The Bride: The Maithili Classic Kanyadan

By Harimohan Jha

'A Suitable Boy in Maithili' Amitava Kumar

'[A] conscientious and nuanced translation' Namita Gokhale

Thirteen-year-old Buchia is quick-witted and pleasant-looking, but in the competitive marriage mart of Bihar, her family needs to be resourceful and wily to find the right groom to uphold their pride. When a match is made with C.C. Mishra, English educated and recently graduated from Banaras Hindu University, everyone believes that a happy ending is near. But unknown to them, the groom dreams of a partner who writes poetry and plays tennis; is more-or-less a carbon copy of the film star Devika Rani. So, when he discovers that his new wife cannot even recognize the letters of the alphabet, their future begins to look less rosy ...

When it was first published in 1930, Harimohan Jha's Kanyadan blazed through the Maithili reading world and became the inspiration for numerous Indian novels and films. Translated into English for the first time, this delectable story about Indian matchmaking will charm readers with its cast of imperfect but unforgettable characters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harper Perennial India
• Release date: Dec 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9789356293922

Harimohan Jha

Harimohan Jha (1908-1984) was born in the Kumar Bajitpur village of Vaishali district, Bihar. He studied English literature and philosophy at Patna University and taught philosophy there. He was a novelist, poet, satirist, critic and, above all, a lifelong crusader against obscurantism and oppressive social practices. Celebrated as the ‘Vidyapati of modern Maithili prose', he won the Sahitya Akademi award posthumously for his 1984 autobiography Jeevan Yatra (The Journey of My Life).

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Contents

Foreword by Harish Trivedi

Introduction

Author’s Dedication

Preface

1. A Mother Prepares for Her Daughter’s Wedding

2. Thugs of Sabhagachhi

3. How to Read a Telegram

4. Tittle-Tattle on the Steamer

5. The Bridegroom

6. Mister C.C. Mishra

7. An English-Educated Son-in-Law

8. A Secret Discussion

9. The Girl in the Pink Sari

10. Kanyadan

11. The Night of Chaturthi

12. The Bride’s Tears

Translator’s Notes

Acknowledgments

About the book

About the author

Copyright

Foreword

I f asked to name just one novel from their language, many Maithili-speakers are likely to pick Kanyadan (1933) by Harimohan Jha, here translated as The Bride. It offers an intimate portrayal of contemporary Mithila society in a high-comic mode which seems to be affectionately indulgent but at the same time exposes the various iniquitous beliefs and social practices of that backward region. Towards the end, as the plot comes to a head, the narrative darkens and culminates in the indignant flight of the bridegroom and the misery of the bride who is no sooner married than abandoned.

The Pan-Indian Context

The Bride belongs to a major sub-genre of the novel in India in its early phase of development which took for its theme the problems of women. These included the denial of education to girls, child marriage, the giving of dowry, and incompatible marriage of a bride either to a young man who was college-educated and thus alienated or to an old man who was often widowed or bigamous. Another major issue was the Hindu religious prohibition against widow-remarriage which left many girl-widows condemned to life-long deprivation of any kind of personal gratification or social status, in many cases even before they had reached puberty.

Indian literature of the late nineteenth century abounds in examples of purposive texts implicitly (or even explicitly) advocating social reform. Such literary productions often aligned themselves with ‘socio-religious movements’ of the day (Das 1991, 113) in a symbiotic fashion, and were produced all over India across a diversity of languages. In the year 1897 were published two texts to which Jha’s Kanyadan bears a thematic and also eponymous affinity: Kanyasulkam (Bride Price), a highly influential play in Telugu by Gurajada Apparao, and Kanya-Vikraya (Sale of Girls), a play in Kannada by Dhareshwara Shivarao Naranappa, to which may be added the 1928 Marathi novel Kumari Vidhava (Miss Widow) by Mama Varerkar (Das 278, Trivedi 1125). By the time Jha came to write Kanyadan/The Bride, some of the greatest writers of modern India had published numerous works depicting the oppression and suffering of women, including Rabindranath Tagore and Saratchandra Chatterjee who both had a nationwide circulation and popularity.

Maithili–Hindi Bilingualism

In Hindi, the language to which Maithili is the closest (and of which it was indeed an integral part until it was granted recognition as a separate language by the Constitution in 1993), Gauri Datt had in 1870 published a novel titled Devrani Jethani ki Kahani which takes the problems of women to a post-marital stage. It depicts the tense co-existence of two young women, the younger and the older daughters-in-law of the title, of whom one is educated and virtuous and the other illiterate and uncouth, who find themselves living under the same roof in an extended family. The story reads in part ‘as if it were a reformist tract on female education’ (Gandotra and Stark, in Datt 25).

The great Premchand had depicted the plight of a ‘fallen’ woman in an early novel titled Bazar-e Husn in Urdu (1922) and Seva-sadan in Hindi (1919), in which a girl, who is married off to an ill-suited and oppressive man, is one day turned out by him, beguiled into becoming a nautch girl, but in the end repents and dedicates herself to social service. In Nirmala (1928), Premchand showed a young girl married to a much older man who has from his previous marriage a son about the same age as his new wife, and the son and the stepmother presently begin to share a bond with each other which is grievously misunderstood. The psychology of anguished women helplessly caught in difficult situations was depicted with nuance by Jainendra Kumar in a succession of novels beginning with Parakh (1929).

The novel in India developed along different time frames in each language and the Maithili novel was relatively late in coming into existence, with a couple of other novels too coming out at about the same time as Jha’s, in the early 1930s. But this is put in perspective by the fact that the first novel in Kashmiri was published only in 1957, for example, and in Dogri in 1960 (Das 1995, 277). Further, as Maithili was not recognized as a distinct language at the time, many Maithili speakers chose to write either in Hindi or in both Hindi and Maithili, as they continue to do even now. Indeed, the greatest novel to come out of the extensive Mithila area, Maila Anchal (A Dismal Region), by Phanishwar Nath ‘Renu’ was written in Hindi (1954) and has enjoyed a status and circulation that few other Hindi novels can match.

The Knowing Narrator as an Insider–Outsider

Harimohan Jha himself is a fascinating example of such bilingual proficiency—and then some. He had an outstanding academic record as a student and, subsequently, professor of philosophy at Patna, and the professional language in which he taught and published was English. His academic works include Trends in Linguistic Analysis in Indian Philosophy and he also published some of his philosophical works in Hindi, such as Nyaya Darshan and Vaisheshik Darshan (see Mishra), possibly with a view to a wider readership. But it was in his mother tongue Maithili that he wrote all his fiction.

Jha could thus, like many other early practitioners of colonial modernity, express himself in a whole gamut of languages as and when he thought fit. With his multilingual cultural versatility, he could aptly choose horses for courses. Even within Kanyadan/The Bride, as the translator Lalit Kumar has noted, Jha makes strategic use of several languages other than Maithili: Hindi, Urdu, English and Sanskrit. He even embeds in his text half-allusions that not many readers may pick up just for art’s sake and swantah sukhay, i.e., for his own writerly pleasure. When he says, for example, of the wake left in water by a steamer that ‘like the desires of a child widow, it disappeared as swiftly as it surfaced’, he is in fact conflating (and moderating) two lines of a Sanskrit shloka which says: ‘Like the withered breasts of a high-born child-widow, / The desires of poor folk no sooner arise than they vanish.’

Jha is in many other ways too a knowing narrator. He is also an ‘intrusive’ narrator who does not merge into his own narrative but makes his presence felt in various ways. Some of his similes are so learned and comically mock-epical as to draw attention to his erudition, and he addresses his ‘dear reader’ directly more than once as if he were a puppeteer manipulating his readers as well as characters. In this, he resembles Fakir Mohan Senapati in his 1902 Odia classic Chha Mana Atha Guntha (Six Acres and a Third). In another even more significant aspect of his role as a narrator, he is rather like U.R. Ananthamurthy in Samskara (1965), for both the novelists grew up in highly orthodox, custom-bound communities, worked out their own salvation through high academic achievements, and then proceeded to portray their native communities with an intimate inwardness while also offering a trenchant critique of them. In phrases often used by Ananthamurthy regarding his own practice, Jha too was a critical insider or an insider–outsider.

Themes and Structure

The main theme which Jha depicts and excoriates in The Bride is that of ill-matched marriages. But as the structure of the novel is loosely episodic rather than organically well-knit and the tone of the novel largely comic and at places even farcical, there is plenty of room for the narrator to target several other social evils along the way and even to insert some set-pieces in a spirit of (what Bakhtin called) ‘carnivalesque’ creative exuberance, just for fun and the general entertainment of the reader. As a result, The Bride is first and foremost a lively and enjoyable narrative and only then a reformist intervention. That may account for its enduring appeal even today when the issues it dealt with have lost their urgent topicality.

The twelve chapters of the novel range over various locales and groups of characters. After the village which is the main setting of the novel and the would-be bride and her close women relatives have been introduced to us in the opening chapter, chapters 2, 3 and 4 take us on a widespread run around, to a marriage market, a nearby town, and aboard a steamer and a train. Through all these adventures, the main plot is not much advanced but ancillary situations and characters are deployed to reveal various aspects of contemporary rural life and its beliefs, superstitions and customary practices. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 then cut away to reveal to us the prospective bridegroom with all his newly acquired Western ways and views. This sets up a nice contrast between what are virtually two worlds and worldviews—the traditional, uneducated, ‘organic community’ which seems contented enough with the customary gender roles prevalent within it, and the Westernized, anglicized aspirational individual who seeks that brave new thing called a companionate marriage.

The Plot within the Plot

In the section that follows, comprising chapters 8, 9 and 10, we have a plot within the plot through which the unsuspecting groom finds himself wedded to the wrong girl, in more senses than one. In the end, chapters 11 and 12 reveal the denouement which turns out—against the run of the comic vein of the novel until this point—to be a catastrophe. In Jha’s depiction, it is difficult to say who is left more devastated at the end, the bride or the bridegroom. Few readers could have seen this coming, especially after the trick played on the groom by ‘The Girl in the Pink Sari’ in chapter 9, a trick so thoroughly charming while it is being executed that for it to lead to anything but a happy ending feels like a betrayal, not only to the bridegroom but perhaps equally to the unsuspecting reader.

If Jha intended to signal here any dramatic irony (through which the reader is let in on what is going on but the characters are not), it is obscured by the consummate ease with which the girl in the pink sari accomplishes her devious purpose. Indeed, many readers may be left wondering how a ‘stunningly beautiful’, clever, Hindi-speaking girl like her can happily inhabit the same remote village and live under the same roof as the ignorant Buchia, and how it is that none of her sterling qualities seem to have rubbed off at all on her poor sister-in-law.

All these complications derive from what may be called Jha’s double vision and extensive authorial sympathy through which he can see both sides of the picture and has, so to say, an empathetic foot in each camp. This is also what makes him leave a small window of a potential happy ending which may be realized some time after the novel ends, possibly in a sequel (as indeed it did). The distressed bridegroom about to flee writes in the letter he leaves behind:

I promise to remain a lifelong celibate … As long as I live, I will strive to reform the lives of women … If I could effectively rescue even a single girl of my country from the bondage of ignorance and superstition, I shall consider my life successful.

This kindles the hope that after Mister Mishra has cooled off and the bride’s folks too have shown signs of due repentance, a reconciliation may be effected. Mishra has resolved to attempt to ‘rescue even a single girl’ from her backwardness, and there is no reason why he should not choose Buchia as the first beneficiary of his noble plan of action. After all, charity is known often to begin at home.

The reincarnation of Kanyadan in English as The Bride nine decades after its publication in Maithili testifies to its enduring value. So does the fact that it is the first Maithili novel to be translated into English. By a happy circumstance, the translator