This Is Not That Dawn: Jhootha Sach
This Is Not That Dawn
Translated from the Hindi by
Anand
Introduction by
Harish Trivedi
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
YASHPAL (1903–76) began to write while serving a life sentence for his participation as a comrade of Bhagat Singh and Chandrashekhar Azad, in the armed struggle for India’s independence. What he wrote formed his first collection of short stories,
Pinjare ki Udan
, published in 1938. After his release Yashpal dazzled Hindi readers with the political journal
Viplava
, which he founded and published with the help of Prakashvati, a revolutionary whom he had married in prison. He wrote more than fifty books including collections of short stories, novels, essays, a play and memoirs of his revolutionary days.
Yashpal died in 1976 while writing the fourth volume of his reminiscences.
ANAND, a former print and broadcast journalist, has translated
Divya
, Yashpal’s other major novel, into English, as well as his short stories into English and French. He was the editor of the fourteen-volume
Collected Works of Yashpal
, published in 2008. He has also translated Canadian writers Alice Munro, Mordecai Richler and Hugh MacLennon into Hindi.
HARISH TRIVEDI is professor of English at the University of Delhi and has been visiting professor at the universities of Chicago and London. He has co-edited
Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice
and has translated from Hindi into English a wide range of poetry and short fiction as well as a biography,
Premchand: A Life
.
To the memory of my mother Prakashvati
who, more than any other,
wanted to see this work
by my father,
in English translation
These tarnished rays, this night-smudged light
This is not that Dawn for which, ravished with freedom,
we had set out in sheer longing
—‘Dawn of Freedom’, Faiz Ahmed Faiz
(Translated from the Urdu by Agha Shahid Ali)
I. Life and Works
FOR HALF A CENTURY NOW, HINDI READERS HAVE BEEN OF THE VIEW THAT THIS
novel is the greatest Partition novel ever written. Yashpal’s
Jhootha Sach
(2 vols, 1958, 1960; literally, The False Truth), beginning in the early 1940s in Lahore and carrying its populous cast of characters forward up to 1957 in Delhi, has an epic sweep, a degree of verisimilitude, and a range of human concerns that no other novel on this cataclysmic theme in any language can begin to match. The vast Anglophone discourse on Partition and its literary representations, which got a new fillip in 1997 when it was the fifty years not so much of Independence as of Partition that emerged as the focus of attention at least in intellectual and academic discussions, will need to be substantially recast now that this novel becomes available in English. So far, it may even seem, it has all been a bit like talking about
Hamlet
without the Prince of Denmark.
Yashpal led the kind of dynamic and dramatic life that could itself be the stuff of fiction. Born on 3 December 1903 in Ferozepore Cantt in Punjab where his mother worked in an orphanage, he was educated initially, from age seven to fourteen, at the Gurukul Kangri, an Arya Samaj institution where he imbibed reformist Hindu values as well as an intense hatred for foreign rule. After further schooling in Lahore, he went for his BA to the National College there where he met Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Bhagvati Charan, and became with them a prominent member and then leader of what later came to be called the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association/Army (HSRA) which worked for liberating India through revolutionary armed struggle. After his more famous comrades had shot dead the British
police officer Saunders in Lahore on 17 December 1928 and thrown bombs in the Central Assembly in Delhi on 8 April 1929, Yashpal himself on 23 December 1929 detonated the bomb which blew up the dining car of the Viceroy’s special train while Lord Irwin, two carriages away, was thrown out of his bed to the floor.
After Chandrashekhar ‘Azad’ died in a shoot-out with the police on 27 February 1931, the HSRA regrouped with Yashpal being elected as its commander-in-chief. On being ambushed by the police in the house in Allahabad of an Irish woman sympathizer who had taken the name Savitri, Yashpal ran out of ammunition and was arrested on 23 January 1932. He was subjected to ideological interrogation and attempts at persuasion by the British police officer with whom he had before being arrested exchanged bullets and by a loyal Indian police officer with whom he traded verses from the Bhagavad Gita, each of them citing
shlokas
which supported their own respective beliefs. Defended in court by his lawyer Shyam Kumari Nehru, a niece of Jawaharlal, Yashpal was sentenced to fourteen years’ rigorous imprisonment.
Meanwhile, for some years before his arrest, he had developed a relationship with another member of his revolutionary group, Prakashvati, and now from jail he wrote to her offering to release her from all bonds so that she could lead her own free life. In response, she petitioned the authorities to be permitted to marry Yashpal, and as nothing could be found in the jail regulations to deny such an unprecedented request, they were married in jail in a brief civil ceremony conducted by the Deputy Commissioner on 7 August 1936, following which Yashpal returned to the barracks and Prakashvati to study dentistry in Karachi. As a result of the elections held under the newly passed Government of India Act, a Congress Government came to power in the United Provinces in 1937 and one of its first acts was to order the release of all political prisoners, including, after some initial objections from the British Governor, a violent militant such as Yashpal. The HSRA was by now virtually disbanded and defunct, and his release on 2 March 1938 marked the end of Yashpal’s life as a revolutionary.
Barred from entering Punjab, Yashpal now decided to make Lucknow his home, and he took to writing as his new calling, wishing to use it as a medium for the same political ends. He founded a Hindi journal titled
Viplava
(i.e., revolution, or more accurately, cataclysm, with the same etymological connotation of a deluge that drowns out the old order), which he described as ‘the avant garde of the Indian National Movement’. His wife set up a publishing house called Viplava Karyalaya in 1941 and a printing press—Sathi Press—in 1944. Prakashvati stood by him not as a romantic muse but rather as a more sturdy and pragmatic partner who helped Yashpal find the creative and intellectual space for going on to write seventeen collections of short stories, twelve novels, and over twenty other books of essays, political analysis and travelogue.
Probably wisely from an artistic point of view, he did not, except in his first novel, turn his experiences as a revolutionary into fiction; instead, he wrote them up as a detailed factual account or personal testimony under the title
Simhavalokan
(3 vols, 1951, 1952, 1955; literally, A Lion’s Eye-View but idiomatically and more modestly, A Backward Glance); this is available in selected extracts in English translation together with a linking commentary by Corinne Friend under the title
Yashpal Looks Back
(1981). (For further bibliographical information on English translations of Yashpal’s works and for a selection of his photographs, see
www.viplava.com
).
On the postage stamp that was issued in his honour, Yashpal is described as ‘writer and patriot’—except that the parallel Hindi text, ‘
krantikari va lekhak
’ (revolutionary and writer) seems rather more accurate both in terms of chronology and political category. It is a rare conjunction, matched in Hindi perhaps only by Satchidanand Hiranand Vatsyayan ‘Agyeya’ (1911–87) whom Yashpal mentions as a younger and technically expert member of the HSRA, who wrote an autobiographical novel he had first sketched out in jail,
Shekhar: Ek Jivani
(2 vols, 1942, 1944; Shekhar: A Life), and whose reputation as a novelist and poet in Hindi, I think, stands even higher than Yashpal’s. One wonders what would have happened to revolution on the one hand and literature on the other had some other revolutionaries with
a marked literary inclination and talent lived on, such as Bhagat Singh or Ramprasad ‘Bismil’, author of ‘
Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamare dil men hai
’ (We have now decided to put a price on our heads), perhaps the most defiant and moving of all the revolutionary poems in Hindi/Urdu.
Yashpal’s first published book was
Pinjre ki Udan
(1938; The Flight of the Cage), comprising short stories written in jail. As with many Indian (as distinct from Western) writers, his numerous short stories are regarded as constituting quite as important a part of his oeuvre as his longer fiction. Of his twelve novels, five are regarded as ‘short novels’ (but only relatively, for they are still on average over 200 pages in length) while the others are more extensive in scope. His other works include collections of essays and accounts of his travels to several Western countries including several times to the Soviet Union, to several other communist countries of the Eastern Bloc, and to Mauritius.
Most of Yashpal’s fiction show a committed and urgent engagement with contemporary issues and reality. The three predominant themes that can be said to run throughout his work are revolution, romance and gender equality, and they all come blended together in most of his major fiction, though not always in artistic harmony or with thematic cogency. Four of his early novels are all concerned with the evolving political situation in the country while they also explore the complexity of man–woman relationships including the place of sex in them.
Dada Comrade
(1941) depicts under thin disguise some aspects of Yashpal’s own experiences as a revolutionary including the phase in which he was sentenced by the central committee of the HSRA to be executed but was later exonerated and restored, and his subsequent journey to communism; in a much controverted scene, its heroine appears in the nude before the celibate hero at his request.
Deshdrohi
(1943; Traitors) attempts to exonerate workers of the Communist Party from the charge of betraying the nation in 1942 when, following the Party line, they supported the British.
Party Comrade
(1946; reprinted as
Gita
) is centred on the naval mutiny that took place that year, and
Manushya ke Roop
(1949; The Many Faces of Man) shows how characters who are influenced in their conduct by ideology are still subject to their circumstances. These skeletal summaries do not reflect the fact
that Yashpal fleshes these novels out with lively characterization, dramatic situations, and a variety of romantic relationships that were thought to be distinctly boldly depicted when these novels were first published and which, in the varying views of different critics, either sweeten or dilute the political content.
With all his concern about the contemporary political situation, Yashpal also wrote three novels set in the remote past. These are interspersed over a wide span of his career and while they illustrate his extraordinary range, they all focus on women characters and serve to reinforce his political convictions and worldview through historical recontextualization. The first and the greatest of these is
Divya
(1945), named after the heroine and set in the times of the rise of Buddhism and its contestation for religious hegemony with traditional Hinduism depicted as hide-bound by its caste system and Brahmin supremacy. Divya is shown as fighting against various kinds of oppression and for her right to social equality and sexual freedom, and she finally decides to go with Marish, a follower of the materialist philosophy of Charvaka, who appears to be the novelist’s spokesman.
In
Amita
(1956), written during the Cold War against the background of efforts to promote ‘world peace’ both by the Soviet Union and Third World leaders and indeed dedicated to Prime Minister Nehru, the climactic episode is the change of heart by Emperor Ashoka after his military victory over Kalinga as a result of his confrontation with the heroine, the child princess of that kingdom. It has been pointed out that this is perhaps the only work by Yashpal in which he is, even if unwittingly, sympathetic to Gandhian values including ahimsa which he had resolutely opposed throughout. In
Apsara ka Shap
(1965), earlier published serially as
Shakuntala
, Yashpal interrogates the version of the story presented by Kalidasa by eliminating the supernatural excuse for Dushyanta’s rejection of Shakuntala, ascribing his conduct instead to pragmatic reasons of statecraft and political alliances, and by altogether diminishing his heroic stature.
Not all of these works, and some others not mentioned here, are equally successful as artistic creations, partly because Yashpal was in all senses of the word a professional writer, obliged to write constantly if only in order to make a living while maintaining at the same time a conscientious level
of imaginative creativity. Yashpal had already won a place for himself in the front rank of Hindi fiction-writers when, through a fortuitous configuration of circumstances, he began in 1956 to write
Jhootha Sach
in which he would excel himself and produce a classic worthy to rank among the great Indian novels. Having found his stride, he then attempted another novel of comparable ambition and scope which is set chronologically before the time-span of
Jhootha Sach
even though it was published considerably later. This was
Meri Teri Uski Baat
(1974; My, Your and Her Story), which traces the political trajectories of a close group of Hindu, Muslim and Christian young men and women, starting in 1928 (though extending through flashbacks up to the Rowlatt Act of 1919 and even earlier) and going up to the critical year of 1942.
Usha, the heroine of this novel, begins with admiration for Gandhi, soon shifts allegiance to the charismatic and recently bereaved Nehru, has sympathy for Subhas Bose in his strife with Gandhi, and ultimately becomes a communist, while the hero finds his ideological resting point in the Congress Socialist Party. Once again, Yashpal weaves intricately the warp and woof of the political fabric of the nation in all its ideological colours, though some of the shades are predictably more prominent than some others. This was to prove to be his last novel and was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Prize in 1976, days before Yashpal passed away on 26 December that year. With all his vocal criticism of the Congress and the government, he had already been awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1970.
The first volume of
Jhootha Sach
is set in Lahore, a city Yashpal had known well in his youth but had not visited ever since, leaving it in 1931 except on a brief clandestine trip in the mid-1940s; it was, of course, closed to Indians after Partition. In 1955, however, when planning his second visit to the Soviet Union, Yashpal was unexpectedly granted a visa to travel through Pakistan and saw his beloved city again. And he wondered:
Is it the same Lahore that I had last seen in 1945 for a couple of days and whose grandeur still lived in my imagination? Instead of a fairground, it seemed to be a graveyard…. The shops were deserted, and the devastated city lay under a pall of gloom. (Yashpal, quoted in Madhuresh,
Yashpal
[Panchkula: Aadhar Prakashan, 2006], p.193; my translation)
Apparently, this visit back became the
donnée
of Yashpal’s greatest novel:
Lahore and the MotherlandI felt constantly agitated. My Panjab and Lahore were gone; could not one preserve even a memory of them? And the anguish of penitence at the folly of collective madness due to communal ill-will? (as above, p. 194)
Such an originary impulse accounts for one of the outstanding achievements of the novel: its intimate and loving evocation of Lahore. The first volume of the novel is titled ‘Vatan aur Desh’,
vatan
being the land where one is born or one’s motherland, while
desh
is the nation. It is the forcible split and unnatural dichotomy introduced by Partition between these two normally synonymous terms that lies at the heart of the novel. Nor is vatan evoked here in grand and vast terms. In an artistic masterstroke, Yashpal identifies vatan above all with just one narrow street in Lahore, Bhola Pandhe’s Lane, near the Shahalami Gate, with all its buzz of domestic chores, family quarrels, the daily office-going and college-going, the occasional clandestine romance and the ritually celebrated arranged marriages. This tightly knit and fully integrated community inhabiting the lane knows no difference between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, at least not until the immediate build-up to Partition.