English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature in India

Chapter 4: The Two Brothers of Ansari Road

71 chapter 4 The Two Brothers of Ansari Road I first went to Ansari Road for the same reason many writers and scholars do, to buy discounted books from the rows of distributors and publishers located there. I was living next to the Golcha Cinema then and felt, for the first time, a faster pulse of the city. Daryaganj and the net of gullies leading through Old Delhi—Chawri Bazaar, the Jama Masjid, and Chandni Chowk—are famous for showcasing just what it is people get up to during the day: buying and selling paper, cloth, wedding cards, plastic toys, and sweets; flying kites, washing dishes, sweeping garbage; praying, walking, watching. Once there, I remembered that this was not the first time I had come to Daryaganj; my mother had taken me there as a child to show me where she was born. She had lived there for fifteen years in a two-room flat with her parents and three brothers, one of the many Punjabi partition families that had settled in the area after 1947. I decided that while I was in the neighborhood I would look for the building. The problem was, I had no idea what the building looked like, and I did not have the address. All I remembered was her pointing to a window, and the image I had of it now was of a window against a pale green wall. So, after buying my discounted books, I went looking for my mother’s window in the wall. I never found the window, but on my walk around the neighborhood I did keep noticing how, while reading the signboards for various publishers in Hindi and English, the two languages seemed to exist 72 | The Two Brothers of Ansari Road side-by-side, the Roman and Nagari scripts almost interlaced at times. On closer inspection, I came to see that they in fact inhabited different worlds. This chapter concerns the world of Hindi publishing, one that has undeniably been shaped by the presence and politics of English. On the one hand, as we will see, Hindi does stand alone as a national presence and in terms of its numerical significance; on the other, its claim to nationality has been vexing for its own literary practitioners. Like all languages it is riddled with contradictions, reflecting the very complexity of the everyday vis-à-vis the ideological; in many respects what has shaped Hindi the most since independence is the tension between its regional and national significance. an intimate audience Early on in my research I had a conversation with the Hindi poet Gagan Gill about who she understood her audience to be. It was the late 1990s, and the question of linguistic authenticity was linked to who one thought one was writing for. It was perhaps an unnecessary question for a writer who wrote in the most widely spoken language in India, yet I was curious to know how she conceived of her audience. She started by recounting several stories of “common people stopping and recognizing” her husband, Nirmal Verma (1929–2005), who was one of the most important living writers in Hindi at the time (and was recognized in 2000 with the Jnanpith Award, which is India’s highest literary honor). She recalled one instance (of which there were many, she said) when she and Verma were walking on a bridge in the Himalayan foothill town of Rishikesh and a young man approached Verma and asked him to sign a book. It was the fact that he was recognized on the street and far from urban literary worlds that had meant something to her. She then shared a story of the time when a young man wrote to her and explained how one of her books of poetry had been serving as a go-between between him and his beloved. He was writing to Gill to ask her to sign a copy of the book and send it to the beloved on his behalf. Perhaps he saw this as sending his beloved not only the poetry but also the poet, as a way of further consecrating their impending union. In this individual plea for authorial consecration , I had the sense from Gill that it was her own consecration that she was refusing. In the end, she did not send the book to the beloved The Two Brothers of Ansari Road | 73 but signed a copy...