This book presents a series of readings of short stories in Hindi as the repository of rural indigenous experiences of the vast expanse of the Hindi heartland carrying orally transmitted cultures and narratives of their crises. This field has remained under-represented in literary and cultural studies, since the changing ways of life have come to distance the urban educated class from farming and harvesting cultures. Consequently, a large area of human experience in Indian society and culture has remained obscure for its documentation not being presented in the language of the western world. The book tracks the tough economic condition of rural peasantry since the era of Premchand to the early decades of Independent India, through the period of liberalization to the recent decades. The study with an Introduction and nine chapters explores more than thirty stories which inherit a strong tradition of peasant narratives after Munshi Premchand. The unique strength of the book is in invoking not only the intricate array of messy complications and contingencies the rural populace has experienced, but also in bringing to the fore a spectrum of ethnic-cultural, psychological biographies that registers the living images of rural scenarios in the democratic India of our times. The book contains substantial reference to concrete facts and data, which resonates with the realistic strain of the narratives explored.
Vanashree is Professor Emerita, Department of English, Banaras Hindu University (BHU). She has previously headed the Department of English, BHU, and has taught at George Washington University in the USA as a Fulbright scholar. She has also been the Chair of Indian studies at Monash University, Melbourne. She has published a number of books and research papers that have been widely cited by an international array of scholars. Vanashree has held various teaching and research positions in several institutions in India and is a noted figure in the literary academy, as far as cross-cultural readings of Indian Bhasha literature are concerned.
The stories of rural India written in Hindi yield a storehouse of know- ledge that upholds their tensile strength, even in the subsequent times. While writing novels and stories has evidently gained major impetus in the democratic fabric of India, many such rural narratives dealing with peasantry and rural existence in vernacular have had a history of being stacked together in the category of 'regional. A much larger area of human experience therefore remains marginalized for not being written in the language of the western world and for addressing local indigenous concerns. The changing ways of life have further distanced the urban- educated class from farming and harvesting culture; terms like rabi, kharif, rain-fed, rural indebtedness, fractured landholdings, scarcity of seeds, procurement price, etc. sound other-worldly to the average 'modern' (educated, urban) Indian. Arguably, farming is much more complex than any industry. In any industry or manufacturing body, the damage can be controlled or the risk is subject to mitigation, but not in farming. Fighting the yearly battle with crops, while the prices are likely to be unstable and volatile, indebtedness, input credit and electricity exorbitantly expensive, dealing with extreme weather, fatal illness of a near one, lack of adequate medical care call for real fortitude and testify why and how poverty has become a distinct identity of rural existence, specifically for small, middle-level, and landless peasants.
Walter Benjamin's comparison of information with storytelling lets us understand what is at the heart of this study. "The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time" Indeed, the newspaper surveys, academic discourses, research surveys, and the state-sponsored policy programmes paid due attention to the gradually dismantling village society and ongoing agrarian crisis. It can be argued however that visiting this world in fictional idiom lends an authentic vision of how in spite of India's emancipation from the colonial rule and the foundation of Indian democracy, a farmer's routine labour and struggle for a good yield remain implicated in an intricate array of messy complications and contingencies. Undoubtedly, the story layout brings to the fore the diverse circumstances and subterranean issues- even the most elusive ones-that seek solution.
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