Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2019. xvi, 442 pp. (B&W photos.) US$95.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-4384-7605-6.
Fiction as History is a carefully crafted book, in which Vasudha Dalmia weaves together a social history of urban North India by bringing together strands of knowledge located in diverse disciplinary practices. The book is an extended commentary on eight major Hindi novels published between the 1870s and the 1960s. By focusing on the cities of Lahore, Delhi, Agra, Allahabad, Lucknow, and Varanasi, the book traces the emergence of Hindu middle classes and their negotiations with colonial and nationalist forces. The discourse concerns aspirational middle-class Hindu youth and their struggle with colonial urban modernity through notions of love and friendship, perceptions of privacy, attitudes to women’s work, and relationships within households. Dalmia argues that “the radical social transformations associated with post-1857 urban restructuring, and the political flux resulting from social reform, Gandhian nationalism, communalism, Partition, and the Cold War shaped the realm of the intimate as much as the public sphere” (back cover).
According to Dalmia, there are “three reasons that determined the selection of these novels” (7): first, the urban context of these novels, which is in stark contrast to great peasant novels, the core of Hindi literature; second, the focus on young people striving to stabilize themselves in a social position; and third, the novels’ depictions of the political climate of their time, a climate which deeply shaped young people’s personal lives. The characters in these novels represent a wide array of middle-class youth belonging to various social, religious, and political backgrounds. The women and men are seen struggling with disparate value systems and ideologies while exploring their sexuality, romantic love, and conjugality. The novels are deeply marked by the times in which they are located: political beliefs, lifestyles, and the way young people lived and aspired. These novels cover a particular period in the history of India, located at the cusp of colonialism, anti-colonial struggle, the partition/independence, and nation-building in post-colonial India.
The book opens with a detailed introduction and has eight chapters organized into two sections. Each section is composed of four chapters, followed by an epilogue. A detailed and incisive introduction brings together themes which outline the framework of the book. These include discussions about the multivocality of the novel as a genre, the history of Hindi novels, Hindi publishing in North India, the restructuring of north Indian urban spaces after 1857, the rise of the middle class in north India, and finally, changing notions of nation and self in theoretical debates around modernity and modernism. The first section, titled “Towards Modernity,” deals with the twin forces of colonial modernity and Indian nationalism that transformed urban lives both at the level of the personal and the political. This section is composed of four novels: Lala Shrinivasdas’s Pariksha Guru (The Tutelage of Trial, 1882), Premchand’s Sevasadan (The House of Service, 1918) and Karmabhumi (Field of Action, 1932) and Yashpal’s Jhutha Sach (False Truth, 1958–1960). The second section, “Modern Conundrums,” deals with the arrival of modernism, when the ideals and promises of modernity are questioned and the merits and demerits of nationalism and electoral politics are debated. This section is based on the critical evaluation of Dharamveer Bharati’s Gunahon ka Devata (The God of Vice, 1949), Agyeya’s Nadi ke Dvip (Islands in the Stream, 1948), Rajendra Yadav’s Sara Akash (The Entire Sky, 1951), and Mohan Rakesh’s Andhere Band Kamre (Dark Closed Rooms, 1961). Instead of writing a summary of all the chapters, the epilogue, “Looking Backward, Looking Forward,” focuses on connecting the salient dots across the novels, especially focusing on women and their negotiations with structures of power. Dalmia argues that as the novel in Hindi matures, ways of perceiving women become more complex and nuanced (426).
The book appends the growing corpus of literary urban studies in South Asia. Dalmia’s thesis that “through their attention to detail, their minute documentation of shifts in structures of feelings, novels are often a record of social history in ways that social history itself is not” (406) is humble yet stimulating. It raises a set of crucial questions about the relationship between history and literature. Can we read fiction as history? For those who believe in the spirit of unified knowledge this may be a non-question; however, for disciplinarians this is an important question, at least analytically. If fiction can be read as history then why do novelists decide to become novelists and not historians? It is a well-known fact that historians have long used literature as an important source for understanding the past. In the last few decades, literature has relinquished this role to the social sciences. Social scientific paradigms have become important in literary studies. Literature is much more than just a political discourse. Literature is historically, culturally, and religiously situated, but literature is not a historical discourse only because it is primarily an existential discourse. At the core of all literature, there is a specific individual who has in a way experienced a certain existential catastrophe or crisis. For a Marxist or feminist, the individual can be understood through a theoretical gaze, but for a novelist, an individual is a person. Novelists do not speak for the characters and their suffering. Literature is about the being and the other. Narratives are all about this struggle between the self and the other. The closest discipline to literature is philosophy. Literary texts, just like those of philosophy, can take you to the innermost layers of a human being. If a text is merely sociological, then it is not literary. This book successfully unpacks these complex issues.
I read this book while I was teaching a course on urban anthropology. In the Indian context, anthropological literature on cities is scarce for the period covered by the novels under discussion. Although Dalmia does not deal with a number of issues discussed in contemporary urban anthropology, I found this book to be an amazing supplement to my reading list, as it offered details about urban transformation and associated urbanism. Vasudha Damlia’s effort is unquestionably praiseworthy on another count, as the book introduces eight significant Hindi novels to the English-speaking world.
Chakraverti Mahajan
University of Delhi, New Delhi