NATION MISPLACED: READING SATINATH BHADURI’S DHORAI CHARIT MANAS

There have been numerous accounts of the nation-building process during the freedom struggle especially in the first half of the twentieth century. Whether it is literature or social sciences, one finds celebration of this process. Even serious academic deliberations too celebrated this process till about 1960s. After that the nation-building process came under scrutiny and questions were posed as to who constitutes the nation and who are the people either excluded from the nation or being pushed to the margins of the nation. Beginning in the early 1980s, subaltern studies series in India brought a new dimension in understanding the history in general and the history of the Indian nation in particular from the margins of the society. This paper uses the understanding of the subaltern studies collective to look at Satinath Bhaduri’s novel Dhorai Charit Manas to analyse how the nation looks from the grass root. This novel is a story of a character Dhorai who is born in a low-caste community in north Bihar. The story covers the time span of first half of the twentieth century and is coeval to time span of high nationalism in India under the leadership of Gandhi. Through the story of Dhorai, the novel also looks at how villages and villagers were imagined by the elite class of city-based nationalists and their grass root volunteers. The novel problematizes the imagination of the nation and indicates a clear disjunction in the priorities of the mainstream politics at the national level and grass root politics at the rural level. The paper seeks to understand and analyse this disjunction and argues for dismantling of meta-concepts of nation and nation-building and replace it with more nuanced understanding of the nation from its margins.