Love, Sex and the City

Patriarchy has always found it difficult to take women off the pedestal—and the problematic national obsession with womanly virtue is evident in some of the early novels which came out of Independent India. “Sudha. She was the one who had taught him that it was possible for men and women to have relationships that were pure and noble,” says Chander (Chanderkumar Kapoor) in 40s Allahabad, setting the precedent for an uneasy equation. All too soon, he is declaring, angrily: “I believed in love and hated sex. But now I think they are one and the same thing.”

There is an annoying single-mindedness to this young economics researcher’s obsession with purity in celebrated Hindi writer Dharamvir Bharati’s Allahabad novel of star- crossed and starry-eyed lovers, Chander & Sudha. At the same time here is an endearing revival of the innocent period he writes in and of, new to nationhood and still finding itself; a city of scholars and poets like Chander, the devta of the title, who recite verse and drink sherbet while putting off their inevitable transition to conventional family life, political and economic reform a steady refrain in the background.

Bharati’s bestseller was first published in Hindi as Gunahon Ka Devta in 1949 (literally ‘the deity of sins’, reprinted over a 100 times) and its attitudes are sweetly evocative of its time, if helplessly dated. The nostalgia of walks through the now- musty Allahabad University and idyllic Alfred Park (now Chandrashekhar Azad Park), which bring back the glory days of somnolent Allahabad—today no longer the great home of the Prayaag, but a dusty, somewhat forgotten city—is tempered by amused criticism of the city’s disordered order, even then. As the narrator, a solemn, often overwrought, fellow, observes: ‘If people still believe in city or village deities, I would say Allahabad’s reigning god is assuredly a romantic artist. The city’s layout, proportions and lifestyle are so unfettered; everywhere you look, there’s a pure, clear openness. It has lanes that are narrower than Banaras’s alleys, and roads wider than Lucknow’s streets. Allahabad’s Civil Lines can match towns like Yorkshire and Brighton but its mohallas are worse than filthy swamps. The climate is varied, there is no sameness, nor is there any sense of balance.’

The city is part of the important network which has bequeathed India freedom, and indeed there are small mentions of this history, if sparse: early on, during Chander’s research, ‘when he read about how the British, in order to extend their trade, had inhumanely looted the richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor, from Murshidabad to Rohtak, he had broken down and wept’. Bharati’s concerns are chiefly societal, as is seen when Dr Shukla, the professor who has taken Chander under his wing, argues about caste and Swaraj: “I’m also proud of Hindustan. I’ve worked for the Congress. But I have come to the conclusion that if you give Hindustanis a little bit of freedom they will not hesitate to misuse it. They can never become good rulers,” he says. This point is not allowed to lie, naturally; “That’s not true. The British have made them like that. Hindustan has produced Chandragupta and Ashoka. And as far as the caste system is concerned, I can see clearly that it is going to crumble,” replies Chander. The novel eventually moves towards this realisation on the part of the scholarly Dr Shukla, who is fastidious about religious ritual but intelligent enough to recognise and effect change; he helps Binti, his slowly evolving niece from the village, escape from a dismal marriage by interrupting the ceremony three pheras in. He is also surprisingly free with his plain yet charming daughter Sudha, an impish, Parineeta-like figure who spends her time dreaming of impossible freedoms (the freedom not to marry chief among them) and lavishing naankhatais and sisterly affection on Chander. Ferociously close yet unable to marry because of their different backgrounds, the two carry out all the laboured rituals of paramours. No wonder our hero is in turns progressive and utterly confused.

For this would-be Henry Higgins is uncertain of his creation: ‘He was the one who, with his every breath, had fashioned Sudha into what she was. He had, bit by bit, constructed her, polished her, embellished her. She was his work, his creation. How, then, could she exhibit such weakness?’ Intelligent when at work but terribly naive when it comes to life, he doubts women in the most predictable ways: ‘All this talk of sacrifice and beauty was nothing but a lie. In the end, wasn’t Sudha just another ordinary girl, hungry for a husband when unmarried and for a lover after marriage?’

Into this mix comes sexy Pammi or Premala D’Cruz, an older woman who has separated from her husband and is uninhibited by the usual rules distancing men and women— predictably an Anglo-Indian whose Christianness keeps her from the larger debates Chander, Dr Shukla and his daughter Sudha are entitled to, that even Gesu, Sudha’s Muslim friend is entitled to, as a fellow partaker of convention. Pammi wears tight flannel trousers and suspenders which cling to her breasts, and has a mad brother called Bertie who was betrayed by his wife and riots about the rose garden while delivering wise lines befitting a Shakespearean fool. This parallel thread, fittingly set in a run-down bungalow in genteel Civil Lines (even more fittingly called Rosalyn), shows potential for departure and allows for some fun in this earnest novel.

Of course sultry Pammi is cast as Salome (the Biblical Herod’s ill-fated niece)—Chander takes her to a showing of Salome, Where She Danced, where Pammi enlightens him on the Bible while the newsreel runs. But she is also complicated beyond this; she is attractive and knows what her charms are, but has a deeper life of the mind, real and honest thoughts about how we should go about the business of love. Women should not marry between 14 and 34, she declares, believing they are too vulnerable to the charms of men, during that period. When stubborn Chander asks—too coyly it would seem to the modern reader—“Is sex a compulsory part of a girl’s love?”, we are not disappointed: ‘“Yes,” said Pammi clearly and forcefully.’ She speaks frankly about the spell cast by sex, its awful and blissful power over human will—and has only too eager an audience. Earnest Chander is constantly pondering over what he sees as a dilemma, like many intellectual boys of the age, perhaps: ‘Did the relationship between men and women have to follow only one path—that of love, marriage and fulfilment? Couldn’t purity, sacrifice, even distance, keep relationships and beliefs alive? If not, then what was the difference between Sudha and Pammi?’ Straight out of a Bollywood movie comes his act of self-denial, or self-flagellation; he marries Sudha off to a worthy socialist of the same caste, who she will never love.

Off goes our devta into a spiral of doubt and sin, spurning Sudha’s letters and luxuriating in Pammi’s lush body for a time. The love scenes may be semi-comical, even irksome, in their fervour, but they are real. We may have come a long way from those days, but there are those who deal with the same demons as Chander. Eventually, he emerges from the spell of the body, declaring: “I’ve come to believe that love is actually just sex, indeed, sex is the main aspect of love, everything else is merely a preparation for sex, the creating of the requisite environment and trust for it.” Revolutionary for his time!

The letdown is Pammi’s letter—‘I’m a Christian, but after my experiences, I have realized that the Hindu system, which looks at marriage through the prism of social and religious circumstances, and not love, is more scientific and much better for women’—which contains some terrible recanting (though it does arrive through the device of a letter). Also, the mawkish ending and the overabundance of tears and temple allegories, all lending itself to a cloying floridness. Perhaps this is a fallout of translation or of time, but one wishes some of it away.

Bharati, a Padma Shri awardee and luminary of Hindi literature—known for his novel Suraj ka Satwan Ghoda, also a Shyam Benegal film, and the much-enacted play Andha Yug—found one of his most lasting legacies in this classic. He was 23 when he wrote it and it is very popular with young men, perhaps the origins of a rather quaint sub-title which the English edition bears: ‘a story of middle-class life’. Bharati gave us a modern Indian man full of contradictions, and Chander is the one we blame for the denouement, not steadfast Sudha: ‘He is a product and victim of his times, without the courage to rise above them,’ says the book’s translator, journalist Poonam Saxena, in her afterword.

We see Chander first in a pashmina coat, sporting a saro leaf in his buttonhole and white zari-embroidered Peshawari sandals, ‘a lock of brown hair [fallen] carelessly on his broad, fair forehead’, believing love to be ‘a kind of mental illness that occurs when seasons change… connected with the spine’. Indeed, this sprite seems ill-prepared to deal with the times—some Edenic notion of man unprepared for the fall. ‘It was almost as if Dharamvir Bharati was holding up a mirror to them and telling them—see what happens when you don’t have the courage to rebel,’ says Saxena. Yet when we leave him, this Adonis is a mature man, contending with death and taking a rebellious modern woman by the hand (as an equal, one hopes), prepared at last for the real world.

When Sudha remarks, “To write one story, god knows you have to endure the tragedy of countless others”, we know what she means. But the rich crop of crossovers make the translating of Indian stories to English, that modern Indian publishing enterprise, well worth the effort.

booksChander & SudhaDharamvir BharatiliteraturePoonam SaxenaTranslatedViking