On Hindi pop fiction
Though the term “Hindi pop fiction” is often used pejoratively, the genre itself is suffused with pathos and features stories that youthful readers enjoy.
Author Divya Prakash Dubey’s second storytelling show, StoryBaazi, at New Delhi’s Little Theatre Auditorium on July 27, was houseful. As were all shows of writer and actor Manav Kaul’s storytelling special, Trasadi. Lately, storytelling as a genre, along with stand-up comedy, is becoming increasingly popular. As part of his show, Divya Prakash recounted a story about “Kitti Bhaiya”, who is very influential in Lucknow. An affectionate neighbour, he considers the narrator his younger brother. With a selfless dedication to friendship, Kitti is somewhat like Ronny Bhaiya, who features in stand-up comic Zakir Khan’s Chacha Vidhayak shows. Young audiences relate easily to these characters and Dubey’s show left many in tears. Apparently, Kitti’s story is real and he inspired Dubey’s first book.
Characters like Kitti Bhaiya appear in the work of many popular Hindi writers including that of Satya Vyas, Neeraj Pandey, Nilotpal Mrinal and Nikhil Sachan. Though the term “Hindi pop fiction” is often used pejoratively, the genre itself is suffused with pathos and features stories of UPSC aspirants, life in engineering college hostels, or the life of a small town boy in a metropolis. The city itself plays a crucial part.
Take Nitolpal Mrinal’s debut novel, Dark Horse, set in Delhi’s Mukherjee Nagar. The descriptions transport the reader to the area’s alleyways and to the rooms of government job aspirants. Indeed, Mukherjee Nagar too is a central character in the novel.
Likewise, Divya Prakash Dubey’s October Junction starts from Varanasi and travels through Delhi and Mumbai. Satya Vyas’s Dilli Darbar, which looks at the capital through the eyes of a migrant student, is the story of tech-geek Rahul Mishra who falls in love with his landlord’s daughter, Paridhi. A morally ambivalent character, he cheats on the girl but still manages to win her over and marry her in the end.
In the last two decades, a wave of popular Hindi writers has explored themes of loss, love, nostalgia, belonging, and aspiration. Most of these emotional stories brimming with small-town sensibilities are written in “new Hindi”, which is markedly different from literary Hindi.
Despite their popularity or perhaps because of it, these writers are not viewed favourably by the Hindi literary establishment. This isn’t surprising considering most of the older writers are proponents of a style that tips its hat to a Sanskritised elementality or to Urdu’s mannerisms. They believe writing can have “anchlik” (regional) variants but must be polished and have often argued that “new Hindi” will ruin literature and is a disservice to the long legacy of serious writing in the language.
This argument is not entirely untrue and the demand that writers preserve linguistic originality is a powerful one. However, the counter argument that there is no one variety of Hindi too is valid. Conservative writers tend to label all popular writers as being “for the masses”. There is also the charge that “one who writes for the masses compromises on quality.” Nilotpal Mrinal, whose Dark Horse won a Sahitya Akademi award, finds this a limiting argument. “You cannot say something is superficial and lacks depth just because it’s popular. People read Premchand. I can’t be read as much as people read him. So, he is more popular than I am. Popularity can’t make your craft, in any way, superficial,” he says. “Judge us on some parameters that you may define for all literature. Not by your likes and dislikes,” he adds.
Author, Rishabh Pratipaksh, who has written two short story collections, and is working on a novella, believes Hindi literature is going through a “churn”. The sensibilities of the Nayi Kahani Movement that represented post-Premchand writing and the themes of alienation, melancholia, values of families, and the battle of the sexes continue to be the mainstay of writing. However, the style and tonality have changed. Today, there are multiple streams within Hindi literature including queer writing and experimental writing. Pop writing and detective fiction are just some of the genres that are extremely popular.
Indeed, writers like Manav Kaul have created niche genres for themselves. Kaul had stated that he doesn’t care about his critics. He releases a book a year much like Akshay Kumar releases a film. “I want to die like a pen running out of ink while writing, with my breath slipping away just like that,” he said in an interview. “Melancholia” is the dominant theme of his writing, which has given him a large and loyal fan base.
Pratipaksh, who is known for experimentation and talking about the everyday, has written stories like Mard that features an army officer staring at a woman’s blouse, and others like Mafi, Kric Panda Po po po, and Mara Hua Shravan Kumar that examine corruption.
“New faces bring a fresh perspective, which is clicking with popular sensibilities,” says the author who believes that, as has happened with writing in English, the boundaries between the popular and the literary are blurring in Hindi writing too. He holds up the example of JK Rowling whose writing is “both popular and has a lot of depth”.
Then there is Ashok Pande whose Lappujhanna is deeply layered. Set in a small town in Uttarakhand, the story features Lafattu, who is one of the most impressive characters to have appeared in Hindi literature in the last two decades. Pande’s language transports the reader to a different world.
Here, it is pertinent to point out that the availability of various tones in each Hindi dialect often limits authors from meditating on characters. For instance, in Vyas’s Dilli Darbaar, the reader learns of the characters of the landlord Vatuk Sharma, and his daughter Paridhi through tone and narration; it is difficult to know how they really think. In his novels, Vyas displays a preference for the narrative and for lead characters. This could be because he now writes for OTT platforms, and the Bollywood ecosystem generally focuses on lead characters. This is an example of how Hindi pop fiction is moulded by the market.
Writing for the screen has also led to some authors to hold back from exploring emotions through actions, and a narrative arc. For instance, all the stories of hostel life assume the reader is familiar with the experience and don’t add layers of description. These works also assume the reader feels the same as the writer. “The world today is more complex than before, especially on a psychological level, even though we are more physically comfortable. As a result, writing too has changed. People often find it difficult to differentiate between their own emotions and those they absorb from the outside,” says Pratipaksh.
The most important criticism of pop writing, though, is that it is primarily savarna; that Dalit and OBC characters are rare to find. It is true that Hindi literature as a whole, not just pop fiction, has been dominated by upper castes. This calls to mind the heated debate that author Rashmi Sadana mentions in her book, English Heart, Hindi Heartland, Bengali translator Enakshi Chatterjee objected to the sanitisation of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, by translator Gopal Gandhi for “Hindi’s upper caste vegetarian public sphere.” “What is at issue for Chatterjee is the deletion by a translator of an author’s original fictional details of the skinning of animals and tanning of their hides,” says Sadana.
It is also rare to find women writing popular literature. However, within the serious literary sphere, there are several, including Pratyaksha, Akanksha Pare and Divya Vijay. Women writers are also experimenting more than men. This is so in both prose and poetry. While poets like Jacinta Kerketta write about the Adivasi experience, and Rajni Tilak wrote about Dalit rights, Geetanjali Shree’s Booker winning Ret Samadhi is the finest example of experimentation in a contemporary Hindi novel.
Clearly, there are exciting things happening in Hindi literature as a whole. Only time will tell if popular writing will follow the lead of high literature in the language and make an attempt to be more inclusive and consequently, more vibrant.
Mayank Jain Parichha is an independent bilingual journalist. He writes about the environment, wildlife, culture, literature, and politics