In the opening chapter of the Angika novel Gulabiya by Abha Purbey (translated into English by Tejaswi Rawal and Shivangi), we meet the titular protagonist, a young woman working as an agricultural labourer near the Kosi river in Bihar as she awaits the arrival of her lover Balesar. From the beginning, Purbey cleverly drops hints that this is a love story on an epic scale, and one with rippling consequences. We are told that Gulabiya is perfectly still, “as motionless as a stone idol”. Her friend Paro, concerned about her lovelorn friend’s single-minded devotion, invokes the Shiva-Sati and Krishna-Radha pairings from Hindu mythology—not coincidentally, for neither of those stories involve happy endings.
Gulabiya is the first Angika novel to be translated into English. It is at once a love story, a slice-of-life drama and a masterful novel of ideas critiquing feudalism, capitalism and the misogyny underpinning Bihari society (as well as India as a whole). Gulabiya and Balesar (who manages labour for the local landlord Seth Patel Singh) are desperately trying to escape the drudgery of daily wage labour. They lease some land and take a shot at the kind of independence (fiscal and otherwise) that feels like a pipe dream to most of their peers.
One of the novel’s biggest strengths is the effortless way in which the conversations and everyday banter between the characters ties in with wider societal and global themes. The perfect example of this is an eight-page segment in the first half where Balesar is eating with and talking to the (male) labourers he oversees for Patel Singh. His loquacious friend Mangru tells the story of Spartacus, the 1st century BC slave/gladiator who led a rebellion against his Roman masters. It is fascinating to see Balesar and company joining the dots between feudalism and early capitalism, à la Rodney Hilton in Class Conflict and the History of Feudalism (1985). “This story was about workers like us,” Mangru tells Balesar and the lesson sticks because Balesar soon quits his job to start a farming practice, cultivating bananas alongside his beloved Gulabiya.
“This context for the (Spartacus) story-within-a-story narrated by Mangru is key to how this section works. It marks the shifting tides in Balesar, coming to realise the bonded nature of his labour,” says Rawal. “There’s something almost like a play about the image of Mangru telling his tale, and his compatriots slowly abandoning their chewing as they listen, even draw physically closer to him, compelled by what he’s saying. Even as the parallels between the slave trade and the workers, particularly Balesar’s gilded cage, are clear, neither Mangru nor the text is being entirely didactic.”
The novel’s midsection, which depicts Gulabiya nurturing her and Balesar’s cherished banana crop, is full of elegant nature metaphors. Gulabiya charging towards the field in the morning is likened to “Kosi Ma leaving the Himalayas and running in the direction of the Ganges”. At one point Gulabiya refers to the crops as her children in jest, but the reader understands that it is half a joke at best. The imagery and the language underscore this point throughout—Gulabiya’s rebellion against the dead-end nature of her and Balesar’s wage-labour is framed in an ecofeminist way.
“Centred as it is on the harvest, Gulabiya was always bound to be preoccupied with images of the seasons and the natural world. It is the world these characters inhabit, and what their language rises out of,” Rawal adds. “One doesn’t ask questions of nature—it simply is. Just so, Gulabiya and Balesar belong to each other, will always meet each other as the earth does the sky. Though these beautiful and gentle images are compelling, Purbey and the narrator understand the dangers as well as the delights of the natural world.”
The inevitability that Rawal alluded to manifests in the second half of the novel, when Patel Singh and his cronies plot to destroy Balesar and Gulabiya’s fragile little world. And while there are the usual financial machinations, the decisive blow is struck by separating the couple. Gulabiya’s folks are coerced into marrying her off to another man, the matter escalating to the panchayat level.
In a blunt monologue, Gulabiya shames the panchayat gathering for allowing a stranger to rape her. “The silence of the gathering, though tinged with some shame, is more from shock at Gulabiya’s audacity—her willingness to speak up for herself. To the panch, the crime of naming and describing a horrific act in plain terms is greater than the act itself,” the translators said.
Gulabiya was published in Angika in 2008. In 1903, the British linguist George Grierson had categorised Angika as a dialect of the Maithili language. Angika speakers disagreed and demanded recognition, kicking off a decades-long sociopolitical movement. The Hindi writer Rahul Sankrityayan (1893-1963), a polyglot, eventually corrected Grierson’s mistake and placed Angika as a language distinct from Maithili. In 2018, Angika was recognised as one of the official “second state languages” of Jharkhand; till date it has no such recognition in Bihar.
“Earlier this year there were widespread protests in Jharkhand over the exclusion of both Angika and Magahi from the Jharkhand teacher’s eligibility test. The agitations were substantial enough for the exam to be cancelled and a committee to be formed,” says Shivangi.
The publication of Gulabiya is a landmark moment for Angika literature. In her translator’s afterword, Shivangi refers to the language’s oral tradition and its now-thriving literary scene. “Angika novels are quite daring and what makes it better is that there are so many women writing in the language. Vidya Rani, Kasturi Jha, Mridula Shukla et al and of course Abha Purbey are all doing very exciting work,” Shivangi adds.
Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based writer