Raag Darbari: More than Just a Satire on Rural India

Shrilal Shukla was a bureaucrat with the foresight of a writer. All his life, he worked for the government and found himself critiquing internally the ways in which India was forced to develop modern ways. His examination of rural Uttar Pradesh is neither primitive nor evolutionary, it’s the reality served with servitude and a pinch of wry humour.

The trajectory of modern rural Indian life in northern India, Source: Pinterest

A bustling kuccha road runs along an open sewage canal. It was a local river body that had been turned into a casual garbage dump by the villagers. Cows, who are susceptible to this fact, are in the habit of taking routine dips in the murky waters. With every dip, their life span thins. This village is Shivpalganj and its legends are remarkable. The leader of this village, who happens to be a vaid, a doctor who specializes in Ayurveda, preaches about chastity and synthesises bhaang in his courtyard.

The inhabitants of Shivpalganj are quite proud about their identities and the fact that they belong to this land where Vaidji rules, working constantly towards the betterment of the people, who happen to be male mostly, as female characters are primarily muted. This, of course, is the setting of Shrilal Shukla’s acclaimed satire, Raag Darbari, a novel originally written in Hindi that won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1969. Shivpalganj is Shukla’s imaginary reinvention of Uttar Pradesh’s post-independence neo-colonialism that wafts off from the life of northern rural India.

Shukla, born in 1925 grew up to work for the government and earned his reputation as a top-notch bureaucrat. During his career, he closely observed the various hypocrisies that go behind and beneath the workings of the government, particularly the the corruption that vomits upon the innocence of a typical rural Indian. He stuffs the tale of India’s suffocated rural political system in the quirky package of a satire that details the disjointed lives of simple rural people who are forced to follow the ways of a leader who enforces his subjectivity on others.

Shukla’s experience of working closely with the government gave him the foresight to portray the reality of rural politics in glaring detail. He creates a vast multitude of characters, each of them more vivid than the other, presenting a different yet distorted perspective about life and their intent to twist the lives of people, to strengthen their hold on power.

The cover of the English translation of Raag Darbari, Source: Open Library

Rangnath, the most intellectual character, symbolises modernist ideologies, and it is through his point of view that the readers get a satirical punch of the daily lives of the people of Shivpalganj, especially Vaidji. The overall effect that Shukla intends to create through Raag Darbari is, however, not just about criticising the ways of post-independence rural India — he intends to create the confusion that a development-obsessed and English-speaking independent India enforces on the common man.

Vaidji, the most powerful man in Shivpalganj, preaches about the traditional concepts of male chastity, he makes medicine to enhance the male reproductive system because it is his belief, an age-old Brahmin orthodox belief, that for a society to function, a man’s fertility is very crucial. Women don’t find a main role in Shukla’s book because rural women existed on the peripheries of society. They did not have a voice, just roles that they were expected to perform with the audibility of a cow.

What makes Raag Darbari a great contemporary read to feast on? Its evocative and realistic voice kind of takes pride in the rural indigeneity of an India which was stuck with the challenge to grow despite the many blows it received in the process of attaining its independence. It also gives a glaring message, that independence was just the start of the many challenges that the country had to face, to align themselves with the world, which always seems to be running at lightning speed.