Interrogating ‘Star-Crossed Love’
Aakriti Mandhwani
CHANDER & SUDHA (GUNAHON KA DEVTA) by Dharamvir Bharati Penguin India, Gurgaon, 2015, 352 pp., 499
May 2019, volume 43, No 5

The great modernist writer Dharamvir Bharati has enjoyed much critical acclaim in translation and/or adaptation into several languages including English. Outside the Hindi world, he is celebrated most notably for stage and film adaptations of his verse play Andha Yug and the novel Suraj ka Satvan Ghoda. Most general Hindi readers also know and love him as the editor of Dharmyug, one of the bestselling middlebrow magazines in Hindi. The translation of Gunahon Ka Devta is now available to us in an English translation as Chander & Sudha. This translation is particularly significant because, at close to a hundred reprints in Hindi, the novel is often counted his most commercially successful and, therefore, arguably his most widely read work. Bharati was just 23 years of age at the time of writing Gunahon Ka Devta.

First published in 1949, Gunahon Ka Devta is set in the city of Allahabad and centres on the tumultuous relationship between its primary protagonists Chander and Sudha. The cover of the first edition of the English translation declares the novel ‘a passionate tale of star-crossed lovers’, immediately locating it as a romance. However, the novel is an active interrogation of precisely the ‘star-crossed’ quality of this love: it shows how its protagonists’ deterministic notions of love, propriety and morality result in their leading unhappy and unfulfilled lives. Bharati’s original Hindi subheading to the novel, ‘Madhyavargiya Jivan Ki Kahani’ or, ‘A Story of Middle Class Life’ perhaps is a more accurate representation of the novel’s central concerns. The author’s emphasis lay in deconstructing the lives of his primary protagonists who interacted freely and regularly under the same roof but were not able to act on their affections because of several considerations, most significant of which rose from their entrenchment in middle class morality.

The first angle through which we can see it is the embeddedness of the notion of propriety in caste. Sudha first meets Chandrakumar Kapoor or Chander through her father Dr. Shukla who is Chander’s professor and guide at the University. Dr. Shukla is characterized as an affectionate father who does not actively practice caste and class prejudices. For instance, Dr. Shukla welcomes Chander’s visits to the house and encourages his closeness with Sudha and her cousin Binti. Dr. Shukla also advocates that Sudha should marry an educated man with a progressive world view. However, Dr. Shukla looks for Sudha’s prospective husband in his own caste: ‘The most important thing in a marriage is cultural similarity… if a girl marries into a different caste, she will not be able to find the correct balance”’ (p. 49). Dr. Shukla’s belief about marital harmony ends up being at odds with his daughter’s ideas about marriage when Sudha declares that she has no interest in getting married, even becoming physically ill at the very thought of it. He asks Chander to convince Sudha to marry her future husband, who does so against his own will because of his own notion of duty. Therefore, Bharati skillfully interrogates the economics of love in this melodramatic scene where, even though the gentle father is agitated that his daughter is deeply unhappy, he expresses care for her in clearly paternalistic terms. He, and even Chander, are unable to see that Sudha’s views may be different yet equally legitimate. Here, ‘middle-class life’ stands in for giving an appearance of valuing autonomy, but in real terms, Sudha’s life is no different from that of her cousin Binti’s, who is actively oppressed by her mother in the village who expresses similar views on marriage.

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