Phanishwar Nath "Renu"

Phanishwar Nath “Renu” was one of the most important Hindi novelists after Premchand and the creator of the āñcalik upanyās — the “regional novel” — in Hindi. His first novel, Mailā Āñcal (“The Soiled Border”, 1954), portrays a single village, Maryganj, in the Purnea district of north-eastern Bihar in the years around independence, not through a single hero but through dozens of characters, castes, festivals, songs, rumours and dialects, so that the region itself becomes the protagonist. His second novel, Partī Parikathā (1957), extended the method; his stories — above all “Mare Gaye Gulfām” (“Killed, the Rose-Faced One”), filmed as Teesri Kasam — are among the most loved in Hindi.

Life

Renu was born on 4 March 1921 in Aurahi Hingna village, Purnea (now Araria) district, Bihar, near the Nepal border. He studied in Bihar, Nepal (Biratnagar) and Banaras, joined the freedom movement and the Quit India movement of 1942, for which he was imprisoned, and in 1950 took part in the democratic revolution in Nepal against the Rana regime. A socialist associated with Jayaprakash Narayan, he joined the JP movement against Indira Gandhi’s government and returned his Padma Shri during the Emergency (1975). He died in Patna on 11 April 1977.

Mailā Āñcal

Mailā Āñcal — the title means “the soiled border (of a sari)”, an image of the neglected rural periphery of India — is set in the village of Maryganj, in the malaria-ridden Purnea countryside, from about 1946 to 1948. A young doctor, Prashant, comes to open a malaria research centre in the village; through him and through dozens of villagers — the landlord, the caste leaders, the Gandhian worker Bawandas, the socialist and communist party organisers, the mahant of the local monastery and his disciples, the singers and dancers, the women — the novel shows how independence, party politics, land disputes, caste rivalries, the struggle against disease and the persistence of superstition transform and fail to transform the village. Prashant falls in love with Kamli, the landlord’s daughter, and, though imprisoned for a time on political suspicion, chooses to stay and serve the village. The Gandhian Bawandas, disillusioned by corruption in the Congress, is killed. The novel is full of folk songs, local idioms, Maithili- and Angika-tinged speech, and the sounds and smells of rural Bihar, and its form — episodic, polyphonic, documentary and lyrical — was new in Hindi.

Stories

“Mare Gaye Gulfām” (“Killed, the Rose-Faced One”), also called “Tīsrī Kasam” (“The Third Vow”), tells of Hiraman, a simple bullock-cart driver, who carries a dancer from a travelling nautanki company, Hirabai, to a fair; on the long journey they share songs and stories, and he falls innocently in love; at the end she leaves on the train, and Hiraman takes his third vow — never again to carry a nautanki woman in his cart. Basu Bhattacharya’s film Teesri Kasam (1966), with Raj Kapoor and Waheeda Rehman, made it famous. Other stories — “Thumrī”, “Rasprīyā”, “Lāl Pān kī Begam”, “Ādim Rātri kī Mahak” — capture rural Bihar’s music, humour and sorrow.

In conversation

• Āñcalik upanyās — the regional novel, in which a place is the hero.
• “Tīsrī Kasam” — the third vow; a resolution born of disappointment.
• Mailā Āñcal — the neglected margins of the nation.