The resignation, p.9
The Resignation, page 9
—Jainendra, 1970
Jainendra Kumar, the little master of Hindi literature, passed away in silence on 4 December 1988 after fifty-eight years of creative writing and eighty-three of reflective living. He had passed into silence in 1986, when a paralytic stroke claimed his voice. His voice was his pen. So it was more than a voice which was stilled; it was the muse itself. Jainendra was one of the few writers who dictated rather than penned his formidable body of work: thirteen novels and a vast number of short stories and essays. I am convinced that the extreme economy of words, a distinctive hallmark of his style, was partly due to the fact that he spoke rather than wrote them.
It is easy for a painter or a sculptor to portray silence on his canvas or medium. A musician or a dancer can conjure silence in the abstraction of the notes and beats. But a writer is doomed to use words—his only tool. How does he then craft silence the way Jainendra did by using them so that they mean more when they are not spoken than when they are? He perfected the art of silence to a degree unmatched by any Hindi writer before or since. Restraint was the essence of his craft and the philosophy underlying it. One can say it was the very essence of Jainendra.
When I read his novels, I am reminded of my grandmother’s chulha. The glow, the cackle, the hiss, the silent smouldering, with the wood fire dying so slowly and operatically that you felt you were watching an elaborate and sacred ritual. His language had all the qualities of old-fashioned wood fire—the painstakingly collected and economically built. But old-fashioned, Jainendra was not! He broke every rule of grammar and syntax, juggled verbs, threw out every superfluous word to craft a new language suited to restraint, renunciation and silence, essential to his creativity and world view. His distinction and inimitability lay in the way he used chaste khadi boli, without simplifying it. It was unalloyed with Urdu or regional dialect, yet a language only he could write, free from the dictates of grammar as practised by his peers, contemporaries and future generations. Its essence lay in its being closer to the spoken than the written word: simple yet mystical, silent yet vibrating with layer upon layer of meaning. He perfected restraint to make the language vibrate in the flow of words as much as in their lack, perhaps more so. This crafting of renunciation made it impossible to separate the form from the content in his works; one flowed from the other and merged with it as surely as the atman merges with the paramatman.
Tyagpatra, the novel translated here as The Resignation by Rohini Chowdhury and first translated by S.H. Vatsyayana ‘Agyeya’ in 1946 under the same title, is perhaps Jainendra’s most quoted and translated work. Interestingly, it is called Tyag-patra in German. According to Jainendra, when he was asked to choose from a number of German equivalents, he asked innocuously, ‘Would you translate my name also?’ The thrust went home and both his name and the original Hindi title of the novel were retained.
The Hindi reader was not ready either when Jainendra first made his onslaught on khadi boli, exchanging mystique for syntax with the minimum expenditure of words. The modern Hindi writer owes a debt to him for clearing the way for spirited experimentation with language, rejecting verbosity and deliberate use of dialect. In any case, since he did not believe in the depiction of factual reality but its transcendence to portray a state of mind, he did not need local dialects.
It is significant that as the obsession for using literary characters to unfold a philosophy took greater hold of him, his women characters gradually changed from unusual to improbable, since they were the ones used as the medium for the revelation of this philosophy. He also lost his command over silence and started playing with words. Ultimately he gave up his awesome brevity for discourse. The trend started with Muktibodh (1965), the Sahitya Akademi Award winner, and culminated in his last novel, Dashark (1985).
To fully understand his novels, it is vital to examine the philosophy which served as their launching pad. The essential ingredients were restraint, renunciation, love and freedom of choice. In Tyagpatra, Mrinal, a vivacious young girl is thrown in a marriage which snatches every vestige of respectability and individuality from her. As a newly-wed, she confides a premarital feeling of love for a youth—a feeling, no more—to her husband, only to find that he gave a fig for honesty or truthfulness. Cast away by him, she lives with a lowly, uncouth and violent coal-seller and gets pregnant. After her child dies, she shifts to the slums to serve the outcasts and rejects of society. When her well-heeled nephew, a judge, comes to take her home with him, she spurns him, saying, ‘… when Yudhisthir went to Heaven he did not leave the dog behind. Tell me, how big is your house—will you be able to take all these people as well? They are not dogs, and they have done much for me …’ When he insists, she asks him to leave his money for the slum-dwellers. He does not. It is only after she dies that he wakes up to the futility of the material world and resigns from his post.
That is the fate of almost all the men in Jainendra’s novels: cruelty, failure and a late renunciation. What comes easily and with charm to women makes men inactive and cruel towards women. They opt for renunciation after a good deal of self-analysis and philosophical dilemma. Even when they don’t, as in Muktibodh, the state of mind is that of an ascetic, not that of a man of action. Unfortunately this karma without desire is born of inertia, lassitude and an unrepentant use of women rather than intuitive renunciation.
Significantly most of the men in his novels are well heeled: lawyers, judges, members of parliament, ministers, and so on. Even the poet, Jayant, in Vyateet (1954) does a stint as a commissioned army officer. He is the most explicit about renunciation as he takes sanyasa in the end. He is also the most sadistic because he has never felt love and Jainendra believes love alone can confer humanism. Women offer themselves unstintingly to him. It is he who spurns them: the poor and tormented Budhiya with kindness, and the rich and beautiful Chanderi with extreme cruelty. Renunciation or sanyasa is his atonement and writing the book Vyateet his confession. But most important is his realization, ‘How could I, a sanyasi, escape from giving love?’ In the end he says, ‘Life seems a useless burden. Why could I never lose it in giving? Then I would have got something and not wandered like this. But there is another birth, that’s all I hope for.’
As for Mrinal, readers have long been exercised by the questions: was Mrinal a masochist, bent upon self-laceration or was she an ascetic, full of love for the lowly and the poor, intent upon serving humanity? We may well ask—if her object was to serve humanity why did she opt to live with a boorish, uncultivated man? Had she no option? She certainly had. She was well educated and had worked as a teacher. It was her insistence on telling the unalloyed truth which got her in trouble each time. Modern rationalist readers insist that Mrinal was a masochist, who got into the habit of punishing herself because of the childhood trauma of being beaten by her sister-in-law for receiving a love letter. Others look upon her as a compassionate woman dedicated to service, a minor Mother Teresa.
In the author’s world view we begin to see that the explanation is not quite so linear. The common thread running through Jainendra’s novels is disillusionment with the hedonist urge. He felt that real freedom came from renunciation of all desires. Since an ascetic wants nothing, no one could exploit him. Since he had no desires, nothing could hold him in bondage. He was free forever of the dominance of material goods, the emotional hold of relationships and the dictates of society.
Looking at Mrinal from this standpoint, we have to concede that she was a woman of singular courage, who succeeded in discounting the mores practised by society. In the process, she obtained a sense of complete freedom. She sublimated personal renunciation by identifying with the poorest of the poor. She lived with them and served them, not from a sense of duty but as a fulfilling pursuit.
Love then is the moving force in Jainendra. Not in a physical sense between man and woman but as a manifestation of the divine. In the introduction to his first novel, Parakh, he says, ‘Philosophy when it takes the form of a Shastra becomes totally cerebral. This special knowledge only divides the knower from the knowledge and does not let him taste oneness. Love alone can give the joyous taste of oneness; it alone gives the pain of separation. I give utmost importance to the torment of separation and pain of love in literature.’
Clearly for him, love meant pain and torment and the realization of a higher self through longing without physical consummation. He did not, however, eschew the adoration of the female body or the lure of money. But the ultimate goal was victory over both so the individual could merge willingly into other beings, society and finally God. Of profound significance is a sentence thrown out casually in typical Jainendra fashion in Vyateet, ‘What freedom looked from afar, came close and it was wilderness.’
Jainendra has been both celebrated and attacked for his portrayal of women as guided by, what he called, feminine logic, ‘Not irrational, only different and quite beyond the understanding of man’ (Vyateet). With the advent of feminism came the concerted attack on his portrayal of self-lacerating women, willing to sacrifice their all for inferior men: with flashes of capricious aggressiveness in Vyateet and Muktibodh and the unabashed offer of the body to cure a disturbed revolutionary in Sunita. Interestingly, all of them were prompted by complex philosophical dictates, not by inner logic.
We may or may not agree with Jainendra’s philosophy of renunciation and self-effacement. He would have been the first to concede that each individual was free to evolve his own philosophy and salvation. What I feel uncomfortable with is his putting the whole burden of it on women. As a result, none of his female characters—Mrinal in Tyagpatra, Neela in Muktibodh, Sunita in Sunita, Ranjana in Dashark—are real people. They are there to act out the philosophy of the writer. As he delved deeper into its complex delineation, it imposed a tedious similarity on their characters. When Sunita disrobed herself followed by Hari Prassan’s shocked withdrawal, remorse and renewed faith in life, it came as a clap of thunder, shattering the complacency of the literary world. But when Anita offered herself to Jayant later to ease his doubt and tension or when his wife Chanderi threw off her night dress in disgust at his indifference in Vyateet, it was just boring routine.
What appeals to my sense of the paradox is the manner in which Jainendra’s woman revenged herself on those who rejected her. She penetrated their psyche deeply. It was easy for lesser men and women to imbibe the superficial devi image and gloss over the philosophy as too enigmatic, abstruse and secondary to creativity. It was also comforting to turn a blind eye to the weakness and cruelty of his men. After all, such fine women were willing to sacrifice themselves for them. Some men are born great; others are pushed to greatness by obdurate women bent upon negating themselves!
It had two repercussions on the portrayal of women in modern Hindi literature. First, even when women were depicted as independent, talented, ambitious and sexually liberated, they were shown to yearn for the life of an ordinary wife and mother. Second and more deleteriously, women were routinely subjected to sexual torment and abuse at home and work without the Jainendran freedom of choice. They were exploited because they could not defend themselves, not because they chose not to. The difference is crucial. For Jainendra, women are not the exploited or the weaker sex but the chosen one—chosen to work out the intricate and complex pattern of renunciation to finally merge in God.
Jainendra was attacked for his portrayal of the feminine mystique, and he was also attacked by Marxist critics ruling the Hindi literary world for choosing to deal with the individual without questioning the establishment or probing social malaise. Ironically, he was described by Premchand, the leading light of the Marxists, as the Maxim Gorky of Hindi. On the face of it, no two writers are more different than Jainendra and Maxim Gorky. Premchand, more astute than his followers, pierced through the false dichotomy between the individual and society and recognized the innate meeting of the two in Jainendra. The individual is shaped by society but not limited by it. The exploration of the possible expansion of limits is what literature is about. In Jainendra’s words, ‘Can a fish arrange for separate water for itself? If man draws oxygen from air for living, he gets oxygen of love from society. So I can’t think how one can formulate a body of thought that pertains to the individual without society or to society without the individual.’
Without passion and empathy for the individual, literature would just be a treatise. A well researched treatise might have authenticity but it cannot match the intense effect of literature on the human psyche and sensibility. Nowhere is the dual relationship of the individual and society expressed more artistically and subtly than in Tyagpatra. When Mrinal asks Pramod to give money to help the poorest of the poor, it is not for charity but because he’ll do ‘good’ to himself by giving his money away.
Jainendra’s legacy lies in the courage of conviction and the ability to think for oneself, in the chiselling and honing of language to the sharpness of a rapier and, finally, in the integration of the two in an inseparable whole. If we read Jainendra in the context of his regimen of thought, we can exorcise the ghost of unthinking acceptance of ideas. Each can fashion an image of the self according to his own perception.
To end with Jainendra’s own words:
A writer lives more in the future than in the present. He seeks the welfare of the world, not to flatter it. That is why society is compelled not to understand him, to ignore him, or at most to worship him—to be scared of him. The world, because it cannot comprehend him, cannot love him. It is the misfortune of a writer, or perhaps his good fortune, that he is like a beacon … he does not look to what society wants, but the illness it suffers from. He seems disinterested but he perceives the deep anguish hidden in the depths of the heart of society. He wants to create a present which has the radiance of its dreams. His connection to society is not of acceptance but also not of rejection. He is humble but unrelenting.
April 2011
New Delhi
Mridula Garg
Acknowledgements
My grateful thanks, first and foremost, to Shri Pradip Kumar, who generously gave me permission to translate Jainendra Kumar’s novel.
My gratitude also to Dr Rupert Snell, who suggested this translation, and who is and remains mentor, guru, friend and guide; to Usha Bubna, for her patient reading of my translation, for her invaluable insights, and her constant support and encouragement; and to Vipasha Bansal, Piyali Sengupta and Urmi Sen for their suggestions and corrections.
Finally, my thanks to Sivapriya, my editor, who kept this together and to Ankita, who saw it through to the end.
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3.
*A herb, the kernel of the fruit of which works as a laxative.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
*S.H. Vatsyayana, The Resignation (Tyaga-Patra), Benares, 1946.
Jainendra, The Resignation
