Godaan

"Godaan was first published in 1936, before India’s independence. It was a time of a lot of rethinking, of political and cultural turmoil – but it was also a relatively prosperous time. Munshi Premchand was a schoolteacher most of his life and he was extremely poor. But he had the heart of a revolutionary. He married a widow after his first marriage failed. He gave up his government job in the Quit India Movement. I like Godaan mainly because it was my grandfather’s favorite book. Like Premchand, my grandfather grew up in a poor village in Bihar. When he first went to town, he went to Patna to study for college and he slept in a little room behind a temple. He would study on the street, under the streetlights, because that was the only lighting that there was. So, for him, Premchand’s India was the India he carried around in his bones even after he became an ambassador and was posted to New York and Paris. I adored my grandfather but for me, growing up in Bombay and Delhi, I had no connection with Premchand’s world. But I loved the stories that my grandfather told me of his childhood in the village, about stealing mangoes from other people’s orchards, wrestling and of course he loved telling ghost stories. I ended up reading Godaan because he said, ‘Read Premchand if you want to improve your Hindi. He is the greatest storyteller in India.’ I was struggling with my Hindi because I came out of Bombay and in Delhi the Hindi level was much higher. My grandfather said, ‘Your Hindi is hilarious, it’s Bombay Hindi. You really need to get to know real Hindi because this is our language. Language is one of the roots of our culture.’ At first, I complained, and then finally I started to read it. It was tough going to begin with, but he used to read to me as well. That was the other beautiful thing: he would read to me and edit it a little bit as he read. Through Godaan, the Indian village really came alive for me. I felt I was there. I was rereading Godaan again yesterday and thinking how it reminded me of Flaubert. It’s the descriptions and this very leisurely pace, the slow unfolding of time. Not that much happens, but things happen at a very deep level. One gets drawn inside the characters; one understands them. And one understands what poverty really feels like. It’s a very simple story about a very poor farmer, who is in a fairly good position in terms of caste. The village in India is not really one village where everybody lives together, it’s more like little hamlets which have relationships with each other. Each hamlet is fairly independent and most of the people in the hamlet are from the same caste and are interconnected through family or other relationships—but not through marriage. You always get married to somebody from a village away just to avoid the consanguinity problem. “For me, a story, a novel, is the ultimate way of passing on knowledge and memory” This farmer has worked really, really hard to get his brothers started in life because his parents died young. He got them maybe not much education—a little bit of primary school, that’s what everyone did in those days—but he looked after them and brought them up. Then he gets them married, which is expensive, and he has to take on debt. It’s a novel about the life of the Indian farmer, and how they live with these crippling amounts of debt, which always happen either because of sickness, or because someone has to get married. It’s the kind of debt that they are then never able to pay off. If they’re lucky, they can keep their land for more than a couple of generations. If you’re a poor, marginal farmer, if you can keep it for even a lifetime, or for two generations, you’re already doing fantastically. It really describes the precarity of that life and that world. Because of that underlying tension and the lack of money and just the sheer hard work of survival, the wife and husband end up in fights. This farmer, after bringing up his brothers, finds they’re really quite useless and rather spoiled and their wives are just as bad. Two of the brothers don’t want to live under the same roof so they move away and live separately. So this man goes from being semi-marginal to being totally marginal because he only has a tiny piece of land and three kids and a wife to look after. They survive but the book starts off with a fight between the husband and wife which is fantastic. It’s also an amazing book because you see a relationship between a husband and a wife who adore each other and yet they fight all the time. She is not at all a submissive wife but cares deeply about her husband. The man desperately wants to have a cow because it’s one step away from total precarity, from not knowing whether tomorrow you’re going to be left with no house or no food, to being able to hold your head up in society. That is what a cow means. It means that if your child is sick, you have that little bit of milk to give them a little bit of energy when they need it. If you have a little bit of extra milk, you can sell it to a neighbor for one or two rupees. The book really shows you what poverty is. It shows you not just what life in India was and what poverty was, but what poverty still is in the village, and the curse that is rural indebtedness. And you learn it in a beautiful way. I studied anthropology and politics and I had to read all these heavy tomes on the same subject. There was The Indian Village by M.N. Srinivas, and umpteen books about the caste system. They were great books, but they’re a lot of effort. Not everybody can make it. You can bypass all that and just read this novel and you will understand — because you are there. You are living it. That’s the thing. For me, a story, a novel, is the ultimate way of passing on knowledge, and memory. That’s the way it’s always been. That’s why we always end up reading novels. I don’t think novels can die because this is a way of passing on deep knowledge in a totally painless way. Godaan has a beautiful, beautiful ending. If you don’t cry in it, then you’re a tough person. But what truly distinguishes Munshi Premchand’s work is his understanding of India — about the relationships that bind people in the village, in marriage, in the family. His description of the village, how everyone’s always listening to each other, how rumors circulate, and how people living beside each other in conditions of utter precarity can be at one moment incredibly cruel and at others very kind to each other. Premchand also shows the nature of the caste, how it really works. Lanterns on Their Horns started off in a very odd way. I was at a cousin’s wedding, feeling very awkward as the oldest unmarried woman there. So I tried to hide in a dark corner but found it occupied by a Brahmin priest in a white dhoti. We nodded to each other and began to talk and after a moment I realized I was talking to the father of the bride, a part-time priest and full-time professor of Sanskrit at the Sanskrit university. Rather awed and feeling very inadequate and ignorant, I asked him a question which had always intrigued me, which is ‘Why is the cow sacred?’ He gave me a fascinating and totally different explanation from the one that you usually get, that the cow is sacred because it gives milk etc. He gave me a Sanskrit scholar’s explanation, deeply philosophical. He told me that gau , the word for cow, has the same root in Sanskrit as the very first ray of light that touches the Earth in the morning. That’s an invisible light but it is the most energizing and nourishing thing in the universe, it is life itself. That’s why yoga and all these things in India are supposed to be done very early. This light is like Prasad , the food that you give to the gods in the temple, divine food. This light is gau . It is what starts the circle of life, because that light is absorbed by all living things and goes into the Earth. Then living things die, and their bodies, their remains, go into the Earth, and then back up into the ether, however you want to see it. I thought that was a fascinating idea. It’s beautiful, poetic and it rang true somehow. I thought to myself, ‘I’d like to write about gau’ and about a cow like the cow in Godaan . I want to write about village India.’ We all carry a village inside us. But at that time, the early 2000s, India was just taking off economically. There was double-digit growth and all that, and the newspapers were full of how India was going to be the next Asian tiger. The newspapers had forgotten the villages. No one was writing about rural indebtedness and farmers’ suicides except for one lone journalist called P. Sainath. He was a total outlier. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Godaan was in the 1930s and my novel starts in 1969, which was the year I was born. It’s also the year a man walked on the moon. That’s why I set it in that year. You have people going to the moon and then, in this village, you had the first roads arriving. My grandfather told me how he remembered when in the villages they had radios for the first time. They would sit around the radio and say, ‘What?!? Someone’s gone to the moon?!? Is that even possible?’ I tried to imagine what it must have been like to sit on a charpoy in a village drinking tea and listening to the radio, hearing that a man had made it to the moon. It was fun. It’s always fascinating how in modernity, you have tradition and in so-called traditional settings, you have extremely modern people. I think of my own family. There were people who lived traditional lives but whose minds were so modern in their way of looking at the world, they didn’t judge those who were different from them. That’s also something which is very typically Indian, not seeing contradiction, because in the Hindu way of viewing the world, things don’t exist only in opposition to each other, there is a level of reality where opposites unite. Thus you can be a nuclear scientist, but you can still be reading the Mahabharat every morning and doing your puja ."