Drawing Inspiration from Petech’s studies on Hindi literature: caste and class related issues in Bhairav Prasad Gupta’s Ganga Maiya

Moving from Luciano Petech’s contributions to the study of contemporary Hindi literature – “La novellistica hindi moderna”(1948) and “Tre novelle indiane tradotte dall’originale hindi” (1949) – the present paper analyzes the literary career of Bhairav Prasād Gupta (1918-1995) and his most famous novel, Gaṅgā Maiyā, ‘Mother Gaṅgā’ (or Ganges), published in 1953. Emphasizing his early adhesion to the Communist Party of India – which led him to sustain the British struggle against the fascist Axis despite the brutal repression of the ‘Quit India’ movement – it successively describes Gupta’s role as the tutor of progressive literary movements such as Naī kahānī, ‘New short story’, and Jan’vādī kahānī, ‘Democratic short story’. The paper then analyzes in depth the two main characters of Gupta’s novel Gaṅgā Maiyā, Maṭrū and Gopī. Building mainly on Béteille’s theories on caste and class (Béteille 1965: 3-4), and on Lévy-Strauss’ suggestions on caste system (Lévy-Strauss 1955: 170), it contends that while Maṭrū embodies issues related to social justice, natural rights of the workers, and the institution of an independent community of men and women on a free and pristine land, Gopī’s character more specifically highlights problems arising from the burden of traditional community values. Maṭrū thus fights mainly against class iniquities, Gopī is involved in the dynamics of caste inhumanity. Yet the specific role that Gupta assigns to nature in the development of the narrative themes, strongly counterbalances the Marxist theoretical framework of the novel. The paper highlights this inner dialectic between Marxist theory and communist practices on the one hand, and, on the other, a sort of Utopian socialism projected against the backdrop of Rousseauan conceptions on pristine nature, arguing that it corresponds to the pronounced polarity that characterizes Maṭrū thoughts and deeds, where the features of both the social agitator and the devoted and ecstatic son of Mother Gaṅgā can be seen deeply interwoven. As regards the intimate relation with the river, Gupta mainly translates it in terms of a feeling of love and tenderness flowing from the mother to her children. In doing so, not only he does propose a dynamic that – being innate – turns out to be more acceptable in Marxist terms than any form of mysticism or religious devotion, but he also implicitly attempts to attain an unprecedented (at least for the Hindi novel standards) synthesis of unity with nature and cultural organization of human society – an achievement that can be arguably considered one of his greatest contributions not just to the political discussion of his times, but also to the contemporary global debate on human-nature relationship.