Lily Ray, one of the most celebrated contemporary Maithili writers, has produced some literary gems. Known for her work which reveals the voices and sentiments of the disadvantaged, she rightly deserves the Jnanpith Award
Lily Ray is arguably the most successful and celebrated contemporary writer of Maithili language. Like the veteran Hindi author, Phanishwar Nath ‘Renu’, she is an exceptionally gifted short-story writer and novelist par excellence. Renu’s masterpiece, Maila Aanchal, a Hindi novel narrating the early years of post-independent India took the entire Hindi world by storm in the immediate aftermath of its publication in 1954.
Similarly, Ray’s magnumopus, Marichika, a Maithili novel about the growing disappointment with and gradual disintegration of the once reining feudal mindset, generated a great deal of euphoria and jubilation in the Maithili literary universe when it was published by Maithili Academy in 1981. It moved educated Maithils enormously and went on to fetch the Sahitya Academy Award the very next year in 1982. It was one of the most moving moments for Maithili literature since a woman writer was chosen for this prestigious award for the first time.
Initially writing with a pseudonym Kalpana Saran, she rose to instant fame with her famous short story called Rangeen Parda. It is remarkably radical in terms of its engagement with the hitherto untalked about emotionally intimate relationships between people who were attracted towards each other but regressive social circumstances placed them under certain conditions where physical intimacy was absolutely forbidden.
It explicitly highlights the sorrow and suffering of women while exposing the insensitive, irresponsible and frivolous nature of the male figure. It turned out to be quite provocative and rather controversial. Many people of the region were extremely offended. But literary connoisseurs appreciated the author for her courage and conviction to depict the seemingly existing realities in a highly persuasive manner.
Lily Ray is a prolific writer. Apart from numerous short-stories spread over two different collections, she has written four novels — Patakshep, Marichika, Upsanhar and Jijivikha. Her first novel centred around the idea of a bloody revolution along the lines of Naxalbari movement in a specific village called Tulsipur of Purniya district. Even after attaining independence, equitable land distribution remained a distant reality and exploitation of the landless villagers a norm rather than an exception.
Such societal disparities were often said to be responsible for the emergence of naxalite leaders, like Shivnarayan, who helped spread awareness among the villagers about the concept of class struggle, never failed to emphasise the need for violent revolution which supposedly lead to the victory of the people from the periphery and subsequent establishment of the rule of the sarvahara.
Young enthusiastic intellectuals like Anil, Dilip and Sujeet go and help Shivnarayan and meticulously plan for a revolution. However, certain irreparable gaps and fissures in the organisational structures and ideological imprints led to the sudden extinction of the planned revolution. The novelist is artistically exquisite but in a subtle and surreptitious way suggests the inherent contradictions in the very idea of violent revolution and its efficacy in paving the way for an egalitarian social system in rural India.
From literary point of view, this novel manifests tremendous potential of a promising novelist who goes on to showcase her extraordinarily outstanding ability to construct a classic called Marichika. Striking a fine balance between craft and content of the novel, we are entertainingly told about the gradual decadence of an apparently strong and powerful socio-political order which is often called feudal system.
Through multi-layered narratives giving distinctly different voices to three successive generations of people and their changing perspectives on life and times they live in, the novelist not only successfully exposes the futility of several worldly machinations and shrewd maneuvering, but also effectively engages with complex relationships between residual feudal practices and emergent modern tendencies in an artistically satisfying manner so as to foreground the inevitable sense of disappointment and dispondency.
Her skilfull and entertaining engagement actually defines the ways in which the nuanced socio-political and cultural history of the region called Mithila has been wonderfully written with a profound postcolonial perspective. An eminent, bilingual literary critic, Harish Trivedi, has so succinctly explained the rationale behind his claim to read and interpret Phanishwar Nath Renu as a true postcolonial novelist for his telling depiction of theme of disillusionment in Maila Aanchal.
It is important to mention that Maithili novel Marichika is almost equally telling and effective in its representation of the dominant mood of disenchantment. Interestingly, the writers of both these novels come from similar cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Such common culturally rich backdrops perhaps equipped and enabled them in significant ways with a predominant postcolonial voice to contribute meaningfully to Hindi and Maithili literatures respectively.
Maithil poetry has been quite noteworthy right from the days of Vidyapati, who wrote exhilarating love songs of Radha and Krishna during the late 14th and early 15th centuries. But novel writing in Maithili began rather late. Both Bangla and Hindi writers had already produced terribly good novels before Maithil novels began to dominate the literary horizon.
Kanyadan by Harimohan Jha was the first major novel which caught the attention of almost the entire Maithil community. People from diverse walks of life began to read novels. He championed the cause of female education in this path breaking novel and readers seemed to approve the idea.
The kind of trajectories which the genre of novel in Maithili has charted, for instance, from the days of the first major novelist, Harimohan Jha through those of Baidya Nath Mishra Yatri, Rajkamal Chaudhary, Jeevkant, Lalit to Lily Ray marks its modest beginning but phenomenal growth gradually. Its spectacular evolution exhibits the respective novelists’ primary preoccupations with misery and misfortune of women, and the plight of peasants followed by nationalist upsurge of certain ideals and aspirations which were, however, accompanied by a deep sense of disillusionment with these ideals and aspirations.
Lily Ray has always stayed entirely away from petty politicking and not so petty networking which is so entrenched in all kinds of literary spheres. And she has done wonders over the decades. Her literary gems cast a magical spell over the readers who get so charmed and indeed overwhelmed with her enchanting short-short stories and novels.
She has already received both the Sahitya Academy Award and Prabobh Sahitya Samman for her tremendous contribution to the growth of Maithili novels and short-stories. And there is almost complete consensus about her invaluable output and literary worth among the Maithili literary practitioners who are otherwise deeply divided along caste and gender lines. Almost all are unanimous that this wonderful writer, who reached the pinnacle of literary success without much of formal education, should be conferred Jnanpith award for her enduring contribution to the making of Indian literature through her cutting edge literary craft and powerfully moving content dealing as it does with the central theme of disillusionment of heroic characters like Hira who despite their struggles and consequent material accomplishments get thoroughly disappointed and disenchanted with the painful circumstances prevailing in Maithil region of the nation.
Such captivating narration of a representative region of the nation with adequate focus on the struggles but inevitably followed by disappointment and hopelessness of its inhabitants makes Ray a quintessentially postcolonial writer entirely worthy of the highest literary award we have in our country.
(The writer is Assistant professor of English at Rajdhani College, Delhi University)
