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Pain Of An Unfinished Matter

There is no major complication or conflict that would have shaken the novel to life.

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Pain Of An Unfinished Matter
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One of the pleasures of reading this translated version of a Hindi classic is that it does not read like a translation. It happens often that the translator is comfortable with one language and not the other. Happily, Poonam Sax­ena is at ease in both Hindi and English and has steered away from a literal translation of Dharamvir Bha­rti’s famous novel. Instead, she has captured its spirit and essence in her own words. It’s a delightful read.

Gunahon ka Devta was written in 1949 when the author was just 23 and fresh out of college. The novel was an instant success and over the years it has gained a cult following, especially among the young, and has gone through over a hundred reprints. Bharti, who died in 1997, was also a celebrated poet and playwright. He did a long stint as editor of Dharamyug, now defunct, the leading Hindi weekly magazine of its time and a companion to Illustrated Weekly in Times of India’s stable.

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The novel is set in Allahabad at a time when it was an idyllic provincial town. The residents took morning walks in Alfred Park, drank sherbet on hot summer afternoons and young men and women read poetry to each other in the evenings. There were no telephones in homes to distract them. There was little by way of entertainment besides cinema. Bharti’s story revolves around two such people. Chander, mild-mannered and bright, is the favourite student of Professor Shukla and through him he meets his attractive young daughter, Sudha. Chander does various errands for the family and has easy access to their home. Chander and Sudha fall in love. It is passionate but it is also chaste. We are in a different, more innocent time.

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Chander is the ‘devta’ of the original title. His ‘gunahen’ include not having the courage to propose marriage to the only woman he loved. When Sudha marries another man of her father’s choosing and of her caste, she is miserable. He falls to pieces and has an affair with another woman, Pammi. It is here that the author stumbles. Bharti choo­ses to portray Pammi as a Christian and an Anglo-Indian. It’s a gratuitous slur on a community; the implication here is that a Hindu woman would not have been capable of an affair.

My second problem with the novel is that the lives of Chander and Sudha flow too smoothly, from their first meeting to the tragic end, with only hiccups along the way. The story does not have a middle; there is no major complication or conflict in the lives of Chander and Sudha that would have shaken the novel to life. It stays at one level throughout. That was perhaps the reason why a novel that was so hugely popular could not be made into a film. Otherwise, a young Meena Kumari or Jaya Bhaduri would have made a terri­fic Sudha.

Still, Chander and Sudha beautifully captures the ethos of life in a large provincial town with its old world courtesies and restrictive social norms. It was an era when the middle class lived comfortably in sprawling bungalows and yet travelled second class on trains, when it was common for the husband to be fed first before the wife ate. To use a cliche, it was a way of life that has gone with the wind.

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