The Knowing Narratorial Voice

The MA English class in Delhi University, where I've been teaching both Godan and Raag Darbari (officially in English translation but illicitly also using alongside the Hindi originals), the great majority of our students year after year have warmed to Raag Darbari far more than to Godan. This of course would have been sacrilege to Shrilal-ji himself, but then our students come unencumbered by the canonical Hindi hierarchies. In fact, of all the texts I've taught over the last 40-odd years to our BA and MA students in St Stephen's and then in DU, only A House for Mr Biswas has come close to evoking a similarly intimate response and was found to be as truly comic.

I too knew Shrilal-ji a little. In fact we are distant relations -- at the third remove, as Shrilal Shukla reminded me in exact genealogical detail each time we met, and as my father, who has known him as a contemporary and also as a fellow civil servant in UP, is delighted to confirm! In fact, whenever I met him, I just mentioned to Shukla-ji who my father is, and all the blood intimacy would come flooding in on his part:

pituu samet kahii-kahii nij naamaa
karne lage sab danD pranaamaa

I recall in particular two occasions of being together with Shrilal Shukla -- a conference in London where he seemed fully focused on employing his time to buy a Harris tweed jacket and a particular brand of Scotch, and a conference I helped organize for the British Council in New Delhi in the 1990s with the generosity of Neil Gilroy-Scott, then the BC boss, where I could get together in the same session Shrilal-ji, Gillian Wright, and an M. Phil. student of mine, Deepika, who read a scathing paper, as the young will, pointing out all that was wrong with Gillain Wright's translation! Whereupon Gillian disarmed us by sharing with us plenty more that was wrong with her version, e.g. all the passages that Penguin asked her to take out so that they could hold the price-line at the psychological threshold of Rs 99 or was it Rs 95! Shukla-ji refused to be drawn on the matter, except to agree that the choice presented to him was between a truncated translation and no translation at all. That translation cries out to be restored.

A small particular aspect of Raag Darbari I have always wanted to write on is the extensive use of English in it and of all the wide ranging Western references embedded in the knowing narratorial voice, to counterpoint the irredeemably indigenous reality. This apsect culminates I think in the Hazratganj scene towards the end of the novel -- the only one where Vaidya-ji is actually obliged to leave his own baithak/durbar to go and visit that English-smeared ('angrezii meN sanii') city and in gut reaction delivers a wholly Sanskritic hymn to Shiva.

For me Shrilal-ji served to restore one's faith in the infinite creative possibilities of Hindi in an age of poor little talkative Indian-English.