Rereading Renu’s Parti Parikatha: How A ‘Fallow Land’ Still Shapes Bihar

Parti Parikatha is a landmark Hindi novel by Phanishwar Nath “Renu”, one of India’s greatest subaltern writers—a small, indebted farmer, who even added “Renu” (debtor) to his name as a quiet, permanent protest.

At its heart, Parti Parikatha is a many-voiced portrait of a region and its people, scarred by the Kosi river and by history, yet still dreaming of renewal. The novel is set in and around Paranpur and the wider Kosi plains, once lush and water-rich, now suffocated by silt after the river suddenly changed course.

Renu describes this landscape as a kind of “corpse of the earth”—cracked and dry, like the back of a tortoiseshell, fields buried, ponds vanished, livelihoods destroyed. Over this ruined ground float memories, myths, and rumours that refuse to die.

Balladeers, birds, and a wandering buffalo-herder keep alive an old, sacred legend of Kosi maiya, the insulted daughter-in-law who storms out of her husband’s house. Her rage unleashes floods that destroy villages, and her tears, blessed by her gentle stepsister Dulari Dai, promise that life and greenery will one day return.

Around this myth cluster smaller tales.

Panduki, the poor rice-thresher who loses her son Jeetu before she can finish his beloved fairy-tale. She is now the stranded Himalayan bird calling out across the sandbanks for a child who has been swallowed by poverty, migration, or the river.

The land itself is waiting for a story to be completed. From this legendary past, the narrative moves into contemporary Paranpur, a once-prosperous village, now riven by caste politics, land disputes, and broken institutions.

A mammoth land-survey is underway, with the purpose of redistributing land owned by the big landlords to those who have tilled the soil. It triggers an explosion of “claims”, court cases, and betrayals. Brothers disown each other, daughters-in-law break purdah to fight in court, and poor sharecroppers struggle to use a law that is supposed to give them rights but is easily twisted by big farmers and the local elite.

Renu shows, with tenderness and sharp irony, that it is not only the land that has become barren, but also culture and community life. The village library shuts down. Theatre troupes disband. Festivals become smaller. People stop gathering to listen to Ramayan recitations or folk dramas.

They meet instead as clients of politicians, debtors of moneylenders, or opponents in court. The public sphere of songs, stories, and shared emotion has been replaced by a cynical marketplace of votes and bribes.

We meet the eccentric landlord Jitendranath Mishra (Jittan Babu), the last scion of Paranpur Haveli, who has returned from the city with paintings, books, and a confused sense of responsibility.

Then there is Bhimmal mama, the village gossip-philosopher; Luttoo, the sharp but humiliated party worker from a stigmatised caste; moneylenders, teachers, poets, small farmers, petty officials and countless others whose lives intersect around land and power.

Two outsiders look at the landscape differently. Bhavesh Nath, a young photographer, studies the textures of the soil and remembers the Tennessee Valley Authority documentary where hydropower made land fertile again. He imagines a technology that could turn this “dead” region into a rainbow of fields and factories.

Surpati Rai, a researcher compiling the stories of riverside ghats, discovers old letters and folk songs (including traces of Mrs Rosewood, an Englishwoman who collected songs decades earlier) and realises that the true history of the land lives in oral tales, not official records.

A counter-project emerges. Jittan recognises that the deepest loss is not only material but communal. It’s the disappearance of shared spaces where people can meet as human beings rather than as castes or clients. Nudged by Bhavesh, Surpati, and allies like Iravati, a civil society activist, and Raja Kamrupnarayan, an engineer, he seeks to “re-link the broken circle” by reviving a people’s stage, the Lokmanch.

Together they create a new play that stitches everything together. The legend of Kosi maiya and Dulari Dai, Panduki and Jeetu’s unfinished fairy-tale, the dream of a dam and a just land reform, and the lived agony of the villagers.

In the climactic performance, tractors and bulldozers roar across the stage. The barren sandbanks are transformed into fields of colour. For one charged evening, villagers forget their divisions and see themselves as part of a single, wounded but living community.

Panduki’s lost Jeetu “wakes” inside the drama; and villagers are briefly united in awe. For a moment, the parched “corpse” of the earth becomes fallow, not dead, but resting, swelling with the promise of new birth.

The novel does not offer an easy happy ending. Caste hierarchies, greed, state neglect, and party politics still hover over everything. Yet the shift from describing the land as a corpse to recognising it as fallow is crucial. A corpse is beyond saving. Fallow land is resting, storing strength for a future crop.

Renu suggests that the transformation from corpse to fallow depends less on government schemes alone and more on people reclaiming their own stories, songs, and stages. The tale suggests that through collective memory and people’s art, a different future can be imagined. One in which the land and its people are no longer abandoned, but slowly coaxed back to life.

I was sitting in my father’s house in Forbesganj, a small town in north Bihar, near the Kosi river, working through my English translation of Renu’s 1957 novel, when the election results came in. The television in the next room glows with maps in saffron and green. The 2025 results show the National Democratic Alliance sweeping 202 of 243 seats.

TV debates from Delhi; local channels interviewing migrant workers at bus stands; TikTok videos of young Bihari women mocking every party; slogans shouted in Bhojpuri, Maithili, Urdu, Hindi, create a polyphony. But at the end of the election, all that noise is compressed into one number per constituency: a single winner, everyone else marked “lost”, no matter how loudly their supporters sang.

From my desk, the numbers felt both important and oddly beside the point. What stays in my mind is not the exact seat tally but the texture of this election: the stories of first-time women voters who had to fight with their husbands to go to the booth; the images of elderly people turned away because their names had vanished from the electoral rolls; the quiet anger about unemployment that runs through so many interviews; and the way caste loyalties and aspirational dreams both bend and reinforce each other.

Commentators talk of a “beneficiary bloc”, of women voters lining up in record numbers, of schemes that brought cash transfers to them. Another segment notes the lowest number of Muslim MLAs in decades. The state I grew up in looks, on that screen, both rewarded and narrowed.

A notification popped up: “RJD wins largest vote share, but few seats.” In other words, one party had more votes, another had more power. It is this double exposure that pulled me back to Parti Parikatha. I thought of a line from my translator’s notebook: In Renu’s Bihar, numbers never tell the whole story. The khatauni, the land record, is always already a lie.

The elections and the translation kept interrupting each other, like two tabs on the same browser. The TV anchors loved the phrase—“Bihar ne raasta dikhaya hai” (Bihar has shown the way). They said it about the turnout, about the NDA’s margin, and about the humiliation of the new Jan Suraaj Party, which contested almost the entire state and didn’t win a single seat.

A YouTuber gently explained that an old woman, eighty-five-year-old Jitni Devi, had been dropped from the voter rolls by “mistake”. The reporter found her sitting outside a closed polling booth, Aadhaar card in hand.

In Parti Parikatha, too, Bihar is always “showing the way”. For better and for worse. The abolition of zamindari is not a triumphant march towards equality. It is a slow, uneven process, resisted, gamed, and appropriated by those who already have power.

The book is polyphonic in the deepest sense. It’s a village full of clashing and overlapping voices. Renu works across (at least) eight distinct linguistic registers—from standard Hindi, Bengali, Nepali, English and Sanskrit, to Maithili, Bhojpuri and Thethi, the local dialects of the Kosi belt.

To the mix he adds English words as phonetically used by the local villagers from the bureaucratic jargon of land-survey officials and used by the media. The high, incantatory language of epic Sanskrit and the sharp slogans of party politics, along with the romantic idiom of film songs and Urdu-inflected love lyrics, are all seamlessly melded in dialogue and descriptions.

These voices belong to many communities—upper-caste landlords, de-notified and marginalised groups, small peasants, itinerant performers, and migrant workers. And they bring with them their own proverbs, swear words, prayer formulas, and ways of naming the world.

The novel is also steeped in seasonal, cultural, and agricultural references. The timing of floods and droughts, the sowing and harvesting of different crops, the names of local winds and minor deities, and the precise feel of a winter fog or a pre-monsoon dust storm. Festivals, wedding songs, folk remedies, the smell of stored grain and rotting silt are woven into the narrative so that the reader inhabits not just a plot but an entire ecosystem of life.

Caste is neither slogan nor metaphor. It is the way people are arranged in space. It is what you can drink and whom you can marry; how you get beaten and who will or will not testify for you. It is whether you own land or only your own body. It is geography, economics and theology in one word.

What makes this novel unlike any other I know is the fineness of its caste-grain. Renu doesn’t say “upper caste” and “lower caste” and leave it there. He names, with almost ethnographic stubbornness, dozens of groups: Brahmin and Bhumihar, Kayasth and Rajput, Raidas and Chamar, Kurmi and Yadav, Dhobi and Nai, Nat and Khawās, Muslims and Bengalis, Solkanhs and Babus. You feel that if one of these vanished, the village’s balance would shift.

In an unforgettable scene, Pandit Sarabjeet Chaubey, the Thakurbari priest, has reinvented himself as the leader of 4,000 Solkanhs. He is a man now backed by Luttoo, a political fixer, and Birbhaddar Babu, a landlord. He leads the villagers to a field and commands them to moo like cows—“Baa-aa-aa”—twenty times. Each moo, he says, will transfer the sin of cow slaughter onto Jittan.

And what is Jittan’s sin? Rashly, bravely, he believes that the tools of the new India can repair the damage of the old.

He has gone out, studied, seen tractors and turbines and neat diagrams. He has read the Gazette notifications and the tenancy laws with a student’s fervour. He studies old documents and convinces surveyors to come and mark a proposed canal that will carry the Kosi’s water into Dulari Dai, the old dry stream. He offers up his own family’s land first. He drives his tractor over plots the village has long kept untouched. He tells sharecroppers they can claim rights if they have tilled a field for three years.

Where the big landlords see the reforms, they are scared. Where the poor see a river as either goddess or calamity, he sees water that can be guided. Caste arranges who sits on the charpai and who on the floor, who draws water from which well, who may touch whose food, and whose evidence counts in a dispute.

Renu sketches the hierarchy with cruel clarity. There is Gurbanshi Babu with his 10,000 bighas of land and two airplanes; Bhola Babu with 15,000 bighas and 18 tractors; in this company, a man with 500 bighas is considered “small.” These are the people who have long treated flood as a kind of harvest: compensation money, relief contracts, and cheap labour fleeing to their safer lands.

For them, Jittan’s vision of dams on the Kosi and canals through the fallow stretches is dangerous precisely because it promises enough: enough water for small farmers to grow their own grain, enough food that people do not have to work on others’ terms, enough security that migration becomes a choice, not a sentence. An irrigated village is a less obedient village.

They do not oppose him directly. That would be vulgar. They have other tools.

One tool is crime. Men like Luttoo and Garuddhuj Jha, half-henchman, half-politician, orbit the big landlords like moons. They have a gift for locating a fear and sharpening it. When Jittan drives his tractor over “old barren land”, they insist it is an insult to tradition. When he explains the Kosi project will require some land to be submerged but will save much more, they whisper: “First they take your land, then they make you coolies on the dam.”

The priest who invokes Ram Lalla’s dream, claims that breaking the earth is like driving a knife into the mother cow’s stomach. Some men moo out of genuine fear, some out of habit, some because everyone else is doing it and they don’t dare be the one who stands silent.

Poor men, who stand to gain most from irrigation, are persuaded that acting like cows on command will save them from a sin invented for the occasion. It is a grotesque little drama of scapegoating. Even though the whole thing is stage-managed by the priest and the landlords behind him, the sound is real: a human chorus coaxed into animal shape.

The episode of the cows’ chorus is comic on the surface and terrifying underneath. It would be farce if it weren’t so familiar. The language—cow, womb, sin, sacrilege—could drift almost unchanged into certain speeches in our present, only the microphones and cameras upgraded.

What interests me, translating the scene, is how easily the poor are persuaded to act against their own material interests. The very people who would benefit most from irrigation are led into a performance that condemns it as an attack on the sacred.

Trusting the state means unlearning generations of experience in which power always had a local address: the landlord’s veranda, the moneylender’s table, the priest’s sanctum. Trusting Jittan requires unlearning the sentence written deep inside so many in Bihar: hum chhote log hain—we are small people. We must not ask for much.

If the rich oppose Jittan because he threatens their control, the poor sometimes oppose him because hope itself has become dangerous. When you have built your life around the idea that nothing will change, a person who says “it can” can feel almost like an enemy.

But Renu, and through him Jittan, trusts the villagers’ intelligence more than this moment suggests. As the crowd is busy mooing, a government drumbeat sounds from another part of the village, announcing that unploughed land will be taken over by the state.

Suddenly the priest’s spectacle looks foolish. “What is the point of mooing now?” someone says. “See, that is why Jittan Babu took the tractor through that land a month ago. He is so smart.”

The priest, who a moment ago loomed large, shrinks. It is the first small victory: superstition punctured not by an argument from atheism, but by an argument from survival.

At the same moment, far away, a young scientist in the irrigation department spreads a map and explains how diverting the Kosi’s water into the dry streambed of Dulari Dai could irrigate thousands of acres and save 200 villages.

The villagers must learn to read both the engineer’s diagram and the priest’s parable, and decide whose story to believe. One character says: “To make society more humane and to make humans more socially aware is the only path to liberation.”

Reading this in the week when social media overflows with memes about “gau raksha” and temples, and when major parties in Bihar still flirt with communal dog whistles, the scene feels less like a relic and more like a script. Migrants still leave; floods still come; and caste still structures opportunity like a shadow map over the official one.

But the land is not dead. It keeps sending up shoots: girls insisting on finishing school; women’s collectives starting micro-businesses; young men using their precarious lives in the Gulf or Gurgaon to fund a sibling’s education back home. Some of these stories find their way into parties’ manifestos and slogans; many do not.

What will matter even more, five or ten years from now, is what happens between elections: in the way land is irrigated or not; in whether a flood compensation cheque arrives; in whether a girl in the Kosi belt can finish school and choose her own future. These are the stories Renu chronicled; these are the stories that will test this “historic” mandate.

The Kosi belt that he had written about was parched, barren, and cracked like the back of a tortoise shell. It is now a patchwork of green. The mandi exports multiple crops, trucks bulging with grain. There are more pucca roads, more motorcycles, more mobile towers.

The Kosi is still dangerous, but embankments and canals have changed its behaviour. Girls from red-light areas, whom my organisation works with, now reach for smartphones and karate belts as well as schoolbooks.

The fairytale is not that caste vanishes or the Kosi is tamed forever. It is that once—just once—in a village on that river’s edge, people pushed against the way they had been sorted. They stopped mooing long enough to listen to a government notice. They watched themselves on a stage and found themselves ridiculous and brave. They chose to see their land as fallow, not wasted; themselves as capable of change, not condemned to the roles their names and their landlords had assigned them.

They did it once. That is the story Renu leaves us.

Yet, I also see old inequalities hardening in new forms: coaching-centre capitalism, WhatsApp-fuelled hate, and the monetisation of every government benefit into electoral currency.

In this Bihar election, women appeared as a decisive force, their higher turnout credited with delivering the NDA its crushing victory. Many of those women are the daughters and granddaughters of Renu’s Harijan labourers, sharecroppers, and midwives. They are beneficiaries of schemes, and bearers of memory. They will remember who treated them as full citizens or as disposable vote banks.

Paranpur’s mooing men stand behind today’s selfie-taking crowds at rallies. The priest with his theatrics stands behind certain mooing loudspeakers.

Jittan’s bruised, stubborn idealism stands behind the question I keep asking: who, in this present Bihar, dares to see land and people as fallow, full of possibility, rather than wasted or disposable?

The irony, reading the novel in 2025, is that the Kosi belt has already lived that shift. The same region that appears in Parti Parikatha as exhausted and flood-scarred is today one of the most fertile stretches of India, with multiple crops, big mandis, and endless lines of trucks hauling grain. And thanks to the barrages and canals that Jittan Babu dreamed of.

Yes, the floods continue but not with the same persistent, devastating effect. Dams, barrages, and embankments restrain what they can of the river. A network of canals and channels carries her water across fields instead of letting it loose over homes.

Officers open and close sluices to irrigate the land and to release or hold back water without drowning their villages. Pipes and tubewells take water to every home and poles take electricity to every village.

The “fallow” earth of Renu’s time did not remain barren; it remembered how to grow. When I go for a walk along the canal, I see green rice fields and fruit trees. When I go to his village, I see a forest growing on the red barren earth he had described.

When pundits speak of a “new caste” of welfare recipients, I think of Renu’s “new caste” of those who have learned to read the Gazette and the newspaper, who know Section 40 and who can dictate a telegram to Nehru. The lines may have shifted, but the work is the same: to turn subjects into citizens.

That is why though earlier translators had called the novel’s English title, Tale of a Wasteland and Story of the Barren Soil, I have chosen to interpret it as Fairytale of a Fallow Land.

My hope, as both activist and translator, is that Bihar can once again be that impossibly noisy village in Parti Parikatha: divided, yes, but still capable of coming together to demand irrigation for all, not just contracts for a few; to insist that rights are not favours, and that development is more than a slogan shouted from a stage.

Translating Renu in this moment is my way of refusing both easy despair and easy celebration. Every page I translate is my refusal to forget that. And every time I look up from the manuscript at the bright green fields and the trucks heading to the big mandi, I am reminded that the land, at least, believed them.

Ruchira Gupta is an emmy-winning documentarian, NYU professor & author of The Freedom Seeker & Kick And I Fly