(Finally), it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.Footnote 1
No expectation without experience, no experience without expectation.Footnote 2
(Moreover), this hotel work does not have any guarantee. Till now, I have lost this job more than twenty-five times and starved days together. As I do not have any doubt that my life in the future is going to be the same, I get an untoward fear regarding how the remaining lifetime will be spent.Footnote 3
Introduction
The literary and intellectual journey of S. Natarajan (1925–1955), also known by the pen name ‘Sarada’, was a unique phenomenon in the intellectual history of modern South Asia. Although his mother tongue was Tamil and he only started learning Telugu at the age of 12, Natarajan emerged as a prodigious fiction writer and columnist in the late 1940s and early 1950s in the Telugu public sphere. The Andhra Abudaya Rachaitala Sangham (Andhra Progressive Writers’ Association)Footnote 4 played a crucial role in transforming a migrant worker living in precarious conditions into a significant writer. His novels and short stories meditate on the moment of transition from colony to independent nationhood. Natarajan’s brief and abbreviated literary career illustrates the new possibilities that the Telugu public sphere opened up to individuals from ordinary backgrounds. However, his untimely death in the prime of his life and literary journey indicate the wretched conditions that authors like him were exposed to. His works have not been translated into English. He belongs to ‘the historical conjuncture of the transitional period’.Footnote 5 Commenting on existing historical works, Sekhar Bandyopadhyay argues that ‘there is little discussion in this literature on how the people in the decolonized societies viewed their newly achieved freedom and experienced it in their quotidian lives’.Footnote 6 Having been serialized in 1954, Manchi-Chedu (Good-Evil) is an extraordinary novel as it articulates a brutally exploited worker’s vision of triumphant Indian nationalism at ‘the moment of arrival’Footnote 7 and its meaning for the dispossessed. By narrating the life journeys of three ordinary individuals and engaging with the problematic aspects of modern societies such as exploitation, destitution, and prostitution, Manchi-Chedu encounters head on some of the dominant themes and tropes of the Indian nationalist novel, such as the representation of the nation as a virtuous Hindu wife and others.
As the first epigraph suggests, the story of a nation is often imagined as a community, despite inequality and exploitation. The second epigraph argues that the relationship between experience and expectation is intrinsic and dynamic. The third epigraph expresses the intense anguish of a worker living in precarious circumstances and a budding writer in ‘India’s founding moment’.Footnote 8 Taking a cue from these formulations, this article addresses the following questions: how do workers experience their day-to-day lives? How do their experiences of everyday life shape their expectations of the newly arrived independence? How do their experiences and expectations shape their perspective on the newly arrived independence? What is the structure of the world that Sarada created in his fiction? How is it different from that of the Indian nationalist novel fashioned by the English-educated middle class? What possibilities would the genre of the novel, one of the most important constituent elements of ‘modern social imaginaries’,Footnote 9 offer to articulate Natarajan’s experience and vision of a new nation that had come into existence only recently? In a review article, Dilip Menon points to an immensely problematic dimension of Indian intellectual history that has a bias towards the elites. According to him, it assumes that ‘intellection is not a subaltern predilection’.Footnote 10 Even though academic scholarship has focused on studying a few elite figures, individuals hailing from non-elite backgrounds such as Natarajan have emerged as hugely influential authors in the Telugu public sphere through their intellectual ecumenism. Despite having little formal education and labouring for 10 to 12 strenuous hours per day as a hotel worker, he became a consummate and extraordinary fiction writer in a language that he only started learning at 12. In a column entitled ‘Naa Dainika Samasyalu’ (My Everyday Problems), he narrates most remarkably the traumatic and painful experience of having to work for 10 to 12 hours a day and his dependence on inadequate wages to cover necessities.Footnote 11 This brief piece of writing shows that the experience of the everyday in the form of long and tedious hours structured the ‘horizon of expectation’Footnote 12 for him beyond measure.
Manchi and chedu, the two terms from the novel’s title, are frequently used words in the Telugu language. They are idiomatically used in the sense that one should discriminate between good and evil aspects before initiating any action or making any decision.Footnote 13 They can be roughly translated into English as ‘good’ and ‘evil’. By keeping these commonly used words as the title, Natarajan underplays the profundity and urgency with which the novel foregrounds the questions that have a great implication for a nation that had only recently come into existence. However, the title gives the deceptive impression that one is going to read a moral fable. At one level, this novel addresses the plausibility of distinguishing between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in a modern social world. On another level, it engages with the prominent tropes of the nationalist novel. Sarada skilfully interweaves a complex plot connecting these ostensibly different domains. My reading of Manchi-Chedu aims to establish the interconnection between the critique of the dominant tropes of nationalist discourse and the novel, and the problematic aspects of social realities in modern societies, to argue that mythifying nationalism glosses over the immensely violent and tragic implications of exploitative social conditions for the citizens of an independent nation-state.
The Progressive Writers’ Association and the question of realism
First, it is important to examine three intersecting categories of the novel in order to understand the significance of Sarada’s critique of the Indian nation and nationalism as represented in fiction. They are: the nationalist novel, the Progressive novel, and realism. Manchi-Chedu enables us to interrogate certain generalizing and problematic formulations on the nature and impact of the Progressive literary movement of the 1950s by contemporary scholars such as Priya Joshi and Aamir Mufti, among others.
Benedict Anderson, in Imagined Communities,Footnote 14 argues that print forms such as the novel and newspaper play a crucial role in creating a feeling of community among readers. Since then, several scholars such as Sudipta Kaviraj, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and others have pointed to the relationship between Indian nationalism and imagination. Most importantly, they emphasize the role of the novel in fashioning the Indian nationalist discourse.Footnote 15 Regarding the intimate connection between the novel-form and the nation-form, Padikkal argues: ‘If we take nationalism to be a discourse which constructs its own narrative, we can see how the novel is an inextricable part of this process.’Footnote 16 Authors such as Bankim Chandra (1838–1894), Chandu Menon (1847–1899), Govardhanram Tripathi (1855–1907), and others are the significant nationalist novelists and have a huge impact on the reading public. Tanika Sarkar explains: ‘scholars generally regard Bankim as a crucial force in the making of both a nationalist imagination and a Hindu revivalist polemic’.Footnote 17 Julius J. Lipner characterizes the immense impact of themes on the psyche of Indians as ‘surreal’. He writes,
As in some surreal drama, the sanatans are the catalytic agents of this diffusion, both in the novel and beyond, for Anadamath’s publication was directly instrumental for shaping Hindu political sentiment in the strategies for nationalist awakening that were developing at the time.Footnote 18
Lipner points to the need to study the conditions that helped popularize Bankim’s ideas in different parts of India. His novels were translated into Telugu very early in 1907. In the ‘preface’ to the Telugu translation of Durgesa Nandini, the publishers state:
As announced earlier, we started publishing novels gradually. We publish one novel for every three months …. We are the first to translate Bankim’s novels into Telugu in the world of Andhra. We published Anandamath in 1907. By that time, no one had published the translations of Bankim. Eventually, we published Unmadini, Radharani, and Seetaramam. We have had the aim of making available all the novels of Bankim to the world of Andhra … Now onwards, not only will we translate all the novels of Bankim, we also made arrangements to publish the translations of the famous novels from Hindi, Karnata, English and Bengali languages gradually.Footnote 19
The imaginary created by the Indian nationalist novel has continued its significance and resonance even in contemporary India.Footnote 20 Most significantly, the ‘Vande Mataram’ song from the novel became immensely popular during the nationalist movement of the early twentieth century and was subsequently given the status of a national song in post-colonial India. The Gujarati novelist Kanhaiyalal Munshi (1887–1971) not only actively participated in the nationalist movement but also became a part of the government of independent India. Contemporary ultra-Hindu nationalists such as L. K. Advani and Narendra Modi have confessed that they get inspiration from reading the novels of Munshi to take their respective projects forward.Footnote 21 The ubiquitous visibility of nationalist authors in academic scholarship and the popular imagination is in contrast to the conspicuous invisibilization of authors who took critical and contrary stances to the official nationalist movement and ideology. Although novels written by authors affiliated with the Abudaya Rachaitala Sangham (Progressive Writers’ Association, PWA) received great appreciation from the reading public of that time and subsequently, the novels have received little attention from scholars. This article will try to address this critical bias towards the nationalist novel.
Most of the scholarly studies on the Progressive Writers’ Movement are restricted to the Urdu-Hindi literary cultures.Footnote 22 Further, this literary movement has received adverse criticism from scholars such as Priya Joshi and Aamir Mufti. According to Joshi, the Progressive literary movement had a negative impact in its later phases. This article argues against their views. Joshi writes:
The reach of this movement was substantial, so much so that the progressive tendencies it mandated in the 1930s—the insistence on a language the masses understood—persisted in the Indian novel in English for so long that another jolt would be needed to liberate Indian letters from what had become the often stultifying literary decades of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.Footnote 23
Joshi’s comments need some attention as she makes some intriguing and problematic suggestions and observations. In the abovementioned quote, Joshi unwittingly equates the ‘Indian novel in English’ with ‘Indian letters’. This generalization is very problematic as it equates Indian English with Indian letters itself. The crucial question is whether the impact of the Progressive Writers’ Movement was equally and uniformly stultifying in different languages in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. According to Mufti, the ideology of the Progressive movement is not much different from that of the official Indian nationalism represented by the Indian National Congress.Footnote 24
The novel, as fashioned by the PWA in the context of North India, has received contradictory and contentious evaluation and judgement from existing scholarship. I want to discuss Aamir Mufti’s views on the relation between the PWA and the novel as a literary genre, as his views represent a very influential post-colonial perspective. He points to the prominence of the short story and ‘the absence of a canonical novel form in Urdu’.Footnote 25 Mufti explains this fact in relation to Urdu’s minor position vis-à-vis Indian nationalism. According to him, the novel as a form is essentially bound to narrate the ideology of an emerging secular nation in the context of South Asia. Further, he argues that the idea of ‘realist aesthetics’Footnote 26 was originally formulated during the Soviet Writer’s Congress in 1934. The Indian Progressive Writers’ Movement wanted to reconfigure realist aesthetics in fashioning the novel which effectively expressed the nationalist ideology. Mufti characterizes it as ‘national realism’.Footnote 27 The objective of these narratives is ‘a secular nationalist consciousness’.Footnote 28 Mufti’s characterization implies that progressive realism is ‘complicit in the hegemony of the nation-state’.Footnote 29 Another major criticism against the novel as fashioned by the authors associated with the PWA is that these novels failed to do justice to the realist mode of writing. While discussing how South Asian authors engaged with the realist mode of writing, Javed Majeed argues that the use of the realist mode by some Progressive writers has had ‘the peculiarly disappointing effect’Footnote 30 on readers. Further, he argues,
They [Progressive writers] attempt the impossible task of converting realism as a self-conscious mode of writing into an unselfconscious mode of representing social reality. In their attempt, their texts sometimes read not just as fables at odds with their realist aims, but almost as parodies of realism.Footnote 31
While Mufti is not claiming that the authors affiliated with the PWA are incapable of fashioning a proper realist novel, Majeed is suggesting precisely that these authors are unable to comprehend the essence of the realist mode of writing and consequently failed to master the realist mode of writing. For Mufti, novels written by writers associated with the PWA have the same characteristics and ideology as that of the nationalist novel. The Progressive novel too represented the ideology of the newly emergent nation. In other words, the novel fashioned by writers associated with the PWA could not escape the spell of nationalist ideology and unwittingly mimicked it. Majeed’s criticisms of the novel are of a different order. According to him, the writers associated with the PWA did not understand the nature of realist aesthetics properly and mishandled it. As a result, they were successful only in producing either ‘fables’ or ‘parodies of realism’. Although these criticisms are equally severe and damning, their rationale is different, and it is important to point out that all these scholars are commenting on the Hindi and/or Urdu ‘Progressive’ novel. In this context, it is important to assess their validity in the context of the immense popularity of Telugu novels written by an author associated with the Progressive Writers’ Movement in the realm of the Telugu public sphere. This article addresses the veracity and legitimacy of these criticisms.
S. Natarajan: The hotel worker as a novelist in the late 1940s and 1950s
Historical time, if the term is to have a meaning, is tied to social and political units of action, to particular acting and suffering human beings and to their institutions and organizations.Footnote 32
S. Natarajan was born in Pudukkottai in February 1925. When he was two, he lost his mother. The high cost of dowries in Chennai meant that two of Natarajan’s sisters were married off in distant Tenali. Due to poverty, he and his father travelled to Tenali in the winter of 1937, and he was inextricably connected to the town until his death. At this time, he did not know Telugu at all. Although he had the habit of reading Tamil literature and translations in Tamil, he could not get hold of Tamil books in Tenali. He used to say to his friends that his favourite book was the Tamil translation of Alexander Dumas’ The Count of Mount Cristo. As he had to work at his brother-in-law’s hotel for his survival, he had to learn Telugu to communicate with other workers. Working at the hotel throughout the day, he could only dream of going to school and learned Telugu informally at a street school.
At this point, Tenali was abuzz with literary-cultural activity. The first conference of the Andhra Abudaya Rachaitala Sangham (Andhra Progressive Writers’ Association) took place on 13–14 February 1943 in Tenali itself.Footnote 33 The pre-eminent Telugu literary scholar, Velcheru Narayanrao, argues that the impact of the Progressive Writers’ Movement on Telugu poetry is immense and characterizes it as a major revolution.Footnote 34 Natarajan became a member of the Communist Party around this time and attended the first, historic Andhra Sahitya Pathasala (Andhra Literary School) from 11 May 1946 to 10 June 1946 at Pedapudi village, organized by the Andhra Abudaya Rachaitala Sangham.Footnote 35 Great Telugu literary figures and historians such as Srirangam Srinivasarao (Sri Sri) (1910–1983),Footnote 36 Kodavatiganti Kutmbarao (1909–1980), Mallampalli Somasekhara Sarma (1891–1963) and Nidadavolu Venkata Rao (1903–1982) taught classes for aspiring and budding writers. This was a unique initiative of the Andhra Abudaya Rachaitala Sangham to encourage and train budding writers. The impact of being taught by great literary figures on young Natarajan cannot be underestimated. Within a few weeks of attending the literary school, his first story was published. On 1 July 1946, Natarajan’s first short story, ‘Prapanchaniki Jabbu Chesindi’ [The World Has Got a Disease] was published in Prajasakti (The People’s Power).Footnote 37 He was influenced by great literary figures such as Chalam (1894–1979),Footnote 38 Sri Sri, and Kodavanti Kutumbarao, among others, and suggested to one of his friends that they read these authors to become good writers.
After that, Natarajan wrote several short stories under different pen names. He died at the age of 30 in 1955. In his very brief and abbreviated literary journey, he published several short stories, sketches, and four novels, and left behind two unfinished novels. They were published in all the major magazines, including Andhra Patrika, Telugu Swatantra (The Telugu Independence), Abudaya (The Progress), and Prajasakti, among others. Natarajan’s association with the Andhra Abudaya Rachaitala Sangham continued until the end of his life. Just a few weeks before his death, he attended the fifth state conference of the Progressive Writers’ Association in Vijayawada, which took place on 30 and 31 July 1955. At this conference, he introduced the following resolutions:
It is condemnable that if either magazines or publishers do not give sufficient remuneration to writers even after publishing their works. Every magazine and publisher should publicly announce the details of payment to writers. If writers inform us that they are deceived by any magazine and publisher, Progressive Writers’ Association will protest against it.Footnote 39
His short story ‘Swatantra Swarupam’ (The Form of Independence) warrants discussion as it shows how he viewed independence and its implications for the common people.Footnote 40 In this intriguing short story, he explores the idea of what form it takes if one gives shape to the abstract notion of the independence of the nation. The people of the newly independent nation requested that the government install a statue commemorating independence. The government agreed to their request and asked a sculptor to make a statue. As the people had achieved their independence through the struggle, they asked the sculptor to make the statue one of a fighter in such a manner that reminded them of their struggle, and also a comfortable independent future. The sculptor started making a statue in the form of a great warrior. But the capitalists, who were afraid of the initiative of the common people, thought that the statue of independence should be in the shape of a guru, to teach people obedience to the newly acquired independence. They thus asked the sculptor to make the statue in the shape of an ascetic. Some of the capitalists, with their hoards of money, proposed that the statue should be in the shape of a big merchant of ships to represent an independent nation’s independent spirit of business. The sculptor began transforming the statue of an ascetic into that of a great businessman.
Some prominent government members, who were not happy with these ideas, appointed two or three committees to decide the statue’s form. Those committees suggested that the statue should be in the form of an armed soldier to teach respect and discipline to the general public. It also felt that a statue of an armed soldier would reflect the crucial role the army plays in protecting democracy and peace, and ordered the sculptor to fashion the statue accordingly. The sculptor started refashioning the statue of a businessman into a statue of an armed soldier. When it was installed in a city and unveiled by the president of the government, the statue of independence appeared in the form of a horrible devil with modern weapons.
Literary texts always pose a challenge to interpreters as they articulate different ideologies in complex ways. Quentin Skinner argues that to produce an utterance is to articulate an ‘intervention’ and ‘to argue is always to argue for or against a certain assumption or point of view or course of action’.Footnote 41
This article argues that Natarajan’s writing is a complex intervention in the moment of transition and offers an ideological critique of the Indian nationalist novel. Only if we read Manchi-Chedu from this perspective, can we understand the significance of the various gestures such as criticizing the idealist youth’s penchant for dowry, comparing supposedly immoral Padma with other Hindu women while commenting on her devotion towards the goddess, Parvathy’s commitment to her husband, and Padma’s singing of Vaisnava Jantho Footnote 42 in front of the picture of the god, Kodanda Rama, to get relief from the mental agony caused by the harassment of the police for money.Footnote 43
Furthermore, in Natarajan’s writing, the meaning of independence was broadened into the question of forms of exploitation in modernity. And the question of forms of exploitation was expanded into a reflection on violence. Exploring the articulation of violence in widely different situations and contexts is one of the significant aspects of Natarajan’s style. The great fratricidal violence in the context of Partition has received the attention of writers and scholars such as Bhisham Sahni, Saadat Hasan Manto, Urvashi Butalia, and others. Sarada focused on the quotidian forms of violence. It is challenging to attribute the violence experienced by a diverse range of characters, including Padma, Sarojini, Parvathy, and Sambasivarao, to a single factor.Footnote 44 They come from very different caste and class backgrounds and respond to the experience of violence in divergent ways. Most of the time, women were at the receiving end. They were subjected to intense forms of physical and emotional violence. Sarojini was beaten and thrown into the burning stove at home by her stepmother, which resulted in the disfiguration of her face. Sambasivarao kills his wife by hitting her on the head with a pestle used for pounding spices in the kitchen. The author writes that her head was hit with such force that her brain came out of her skull and she died instantly. Women in the profession of prostitution were the targets of physical abuse by both local thugs and the police. The constant experience and threat of violence inculcates fear in their subjectivity. But the experience of violence is by no means restricted to women. Sambasivarao, who kills his wife, dies of intense anguish and with a feeling of guilt when he realizes that his suspicion was baseless. Natarajan’s novels explore how the common people experienced independence in their day-to-day lives. In Manchi-Chedu, Natarajan focuses on two forms of modern life that are related more to unfreedom and exploitation than to independence. The characters in the novels are small employees who survive on meagre salaries and prostitutes who have to sell their bodies as a means of survival.
The moment of Indian independence, which signals a major historical transition from a colony to a sovereign state with its own constitution, evoked euphoria, nostalgia, and anxiety. Historians have expressed different views on the duration of this transition.Footnote 45 Recent scholarship emphasizes its extremely turbulent and bloody nature.Footnote 46 All critics of the Indian National Congress were marginalized and relegated to the shadows in post-colonial nationalist histories. Shalini Sharma writes on these phenomena that ‘historians across the political spectrum have followed the same logic as the Indian National Congress and confined the Communists and Socialists to the periphery of this period’s history’.Footnote 47 The epigraph to this section argues that historical time can only be understood in terms of the experiences of particular individuals associated with organizations with certain beliefs. Taking a cue from this, I argue that Manchi-Chedu gives the world view of an exploited worker and author associated with Andhra Progressive Writers’ Association at the historical moment of transition from colony to independent nation-state. In this transition, the Association faced immense persecution at the hands of the new nation-state. The historian V. Ramakrishna writes:
The glorious epoch of the cultural revival in Andhra—both literary and theatre—received a rude shock in 1948 when, along with the Communist Party, all its front organizations, including IPTA, were banned and large scale repression was unleashed. The offices were raided and ransacked, artists arrested and some activists among them killed, printing presses and libraries were destroyed with the result that the whole movement got paralysed temporarily.Footnote 48
Manchi-Chedu
Sarada’s singularly important novel Manchi-Chedu is so poignant, artistically eloquent, and dazzlingly exquisite. A reader of that time grasped its significance and recollects the experience of reading the novel:
Manchi-Chedu … was serialized in Andhra Patrika. The writer’s name is Sarada. Who is this Sarada? Is she a woman writer? Or is it the pen name of someone? Although this question haunted us, we were completely engrossed in the novel’s content. After having read for four or five weeks, the serial created so much curiosity. We used to eagerly wait for the day when the magazine came to the market. Even before finishing, we concluded that Telugu had a novel with a new trend and style. Once finished, we had a feeling ‘what a good novel, we have read!’.Footnote 49
When Manchi-Chedu was first serialized, it created quite a stir and enchanted readers. The editor of the magazine Andhra Patrika writes,
Through the letters from a good number of people asking about the name and place of the author and appreciating the novel, we can understand the reading public’s attachment and affection towards this novel. Author ‘Sarada’ lives in Tenali. His real name is S. Natarajan. Mr ‘Sarada’ has to be congratulated, for being a Tamilian and having had to work as a server in a hotel throughout the day, still learning Telugu and English through his effort and has been writing in Telugu and getting the regard and affection from the Telugu reading public.Footnote 50
I will begin with a schematic summary of the novel. The plot of Manchi-Chedu focuses on the entangled life journeys of three young individuals—Padma, Bhaskararao, and Sarojini—and their experiences and the pain and agony they caused. Further, the author evaluates the possibility of judging the intentions and actions of the various characters in terms of good and evil. The action of the novel begins in the mid-1940s and ends in the late 1940s. Most of the action takes place in Vijayawada. The novel begins with describing Bhaskararao’s arrival at Vijayawada on the Puri Passenger. He is 22 years old and studying in Madras. He leaves the railway station, walks towards Governor Peta, and encounters his childhood friend. Through him, Bhaskararao comes to know that his father has married again. Bhaskararao thinks about his mother and struggles to give a new woman a place beside his mother.
Badraiah is Bhaskararao’s widowed father. An agriculturist, he has left his village, Nagailanka, as he aspires to be a businessman in the town of Vijayawada at the suggestion of Sudarshanam. When a distant relative, Venkataiah, approaches wealthy Sudarshanam asking for help in getting Padma, his 20-year-old daughter, educated, Sudarshanam discourages this idea and suggests that he marry her off instead. The self-serving Sudarshanam encourages and convinces his widowed friend and business partner, Badraiah, to marry Padma, believing that it will help him get his daughter married to Badraiah’s son. Although Padma is quite unhappy and reluctant, she agrees to marry the much older and widowed man, as her parents are not in a position to give a dowry. However, the domestic life of the newly married couple does not go smoothly. Badraiah visits Padma’s room regularly, but they do not have a conjugal relationship. Padma’s unhappiness is aggravated once she is introduced to Bhaskararao, her stepson, who is closer to her age. Immediately, she starts adulating him, believing that her love will be reciprocated. Although Padma is deeply disturbed by the moral transgressions involved in this kind of love, she tries hard to convince herself that there is no wrong in it, as there is no other option to fulfil her sexual desires.
Meanwhile, Sudarshanam proposes that his daughter, Sarojini, should be married to Badraiah’s son. Having seen the disfigured and grotesque face of Sudrashanam’s daughter, Bhaskararao refuses to marry her. Bhaskararao’s rejection greatly angers Sudarshanam. The novel’s only flashback tells readers that Sarojini’s stepmother harassed her and threw her into a burning stove. Sudarshanam deceives his friend in a very cold-blooded manner and makes him bankrupt. As Badraiah loses all of his property, he has to move to a small home with his family. The newly arrived poverty creates a lot of problems for the family members. Bhaskararao starts working as a clerk for a meagre salary to support the family. Padma becomes increasingly irritable and picks quarrels with the family members. Due to all these issues, Badraiah’s health deteriorates, and he dies within one year of his second marriage.
Although Padma is in love with Bhaskararao, she cannot express it; the reason being the respect and affection he shows towards her. But she is increasingly bored with her life. Having recognized this, a student who lives in a nearby building tries to attract her by showing her money. Driven by hunger, the fact that the meagre salary of Bhaskararao is not sufficient to provide sustenance to the family, and the sexual desires natural to a young woman, Padma starts sleeping with the student. As a result, she becomes pregnant. She is not only afraid of social ostracization for having become pregnant outside of marriage, but also worries that people may suspect an illicit relationship between her and her stepson. She leaves home and gets out of Vijayawada. In the outside world, she tries hard to live by doing some work. However, she is threatened and bullied by small-scale rowdies.
Against his daughter’s wishes, Sudarshanam finds a bridegroom, Sekharam, who is willing to marry Sarojini withhout looking at her face, purely for the sake of property. The bitterness in their marital life creates immense agony and torment for Sarojini. Sekharam spends most of his time outside the home and is a philanderer. As a result, Sarojini contracts sexually transmitted diseases from him. Sekharam comes to know about Padma through one of his friends who greatly praised Padma’s beauty. On the pretext of starting a new business of counterfeit ornaments, he goes to Bandar and brings Padma to Vijayawada and keeps her as his mistress in a separate home. Ironically, Padma becomes the mistress of the son-in-law of Sudarshanam. Due to her unhappy married life, Sarojini falls ill and dies subsequently. Immediately, Sudarshanam throws Sekharam out of his home. As Sekharam stops coming to her, Padma becomes a fully fledged prostitute for the sake of survival. Finally, Padma meets Bhaskararao at a movie theatre, invites him to her home, and gives him her daughter. At the end of the novel, Padma’s fate remains uncertain.
A critique of the nation through the lens of the Hindu woman: The desire and domesticity of the Hindu wives
No one could know her plan. If they did know, they would call it prostitution. But, how could she quench her painful hunger of the stomach?! Where is the possibility of her desire being satisfied in a justified way?Footnote 51
The refashioning of Hindu domesticity was one of the central targets of Indian nationalism and the Indian nationalist novel.Footnote 52 Indian nationalist novelists played an important role in reordering Hindu domesticity. Kaviraj writes, ‘Domesticity is of course a field that is of extreme significance in Bankim’s view of the world.’Footnote 53 According to Sangeeta Ray, Bankim’s novels fashion the woman as ‘the signifier of a sacrosanct traditional domesticity’.Footnote 54 Likewise, marriage and domesticity have always been the pre-eminent social institutions for novelists to explore in their novels, and through them, they engage with the various dimensions of the social world.Footnote 55 The foremost theorist of the European novel Franco Moretti argues that marriage creates a certain equilibrium in the social turbulence in the classic European Bildungsroman novel.Footnote 56 Contrary to that, the marriage between Padma and Badraiah sets the stage for turbulence in Manchi-Chedu and profoundly disturbs the equilibrium of the status quo. Sarada narrates in detail the conditions in which three marriages—Badraiah and Padma; Sekharam and Sarojini; and Bhaskararao and Aruna—took place as they play a crucial role in determining the trajectory of their domestic lives. Sarada explains the conditions that led to the marriage between young Padma and Badraiah. Sarada writes:
Having entered the twentieth year, the fifth girl becomes a great burden to him. Even after having tried hard for five years, the unfortunate man has failed to get her married off. All of the youth might emphasize in their speeches that dowries were outdated, but, coming into practice, they remain merely as ideals. In front of the rupee, all ideals are equivalent to dust. Such type of so-called idealist young men (and) their parents did not at all agree to marry the fifth daughter of Mr. Venkataiah, without at least a bag full of money. Padma is beautiful and sings very well. She studied at a secondary school for some time. She can do all the household work very well. Everything is alright. Yet, what is the use? Because her father is a person bereft of money, no young man is not at all agreeing to marry her.Footnote 57
The two marriages that occur through exigency and the mediation of property end in disaster. At the very start of the novel itself, while thinking of manchi and chedu when arranging the match between Padma and Badraiah, Sudarshanam thinks only about his interests. Here, it is intriguing to note that the author compares the functioning of Sudarshanam’s ‘discretion’ with that of a ‘weighing machine’.Footnote 58 It implies how mechanical, instrumental, calculating, cold-blooded, and causal Sudarshanam is in arranging this marriage, as he does not take much time to think and reflect on the pros and cons of marrying a very young woman to a much older man. In other words, his discretion is bereft of human emotions and functions like a machine. Most significantly, he arranges this match in terms of an exchange of a young woman with two acres of land between Badraiah and that young woman’s father. This way of treating women as objects prefigures the figure of the prostitute in the latter parts of the novel. In the case of Sarojini and Sekharam, we find a man and a woman entering the marital bond with two distinct expectations, and their domestic life is riddled with tensions. The man wants to use the relationship of marriage as a means to a philandering life, and the woman expects domestic reciprocity and love from the husband. The unhappy married life causes immense agony to Sarojini and results in her untimely death.
By interrogating certitudes in familial and political traditions through revolutionary breakthroughs in its structure and articulation of female desire and Hindu womanhood, this novel encounters head-on the representation of the Hindu woman and wife in the nationalist novel and the more social reformist version of the woman. The bulk of the narrative in the first parts of the novel is focused on the adulterous desire of Padma towards her stepson, her struggle with her conscience to justify her desire, and her failed initiatives to seduce him due to the one-sided nature of it. She faces the profound dilemma of whether to follow customs and remain a virtuous Hindu wife or fulfil her desires by transgressing customs and familial norms. Although she finds it extremely difficult to articulate and communicate her desire and love for Bhaskararao, she tries various means to express it. This is the struggle between the desires natural to a young woman and familial interdictions. In one instance, she touches Bhaskararao’s fingers while taking a cup of tea during the intermission at the cinema theatre. In another, she can only go to the threshold of the room where Bhaskararao is sleeping but does not dare to enter the room in the middle of the night. Although Padma’s adulterous desire for his stepson does not result in a physical act of consummation, it foreshadows her breaking of familial norms by having a sexual relationship with a stranger. However, Padma considers a relationship with her stepson, which society finds morally wrong, to be acceptable. Unlike Nirmala in the social reformist novel Nirmala,Footnote 59 Padma is articulate and vocal about the injustice that she has faced.
The intimate connection between the novel, temporality, and the nation is widely discussed in existing scholarship.Footnote 60 Not only has Good-Evil paid great attention to the historical time in which the action is taking place, it also focuses on the role of temporality in the fashioning of the characters’ thought processes. Bhaskararao, a widowed aunt, and the stepmother go to the theatre to watch Swargaseema (The Abode of Paradise).Footnote 61 At this point, talkies are still a novelty for certain sections of the audience, including the widowed aunt. The last time she remembers going to theatre was when she watched a silent film in the year of Dhata.Footnote 62 The consciousness of the plausibility of having her sexual desire fulfilled withers away with the onward movement of time, aggravating Padma’s agony at being deprived of conjugal pleasure. While thinking about the good and evil aspects of wanting to have a sexual relationship with her stepson, Padma finds a strong justification in the nature of temporality itself. She ponders over her passion and desire for her stepson in the following manner:
If her husband was a person like Bhaskararao!! … If it were Bhaskararao himself, her life would have been filled and flourished with happiness. Do these kinds of nights come again in one’s life, if wished so? Spring, wintry nights (and) monsoon nights come year after year. Nature’s law remains the same for centuries together. But, experienceable nights are only a few in an individual’s life! Do those have to be wasted in this manner by remaining bound to morals and customs created by human beings?Footnote 63
The context of the epigraph of this section is that Padma has started sleeping with a stranger. She is deeply troubled by the moral implications of this kind of action. The epigraph explains Padma’s justification for fulfilling her sexual desires in an illicit relationship. At a very crucial moment of the novel, the author makes a very intriguing observation: ‘At that moment, her consciousness is very serene and fully concentrated on the Parvathi’s strength of character and constancy of devotion towards her husband. Like every (other) young Hindu woman, she too has perfect and complete devotion.’Footnote 64 The context of this observation is that the author describes Padma’s state of mind while reading verses from Dakshayagnam Footnote 65 aloud to her sister-in-law. It is a part of Padma’s post-dinner routine to read Dakshayagnam, which extols the virtuous character of the goddess Parvathy, just before going to the stranger’s room to fulfil her sexual desires. The present-day reader might be greatly struck by this abrupt comparison with the Hindu woman. Sarada’s comment implies that although she has the qualities of any other virtuous Hindu woman, she has no choice but to have an extra-marital relationship to fulfil her sexual desires. In this manner, Sarada problematizes one of the ubiquitous tropes of nationalist ideology. In the context of the above discussion, we fully understand the implication of Sarada’s comparison of Padma with any other Hindu woman.
Scholars such as Tanika Sarkar, Sangita Ray, and others have pointed to the syncopation of the mother-son relationship with the nation and its subjects in the latter phases of Indian nationalism.Footnote 66 Many interactions take place between Padma and her stepson throughout the novel. These interactions play a pivotal role in their evolution and the movement of the plot. The final encounter and the conversation between Padma and her stepson are significant in many ways as they engage with the dominant trope of sons’ veneration towards the nation-mother. Readers are reminded of the iconic encounter between Mahendra and the idols of a Hindu goddess, in their glory and decay, who are introduced as new forms of mother by Satyananda in Anadamath. In Bhaskararao’s case, he meets his stepmother in shockingly new conditions. As Mahendra is shocked at the decay and grandeur of the new mother, Bhaskararao is shaken to the core to see his stepmother in the most depraved conditions. While the figure of the mother goddess has a stunning effect on Mahendra, the figure of Padma has a devastating effect on Bhaskararao. He confesses and regrets his family’s role in ruining her life. But Padma is not an idol to be worshipped, but a flesh-and-blood woman. While the motherland in Anadamath commands the sacrifices of her children, this novel portrays a prostitute as a mother who risks and sacrifices her life and future for the sake of her child. To Bhaskararao, the wretchedness of Padma’s condition and her precariousness are too overwhelming to bear. It is difficult to decide what is more poignant in the whole episode: Bhaskararao’s courage in inviting his stepmother to his home or Padma’s concern about Bhaskararao’s prospects if she goes along with him. Although he tries hard to persuade her to come to his home, she does not agree to it. Further, she shows the black and red marks on her hands, which are due to sexually transmitted diseases, and explains that everyone will recognize that she is a different kind of woman and will not accept her. She says,
You only invite me. But Bhaskaram! Everyone will not accept. Respectability and status come as obstacles to them. You may lose your job too. On the one hand, you face opposition outside the home. On the other hand, you face opposition inside the home too.Footnote 67
Among the three protagonists, Padma is a quintessential ‘problematic individual’Footnote 68 whose desires and actions contradict sanctioned moral conduct. Through the portrayal of Padma and other women, the author explores the problematic nature of the social world itself. The narration is dynamic as the narrative quickly moves from one event to another, making the novel very interesting and exciting to read. The narration very diligently pays great attention to the movement of time as well as to the characters’ features and surroundings in precise detail. These aspects of the novel may be the reason that it created enthusiasm among its readers when it was serialized.
Padma encounters her life as a series of impossibilities and difficult choices. When she has to marry, she is compromised by having to marry a widower. In marriage, she does not get conjugal pleasure. When she loves her stepson, it is not reciprocated. When she becomes pregnant in an extramarital relationship, she has to hide it and leave the home to avoid being stigmatized. When she wants to live by doing some work in the outside world, she is forced to prostitute herself. While living as a prostitute, she is harassed by thugs and the police for the sake of money. Finally, she has to give away her daughter who is close to her heart. Likewise, Sarojini’s life is determined by contingencies and tragedies. By paying close attention to the life journeys of Padma and Sarojini, the novel asks a very pertinent question: what are the prospects of ordinary women in the newly formed nation-state? Along with them, a number of women have a significant place in the movement of the novel. We encounter a good number of women in the novel, including Padma’s mother, Bhaskararao’s widowed aunt and wife Aruna, Sudarshanam’s daughter Sarojini and third wife Kamala, the older woman who tries to trap Padma into prostitution, Venkulu, whose body language Padma finds reckless, women in the profession of prostitution, and others. Although these characters occupy a brief narrative space, they throw light on the social world the protagonists are navigating. Padma gets support from other women in the profession of prostitution in the outside world. The women belong to different strata of society: while some of them lead contented lives as wives, widows, and mothers restricted to their homes, others lead disreputable lives in the outside world. Most of these women lead a precarious life at the mercy of the men. This novel also trespasses on Premchand’s articulation in Sevasadan Footnote 69 of a more social reformist version of woman as someone to be secured and reformed, a theme intrinsic to the ideology of the home/world distinction. This is how this novel encounters head-on one of the dominant tropes of the nationalist novel, that is, the mythologization of the nation as a virtuous Hindu wife and mother.
A ‘figure of ill-repute’ in the outside world: Critique of the nation through the figure of the prostitute
While Padma’s desire for her stepson functions as ‘a thematic instrumentality of plot and a basic motivation of its telling and its reading’Footnote 70 in the first parts of Manchi-Chedu, her turn to prostitution, thus becoming a public object of desire to earn her livelihood, is the thematic focus of the latter parts of the novel. In other words, she becomes a ‘figure of ill-repute’.Footnote 71
The fictional world of Manchi-Chedu has a large presence of prostitutes, pimps, thieves, and the destitute, whom the middle class considers evil and looks down upon. In other words, they are the ‘Other’ of the mainstream society. At the very beginning, Sarada indicates their presence in Vijayawada, who keep odd timings for their activities. He writes, ‘It is the time at which respectable people, thieves, prostitutes surreptitiously slip into the seamy side of the city of Vijayawada.’Footnote 72 This prefigures their larger presence in the latter parts of the novel. Later, in the course of action, a pimp traps the protagonist of the novel. Sudarshanam’s son-in-law is a philanderer. Most remarkably, one of the protagonists of the novel turns herself into a prostitute as a means of survival. The overwhelming and ubiquitous presence of these stigmatized figures in the novel needs our attention and an explanation. In traditional Marxist understanding, they are characterized and stigmatized as lumpenproletariat. Walter Benjamin gives a radically different perspective on these ‘figures of ill repute’,Footnote 73 which I discuss below. An interesting question would be: what is their role in modern society? In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx argues that ‘prostitution is only a specific expression of the general prostitution of the labourer, and since it is a relationship in which falls not the prostitute alone, but also the one who prostitutes … the capitalist, etc., also comes under this head’.Footnote 74 In this provocative observation, Marx claims that prostitution is only a particular articulation of the general condition of the labourer in capitalist society. It implies that the phenomena of prostitution cannot be understood without properly understanding the condition of the labourer. In other words, the unfreedom and brutality experienced by the prostitute are also being experienced by the labourer. Both the labourer and the prostitute are under duress to sell their respective commodities. The figure of prostitute has received extended attention in the work of Walter Benjamin. In his The Arcades Project, Benjamin comments extensively on the figure of the prostitute. According to Benjamin, the prostitute/whore is one of the major Ur-forms of capitalist modernity.Footnote 75 For him, she is a ‘seller and commodity in one’.Footnote 76 The other two are the flaneur and the collector. Flaneur takes many forms in capitalist modernity. Although the Ur-forms of capitalist modernity look very different from each other, they have many features in common. One important feature is loitering. According to Buck-Moss, ‘the flaneur is not the aristocrat: not leisure (Musse) but loitering (Mussiggang) is his trade’.Footnote 77 According to Gluck, the flaneur is ‘the privileged bourgeois male, who surveys and dominates the social spaces of the modern city’.Footnote 78 Benjamin comments that Charles Baudelaire ‘goes to the marketplace as flaneur, supposedly to take a look at it, but in reality to find a buyer’.Footnote 79 Similarly, the prostitute also loiters in search of a buyer of her services. In other words, as the prostitute loiters in public places to find a potential buyer of her services, the author searches for buyers in a literary market. Interestingly, at different points in the novel both Bhaskararao and Padma loiter on the streets of Vijayawada, one as a middle-class young man and the other as a prostitute.
Manchi-Chedu demonstrates that reality exists neither objectively nor statically. What one experiences as reality depends upon the socio-economic condition of a particular individual. Bhaskararao experiences two very contrasting realities of the town of Vijayawada. As a middle-class young man, he has a panoramic view of the dazzling streets of the town of Vijayawada in the light produced by the mercury lamps and is enthralled by it. As a small employee struggling for survival, he observes the existence of different classes in the town. While the children of the rich are leading a commodious life, the destitute live on the footpaths and shopfronts. As a young man belonging to the middle class, Bhaskararao experiences the glittering Vijayawada in the following manner:
Pleasant moonlight of Trayodashi mixed with blue light coming from mercury lamps on the street at Governorpet centre, Vijayawada seems to be in the middle of the day. Whistling enthusiastically and having walked street after street, he arrived at Bandar road. Wherever witnessed, all shops are full of people. Everyone is busy with their work. No one bothers about others. Although it’s going to be eight o’clock, coffee hotels are full of people.Footnote 80
Now a small employee struggling for survival, Bhaskararao gains a different perspective on Vijayawada. He explains to his friend:
Young man, look at them. This is an example of the miserable conditions human beings can live in. Till the day before yesterday, I could not have known these difficulties. I am observing these people by coming here destitute after having lost all of our property.Footnote 81
While interpreting Sadat Hasan Manto’s short stories, Mufti makes an extended discussion on the representation of the figure of the prostitute. He argues that the woman as a mother is instrumentally deployed by the nationalist bourgeois, and the ubiquitous figure of the prostitute in Manto’s fiction does not indicate a sign of capitalist modernity but is a counter-figure to the representation of woman in nationalist discourse and iconography.Footnote 82 However, taking a cue from the interpretation of Marx and Walter Benjamin, I argue that the figure of the prostitute in Manchi-Chedu has a greater implication than that which is warranted by Mufti’s interpretation. The figure of the prostitute or prostitution also indicates the status of wage-labourers in capitalist modernity. This can be illustrated by the status of Bhaskararao as a small employee in the latter parts of the novel. He constantly expresses his displeasure at the low wages that he earns, which do not allow him to buy even a newspaper. His stepmother’s condition is much more precarious and she is subject to violence at the hands of local thugs and the police. I argue that prostitution or the prostitute represent an extreme form of exploitation, as this implies the objectification of human beings in the most blatant manner one can imagine. In this profession, one has to sell oneself as a means of livelihood. Although this phenomenon has various dimensions, Sarada focuses on a few of them. Sexually transmitted diseases are an important dimension of the profession of the prostitute. Sarada’s realism does not overlook this. Like many important phenomena, we encounter them twice in the novel. Initially, Sudarshanam’s daughter suffers from sexually transmitted diseases she has contacted from her husband, who is a philanderer. Later, Padma suffers from sexually transmitted diseases. Further, Sarada narrates the brutalization and exploitation of prostitutes at the hands of local louts and the police. This brutalization inculcates deep fear in Padma’s mind and creates insecurity about herself and her daughter’s future. In one instance, confusing the counterfeit (gold) ornaments of Padma as real gold, the policeman assumes that she has a great deal of money. He threatens her and asks her to come to the police station. As suggested by another woman in the same profession, Padma gives him 50 rupees. Sarada describes her mental condition in the following manner,
Padma counted and gave fifty rupees to police from her saved money. That was indeed very carefully saved money. Money earned in flesh trade! Notwithstanding her like or dislike, feeling pain deep inside, having yielded to harsh men, and suppressing pain inside and laughing outwardly, earned money! That kind of money … in this manner … has to be given freely.Footnote 83
As she navigates the outside world independently, Padma’s journey holds great significance for character development and plot progression. She encounters various kinds of people and experiences and realizes that the outside world is a dangerous place for a single woman without the support of a family. Leaving home becomes an immensely traumatic experience for Padma. In the nationalist novel, while the woman’s place is restricted to the home, the hero negotiates with the outside world. In the process, the hero travels to important places. This travelling also indicates the development and maturity of the hero. While discussing Indulekha as a nationalist novel, M. T. Ansari interprets the hero’s tour of important cities such as Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta of colonial India as an attempt to fashion a yet-to-be-unified India at a symbolic level.Footnote 84 The same can be found in the Telugu nationalist novel Bapiraju’s Narayanarao.Footnote 85 Contrary to that, Padma travels from her native village, Lankapalli, to Vijayawada, one week before her marriage. She stays at Sudarshanam’s home, which is closer to the temple, gold ornament shops, and flower shops. After leaving home, Padma travels to smaller towns such as Gudivada and Bandar. Despite the glorification of the nation as a mother in the nationalist discourse, the nation is a dangerous terrain to traverse for a single woman without the support of the family.
By the penultimate stage of the novel, Padma emerges as a figure of heartrending and immense tragedy, whose future remains uncertain. Her destruction is complete and she stands alone as she has given away her daughter to her stepson in the hope of giving her a better future. As the nationalist discourse glorified the Hindu woman as a virtuous wife and mother, this novel portrays the condition of women belonging to widely different social strata. Most importantly, what does the profound tragedy of Padma indicate for the readers of the novel? Is it merely restricted to her? Why does Sarada articulate a great tragedy for a very young woman? Or, does it indicate the fate of the dispossessed in a newly formed nation-state? These questions haunt the readers long after reading the novel.
Conclusion
Sarada’s Manchi-Chedu is a 1950s novel that belongs to a period when India was transitioning from a colony to an independent nation-state. By portraying the aspirations, struggles, and travails of ordinary individuals, Manchi-Chedu interrogates the dominant representation of women in Indian nationalist discourse. In the process, it breaks the home/world dichotomy as one of the protagonists leads an equally turbulent life both in the home and the outside world. The novel’s spectacular success and reception in the Telugu public sphere show the different kinds of imagination (about the nation) in regional literature.
Having been serialized just seven years after the formation of the nation-state, Manchi-Chedu raises very pertinent questions about the future of the ordinary people in the new nation-state. Unlike the protagonists of nationalist novels, the protagonists of Manchi-Chedu are ordinary individuals. This is one of the novel’s unique features. At home, Padma is treated as an object that can be exchanged for other objects. When she leaves the house, she constantly feels insecure in the outside world. When she becomes a prostitute, she is continuously harassed by the police for money. Ironically, and significantly, while one of the protagonists in this novel is being represented as a prostitute, the nation is being represented as a mother in nationalist iconography, discourse, and other novels contemporaneously. However, Manchi-Chedu also indexes the exploitative social relations in the fictional world of the novel. The narrative interrogates the existential status of these two abstract moral qualities—manchi and chedu—in a society where exploitation is rampant.
The underlying theme of the novel is that it examines the status of these seemingly opposite qualities at various levels, to offer a critique of nationalist sentiment. Further, the novel raises the pertinent question of whether it is possible to characterize individuals as good or evil based on their actions in the context of exploitative social relations. One can see that there is an uncanny relation between the lived experiences of Sarada as a brutally exploited migrant worker and the exploitative social relations in the fictional world of Manchi-Chedu that he so passionately created. The novel form, in the hands of Sarada, does not merely depict the values of existing society. Neither does it represent the ethical socialization of individuals, as argued by Mufti. In contrast, it scrutinizes the validity of morals in a reified nation-state.
This close reading of Manchi-Chedu makes it clear that Mufti’s characterization of the novel fashioned by authors affiliated to the Progressive Writers’ Association must be qualified. Particularly in the hands of a brutally exploited migrant worker, the novel exposes the shallowness and glibness of the tropes of the nationalist novel. As we have seen above, Manchi-Chedu is highly critical of the prominent tropes of the nationalist novel at various levels. Sarada skilfully and effectively used the realist mode of novel-writing to propose a critique of the ideology of the nationalist novel.
Acknowledgements
I began working on S. Natarajan for my PhD when the ground was prepared for this article. I am deeply indebted to my supervisor, Shivarama Padikkal, for his encouragement and feedback throughout my PhD. I am immensely grateful to Hephzibah Israel for her ecumenical comments and suggestions on different versions of the article, which created momentum in its progress. I thank Sasheej Hegde, who has read early versions of this article and given valuable feedback. I thank Mohamed Shafeeq K, who has read the latter version, for his crucial suggestions. I thank Ashokan Nambiar C, Sudarshanarao Ittadi, and Prashant Vemuri for their suggestions. I thank Vignesh Kollati, Sivaji Siddabuttuni, Naresh Nunna, and Sugunamani Dadisetti for their help in procuring the materials. I thank the anonymous reviewer for their comments, which helped to strengthen the arguments in this article. I thank the editors of Modern Asian Studies for their support throughout the process. I dedicate this article to the memory of my friend, Nagaraju Koppula.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
