Phanishwar Nath `Renu'
Phanishwar Nath `Renu'
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Briefly
Ian Woolford is a professor of Hindi at Melbourne's La Trobe University. The UK-born American has been teaching in Australia for the last three years, and is now working on a book on writer Phanishwar Nath `Renu'. He talks to Kim Arora
I've spent over a year going back and forth to Renu's village in Bihar's Araria district, mostly working on his novel, Maila Aanchal.
It has over a hundred folk songs. I went to the village after reading Maila Aanchal be cause I thought, my god, there is something special here! Renu un derstood something very special about his motherland and his vil lage which is very difficult to ex press in a Hindi novel. I wanted to go to the village to find out what is happening now.
So I went and I learnt that Renu himself was a singer and performer. There were still some elderly people left -this was ten years ago when I first went there -who remem bered singing with Renu. And of course, they performed this tradition. Now there is a new younger generation that is doing this... I re corded it. And now I'm writing about this con nection between local performance and Hindi literature. There is a feeling in the village... they say, gaane ke liye koi nahin bacha hai aajkal (there is no one left to sing today). This is a very sad feeling. But coming from the outside as I do, I can see the sense of loss, but also the joy that this tradition existed at all. The joy in its memory and that an amazing figure like Phanishwar Nath Renu wrote about this and that we can still have it in our presence by reading it. I am writing about this in a very positive way , that even in the 21st century we can experience this.
Politics
Piyush Tripathi, April 21, 2019: The Times of India
When Narendra Modi quoted from Phanishwar Nath ‘Renu’’s highly-acclaimed novel Maila Aanchal at an election meeting on Saturday, the PM was hoping to strike a local chord with the audience. The noted Hindi writer was born in Aurahi Hingana village, now a part of the Araria Lok Sabha constituency.
Renu’s seminal novel captured the aching heart of impoverished rural Bihar like none before. The line Modi quoted was, “Main sadhana karoonga gramvasini Bharatmata ke maile aanchal taley.” Soaked in the religio-social idiom of rural India, the line can roughly be transliterated as: Under the shade of Mother India, I will toil. Renu also penned the short story, Maare Gaye Gulfam, which became the subject of the much-feted Teesri Kasam, which had Raj Kapoor and Waheda Rehman in lead roles. Dagdar Babu, a film based on Maila Aanchal starring Dharmendra and Jaya Bhaduri, remained incomplete. Interestingly, Renu had also contested an assembly election from Forbesganj in 1972. He secured around 45,000 votes as an independent candidate but lost to close friend Sarju Mishra of Congress. Speaking at the ancestral home in Aurahi Hingana, his eldest son Padam Parag Roy ‘Venu’ said that “PM Modi’s ‘achche din’ slogan was perhaps inspired by a sentence in one of Renu’s books that “desh to azaad ho gaya, lekin kya achche din aa gaye”. “Modi had also said in his public meeting at Bhopal on September 14, 2015, that if one wants to know real Bihar and its poverty, he should read Renu’s books,” said Venu, who was a BJP MLA from Forbesganj from 2010 to 2015.
Venu’s younger brother Aparajit Roy ‘Appu’ wittily intervened, “And the news of bhaiya (big brother) not getting ticket in 2015 assembly elections came merely eight days after that. He later joined JD(U).”
Renu had returned the Padma Shri award to protest the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi in 1975. He passed away in 1977.
CM Nitish Kumar has visited his village at least four times. “A Renu Smriti Bhavan has also been constructed for research and other academic activities related to my father’s works,” Appu said.
Appu said the hutment where Renu lived and wrote has been preserved in its original form. “The thatched roof has been kept intact along with a few items belonging to Renu, including his photographs,” he said.
Renu has three sons — Venu, Appu and Dakshineshwar Prasad Roy, an MBA in rural management. “My father believed in socialist ideology. He crisscrossed Bihar to understand people’s real problems,” said Appu, a farmer. On being asked whether any of the candidates contesting from Araria has visited the village, he replied in the negative. He also said that “Extremely backward castes (EBCs) could be a decisive factor as they form a sizeable chunk of electors in Araria after the Muslims.”
