Do you know Kulli Bhat?

Sandeep Dikshit

Internet has given wings to everyone for uninhibited expression of opinion. Today, a person needn't make the rounds of publishers or have to be someone with a baggage of significance to disseminate views to the wider world. Nearly a century ago, only wordsmiths of the finest calibre with a world of experience could overcome the restrictions of caste, technology and social standing. They had to soar over the limitations of inadequate education, even unfamiliarity with language, to make the cut. Every language threw up its liberators. They are the ones who were meant to write. Their life's passage is the unavoidable journey they must undertake to soak in the life's ecstasies, bitterness and ambiguities.

One of the chosen ones for Khari Boli, the youngest language of all Indian languages, was Nirala, the one with piercing eyes and broad shoulders; the son of a watchman on irregular employment; the scythe of the plague decimating his family early on; restless of mind and persistent; and irreverent. In the countryside of Bengal, Nirala would stay up till three in the morning construing sentences of what was then known as ‘Delhi Hindi’ on the basis of what he knew of English, Sanskrit and Bengali. The ink dried on Kulli Bhat, Nirala's slim novelette that took the high road of humour to sketch a world of bullock carts, sexual tensions, emergence of modern political consciousness, the intrigues of decaying zamindars and, of course, the protagonist by the same name — the erudite and ostracised, the straight and gay and the rebel and the acquiescent.

It was people like Nirala alongwith Jayashankar Prasad, Mahadevi Verma, Sumitranandan Pant who instilled emotions and a touch of everyday in the Hindi pioneered by Hazari Prasad Dwivedi and his fellow travellers. It is they who liberated the staid Hindi from the confines of grammar, form, metre and composition. And then they instilled the soul in the language, both poetry and prose, with deft weaving of feelings in events. This is the essence of the Chayavad movement that Nirala was a participant of. It isn't agit-prop. But the genre isn't pure romanticism either. As Nirala says, ‘I noticed that people were puzzled when reading my poems but understood them perfectly when they heard them recited.’

Today, a new generation is carrying forward the torch for a more widespread appreciation of their efforts and Satti Khanna's translation A Life Misspent, which he found to be a mature work early in Nirala's literary life. In his words, it brings the terror of being into consideration. The tone is ironic. The movement from scene to scene abrupt. The novel breaks off without leave-taking.

Much has been said in the reviews about how the novelette carries in its womb the unrequited sexual attraction between the handsome Nirala and an untouchable Kulli Bhat. In the end was there ‘something’ between the two? That pitch should sell a few copies. This isn't a biography too as some suspect. Nirala never permits himself to be trapped by the mundane. The fizz and the crackle erupt from the preface. Nirala makes himself unemployable in palaces and places of patronage: ‘I could not find a worthy person to whom this book could be dedicated. Eminences with qualities similar to Kulli's seemed inadequate to the sum of Kulli's character. Therefore I am deferring the ceremony of dedication.’

As Nirala was to discover, Kulli was knowledgeable. The learned learnt from him. He practiced what he thought by bringing a Muslim home as his wife. But in the end, caste ostracism and the one-way bond between Independence movement leaders and their opinion builders in the far flung villages of India broke Kulli physically. ‘He had turned to face to God only because he lacked human help, human support, human encouragement.’

The progressives were wary of Nirala till he was around. But later, some of their leading critics came up with a rounded appreciation about the body of his work and school of thought. A Life Misspent and the works of Namwar Singh and Ram Vilas Sharma could be the stepping stones to enter an intriguing and complex but unstructured world of Chayavad in Hindi literature.