Few people of the new generation in Nepal would be familiar with the life and works of a remarkable semi-freak, amorous anarchist, sadhu, linguist, literary creator, and a Marxist writer of India with over 120 books to his credit—named Rahul Sankrityayan (1893-1963). Though I could not meet Sankrityayan because of my time and space, I became familiar with his ideas through some Nepali writers who often narrated their personal associations with him, and his wife Kamala Sankrityayan Pariyar of Darjeeling whom I met in literary seminars. She was naturally full of stories about this great scholar, her mentor, inspirer and husband. The episodic avatars of Sankrityayan in Nepali narrations were full of life, humour and thrills. I read some of his works, especially his ideologically oriented writings and his ‘self-storying’ texts.  

A recent discovery

For me, the most prominent among the Nepali writers who were full of stories  about Sankrityayan were Janaklal Sharma and Krishnachandra Singh Pradhan. Janaklal Sharma, a very close associate of Sankrityayan, had a great repertoire of personal memories about writers of Nepal and India, and his episodes were inexhaustible. What struck me most was the philosophy and character of Sankrityayan, a unique scholar of this region who dedicated his life to find links and forge bonds in terms of the commonalities of people,  especially in spheres where they share a number of issues, scripts and cultures. It is typically especially interesting to recall Sankrityayan in today’s context when Nepal’s relationship with India is passing through a number of vicissitudes. But when it comes to the question of sharing broader cultural and literary culture, people accept a reality that does not naturally come under close scrutiny.

Sankrityayan’s philosophy and his interpretation of Hindi’s broader sphere and nationalism have begun to come to the world of academic discourse only in recent years. It has lately come through a book written by a Nepali scholar. The landmark work is A Life History of Rahul Sankritayan, published by Oxford University Press in 2016. This book is written by Alaka Atreya Chudal, a tenured lecturer at the Department of South Asian, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies, University of Vienna, Austria. This remarkable woman is a great scholar of Sanskrit and South Asian languages including Hindi, and a literary writer. She is one of the few outstanding Nepali scholars who teach in the prestigious faculties in European Universities.

Except for the eminent Marxist literary critic Nambar Singh whom I knew and met in India and Nepal, who came to examine our students’ PhD dissertations a few times, I did not hear the Hindi writers talking much about Sankrityayan. Some writers interestingly used his name when they wanted to open some avenues of Nepali Hindi literary bonding in seminars I was attending. But Alaka’s book has remarkably fulfilled that need not only for the Indian but also for the Nepali literary public who would like to find some persona, some theory and some associations that open up entirely neglected but very important spheres of literary print culture shared by a large section of the people.

By evoking Benedict Anderson’s theory of ‘imagined-community’ and that of ‘print-capitalism, Alaka has looked at Sankrityayan’s unique theory of the sphere of Hindi that trespasses the boundaries that scholars by using Jurgen Habermas’s theory of social sphere have been interpreting according to their needs. Here, we must mention Francesca Orseni’s seminal work The Hindi Public Sphere, 1920-1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism published by Oxford University Press in 2002, that theorises on the core issue of nationalism and Hindi language sphere. Orsini says Hindi’s nationalist claim was “an ideological construct’ made at the expense of local languages, and it was ‘pure’, exclusive, and elitist. Was Sankrityayan’s theory of Hindi nationalist sphere an elitist approach?

Redefining public sphere

Alaka’s book has shown that Sankrityayan redefined the theory of public sphere of Hindi by linking it not to the monolithic, narrow nationalistic formulation but by showing how its propensity for sharing and bonding has made it broader. By giving examples and meticulously analysing Sankrityayanian’s texts the author shows how he extended the meaning of print-capitalism to include the bonding of languages that share a number of features.

“Making Hindi the leading print language and Devnagari the common print script were key parts of Sankrityayan’s nationalism”, says Alaka. But she also makes it clear that it was not a hegemon; instead, it was the spirit of geo-spatial bonding, because, “Sankrityayan accepted Hindi and Urdu as one language”.

Alaka calls this factor ‘printed word’. She has given Sankrityayan’s Nepal association through his unique theory of sphere, which is different from Orseni’s prismatic perception of the rise of Hindi that was propelled and supported by the canonical criticism and politics. Alaka problematises Sankrityayan’s ‘nationalistic kinship’, and ‘or brotherhood’ with Nepali as a factor that should be discussed in this spherical discussion.

This book shows Sankrityayan’s Nepal associations within the chapters as well as in the appendices. These people include poets, Lhasa traders, monks and writers because Sankrityayan travelled to Tibet and had Buddhist associations. She gives a list of 15 people, out of whom Balakrishna Sama, Chittadhar Hridaya, Laxmiprasad Devkota, Janaklal Sharma and Dharmaratna Yemi were writers, and Hemraj Sharma was a great grammarian and scholar associated with the Rana court. Sankrityayan’s aphorism that poet Laxmiprasad Devkota was the sum total of three major Hindi romantic or chayabadi poets—Panta, Prasad and Nirala, has gone down in Nepali literary criticism as the greatest single statement unfailingly quoted even to these days.

But curiously, Devkota who attended the speech in which Sankrityayan made this analogy, was angry because he had mentioned Devkota’s brief commitment to Ranchi mental hospital. This factor had triggered his famous poem “the lunatic” or pagal in which he lampoons a character who is a “scholar”.

This valuable work of scholarship, by discussing Sankrityayan’s autobiography, his admiration of Arya Samaj as ‘new light’, his Buddhist associations, his intellectual odysseys and his sundry but meaningful associations in Nepal, has put together a complex, challenging, anarchic history and life of a scholar whose name and work today would help open up new avenues of relationship among societies and people in this region by redefining spheres of culture, language and art.