Gendered lives in vernacular fiction: Redefining family in Hindi short stories of the early 1940s

Abstract

This article is embedded in discourses surrounding the new mobility of people as well as scientific, technological and socio-cultural changes in a late-colonial setting. It investigates how a number of prominent and less-known male authors from the centre and margins of the twentieth-century Hindi literary canon, including Rishabhcharan Jain, Shriyut ‘Arun’ and Durgadas Bhaskar, depict unconventional family constellations and human relationships that challenge normative conceptions of family, fatherhood, conjugality and blood bonds as well as gender roles and responsibilities. The short stories under investigation suggest that human relationships require constant negotiation and investigation of the meaning of kinship, caste, class and the human. In the process, we encounter adulterous husbands, strong wives and nurturing fathers’ life struggles and tribulations. These short stories centre on husband–wife, man–mistress, wife–mistress and father–son relationships. Their male protagonists are authoritative towards their wives, caring towards their mistresses and nurturing towards children. At times, their self-sacrifice goes as far as to complete self-annihilation for the sake of the offspring, and, at other times, they lead double lives. Mothers are absent in these short stories. Instead, male protagonists claim parenthood and are ready to go as far as to abduct infants in order to perform fatherhood. I argue that parenting constellations and conjugality became negotiable for a number of factors that are addressed in my selection of Hindi short stories: (a) parenthood was not contingent upon biology (as stories on adoption and abduction suggest), (b) contraception was readily available to women and men (as promoted in periodicals of the time) and in the process also changing attitudes towards sexuality and conjugality, (c) abortion emerged as a medical option to undo a pregnancy emerging from an illicit love affair and (d) the new mobility enabled people to get around easily and frequently and even lead double lives. In addressing these factors, fiction published and circulated in periodicals offered novel imaginative and innovative spaces for the negotiation of family models once projected as normative in social reformist and nationalist discourses.