This is about Yashpal's short stories "Enlightenment" and "The Mire of Sin." At this point in the class, these had been my favorite readings. I would highly recommend them. Both Yashpal and Premchand have a really nice range of expression with their prose, but at least in the texts I encountered, Yashpal doesn't run into the issue of reproducing the systems he critiques. Both are still some of my favorite realist authors I've encountered in any geography.
In this week’s selection of readings, I was struck by some of the writerly decisions Yashpal makes to critique asceticism and any kind of devotional renunciation of life. When “Ascetic” Needak delivers his sermon, there is an evenness to the prose. Many of the sentences are just one clause; almost all of them share the aphoristic structure of “X is Y.” The repetition of this sentence construction — an authoritative assertion of truth — creates a sense of inevitability in Needak’s sermon. To those receiving it, who are “Devoid of any hope of physical pleasure, their eager eyes star[ing] at the ascetic from the caves of their decaying forms, as if to absorb as much of the sermon as possible…” (16) the sermon is some kind of consolation. Combined with the sense of inevitability from the repetitive construction of the sermon, this makes Needak’s effect on people almost hypnotic. But listen to the contrast between the sermon’s aphoristic quality and the evocative metaphor Yashpal uses to describe its listeners: “Like mango peels which have been sucked up and then discarded, their bodies appeared to be monuments to the seeming meaninglessness of human life” (16). By associating asceticism with monotonous and repetitive prose and then placing his own vividly expressive prose next to it, Yashpal rejects asceticism through his style in itself.
In a moment when Needak becomes confused about his asceticism, he asks himself “Is the struggle for life opposed to the laws of life?” Then he looks at the setting sun and thinks: “It was the moment when Nature appeared to be flowing naturally towards its consummation” (18). Of course, I don’t know what the original Hindi word indexes here, but the dual significance of consummation as both something’s completion and sex is interesting. On the one hand, I think this could be read as Yashpal writing Needak’s character as having an underdeveloped appreciation for beauty and life: his repression of desire leads him to ascribe a sexual significance for a purely asexual part of nature. He is alienated from the breadth of possible types of beauty and therefore falsely ascribes sexuality to them. But, in its other sense, Needak’s reading of the sunset as consummation — as in, the sunset as nature’s completion, the sunset as an end — might be something Yashpal wrote in because he also sees it that way. Once Needak contradicts his ascetism by getting intimate with Siddhi, he says “Narmada’s flow is Narmada’s life. If you try to reverse its course the result will be unnatural. If this river, imagining its flow to be painful were to oppose it, what sort of salvation could it expect?” (20). There is an implied essentialism in Needak’s metaphor of the river here, and that essence has an implied normative conclusion. The river has a nature, and it should adhere to that nature. Yashpal then has Needak ask Siddhi: “Are we really supporting Brahma by believing that all his Creation as a mirage and an illusion?” (21). Of course, Brahma does not create purposelessly. The implication here is that one should not renounce one’s nature as a sensory being. That is one’s nature out of the Creator’s design. To be a sensory being is one’s end. Writing the sunset as consummation could be read as a manifestation of the teleological, essentialist perspective embedded in Yashpal’s critique of asceticism.
Yashpal reproduces this essentialism in how he has the Reverend articulate his feelings towards Rosario’s life in “The Mire of Sin.” “Religious faith does not impart any wholesomeness on his life; on the contrary it is sucking away the very essence of his life” (173). I wonder, though, whether we can really deduce from his characters’ essentialist engagement with a critique of asceticism that he thought about things in the same way. He might have just wanted to portray that critique on the page.
A possible reading based on the latter interpretation could be that Yashpal looks to portray how commitment to asceticism leads people to have a problematic relationship with life. When they break out of the asceticism, Yashpal does not have his characters take a straight-forward, just path to enjoying life: the sex between Needak and Siddhi has awkward power dynamics; Rosario only begins to enjoy life after mistreating his wife because (as Reverend Sabil requested) he got drunk. In both cases, he has the ascetic character try a joyful thing (sex or alcohol) that they usually renounce, but in both cases, the way they do that thing is problematic. The fact that an essentialist and teleological reading of nature is associated with this means that Yashpal might not mean to endorse that worldview. He could have intended to show how an ascetic life, by making people repress desires, can mean that when people reject that asceticism, they conflate desire with essence and do questionable things. Still, though, this is better than remaining a man of “lackluster face, devoid of all expression” (171). As Yashpal’s Reverend put it:
Just as you feel great satisfaction when you embrace your children who may be covered with dust and mud, God too receives great satisfaction in taking His sinful creatures to His bosom and bestowing mercy upon them. The quarrel of that evening removed the crust of arrogance from your heart and made you a creature of his earth. (187)
Maybe part of covering oneself with dust and mud is mistaking a sunset for nature’s consummation.