Of Departures and Farewells: Life in a Civil Lines Bungalow in Allahabad, 1947

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• published: 17 Dec 2015
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http://southasia.berkeley.edu/ Though it spans the months between spring 1947 and summer 1948, Gunahon ke Devata or The God of Vice, the 1949 work that was to become a cult novel for successive generations of North Indian youth, makes no mention of independence or of the cataclysmic violence of partition. However, it is also no simple tale of thwarted love. Written by the twenty-three year old Dharmvir Bharati, a renegade from the Progressive- Socialist writers’ camp, it is part of the bitter culture wars that set in with the Cold War, and the programmatic feuds that would ultimately partition the Hindi literati in Allahabad and beyond. The departures and farewells that I will speak of in my talk will have as much to do with these culture wars as with the novel’s setting in a colonial Civil Lines bungalow in Allahabad and the Indian Professor’s family that live in it. Vasudha Dalmia is Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Hindi and Modern South Asian Studies. She is on the Advisory Committee of the Group in Religious Studies, of which she has also been Director, and she is a member of the core faculty of the PhD Program in Performance Studies. The body of her work may be described as the study of cultural formations, grouped around four broad thematic clusters: the politics of religious discourse, transitional cultural phenomena of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, the politics of the literature of the new nation-state, particularly of modern Indian theatre, and studies of the position of women in these transitions. Her monograph, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu Harischandra and Nineteenth Century Benaras (1997), studies the life and writings of a major Hindi writer of the nineteenth century as the focal point for an examination of the intricate links between politics, language, culture, religion, and nationality. Her work on drama, Poetics, Plays and Performances: The Politics of Modern Indian Theatre (2006), traces the genealogies of theatre as it sought to constitute itself anew after independence. Of her edited works, Hindi Modernism: Rethinking Agyeya and his Times (2012) appeared most recently.