Chandrakanta (Santati): A Chronicle of Contemporary Ethos

Siddhartha Singh
Associate Professor
Department of English
Sri JNMPG College, Lucknow

The question is why I chose Chandrakanta (serialized 1887, published in full 1892) by Babu
Devakinandan Khattri to write upon after 130 years of its publication? The answer is threefold:
First it was a product of a particular socio-cultural milieu which was consciously trying to
synthesize the particles of a scattered and perplexed cultural tradition with a dual aim to resurrect
themselves and to defy the ideological hegemony of what we call “Orientalism”; secondly it had
immense influence on the common man, the neo-literates, as they learned Hindi just to read this
novel and the novel became the first best seller of Hindi; and finally the most important reason
that though the novel shows a remarkable fusion of tradition and modernity and Devakinandan
Khattri is able to redefine not only Hindi/Hindu reawakening but also he was creating a concept
of gender equality which was incomparable in world literature of the time and yet the giant Hindi
critics marginalized the text as non-literary. When I say Hindi/Hindu reawakening it should be
noted that in the beginning of the Indian renaissance Bengal was the center of Hindu
reawakening. This renaissance began with an added emphasis on the rise and development of
vernaculars through literature against Macaulay’s intention of erecting English as an
“imperishable empire”. The rise and development of Bengali language was coterminous with
Hindu identity and the same phenomenon shaped the movement of Hindi language and literature
of the time. Devakinandan Khattri holds a special place in this movement. He has made a
conscious choice not to use the contemporary puritanical trend of the Sanskritised language of
the Bhartendu period (1869-1900); he had written a the novel in a language of common people to
attract a wide readership and the result was that Chandrakanta not only gained such popularity
but even today the book cover boasts of how ‘countless people learnt Hindi just to read this
novel’, but (Hindi) also emerged as victorious in competition with Urdu and thus the novel
provided an impetus to Hindu/Hindi nationalism.

Let us begin with a summary of the plot. The novel’s action is quite convoluted, with the
many twists and turns one would expect from a Western fantasy novel or from the Indian dāstān
genre (which will be explained in detail below), but it is at its core a love story revolving around
the passion of Prince Bīrendra Singh for Princess Chandrakāntā of the neighboring kingdom.
However, the chief minister to Princess Chandrakāntā’s father is also in love with her and is
plotting to get her for himself at all costs. The two sides’ aiyārs (spies) do battle and when the
dust settles, of course, Bīrendra Singh and Chandrakāntā are married. The splendor and chivalory
of the prences and princesses are somewhat overshadowed by the excitement offered by the
activities of another kind of characters, the male ‘ayyar’n and female ‘ayyaras’, who friends of

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the princely characters but actually hold quite distinct function and worldview. Off course form
and structure of the novel bear cross cultural and cross literary negotiations yet the novel offers
more than a fantasy fiction and dastan at various levels to appeal the mass with an amazing
number of readership. It was published an astonishing twenty times before 1936 and remains in
print today. This proves its success story.

Despite the phenomenal success of this novel to emerge victorious in Hindi with Urdu
competition, it invited negative assessment by Acharya Ramchandra Shukla, the most important
critic because the novel was not fit in the canonical parameters set by him. He marginalizes the
novels in following words

… the aim of (novel such as Chandrakanta) is weird and wonderful

This narrow definition of “literature” and the “novel” has mostly prevented a positive
appreciation of Khattri’s extraordinary inventions. Some of later critics tried to recanonize this
novel. Rajendra Yadav argues that the novel corresponds to the collective imaginaire of the
period:

After the defeat of 1857, people accepted the material and social defeat, but not
the intellectual and spiritual defeat. The celebration of vigilance and extraordinary
intelligence in Chandrakanta can be linked to this. Chandrakanta does not accept
defeat but transforms the terrible defeats of feudal prowess into intellectual
cleverness-in other words a feeble attempt tom prove one’s intellectual excellence
after one’s material strength worthless”.

This is a very important statement to highlight the cultural significance of the novel. Rejecting
the novel in the name of Tilism, adventure and ayyari is a grave injustice. The impact of
modernity is quite evident in this novel. The rhetoric of indigenous self-improvement popular
among Indians in the late nineteenth century straddles pre-Modernity and Modernity, Eastern
and Western social practices. Indian reformers, both Hindu and Muslim, consciously imitated
their colonial masters but usually also appealed to the reclamation of Indian tradition as a
justification for reform. They simultaneously bought into Western notions of technological
development as progress while maintaining — or, it can be argued, largely inventing — a
traditionalist faith in the possibility of a return to a Golden Age untainted by foreign rule and
Chandrakanta (Santati) is no exception to this phenomenon. Ironically the ‘tilism’ which were
based on technical and scientific facts, were shown as jadoo in the teleserial. Apparently Tilism,
adventure, ayyari, and the theme of love between Rajput prince and princess seem to make it

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only a work of popular literature for entertainment, but at a deeper level the novel is an epic of
the first rise of realism which is anti-imperialist in texture and structure. Rejecting it as literature,
critics forget that no work of art can survive without some element of entertainment. They are
not able to see beyond their set canonical parameters that tilism literature of Khattriji is a very
powerful chain joining the anti-imperialist consciousness of Hindus. Keeping it outside the
world of literature is to deprive us from an anti-imperial consciousness of wider significance. It
must be noted here that Chandrakanta (Santati) is not just an edition to an already existing
Rajput palimpsest and a palimpsest formed by earlier Parso-Urdu Dastans. Tilism is only an
important component of the style craft in Chandrakanta; it is just a technique unlike the magical
fantasy of earlier Dastans. Besides, the novel is marked by the complete absence of the
indecencies found in its rival works on fiction in Urdu, the Bostan-i-Khyal and Dastan-i-Amir
Hamza. Khatri ji is always conscious of the piousness and moral standards of their (Hindu)
characters.

Another important aspect which I want to highlight here is the rise of new woman, a
newer conception of female identity than what his contemporaries in the West, like Shaw and
Ibsen, could imagine or could not imagine. It is not merely a coincidence that Devakinandan
Khattri chose the title of the first “best-seller” Hindi classic novel after the name of his female
protagonist and the subsequent narrative sequence bears her name Chandrakanta Santati. A
daunting incomparable task, that was not possible even for those carrying the ‘White man’s
burden’ to choose a title after the name of a female protagonist. Throughout Chandrakanta
(Santati) Khatri creates plethora of such female characters who are perfect embodiments of
valour, beauty, wisdom, chastity and delicacy. Most of the female characters are brave and
courageous like their male counterparts. As a custodian of culture they live up to the expectation
of an awakened Hindu consciousness after the Gadar. The most important aspect is that khattriji
moves away from the tradition of Riti Kaal of head-to-toe delineation heroin’s beauty and shies
away from explicit sensuality. He consciously supplements the reader with a nice description of
their strength, both physical and moral. For example I cite the description of Chapla, the best
friend and ayyara of Chandrakanta.

Chapla was no ordinary woman. Apart from beauty and elegance, she also had
strength. To fight with two or three men and capture them was but a trifle for her.
She was fully competent in the art of using weapons. And apart from her art of
ayyari she had many other qualities. Masterful at singing and playing
music,expert in dancer, very fond of making fireworks-what else can I write?
There was no art in which Chapala was not skilled. Her complexion was fair, her
body shapely in every way, her delicate hands and feet suggested that to strike her
with a flower would be a crime. Whenever she needed to go out she would
consciously spoil her beauty or disguise herself.

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 Lifting the national spirit in the wake of Indian renaissance the novel aims at constituting
a web of socio-cultural ethos through incomparable character delineation. Chandrakanta
(Santati) stands on that juncture of time where one period of time is falling and another is rising.
It is a record of the rise of new ethos in the time of rapid socio-cultural and religious
reformations.

Chandrakāntā is certainly a salvo in a culture war that plays out through Partition and
into the post-colonial period: Language use became associated with religious community. Alok
Rai’s analysis of this social change, Hindi Nationalism, has a marvelously apt title, which plays
on Hindu/Hindi, because Chandrakāntā and other books of this time are creating the (Hindu)
Indian nation by drawing old strands of Indian thought into a newly formed Hindi literary space
(Rai 2001). English literature exerted its prestige when vernacular authors imitated British
models. Yet the process was much richer and more nuanced than the usual model, which argues
that the political center creates culture and the dominated periphery only imitates.