The game of life, translated

Wiping away tears, I’m thinking in amazement: “This really shouldn’t work.” But it does. I’ve just finished reading the death of the hero in Premchand’s novel Rangbhumi. The blind beggar Surdas dies like a saint, with forgiveness for those who once beset him and with humility. Almost his last words are “Ram-Ram”. His village mourns him, and when his body is mounted on its funeral pyre every man, woman and child is there. His estranged son comes weeping to light the fire. It’s significant that just a few days earlier the entire village had burned to the ground, after a terrible conflict that had very humble origins, as a struggle over a piece of land.

This is surely too heavy-handed. It sounds like Gandhi and the independence movement, even perhaps Partition. There are other familiar characters: Kunwar Bharat Singh and his son Vinay surely approximate Motilal Nehru and his son Jawaharlal. But Premchand died in 1936, aged just 56, and Rangbhumi was written in the early 1920s, the time of non-cooperation and Chauri Chaura. Call it prescience, or call it pattern-recognition; even the lives of saints and rich men of conscience follow a set of rules.

 Whatever it is, the emotional force of this piece of narrative is surprising — especially for a reader who is, like me, so little acquainted with Hindi-Urdu literature. Somewhere within the Indian reader must be buried the necessary raw material, the understanding of Indian archetypes of character and motivation, and Premchand is able to mine that seam more effectively than Western or Western-inspired contemporary Indian writers. In Western literature this subject would make a tragedy. In India, opposed imperatives never grow monstrous — think of Oedipus confronting his irreconcilable duties as son, king and husband, or Macbeth’s terrible crisis of loyalty and ambition — and altogether consume the individual. Somehow, dharma provides the answer and the solution. From anger comes peace. The universe is what it is. And so on.

Full report here Business Standard