Abstract
Here’s a title that brims with promise. Pleasure, popular literature/culture, entertainment have all attracted renewed scholarly interest in the wake of the rise of mass media in the late 20th century. Francesca Orsini tracks back a century or so to ask what constituted entertainment, pleasure and popular publishing in the region she terms colonial north India. This is a challenging task for a historian, given that what is regarded as ephemera tends rapidly to disappear. But Orsini comes up with a surprisingly rich body of material—thanks in part to the archiving energy of the India Office and the British Museum, but more to her painstaking checking of local library lending registers, publication data relating to commercial presses and combing through contemporary magazines for reviews and letters from readers. In addition, the period studied straddles the years when Hindi began differentiating itself from Urdu.
The popular/canonical divide is accompanied, Orsini shows, by a technological one. The educated elite read the uplifting and reformist material brought out by publishers, such as the famous Naval Kishore Press of Lucknow. Readers of the popularly circulated texts studied here came from a different class (and possibly caste—though that question is not addressed at all) and were quite often neo-literates. While books patronised by the elite were printed in moveable type and were relatively expensive, lithography made it possible to produce in large numbers the songbooks and short narratives, patronised by these subaltern readers, and sell them at a more modest price. Separate chapters deal with printed versions of literature that earlier would have circulated in the oral mode—barahmasa and other songbooks, and qissa printed in both Urdu and Nagari scripts. Two long-running serialised publications, both ‘big hits’, Pandit Ratannath Dar Sarshar’s Fasana-e Azad in Urdu and Devikinandan Khatri’s Chandrakanta in Hindi, are then taken up for detailed study.
Both these works, Orsini writes, ‘subordinated ideas of social reform [the mainstay of canonical texts of the time] to a combination of pleasures and aesthetics: the older pleasures and aesthetics connected to tales and poetry and the new pleasures…suspense, uncertainty regarding character and plot, verisimilitude of setting and character’ (p. 162) associated with the novel. Episodes of Fasana-e Azad appeared, first daily and then weekly between 1878 and 1885 in Avadh Akhbar, the Lucknow-based Urdu newspaper edited by Sarshar himself, a Kashmiri pandit from a family that had relocated to Lucknow. Accompanying each episode was a discussion of plot, character and literary form in which Sarshar began with readers’ questions and responses, and went on to comment on the art of fiction. Most readers were forthright and quite specific about what they liked, disliked or wished for and many appreciated his ability to realistically depict life in the inner world of a Muslim family. Indeed it would seem that realism—or as Sarshar put it, ‘Nechar [nature]-nechar- nechar’ (p. 184)—was the principal new pleasure on offer in these narratives. And as the author, who took pride in the richness of his detailing, pointed out, ‘neither prose nor verse, neither story nor masnavi’ (p. 184) could offer nechar in similar measure.
The serial turned out to be something of a communal experience, with families, groups of friends and even fellow travellers in a railway compartment getting together to read or listen to and discuss each episode in the hero’s adventures. The story set in an elite and cultured Muslim world managed to build up a whole new and intense relationship between author, narrator, characters and readers, Orsini points out. Disappointingly, however, the study remains a rich ‘description’ and does venture to develop the concepts or draw on frameworks that would help us capture a sense of the meaning or historical significance of this new intensity or of popular reading itself.
When Chandrakanta was first published in four parts between 1887 and 1891 from Banaras, it met with overwhelming popular acclaim. Khatri soon started his own monthly fiction magazine Upanyas Lahari in which the story continued until the 24th and final (for the time being) part appeared in 1905. Chandrakanta was written in the Nagari script in a studiedly non-literary—in other words, non-Sanskritised—prose that was close to the spoken form and its familiar Persian/Urdu vocabulary. His Hindi, he said, contrasting it to that of towering canonical figures such as Bharatendu Harishchandra, was such that ‘one does not need to reach for the dictionary in order to read it’ (p. 224). So popular was this serial, we learn, that scores of men and women learnt the Devanagiri script to read it. The fantastic plots and stock characters clearly signal the Urdu dastan as source. This affiliation includes the use of the ayyar, a character described in the glossary as ‘spy with almost magical skills of disguise; the prince’s companion in a dastan’ (p. 279), clearly something like the hero’s ‘sidekick’ in a present day Rajnikant or Chiranjeevi film. Orsini describes Khatri as ‘Indianizing and Hinduizing’ the dastan. In addition, she says, the account ‘made characters and adventures that existed only in the imagination move closer to the world of the everyday. The result was not a “realistic” novel but the thrilling possibility of imagining oneself as part of that wonderful world’ (p. 205).
A final chapter discusses the early 20th century rise of the jasusi upanyas or detective novel. Though this was a new genre in Hindi–Urdu (as indeed it was in the European languages), both in its suspense-structured narrative and in the scientific rationality, it points to earlier strands of logical deduction and divination, Orsini argues. If we go by the example of the Sherlock Holmes type observation that ‘a mule blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right’ (p. 239), we would need to acknowledge Amir Khusrau, the author of that example of observation and deduction, as one of the progenitors of the genre of detective fiction! And for Sherlock himself, we should not be surprised to find genetic stock that traces him back to the ayyar. Two other themes run richly through the weave of the argument—women readers (but not writers) and the Hindi–Urdu question.
Orsini’s method is resolutely that of the realist historian. She tells a story and the narrative is based on a thick accumulation of facts and backed by detailed documentation. It is a method that manages to straddle history, anthropology, Hindi and Urdu literary studies and what today might be termed media studies, with equipoise. I cannot remember a page without a footnote and recall many with three or four. A student may not need to look elsewhere to fill out her bibliography of British and American work in the area. However, a difficulty with such realism is that it takes too much for granted and glosses over the questions that lead us beyond the identifiable, touchable–countable, physical object to open out ‘formations’ such as the popularity, pleasure or entertainment. The classical literary critical method used here—of providing some contextual information about author or location and then concentrating on the story—leaves unaddressed questions such as: Who were these readers? Were they urban? Or rural? What class or caste were these ‘neo-literates’? If the songbooks replaced performers such as the domini, what can we take that to signify? Is this process in any way similar to what happens with Bharata Natayam, the Khayal or the vaishnav women of Bengal? At the end of this rich book, one is still hungering for some ‘conceptualisation’ of popularity, pleasure and entertainment in colonial India.