugni have the vibrant , collective presence of the women in the paintings of Amrita Sher-Gil.Reading their mini narratives woven in the tapestry of the patriarchal village world,one recalls Shergill’s  women seated in small groups—on a parapet, in a village chaupal, in the angan, at the threshold, or under a tree in after the daylong  chores . Their dignity lies in a quiet gaze that knows how to say” no”, and in the wisdom to recognize suffering as suffering without ceasing to give it a tough fight

A cardinal virtue of the novella is its acknowledgement of ordinary life as lived by the people in the villages of British India. It will always be remembered for its living relationships—for the intimate connection of people with the soil, and with that elementary moral awareness within themselves which we call conscience.

Under the pressure of circumstance, conscience may recede for a time, but there is something in the novella that suggests that  it will keep rising again and again, as it does in memorable human characters, especially the women characters whose language betray the force of lightning and rain . They are the ones who raise some hope in the mind of the narrator. He sees them alone as the agents of change .

Compared to the women of Bengal and  Maharashtra, the epicentres of Renaissance in India, these women from the dehatee duniya may be different but they have s fire of their own .

On the whole, the  work traces the petty vanities, ostentations, and complacent values of bourgeois respectability.Just as Hardy explores the strange and unfathomable equation of will and necessity and the intransigence of the human will, Sahay focuses on the comfortless humdrum of small lives lived in small villages :the anxieties, terrors, follies, afflictions, peace, derisions, and indecisions of forgotten people with nowhere to go and nothing to spend or defend themselves with and he does it in way that even his minor characters become the  permanent citizens of our imagination.

 (C) Anamika

 [ Dehati Duniya by Shivpoojan Sahay was first published in 1926, and in this Centenary year 2026 an English translation of the novel for a broader readership ( done by Dr BSM Murty) is shortly to be published, along with its special Centenary Hindi edition with new photographs and additional critical material, as well as in the form of an E-Book in Hindi narration. A new series of articles and features shall also be published on our blogs - VAGISHWARI and MURTYMUSE. Necessary notifications shall also be published about all related activities as they are projectedin this centenary year. Comments of our blog readers are solicited and welcome in this regard. 

An extract giving more material about the novel from the English monograph of Acharya Shivpoojan Sahay by Dr BSM Murty (published by Shitya Akademi)  is also being simultaneously published on our other blog - vagishwari.blogspot.com. Readers of these blogs are requested to keep in touch with these blog posts in the following months of the centenary year and record their comments. -Ed.]