Nirmal Verma is one of those ultimate littérateurs who relentlessly put colonial modernity to thorough scrutiny in most of his creative works in order to explore the idea of India in its entirety
Remembering the legendary Indian writer, Nirmal Verma, necessarily encourages one to revisit some of his literary works which turn out to be completely mesmerising. Indeed, it is akin to doing a literary pilgrimage. Such a pilgrimage is particularly significant for the fact that he appears to never ever lose sight of the sanctity of his native roots, cultural moorings and indigenous traditions even in the face of an aggressive onslaught of various forms of all-encompassing but counterproductive western modernity. As a matter of fact, he is one of those ultimate littérateurs who relentlessly put colonial modernity to thorough scrutiny in most of his creative works in order to explore the idea of India in its entirety.
The irreconcilable incompatibility between Indian way of conceptualising, planning and strategising about the vagaries of human life and the unavoidable pulls and pressures of Western modernity is so effectively embodied in different essays written in Hindi and compiled in such collections as Shabda Aur Smriti, Kala¯ ka¯ jokhima, Dhalaan Se Utarte Hue, Bharat Aur Europe : Pratishruti Ke Kshetra, Kala, Smriti, Akanksha, Shatavdi ke Dhalte Varahon Mein, Adi, Ant aur Aarambha.
In the very first collection, the figure of Gandhi appears time and again. Emphasising the re-awakening of nationalist consciousness embedded in the persona of Gandhi, Verma tries to make an assessment about the idea of India in connection with its relationship with Europe. What he finds out is the fact that the best of indigenous thoughts and sensitivities don’t carry the kind of ruptures which we witness in the form of deep-rooted alienation of modern life. The second collection, Kala¯ ka¯ jokhima talks about the role of art in the making of modern world, whereas the third collection, Dhalaan Se Utarte Hue mentions certain kinds of fissures and contradictions which expose the hollowness of so-called modern civilisation.
In the fourth collection, Bharat aur Europe, Verma looks at basic assumptions behind the intellectual and philosophical traditions of India and Europe respectively. He is basically pre-occupied with the task of evaluating what India and Indians found and lost when they came in contact with European culture and civilisation. The ways in which we have been dissociated with our own traditions, and the manner in which we have made certain attempts to keep those invaluable traditions intact, are some of the major concerns of the essayist. All the issues and concerns are addressed with a definite objective to foreground the essential indianness of we, the people of India.
The indianness of post-colonial Indian mind is his genuine concern. And it governs his engagement in myriad ways with the questions of politics, religion, culture, literature, history, secularism and Marxism. He does not construct any theoritical premise or rigid conceptual framework to make sense of the issues revolving around the already cited questions of contemporary India. His focus is on exposing those tendencies, sometimes subtle and surreptitious, that make us think and feel that West is the way forward to look for the resolution of all those problems we face today.
The deep imprints of colonial mindset, which generated an evidently infectious impact on our thought process, and made us in turn subservient to the Western ways of thinking, evoke sharp responses from Verma. He indeed wishes to get rid of those prejudices and assumptions that have been responsible for putting chains on our own style of thinking, behaving and living life with our own terms. Efforts to erase the traces of cultural and intellectual colonisation define and decide the quality of discussions and deliberations about East-West encounter in his essays.
For his first collection of short-stories, Parinde, Verma was declared to be the harbinger of a new literary trend called ‘Nai Kahani’ in Hindi literature. It opened up several opportunities to express his yearning for a liberating, fulfilling and satisfying existence, which was extremely difficult to find in a modern set-up. The kind of irreparable grief caused by the partition of a newly independent nation state aggravated further by disillusionment with the ideals and aspirations created during the freedom struggle and subsequent deepening of colonial temperament in various ways and numerous places of postcolonial India triggered the creative expressions of an entire generation of writers, of whom, Verma proved to be the major voice. Abandoning old narrative techniques and already exhausted subjects of short story writing, he went on to delve deeper into the complexity of contemporary realities with new sensibilities and even newer idioms producing highly captivating content in an enabling form.
His succeeding collections of short- stories such as Jalti Jhadi, Pichhli Garmiyon Mein, Beech Bahas Mein, Kavve Aur Kala Pani, which brought him Sahitya Academy Award and the last one, Sukha, are marked by a connecting thread which so evocatively invokes the issues of alienation and depression primarily caused by the imperatives of modernity. Deeply disturbing experiences of the emergent middle class which suffer rather miserably in some ways because of their illusion about the nature of modern life generate radically different indigenous sensibilities than seen before in the works of Verma.
European experiences led to the transformation of Nirmal Verma’s mindset in a huge way. But they did not succeed in making him think and feel that his own culture and civilisation are inferior to those of Europe. Instead, he does not forget to tell us that we have legitimate reasons to harbour serious misgivings about the adequacy and effectiveness of the idea of progress embedded in the notion of Western modernity that wrecked havoc on humanity through the two world wars alongside creating irrevocable ruptures in human relations as is amply clear from the hollowness between man-woman relationships and increasingly entrenched sense of alienation, destructive self-centeredness, self-exile, frustrations and disappointments so inseparably interlinked with modern life and experiences of humankind. The moral of the story is that the socio-political and cultural manifestations of modernity have been categorically put into the bar of judgement.
Whether they are essays, short stories or novels written by Verma, he does not seem to subscribe to any particular ideological persuasion which essentially obstructs the articulation of the nuanced perception of the existing complex realities in the outside world. In the very first novel, Ve Din, memory plays a central role in a modern milieu. The image of scattered, disintegrating, self-obsessed Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War is thoroughly scrutinised by an almost entirely Indian perspective. The second novel, Lal Teen Ki Chat, reflects the acute loneliness of the protagonist, Kaya who is totally caught in a cynical world full of isolation. Such explanations of loneliness and isolation are aimed at presenting a scathing critique of what is often called the modern life.
The third novel, Ek Chithda Sukh, is an attempt to find an answer to the question of what is happiness. The desire for happiness leads one to the realisation that it is indeed an illusion. It is an endless wait as we never ever get to have a real sense of happiness in modern world order. The fourth novel, Raat ka Reporter, revolves around the self-centeredness of a journalist who deal with those circumstances which led the masses to severe kinds of disappointment with modern forms of democracy and development. The fifth novel, Antim Aranya, chooses to discuss the recurrent theme of loneliness along with issues of death and depression. It offers us an innovative approach to look at the relationship between life and death and also the conditions which lie in between so as to undermine the supremacy of material possessions and underline the primacy of spiritual fulfillment.
In his travelogues, diary-writing and even selections of nine prominent works of world literature for their translations into Hindi, he exhibits tremendous consistency in terms of doing a stringent critique of the Western modernity. And India always remains at the core of his creative pursuit. So, he keeps searching consistently for the civilisational roots of the nation, its encounter with colonial modernity and the consequent distortions of our collective consciousness with a view to highlight the need to discover first and then recover and foreground our own autonomous and indigenous modernity.
(The writer is Assistant professor of English at Rajdhani College, Delhi University)
