Amid the inexplicably continual stream of indifferent novels in English, one looks to translations for relief. Poonam Saxena’s translation of one of Hindi’s most beloved novels — Dharamvir Bharati’s Gunahon ka Devta ( Chander and Sudha in English — is set in Allahabad of the 1940s, a city that Bharati describes as possessing a “reigning god [who] is assuredly a romantic artist”. But one of the disadvantages of this publication is the lack of an Introduction giving even a minimal literary, biographical, or intellectual context; the Afterword is too elementary an exercise. One can only appreciate this bestselling 1949 novel by comparing it to the work of authors like Agyeya, Bachchan, Ismat, Hyder, Yashpal and by asking how and why the issue of companionate (i.e. ‘love’) marriage achieved a particular salience in this Hindi-Urdu milieu.
This novel transports one into an older time, not only in space but in sensibility: with companionate marriage, sexual desire is largely formulated as a choice between purity and animality. Yet this also means that there is an animal-attraction to purity, or that purity is erotic in itself, or even that the guilt of impurity is attractive — the novel charts this territory ambitiously, if not always deftly.
The story in a nutshell is: Chander and Sudha are in love with each other (though both react quite hysterically and convolutedly to those who point this out). As Chander has been financially supported by Sudha’s father, he is like a strict, self-absorbed elder sibling to Sudha — and neither quite realises that this sibling love seeks rather more exclusivity and intimacy, till Sudha is married off (partly due to Chander’s lecture on family responsibilities) to Kailash, the groom chosen by her father.
It is hard to sympathise with the male rhetoric of the novel, even if the author was only 23 when he wrote this. The narrative voice seems to take an odd pleasure in focalising itself through Chander — a pleasure that is a mixture of sadism, sentimentality and self-pity. The portrayal of Sudha’s life after marriage (where she keeps writing cloying letters declaring her love) does not ruffle Chander’s moralising on the deceitfulness of women. The existential question that Chander asks himself — should I trust in goodness? — is posited on the supposed fidelity/fickleness of women. In this, he is heir to a long tradition of male writing on women and, if one looks at how Chander treats the other women characters, one is even more dispirited. Perhaps the novel can only be redeemed if read against the grain — its impassioned elucidation of male sexual anxiety that masquerades as grandiosity: Chander, at one point ,disarmingly confesses to wanting to be the prophet of a new world (and sex) order.
In contrast, Vinod Bhardwaj’s novel Sepukku attempts to be a contemporary novel. Centred on the art market, it is about an unsuccessful provincial artist, writing about a fellow artist — a friend of over 30 years — who has been very successful. The novel (a lightly strung together sequence of sketches) is slow to begin with and takes time to pick up pace and comic perspective. The stories could have been crafted with more continuity and overall coherence, rather than a recurrence of similar (though not identical) themes clustered together, sometimes repetitive, and sometimes seeming to trail off without making any decisive point. Many anecdotes are simply too light and interspersed with the names of historical persons and the general sorry state of the art media; so it is hard to know what is being commented on. This confusion of tone and content seems more like hasty, even if deeply felt, opinion.
However, on the whole, the novel has fluidity, whimsy, detail, and insightful insider-knowledge of Delhi’s hypnagogic art underbelly. The book ends with a rare, solitary, moment of reflection — as the painter lies dying, the values of his paintings fluctuate like the stock-market or his heartbeat; he is often worth more dead than alive. These two novels, spanning over six decades, allow us a glimpse of both the achievements and the confinements of the Hindi novel.
Chander & Sudha;Dharamvir Bharati, trs. Poonam Saxena, Penguin/Viking, Rs.499.
Seppuku: The Curious Workings of the Art Mafia;Vinod Bhardwaj; trs. Brij Sharma, Harper Perennial, Rs.299.
