Tue Daur Limrr Pony REALISM, REPRESENTATION, AND Crusis 1y Pp, 'MCHAND Toral Jatin Gajarawala We do not believe in imaginary men. -—Premchand, “The Aim of Literature Modern Hindi literature, it is said, begins with Premchand. The early nineteenth-century writers of Hindi, producing “literature” in an only tandardized and consolidated “Janguage,” were writing pedagogic treatises, educational texts for students at Fort William College in Calcuta, “fiction” created by the political mandate of the British East India literary world of North India and Urdu, ly into the generic grids then available to social uplift; Lallujilal’s 1802 Premsaga cyclical narratives that characterize ther adaptations as well as recently st Company. Influenced by the these prescribed texts fit snugl prose narrative: romance, fantasy, introduces Krishna, ensconced in the Sanskrit but in a simple Hindi prose. There were many 0 of Sanskrit tales and epics throughout the nineteenth century, texts like Pandit Gauri Dutt’s 1870 Devrani Jethani ki Kahani (The Sry of Two Sisters-in-Law), which fictionally schooled women on appropri behavior. Later in the century, there woul g work of Bharatendu Harischandra and the development of the ess), satire He literary journal, as well as the turn to forms and genres adopted transposed, and translated whole from English and Bengali.’ Into this stilted prose fiction world, Premchand’s writings appeared a the harbinge ofa new era, that which had been the province of Bengali and Marathi for quite some time. The newness of Premchand, I would s is code Sapecious enough to signal many things, but i refers to his realism. When Premchand ne d from writin; Hindi, a transition he made throughout his a E ae in was effectively inaugurated, and with it cam fe,” re ist writing ie e the subject of the P® SS id be the pioneerin in Urdu? Hindi atsa. ee Tie Dat Limtr Poney | 275 ed a constant, the basis of a literary trope that would endure who dhe twentieth-century Hindi literary canon,’ But if modern fiterature “begins” with Premchand, Hind! Dalit literature area begin with opposition to Premchand, for Precisely the SII ly true; the fll Rowering of Dalit wring ie ‘This isn't Titerally true; the ful Ss of Dalit writing in Hindi regis much later, in the late Aa ay it is the 1920s, during the rise i Acchutanand and he Adi-Hindu movement that argued for a ‘nique and politicized caste identity for untouchable Castes, the period ‘ring which Premchand most fruitfully wrote, that can be said to have seduced the first literary articulations of Dalit identity in the Hindi- ‘belt of North India. In 1914, the unknown “untouchable” poet publishes what may be the first Dalit writing in Hindi in the ry journal Saraswati, “Acchut ki shikayat” (“The Lament”). Wielding a two-pronged critique against both colonial rulers, Hira Dom concludes with a plea ong castes, drawing on the language of national ‘Although that sentiment requires another sixty-five years i id the bureaucratic engines of independence, mn, and education to produce what we now recognize timing is more than coincidental. An ideological remchand and the thetoric of sympathy he is seen to we can locate the first affective stirrings of Dalit . angbhumi in 2004, they burned not only a novel but a genre, an ideology. Rangbhumi, written between jllows the blind beggar and eventual Gandhian hero 48 he attempts to support the peasant community in the d usurpation, Surdas, our protagonist, dies as a saint mpted to save burns before him, Heralded as one of documentations of the crisis of the peasantry in North emonstrates a Gandhian vision of sacrifice and satyagraha brutalities of materialism, Premchand’s Surdas Chamar276 | Torat JATIN GaJARAWALA serves as a confirmation of this early phase of Premchand, matked Gandhian idealism and a rhetoric of sympathy. For Dalit writers, ho Premchand is never simply “Premchand” but a literary figure seek role in literary history, attempting “to gain the praises of Uppercase Brahmins who would thereby consider his work ‘literature’” ( 18). This claim, made by the Dalit Sahitya Akademi president, Sohanpal Sumanakshar, reminds us of the vagaries of literary history and the always archaeological work of ahistoricist literary criticism. Sumanakshars suggestion is provocative; he claims that Premchand used a certain of representation instrumentally, and engaged in an extremist form of stereotyping in order to curry favor with those whose sanction established the literary canon. But the hint that the category of literariness and the characteristics of canon have been created at the expense of not only Dalits, but also of Dalitness, is clearly one that resonates with any politics ofa democratic literary sphere. Narrative has relied on a certain form of aesthetics, but also on a rigid binarism—not only between upper- and lowercaste themselves, but between their respective languages, politics, and imagery—that has made only certain representational paradigms worthy of literary enterprise. Sumanakshar is thus critiquing the category of literature (thus far almost exclusively the province of the uppercastes and their aesthetics) for foreclosing certain conditions of possibility. In effect, the horizon of literary representation is ontologically constrained for the Dalit character, demonstrated particularly—and most often—by the figure of the Chamar, member of the leather-working untouchable caste of North India, who has come to occupy a certain space in the realist imaginary where the Dalit is concerned. Premchand’s characters have become “literary types.” Rangbhumi may have functioned through repetition of a stereotype, but after a century of circulation, it has archetypal power.> What I will suggest is that the problem is less with Premchand than with the ideological and aesthetic constraints of the realism he employed.” “Premchand” as an object of literary interpretation is in a bind, produced in large part by his attempt at “idealistic realism”; his fiction was to be recognizable, in every aesthetic and political sense, despite its “newness,” while also being socially conscious, progressive, political, Sumanakshar’s critique and the Dalit critique more generally is, in fact, engendered by ng a-— a realist, and therefore holding him morally and as such. Rather than beginning with the usual Tae Daur Limrr Por | 277 and as emchal ing En ste lly responsible ' ! | ie i" as Premchand? I will begin here with the question: What B,; Who was jn: “hand? What does it mean to read the text we refer to as i oa " wis such a text produced? What are its generic mandates? pnd et readerly compact does it require? what ai Premchand’s writings are described by mainstream : ve re powerful and authentic accounts of the national ra and people's life. . and in particular the community life of India, peasant commonsense” (Singh, “Premchand’s Ideology” 76). also described as “in favor of Gandhian ideals, feudal values and system” (Valmiki, Dalita sahitya 99). The Dalit critique of d should therefore be read alongside a broader critique of gressive realism, Premchand being its most preeminent practitioner. pent. it is the model of readerly sympathy engendered by realist writing, on which it in fact relies, that Dalit writing challenges. This chapter traces the chain of sympathy on which Premchand’s realism depends in order to illuminate a two-fold process: how caste might be revealed as a literary object of analysis, and how the Dalit emerges as a sentimental subject. I argue that the realist novel, despite its insistence that both the woman and the untouchable be “read,” was central to a kind of formal erasure of caste as an analytic. “Premchand” They are the caste Unlike in the case of France, for example—where realism’s origins had as much to do with an attempt to break new aesthetic ground as they did witha democratic and scientific vision of the world, an engagement with bourgeois individualism and, additionally and gradually, a desire to incorporate the low—realism in India effectively originates with the question of social reform and pedagogical responsibility. Beginning with ‘what Meenakshi Mukherjee refers to as the Christian novel (designed to Mative women on proper post-conversion behavior) through the Seneration of vernacular novel writing in the mid- to late nineteenth ‘Century (in Marathi, Bengali, Hindi, etc.), realist fiction was concomitant @hascent nationalism and a range of social issues that dominated lic landscape,” By the end of the nineteenth century, a large278 | Torat Jatin Gajarawata P number of novels had been published, in Several ¢ ald Questions ¢ women’s education, religious conversion, p, Mffeteny fthe tin Iden, Foduced wart na abulism, histe Me cs to ent that Pre Marie ; Neerns tha han, alist style, linked to the question of the social problem as circling around the pressing social prose narratives that dabbled in f arly social novels set fantasy, these e: a preced inherit and refashion, as he navigated the 6; central to young nationalism. His re. A ) therefore 'S in nari potentially resolvable. The novel Nirmala (1928) Tatab "Maly y 'SSituate a a larger discourse on women’s roles and FESPONSibilities i (1932) chronicles Gandhianism, Godaan (1936 8; Ki; i the peasantry. Premchand’s work, his aesthetic, the Beneric con My produced, can only be understood within the framework rte social critique, and novelistic potentiality, OVil ci This has been described as a literature Of soci, realism,® a social realism, a naturalism, aby hy i atin Natrates thet hi al reform as well as what Alok Rg ted literature of conscience” (“Foreword” 199). Prem, aadarshonmukhi_yatharthvad, “idealistic realism” was abe burden of having to produce both social critique and Utopian Premchand’s work was capacious enough to warrant all the aforem, categorizations, moving between what melodrama and something more caustically interventionist, Priyamady Gopal reminds us that for Premchand and the writers of the Progresie Writers Association'® who followed him, this was ideological and not necessarily narratological: “Beauty—our sense of the aesthetic and the affective—has to be recuperated from orthodoxy.and redefined” (quoted in Gopal 27). For Premchand in particular, the aesthetic never operated in a realm of isolation; concepts of beauty, poetic form and gente, and narrative ideals were entirely determined by caste and class. In the famous “Sahitya ka uddesya” (“The Aim of Literature”), Premchand’s 19% address to the first meeting of the Progressive Writers Association, the author argues that once literature becomes detached from the patronage of the wealthy (“a particular class”), it has the freedom to be tly revolutionary and challenge the dominant paradigms of the time. In - important essay on capitalism, “Mahajani sabhyata” (“Capitalist Caltae h Premchand bemoans the cultural shift whereby all the arts, lite! al calls chand’s own te 7 Une Vision? leNtioned We Now recognize % chain)THe Daur Liver Por | 279 are determined by wealth (164). “This capitalist arts; ‘ ; rules and codes according to which every ished new i ‘ eo bs; arrangement is run” (164). The critique of da’ of toe hierarchy, and the problems of an “engaged” literature lass hi }s serious attention throughout his life and effectively : * i the concerns of an engaged writer, radigm for Te" 4 pe uestion of caste as such eluded him. Clearly, Premchand yet the ai proponents of lowercaste sympathies and uppercaste of ae tthe time. Particularly in his attempts to investigate the * national consciousness, he was concerned about the priestly caste, and caste distinction more generally."! His : ting enlarged the circle of fictionality to include not only Brahmins but also untouchable characters, countering centuries “ayevasion.'? Still, the major critique presented by contemporary ter ‘esis that despite his sympathies, his work betrays lingering faith astha, the caste system as a whole. In one of Premchand’s atic novels, the 1931 Gaban (The Stolen Jewels), when a and fine sat establ ; a y's social premchan how much merit a Chamar may benefit from being generous, low-caste Chamar!” “I consider such a Chamar better than oman, and the ideological winner of this debate in the novel. as a problem of birth versus deed is a reflection of ervention on the subject; Premchand was clearly indebted to ion that translated narratively into the problematic “change But the caste problem in this novel is one for the voyeur, a problem of middle-class acceptance rather than a confrontation lit life. Other novels deal with caste more seriously; Sevasadan d Karmabhumi (1934) note its intersection and collusion with il and colonial power. Caste in these novels emerges as one of structural consequence amidst others and it is often an problem; though several short stories paint poignant portraits able caste life, those stories are excised from the totality of life, caste is the essential feature of the very lowest.!? Sohanpal argues that Dalits can’t be represented honorably by280 | Torat JATIN GajARAWALA Premchand, constrained as they are to a certaj ain ty Ne. a ag ee, chee Aetermn 4} ind j Ned In the Onseio : ; ‘aste systern jg ta Ushe respect to inequality—but these are missing in Pre Nger + al Any character who lives in anticipation of kindness, ie hata and pity, cannot be a Dalit” (11). Critic Dr, Dharamg 2 to say that Premchand’s entire outlook was feudal, BO 90 There is a danger of placing an anachronistic burde realist text of the 1920s and 1930s, saddling it with a Tespo} not have culturally borne.'? The kind of radicalism Premchand by contemporary Dalit writers might seem to charge with a preternatural gift, one earned only later via generations da and the political successes of Ambedkar. However, it isn’t true, as Bechain calls Premchand a “C hamar-hating k by Gandhian values: “What one expects to fi a Dalit character with respect to the TON the g sibility i expected might assume, that these questions hadn’t become discursively ava at the time, or that they didn’t have popular currency; recent wor Ramnarayan Rawat and Sara Beth indicates otherwise, Specifically in context of the early twentieth century in the United Provinces, Indeed, range of analytical options proffered on the caste problem in Premch, realism clearly shrinks a growing body of voices, literary and other, approached the problems of caste conflict, caste and nationalism, Dalit identity. I am going to coalesce the range of critiques here thus: is what strains the realism of Premchand.'* The carefree way in uppercaste Kayasthas in Premchand’s novels move in with untouchabl caste Khatiks, as one critic says, may be one example of this. But m importantly, in terms of the “realist,” caste cannot be given cav'sil If for Dalit critics Premchand consistently misreads and misappropri the referent, the “real Dalit,” then this is a characterological critique. such a suggestion belies the very reliance of the Dalit critique on charac which is its only potential narrative avenue for radicalism; once cast? a structural force has been eclipsed, the role of critique is reduced complaint regarding individual speech and action. The defensive intellect posture of the Dalit critique, rooted in character, actually locates on the central problems of realism—reliant upon the demonstration of mimetic capabilities, but also on the social type, realism is invested esp itself in paradigms of bourgeois individualism,"” Premchand’s wt!Te Datit Limtr Pont | 281 - the intersection of realist aesthetics and a discourse of social by to produce not only an inaugural peasant type, but an object a" an affective resistance, the only kind of narrative movement to what one critic calls Premchandian “psychodrama,”!8 The character” is the thematic symptom via which we might read ing problem of the discourse of sympathy. of realist narrative’s most radical innovations was what critic Sinchlin describes as “a democratization of subject matter” the n of the sordid, the marginalized, and the impoverished into 33). Premchand is prototypical in this Tespect, cited as he is for evillage and the peasant into the realm of literary representation consciousness. Godaan, for example, occupies near-mythic at very reason, as it documents the brutal cycle of peasant nsition to a cash-crop economy, the decay of a feudal notion msibility, and the starkest poverty, filtered through the Ram. Rooted, however, in the logic of character, it is reliant ely on the juxtaposition of the zamindar and the peasant to final sense of historical crisis. Thus, painstakingly wrought, demnation of Premchand is precisely the one that Geeta Patel e Progressive Writers more generally, “The people became an «the life of those others, whose oppression served as literary could be easily, transparently rendered” (cited in Gopal 5). The ent rendering of others has been, in fact, the central concern for ovel, largely committed to enlarging the affective circle.!9 For this required the social “type, and it is here that we may locate of a Dalit critique of realism. her and the Question of Typology on of the representation of the other, the question par excellence Tealists, is the question of the “type” Typology might be seen ‘al motif of the realist novel, which travels through a range of aces - For Gyérgy Lukécs, the defining feature of the type as a iceis“a peculiar synthesis” between the general and particular, via which one demonstrates “the complete human This is less an interest in formalism than a determination the ideological underpinnings of the technique: the type is282 | Torat JATIN GAJARAWALA singularly what gives realism its radical Potential ‘th al. The g Lukées relies implies, of course, a dialectical Worldy; "s i es) Ow that ing mn Ct flow, text. In Balzac, where Lukdcs sees the most perfe technique, the petty-bourgeois gold digger, the archyi is socialized—depicted in both his worldliness ag Well ae all idiosyncratic, The type thus becomes the pinnacle of a i me between the internal and the external, and therefore the his Meet, Unlike the pure subjectivism of the modernists, or the pseudo ‘ of the naturalists, the type remains real in its historicism—j 4 tiv individual amidst the historical forces of his production, This oy the of history in fiction is central to Lukacs’s conception of tee ilosop of course, but it also masks the concept of proletarian fog object of which is to “reconstruct the complete human setae the free it from the distortion and dismemberment to which it Pa subjected in class society” (Lukacs, Studies 5), Reading Marxism een proletarian humanism, and perhaps a failed one at that, is brecly a Hindi Dalit critics will claim to be doing fifty yeas later takin, realism, therefore, produces a human-centeredness that functions in opposition to the tenets of a contemporary liberal humanism, such that typology is not a problem of individuality but rather the intersection of class consciousness and individuation. Lukécs’s analysis of the realist type is clearly valuable in a reading of Premchand as well; Premchand’s Writing institutionalized certain figures—the moneylender, the zamindar, and arguably the peasant—all of whom are represented as socially constructed designs. The complete invention of the type, however, with which early realism in India was charged, requires a different figuration. Alok Rai reads Premchand’s short stories as a plea to recognize “the otherness of others,’ “an effort to represent the poor unglamorized, an act of penitence directed at the arrogant presumptuousness of the insensitive reformers who had wanted to remake the poor in their own petit-bourgeois image” (“A Kind of Crisis” 11), Such a social directive is consonant with the logic of the type, and might be said to allow for very limited conceptual notions and literary configurations for the text. Anchored in a representative log the type has to become recognizable asa type; this is precisely the opposite of becoming recognizable as real, Literary types are literary types. A" ny lait the FOF,a Tue Daur Limrr Port | 283 anchored in the dynamic between the individual are types a ‘ 4 he individual and his class formation. In Premchand’s broadly two “types” of zamindar, the cruel rary ¢ jal—i.es tl realist anon there are ' esionate, as there are two “types” of peasant, the pitiable gna the BE inetimes characters oscillate between the types available 3 Godaan’s Rai Sahib makes an ethical discussion of that very — riterary knowledge in Premchand functions as a closed systern— pad text to text, complicates, simmers, and simplifies, adding from an array of social types. The nationalist may be ‘and he may eventually become heartless; Karmabhumi’s nt is both serving and self-serving, But there is only one origin distinction and that is class consciousness. Premchand’s types the social, and occasionally the radically individual, but the an only mean socio-economic. Caste origins are hardly ional power. As a result, there is no third way. inthe case of the untouchable. As such, lower-caste the peasant, their closest literary kin. One it be the change of heart, that “painless device” ways and means having been revealed to them. characters, even when occupying less peripheral ly one of two-dimensionality or stereotype, is caste, not kindness or social class. While dual and the social leaves room for historical ‘agnates, The casteized type can thus never be m is crucial, as its failure undermines realism’s uld like to suggest other modes of reading that ithin the problem of character; character, as as the problem of content that reveals the le Dalit critique of Premchand rests firmly on the on of character, and Dalit literature argues for the it subject —Dalit humanism—the figuration of284 | Torat. JATIN GaIARAWALA that character moves beyond its literal incarnation t realism’s designs with the problematic goal of “otal as, Ahi, realist fiction is a world of interdependent parts, tip The wig among all the forms that inhabit literary texts, and then of the text itself. In a response to the forces of Ctpitallns 4 fragment, disperse, segment, and parse, the realist Novel i Sek i organic, if only to demonstrate the real interrelations fps te in rely.2! But there are technical demands made to produce ny ich we and this is precisely where in ideology of form is most leble novels, chapters oscillate between two locations; in the case ie A Tan the move between village and the city creates a rhythmic pul] ie dialectically organized spaces. Character is drawn through as distinction between inner and outer lives, between what is meant 7 what is said, what is felt and what is expressed, what is believed and ‘a course of action occurs. This writing favored a conspiratorial narration mode that presents a series of dialogues, only to undermine them by capitalizing upon readerly knowledge; the private and public lives of characters are displayed for the reader such that dialogues between characters allow a voyeuristic pleasure in the known and unknown. There is a dualism at work here that is beyond the vast scope of these texts, their representational specificity. Alok Rai writes of how Premchand made certain lives “narratable” and, importantly, “endowed them with an unprecedented coherence” (“Foreword” 2). In “A Kind of Crisis,” Rai describes the peasant sections of Godaan, which form roughly half of the text, as “rendered with consummate and unrelenting perfection,’ as “remorseless and hypnotic” (8). And indeed, as Premchand’s final novel, Godaan might be read as a case study in such coherence.” As a reader, one is left with the sense that nothing falls outside its orbit; everything is included. The narrative disclosures, our access to interiority, the oscillating movement of the text, its very girth—all contribute to a sense of totality created from a sum of various parts. It is the premise of ‘whole- ism, however, that does an extreme disservice to the marginalized, who can only be read as a failure. If the novel as genre privileges 4 liberal individualism (indeed, this is Franco Moretti’s reading”), the Dall ‘character is always a failed individual who rarely has the possibility of transcendence, thereby once again confirming the circular enclosure of the— ij. The Dalit eritiqu oot re of novelistic holism, which demands an inherent gant a interprets the contradictory or vacillating positions mchand’s texts as running from “quixotically radical ” (617) via the various opinions represented—those : characters are reflections presumably of Premchand’s : his individual political transitions. But this is clearly a ‘as well; novelistic construction requires a range of that mimics in some sense the putative intellectual \ to which the realist novel aspires. Within that web, p i! y occasionally throws into relief certain pitiable out for our vision, Sympathy thus emerges as lausible form of narrative justice between the by holism and a logic of social type, stymied by aan, the 1936 novel that represents Premchand dical. What kind of solutions does a putative o the entrenched problem of literary caste? ) moves, using the “meanwhile” structure that entified as crucial to building a sense of national elari in the former province of Awadh and the in its scope, it is peopled with peasants of enders, village headmen, landlords, doctors, d businessmen, It is nonetheless anchored in the come to be known as a novel of peasant life, m (as Premchand’s last complete novel) that began and continued through several other works, ioned Rangbhumi and Karmabhumi. Critics such ee argue that it is the village section that produces in Godaan, the urban section being largely d Reality 148), By the time of the publication of months before his death, Premchand had already hronicler of rural life, of the peasant folk, though d that reputation. The uniqueness of this novel in THe Daut Loar Poner | 285 ¢ of realism, then, anchored in a failed* 286 | Torat JATIN GAIARAWALA particular, however, was the vast web of connectig ONS ¢ Belari and Lucknow, between rural tragedy and thy Teate be an life, ¢ ft Wee, Vacs ted i Oduce 4 Movi. defies microscopic binocularism. Godaan Produces N ebic f i i i ‘ Mov) rather than an intellectualized diagram of its object Unk, Ving - Unlike Br target Mh leita, Da gitimate 4, it S, and Preci C of occasionally contrived, the links between the two pr earlier novels and short stories, which provide an eas critique of the pitiable subject, Godaan produces 4 structural complexity through its locational Politic: avoidance of the central casteized character, Anchored as it often is in the vision of Hori Ram, aoy laborer, from whom we as readers derive our principle eng a life of characters, it is that urban-rural subtext that Prodi inner critique.> Surprisingly little Dalit criticism has been focused on it being largely reserved for Rangbhumi and several salient sh But Godaan would pose several problems for Dalit crit Sharankumar Limbale or Omprakash Valmiki, who deride Premchang. sententious pity and the moral turpitude of his Dalit characters, a novel’s overriding concern is the plight of the peasant in the Village ang the market, and the attack is less on the culture of caste politics, i seens, than on the culture of capitalism. Critics Alok Rai, Vasudha Dalmia Meenakshi Mukherjee don’t mention caste at all in their readings of the novel and the structure of the novel helps to ensure that the Peasants “other” is less the Brahmin, or the uppercaste moneylender, than the landlord and the moneyed inhabitants of Lucknow. But Hori Ram's financial worries are intricately bound up with the maintenance of caste practices; social transgression leads to fines, which lead to still more debt. His most impassioned speeches to his fiery wife Dhaniya revolve around caste. “We're all bound to the caste, and we can't break away from it,” he says to her. “Life outside the caste was unthinkable,” the narrator/character confirms, in a classic moment of free indirect discourse (159), The strictures of caste produce the tragedy of Jhuniya, whose widowhood makes her unmarrigeable, as well as that of Siliya the Chamarin, the Brahmin boy’s lover, both of whom additionally burden Hori’s family, Various village subplots are anchored by the question o! caste as well, demonstrating it to be central to the functioning of be narrative and crucial in maintaining Hori Ram's penury. The symbol 4 Social OTE stories ICS, such aTue Dati Limit Port | 287 _the gift of the cow—can only be understood in a iosity. Particularly because of the initial juxtaposition ae feudal landlord, however, Hori identifies and is Rai = E whose victimhood is ensured through sharecropping, c and greed, delinked from caste subjection.” This is : ‘on; there is a rhetoric of caste propriety and caste : he texts and an attention to its financial consequences. But this, caste emerges as a social phenomenon in that the ‘of Hori’ peasantness a priori are never linked to caste. Hori : there are Chamars in the novel for whom he be constructed as a somewhat casteless victim, ofthe godaar - potent class rage, a workers’ manifesto, and a ofreligion, the prototypical materialist critique, the village is also a casteized one, is hardly an apologist, a peasant whose world has the feudal order, as well as Hindu notions of s better, at some level, and his belief is certain that the new system would fail him jobs?” he muses (34). From this debate, in ditional problematic of feudal servitude, s and the conditions of slavery, and Gobar allenge, a world of just such polarities ensues: and poverty, leisure and labor, encapsulated ung and old, son and father. This neat grid challenged throughout the novel but nevertheless y rooted in place. oncomitant with the demands of realism in its but particularly for the “critical realism” with irged. It is also, I would add, central for a new nean the introduction of a literary genre to the of Godaan, the self-sacrificing logic that Hori that is determined to be hardly a choice, is288 | Tonal. JATIN GATARAWALA confirmed by the figure of Malti, the uppercaste doct, of luxury for Gandhian ideals itera confirmation of inequity, the daily nonvoluntary etihca, a hig is trumped by an act of volunteerism, a charitable rte the Atay tis in this way that the world of the realist ia bya Sc hat shakes it is the logic of sympathy, | .o ful d progressive—novel, sympathy, not he - form | by which the Other is accorded wis, jUStice abandons her life wl i reformer. I circle. The only logic t of the early realist —an is the narrative channe The Circle of Sympathy Sympathy has along history of engagement with the novel; construc sympathy is an essential project of realist fiction and its demo; am of the gaze. The work of the realist novel, as many have suggested 2 been to expand the circle of readerly sympathy. Such a project send a figure eminently readable—identifiable and possible to identify with— who was produced by a kind of melodramatic realism. The sympathei subject may not be specific to realist writing but it clearly is one of realism’s most enduring aesthetic legacies. But the significant amount of criticism on the production of sympathy in the eighteenth- and nineteenth. century novel, in women’s writing, in colonial discourse, and in the debates on slavery, have all demonstrated one broad generalization: the discourse of sympathy (and this may be particularly true in the novel) is at least as much concerned with the sympathizer as the putative object sharing and potential identification, of sympathy.” Sympathy concern: but the writer is in fact entrusted with not only the production of an object of sympathy, but the staging of the affective process of the sympathizer. The language of this discussion is rooted in questions of intimacy (how well can one know the other?), time (when does one know the other?) and, importantly, distance (how far away is that other?).* If realism in India effectively originated with the question of social reform, such that the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century realist novel s often a social reform novel, and such that Premchand’s realism, 0 particular, was designed in part to accommodate “the social question" should be said that the realist novel in India also performed the crucial function of consolidating uppercaste identity. The presence of sympathy in the novel in fact assumes a victimized object who may by ye a womallTue Dart Limrr Point | 289 > time necessarily assumes an uppercaste put at Oe jectely is thus produced by the ability to aii oneself. Alok Rai refers to the “guilty reader” y justice but may also be pushed too far, ce In| syntenance 3 Pe ' 0 gee sympathies may wander; it is a delicate dance, ties . : ‘ 1 oyal 4 But on what basis might the literal and ct. omen and outside the text, flee? The terms of this colored by social categories that remained largely of, the novel. Traced in various European and gs ahidden affective politics of race, in Premchand’s sre of sympathy rests on caste and gender. s thy as a discursive project in India has yet to ‘fm unfortunately unable to trace it here. But I will rely important scholarship on the widow, suffering, which lodges that history within two intertwined ; om the “natural theory of sentiment” avid Hume, and other Enlightenment a product of reason, and the second skrit theories of aesthetics and taste, an intrinsic “heart” (127). The latter mer was premised on a potentially potential sufferer. If we accept Amit of an eighteenth-century mode—a chwarz would put it, one that are still presented with certain the borrowed object of sympathy, ndered subject. ‘the emotions that move plots in the ary goal, however, was less structural so aptly puts it, “the writhings of as in part an acknowledgement of the novel; essentially part of a Gandhian vels were to effect changes of hearts and ough a complex interplay of sympathy, and Alok Rai both suggest the novel al guilt, a means of expiation by which290 | Tonal, JATIN GATARAWALA moments of outrage and potential radicalism were encased conservative generic form. “Insofar as [concern for the “7 aM te a personal release from collective guilt and was not ans Off an understanding of the self in relation to society, it Ma 1g a social force capable of sustaining an organized cae bee transformation of society” (Chandra 620). Chandra reads for th, model of self-critiques Premchand too was wrought othe yehieas ‘ educated background, as were the rapacious nationalists he ae hold accountable to the poor. It was in this context of affective mang ph ty that the vehicle for those convulsions of consciousness became th a subject. The protagonist's plight in Nirmala (1924-25), that of a you bride married off to an older man with whom she is incl intellectually, and socially mismatched, thereby producing a series “ complicated interactions with her similarly aged stepsons, or that of apa in Gaban (1930), responsible in part for the misdeeds of her husband because of her seeming desire for wealth and jewels and her subsequent penance, center that sympathy, guilt, and outrage on certain, and often female characters. The fervent debates on the “women’s ied this; Premchand’s writings were in that sense a lective zeitgeist: widow remarriage, female education, Premchand’s novels, almost ll of the collective pondered, anchored by an object of female nt Titi Ted oy ona series of, question” demand central part of the co! dowry, prostitution. Within problems of patriarchy are sympathy. This didn’t necessarily have to be so; just a decade or so later, the e been deconstructed in the writings question of sympathy seems to have of progressives like Sadat Hasan Manto. “Sympathy,” writes Priyawiwada Gopal, “reveals itself to be a pointless emotion” (116). Within a few shott decades, narrative would choose other channels of radicalism in ordet © ience.” Gopal's is @ post-Partition move beyond the “writhings of consci analysis, however; it is clear that in Premchand’s writing sympathy had a certain instrumental value, inherited from the rhetoric of the soci reformers that Chakrabarty analyzes. This is why Alok Rai refers 10 this body of work as the “literature of conscience” (“Foreword”); sympathy was one aesthetic and political strategy to awaken readership: 4% potentially to “arouse a critical spirit” ( Premchand, “Sahitya” 157): The significant factor in the case of Premchand, is that sympathy was § een asTue Dautr Limit Pow | 291 real; only @ literary realism could produce the s (the writer's] duty to help all those who are and exploited—individuals or groups—and to Sune knows that the more realistic his story is, ression and movement his picture, the more intimate . man nature and human psychology, the greater the 4 (Premchand, “Sahitya” 157). Sympathy must then as of advocacy, measurable in readerly convulsion; it ; be accorded, in an affective contest, one means by sally of wrongs. In the realist system of weights and ents to a static system are made in the interest I argue here that this model, one that relies , of kinship between the reader and the victim, cycle of sympathy, guilt, and outrage, is posed onto the caste question—insofar n’ is not a complete anachronism. A form honed and patterned to deal with the ortably on the grid of caste. oblem of Casteist Sympathies ent between the world of the zamindar village, isn’t replicated in the case of “the home of the landlord and the lly reveal the structural web that binds of exacting taxes, the next chapter pts to procure the money. Bound by rhythmic movement of the novel Hori’s world is just as intricately tied to der and the priest, who might as mative “other” The very structure of the ension of the same oscillating logic to the refore be read as exclusively a problem of ed within rather than beyond the rural he casteized subject is most easily read as ant as a type. In the face of a series of rh om identify occupationally, economically,292 | TorAL JATIN GAJARAWALA but castelessly, Hori too becomes indicative of an abstra For caste as such, for caste prior to its metaphorerton ott Position instead to take the questionable route of love,’! the DOVE ch Let’s take the example of one prominent subplot se Matadin the Brahmin, son of Datadin the elderly * the che moneylender, marriage maker, and veterinarian, is ea (pricy with Siliya, a young Chamar girl. Matadin and his eth according to Brahmin patronage, their small landholdin er Stvivg pandit’s money-lending ventures. Siliya, passionately in love vs and the edge of their compound; as a Chamarin she is not permitted ae th is an abject figure who works for the household, according to her 7 She and caste propriety, with the joy of a new bride. “I’m staying vein though, whether he cares or not. I won't leave him even if he staryes e and kills me. How could I desert him after bringing all this trouble fs him? I'd rather die than act like a common prostitute. I gave him my hand once; now I’m his forever,” she declares (308). But Siliya is not a bride The work that Siliya does as a lover, in the service of a domestic idea), is read by Matadin as labor; he callously dismisses it as “not begaar > When her own family comes to redress the impropriety [forced labor]. of this relationship, by “making” Matadin a Chamar (and feeding him beef), she refuses to go with them and is cast off by both her lover and her family.? The drama of this subplot lies in Matadin’s “conversion’ Siliya’s father Harkhu brings fellow Chamars to defile Matadin by placing a bone in his mouth. Siliya emerges as an object of sympathy through her mistreatment by Matadin, the cruel treatment meted out to her by her mother, and her abandonment by her family. The sympathetic reader would also take his/her cue from Dhaniya, who offers her a space in her home, a benevolent gesture born from pity. She is, after all, a woman scorned. A Dalit critique of the story of Matadin and Siliya might begin with the “dishonorable” portrayal of Siliya and the Chamars; Siliya is a slave, and her family appears brutish and violent despite the fact that the novel puts them clearly in the ideological right. But a different kind of analys altogether might ask what role the untouchables play in this novel more generally: what kind of formal purpose do they serve? To say that theit role is negligible is true; the novel does not need them. But they do serv?Tne Datrr Limtt Poner | 293 gilante justice direct, brutal, vindictive—they defile {vi jand © jiya. The Chamars occupy a peripheral space, both Su : ‘ . at they espouse a different kind of logic wa jtructurally, inth i ale jst, the dutiful, though doubting, casteless peasant, ee and collective physical might to right social wrongs en the realm of the symbolic: they defile Matadin a ghey do not intend for him to become a husband, It is 4 aial justice. But ultimately they are failures. Matadin that very moment, and undergoes ritual purification e status. And when he does take up with Siliya again ‘ofthe novel, this time renouncing his caste to live with vot via coercion but via the time-honored plot device: ‘assertion is featured, concomitant with a liberal ; of social change, but is trumped, in a sense, by | conscience. In contrast, the legitimate ferocity of nl asa caste rage, a form of vengeance, The the sympathetic reader may be inclined its anguish is a woman upon whom can never be conferred but only ‘out by Matadin’s defilement and Siliya’s What purpose does this push and portant role in the creation of anew otion of undeserved suffering, and y, became possible through new 1¢ wrongs of the past could no longer s of the bodily present and suffering paradigms.* In the context of “the widowed, the child bride, the fallen ‘onged by social custom—could now pathy, Insofar as Siliya is read as a nan second, her ritual abandonment by the pendulum of sympathy to swing Siliya works alongside the pure disdain as is seen in this scene of his undoing. d gathered around . , , but no one,294 | Tora JATIN GAJARAWALA surprisingly, came forward to prevent this sactile inwardly pleased at his predicament. Outwardly, we “Thy, assert their superiority over the Chamars” (306) Hon fT hid despite seeing the injustice of Siliya’s situation, has ita the g fy taken by the Chamars—it is only his wife Dhaniya who, te takes Siliya home. The untouchable-caste oy Ndr for the i mn a _ Ot sister bject of the discourse on “ MAN, hoy, M n “the women’s ev a bourgeois movement for upper-class male reformers. As a result, once Siliya’s Dalitness is oe ang narratively thrown in relief, the women’s question b poe , falls into corresponding neglect. When hive caste the scene and insists on the “conversion” of the _— their Dalitness becomes required reading, The carnivalesque ae a revision of the failed Arya Samaj project of shuddhi is ty gad its political critique, the Chamars go home, and the social sana narrative is restored as Matadin goes through the rituals of purificst 7 The problems of Siliya, who critics argue is the representative of ae in the narrative, are eventually resolved through a specifically non-marts yet domesticated relation whereby she becomes ineligible for sympaty Caste exploitation is clearly economic and sexual, but it is also hy el dominated by the construction of a peasant displaced as such: in a nov type, Siliya’s problem, a love story, may be collapsed into “the women’ question” and putatively reconciled through a quasi-normalized social relation. On the one hand, only certain characters—particularly feminized subjects, not casteized ones—are accorded sympathy; on the other hand, sympathy is all they are accorded!** ‘The subplot of Matadin and Siliya is its own short story, ina sense, and functions according to the logic of Premchand’s short stories on caste, which Geetanjali Pandey also suggests operate differently from his novels; they are by and large freed from the drive towards resolution tat dominates the novel (Pandey, “Peasantry,” 1152). The realist novel doestt typically allow for the same open-endedness: Siliya and Matadin mustbe reconciled, but, importantly, they are featured alone, an act of daring iconoclasm, excised from family, caste, village, and all sympathetic narrative voices, This might very well be read as an example formal constraint and local conditions beautifully theorized by compassion, was never the su confined as it was to estan» question and family enters of the clash betwee? RobertoTre Dattt Limrt Pow | 295 text of the Brazilian novel: resolution of all subplots wer sity in order to draw attention to the crisis of the yee but that resolution is challenged by the demands of ere tude (46). While marriage was the narrative pillar of a wer ses realism, it is also a central feature of caste — is an echo here of the Satyashodhak and Self-Respect piso advocated by reformers like Phule and Periyar in the late origes and carly twentieth century, marriages based on self-choice, eed without a Brahmin priest, from which Ambedkar =n his position (Rao, The Caste Question 53-56), But Siliya and seconciliation, occurring long after the birth of a child, and ei devaluation of Matadin’s Brahminness by fellow villagers a sits uneasily here. This is one reason why “gat might be read as a radical Ambedkarite solution—ie., intercaste és doesn't present itself exactly as such: it is transformative only 5 boy; it requires his excision not only from family but in the com" ical neces stagonists is a “marriage” only metaphorically. firmed by returning to our point of departure. Peary ke Whit kind of subject, in the late nineteenth century, is ir suffering of others, in those others as humans, and their zs uld society train itself to make this compassion tment of every person?” I would suggest that when ‘subject might potentially strain the process of “self- ig would occur via the sympathetic figure of the el. fed with the cruel irony of Dalit critique, which € unequal distribution of sympathies (in and of iberal reform) and is required to do so ina kind lon with the gendered subject, its closest kin. The his case via the time-honored trope of a love story, option precisely because caste assertion at this296 | Torat Jatin GajaRawata through its firr i s firm lodging in indivi individual) alized ch maintains the i i a ns the illusion of narrative freedom, Go 08 p aren't universally availa i Pit rc iversally available; while Matadin j | Of course th Mil Brahminness, and he does so in the end, ‘Mie free to aba in * » Siliya re do) Maing Mig ac Realism’s reliance on the logic of sympathy i ’ reform novel, as a narrative act, might Wena context of “oe for the cordoning off the question of caste, ie a keen Method forms of exploitation. While caste exploitation atic 8 it is wi iy and sexual, in the metonymic food chain of wonder 7 must often take second place. ee Othe &Conom). ies, Caste Sympathetic Revisions A non like Premchand’s anchors a discourse of sympathy in particular ways, as I have demonstrated; one way is by mod, very narrative of sympathy for the female victim and transposin, a a untouchable-caste victim. Beyond victimhood, the Dalit cailionene r ; legated has other primary concerns. In this section, [ will focus on other possible architectures of affect for Dalit character, and for Dalit texts. Dalit texts may be labeled as such not only on a basis of identity but through a different narrative structure, one that aspires to a solidarity rather than a sympathy. The radical shift in worldview is the preeminent mode by which this occurs. It isn’t enough to say that Dalit literature seems to be about Dalit peoples, in Dalit spaces, doing “Dalit things.” Replacing a hegemonic space and time with a Dalit one, or Dalit ones, reanchors ideologically every narrative moment, plot turn, dialogue, action. Following a tradition set by realist writers in many places and times, Dalit writing creates new literary spaces (a Valmiki home, for example) and new literary actions (the prototypical animal skinning), as narrative forms of compensation, and demands that they be read, Dalit characters do not simply happe” upon a predetermined hegemonic stage but rather are legitimate actos in spaces no longer contrived elsewhere; the ideological debates that ensue are in fact born from that space rather than prefabricated. Tris now the adyersary— the moneylender, the thakur, or the uppercaste teacher—whe enters the narrative space as an interloper, and Dalit characters who have legitimate narrative arcs. In Dalit writing, the Lukécsian proble to the margins of a text that m of tyPeTut Dattr Limir Pow | 297 aracters always collapse the social and the individual, palit chi ick sani a, ents it a practice by which one can be representative of many, iti -cords 4 dignity to the individual. The central problem i also a by which the massive web of societal transactions jan PY 9 js represented and revealed, the problem of “holism,” cS parrative world is weighted towards the Dalit and the et ion is weighted towards caste. le by which this occurs is through a form of trianguldtion suggest revises the old narrative channel of sympathy. I will mM shissection on the writings of Omprakash Valmiki, probably the paints ji Dalit writer, who has written autobiography, short stories, ey criticism throughout the last fifteen years. He is now routinely, and his work of literary criticism, Dalita sahitya ss a (The Aesthetics of Dalit Literature), has become the the field. Located in the villages and Provincial towns of esh, Valmiki’s writing largely traverses the problems of education, tegration, set in an atmosphere of ubiquitous casteized The following text is one of several that entertain a of dualism, the relationship between student and teacher. it literature and, in part, its generative force, education ing mission par excellence, the road to upward ior for brutality and occupation, a type of migration, gs. The school, in particular, is replete with longing id many Dalit texts in Hindi problematize the putative ative of education. I am going to suggest that Dalit © move away from a logic of failed typology, holism, textual solidarity. The deconstruction of the ideology is a narrative problem; a revision of the standard ism is required. iress that my methodology here is less a comparison than 4 revision, The juxtaposition of Premchand’s writings, large novel Godaan, with Valmiki’s short story may roblematic, But if generic forms impart their own logical believe they do, then a willful disinterest in the novel must only a material choice but an aesthetic and ideological one, ho determine to use the short story may do so precisely298 | Torat JATIN GalARAWALA ae the failures of realism are particularly palpable j in Hindi has become synonymous with Premcha bon OVE suggest that Dalit writing en masse consciously te , | dont the the genre of the short story—there are now in its Vora " i Hindi—rather, that the forms that the short sto Dalit Novels iy particularly suited for different explorations of the hen ate By the time of the emergence of Dalit writing in Hind i aradign, problem of pity and sympathy had largely been eo philosophically. Alok Rai argues that late Premchand, and ae demonstrates an acknowledgement of the failed power of pity Pa of Crisis,” 6). More recently, Amit Rai, working within the Gothic oa as well as on colonial, missionary and abolitionist discourse from Brin traces sympathy as a crucial eighteenth-century European ideological ion, one that implies a distantiation and othering from the pitiable formati and largely inert object as well as a gendered project of mastery and violence. The complicated sentiment of sympathy implies identification but only across a vast power differential. More importantly for this orizes sympathy as a perverse gift, one that requires bt. Unlike the current form of solidarity to which many movements aspire, sympathy is seen by him asan outmoded invested in scenes of suffering by which the subject earns. Rais sh imperial history and therefore relies upon that is implicit in every instantiation of sympathy that he reads, But beyond the assumption that lowercaste feminized, in the context ofa Dalit reading of ise. The zamindar “feels” for litionist felt for the enslaved; in Rai’s work is necessarily therizing,” to put it mildly, reading, Amit Rai the: the incurring of a certain del form, analysis is rooted in a Briti a form of racial binarism bodies are racialized, or Premchand, new questions of sympathy ar the poor ina very different way than the abo! the kind of distantiation necessarily assumed diffused by a caste logic. Untouchability is “o q while also being wholly domesticated. If Dalit writing preemptively shifts narrative space and microscopes the Dalit figure, the earning of that affective debt simply cannot occur in the same way: Still, one way We might read the emergence of Dalit solidarity is via an undoing of the literal, metaphorical, and metanarrative debt assumed by older forms of realist writing,”Tue Daur Lime Power | 299 Indebtedness treats the school and the teacher, the figure of ext, One of the few lowercaste characters featured yam° jitera haunts the t i Mahabharata and Ramayana, Shambuka is punished for Vedas; Jead is poured into his ears. Less a symbol of resistance ader of impending injustice, Shambuka’s story in the epic ends act of listening, In a form of symbolic haunting, however, Sry. alongside that of Ekalavya, hovers over fiction that tional process, the relationship to the teacher, the problem , and the structural failures of casteized institutions, ; lohandas Naimishraya’s Apne-apne pinjare (Cages of ‘mentions the awe with which his illiterate father carefully “pis Hindi and English primers, and more so over his own son’s qure that formation or rewriting of both narrative and cted as a threat to the authority of the school. Paccis chauka dedh sau” (“25 x 4 = 150”),8 es his school work, and overhears him saying ther corrects Sudip, saying, “25 x 4 = 150,” ng in his defense his teacher’s words, as well as k. Both are discredited. “No, father, 25 x 4 = n my math book.’ “Son, why show me the book? o read. For me these black letters are like black for sure that 25 x 4 = 150.... Your book could t, do you think the chaudhari [village headman] i is a much bigger man than your book” (5).” ihe binary opposition between the school and een the home and the world, but this is not an system of pressure, The written word is @ fickle300 | Torat Jatin GAIARAWALA re ae as incomprehensible experie , y. Sudip’s father has no deg: contents of the text, not only because of his han {6 examine, “reading” of the statement “25 x 4 = 150” js dated bat bec of borrowing money from the village headman, ee the ey tienes to a new world, the world of school, his son's nail the book belo with “teri kitab” [your book]), The representation of hc Points up as such (plus the metaphor of the black buffalo), as ex ee Speech from the narrator's standardized, urban Hindi, attests ma differen, when the father’s knowledge is offered in the classroom, dey rv based on the trusty experience with the chaudhari, it aly bein 2 fan ISe hig 95 x 4 = 150.” Master Shivnarayan interrupted him. “25 x 4 = 100” Startled by Master's interruption, Sudip shut up and looked at ji is teacher's face in silence. Master Shivnarayan Mishra was squatting with his feet on the chair Taking a long puff from his cigarette he said, “Hey, son of a Chuhra, why did you stop? What, did you forget?” Sudip started his tables again. “25 x 4 = 150.” Master Shivnarayan Mishra now scolded him angrily. “Hey! Blackie, not 150, 100!” “Master! Pitaji says 25 x 4 = 150!” stammered Sudip fearfully. Master Shivnarayan became furious. Grabbing him, he struck a blow on the boy's cheek. He glared at him and screamed, “Abe, if your father is such a wise man then why is your mother here . . . (a word that cultured people forbid in literature) . .- bastard, you people, no matter how much we teach you, you stay in the same place . . . your brains are just full of garbage You will never be part of the worl tween teacher and student in which the background, the argument proceeds ¥5 words are met with tion of the respected nly a response (© of his id of learning and education” (7). Represented as a verbal battle be rest of the classroom fades into the from the dialogic premise of equality but the master fearful stammering and silence, propelled by the injec pitaji into the classroom, The teacher’s reaction is not 0 the challenge to his authority presented by the student's mention father, which evokes a life that is to remain outside the school boundaries, buta response to a societal problem, the essence of which has crystallizedTae Daur Litt Ponyr | 301 room. Engaging @ pervasive metaphor of dirt and pollution, peer 4, response Is a product of a post-Mandal Commission anti. : sentient echoed in many arenas."” The teacher's Teaction, erin importantly divergent, a different type of casteism overlaid geen course of liberal meritocracy; somewhat tolerant of nce integration, the teacher is skeptical of its outcomes, : of ‘pe triumphantly Expven correct on the basis of biological - ating ‘That paternalism is clearly reflected in an earlier scene ee father's experience of enrolling his son in school, in = “gesture, and posture: his Pleading and Tespectful voice, hands : ‘ogee pending submissively. This, of course, is the only type of p a that the teacher is ideologically capable of maintaining, cornered ‘i of dem jocratic education that insists on clean slate-ness, and ae ny, of course, as is made plain by narratorial intervention, is "ut it is the cultured and revered teacher who is using foul language, — is considered inappropriate not only for the classroom but has been thus far defined. In fact, this comment evokes te on the very nature of Dalit writing and its place Dalit literature has often insisted on the use of a andardized Hindi (itselfa fairly recent invention), on ous regional dialects and casteized speech, rder to question, precisely, the “standard” -as a language and Hindi as a literature! The itself at one level, while asserting his authority es have the privilege of certain speech), tion to the culture of the classroom is not . The editorial decision on the part of the ity and leave it to be guessed by the reader, ras the standard that students are to follow, is of Hindi literature by putting the controversial of an uppercaste figure rather than the Dalit. tion at this moment serves other purposes as mentary breaks the haze of dramatic realism and 0 excise this episode from its Dalit context, while ntly partial sympathies underlying the narrative