Forensic Explorations Of Self And Family
Nikhil Govind
IN THE CITY A MIRROR WANDERING by Upendranath Ashk Penguin Random House India, 2019, 504 pp., 599
May 2019, volume 43, No 5

Perhaps it is inevitable that every generation claims newness. It is really the task of scholarship to give validation and depth to such claims in literary grouping such as the Nayi Kahani (the new story) of the nineteen fifties and sixties. The analysis would move from simple claims to a larger exploration of what the distinctive voice or quality of the work is; it would be less interested in newness (is anything ever meaningfully new or old?), and be more of an attempt to trace the specific contours of a given novel in terms of questions like self-formation, friendship, agency, playfulness, intimations of the tragic and so on. By immersing oneself in a work, and exploring the above terms, one can get a much deeper sense of the work than by empty terms like social realism or Nayi Kahani or tradition or romanticism.

It is in this context that Upendranath Ashk’s (1910-1996) oeuvre is especially instructive—In the City a Mirror Wandering (1963) was published sixteen years after Falling Walls, the first novel of the six volume novel-cycle. This second novel of the cycle has been recently translated into English by Daisy Rockwell. The traditional understanding of Hindi literary genealogy moves from Premchand to Jainendra-Agyeya, with Yashpal retaining Premchand’s mantle, even as the Nayi Kahani writers (Kamleshwar, Nirmal Varma, Mannu Bhandari) dominate the fifties and sixties. Such formulae are accepted only at the cost of injustice to everybody. Ashk seems to have especially lost out. For he retained and developed the Premchand form into something oceanic, truly exceptional, and viewed from a very different, non-didactic vantage point. Ashk must be seen on his own terms—this novel is about the indefatigable story of a young artist in a lower middle-class world, determined to create against all indifference and contempt, great art. It is marvellous that the internal desire (the desire to create) is both process and summation in the creation of the artwork—the great novel is about the writing, as if in real time, of the great novel. It is this that gives the novel a reflective quality that the older realism of Premchand lacked—the constant preoccupation with reflection is reminiscent of Agyeya’s Shekhar, yet Ashk retains the detailed visual descriptive form of the great nineteenth century Victorian or Russian novelists.

The book is organized simply—it is a day’s wandering through the streets of nineteen twenties/thirties Jalandhar. The protagonist, Chetan, is a young man, who is already worried that he will not become the great writer he so yearns to be. The initial section contains a pathos that the later sections (which prioritize other sentiments such as the comic, or anger, or frustration) do not quite have. The situation is simple: Chetan is married to a woman Chanda he is fond of but does not love. He loves someone of his wife’s family, and whom his wife thinks of as her younger sister (this latter woman Neela was around twelve or thirteen when Chetan first saw her and fell in love). The young Neela is aware of Chetan’s fascination and does not discourage his attention—one day he kisses her. She is promptly, inevitably, married off. The sorrow of that simple, absolute separation haunts the day that the novel takes place in, steeping it in guilt, remorse, horror. Though the awfulness of such situations always fall harder on the women involved (one thinks of Mrinal in Jainendra’s Resignation, or Shashi in Shekhar), the young men are also rather battered. Some of this battering brings out its own tentative tenderness—for example, the last chapter of the novel recapitulates Chetan’s first night with his wife. He had tried to play the sophisticate, exchanging witty banter—he could not bear to be the man who, as his friend advised, was supposed to keep a hidden flashlight handy as he knew so little of a woman’s body.

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