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Bāṇa, Vyomkesh Shastri, Stella Kramrisch: authority and authorship in Hazariprasad Dwivedi's Bāṇabhaṭṭa kī ‘ātmakathā’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 December 2023
Abstract
Hazariprasad Dwivedi's 1946 novel, Bāṇabhaṭṭa kī ‘ātmakathā’, has long been considered one of the most prominent historical novels in modern Hindi literature, canonised in literary history for its progressive view of the past and for elaborating an autobiographical voice for the seventh-century Sanskrit poet, Bāṇa. However, the many layers of fictive authorship that enfold the main narrative of the text are rarely taken into account. Examination of the metatextual materials of this text reveal, however, that Bāṇabhaṭṭa kī ‘ātmakathā’ is meant to be read in terms of the problem of its authorship, in such a way as to problematise the autobiographical voice that it presents to the reader. In this article, I analyse this material and argue that the actual author of the text, described as an Austrian woman named Catherine, is most likely inspired by Stella Kramrisch. Further analysis shows this novel to be deeply shaped by the intellectual milieu of interwar Bengal, where Dwivedi was a teacher at Shantiniketan and engaged in commenting upon the complex intellectual traditions that existed in part of that world.
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References
1 Singh, Namwar, Dūsrī Paramparā Kī Khoj (New Delhi, 1982), p. 118Google Scholar.
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9 See Thapar, Past Before Us, pp. 42–48.
10 R. C. Majumdar, ‘Ideas of history in Sanskrit literature’, in Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon, (ed.) Cyril Henry Philips (1961), pp. 13–28, at p. 18. For a more appreciative account of the Harṣacaritā, see Pathak, Ancient Historians of India, pp. 30–55. Pathak challenges many assumptions held towards the Harṣacaritā, such as the idea that it should be seen as fragmentary and incomplete. A comprehensive study of the Harṣacaritā available in English is Vasudeva Sharana Agrawala and Bihāra Rāshṭrabhāshā Parishad, The Deeds of Harsha; Being a Cultural Study of Bāṇa's Harshacharita, 1st edn (Varanasi, 1969). More recent discussions of the text include Roy, ‘Patrons, poets and lesser mortals’; and Ali, ‘Indian historical writing’, p. 88. The latter, while brief, situates the Harṣacaritā firmly within Indic-language traditions of history writing.
11 On this novel, see Rāy, Gopāl, Hindī Upanyās Kā Itihās (New Delhi, 2002), pp. 187–88Google Scholar.
12 Because of the canonisation of the novel in Hindi literary history, the number of texts dealing with Bāṇabhaṭṭa kī ‘ātmakathā’ is vast. A representative selection of important reviews is collected in Siṃha (ed.), Śāntiniketan Se Śivālik. See also Deśrājasiṃh Bhāṭī, Bāṇabhaṭṭa Kī Ātmakathā, Eka Vivecan; Hazārīprasād Dvivedī Kṛt Bāṇabhaṭṭ Kī Ātmakathā Kī Ālocanātmak Adhyāyan (Delhi, 1964); Lakshmaṇadatt Gautam, Bāṇabhaṭṭ Kī Ātmakathā: Vimarśa Aura Vyākhyā: Ācārya Hazārīprasād Dvivedī Kṛtt ’Bāṇabhaṭṭa Kī Ātmakathā’ Kā Sarvāṅgīṇ Adhyāyan (Patna, 1967); Bāṇabhaṭṭ Kī Ātmakathā: Pāṭh Aura Punarpāṭh (Panckula, Haryana, 2007); and Jñānendra Kumār Santoṣ, Ātmakathā aura upanyās: viśeṣ sandarbh, Bāṇabhaṭṭa kī ātmakathā (New Delhi, 2013).
13 For a representative interpretation, see Rāy, Hindī Upanyās Kā Itihās, p. 190.
14 Singh, Dūsrī Paramparā Kī Khoj, p. 113.
15 On the early novel, see Meenakshi Mukherjee, Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India (Delhi, 1985); as well as Francesca Orsini, Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India (Bangalore, 2009); and Vasudha Dalmia, Fiction as History: The Novel and the City in Modern North India (Ranikhet, 2017). On the adaptation of the dāstān, see Jennifer Dubrow, ‘A space for debate: fashioning the Urdu novel in colonial India’, Comparative Literature Studies 53.2 (2016), pp. 289–311; and Pasha M. Khan, The Broken Spell: Indian Storytelling and the Romance Genre in Persian and Urdu (Detroit, MI, 2019). On Kādambarī as a term for the novel, see Mukherjee, Realism and Reality, p. 12; and Rāy, Hindī Upanyās Kā Itihās, pp. 62–63.
16 See, for example, Singh, Dūsrī Paramparā Kī Khoj, p. 1.
17 On Dwivedi's importance to bhakti, see John Stratton Hawley, A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement (Cambridge, MA, 2015), pp. 49–58.
18 On Shukla, see Milind Wakankar, ‘The moment of criticism in Indian nationalist thought: Ramchandra Shukla and the poetics of a Hindi responsibility’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.4 (March 2003), pp. 987–1014.
19 See Kamalkiśor Goyanakā, Hajārīprasād Dvivedī: Kuch Saṃsmaraṇ (New Delhi, 1988), pp. 8–9.
20 See Singh, Dūsrī Paramparā Kī Khoj, p. 13; this has been translated as Namvar Singh, ‘In search of another tradition’, (trans.) Akhilesh Kumar, Indian Literature 58.1 (279) (2014), pp. 170–79.
21 Singh, Dūsrī Paramparā Kī Khoj, pp. 18–19.
22 Ibid., p. 18.
23 Ibid., p. 15.
24 Kris Manjapra, ‘Knowledgeable internationalism and the Swadeshi movement, 1903-1921’, Economic and Political Weekly 47.42 (2012), p. 54.
25 See Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (Chicago, 2008), p. 188.
26 On the history of Hindi, see Vasudha Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bhāratendu Hariśchandra and Nineteenth-Century Banaras (Delhi, 1997); Christopher Rolland King, One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India (Bombay, 1999); and Alok Rai, Hindi Nationalism (Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, 2001).
27 See Kris Manjapra, Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals Across Empire, Harvard Historical Studies (Cambridge, MA, 2014), pp. 291–92.
28 On the life of Stella Kramrisch, see Barbara Stoler Miller, ‘Stella Kramrisch: a biographical essay’, in Exploring India's Sacred Art: Selected Writings of Stella Kramrisch, (ed.) Barbara Stoler Miller (Philadelphia, 1983). On the genealogy Kramrisch's ideas of art history, see V. K. Chari, ‘Representation in India's sacred images: objective vs. metaphysical reference’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 65.1 (2002), pp. 52–73; and Manjapra, Age of Entanglement, pp. 240–57.
29 See Manjapra, Age of Entanglement, p. 246.
30 See Miller, ‘Stella Kramrisch’, pp. 6–8.
31 See Manjapra, Age of Entanglement, 245.
32 Letter to Gerta Callman, 19 March 1934. Stella Kramrisch Papers, 94.6.
33 See Rāy, Hindī Upanyās Kā Itihās, p. 188.
34 On the Udayagiri cave statues, see Phyllis Granoff, ‘Mahiṣāsuramardinī: an analysis of the myths’, East and West 29.1/4 (1979), pp. 139–51. Kripal Singh Shekhavat is credited for one of the walls of the bhakti mural at Viśva-Bhārati; see Hawley, Storm of Songs, p. 277.
35 On the origin of this name, see Dvivedī, Hajārīprasād Dvivedī Granthāvalī, 11:360. Dwivedi claims that he invented the name while a student in order to criticise one of his professors.
36 Ibid., 1:18. All translations are the author's own.
37 Ibid., 1:19.
38 Ibid., 1:23.
39 Ibid., 1:23.
40 See Bāṇa, Princess Kadambari, (trans.) David Smith, 1st edn (New York, 2009), p. 2.
41 Dvivedī, Hajārīprasād Dvivedī Granthāvalī, 7:306.
42 On Premchand's speech, see Carlo Coppola, Urdu Poetry, 1935-1970: The Progressive Episode (Oxford, New York, 2018), pp. 141–43; Ulka Anjaria, Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel Colonial Difference and Literary Form (New York, 2012), p. 1; and Preetha Mani, The Idea of Indian Literature: Gender, Genre, and Comparative Method (Evanston, IL, 2022), pp. 68–73.
43 Dvivedī, Hajārīprasād Dvivedī Granthāvalī, 1:25.
44 The classic essay on this subject is E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism’, Past & Present 38.1 (December 1967), pp. 56–97.
45 Dvivedī, Hajārīprasād Dvivedī Granthāvalī, 1:99.
46 For an account and critique of this tradition, see Chari, ‘Representation in India's sacred images’. As Chari points out, Kramrisch was part of a larger moment of imagining Indian art through new readings of classical sources.
47 See Kramrisch, Exploring India's Sacred Art, pp. 131–32.
48 Ibid., p. 131.
49 Ibid., p. 197. The comparison of this passage may also be read as a reference to the lingering influence in Kramrisch's work of Strzygowski; see Manjapra, Age of Entanglement, p. 257.
50 Kramrisch, Exploring India's Sacred Art, p. 135.
51 Dvivedī, Hajārīprasād Dvivedī Granthāvalī, 1:99.
52 Ibid., 1:255.
53 Ibid., 1:255.
54 This seems to be implying that this letter is appearing after the publication of Bāṇabhaṭṭa kī Ātmakathā in Vishal Bharat. Without access to the actual issues of the journal itself, it does not seem possible to discern whether or not this epilogue was written specifically for the book.
55 There is no mention elsewhere of any letters from Catherine, so this may be an error of continuity—or it may simply be meant to add to the mystery of the situation.
56 Catherine here uses the English word.
57 The Kinnaras were a mythical race of men with the heads of horses.
58 Dvivedī, Hajārīprasād Dvivedī Granthāvalī, 1:257.
59 It is impossible to say whether this is intended as a joke without knowing to what extent Hazariprasad Dwivedi was familiar with German; in any case, the analogy only works if you ignore the fact that the German name for Austria is actually Österreich.
60 See Madhureś, ‘“Bāṇabhaṭṭa Kī Ātmakatha”: Ek Pratikriyā-Dharmī Viśleṣaṇ’, in Śāntiniketan Se Śivālik, (ed.) Siṃha, pp. 216–19, at p. 234. Attention to this point is perhaps obscured by the prominence of Rabindranath Tagore and Shantiniketan in the story of Dwivedi's career in Bengal. Dwivedi wrote a book-length appreciation of Tagore, Mṛtyuñjay Ravīndra, and frequently depicted his time at Shantiniketan as a relationship between guru and student.
61 On Dinesh Chandra Sen, see Chakrabarty, Dipesh, ‘Romantic archives: literature and the politics of identity in Bengal’, Critical Inquiry 30.3 (2004), pp. 654–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Rakhaldas Bandyopadhyay, see Chakravorty, Mayurika, ‘“Skeletons of history”: fact and fiction in Rakhaldas Bandyopadhyay's Sasanka’, South Asia Research 24.2 (2004), pp. 171–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hemendrakumar Ray is discussed in Projit Mukharji, Bihari, Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, 1920–66 (Chicago, 2023)Google Scholar. One further angle through which to consider the multilingual milieu of Dwivedi's work would be to focus on his treatment of romance and the emphasis, as in Baccan Singh's review of Bāṇabhaṭṭa kī ‘ātmakathā’, on the novel as combining what he calls the romantic and the classical. See Baccan Singh, ‘Bāṇabhaṭṭa Kī Ātmakatha: Spandacetanā Kī Kāvyānubhūti’, in Śāntiniketan Se Śivālik, (ed.) Siṃha, pp. 223–31, at p. 223.