Premchand’s Ramlila and Joyce’s Araby: A Comparative Reading

Joyce’s Araby foregrounds, via the medium of the short fiction, a kind of psychological insight and use of symbolism that would soon become the genre’s mainstay. Storytelling, after Dubliners, would be more mimetic, symbolic (bringing to use classical myth as subtext), and less likely to discussing events in someone’s life. Direct narration of events would be replaced by dense psychological moments. (Like the description of a boy, love struck and lonely, clasping his hands and probably genitals, listening to the sound of rain drops pattering on the grass outside his room and he feels that they are like needles impinging on his skin and senses.) Few years later, the technique would be taken to a greater height of complexity by T S Eliot in The Wasteland. Cultural and psychological space would become like the cursed and barren kingdom of the Fisher king in the Arthurian legend: the mad poet in search of shanti would be described as ‘shoring his fragments against the ruins’.

Premchand, rooted and committed to social reality of the villages and small towns of his era, could explore psychological complexities through a way of narration that is less symbolic and more direct; he would use a style that would not make us question the authenticity of the ‘dramatized narrator’ (an expression lent to us by Wayne C Booth in his classic The Rhetoric of Fiction) as we are expected to when we read Araby. In Ramlila, for instance, as we progress with the story, we are told that the narrator does not think much of the Ramlila festival in Kashi for the one in his village was as colourful and more fun. Soon, we discover that the disenchantment is born out of nostalgia as he is now a retired man who has been pensioned off. He has fathered sons and worked to feed and get them married. In Araby, the boy is never seen to grow old. His disillusioned narrative, full of Biblical symbols that re-tell the story of Genesis and the Quest of the Holy Grail in a misogynistic fashion, constantly overlaps youthful romantic exasperation with a matured man’s sense of decadence that pervades his atmosphere. Expressions like ‘my foolish blood’ co-exist with ‘her name was like a prayer to my lips’.

Yet, Ramlila like Araby tells the story of growing up and disillusionment; both use the motif of the religious festival where evil triumphs over good and tell us how the festival becomes the occasion of epiphanic revelation of reality that subverts the cultural memory of mythical heroism and goodness. If the young boy in Araby journeys to the occidental fair imagining himself to be the Arthurian knight in search of the Grail; Premchand’s narrator enjoys his proximity to the mythical hero Ram. The father in Ramlila would find his counterpart in the drunken uncle of Araby who turns out to be a spoilsport and also a representative of a decadent gerontocracy. If Araby has been read as a precursor to Joyce’s classic bildungsroman Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the first-person narrator in Ramlila, much like Premchand lives in Beneras. The flirtatious women in Araby could be read as the counterpart of the tawaif in Premchand’s story.

The richness of Premchand’s story comes from its economy of style, its spare use of symbolism and yet the deep and subtle psychological ramifications that it brings out. Recall, that the story had begun with a sense of fondness for the Ramlila festivities in his village; he even privileges it over the more glossy and glitzy events of Kashi, that is, Beneras. The story ends with the narrator in tears, a mellow satisfaction of seeing off a friend with a couple of annas as fare for the road. The disillusionment has not been the expected one: that the mythical hero Ram turned out to be penurious or that he did not recognize his friend during the brief moment of glory as Ram. It came from the action of his father who could pay gold coins to a courtesan and not an artist who had entertained the spiritual needs of a whole community. He says, Us din se pitaji par se meri shraddha uth gayi. His respect for his father was lost on that very day. The perversity of a feudal lord, a government employee, and a businessman is placed against the innocent love and admiration that the narrator has for a friend and artist. While the older men respond to sexual gestures, the narrator is aroused by the sheer power of performance. But, what contributes to the complexity of this apparently simple story of growing-up is the way such a bitter memory is overpowered by fond nostalgia for the same experience.Discovering hatred for ones father cannot be explained away by merely citing Freudian theory; it is too strong an emotion to forget. If Ramlila has been the source of such strong and bitter emotions, one needs to understand the reason for renewed attachment to it. The fact that he has been a father himself is not explanation enough. I believe that there was something more enduring in the festival itself that has lingered on and more strongly than the sentiments of resentment.

There were two celebrations on the fateful day. One was the Ramlila itself. The other one was dance of the courtesan. The second led to a denial of the first. Let us work out a schema—Ramlila: Innocence::Nautch:Experience::Good:Evil::Son:Father. The triumph of Ram over the evil Ravana that the Ramlila symbolically conveys is denied by the commercial and carnal interests of the Chaudhary and the father of the narrator. (In fact the triumvirate of the Chaudhary, the Daroga and the Baniya, that silences the actor, carries the Marxist symbolism of the feudal, the bureaucratic, and the businessman working in cohorts against the proletarian artist. In Araby Irish politics is nonexistent. Here is probably the major difference between the modernist in South-Asia and in the West.) The act of giving a couple of annas to the actor, who played the role of Ram and earned money for the feudal-patron, is an attempt to fight for the mythical-hero and also the friend. This is what the Ramlila of childhood offered: a chance to be Ram. It is a role played in silence and oblivion but a role that the ‘real-Rama’ acknowledges. It fills his eyes with tears and heart with satisfaction—Unhe vida karke lauta, to meri ankhein sajal thi; par hriday anand se ubhra huwa tha. As he has moved on in life, Ramlila has acquired more colour and more glitz. Yet, here, he can never be friends with Ram; he can never win over the Ravana, even if that meant that the villain was his own father. Therein lay his pleasure and the source of all his fond nostalgia. Premchand invests in the narrator’s entry into puberty (when defying the father-figure is common) with social and cultural values. This is what distinguishes man from monkey; the artist from the munshi.