There is a broad consensus that India only became “modern” on account of its conquest by the British in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. It is generally agreed that Apparao and Senapati are the first creators of modernity in their respective languages, Telugu and Oriya. Apparao is celebrated as the father of modern literature in Telugu, as Senapati is for Oriya. While the consensus I refer to defines modernity as a specifically colonial modernity, one that was produced by the impact of English on Indian literature and society, I suggest here that in the two late-nineteenth-century works under review, Kanyāśulkam (Girls for Sale) and Chha Mana Atha Guntha (Six Acres and a Third) Apparao and Senapati present an indigenous modernity, distinct from the colonial variety.
In my study of Gurajada Apparao’s Girls for Sale,1 I have argued that his work represents a continuation of a modernity that was flourishing in Telugu literature from the sixteenth century onward. During this period, Telugu literature saw the emergence of a new subjectivity, which included psychologized characters and even characters with split personalities (often falsely assumed to be the gift of the West at a later date). A new sense of time and a new understanding of the individual emerged in this precolonial period; a new sense of history emerged, with history being written in several genres. The courtly tradition of patronizing poets gave way to a public patronage, distributed over a wide range of affluent individuals who aspired to a new social status. A major shift occurred in most parts of India during this period, which my collaborators, Sanjay Subrahmanyam and David Shulman, and I call the emergence of an indigenous modernity.2 This was not a radical break from the past, but it involved a significant change in social practices, political institutions, and literary sensibilities.
Colonialism in the nineteenth century eclipsed these developments. The familiar story, which I need not repeat here, recounts how the English education system encouraged Indians to devalue most of their literature as immoral or decadent. A cultural amnesia overtook the newly educated middle class, who rejected their immediate past in favor of colonial modernity. English education, with all the opportunities and perspectives it opened for Indians, infused a distinct sense of inferiority in them, which affected their confidence in what Indian society had achieved before the arrival of the British. The new middle class accepted the colonial representation of Indian society as stagnant and decadent, with Indians as a group of people steeped in superstition and immorality. Committed to changing these conditions, social reformers in several areas of India began to lead movements to improve the moral and social conditions of Indians.
Girls for Sale
Apparao wrote Girls for Sale against the backdrop of the social-reform activities of Kandukuri Viresalingam in Andhra, who was influenced by Raja Rammohun Roy and Kesabchandra Sen in Bengal. Viresalingam led an attack against the two evils of society: not allowing child widows to remarry and allowing courtesans to practice their profession.
Viresalingam’s social reform movement was aimed at the evils that primarily affected the upper castes, particularly Brahmins, and to a lesser extent some of the Brahminized landed castes. The top layer of society that this movement touched was a small minority as compared to the huge population of the lower castes who were beyond the so-called evils the reform movement militated against. Widow remarriage was not a problem for the lower castes, because their women freely married after the death of a husband and sometimes even while he was still alive. The anti-nautch movement aimed against courtesans did not touch them either, because the lower castes had no money to pay for high-class courtesans, nor did the courtesans entertain them even if they paid. This social reform, despite its high-sounding name, was actually upper-caste reform. As a result of this successful movement, the institution of courtesans, so distasteful to the new Victorian moral order, was gradually eliminated. Widow remarriage and the prohibition of child marriages freed the upper castes from the clutches of the ritual order to which they were bound. This, together with the economic benefits resulting from new jobs in the British administration, paved the way for the upper castes to grow into a new middle class, which would be poised to inherit political, cultural, and economic power from the British. This was the social background for the emergence of (colonial) modernity in India, spearheaded by the Bengali and later the Hindi writers and poets of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
On the surface, Apparao’s Girls for Sale reads like a play in support of social reform. To briefly present a summary of the play:
A miserly old Brahmin, Lubdha Avadhanlu, makes a deal to buy, as his wife, a very young daughter of another Brahmin, Agnihotra Avadhanlu. The bride’s mother is opposed to the marriage. She knows how disastrous such marriages can be from her own experience of seeing the pain of her elder daughter Bucc’amma, who was widowed when her very old husband died. Her brother Karataka Sastri promises to foil the match. In the drama that ensues, Madhura-vani, a courtesan who is now kept by Ramap-pantulu, takes an active role behind the scenes. Ramap-pantulu is a village politician who is unscrupulous in forging documents and telling lies. He has been advising Lubdha Avadhanlu in matters of his marriage. Karataka Sastri is an old customer of Madhura-vani, and she promises him her support to save the little girl from the disastrous marriage. Karataka Sastri’s plan is to dress his own disciple, a young boy, as a girl and offer “her” to Lubdha Avadhanlu for a cheaper price. Madhura-vani successfully manipulates Ramap-pantulu to get Lubdha Avadhanlu to accept the pseudo girl.
In a parallel story within the play, Girisam, a young and handsome con artist with a glib tongue, who flaunts his knowledge of English and appears as a supporter of the social-reform movement, secretly keeps Madhura-vani as his concubine. He enters Agnihotra Avadhanlu’s house under the pretext of teaching English to his son and seduces his widowed daughter Bucc’amma even as wedding arrangements for his second daughter are in progress.
Meanwhile the pseudo wedding is successfully performed, after which the bride (the boy) takes off his costume and escapes. When the bride cannot be found, the police accuse Lubdha Avadhanlu of murdering her. The idealist social-reformer lawyer Saujanya Rao defends Lubdha Avadhanlu but does not find evidence to prove his client’s innocence. The last scene of the play is the most crucial.
I will present a close reading of the last scene as a point of entry to comprehend the complexity in Apparao’s play.3 Madhura-vani, dressed as a man, enters Saujanya Rao’s upstairs bedroom unannounced, since the front door downstairs is open and there is no attendant to ask for permission. (Apparently, there was no fear of crime and people did not lock their doors until late in the night.) Girisam happens to be there because he has taken shelter with Saujanya Rao and is trying to get his help in marrying Bucc’amma with whom he, Girisam, has recently eloped. Girisam continues to pretend he is an honest and enthusiastic supporter of the social-reform movement in order to gain the support of Saujanya Rao. Madhura-vani, who enters in the middle of the conversation, takes Saujanya Rao’s permission to remain anonymous and says she knows Girisam, and that she is his follower in the anti-nautch movement. Clearly, Girisam has detected that this stranger is none other than Madhura-vani in a man’s clothes, but he is too scared to expose her because that will betray his own shady past.
Tactfully, she says that she has come on private business, forcing Girisam to leave her and Saujanya Rao alone. The gesture Girisam makes to her as he leaves the room shows his desperate appeal to Madhura-vani not to reveal him. Madhura-vani cunningly asks Saujanya Rao what he thinks would happen to reformed courtesans. How would they make a living? How will reformed courtesans find decent husbands? Would Girisam or he himself consider marrying one? Shocked at the audacity of this suggestion, Saujanya Rao states that he would never marry a courtesan and would not even so much as touch one. And if he should touch one by accident, he would cut off that part of his body.
Having allowed Saujanya Rao to dig a hole for himself, Madhura-vani tells Saujanya Rao that she knows someone who would be of great help in his client Lubdha Avadhanlu’s case. The trouble is that the woman in question happens to be a courtesan. This is not a problem for Saujanya Rao, for he assumes that all courtesans can be bought. He suggests paying the courtesan for the information. Madhura-vani responds that the woman in question is not interested in money and that her price is of a different order. Saujanya Rao takes the hint and asks if the courtesan wants him to keep her and says that is out of the question. Madhura-vani forces a break in the negotiation and declares that Saujanya Rao’s client cannot be saved any other way. Saujanya Rao still presses on in the negotiation, when Madhura-vani, without batting an eyelid, says that if he does not want to keep her as his pleasure woman she would consider marriage.
Offended by this unexpected turn in the conversation, Saujanya Rao now demands to know from the stranger how he has come to know a courtesan if he is a follower of Girisam in his anti-nautch movement. At this point Madhura-vani removes her turban and coat, revealing her true identity. Furious at this audacity, Saujanya Rao asks her to leave, but as she is leaving he calls her back to further explore the possibilities of saving his client. Madhura-vani offers a compromise. Clearly under her spell now, Saujanya Rao says, “If you stand here long enough before me, I am afraid I will accept any compromise you suggest.” Madhura-vani gently says, “How about a kiss?” (Apparao 154). Saujanya Rao is surprised that a kiss is more valuable than money for her. He admits that he would not mind kissing a beautiful woman like Madhura-vani, but agonizes over breaking his vow never to touch a nautch girl. Despite all his reservations, Saujanya Rao agrees to Madhura-vani’s demand. Having clinched the deal, Madhura-vani tells the lawyer that the “bride” Lubdha Avadhanlu married is not a girl and that Karataka Sastri dressed his boy disciple as a girl and married him to Lubdha Avadhanlu. Therefore, the whole thing is a hoax. There is no murder. Now Saujanya Rao has to pay up. But just as he is about to kiss her, Madhura-vani stops him. She tells him that she has remembered a vow of her own. Her mother made her vow not to corrupt people who were not already corrupted. So she must not allow him to kiss her. While a relieved Saujanya Rao is still recovering from this double surprise, Madhura-vani’s attention turns to a book Saujanya Rao keeps at his bedside. It is the Bhagavadgīta. Saujanya Rao tells Madhura-vani that the Bhagavadgīta is a book that converts bad people into good, and those who read it will find an invaluable friend in the god Krishna. Madhura-vani mischievously asks, “So Krishna is not anti-nautch!” As Madhura-vani is about to leave, with the Bhagavadgīta pressed against her chest, Saujanya Rao asks how she came to know Girisam. Madhura vani initially pretends to be reluctant, but finally reveals that she was his kept woman for some time. Saujanya Rao calls Girisam, makes him confess, and throws him out of his house.
This is a very intriguing scene that can be read at many levels. Crucial junctures in the scene leave room for multiple interpretations, and nearly every line of dialogue has many implications and layers of meaning. The best part of the scene lies in Madhura-vani’s skillful use of language in manipulating Saujanya Rao. She assiduously addresses Saujanya Rao with a “Sir” all the way through, stroking his ego while cornering him with her questions. But her tone changes once Saujanya Rao shows signs of being attracted to her. When she stands before him without her disguise, he says that if she stands there long enough he is afraid he will accept any compromise she suggests. This is the point at which she is sure that Saujanya Rao has fallen for her beauty and charm. Once she is certain that she wholly controls his erotic feelings, she drops the “Sir” and addresses him with a confident tone of dominance. From this point on, her answers to his requests are curt and monosyllabic: “I won’t,” “I don’t,” and so on. She is so sure of her power that she knows once a man has come into her feminine arena he cannot escape and she can totally humiliate him. Through the rest of the scene, she has a field day deflating Saujanya Rao’s large ego and playing games with him, to the point that she even makes him believe she really wants to read the Bhagavadgīta with him, when in fact she has almost certainly read it before, since she clearly knows Sanskrit well enough to accurately quote the Mṛcchakaṭika, a rather difficult play in that language. One may even suspect that she also knows Saujanya Rao himself has not read the Bhagavadgīta, because he has been misquoting it.
So, at the end of the play, does Madhura-vani really change her ways, realize the sinfulness of her profession, and want to read the Bhagavadgīta in order to repent and turn a new leaf in her life? Or is she just playing an elaborate game to make a fool of Saujanya Rao, the “modern,” Westernized professional who assumes the role of a Catholic missionary, who hears confessions and absolves the confessor of his or her sins and provides moral guidance by giving a sermon from the Good Book! Or is it possible she has realized that times have changed, that no respectable man will come to her door anymore, and that rather than work with low-level village men she has to make her life worthy of the company of “gentlemen” like Saujanya Rao?
Nearly every critic who has read this play is certain that it supports social reform, that Madhura-vani has changed her ways, that Girisam has been punished for his false pretences and immoral practices, and that Saujanya Rao has saved Bucc’amma’s life from being ruined by Girisam. The ambiguities of the play, like the irony in Senapati’s novel, do not give room for such a one-sided reading.
Let us turn our attention to the other parts of the play, especially the court scenes. Apparao and Senapati share a common perspective in depicting courts and lawyers as sources of lies, deceit, and corruption. Ramap-pantulu, the tout, does not have any problem forging horoscopes and giving false evidence. Lawyers swindle their clients out of their money and leave them destitute. Even Saujanya Rao, the lone honest lawyer, complains that witnesses resort to fiction when they are asked to give evidence. He even compares lawyers to whores because both offer their services to the highest bidder.
English is the new language of power, and members of the upper castes, who can pay for an English education, hanker after it because it leads to jobs where opportunities for corruption are plentiful. A hilarious scene in Kanyāśulkam shows how naively attracted the village Brahmins are to the mere sound of English. Venkatesam, Agnihotra Avadhanlu’s son, who is learning English in a nearby English school, displays his learning at the request of his illiterate mother. He and his tutor Girisam converse as follows:
Girisam addressing Venkatesam:
My dear Venkatesam,
Twinkle, twinkle, little star!
How I wonder what you are!
Venkatesam: There is a white man in the tent.
Girisam: The Boy stood on the burning deck, Whence all but he had fled.
Venkatesam: Upon the same base and on the same side of it, the sides of a trapezium are equal to one another.
Girisam: Of man’s disobedience and the fruit of that mango tree, sing, Venkatesa, my very good boy.
Venkatesam: Nouns ending in “f” or “fe” change their “f” or “fe” into “ves”.
Agnihotra Avadhanlu, who does not understand a thing they are saying, innocently asks, “What’s the meaning of what you are saying?” and Girisam answers with a straight face, “We are discussing what we should read during this vacation and all that” (Apparao 22–3). As for the illiterate mother, the very sounds of the language are music to her ears and make her proud that her son speaks like a dora, the white boss.
Their reaction is entirely different when they test Venkatesam’s Telugu learning. His uncle, Karataka Sastri, a good scholar of Telugu and Sanskrit in his own right, asks the boy to read a Telugu verse. Girisam suggests a respectable verse from the Telugu Mahabharata by the great poet Nannaya. Venkatesam manages to read the verse:
Nala-damayantul’iddaru manaḥ-prabhavanāla dahyamānulai
salipiri dīrghavasaranisal …
Karataka Sastri stops him and asks, “What is the meaning of manaḥprabhavānala?”
Venkatesam looks up toward the ceiling when Girisam intervenes and says, “How can a young boy know the meaning of such difficult poems?” A surprised Agni asks, “Don’t they teach the meanings of poems?” Girisam with his ready wit answers, “For now they make them chant the verses like the Veda. In the white man’s school they don’t care much for Telugu poems. All the time they bombard the students with jagarphi, gigraphi, arthametik, alligibra, mathamatiks, and all that heavy stuff.” Agni asks in innocent amazement: “They teach all that?” Girisam solemnly confirms, “Yes, sir, all that and more. A boy who works hard like your son will not have a break even for a minute” (Apparao 23). In short, Apparao quietly portrays without a comment how a shallow culture is replacing a traditional education, and how the upper caste is all for it.
Let us look at the central event of the play—the wedding of a child to an old man. This is the supposedly big evil social reformers loudly condemn, declaring society morally bankrupt because it allows such things to happen. The careful reader of the play easily realizes, unless he or she is brainwashed into thinking that Apparao wrote his play in support of colonialist social reform, that a whole village, across all castes, unites to make sure that the sham wedding goes through without a hitch—thus stopping the real child marriage. From the priest to the policeman, to the servants and the schoolboys, including the bridegroom’s own daughter, all join hands to foil the real wedding. They make a fool of the cunning middleman who arranged it and the septuagenarian groom who was foolish enough to agree to the idea. The point becomes clear: this is not a society that normally allows such marriages to take place. The people in the village know that the practice is wrong. But people like Saujanya Rao, the leader of the upcoming urban middle class, make a big issue of reforming society and believe that it is their self-appointed task to lead it to morality.
Six Acres and a Third
Now let’s look at Senapati’s novel, Six Acres and a Third.4 The most striking thing about this novel is that a narrator, rather than the author, tells the story from beginning to end. This allows the author Senapati to gain a certain distance from the narrator of the story.
Satya Mohanty posits that in creating the narrator Senapati has drawn on the touter, a new social type that emerged in the nineteenth century in Oriya society, a “disreputable wit who inhabits the lower rungs of society and is always a bit unreliable,” and that he transforms this disreputable character into a “self-conscious satirist, social critic, and a moral philosopher.” I want to pursue Mohanty’s insightful comment that this narrator “enters the modern Indian novel from the world of oral discourse.”5 In a typical purāṇa performance, well known in the oral tradition of India, a paurāṇika tells a story with his comments and quotes from several texts. It is his voice we hear in any oral performance of the purāṇas—whether it is the Mahābhārata, Bhāgavatapurāṇa, or the Rāmāyaṇa—and not the voice of the author: Vyāsa, Vālmīki, or their regional language retellers. Occasionally, the narrator who sits in front of the audience might bring in the name of the original author, Vyāsa (or in the case of the Oriya Rāmāyaṇa, Balaram Das, or, for the more popular Oriya Bhāgavatapurāṇa, that of Jagannatha Das). In the mind of the audience, however, the narrator becomes the original author, while they themselves merge with the first listeners who sat in the Naimiṣa forest listening to Saunaka or King Parīkṣit listening to Śuka. The narrator comments on the events of the story in his own voice throughout the narration, even as he reads from the text of the original author. The narrator in Senapati’s novel is an intelligent modernized version of the purāṇa narrator, who impersonates the role of the author. An innocent reader might mistake the narrator for Senapati himself, but will recognize the literary device if he or she is careful not to be lost in the illusion.
As we silently read Senapati’s novel, we feel we are hearing the story rather than reading it, despite the narrator’s occasional references to the act of writing his story. In this sense, it is an oral novel, as it were; it does not read like a written text. Senapati’s narrator, however, is not exactly like a purāṇa performer. The narrator is tricky, funny, and intriguing, even downright false at times. His is not the authoritative, trustworthy, and full-throated voice of the purāṇa narrator; he only pretends to be one.
The creation of a pseudo paurāṇika distinguishes Senapati as a creator of an indigenous modernity. At first reading, Six Acres looks like a realistic novel authentically representing the events taking place and reporting conversations in a modern spoken idiom, faithfully depicting the characters as they move through their lives. But on a closer reading we see that what Senapati creates is not realism that produces a literary image of reality, but a pseudo realism that provokes the reader to question what appears as reality in the world.
To begin with, the narrator does not have a name. Is the narrator a man or a woman, upper caste or lower caste? For some reason we are inclined to assume he is a man. Could it be that somewhere in our minds we identify the narrator with the author? But we realize that the identification does not work; the narrator is unreliable, downright dishonest, and pretentious—not qualities we would like to associate with the author, Senapati. The narrator is clearly educated because he quotes Sanskrit texts; even when he misinterprets them, he does so deliberately. He demonstrates a fairly sophisticated knowledge of history and contemporary politics. That is a strong enough reason to assume that the narrator is an upper-caste man. The lower castes and women had no access to such education in Orissa at the time Senapati was writing.
Senapati’s narrator changes his tone and voice in so many ways that the reader may wonder whether he is a single narrator or more than one. The seamless continuity of the story and its development imply a single narrator, who, however, acts like a ventriloquist or a composite person, housing many individuals inside him. Let us take a look at the various voices of the narrator.
Sometimes the narrator adopts a tone that demands an opposite reaction. The opposition is intentionally provoked. The narrator not only does not want to be listened to with approval, but he expects his words to be vehemently opposed and summarily rejected. Every argument the narrator presents, in favor of Mangaraj’s fasts on Ekadasi days, for instance, comes with an invitation to laugh the narrator out of court. The narrator comes before us with the words “don’t take my words at their face value” writ large on his forehead.
Then there is another voice of the narrator, this time tongue-in-cheek, as when he talks about the drumsticks that Mangaraj never serves to his servants, because they are not good for their health. But Mangaraj gives them plenty of the drumstick leaves instead, which are good for their health. A little later the narrator informs us with a straight face that the drumsticks are sent to the market to be sold for a good price.
When the narrator tells you the story of the auntie from Tangi, we read, or rather listen, to the narration with great interest. The voice of the narrator is quite trustworthy, and the cultural information given is authentic. We listen with attention to the quality of his description which sounds like that of a competent ethnographer. The narrator does not give you a clue to suspect that the auntie visiting is actually Champa in the guise of a rich relative. In the chapter that follows we begin to hear clues that confirm there is no such person as Auntie Tangi and it might be Champa in a different guise. And even after the end of the narration, we are left wondering what exactly she, Champa, might have done to cause the accidental fire in the house immediately after her brief, disguised visit. After carefully sifting through the dense ethnographic details, we find that the place where the fire started was the very place where the auntie from Tangi went to relieve herself.
The narrator uses all his skill in describing Champa to us. The first impression he gives us is that the novel’s main character, Mangaraj, a man who grew to be a rich zamindar from his humble birth in an obscure and poor family, is the hero of the novel. It is, after all, his story. As we follow the life and times of Mangaraj, the novel reads like a moral tale of greed and injustice. But on a second and more critical reading details disturb this picture. Slowly Champa gains importance. She stands out as the “hero” of the story. She is the brain behind Mangaraj and the one who masterminds the acquisition of the six acres and a third and the cow from their owners, Bhagia and Saria. She personally brainwashes Saria to mortgage her land in return for the cash to perform rituals for the birth of a son. Right at the beginning of the story we are told that Champa is an artist. She painted a great many varieties of pictures of women and animals on the walls of Mangaraj’s palace. She is a talented actress as well, if we consider the skill with which she impersonated a non-existent aunt and managed to have the Baghasingha family home and wealth destroyed by fire.
The narrator doesn’t tell us about her caste, but we can suspect that her name Harakala, which she doesn’t want to be called by and which Mangaraj orders never to be uttered, suggests something fishy.6 She is respected in Mangaraj’s household and commands authority over the servants. The narrator devotes a considerable amount of time to describing her, parodying the descriptions of the modern romantic poets and the great Sanskrit poet Kālidāsa. We come to know that the narrator is learned and very clearly wants to give a lot of attention to Champa. No other character in the story receives such attention. As the description progresses we casually hear, along with many other physical details, a humorous description of Champa’s teeth. One of her front teeth is crooked; it sits on top of the tooth next to it, protruding forward. The narrator twists the meaning of Kālidāsa’s phrase śikhari daśanā, one who has a row of teeth each shaped like mountain peaks, describing Yakṣa’s beautiful wife in Meghadūta, to fit Champa’s protruding front tooth, which looks like a small hill in itself. The description makes you laugh as you appreciate the narrator’s sense of humor. Later when women in the Baghasingha household comment on the auntie from Tangi after she has left, we hear that the auntie’s front tooth is crooked too. Much later, we see the point. This particular feature of Champa’s front tooth is what the narrator skillfully marks to give us a clue to identify the auntie from Tangi as none other than Champa in disguise. It takes a while for us to make the connection, and to admire the craft of the narrator in telling the story.
Mangaraj prefers Champa’s company during the night to his wife’s. We are told that he and Champa confer secretly after dark, and Mangaraj dismisses his wife when Champa shows up. No sexual relationship between Mangaraj and Champa is clearly indicated, but the narrator leaves room to imply it. In any case, sex is not on her mind. She is clearly motivated by an irrepressible urge to move up to a position of power and status.
The narrator often resists telling us anything he has not himself seen or found out from other secret means. One such instance is when the barber who murdered Champa jumped into the river and was unable to swim to the shore. The alligator that swallowed him is intriguingly called gomuhan or crocodile. The Sanskrit word gomukha, from which the Oriya word is derived, means “cow-faced,” a word often used in the Sanskrit phrase gomukha-vyāghra, a tiger with the face of cow, used to describe a dangerously deceptive person.
This raises questions about the accident itself. Was it truly an accident? Was the crocodile a real crocodile? We know that Champa and her accomplice, the low-caste barber, stole a lot of gold from Mangaraj’s house. Apparently the gold was in the bag that the barber was carrying on his back when he jumped into the river. We hear nothing about it and are left with nothing but a bunch of palm-leaf records. One of the palm leaves on which an innocuous IOU was inscribed fell out of the bag and was recovered by the boatman. We even get the complete text of the IOU, which gives us one more piece of evidence to show how Mangaraj swindled innocent poor farmers. This piece of evidence is hardly necessary at this stage of the story. Mangaraj’s plunder of the peasants is demonstrated many times before. The IOU on the palm leaf is to distract our attention from Champa’s murder. The reason the narrator gives us for not telling the full story is clearly a lie in order to put a lid on Champa’s murder. The people in power are not interested in Champa. They have nothing to gain by proving that she was murdered, nor in showing that the barber is the murderer. So the case is closed. We are left with a suggestion that makes things even more bizarre. Champa’s corpse, without her silk sari and her silver anklets, is thrown into the river and a crocodile pulls her away in exactly the place where her co-conspirator and murderer was carried away earlier. And we are told that the shopkeeper deserted the area, where people claim to see a pisaci (spirit) inhabit.
What happened to the gold and silver in the bag, the value of which was so huge that Champa had said that it would be enough for them to live on for the rest of their lives? The shopkeeper does not say and neither does the narrator. The comment that the narrator makes soon after reporting the incident of Champa’s murderer’s fatal jump into the river is sarcastic on the surface: “You see, dear reader, we are the author, and therefore we are omniscient. We know why this crocodile snatched the man away, where it carried him, whether it treated him well or not; we have answers to all these questions. However, we are unwilling to talk about this openly since Chandia Behera himself kept the story a secret for reasons best known to him” (Senapati 196–7). If this is the commentator that appears before us time and again, right from the beginning of his narration, how are we to take his words when he narrates events of the story without his commentary? As, for example, when he tells us what was going on in the mind of Mangaraj as he lay dying.
Only a few minutes earlier the narrator has been telling us about the village vaidya, doctor, Kaviraj, who comes to treat Mangaraj after all the other doctors left him to die. The narrator indicates how pretentious the vaidya was, when he quotes from Sanskrit texts hilariously out of context, applying Kālidāsa’s love poem to diagnose a disease. But very soon the narrator disappears and we read, not hear, the silent thoughts and visions in Mangaraj’s delirious mind. This technique of leaving us alone with the dead man’s thoughts is deliberately adopted to make us believe that in the end Mangaraj has repented for all his sins, and his pativrata wife has received him in heaven. The novel ends with the cries of Hari Bol, saying everything is back to normal.
On reflection, the reader decodes the silence of the narrator. Mangaraj’s confession symbolizes the new order of power that has taken over under colonialism. In this order, modern prose, supposedly neutral, represents truth as is. It does not need a commentary because it is supposed to be transparent. The prose declares that the efforts of a Mangaraj or a Champa to acquire power and status have not succeeded.
Let us take a moment to see why they have not succeeded. It is not because they were greedy, unethical, or immoral. The new order that has taken over is not any less unethical or immoral, but Mangaraj and Champa were not modern in the mode of their operation. They did not know how to steal in the new style. Mangaraj wanted to become an old-style landlord, and Champa, even worse, wanted to be treated as a zamidarini. She succeeded briefly on two occasions, once when she pretended to be the auntie from Tangi, and a second time just before her death, when the shopkeeper treated her with great respect.
How do we take the silences of the narrator, then? If his silences are strategic, what about the words he speaks—are they not strategic too? We come away with the feeling that the narrator knows everything but is not straightforward with us. We have to suspect every word he says and does not say—every description he gives, every comment he makes, every detail he presents, and every silence—nothing can be taken at face value. This feature makes Senapati’s novel, despite its apparently realistic mode, anything but realistic. Realism is too impoverished a label to adequately describe his style.
The structure of the novel alternates between description and narration. After a brief introduction to Mangaraj, we hear about a number of people, including the goddess Mangala, almost as if she were an actual person. We listen with great interest because these introductions are so lively that we begin to feel we practically know these people and want to talk to them the next time we see them. We do not even wonder why we are being introduced to them. They seem to do nothing except appear like people in their own right. But we do not object or become bored by these introductions because the prose is so lively and good-humored. In the process we also hear about a pond with four different shores where a lot of things happen. The description of the pond makes us realize how it is the center of life and death of the village. It is a metaphor of life in the village and the center of the story as well. We know about the irrational beliefs of the villagers in the story of the tunnel to the Ganges from under the lake, which the goddess Mangala’s tiger made from her temple. The myth, however, has two sides to it. There are people who believe in it and succumb to it like Saria, and people who use it to make money, like Mangaraj and Champa. The elaborate trick played upon Saria by Mangaraj with the collusion of the village guardsman, Gobara Jena, is evidence that the myth is not universally believed. However, we hear only a hint of it during the first introduction of the lake and the goddess. For the rest of the story we have to wait until the first investigation of Saria’s murder and her alleged murderer, Mangaraj.
The story begins right on the bank of this pond. It is here that the seeds of the central event of the novel are planted. Champa brainwashes Saria to mortgage her six acres and a third of land to the zamindar Mangaraj and get some money to build a temple for the goddess. Surely the goddess will give Saria children and lots of money. The loan would easily be repaid to Mangaraj, and she would live happily ever after with Bhagia and her children. The Asura Pond is a metaphor for India, Orissa, and the village during the early nineteenth century. It stands as a metaphor for the colonization of the Indians by the English, of the Oriyas by the Bengalis, and of the decline of the old classes under the influence of an emerging middle-class culture.
The descriptions in the novel keep the reader engaged while constructing a carefully layered picture of two of the major weaknesses that plagued Indian society and paved the way for the English Company to grab power. One was the decadence of the Muslim zamindars and the other was the degeneration of the weaver communities. The story of Sekh Dildar Mian and the story of Bhagia and Saria are representative of these communities. Before the colonial takeover, it was these two communities that kept India on the world map with their wealth and international trade. The novel takes note of them long before the cultural and economic history of the colonial period pays attention to them.
The digressions in the narrator’s descriptions are as important as the main story in the novel. It is the digressions that give us a deeper understanding of the social and political changes during the early colonial period. For instance, one such digression tells us of the panchayat, which settled disputes. If a person in a caste was found to have committed an offense or a crime, the pañcāyat fined him, and the fines thus collected stayed with the caste. The new court system removed such settlements at the local level, transferring funds from the village to lawyers and the newly established British courts in towns. Now justice is available only to those who can pay for it.
Even a comment that looks casual is not really casual, such as this one from Chapter 10: “Do you know how cash contributions are raised? Although you may need no explanation, the new babus do, for they are educated: they have studied and have mastered profundities. Ask a new babu his grandfather’s father’s name and he will hem and haw but the names of the ancestors of England’s Charles the Third will readily roll off his tongue.”7
The success of colonial education consists of creating a generation of people who are cut off from their own past in favor of a new education in the name of history and science. It is a common feature in the nationalistic novels of the time to decry the loss of indigenous knowledge. But Senapati does this with a sense of irony.
Two characters in the novel—one who speaks very little and inaudibly, and the other who is deaf and dumb and cannot even speak a word—stand as silent witnesses of the deterioration around them. They are Mangaraj’s wife (she has no name) and Gobinda, the low-caste servant who came with her from her parents’ house and has taken care of her since her birth. We have a long description of both these characters. They do not speak a word but you cannot forget them. They stand as ineffective representatives of a dying culture—good, honest, and kind according to the values of a dying order, but incapable of correcting the injustice they see or unable to imagine the cruel but inexorable dynamics of power unveiling right before them.
Senapati’s novel, as Satya Mohanty says, can be read on one level as a “tale of wealth and greed, of property and theft” (Senapati 1). An established social order, whether it is a traditional society based on Brahminic dharma, with its four-varṇa order and caste hierarchies, or a modern society based on democracy and rule of law, tries to keep the property and status relations in a tolerable equilibrium. Minor adjustments are allowed where a relatively poor upper-caste individual is allowed to acquire wealth and status, but no really poor and low-class person is allowed that opportunity. If ever such a person should try to become wealthy and aspire for status, he or she has to break a lot of laws, transgress dharma, and be willing to be seen as a criminal or even worse. Marx may have said all property is theft, but after a proletarian revolution property again settles in the hands of a new class of people who come into power. Not only is all property theft, all power is theft as well.
Because of their nature, property and power never shift from one group to the other without some kind of violence, destruction, or transgression of law. If people who act violently end up succeeding, they are called heroes. Heroism is valued in all societies, but only some people are allowed to become heroes. In the Mahābhārata society, Arjuna could become a hero, but not Ekalavya. Or in a Rāmāyaṇa society, Sītā could be a queen but not Śūrpanakhā. In troubled times, when the law and order situation is weak, when the old order is crumbling and a new one has not yet been established—that is when aspirants who never had a chance to move up in society have an opening. The juncture between two orders of society, the space between two major changes—that is the time for people on the lower level to try to grab power.
Is there a time for Ekalavyas and Śūrpanakhās to assert their superiority? Yes and no. Initially Senapati’s novel makes you think that Mangaraj, Champa, and the barber who killed her suffered the consequences of their greed. But an attentive reader will realize that they were merely doing what rich people of the past have done and the rich people of the future will do as well—those who somehow are believed to have a time-honored right to be rich. It turns out that Mangaraj and Champa are revealed to be usurpers, greedy for status and power. A just society punishes them. In the end, an unknown lawyer, a representative of the new middle class that has emerged in the new space for power created by the colonial administration, legally grabs the accumulated riches without a hitch.
A similar transition takes place in Apparao’s play as well. The old-fashioned courtesan, who was not considered to be doing anything immoral in society before colonialism, is now called a whore. Saujanya Rao has moral qualms about seeing or touching her, and believes she must be reformed before she becomes respectable. Girisam, who has no property, no job, and no earnings, but has a dazzling brilliance and the ability to turn any difficult situation to his advantage, is punished because he has associated with a courtesan. His irresistible urge to move up in society is dampened and his future left in doubt. What is conveniently overlooked is the fact that he has no money to buy a wife properly and that the only recourse he has is to find one to elope with. In contrast, the new class of lawyers and police officers who are corrupt to the hilt are considered citizens of high class.
It is of course possible to read Six Acres as a critique of traditional Indian society, as a demand for social reform. Such an interpretation would be similar to the one provided by the Telugu critics who read Apparao’s Kanyāśulkam as a work that supports the social reform movement of Viresalingam in Andhra. Other readings of these two literary works are possible, depending on the location of the reader and his or her perspective. I have provided the outlines of an alternative reading of these two important texts.
In the end, the two authors, Apparao and Senapati, do not produce their works in a realistic mode. Neither do we find an authorial intention nor an omniscient author who sees and reports it all for the reader to receive. They do not unequivocally condemn society as decadent and superstitious, nor do they invite the changes introduced by the colonial administration as liberating and uplifting. They do not reject Western influence in a blind patriotic stance, eulogizing everything traditional. Rather, they adopt a critical perspective that liberates the reader to read their works unfettered by an overpowering authorial sermon, while they take inspiration from the traditional oral forms of literature, including the epic performances with their multiple voices and polyphonic characters—their “truth” open to interpretations.
Notes
1.All references to Apparao’s Kanyāśulkam are from my translation of the play, Girls for Sale: A Play from Colonial India.
2.See my Symbols of Substance: Court and State in Nayaka-Period Tamilnadu with David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam; A Poem at the Right Moment: Remembered Verses from Premodern South India, with David Shulman; Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, with David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam; The Sound of the Kiss, or the Story that Must Never be Told: Kalapurnodayamu by Pingalī Surana, with David Shulman; God on the Hill: Temple Songs from Tirupati by Annamayya, with David Shulman; The Demon’s Daughter: A Love Story from South India by Pingalī Surana, with David Shulman.
3.Adapted from my afterword to the play, “The Play in Context: A Second Look at Apparao’s Kanyāśulkam,” pp. 159–92.
4.Fakir Mohan Senapati, Six Acres and a Third: The Classic Nineteenth-Century Novel about Colonial India. Trans. Rabi Shankar Mishra, Satya P. Mohanty, Jatindra K. Nayak, and Paul St Pierre. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
5.Senapati, Six Acres, pp. 6–8.
6.No one has discussed the meaning or social connotations of this word in Oriya. Other than the implication that the word indicates something derogatory, we do not know much about it. Siddharth Satpathy (oral communication) says that the word means one who is skilled in all the arts of deception. He says that she could be a poili, a common noun meaning a concubine, and that the name Harakala could relate to her skills of manipulating men.
7.Mohanty draws our attention to this in Senapati, 7. The quote from the novel is on Senapati, Six Acres, p. 84.
References
Annamayya. God on the Hill: Temple Poems from Tirupati. Translated by Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Dean Shulman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Apparao, Gurajada. Girls for Sale: A Play from Colonial India (Kanyāśulkam). Translated by Velcheru Narayana Rao. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007.
Narayana Rao, Velcheru, and David Dean Shulman. A Poem at the Right Moment: Remembered Verses from Premodern South India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Narayana Rao, Velcheru, David Dean Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. Symbols of Substance: Court and State in Nayaka Period Tamilnadu. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992.
———. Textures of Time: Writing History in South India. New York: Other Press, 2003.
Senapati, Fakir Mohan. Six Acres and a Third: The Classic Nineteenth-Century Novel about Colonial India. Translated by Rabi Shankar Mishra, Satya P. Mohanty, Jatindra K. Nayak, and Paul St Pierre. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Surana, Pingali. The Demon’s Daughter: A Love Story from South India. Translated by Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006.
———. The Sound of the Kiss, or the Story that Must Never be Told: Kalapurnodayamu. Translated by Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Dean Shulman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.