The Poetics of Suffering

Sneha Sharma traces the relationship between satire and suffering, humor and political hope in Shrilal Shukla’s Raag Darbari and its delineation of the provincial subject. The use of colonial frames in postcolonial environments in conjunction with nationalist myth-making created a fraught and overdetermined space that occupies a niche as part of a binarized coupling—the village in opposition to the city. The village is the location for India’s true identity, even as it is the site for frenzied developmental activity, making it foundational and reformable at the same time. The cutthroat morality that exemplifies the community of Shivpalganj belies the history of social moralism that had bolstered the position of the village in the national social imaginary. By closely studying the characters in the novel, Sharma interrogates the forces which prevent the village subjects from transforming themselves into right-bearing citizens. The contestations and struggles against state power, fused with surviving feudal networks, require more than the “ethos of improvement” encouraged as part of local and national development. Sharma reads Shukla’s novel not merely as a literary chronicle of the welfare state in the 1960s but as a studied reflection on aspects of social legitimacy, political obligation, and rights-bearing personhood.