INDIAN SHORT STORIES IN GERMAN

TRANSLATION *

KLAUS BECHTLOFF

Books shall be an axe for the frozen sea in us, said Kafka. We need this axe from time to time, for we have always a strong tendency to choose the easy way, to walk, as it were, on the solid ice and to avoid what is flowing, ever In motion: life. We are too quick in closing the files on the reality around us and looking at our tentative explanations and interpretations as definite truth. But suddenly we must realize that the whole world around us, rich in strange and alluring detail until then, has become uniform and dull. Our thought and our impulse to discover ever-new details has to be set in motion every now and then. For which, we might go out travelling, or start reading a new book.

It is with a feeling of gratitude that I close the German anthology of modern Indian short stories, [*Der Sprechende Pflug. Indien in Erzahulungen Seiner Besten Zeitgenossischen Autoren] (The Talking Plough. India in the stories of her best contemporary

authors, edited and selected by W. A. Oerley and published by, Horst Erdmann Verlag, Herrenalb, W. Germany.) Gratitude because the ice is broken and my ideas about India have once again been changed and set in motion.

W. A. Oerley, the editor of this volume, who has also translated a good number of these short stories into German, has done a good job of work, on the whole, The book comprises 34 stories of Indian authors born between 1861 and 1928. Besides the biographical data of all the 34 authors, we have here a glossary explaining in German some specific Indian words. All important Indian languages are represented, but unfortunately many translions are secondhand, from English. Is it so difficult to obtain direct translations into German? The four Dravidian languages are not sufficiently represented, the emphasis being laid on Bengali, Hindi, English and Gujarati authors. It seems, however, that the publisher, Horst Erdmann, is aware of this defect, for he announced during his visit to Madras in 1967 the publication of a new collection, which will take into account a larger number of authors representing the South Indian languages.

Spiritual encounter with modern India: this is the declared purpose of this book. This aim obviously guided the selecting process. Only stories which deal with modern India were chosen. We have to commend this intention, for due to the traditional attitude of German indology we know more about ancient India’s culture than about modern India. Apart from very few stories the literary standard is rather high, especially Buddhadeva Bose’s Wir Drei (We Three), Yashpal’s Der Vorhang (The Curtain) and Niranjan S. Phadke’s Das Buch (The Book). We don’t find experimental story-writing in this anthology. Does it exist in India? Anyway, the documentary purpose of the selection is better served by a literary approach, which does not question reality and the representation of it.

Let me now try to describe briefly my impressions after reading this book. For it might be of some interest to the Indian public to know how his country is looked upon by a foreigner.

There is, first of all, the great importance which is still given to religion. Mysticism is still alive. In Saradindu Bannerji’s Das Gottliche Bildnis (The Divine Image), two men with modern education experience the mysterious power of a Buddha image in the Himalayas. This story is full of romanticism and has rather naive and adventurous elements: the India of “Tom, Dick and Harry”, we are tempted to say, where miracles and other supernatural events are facts of daily life to be reckoned with. But the author of another story, Prabodh Kumar Sanyal, in Eine Tugendhafte Frau (A Virtuous Woman)–where a woman, during a pilgrimage in Nepal, has a mysterious encounter with the divinity, leaves the interpretation of the mystery to us, the readers. This seems to me a more sincere approach to religion, by which the subjectivity of belief is admitted.

In most of the cases, religion is seen in its confrontation with modernity. As it is closely linked with the traditional social order, this confrontation can easily become a contradiction. Industrialisation, rural exodus and class struggle enter into the seemingly peaceful life in the small towns and villages. And. on the horizon a powerful danger to rural peace can be seen: the big city. The young Adivasi who broke away from the old beliefs and Customs of his village might be looked upon as a criminal by the villagers and by the author, Tarasankar Bannerji in Der Steinerne Thron (The Throne of Stone) but that does not alter the fact that he is the only character in this story who has to suffer Psychologically from the changes caused by a modernizing civilisation. If Bannerji seems still to be guided by a certain admiration of the traditional order, Mulk Raj Anand in Der Traktor und die Getreidegottin (The Tractor and the Goddess of Corn) shows in a knowing and humorous manner how an idealistic zamindar succeeds in modernising his land and the minds of the peasants working on it. He chooses the Gandhian way in implementing the revolution: the threatened outbreak of violent clashes is overcome by means of persuasion. Superstition disappears. Humour and wisdom, too put an end to superstition in Tagore’s Das Horoskop (The Horoscope), a story full of the atmosphere of tenderness and restrained passion. Here all the conflicts, not only that of traditional order and modern enlightenment, are embraced by the atmosphere of safety, which is given by the “home” and the family. On the other hand, however, this organic order, far from suppressing the individual, seems to live, with the conflicts quivering beneath its surface. In this work of Tagore, the Mahatma’s way of facing and solving conflicts seems to me exemplified most clearly: there is a profound belief in the ultimate victory of goodwill, reason, humour and wisdom.

But we get acquainted with the reverse also: the uncompromising delineation of misery, poverty, sickness and death in the stories of Bhabani Bhattacharya, Bisham Sahni, Yashpal, Arvind Gokhale, Achintya Kumar Sen Gupta and S. K. Pottekatt. In Frigen (Figs), by B. Bhattacharya, young boys, who, in normal conditions, should be playmates, become almost like wild animals due to hunger. Childhood and youth are their years of hopelessness and distress, yet still, even in that situation without escape, there is a manifestation of humanity, friendship and self-denial. In the other stories, however, this last assertion of human values does not express itself in the form of resistance to misery. Poverty, hunger and humiliation there are no longer mere proofs, by which the human dignity is rendered evident or even glorified but quite the opposite: conditions by which the human dignity is destroyed and gets lost. The downfall of a high class family in a society without bottom in Yashpal’s Der Vorhang (The Curtain) reveals existing conditions for the slow pauperization, degradation and defiguration of man. Chowduri Pirbux, a rather insignificant average man, who is so proud of his “noble” descent, his white shirt and, above all, a precious curtain, the symbol of his noble origin, at the end lies in the mud, in the slums before the feet of a little usurer, his wire and daughters covering shamefully their nakedness. The permanent and irresistible decline of this man is full of symbolic power, also because of the laconic and almost documentary style.

There are other delineations of poverty like, for instance, Achintya Kumar Sen Gupta’s Der Bambustrick (The Bamboo-Trick) or Bisham Sahni’s Der Preis Eines Huhns (The Price of a Chicken) which are as uncompromising as Yashpal’s story, but their effect is somehow blunted, because they appeal to our sense of pity and are not so objective as the dispassionate “report” of Yashpa1.

It is a long procession of Indian characters, which passes in front of us. The strange but deeply human ambitions of an old woman mourner of Gujarat, for instance, and her tragic breakdown after having been displaced by a younger rival. Here again, a realistically narrated destiny of an individual becomes transparent and something like a parable of general human significance. Satire is represented in the enjoyable story of a rickshaw-man who lets down a fatuous and conceited civil servant (by Upendra Nath Ashk) or in Humayun Kabir’s Prestige, where an orthodox and extremely narrow-minded Muslim is given the “run-around” by his clever young wife. We see a Brahmin widow, full of her inherited centuries-old hauteur, who nevertheless is overcome by humanity, when she is confronted with the distress of a dark-skinned child from the lowest of social classes. We get a glimpse of the words of Tamil and Malayali farmers, and that of cabmen in Maharashtra, of westernised Bengali intellectuals. The women characters deserve a special essay all to themselves. In general and especially in the traditional sectors of the society they are underprivileged. Is it for that reason that they attract the sympatby of the authors? Again and again, their courage, their readiness for self-sacrifice, their absolute devotion, but also sometimes, their astute shrewdness, is depicted. We see Indians in their families, in their marriages, in their work, in their passions and despair: we see the eternal human comedy in all its variety and with all its possibilities in India, and when we close the book, after the last story, we know more about this country than any learned thesis or analysis could have told us.

If the present selection is representative, Indian story-writing seems to be characterised by a profound belief in the “wholeness” of man. There is no psychological analysis, worth nothing, nor the torments of self-observation and self-analysis; ambiguity in language is not there either, but it seems to be the hidden aim of many a writer to make out and to confirm the integrity of human nature, especially among the unsophisticated, poor, insignificant people. In this tendency to discover the beauty and dignity of those whose life is lustreless consists the highest value of many of these stories.

It is in this general assertion of human “wholeness” and dignity, in this almost complete absence of analysis and absolute scepticism that we recognise the persistent Indian tradition. I could best sum up my impression of the story-writing in India, as represented in this selection, as a sort of cautious stock-taking of the Indian reality on the basis of an undoubted faith in man.

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