http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?225730

RESIDENT UPITES insist that they are pan-Indian: ‘The Hindustani man’. That they have little in common except accidental geography. But they readily admit to one binding feature. As Avinash Pandey Samar, a research scholar at JNU, puts it, “The first characteristic is the huge sense of relief all UPites feel about not being Biharis.” It hurts the UPite’s sense of self to find himself lumped with the Biharis by non-UPites. To the rest of India, UP, Bihar, and parts of Madhya Pradesh, Delhi and Haryana are one big ‘Bhaiyya’ blob – the guy who abandons the mofussil mitti, to trundle into metros without the assurance of a bed to dream in.

http://www.tehelka.com/story_main43.asp?filename=hub270210the_bhaiyya.asp

Bit tongue-in-cheek and over the top in places (teens these days on Lucknow campuses may well indulge in “gang-war” or as we call it ‘student politics, but very few of them will complement this by reciting Faiz to their pretty classmates; very few kids these days read Faiz) but conveys the basic idea.

If the novel is indeed trying to set up a conversation with Hindi literature and IWE in this way, where the trajectory of the Indian-English novel and its ‘translated’ aesthetic is towards the provincial place rather than the metropolitan reader, it would be an interesting, fresh way out to think through, and past authenticity traps or the location angst and translation quibbles that are the gatekeepers of Indian literary criticism. The thing is, we don’t even have a conceptual space and vocabulary to discuss and theorize such moves within the rubric of Indian literature in terms of these creative transactions, because linguistic hierarchies and compartments are so sharp and dominated by overt and often puerile political or national/regional questions. Placing an English novel within an ‘aanchalik’ discussion would make little sense to readers of a contemporary English review of this book in either newsmagazines or classrooms because very few would know the history and layered meanings of that term within Hindi literature, or be interested in integrating it into a more nuanced understanding of Indian writing. Those who would, esp. in a Hindi litt. classroom, would probably, as things stand, have little reason or use for a discussion of such a novel for their own critical or creative purposes. How many people read both, and are interested in bringing both discourses together? I am reminded of Bhalchandra Nemade’s polemical formulation of ‘deshivaad’ within Marathi literature a few decades ago, which also has considerable value, if critically fleshed out, for thinking about literary fidelity to place, to lived experience and ‘the real’ in all Indian writing, but it has consistently been watered down in Marathi criticism to a kind of knee-jerk nativism, and used to police the credentials of those who write bilingually, or are interested in supra-local spaces and imaginaries – like Kiran Nagarkar and Arun Kolatkar. In English surveys of “regional literature” Bhalchandra Nemade only serves as an enfant terrible supplier of angry, resentful soundbites about how bhasha literatures are ignored at the expense of ‘rootless’ IWE.

Still, it seems to me that drawing on such cross-literary categories and efforts is also closer to the actual history of modern Indian literatures, which have been aware of, and drawn on ideas and themes from each other and from Western ones. Can criticism and sheer awareness of such interventions in different languages – through bilingual journals, conferences, critical vocabularies – attempt to bridge this gap a little, or is the burden on IWE creative writers to further the conversation with bhasha literatures? The question, of course, is hardly limited only to fiction…

http://epw.in/epw/uploads/articles/14459.pdf

I think Nitish Kumar is a relatively decent politician (by Indian standards) and is making a go of it. He passed over appointing one of his own relatives as Chief Secretary, 2 years ago, (an individual who was an outstanding IAS officer) and this is unheard of in a place like Bihar as you can imagine. Unfortunately, it seems to be too little, too late really; though after the bifurcation; most of the worst problems are now to be found in Jharkhand.

As another aside, with Lapata’s comment about prejudice towards Biharis and Bihari jokes; this seems less common to me now than say 20 years ago – or it could just be my perceptions but the use of language still reflects this kind of attitude towards Bihar. Peter Gottschalk in his book “Beyond Hindu and Muslim” recounts how ‘going to Bihar’ among the villagers he was with in UP, was slang for engaging in gay sex, the view being that any deviant sexual activity naturally had to be normal in a place like Bihar. I always enjoyed telling this to me Bihari friends and watching them convulse with rage :D

This is a repeated claim and in many ways true; and I speak as someone who has a lot of connections with Bihar, my mother was born there, and her family lived there for many years and I grew up there as she was allocated to the Bihar cadre in the civil service. My Hindi is very much shot through with Bihari colloquialisms, which tend to elicit a fair amount of laughter (much of which is good-natured it must be said) when I moved to Delhi. The prevailing attitude towards Bihar and Biharis was as you describe, always seen as a den of casteism, corruption and violence. However, the more time I spent in other parts of India, in places like UP, Haryana, Rajasthan and MP; the less this rang true. There seems to be little difference in these terms between much of UP, especially Purvanchal and Bihar; police corruption, brutality and the lack of order in the countryside don’t seem much different; the abuse of power by scions of the ruling establishment are as apparent in places like Haryana (those who have had the misfortune to come across them will attest to this) as in Bihar and as for things like dacoity or crime; well one only needs to go to the outskirts of Delhi, in places like Ghaziabad after dark to see the problems here. More and more, there always seemed to be something uncomfortable about such assertions regarding Bihar; as if there was a determination to show that however bad things were there, it wasn’t as bad as Bihar and part was the metropolitan fantasy that actually only in lawless backwaters like Bihar is the situation like this and is not the norm for most of India. Periodically of course this breaks down, as whenever advocates decide to go on a rampage, destroying court property and battling it out with the police or when disputes over scheduled status between caste/tribal groups like the Meenas and Gujjars can bring large parts of the NCT’s hinterland to a standstill. While there is an underlying realisation that the problems of Bihar, are really the problems of most of India; it still serves as a reassuring ideological deflection to be held up as the ultimate metaphor or symbol of what is worst. This along with the fact that, the Hindi belt actually contains a huge chunk of the population, probably makes it perhaps a little different from what ‘flyover’ country would normally mean in the US.

I enjoyed the article very much, though I felt you were somewhat harsh on Dubey’s character – is it really that he has only the dimmest idea of what realism is, or is it that along with so many Hindi cinema viewers, he cannot bear to have to watch it?