Abstract
Serialisation allowed for remarkable experimentation with the new genre of the novel in colonial South Asia. The open nature of serialisation in South Asia, in which novels were not planned in advance but rather could develop and change while in progress, meant that serialised versions of novels were often more experimental than their later book editions. In this article, I use the pioneering Urdu novel Fasāna-e Āzād (1878–83) as a case study to examine serialisation’s effects on the emerging novel genre in the late nineteenth-century South Asia. By comparing the serial version and later book editions, I show that Fasāna-e Āzād underwent a fundamental transformation from serial to book, changing from a set of satirical sketches critical of Westernisation, to a pro-colonial novel. The protagonist Azad’s shift from a picaresque anti-hero to a proto-nationalist hero reflected the changing nature of respectability, what in Urdu was called sharafat, in the late nineteenth-century South Asia. Finally, I suggest that Fasāna-e Āzād’s evolution from serial to book anticipated the turn in South Asian literature from satire towards nationalist and prescriptive discourse, reflecting the broad movement from ideological and narratological openness to closedness in the twentieth century.
Fasāna-e Āzād (The Tale of Azad, 1878–83) is a four-volume Urdu novel now considered a classic of Urdu literature. It follows a character named Azad (‘free, independent’) from the streets of the late nineteenth-century Lucknow to the battlefields of Constantinople and Russia, where Azad fought in the then-ongoing Russo-Turkish War (1877–78). As a work of over three thousand pages, Fasāna-e Āzād’s plot is hard to summarise. Its most well-known episodes portray Azad’s interactions with various social types, including debauched aristocrats (navabs), street peddlers and opium addicts. Scholars have considered these scenes to be very realistic. Also celebrated is Azad’s sidekick, a Sancho Panza-like dwarfish opium addict named Khoji, whose comic misadventures and violent outbursts (his most famous is ‘Nah hu’i qarauli’ (‘If only I had my dagger!’) are still known to Urdu connoisseurs. The work of famed Urdu satirist Ratan Nath Dar ‘Sarshar’ (1846–1903/04), Fasāna-e Āzād pioneered print serialisation in Urdu. It was first published serially in the prominent Urdu newspaper Avadh Akhbār, then revised and published as a book, which appeared in four editions between 1881 and 1899. Since its first publication in Avadh Akhbār, Fasāna-e Āzād has remained influential and popular. The great Hindi and Urdu novelist and short story writer Premchand (1880–1936) even composed his own loving tribute called Azad Kathā (The Story of Azad), published in 1927.
Fasāna-e Āzād’s textual history as one of the first serialised novels in South Asia remains understudied in the scholarship. Many of the first vernacular-language novels in South Asia were serialised. 1 Yet the link between serialisation and the development of the novel genre has not been well explored. In this article, I use Fasāna-e Āzād as a case study to examine serialisation’s effects on the emerging novel genre in colonial South Asia. By comparing the serial version and later book editions, I show that Fasāna-e Āzād underwent a fundamental transformation from serial to book, changing from a set of satirical sketches critical of Westernisation, to a pro-colonial novel. The protagonist Azad also shifted from a picaresque anti-hero into a proto-nationalist hero. His misadventures with low-class and -caste characters reflected the changing nature of respectability, what in Urdu was called sharafat, in the late nineteenth-century South Asia. Finally, I suggest that Fasāna-e Āzād’s evolution from serial to book anticipated the turn in South Asian literature from satire towards nationalist and prescriptive discourse, reflecting the broad movement from ideological and narratological openness to closedness in the twentieth century. 2
First conceived of as a set of humorous sketches, Fasāna-e Āzād gradually evolved into the first successful example of a serialised novel in Urdu. In South Asia, serialised novels were rarely planned in advance but rather developed over the course of serialisation, often with the feedback of readers. Fasāna-e Āzād was published by Naval Kishore Press (NKP), the largest Indian-owned press and publishing house of the nineteenth-century South Asia. Throughout Fasāna-e Āzād’s serialisation, Sarshar and NKP experimented with various formats and frequencies. The work first appeared as a recurring segment in a humour column entitled zarafat (‘wit, witticism’), which Sarshar inaugurated as the new editor-in-chief of Avadh Akhbār in August 1878. After sporadic publication between August and December 1878, Sarshar increased Fasāna-e Āzād’s frequency. He began to bring out Fasāna-e Āzād daily, producing an astonishing four pages a day, Monday through Friday, from January 1879 to January 1880. At the same time, he continued to edit the newspaper, write articles on political and social topics, and compose other humorous dialogues and vignettes. By 1880, Fasāna-e Āzād had become a great success, allowing Sarshar to resign from the editorship of Avadh Akhbār and become the first full-time novelist in Urdu. In July 1880, he began serialising two works simultaneously in Avadh Akhbār: Volume Two of Fasāna-e Āzād and a new novel he called Fasana-e Jadid (Tale of the Modern), later retitled Jām-e Sarshar (Sarshar’s Cup). Starting in September 1880, NKP began publishing Fasāna-e Āzād in monthly supplements, sold by subscription separately from the newspaper. This continued through 1883, while Sarshar also revised and republished Fasāna-e Āzād in book form.
Fasāna-e Āzād’s textual history as a serialised novel forms part of an explosion of print publishing in the late nineteenth-century South Asia. The book became an affordable commodity in the 1840s, leading to a boom in commercial publishing. In Urdu, the technology of lithography, which allowed the mass reproduction of images and hand-written text, democratised access to print. 3 The spread of lithography across North India allowed Indians to set up their own presses, transforming the nature of South Asian publishing away from government and missionary presses, towards Indian-owned commercial printing. 4
Serialised fiction was an important component in promoting the new print medium and developing its audiences. It allowed authors, many of whom were moving to commercial presses after the collapse of aristocratic patronage, to be highly experimental and adaptive. 5 Unlike the planned in advance, three-volume (‘triple-decker’) model of serialised fiction popular in Victorian England, 6 such fiction in South Asia was often haphazard and experimental. Authors used serialised formats to try out new material with readers before committing to an entire work. They also responded to ongoing reader feedback, and could adjust the narrative as it was in progress. The variety of Fasāna-e Āzād’s serialised formats points to the open and provisional nature of serialisation in the competitive print market of the late nineteenth-century South Asia.
The transformation of Fasāna-e Āzād from serial to book also illuminates the distinct trajectory of the novel genre in South Asia. The novel in South Asian languages evolved, beginning as a fluid and open genre before being revised by authors into less ambivalent forms. Multiple scholars have traced how the nineteenth-century early novels and fiction displayed a more indefinite and open-ended attitude towards life and subjectivity under colonial rule, indulging in satire and laughter as a means of dissent.
7
This strong ‘self-ironical tradition’, to use Sudipta Kaviraj’s phrase, seems to have been superseded in the early twentieth century by more prescriptive and serious concerns, as the novel was pressed into the service of nationalism.
8
In the case of Fasāna-e Āzād, Sarshar experimented with using the form of comedy, what he called zarafat, for social critique. However, when Sarshar began to conceive of Fasāna-e Āzād as a longer narrative, what he called a ‘novel’ in the mid-1879, he started to imagine different aims for the work. As he wrote in a weekly review column about Fasāna-e Āzād in Avadh Akhbār on 17 May 1879:
[Eventually]… you’ll see what my point is in this story, and why I’ve brought it into this novel. … Those gentlemen (buzurgvār) who have read novels closely will applaud my efforts. … How can there be humour (mazāq) without a moral purpose (akhlāq) lurking behind it?
9
Sarshar used the words mazāq (‘wit, humour’) and akhlāq, the latter referring to the rich genre of moral and ethical literature practiced in Islamicate South Asia, 10 to define the novel genre. Sarshar here suggested that the novel has a moral purpose, and that humour must be backed up by ethics. In doing so, he likely responded to contemporary ideas of the novel as immoral and linked to Western licentiousness. 11 However, the mode of ‘satirical dissent’ that Hans Harder has identified as part of the early nineteenth-century naksha (sketch) tradition in Bengal remained present in Fasāna-e Āzād, but, as I have shown elsewhere, it moved into the minor characters. 12
I suggest here that the open nature of serialisation in colonial South Asia also enabled a fundamental openness in the novel genre itself. Scholarly attention to serialisation demands a new approach to the study of the novel in South Asia. This openness was enabled by the interactive space of the print periodical, in which authors and readers could communicate about developing narratives. As this reader’s letter by Muhammad Mahbub Khan, a district surveyor from Montgomery in Panjab, attests, periodicals circulated among multiple audiences and were often read aloud in an oral-performative context:
Thanks to [the newspaper] Avadh Akhbār, a group of people assemble every day for two hours. When the newspaper comes, they take out the humour supplement. Because of the beauty of the writing, a fight breaks out among the readers. One says, ‘I’ll read’. Another cries out, ‘It’s my turn’.
13
Though the book as an object appears more permanent than serialised novels such as Fasāna-e Āzād, periodicals were the locus of literary activity in the late nineteenth century. The group reading and listening experience described by Khan highlights the importance of periodicals in building audiences for print and establishing new genres such as the novel.
Serialisation and Book History in South Asia
Book history in South Asia represents a growing field of study, in which serialisation has received little scrutiny. Many publishers in South Asia have not preserved their records, making it difficult to trace serialisation or to ascertain whether a text was ever serialised. Serial versions are often lost or difficult to track down. However, comparative studies of serial and book versions of important late nineteenth-century texts such as Bankim Chandra Chatterji’s novel Anandamath (1882), the origin of the nationalist icon Bharat Mata, reveal that major revisions often took place between serial and book editions. Our understanding of colonial-era South Asian literature is, therefore, compromised by an inattention to serialisation.
The textual history of Fasāna-e Āzād illuminates an intriguing and important challenge in the study of South Asian book history: how to interpret publication data. For Fasāna-e Āzād, many scholars have followed the publication date of 1880 listed on the title page of Volume One of later book editions. However, this publication date is incorrect, highlighting the difficulty of using such data for many late nineteenth-century works. Publishers often did not discriminate between dates for serialised versus book editions. In Fasāna-e Āzād’s case, the 1880 publication date marks the conclusion of the serialised version of what would later become Volume One of the book editions. The first publication of Volume One actually occurred in January 1881. Yet the title page for that book, published by NKP, lists 1880, likely reflecting the serialised version. These seemingly simple errors can significantly change our understanding of a text, as Sarshar substantially revised Fasāna-e Āzād between 1880 and 1881. Scholars, following the 1880 date, have missed these later changes. 14
Fasāna-e Āzād’s complete publication data, which I tracked over several years and multiple archives, reveals a key finding about the practice of serialisation in South Asia—serial and book editions of a text could overlap. NKP was releasing book editions of individual volumes of Fasāna-e Āzād at the same time as Sarshar was composing the next volume in serial form. This pattern of overlapping serial and book production meant that the process was more open-ended. In the case of Fasāna-e Āzād, serialisation allowed Sarshar to adjust and revise book volumes in accordance with reader feedback, as he was composing and designing upcoming sections in serial form. We can see how this works by examining the full publication data for the serial version and first book editions of Fasāna-e Āzād, which I have determined to be as follows:
Volume 1: published serially in Avadh Akhbār, August 1878–January 1880 Book edition: January 1881; NKP Volume 2: published serially in Avadh Akhbār, 1–30 July 1880; then as a monthly supplement to Avadh Akhbār sold by subscription Book edition: July 1882; NKP Volume 3: originally serialised as monthly, February 1882–January 1883 Book edition: June 1883; NKP [3 rupees; 200 copies printed] Volume 4: unknown when serialised Book edition: 1883 [month unknown]; NKP
This list reveals some important components of Fasāna-e Āzād’s publication. First, the volumes of the first book edition appeared piecemeal, with usually about a six-month to one-year interlude between each volume, allowing Sarshar to revise in the meantime. Second, we can appreciate the speed and entrepreneurship of print innovators such as Sarshar, who was writing, revising and adjusting to new formats, all at once. Sarshar playfully presented this fact in a response to a reader’s letter requesting that the book edition be published quickly. Sarshar reframed book publication as an improvement on the serial version:
The story of Mr. Azad will be published separately [as a book]. But it still requires a lot of revision. … A few times my health was not good, then the topic became vapid [phīkā], and anyway, the story [qissa] isn’t finished yet. God willing, this novel will soon be published [as a book]. I ask my devotees [mushtāq] to bear with me.
15
We can see here how Sarshar cleverly used the fact of overlapping serial and book versions as a marketing device, pointing to the ingenuity of authors in exploiting the new print medium.
Finally, Fasāna-e Āzād’s book editions were expensive—Volume Three alone cost three rupees, in comparison with cheaper texts such as Fasana-e Aja’ib, one of the bestselling late nineteenth-century works, whose price was six annas (one anna is equal to 1/16 of a rupee) in 1882. 16 If we assume a similar price for Fasāna-e Āzād’s other three volumes, a complete set of the four-volume book edition (about 12 rupees) would cost about half the price of a year’s subscription to Avadh Akhbār, which was 20 rupees per year for ordinary subscribers in 1877. 17
The Ridicule of Extreme Positions: Fasāna-e Āzād’s Early Sketches
Fasāna-e Āzād began on 23 August 1878. Sarshar did not seem to have a plan for the sketches for the first several months of publication. Instead of a fully conceived story, Sarshar produced humorous sketches, a form that was practiced by many late nineteenth-century South Asian writers, 18 and likely influenced by Punch (est. 1841), the popular British satirical literary magazine that circulated in India at the time.
In this section, I examine Sarshar’s first sketch in Avadh Akhbār, followed by the early sketches of Fasāna-e Āzād, to argue that Sarshar’s interest in these sketches was the ridicule of extreme positions. Before Sarshar envisioned Fasāna-e Āzād as a novel, he produced satirical sketches that laughed at both sides of a debate. The text’s early critique of Westernisation fundamentally contrasts with its later sections, which became more didactic and pro-colonial. In particular, the character Azad, who would later become the eponymous hero of the novel, originated as an example of the Anglicised babu, a character type that represented sycophantic adoption of British tastes and habits. This worldview changed when Sarshar later transformed Fasāna-e Āzād into a ‘novel’.
Sarshar’s early sketches in Avadh Akhbār often featured sparring between two characters, in which both characters stood on opposite sides of a spectrum in terms of dress, appearance, belief system or worldview, and/or reaction to British rule. Sarshar’s first sketch in Avadh Akhbār was three columns long, entitled ‘Master Sahib aur Lalah ji ki Gulkhap’ [A (Verbal) Confrontation between the Lalah and the Master Sahib]. This sketch appeared on 13 August 1878, and is a stand-alone, separate from Fasāna-e Āzād. In the sketch, two characters debated the relative merits of the new colonial educational system, in which progress was measured by a student’s merit rather than family or caste background. Let us listen in on the main thrust of the argument:
The Lalah: … You’re very tricky, on one hand you’re very nice to me, and then you don’t pass my son? He’s been in the same grade for years, and all the other students advanced. Master sahib: Is that all it is? I thought there was some real problem. Lalah: Oh, it’s nothing to you. He wastes his whole life in the same studies, the same books, the same grade, the same Master— Master: The same whining, the same barking— Lalah: This is all a joke to you. What did we ever do to you that you should punish us in this way? [The Master informed him that the reason his son was not advancing was because his studies were ‘spotty’. If he came for two days, he missed the next four.] Master sahib: Now how can I pass him? That would only make his life harder, like giving a camel’s load to a horse! If his addition is bad, his mathematics are non-existent! Lalah: Ha! The son of a Kayasth [caste] and he can’t add? Master sahib: Please, get your head examined! What difference does it make that he’s a Kayasth’s son? He has to do the math himself, doesn’t he? And anyway, I swear by Husain, if you can do better math than a fourth-grader, I owe you a month’s salary. Lalah: Please, don’t say anything more. The students that gave you some nice pula’o [savoury rice] had no problem passing. If I had known, I would have sent some delicacies for you. But it’s too late now.
19
This sketch dramatised changes in the educational system, from traditional maktab (which might teach Arabic and Persian) to a colonial school. The two characters represented opposing types in several respects. First, the Lalah is identified only by his caste-name (as a Kayasth, or a member of the administrative and record-keeping caste 20 ), here portrayed as a country bumpkin, while the Master, a Shi’a Muslim, is a teacher in a colonial school, and belongs to the urban gentry. Second, the two men embodied opposite responses to the colonial reform of the education system. 21 The Master suggested that a student’s individual merit was the only way to advance through the grades, whereas the Lalah implied that somehow belonging to a particular family or caste background guaranteed knowledge. There is a third, linguistic distinction. The Lalah speaks Avadhi, a form of Hindi–Urdu redefined in the late nineteenth century as a village dialect and therefore ‘backwards’, as opposed to the Master’s refined, educated Urdu. 22
Yet I suggest that the sketch’s real aim is the ridicule of both positions. Both men appear laughable in their obstinacy and extremeness. On the one side stands the perhaps correct yet corrupt Master, whose arguments might be a thinly veiled attempt to extract a bribe, and on the other side is the backwards Lalah who fails to understand the logic of the new school system. Though the sketch ended with an admonition about the necessity of studying in the new colonial schools, we cannot help but laugh at both men in this scene, each equally intransigent in his position, and each ready to sling insults to prove his point.
Fasāna-e Āzād offered a different view of colonialism in its early sketches than in later volumes and revised book editions. In the sketches that now open Fasāna-e Āzād, Sarshar introduced an anonymous wandering figure, identified only as ‘Azad’ (‘free, independent’). This empty figure possessed no family background, no class or professional identity, and no past. He appeared to be, in some ways, the ‘modern man’, free to make his own destiny, able to define himself as an individual separate from a social group. 23 Yet reading Fasāna-e Āzād in the original serialised version allows one to see that in the early sketches, Azad in fact originated as a form of the Anglicised babu, a social type ridiculed in other genres of social parody of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including farces (naql), Kalighat pats (scroll paintings), and Hindi literary journals. 24 Whereas later in Fasāna-e Āzād’s development, Azad transformed into a social reformer and idealist, in the early sketches he was meant to be mocked.
It becomes apparent how Azad originated as an example of the Anglicised babu by reconsidering his first appearance in the serialised version:
Khaki pants, black jacket, yellow ‘coat’ and loose waistcoat; a dense beard like a rabbit’s thicket; a half-pint [of alcohol] raised and a cigarette dangling from his lips; a fat walking-stick in one hand and opium-pestle in the other, he was racing along ‘double-time’, his knee-high boots clicking and clacking.
25
This description is significantly different from that in revised book editions of Fasāna-e Āzād, where Azad entered without the hilarious list of ‘Western’ objects: half-pint, cigarette, fat walking-stick and opium-pestle. 26 These objects in fact contained the key to the story. That Azad carried more Western objects than could possibly fit in two hands pointed to the larger satire of the description. Azad had put on multiple articles of Western clothing, including a black jacket (perhaps a blazer) and yellow overcoat (kot, which could mean blazer or overcoat; Azad wore both, and in clashing colours). He had also adopted behaviours or modes of comportment that would have aligned him with his colonial masters in India: the ideal of ‘efficiency’, here seen in the speed with which Azad carried himself, as well as the ‘fat walking-stick’ which pointed to the Victorian pastime of ‘taking the air’. 27 Sarshar signalled the foreignness of some of these behaviours and objects by sprinkling in English words: Azad wore a ‘kot’ (coat) and walked ‘dabal (double) cāl’, literally ‘double-step’, perhaps in the sense of a quick march. The overall impression was of sycophancy and over-attachment to Western symbols and outward signs.
Scholars have interpreted the first scenes of Fasāna-e Āzād as presenting Azad as a ‘modern man’, a representative of colonial masculinity.
28
He was opposed to the second character in the sketch, a foppish man named Chammī Jān, who represented the middle class’ critique of the effeminacy and decadence of the old elites of Lucknow. Chammī Jān was as attached to Lucknow’s aristocratic and ‘effete’ court culture as Azad to Western trappings. Chammī Jān first appeared as follows:
The second man was of attractive and delicate figure. He had on a light-green tunic of sheer gauze, on top a tight tunic bound with not one but three rupee-per-yard fine muslin sashes, and finally, tights of embroidered silk that he had gathered into pleats going up to his knees. Like the courtesans, he had parted his hair carefully in the middle, adorned himself with perfume, and put on a delicate small two-cornered hat fastened with a pin. His hands covered in henna, eyes lined with kajol [collyrium], and feet adorned in pointed yellow velvet shoes, he sauntered along carefully, his waist swaying from side to side.
29
It was Chammī Jān who first recognised Azad within the text itself as overly Westernised, in a wonderful tête-à-tête in which both characters derided each other as extreme and liable to public ridicule. Their first exchange proceeded as follows:
Delicate-Bodied Man [Chammī Jān]: Hey there, fast-walker! Oho there! Where are you rushing off to at top-speed? By God, my stomach is in knots watching you flail around. Be careful you don’t slip and drown in others’ laughter! The Walker [Azad] (stopping): Kindly state your meaning, please. What is it to you if I slip? Delicate-Bodied: Don’t blame me when you fall then. The Walker: Ha! If I fall, I certainly will blame you, and I’ll also take you with me, God willing. Of course you’ll be on bottom and I’ll be on top. Delicate-Bodied: What is this ridiculous get-up you’ve made for yourself? You’re not the one they call Mr. ‘Gaddam-ya’, are you? Walking man: And what prompted you to adopt this woman’s style (zanānoñ kī vaz’)? You’re not the one called Chammī Jān, are you? […] Chammī Jān: By God, this is quite a style. Two coats and these wood-breaking boots! God save you! Azad: And by God, these henna-stained hands, these adornments, and this delicate little waist! May God protect your kajol-lined eyes from the Evil Eye. And may God make a little man (mardu’ā) out of you!
30
The opposition between the two men extended to their names. Chammī Jān’s name evoked that of a courtesan (jān was a common epithet for courtesans in the late nineteenth-century Lucknow). By contrast, Azad’s name, which meant free or independent, originated as a phabtī, a ‘name given in jest’ to ridicule someone. 31 In fact, in the original sketch Sarshar had used the word ‘āzād’ itself to connote blind imitation of Western manners; Chammī Jān had originally said, ‘You’re not the one they call “Azad,” are you?’, showing that the name originated as a phabti (the Urdu was, Kahīn Āzād kī phabtī āp hī par to log nahīn kahte haiñ?). Azad’s name is now replaced in current book editions with gaddāmīr, a fascinating and now outdated word that signified Indian imitation of English speech: the early twentieth-century dictionary Farhang-e Āsafīyah defined it as a corrupt form of ‘Goddamn you’. 32 Here, it would seem to mean a person who tries to say, ‘Goddamn you’, or ‘God damn ye’, imitating British speech. Azad’s name, therefore, did not represent independence or modernity, but rather sycophancy. This is important when considering Fasāna-e Āzād’s title: Sarshar likely named the novel Fasāna-e Āzād (The Tale of Azad) as a rejoinder to Rajab Ali Beg Surur’s bestselling tale Fasana-e Aja’ib (Tale of Wonders, composed 1824–25); Fasāna-e Āzād suggested Sarshar’s work as a modern revision to Surur’s classical-style tale.
Far from the moral hero of Fasāna-e Āzād, Azad originated as a version of the Anglicised babu parodied in Bengali farces and plays, and Kalighat paintings. This points to Fasāna-e Āzād’s ambivalence towards colonial modernity in the early sketches; rather than a pro-colonial, prescriptive work, Fasāna-e Āzād originated as a set of sketches interested in satire and the ridicule of all extreme positions. This ambivalence and openness was later closed as Fasāna-e Āzād evolved into what its author called a ‘novel’, which he and his readers described as requiring prescriptive aims.
From Picaro to Hero: Azad and Respectability in Fasāna-e Āzād
If in early sketches Sarshar depicted Azad as a satirical social type, in the following segments he explored the social mobility that accompanied changes in respectability, status and class in the late nineteenth-century South Asia. As a popular nineteenth-century saying went, ‘Last year I was a Julaha [a weaver], this year I am a Sheikh and next year, if prices rise, I shall be a Syed.’ 33 In Fasāna-e Āzād’s serialised sketches, Azad became a symbol of this uncertain status. If in the earlier sections, he was a form of the Anglicised babu, later he was revealed to be a social climber, who exploited the dramatic social change of the era to claim respectability. Yet in the serialised sketches, Azad was always brought down, usually by a lower-class or -caste figure. In serial form, Sarshar seemed to point to the instability of class and status, and unmask men such as Azad, who claimed a higher status without the qualifications (behaviour, profession, comportment) to back it up. 34
Other Urdu novels also investigated these changes. Nazir Ahmad’s 1868 novel The Bride’s Mirror (Mirāt ul-Arūs), for example, followed the fortunes of Muhammad Kamil, who, despite being born into a respectable (sharif) family, faced financial ruin. The novel follows how Kamil with the help of his enterprising wife obtained employment in the colonial government. 35 Mirza Hadi Ruswa’s Sharīfzāda (literally, Son of a Respectable Family), published in 1900, took a more didactic approach to the issue by posing the example of Mirza Abid Husain, a member of a petty aristocratic family who was nevertheless impoverished due to his family’s profligate spending and political change. Abid Husain must work his way up through the colonial bureaucracy—first working for free in a draftsman’s office, then becoming a draftsman and finally a surveyor—by observing the ideals of thrift and hard work. 36 Together these texts point to the shifting ground of sharafat in colonial South Asia, as well as how early Urdu novels engaged with altering social and economic realities.
British colonialism displaced pre-colonial class structures that were based on status and respectability, often derived from land grants and positions bestowed by officials in Mughal and native courts. With the fall of the Mughal Empire and many native kingdoms, class structure was remade and a colonial middle class emerged in urban centres such as Lucknow. As traced by Sanjay Joshi and Margrit Pernau, the middle class defined itself in contradistinction both to the former elites (aristocrats and nobles) and to the lower classes, which comprised low castes such as untouchables and shudras, Muslim peasants and labourers, and menial workers. 37 Central to this redefinition was the question of whether respectability (sharafat) was produced through birth or rather by one’s action and qualities. Respectability became more flexible, and was redefined in Delhi and Lucknow as a critique of the old elites who were reframed as debauched and licentious.
As David Lelyveld has argued, respectable (sharif) behaviour in the late nineteenth century required adherence to certain modes of behaviour and comportment.
38
Drinking alcohol was not included. It is thus not surprising that one of the most closely revised aspects of Azad’s behaviour concerned his consumption of alcohol. In the serialised version, Azad suffered several bouts of drunkenness, leading him to be beaten up by two low-caste, ‘public’ women, a kalvārin (distiller) and a dhobin (a washerwoman). Azad had already appeared imbibing alcohol as part of his generally overly Westernised dress and behaviour, as in one incident in which he fancied himself a ‘real gentleman’ and showed off his status on the train:
[In the compartment] he saw no one that looked like a ‘gentleman’ (except himself). He took off his hat and threw it aside. ‘Achoo!’ He spread out his legs and started reading a novel (Monte Cristo), after fifteen minutes he threw that too aside and then he started walking here and there. He took out a glass, poured himself some lemonade, and downed it in one gulp. Then he wiped his face with a handkerchief, and started walking about again. Then he read some more of the novel, took out a bottle of alcohol, and took a swig, when suddenly he heard…
39
It is significant that Azad was able to take on this comportment in the train, a symbol of modernity and mobility in the late nineteenth-century South Asia. 40 Yet Azad’s drinking here also appeared somewhat culturally acceptable as part of his Westernised demeanour. This included the display of several outward signs: a hat (one would assume Western style), a noticeable sneeze with ‘Achoo’ (rather than the appropriate Arabic phrase or no response at all), a certain way of sitting, the reading of novels, and drinking lemonade and then alcohol. As the standards of behaviour that guaranteed success in the new colonial order changed, the outward signs by which one signalled one’s status became more important. In all these ways Azad signalled that he was a new, ‘modern’ man.
It is significant, then, that in later scenes Azad was frequently disgraced, sometimes by lower-class or -caste characters. In one scene, Azad and a friend, Bigare Dil (a ‘flirt’), were celebrating the Hindu spring festival of Basant by drinking at the shop of a local distiller (kalvārin) named Hansiyā (Jolly). The two eventually became so drunk that they slipped and fell on the pitcher, and spilled alcohol on their clothes, a disgrace that prompted the kalvārin to cuff them both:
In short, the two men’s clothes were soaked in alcohol. Hansiya took a good look at them, and laid such a slap on the back of their heads that the sound ‘thwack!’ reverberated throughout the shop. But these men were without shame! Smiling, they pronounced, ‘You had not had this slapping habit before, Hansiya/Alas, if only we had beaten her to it’ (hā’e kar baithe the ham hi peshdastī ek din).
41
The two men then fell drunkenly on each other, and eventually proceeded into the city. To be beaten up by a distiller would have represented a great disgrace for both characters.
Sarshar revised this scene twice, initially for the first book edition (1881) and again for the third book edition (1887), each time removing Azad progressively farther away from the event. In the first book edition, only the Bigare Dil actually imbibed the alcohol; in the third book edition, ‘Azad and his friend observed this state of affairs’, which concerned ‘a few men’ whom Azad and the Bigare Dil en-countered on the street.
This first scene built to a startling conclusion a few sketches later, when Azad suffered a public beating from the dhobin, another low-caste and -class public woman. The scene was set up around the device that Azad [Bigare Dil in the first book edition; the whole scene is missing from the third edition] resembled a dhobi (a washerman) in terms of both appearance and action. This pointed to the difficulty of determining one’s status in the new age; if Azad was falling down drunk and could be mistaken by a dhobin for her husband, then what was in fact to separate him from a low-caste washerman? The disjuncture between Azad’s supposed respectability and his actual conduct dramatised the question of status against the backdrop of social mobility.
The narrator related in the beginning of the incident that Azad [Bigare Dil in the first book edition] ‘resembled’ the dhobi, literally that their appearances were similar (hamshakal). That Azad was beaten up by a female washerwoman was especially humiliating, since (as a member of the lowest caste) her touch would have been considered polluting. Yet, however disreputably Azad might behave, he could not consider himself equal to a low-caste, low-class dhobi, as seen in the main encounter:
It so happened that a dhobī had run away from home in the throes of mahvā (cheap liquor). One person fond of playing pranks (thatol) went and told his wife, ‘Hey, your dhobi is off in the bazaar cursing and prattling, and his friends are giving him a good beating and laughing it up while playing Holi.’ The dhobin was furious. She hightailed it to the bazaar as if on a warpath. Now listen: by coincidence her husband and Azad [Bigare Dil in first book edition] happened to look alike. And it was nighttime, and the dhobin had downed several swigs herself. As soon as she arrived, she started letting the neighbours and all the spectators have it. Then she grabbed Azad [Bigare Dil in first edition] by the hair and fell upon him. Wham! Bam! Tarāq! Boom! ‘To hell with such a husband! He can get smallpox for all I care.’ Meanwhile, the spectators (yārān-e sar-e pul), who loved to hear insults, applauded every blow. ‘That’s it! Another! One for me! Now you’ve got him!’ When he had been thoroughly beaten, Azad [Bigare Dil] came to his senses. As the saying goes, ‘A good thrashing will make a ghost dance.’ When he heard the dhobin’s ‘chaste’ language (shustah zabān), he was ashamed and smiled to himself. Quietly, he asked, ‘Friends, at least tell me who this woman is.’ Someone replied piquantly, ‘Forgotten your wife so quickly?’ That got Azad’s attention. ‘What?!? A dhobin, my wife!’ Another wit replied, ‘Were you lost? Well, she’s found you now.’ Azad [Bigare Dil in first book edition]: God save me. What do you mean, ‘lost and found’? This woman’s a dhobin! What do you think I am, an ass? Dhobin: Hey, if you’re not an ass, then what are you? Quit yapping.
In short, the dhobin snatched her fake husband Azad by the ear and dragged him off toward home…. 42
Though the question of Azad’s status was eventually resolved, when a nobleman saw Azad’s face and recognised that he was not a washerman, the pleasure of the Falstaffian scene lay in Azad’s humiliation and fall from grace, as enacted in the public space of the street during Holi. 43 Here too, as in the previous scenes with the Lalah and Chammī Jān, no reasonable alternative was presented, nor any character set up as a role model. Azad appears as a picaresque figure, whose claims to respectability were frequently rebutted.
We have seen how in the serialised version of Fasāna-e Āzād, Sarshar explored the space between ideologies, taking greater interest in the breakdown of social norms and the ambiguities of social change in the late nineteenth-century Lucknow than in promoting any one position. This satirical mode gave way to increased didacticism as Sarshar proceeded into the later three volumes of Fasāna-e Āzād. By the end of the 3,000-paged novel, Azad had transformed into a respectable hero, one who had proven himself on the battlefields of the Russo-Turkish War (1877–78) and returned to India a famous and esteemed man. The novel concluded with Azad as an advocate for education and industry, happily married with children and supporting the cause of Muslim social reform. His settling into family life followed the broad shape of the early twentieth-century Hindu and Muslim reformist discourse, which stressed the importance of each family member living an individual and social life that would serve the nation. 44 At the same time, Azad’s fighting on behalf of the British and Turks, who were allied during the Russo-Turkish War, allowed him to serve as a proto-nationalist figure in the decades preceding the nationalist movement.
Most importantly, the novel concluded with Azad being appointed to the Legislative Council of India by the governor general, where he would work for the good of the nation. In a nod to the work’s roots in the world of print and newspapers, Fasāna-e Āzād ended with several fictional news articles about Azad’s progress. Now named ‘the Honourable Azad Pasha’, the Government Gazette (fictionally) noted, ‘We are confident that Azad Pasha will benefit his countrymen (ham vatan) with his eminent abilities and always work for the prosperity and welfare of his country.’ 45 This folding of Azad into the colonial reform project anticipated the beginning of nationalism a few years later; the first meeting of the Indian National Congress took place in 1885. Azad’s English had become so proficient that ‘many Europeans were deceived and thought it [his article] had been written by some worthy Englishman’. 46 The article went on to remark that Azad will be drafting bills ‘for the good of the country’, and that he is unparalleled in his ‘patriotism’ (hubb ul-vatani), worthiness, compassion, independence and ideas. Finally, by the end of the novel, Azad’s status question has been resolved. Azad has become an ‘Indian gentleman’ (Hindustani jantalmen), using the English word ‘gentleman’ probably to convey respectability different from sharafat. 47 Azad is ensconced in print culture: his articles and activities are reported on in both the Urdu and English press, including ‘London’s famous newspapers’. 48
Sarshar himself called attention to Azad’s transformation from what he called ‘ignoble’ to ‘respectable’ (vazedār
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) after the concluding sketch of Volume One of Fasāna-e Āzād, which first appeared in Avadh Akhbār on 5 January 1880:
Miyan Azad himself did a few things that were ignoble. He drank alcohol and got beat up. But over the course of a lifetime, every human being steps outside the bounds of moderation at some point. Of course, if someone becomes attached to this kind of action, it’s terrible, but in the second part, over the course of things Azad became respectable (vazedār). Starting when? Starting from when he met eyes with the lovely Husn Ara. As the verse says, ‘A virtuous and beautiful woman/can make a dervish into a king.’
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Sarshar here offered a playful excuse for Azad’s transformation, claiming that his change had been at the behest of his intelligent, respectable and educated fiancée (and eventual wife), Husn Ara. In fact, the real explanation for Azad’s change lay in Fasāna-e Āzād’s textual history, in its transformation from a series of satirical sketches to what Sarshar envisioned as a ‘novel’.
Serialisation allowed for remarkable experimentation with the new genre of the novel in colonial South Asia. On the one hand, serialisation allowed authors such as Sarshar to modify the narrative as it was in process, enabling the genre to be open and fluid. Furthermore, the provisional nature of serialisation in South Asia, in which novels were not planned in advance but rather could develop and change while in progress, meant that serialised versions of novels were often more experimental than their later book editions. 51 In the case of Fasāna-e Āzād, reading the revised book editions alone obscures Sarshar’s original critique of the sycophantic adoption of British manners, as well as the text’s uncertainty about status and social change.
Attention to the serialised versions of early novels such as Fasāna-e Āzād also suggests how the history of the novel in South Asia progresses from ideological and narratological openness towards the novel as servant or handmaiden of the nation. If the novel genre by definition is characterised by dialogism, 52 or what Michael McKeon has described more recently as its ability to work out conflicting agendas, 53 then in the colonies this possibility was for a time closed off as the novel was pressed into the service of nationalism, and eventually the nation itself. Tanika Sarkar has traced how in colonial Bengal, possibilities for imagining radical alternative worlds were closed down due to the rise of a ‘hard and closed nationalistic culture’ with the development of Hindu nationalist discourse in the late nineteenth century. 54 As Sarkar has shown for the works of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, a satirical and ironic worldview that ‘satirize[d] and laugh[ed] at whatever seemed closest to an agenda’ was gradually superseded in his own works by a project of Hindu cultural nationalism. 55
Yet the beginning of modernism, dated to the 1930s and 1940s in India, marked a renewed commitment to the critique of colonial forms, the emerging idiom of the nation, and aesthetic conservatism. 56 In Urdu, the formation of the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association in 1936 led to a new commitment to the idea of literature as an instrument of social uplift, leading in many cases to a more didactic and closed ideological outlook. However, at the same time, Progressive writers experimented with modernist techniques of direct address, stream-of-consciousness writing and nonlinear narrative, again engaging in narratological and ideological openness as they explored modernist themes of alienation, fragmentation and the contingencies of modern life. The critical and satirical worldview of Fasāna-e Āzād’s early sketches, therefore, does not disappear but rather appears in other forms and other times.
Considering the serialised versions of early vernacular novels in South Asia often leads to new findings. In the case of Fasāna-e Āzād, serialisation in the Urdu newspaper Avadh Akhbār allowed for an open and exploratory approach to the developing novel genre. Fasāna-e Āzād’s early sections ridiculed extreme positions, and depicted their main character Azad as an Anglicised babu. Azad’s misadventures with low-class or -caste characters pointed to shifting definitions of respectability (sharafat) in the late nineteenth-century South Asia. These positions changed, when Fasāna-e Āzād was revised and published in book form. A new attention to serialisation among scholars of South Asian literatures can revise the literary histories of the colonial period, revealing how the novel served as an ambiguous space before it was folded into the nationalist project, its experimental impulse soon to re-emerge in other forms.