Hindi literature lost – Written by Iqbal Abhimanyu and Alok Ranjan Gyanranjan, an author and editor who symbolised the awakening of realist narrative prose in the Hindi heartland and gave voice to growing disillusionment and self-doubts of small-town youths, once the romance of post-Independence India started to wither, died in Jabalpur on January 7. Advertisement Born in Akola, Maharashtra, in 1936, he grew up in different cities — Ajmer, Delhi and Varanasi — before settling as a Hindi teacher at a college in Jabalpur, where he spent the rest of his life.
His proximity to the “ordinary” lives of mofussil towns helped him establish his signature style and break through the dominance of urban narratives that had come to characterise the Nayi Kahani (the new story) movement prevalent in the Hindi literature of the 1950s and 1960s. In the early 1970s, Gyanranjan, along with Doodhnath Singh, Kashinath Singh and Ravindra Kalia, emerged as the Chaar-yaar who signified a break from the established forms of short fiction.
He captured the angst of the lower-middle-class youth, finding a poetic rhythm that tapped into the psyche of his characters. Unlike some of his predecessors, such as Nirmal Verma, this angst was not individualistic alienation, expressed through metaphors and streams of consciousness, but rooted in the collective realities of small towns. Advertisement Some of his most iconic stories deal with characters such as a son struggling to understand a father who rejects material comforts and revels in his small world full of scarcities: An eternal outsider in a middle-class household transitioning into an affluent one (Pita: Father).
Or a small-town man of words who warms up to an agent who sells his ideals to the highest bidder and calls himself an intellectual, only to be beaten up and thrown back to his poor idealist friends in a street corner once he starts deriding the rich and sleazy party of military officers and affluent businessmen (Ghanta). “In order to become a stable man, for the last 25 years I have been living as a tortoise,” says another of his protagonists in Bahirgaman (Emigration), a biting satire on “satellite” authors and intellectuals who live abroad or in mega-cities, selling their country’s miseries and coming back to flaunt their exotic debaucheries. His characters tried to live for their ideals in a surrounding haunted by the contradictions of small-town life and morality.
Another influential and far-reaching contribution of Gyanranjan was his Hindi literary journal Pahal, which he edited from 1971 to 2008 and again from 2013 to 2021. At a time when most Hindi magazines were taken over by big media houses, Gyanranjan was a mainstay of what has been dubbed the “small magazine movement” in Hindi.
Pahal, though largely progressive and left-wing, did not resort to dividing authors into camps and limiting its publications to certain agendas. Widely recognised as a major voice in Hindi fiction quite early in his career, Gyanranjan dedicated his life to being a people’s editor and remained committed to being an outside voice to the establishment. His death comes at a time when the entire Hindi intelligentsia faces the challenge of losing its voice to a majoritarian wave.
His true legacy would remain among those who buck the trend and deride the riches of conforming while embracing the everlasting angst of the outsider. Abhimanyu teaches at Delhi Skill and Entrepreneurship University, Ranjan is an award winning Hindi writer.