Dhaniya's Anger in Premchand's Godan: Emotion System Activation and Affective Marxism

Premchand's novel Godan (1936) shows an “overwhelming concern with intricacies of finance” (Sprinker, 1989, p. 65); the following discussion seeks to situate the affective features of this concern in the context of Marxist political theory—specifically, Karl Marx's account of the small peasant in French society and his writings on the Indian small peasant during British rule. Premchand was influenced by Marx and uses narrative emotion to tell the (Indian) story of labor and capital. Labor is somatic, as is emotion. Using this as the starting point for an exploration of affective Marxism, my analysis of Godan draws primarily on the work of prominent neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp—most notably his isolation of emotion systems, as well as his paradigm of the triangulated affective mind. Though a biologically oriented emotion scientist who believes that affective volitions come from the activation of built-in systems, Panksepp assumes that emotions occur in a social context and that enculturated values inflect emotion regulation and expression (Panksepp, 2000). ¹ Premchand uses Marx's thoughts on the accumulation of primitive capital (and other ideas) to organize the story worlds of Godan, and they shape the social context in which the novel's emotions occur.

The essay is divided into two parts. Part I is orientational, and provides (a) a plot summary of the novel; (b) information about the author; (c) an overview of Panskepp's triangulated model of the affective brain; and (d) an overview of Marx's writings on primitive accumulation of capital on the basis of labor power that predates market economies and industrial capitalism. Part II is devoted to textual analysis of three anger episodes in the novel, drawing intensively on Panksepp's ideas on the RAGE, PLAY, and CARE systems (because play modulates rage, while care inhibits it). Overall, the essay seeks to present narrative emotion—looked at from the lens of the neuroscience of emotion—as a diagnostic tool for identifying systemic injustices that produce misery, to which anger is a consequential reaction.

Part I

Part II

Having discussed the necessary background, my textual focus in Part II is on anger episodes involving Dhaniya. The first two start within the domestic space of their home, burst forth into RAGE—with raised voices and screams, bringing neighbors to the spot as witnesses, as well as spectators. Thus, public exposure of domestic anger engages the PLAY emotion system of the community. Narratorial commentary, sometimes blended with some character's thought process (at other times without such a tag), gives a blow-by-blow account of who is winning and who is losing, as if these are sports events. In the first episode, Hira is the target of Dhaniya's anger; in the second, by which time Hira has already poisoned the cow and her corpse is still in the house, the target is Hori himself, the police inspector, and the village elders. In the third episode, anger flares outside the home, reducing two young women to homelessness, as the poverty-stricken domestic space of Dhaniya-Hori's household provides shelter.

Dhaniya's Anger at Hira's Envy

When Hori acquires what everyone desires, the cow, Hira's envy is elicited by his not being able to fathom how Hori could afford this luxury: where did the surplus come from? Hira does not know what the reader knows. In the course of an emotion-sharing episode that spans portions of chapters 1–2 (pp. 31–35), Bhola—a milkman and possessor of many cows—offers Hori one with the understanding that Hori can pay for the cow whenever it is possible for him. The ambiguity about the cow being a gift and/or a purchase has consequences later on. At the moment of this exchange, we know that Bhola's wife has recently died in a heat stroke; Hori has promised to find him a new wife. When the cow is actually brought to Hori's house and the entire village comes to celebrate, Hori's brothers deliberately absent themselves. Hori feels unloved; Dhaniya doesn’t. She says: “the very mention of their names sets my body on fire,” adding: “they must be burning with envy” (p. 57). Dhaniya's conjecture reads Hira's emotion correctly. The two kinds of burning relate to two emotions, the brothers’ envy and Dhaniya's indignation at their ingratitude. As for the cow, apart from her being a sign of earth, the nourisher, the material prosperity she portends is significant—she will produce 5 kg of milk daily, and the calves she’ll bear every year and a half will be sold at good prices. The officer who keeps a record of the peasant holdings is present, assessing the value, partially in the interest of future possibilities (to use Marx's phrase) for accumulation of capital by the village administrative organization.

Considering the brothers still a part of the family, Hori does not expect envy from them, because he does not expect economic competition. He pays them a visit and overhears Hira spinning a conspiracy theory that Hori must have kept back some jointly owned money. He runs away after this patch of overheard conversation:

It is revealing that Shoba, who manifests no envy, praises the cow for her beauty, while Hira commodifies her as wealth. As small peasants in the Marxist sense, none of the brothers direct their anger towards the exploitative systems that cause their penury, because their class interests have not assumed a label, as Marx would say. Hira resorts to blame at the secondary process of affective cognition, and paranoia at the tertiary process. Hori senses his own rage as if a “a pot were boiling over” inside him, but he holds it in (p. 54). The omniscient narrator's comment tagged to Hori's mentalization of the primary RAGE process confides: “letting go of the bitterness of the past, Hori had come to his brothers full of fraternal love. This hard blow made a hole so big … no cotton rag would be large enough to stop the flow” (p. 54). The arrival of the cow was festive, a spreading out of conviviality. Hira's words destroyed good cheer and caused pain. At home, he tries to contain the “poison spread through his awareness like intoxication” (p. 54), referring now to the spillover into his cognitive awareness. In that “maddened state,” Hori takes hold of the halter and decides to return the cow to Bhola. Dhaniya intervenes, wanting to know the why and how; Hori is evasive, but she wrenches it out of him (p. 55).

Unlike Hori, Dhaniya does not hold her anger in. She takes the halter from his hand, ties the cow back to her spot, and heads out to Hira's place. This scares the non-confrontational Hori because he knows Hira is as “anger prone” as she is and thinks: “now, what kind of fire have I ignited!” Soon Dhaniya's “harsh (karkash)” voice reaches him, as does “Hira's roar” (p. 55). Karkash voice is often associated with female shrewishness. Hira's roar signals the primary process RAGE. The “disturbance” becomes “fierce,” as if there is a fire. The narrator quips that “Hori's small peasant nature makes him run away from fights” (p. 55), invoking Marx's description of the small peasant's timidity—whose collectives, he says, form “as potatoes in a sack form a sack full of potatoes” (1978, p. 608). Disapproving Dhaniya's blunt expression of anger, Hori's potato mentality informs a policy of conciliation. He reasons: “if unpleasant words have not been spoken to your face, you shouldn’t react to them” (p. 56). Dhaniya has reacted to words not spoken to her face, and now she will have more abusive words hit her in the face.

Once Hori gets to the battlefield, “like the commander of troops, he wants to assess the situation” (p. 56). If Dhaniya is winning—everyone is there now, taking sides and watching the show—then he can be silent. If she is losing, then he will join the fray. He realizes that Dhaniya is losing because she is not “good at war strategy” (p. 56). She is making strategic mistakes by berating her brother-in-law for ingratitude, provoking Hira to say: “in your home we ate like dogs, and worked whole days,” which is most likely true, but is also the case for everyone in that household. Dhaniya probably didn’t even have the luxury to eat like a dog. Hira calls her a “demoness (rakshasi),” who made their lives “bitter.” She calls him “Namak-haram,” a curse word that literally means someone who is shamelessly ungrateful. At this point, Datadin, the Brahmin, turns to Dhaniya: “why are you uttering such bitter words. It is the dharma of a woman to swallow her pain. He [Hira] is an uncouth barbarian, why engage him” (p. 57). Pateshwari, another village head, confirms Datadin's assessment. “I know you all,” Dhaniya turns to them, “I know every nerve and vein in you. If I am abusing him, is he showering me with flowers?” (p. 57). ⁶ It is obvious that Datadin uses the dharmic norm of self-restraint selectively as if it applies only to women.

Keeping in mind Panksepp's notion of how enculturated values impact the expression and regulation of emotion, it is illuminating to note that two terms are used reiteratively in this novel: dharma and maryada. Dharma, in Indian discourses, is a polyvalent term. Sadarana dharma, the codification of general rules of ethics, includes “abstention from injury, truthfulness of speech, justice, compassion, self-restraint” (Radhakrishnan & Moore, 1957, p. 164). This summation identifies truth (satya) and non-violence (ahimsa) as the basis of dharma, which, as a composite, is defined as “that mode of living which is founded upon a total harmlessness towards all creatures (in case of actual necessity) upon a minimum of harm.” ⁷ Considerations of expedience limit absolute non-violence: “that again which is virtue may, according to time and place, be sin. Thus appropriation (of what belongs to others), untruth, injury and killing, may, under special circumstances become virtue” (p. 165). When the oppressed urban proletariat sets fire to Khanna's sugar mill at the end of the book, it is thus virtue, not sin. Contrarily, the village leaders’ extortionist exploitation of the pauperized Hori (as we will see) is sin. A caste-based variant, or varna-dharma, explains why a khyatriya, an individual belonging to the warrior caste, “in distress should take (by force) what he can, with a view to (ultimately) protect the people,” acknowledging that “no person in this world … can support life without injuring other creatures. The very ascetic leading a solitary life in the depths of the forest is no exception” (p. 166). In other words, violence and injury must be minimized because they cannot be eliminated in any absolute sense.

The maryada, or “conventional conduct,” that Hori observes is more than social pride. It is a moral virtue that assures cosmic benevolence, for “it is conduct that begets righteousness”: it is “the bringer of prosperity and retainer of fame” (p. 167, emphasis mine). In other words, conduct begets social trust, which in Panksepp's model is a secondary process emotion-mentation. Many of Hori's economic decisions, guided by maryada, do beget trust. The village leaders, Pateshwari and others, on the basis of their trust in Hori's sense of honor, abuse it for their profit. The underlying irony is part of Premchand's Marxist critique of culture. Hori spent money he didn’t have on his brothers’ marriages, adding to his debt. Conversely, Hira's ingratitude incurs no debt; nothing is owed. At his home—which has become a village arena at the moment—suspense about who wins and who loses the war of words shows that although anger is expressed, an intense PLAY system is also activated, as the crowd becomes invested in how the dominant and subordinate positions between the opponents shift.

“The PLAY urge,” Panksapp & Biven say, “is robust and fragile,” because environmental factors can evoke negative emotions like “anger, fear, pain” in the combatants (2012, p. 355). Though they have in mind the primary process of play (of the mammalian brain), in this literary example the same dynamics occur at the secondary and tertiary levels and show how anger is expressed and modulated through play. The combatants are like wrestlers, or actors on stage, as we learn “the tide is turning against Dhaniya” and Hira is emerging in a dominant position. “Roaring like a lion,” he calls her “a witch” (p. 57) and orders her to leave the premises, or he’ll grab her by her braids, beat her with a shoe, and throw her out. Reflecting on anger modulation, Panksepp says that “animal brain research will not let us understand aspects of enculturated human values … ways of being that can counter the animal instinct [such as] the ability to forgive [and] the ability to feel remorse”—however, it can teach us “what it means for RAGE to flare forth” (2000, p. 147). Both processes are at work in Premchand's affective narration. For instance, the narrator attributes the failure in Hira's anger modulation to the lack of humility (respect for elders): “if Hira had shown humility he would have been victorious” (p. 57). ⁸ Hira's latest abuse rouses Hori to anger, who raises his voice at his brother. The spectators now turn against Hira. Jhingur Singh calls him “Satan,” while Dulari calls him the “evil-spawn” (p. 57), though a minute ago she was on his side against Dhaniya. The narrator's conclusion is that while one harsh word had weakened Dhaniya's side, excessive verbal abuse of his opponent, who is also his elder sister-in-law, “pushed Hira into the ditch” (p. 57). This spectacle of RAGE and PLAY ends with Dhaniya's anger refusing to burn out. She says she will vacate the premises only after being beaten by Hira's shoes if he dares to, and “like a lioness” physically pushes Hira “so hard that he falls to the ground with a thud,” while she is “dragged home” by Hori (p. 58).

Even though their anger does no physical harm, predatory/hostile animal imagery configures their action readiness. At the same time, a cultural history of emotion is also invoked. Hira's threat that he’ll grab Dhaniya by the braids, inevitably, calls to the culturally literate Indian mind an incident involving Draupadi from the Indian epic, Mahabharata (The Great War), mentioned above in connection to definitions of dharma. When Draupadi's husband, Yudhishthira, plays a game of dice with his cousins—losing first his kingdom, then his brothers, and finally his wife—one of the cousins, Dushasana, grabs Draupadi by her hair and begins disrobing her in the court while the elders stand tongue tied. While the honor of the mythical Draupadi is saved by a miracle, the village wife Dhaniya propels her body, as an animal might, to push her antagonist to the ground. If one can impute proto-class consciousness to Dhaniya, Hira's envy is treasonous to their solidarity as small peasants. Hori's investment in maryada is also hostile to class interests because it creates an opportunity for the accumulation of capital by others. This factor is foregrounded in the next anger episode. In “The Secret of Primitive Accumulation,” Marx considers primitive capital as “a pre-historic stage of capital and of the means of production,” emphasizing that “the economic structure of capitalist society has grown out of the economic structure of feudal society” (1978, p. 432). ⁹

Dhaniya's Anger at the Police Inspector, and Others

This anger episode has lower entertainment value for Hori's neighbors, as it does not engage the PLAY system as much. However, it fits Aristotle's definition of when anger is justified. Aristotle says:

Anybody can become angry, that is easy, but to be angry with the right person, and to right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way, that is not within everybody's power, that is not easy. (cited in Panksepp, 2000, p. 145)

Narratively, the episode develops in this way. One evening Hori sees Hira standing near the cow, his back towards Hori. It has been a fateful day in other ways too. All small peasants in this locality have not yet paid off what they owed in rent, but they can plow the fields only after paying off. It is getting late in the season, and there is panic. Hori visits Jhingur Singh for a loan, but the latter refuses, saying he will instead buy Hori's cow. This means Hori has decided to sell the cow so he can pay the rent and plow his fields. That is why the cow has been tied to the stall outside the house, to make the coming separation easier for the girls. They have all become attached to this animal, which is a sign of atmospheric benevolence and a harbinger of hope. That evening Gobar comes home late because he could not “endure the cow being taken away” (p. 126). Upon his return, he announces that Sundariya, the cow, is not well. Within minutes, after a horrible struggle, she dies (pp. 128–129). When the initial shock settles, Dhaniya asks Hori if he suspects anyone. He tells her that he saw Hira in the evening shadows, standing near the cow. He even asserts that Hira was there to see if the poison was working. The husband and wife, of course, argue late into the night about what to do with this information.

In the morning people wake up to a disturbance caused by Hori's beating of Dhaniya, as she screams loudly in pain, shame, and outrage. Why would Hori do something like this? He is a man of good conduct and a possessor of exemplary emotion regulation skills. Curiosity draws the village to their house. While Hori admitted his suspicions to Dhaniya, he had no intention to expose his brother to harm, which would include jail and afterward religious penance. Hori had confessed only to get it off his chest, and to gain his wife's sympathy. In opposition to Hori, she wants to file a case with the police and name Hira as a suspect. Hori acts out a primary process, predatory RAGE because she is frustrating the fulfillment of his immediate goal, which is to protect Hira. His insistence that she should go along with his strategy of silence involves higher cognitive reasoning based on social emotions like family pride. From a Marxist perspective, we see how the superstructure economy of cultural norms is linked to base-structure economic relations, and how this domestic quarrel has opened up a chance for accumulation of capital by the police inspector (and others), with Hori being only too willing to take on yet another loan.

With his mind fixated on preventing a house search, Hori's habitual containment of anger suffers a collapse. He is changed into a dominant, raging male. When the usual crowd of “spectators assemble at the house” (p. 131), Datadin tries to stop Hori, as Dhaniya appeals to him:

Sir, you are a witness, I will not drink a drop of water today before sending him and his brother to jail. His brother killed the cow by feeding her poison. I want to go to the police station to file a report, and this murderer is beating me. (p. 131)

Hira had only threatened to beat her; for Hira's sake, Hori has lied, taken a false oath, and beaten her in public. In the earlier episode, the Draupadi allusion remains implicit, but here Dhaniya makes it explicit. As before, the cultural memory of Draupadi preserved in song, spectacle, and ceremony makes “public opinion turn in Dhaniya's favor,” as “no one has any doubt that it was Hira who poisoned the cow” (p. 132). She has the correct ethos, with epistemic and moral authority. Her testimony is accepted.

Hira is sent for. He has left home and will return from his wanderings only at the hour of Hori's death, in the final chapter. At the inquest, the other brother Shoba admits that the previous afternoon Hira borrowed his scythe and went into the forest, which suggests he acquired a poisonous plant to feed the cow. In contrast, Hori makes the same false statement that he suspects no one, and that the cow was old and simply died (p. 134). When the inspector readies to search Hira's house for evidence, Hori's panic is written large on his face, and he appeals to Pateshwari. Of course, Pateshwari had anticipated this. He turns to the inspector with a conspiratorial gesture: “why would you want to search Hira's house when his brother is ready to appease you in any way possible” (p. 135). It is clear that this sort of appeasement happens often. The Daroga keeps some of the hush money, while the rest is distributed among the headmen. With the corpse of the cow still in the house, they consult and conspire in Dhaniya's home. Jhingur Singh is now willing to extend a loan and Hori is deeply gratified (pp. 135–136).

From the perspective of the men in charge, all goes well. A “happy faced” Hori arrives from Jhingur Singh's home, the money wrapped in a small towel (p. 136). At this juncture, because she is on to them, Dhaniya “plunges forward”—her body propelled in the same way that felled Hira to the ground—in Hori's direction, with such precise aim that the knot in the towel comes off. Money falls to the ground, and she “hisses like a snake” to condemn Hori's shameful action to buy family honor. A home that has no food, where rats can’t find a scrap—such a house cannot aspire to honor, she says: “we lost a cow that was worth a hundred rupees, and now this surplus top for what: what kind of honor is this?” Reacting to this well-timed, purposeful anger, the “collectivity” of people “trembled,” because the weight of truth touches them all. In Marx's sense, the truth is their class interest does not have a label. It is at this juncture that the word, “the collective of people,” jana-samooh, is used for the first time. Those who have assembled are no longer just spectators, and Dhaniya's anger is no longer an entertaining reality show—it becomes the purposeful anger of the poor, the hungry, the exploited, and the beaten down, literally and figuratively. The Daroga loses face and tries bullying tactics when he says he can as easily frame Dhaniya for the murder. She turns on him, saying “we have seen enough of your justice; it is one thing to cut the throats of poor people, quite another to separate water from milk” (p. 136)—a proverb in Hindi that stands for perspicacious fact-finding out of tangled events. Hori is enraged at Dhaniya's verbal combat with the Daroga. With “embers of anger spilling from his eyes,” he moves forward to attack her again but is restrained by Gobar. Dhaniya, however, is not intimidated:

You get out of the way, Gobar, let us see what he can do in the presence of our Daroga ji, let us watch his courage. He loses honor (izzat) in having his house searched, but he does not lose honor in physically abusing his wife in front of the whole village. This, indeed, is the dharma of a brave man. (p. 137)

Some of her success is confirmed by the information provided in the following chapter. In the village, we learn that “because of her courage, Dhaniya earned leadership of not only the women, but also the men” (p. 140). People continued to discuss the fight between the Daroga and Dhaniya. In retellings that depart from the exact truth, the combatants are Dhaniya and the Daroga, and the man she protects is Hori. It is clear from this that the Daroga is a public enemy. Dhaniya has given voice to something that touches everyone. Dhaniya's purposeful anger has transformed her into Bhawani, the benevolent mother goddess; people from other villages come to see her (p. 140).

Injurious Angers in the Village and their Remediation

Since the central motif of this novel is the cow—which, in representing earth, the nourisher, symbolizes the CARE system—it is clear that a culturally specific affective ecology is disturbed by Hira's poisoning of Hori's cow. This rupture is partially compensated for by Dhaniya and Hori's protection of Jhuniya and Siliya, pregnant young women who have become homeless because they have engaged in premarital sex. Because dictates of dharma require preventing harm, violation of sexual morality in both cases is less persuasive than preventing injury to the women and the unborn babies. In contrast to how divided they were over the issue of hushing up Hira's murder of the cow, Hori and Dhaniya modulate their parental anger together when their son runs away from home after getting his girlfriend, Jhuniya (the widowed daughter of Bhola) pregnant (pp. 139–146). After a full-throated display of outrage at Jhuniya's shamelessness—in which Dhaniya calls her the “blackface-slut” and other names (p. 146) and both rage at their son's scandalous conduct (p. 145)—they welcome their daughter-in-law into their home.

However, in doing so they incur the wrath of the village community and Jhuniya's family. When Datadin chastises them, Dhaniya plays on the proverbial analogy of losing social respect as “having one's nose cut off”: acerbically, she says “rich people might place a greater value on their nose than on the life of another person, we don’t love our nose more than we love the life of another person” (p. 149). More intimately, her shift from anger to CARE is elaborated thus: “the child in Jhuniya's womb is a piece of Dhaniya's heart” (p. 149). For his part, Hori says to the distressed Jhuniya: “don’t be afraid,” because “you are at your own doorstep: we are yours” (p. 146). In the village, Hori replies to Pateshwari's harsh words by invoking ahimsa: “because of the fear of the village community, we cannot act like murderers” (p. 150). Typically, a girl in Jhuniya's situation would either become a victim of sexual predation or kill herself. The Panchayat—with profit, rather than care on its mind—formally ostracizes the family and exacts a penalty as the price for their re-integration.

To expedite matters, the Panchayat (without waiting for the vote of all the members) formalizes Hori's fine: 100.00 Rupees, and 30 maunds (one maund in Indian measurements is equal to 43 kg) of grains that have just been harvested. With great difficulty, Dhaniya negotiates a very small amount (about 50 kg) of grain to take home, as Hori, in contained fury, works all night to carry the abundant variety of grains to where he is asked to accumulate it (p. 152). The transformation of Hori's labor power into accumulation of capital could not be more starkly on display. Emboldened by this punitive action, Jhuniya's father confiscates their oxen as belated payment (with interest) for the cow. Expressing his grievance in monetary terms, Bhola says to Hori and Dhaniya:

If you think we accept dishonor and you live happily, that is not going to happen. You are crying over a hundred, or two hundred rupees, but we lost honor that is worth a million. If you want your safety turn Jhuniya out of your house same way you took her in. If you do, we will not ask you to pay for the cow, nor take your bullocks. (p. 183)

Urged, no doubt, by ethical principles and the inhibition of anger when the CARE system is activated, Hori and Dhaniya have acted in the best interest of their son, who eventually returns to claim his wife and child. It is when Dhaniya, against Hori's caution, takes in the Untouchable girl, Siliya, that their conduct assumes richer ethical qualities. Siliya has become pregnant without legal protection of marriage to her upper caste paramour, Matadin, Datadin's son. To Hori and Dhaniya, Siliya is not kin so their protection of her is not kin-selection, but dharmic compassion and class solidarity. Hori and Siliya are, at this time, both working for Datadin on daily wages. Though different in caste, she is similar in class. Anger of caste-conflict is underscored when Siliya's family enters Datadin's courtyard and forces an animal bone down Matadin's throat to make him lose caste. Though the anger is on target, Siliya does not trust their motives. When she refuses to go home with them, they drag her like a sack of jute. Her clothes torn, her back bleeding, Siliya turns to Dhaniya: “if I ask you to give me a small place in your home to sleep, you won’t deny me, will you?” and Dhaniya says, “there is no lack of place, come live in my home” (p. 299). Besides demonstrating class solidarity, this episode underscores the CARE system, which Panksepp & Biven believe “activates the SEEKING system, such as the goal-driven maternal foraging tendencies for nest building” (2012, p. 291)—this is shown in Siliya's asking for shelter and Dhaniya's effortless compliance. Further, the CARE system “in addition to being fueled by oxytocin is also fueled by endogenous opioids, that play a role in all positive social interactions,” because they inhibit “aggression” (p. 292). In light of these insights, it is illuminating that Hori's affective transition from anger to care occurs when he notices how “mother-love lit up” his wife's “worry-worn face and figure [like] a lamp,” and “transfigured” her to “the young girl whom Hori had brought home twenty five years ago” (p. 146). His memory of “her first embrace,” and his own youth, suggests oxytocin release from another affective pathway, inhibiting anger.

Conclusion

I began this discussion by stating that Godan is not a nationalist or anti-colonial novel—because, in comparison with Premchand's novel Rangabhumi (which is explicitly on India's independence movement), Godan is about the development of proto-class consciousness in rural areas, with a concise focus on the solidarity of the small peasant with the urban proletariat. The imagery used to describe Mr. Khanna's mill burning in the city resonates with images used to describe the anger of Dhaniya, Hori, and others in the village. The fire in the city is described thus:

Suddenly a strong breeze blew and the downward push of the flames plunged ahead … as if the sea was raising a tornado. … people [on the street] ran with their feet on their head … as if a lion was headed towards them. (p. 346)

Figures of turbulence in nature—of the sea, the lion, and Sheshnag—highlight primal anger. A tornado actually looks like visual images of Sheshnag. In Hindu mythology, Sheshnag is the “giant serpent which lies under the earth and supports its weight,” and is called shesha (remainder), because “he represents the remainder of destroyed universes, when during the sleep of the divine night, the power of creation recoils itself” (Danielou, 1991, p. 308). Nag is a snake. Vishnu, the preserver God of the Hindu Trinity, is “represented as resting on the thousand headed” serpent spread out over the seas, “when creation is withdrawn” (p. 162). This striking image resurrects culturally specific constructions that resonate with evolutionary mutations, history of emotions, and transnational solidarity movements. Stone idols of Sheshnag are found in temples everywhere in India. In Premchand's radical vision, the serpentine remainder has awakened from its primordial sleep, to emit fire from his thousand mouths. The god that Dhaniya thought was “asleep” when her husband abused her has now come. His wrath collaborates with the urban proletariat's revenge, as if affirming it, giving it celestial as well as primal sanction. Agni in Sanskrit (and Hindi) refers to fire but is also the name of the messenger god Agni, one of the foremost gods in the Vedic pantheon. The Marxist, and to some extent the Hegelian dialectic of history—that marks a movement of the spirit, and/or of material capital and labor, through physical time, whether right or wrong, truth or, idealistic delusion—achieves through Premchand's pen a culturally specific format. The affective systems RAGE, CARE, PLAY, in my reading of this modern Indian epic, gain greater epistemological weight when brought in contact with Premchand's culturally embedded, radicalized view of anger, as well as the better-known Marxist sociology of historical change.