Rāg Darbārī

Rāg Darbārī (राग दरबारी), published in 1968 by Shrilal Shukla, is the great satirical novel of Hindi literature and of independent India. Its title is the name of a grave, majestic raga of Hindustani classical music, associated with the Mughal court (darbār) — and here an ironic image of a society where everyone plays the music of flattery and power at the court of a petty village ruler. Set in Shivpalganj, a large village near a small town in Uttar Pradesh some twenty years after independence, it follows Rangnath, a young history postgraduate from the city, who comes to stay with his uncle Vaidyaji to recover his health — and discovers, with growing comic horror, how every new institution of the democratic republic, from the village college to the cooperative society, the council, the police and the courts, has been captured and turned into an instrument of power and profit. It won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1969 and has been in print ever since.

At a glance

The story

The novel opens with Rangnath travelling to Shivpalganj on a government truck, whose driver and cleaner treat the rules of the road and the law with lordly contempt — a first taste of a world where everything is negotiable. “Bribes, lies, pull,” he soon learns, are the true currency. The narrator’s sardonic voice sets the tone: the truck, standing across the road, “was born to be a nuisance.”

His uncle Vaidyaji — a dignified, soft-spoken, pious-seeming Ayurvedic doctor who sells tonics for male vigour — is the most powerful man in the village. He is the manager of the Changamal Vidyalaya Inter College, which he uses as a base of patronage; he controls the cooperative union, whose supervisor embezzles the stock of wheat with Vaidyaji’s knowledge (Vaidyaji then expresses grief and refuses to resign, as a matter of principle); he manipulates the village panchayat. His sons are Badri Pahalwan, a wrestler who enforces his will, and Ruppan Babu, a perpetual student who has stayed in tenth class for years and is “a leader” in the college. Around them are a cast of sycophants, schemers and idlers: the college principal, who conducts the school as a fief and fights a feud with the teachers’ faction of Khanna Master; Sanichar, a ragged, half-naked hanger-on in underwear whom Vaidyaji makes village headman (pradhān) through a rigged election; Langad, a lame man who has been fighting in the government offices for years simply to get a copy of a document he is entitled to, refusing on principle to pay a bribe; Chhote Pahalwan, Badri’s sidekick, who beats his own father; Joginath, a drunk thug; and the police daroga, who knows everything and does nothing that does not pay.

Rangnath, with his city education, sees everything: the college where no one teaches and the principal fights the opposition by any means; the bhang sessions under the trees; the court cases that go on forever; the development schemes that exist on paper; the election of Sanichar as pradhan through intimidation and fraud (“democracy” arriving in Shivpalganj); the elaborate rituals of village gossip and leisure; the police inspector’s arrangements with dacoits; the way principle becomes a pose and corruption a way of life. Each institution of the modern state — education, cooperation, local democracy, law — has been adopted in form and inverted in substance.

Langad’s fight for his document becomes an emblem of the citizen’s helplessness; the teachers who oppose the principal are defeated; the honest are mocked; and Rangnath, who considers himself enlightened, does nothing. Disillusioned and bewildered, he prepares to leave. The narrator closes the novel with a mock-epic piece of advice to the reader — to run away from such reality, for there is nothing else to do: “Palāyan saṅgīt”, the music of flight.

Themes

The capture of institutions. The novel’s core insight is that the democratic and developmental institutions created after 1947 did not transform rural society but were absorbed by its existing structures of caste, landholding and patronage. Vaidyaji is not a villain of melodrama but a smooth, respectable operator who speaks the language of public service and morality.

Rhetoric and reality. Words like “democracy”, “education”, “cooperation”, “development”, “principle” are repeatedly emptied of meaning in the novel’s ironic narration.

The intellectual’s impotence. Rangnath, the city-educated observer, represents the liberal middle class that sees and judges but cannot or will not act — and the novel turns its irony on him too.

Comedy. The novel is extremely funny, written in a supple, ironic, allusive Hindi that mixes village idiom, bureaucratic jargon, Sanskrit and English, mock-epic similes and deadpan commentary. Its humour is the vehicle of its bleakness.

Reception

Rāg Darbārī was hailed on publication and won the Sahitya Akademi Award. It is regarded as a classic of Hindi literature and of satire, compared to Gogol’s Dead Souls and Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk, and is still cited as an accurate portrait of Indian politics and bureaucracy. Its phrases — “Shivpalganj”, “Vaidyaji”, “Langad” — have become shorthand among Hindi readers.

In conversation

• Langad’s document — the citizen’s endless, hopeless fight against bureaucracy.
• Vaidyaji — power that wears the mask of service.
• Shivpalganj — the Indian village as a mirror of national politics.