Book review | The Bride: HarperCollins brings Harimohan Jha's magnum opus 'Kanyadan' to English readers

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century colonial India, numerous authors raised the issues of women’s education, ill matched marriages, structured gendered inequality, and the impact of modern education on society at large in their novels, short stories, and plays. In Maithili, a language spoken by millions in parts of Bihar and Nepal, the legendary novelist, Harimohan Jha contributed to this movement aimed at the empowerment of women and eradication of superstitious practices with the publication of Kanyadan (1933). The novel became instantly popular and went on to become an Indian classic. The first Maithili film titled Kanyadan (1965), directed by Phani Majumdar, was based on this novel. The acclaimed Hindi author Phanishwar Nath “Renu” had written dialogues for the film. Kanyadan tells the story of an ill-matched marriage between an English-educated young man C C Mishra and an unlettered country girl Buchia with robust humour. The novel not only becomes an authentic source for understanding the impact of colonial modernity on Bihar but also offers us a window to know in great detail the cultural distinctiveness of Mithila, such as Madhubani paintings, wedding songs, and Sabhagacchi – a centre of learning in pre-colonial times which was reduced to a marriage market. It is unfortunate that this historically important text of Indian literature was hitherto not available in English translation. [caption id=“attachment_12723002” align=“alignnone” width=“198”] The Bride: The Maithili Classic Kanyadan by Harimohan Jha| Lalit Kumar
Publisher: HarperCollins[/caption] Lalit Kumar has addressed this lacuna by bringing out an excellent and nuanced English translation of the book as The Bride with an enriching introduction that will be beneficial not only to general readers but also to the students and admirers of Indian literature, gender theorists and historians. Kumar’s second published translation, The Bride: The Maithili Classic Kanyadan has much less to do with dreams than with the cold, hard truths of life. Harimohan Jha, an extraordinary author of Maithili, which is the language of great Vidyapati and Jyotireshwar Thakur, was born on 18 September 1908, in the Vaishali district of Bihar. His father Pandit Janardan Jha “Jansidan” was a great scholar and is credited to be the first novelist in the Maithili language besides ushering it to the modern pattern of literary craft. Lalit Kumar has rightly pointed out in his introduction - “What Fakirmohan Senapati is to Odia literature, and Premchand is to Hindi literature, Harimohan Jha is to Maithili literature." Harimohan Jha studied English literature and philosophy at Patna University and went on to become a professor of philosophy there. He was a prolific author – a novelist, poet, satirist, and critic – who played an instrumental role in not only giving a new direction to prose in modern Maithili, but also came up with a penetrating critique of orthodoxy and obscurantism. Some of his prominents works that continue to fascinate critics and readers alike even today include Kanyadan, Dwiragman, Pranamya Devata,Khattar Kaaka’k Tarang and  his autobiography Jeevan Yatra for which he won the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award posthumously in 1984.   Celebrated as the “Vidyapati of modern Maithili prose”, Jha excoriates the decadent social-religious rituals, superstition, and hypocrisy of Maithil society through humorous satire, parody and sarcasm. He spent his transitional period in Darbhanga in close association with historic Pushtak Bhandar, until he joined Bihar National College in 1933; afterwards, a very glittering academic career was waiting for him. The year 1933 also proved epoch-making for Maithili literature and for that, a big contribution goes to Harimohan Jha, since his magnum-opus novel Kanyadan (The Bride) elicited unprecedented wave of response from the literary circle as well as from common folks and later it became a household name. The central theme of Jha’s novel is ill-matched marriages that the author initially deals with in a comic mode but towards the end the narrative becomes dark with the indignant flight of the groom, C C Mishra, who leaves the bride, Buchia, in tears. The twelve chapters of the novel create two contrasting worldviews: One is the modern world of English educated youths and the other the world of unlettered country women. The binary between these two worlds is as neatly created as it is destroyed as the story progresses and the Anglicised protagonist is impelled by the rural women to acknowledge that his actual name is Chandi Charan Mishra. His dream to marry a girl like Devika Rani is shattered when he is duped into marrying a thirteen year unlettered country girl Buchia and the reader keeps on wondering: Who is more devastated – the groom or the bride. The last chapter titled The Bride’s Tears makes it amply clear that the sympathies of the novelist lay with the bride who is punished for no fault of her own. The ironic dedication of the novel indicates that it is an effective critique of a society which employs all sorts of deception to yoke “an innocent she-calf to a circus horse in the cart of marital life.” Though he adopted a satirical canopy to express his dissatisfaction with the prevailing starkness and ignorance in the life of Maithili women; the female protagonist Buchhi Dai’s feeble awareness of worldly knowledge reflects the grim situation of education and progressive approaches in contemporary Maithili society. In his fascinating foreword Harish Trivedi calls Jha a critical insider or an insider–outsider and compares him with U R Ananthamurthy “for both the novelists grew up in highly orthodox, custom-bound communities, worked out their own salvation through high academic achievements, and then proceeded to portray their native communities with an intimate inwardness while also offering a trenchant critique of them.” It was Harimohan Jha’s own experience that compelled him to write about female emancipation; only he slightly changed the locale and used Banaras Hindu University as Alma mater of protagonist instead of Patna University where he went through similar feelings and conceptualised Kanyadan. The enormous popularity of his first work encouraged him to write its sequel Dwiragman, which came in 1949 and proved equally sensational since it was seen to be advocating women’s emancipation fervently.   In fact, Harimohan Jha consolidated great moments in Maithili literature along with his contemporaries such as Baidyanath Mishra “Yatri” (wrote by the name Nagarjun in Hindi), Phanishwar Nath “Renu”, Rajkamal Chaudhary and Lalit through an outpourings of literary activities in their lifetime. To summarise, The Bride has relentless universal values and would undoubtedly remain so. In fact, his literary journey was like the soul-searching of his loving region, and for that he precisely tried to capture all its complexities. This book simply attained the scale of popularity, which no other literary work in Maithili has succeeded to meet again. Published by HarperCollins it is the first-ever translation of a classic Maithili novel from colonial times into English and in the words of Harish Trivedi it is “a peach of a translation”.    Each sentence is so delicately and profoundly rendered into English that as you move on into the book, you can start feeling an intricate fabric forming around you and engulfing you in its beauty. The author is a Bangalore-based Management Professional, Literary Critic, and Codirector with Kalinga Literary Festival. He can be reached at ashutoshbthakur@gmail.com. Views are personal.  Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News , India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.