Visualising a region: Phaniswarnath Renu and the archive of the ‘regional–rural’ in the 1950s

Abstract

Anchored in the decade of 1950s, this article focuses on the writings of Phaniswarnath Renu to understand ways in which he represented the rural life of Kosi region. Also known as the old Purnea district of Bihar, this region has been historically visualised as unhealthy and backward. Following Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, the article argues that Renu’s craftsmanship renders the backwardness of this region in a manner that highlights what Edward Soja calls ‘instrumentality of the space’. Unlike the dominant constructs of village life in India, Renu’s villages are neither empty of their geo-cultural specificities nor devoid of placeness. Instead, the landscape of a backward region is densely imbued with particulars that cannot be translocated to any other setting. Renu’s ‘regional–rural’ craftsmanship depended on three mutually connected factors. These include his innovative use of language forms distinguishing him from his predecessors like Premchand; his mobilisation of an enormous amount of information, which I shall call the cultural memory of the region; and third, his technique of storytelling. Together these three produce an archive for the reconstruction of the region at a particular historical juncture. This archive draws our attention to the apathy accrued to the dynamics of space by a large section of litterateurs as well as social scientists otherwise obsessed with the time.