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With the change of season, one is witnessing the change in perception of the Indian media about Team Anna. While Team Anna, which stole the thunder from Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s Team India just after they had won the Cricket World Cup in April, battles ignominy of personal corruption charges and internal strife, it’s time to mourn the passing away one of the finest post-Independence satirist. Shrilal Shukla, the creator of Raag Darbari breathed his last in Lucknow last Friday. Shukla, himself a part of bureaucracy, raised issue of corruption, red-tapism and nepotism most effectively.
He was last of the surviving literary icons who made Lucknow their Karmabhoomi. The others being Amritlal Nagar and Shivani. All three contributed extra-ordinarily to enrich contemporary Hindi prose. The triumvirate was unsparing in criticism of 20th century post-Independence society. Be Amritlal Nagar’s Nachyo Bahut Gopal, Shivani’s Surangama or Shukla’s Raag Darbari, the criticism of the Indian political class was sharp and honest. The three came from different social backgrounds and cultivated different narrative styles, but for sure all of them held the reader in rapt attention.
While there are several references of interaction between Shivani and Nagar on their literary expositions, I am not sure whether Shukla ever held any dialogue with the contemporary titans of Hindi novel writing. Though Shukla got the Sahitya Akademi Award for Raag Darbari in 1970, a year after it was published, he, unlike Shivani and Nagar, became a household name only after the novel was serialized on Doordarshan in the 1980s.
In theme, content, narrative and use of literary tools, at the risk of inviting annoyance of literary critics, I would say that Shukla was closer to Phanieswarnath Renu. This great storyteller from Araria in eastern Bihar became famous nationally when Basu Bhattacharya made Teesri Kasam on his short story Mare Gaye Gulfam. Produced by lyricist Shailendra, Teesri Kasam starred Raj Kapoor and Waheeda Rahman, both giving powerhouse performances.
Doordarshan, around the same time as Raag Darbari was serialized, also telecast Renu’s magnum opus Maila Aanchal. The serialization of both the novels led to their re-launch and they, especially Raag Darbari, went onto become a bestseller. Doyen of theatre Manohar Singh breathed life into the central character of scheming village elder Vaidyaji. In the early 1990s, Shukla’s work was translated in English by Gillian Wrights and published by Penguin. Though Shukla’s novel was first published a decade and half after Renu’s work, both, however, effectively managed to juxtapose the regional theme with universal appeal. The core of their work was best brought in rendition by Pandit Bhimsen Joshi “Darbari ke saat suro me… saat rang hai, tere mere”, which was used as the title montage for Raag Darbari serial.
Both the works emphasized on few common points — corruption in society, helplessness of aam aadmi (common man), gender bias and education as the catalyst for change. Anthropologist Akhil Gupta made Raag Darbari, a basis for his seminal (2005) essay Narratives of corruption: Anthropological and fictional accounts of the Indian State. He mentions in the introduction to the essay, “In this article I attempt to analyse stories about corruption for what they might reveal about the Indian state. By triangulating my own fieldwork data, a prize-winning novel written by an official of the Uttar Pradesh (UP) State Government, and the accounts of corruption by one of the major social anthropologists of India, FG Bailey, I claim that narratives of corruption, and the actions of bureaucrats and agencies in relation to those narratives, are fundamental to the constitution of the state in contemporary India. I argue that the success of policies geared to providing basic needs to the poor depend on changing these narratives and thereby altering the affective relations that poor citizens have with the state.”
In her obituary to Shukla, author-editor Mrinal Pande wrote, “Shukla belonged to a group of vernacular writers who were the first to disclose the hidden face and challenges of democracy right after the Nehru years. In the Hindi belt, a novel like Raag Darbari gave voice to the other India of little villages and small towns, of rogues and saints and scoundrels in khadi and penniless farmers and cunning clerks pitting their frail frames against the enormous machinery of a corrupt welfare state.”
If Shukla was writing in post-Nehru era, Renu was penning at the height of Nehruvian romanticism. While the remote village in Araria mourns passing away of Gandhi, it cannot feel the freedom which Mahatma has delivered to the nation. For them it’s their Dagdar Babu (the doctor), who brings freedom from malaria and kalazar. In Shukla’s Shivpalganj city-educated Rangnath’s predicament towards people and politics is quite understandable. Retrospectively, Raag Darbari’s Laangad would not have been as helpless if he had been then empowered with the Right to Information Act.
In these times when the nation debates the demand for creating a parallel bureaucracy in the name of Jan Lokpal to end corruption, Renu and Shukla probably have the answers. Our experience shows that empowerment would never come by creating bureaucratic structures and super structures, but through education and technologically-aided acts of empowerment.
He was last of the surviving literary icons who made Lucknow their Karmabhoomi. The others being Amritlal Nagar and Shivani. All three contributed extra-ordinarily to enrich contemporary Hindi prose. The triumvirate was unsparing in criticism of 20th century post-Independence society. Be Amritlal Nagar’s Nachyo Bahut Gopal, Shivani’s Surangama or Shukla’s Raag Darbari, the criticism of the Indian political class was sharp and honest. The three came from different social backgrounds and cultivated different narrative styles, but for sure all of them held the reader in rapt attention.
While there are several references of interaction between Shivani and Nagar on their literary expositions, I am not sure whether Shukla ever held any dialogue with the contemporary titans of Hindi novel writing. Though Shukla got the Sahitya Akademi Award for Raag Darbari in 1970, a year after it was published, he, unlike Shivani and Nagar, became a household name only after the novel was serialized on Doordarshan in the 1980s.
In theme, content, narrative and use of literary tools, at the risk of inviting annoyance of literary critics, I would say that Shukla was closer to Phanieswarnath Renu. This great storyteller from Araria in eastern Bihar became famous nationally when Basu Bhattacharya made Teesri Kasam on his short story Mare Gaye Gulfam. Produced by lyricist Shailendra, Teesri Kasam starred Raj Kapoor and Waheeda Rahman, both giving powerhouse performances.
Doordarshan, around the same time as Raag Darbari was serialized, also telecast Renu’s magnum opus Maila Aanchal. The serialization of both the novels led to their re-launch and they, especially Raag Darbari, went onto become a bestseller. Doyen of theatre Manohar Singh breathed life into the central character of scheming village elder Vaidyaji. In the early 1990s, Shukla’s work was translated in English by Gillian Wrights and published by Penguin. Though Shukla’s novel was first published a decade and half after Renu’s work, both, however, effectively managed to juxtapose the regional theme with universal appeal. The core of their work was best brought in rendition by Pandit Bhimsen Joshi “Darbari ke saat suro me… saat rang hai, tere mere”, which was used as the title montage for Raag Darbari serial.
Both the works emphasized on few common points — corruption in society, helplessness of aam aadmi (common man), gender bias and education as the catalyst for change. Anthropologist Akhil Gupta made Raag Darbari, a basis for his seminal (2005) essay Narratives of corruption: Anthropological and fictional accounts of the Indian State. He mentions in the introduction to the essay, “In this article I attempt to analyse stories about corruption for what they might reveal about the Indian state. By triangulating my own fieldwork data, a prize-winning novel written by an official of the Uttar Pradesh (UP) State Government, and the accounts of corruption by one of the major social anthropologists of India, FG Bailey, I claim that narratives of corruption, and the actions of bureaucrats and agencies in relation to those narratives, are fundamental to the constitution of the state in contemporary India. I argue that the success of policies geared to providing basic needs to the poor depend on changing these narratives and thereby altering the affective relations that poor citizens have with the state.”
In her obituary to Shukla, author-editor Mrinal Pande wrote, “Shukla belonged to a group of vernacular writers who were the first to disclose the hidden face and challenges of democracy right after the Nehru years. In the Hindi belt, a novel like Raag Darbari gave voice to the other India of little villages and small towns, of rogues and saints and scoundrels in khadi and penniless farmers and cunning clerks pitting their frail frames against the enormous machinery of a corrupt welfare state.”
If Shukla was writing in post-Nehru era, Renu was penning at the height of Nehruvian romanticism. While the remote village in Araria mourns passing away of Gandhi, it cannot feel the freedom which Mahatma has delivered to the nation. For them it’s their Dagdar Babu (the doctor), who brings freedom from malaria and kalazar. In Shukla’s Shivpalganj city-educated Rangnath’s predicament towards people and politics is quite understandable. Retrospectively, Raag Darbari’s Laangad would not have been as helpless if he had been then empowered with the Right to Information Act.
In these times when the nation debates the demand for creating a parallel bureaucracy in the name of Jan Lokpal to end corruption, Renu and Shukla probably have the answers. Our experience shows that empowerment would never come by creating bureaucratic structures and super structures, but through education and technologically-aided acts of empowerment.
