Chosen Families and Self-Transformations in Dhan Gopal Mukerji's Books for Children, 1920s–1930s

Abstract

In the Indian subcontinent, the understanding of ‘the family’ in numerous narrative traditions has always extended into relationships with non-humans, with a pivotal emphasis on the guru-shishya (preceptor-disciple) relationship. This paper focuses on the highly popular English-language ‘juvenile fiction’ of Dhan Gopal Mukerji to suggest how he reconfigured these narrative traditions for a primarily non-Indian audience in the 1920s–30s. The paper considers Mukerji's young protagonists—invariably male, whether human or animal—in relation to the web of familial and outside social relationships through which the ‘quest motif’ is played out for a transnational readership. The epic form pervades his ‘jungle books’ through the figures of the animal protagonists, the search for a leader/guide/guru, and a re-imagining of caste, ethnicity and gender. Of particular interest is the composite mother figure. Dhan Gopal's oeuvre for children maps out a socialisation that is ‘free’ of the apparatus of the colonial home or of other disciplining institutional sites. Paradoxically, the search to be ‘free from fear’ can only be played in the alternative topos of the jungle, where violence is inescapable. How, if at all, may these narrative tropes be mapped onto contemporary history?

Keywords:

• Family
• jungle
• wanderings; mother
• guru
• epic
• violence
• fear
• caste
• revolutionary

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Devaki Bhaya, Ira Raja, Kumar Shahani, the late Dhan Gopal Mukerji Jr. and Marianne Mukerji for their support at different times. I thank also the anonymous reviewers of this paper for their critical queries.

Notes

  ¹ In his autobiographical Caste and Outcast, Mukerji refers to Kipling as ‘a brilliant painter of Indian life’, emphasising thereby his own ‘insider’ status: ‘I use the word painter advisedly, for everything that the eye alone takes in, that Mr. Kipling not only sees but takes in. No one however, except a Hindu, to whom the religion of his country is more real than all material aspects put together, can understand Indian life from within’. D.G. Mukerji, Caste and Outcast (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1923), pp.3–4.

  ² D.G. Mukerji, Bunny, Hound and Clown (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1931).

  ³ D.G. Mukerji, Dorothy Lathrop (illus.), Fierce-Face: The Story of a Tiger (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1936).

  ⁴ Mukerji and his wife decided to move to France in the aftermath of the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924. Much of Gay-Neck was written there. Conversation with author's son, D.G. Mukherji Jr., Hilton Head Island, USA, 1 May 2008.

  ⁵ John Williams, ‘The “Western”: Definition of the Myth’, in The Nation (18 Nov. 1961), p.401.

  ⁶ Suresh Chandra Banerji translated Gay-Neck as Chitragreeb, and Chief of the Herd as Juthopati. The original dates of publication are not given in the available reprints of the two novels (Calcutta: M.C. Sarkar and Sons, BS 1396/1989).

  ⁷ Robert Antoine SJ, Rama and the Bards (Calcutta: Writer's Workshop, 1975), p.37.

  ⁸  Ibid., p.80.

  ⁹ Nirode K. Barooah, Chatto, the Life and Times of an Indian Anti-Imperialist in Europe (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), p.i.

¹⁰ See Maia Ramnath, ‘Two Revolutions: The Ghadar Movement and India's Radical Diaspora, 1913–1918’, in Radical History Review, Vol.92 (Spring 2005), pp.7–30.

¹¹ Gordon H. Chang, ‘Introduction’, in G.H. Chang, Purnima Mankekar and Akhil Gupta (eds), D.G. Mukerji's Caste and Outcast (Stanford: Stanford University Press, rev. ed., 2002), pp.1–40. Chang's comments on the irony of the unhappiness of Mukerji's own family life (pp.33–4) were echoed during my conversations with Dhan Gopal Mukerji Jr. in 2008.

¹² Peter van der Veer has persuasively argued that the ‘imperialist construction of muscular Christianity was answered by an Indian nationalist construction of muscular Hinduism’. See his Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Delhi: Permanent Black, rpr. 2006), p.94.

¹³ Among others, see for example studies of Byron, Shelley and other Romantics in Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (eds), Romanticism, Race and Imperial Culture, 1780–1834 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996).

¹⁴ D.G. Mukerji, Jungle Beasts and Men (1923) (Delhi: Rupa & Co., rpr. 2003), p.158. See also Mukerji, Caste and Outcast, p.17.

¹⁵ D.G. Mukerji, Boris Artzybasheff (illus.), Ghond the Hunter (1928) (Delhi: Rupa & Co., rpr. 2003).

¹⁶ The desire to create a perfect composite of all castes is evident in the words given to Kuri on pp.30–31. But this is undercut by the ambivalence of Chapter XIII, which ends with the chamar (cobbler) being hounded out of the village on suspicion of being a ‘were-tiger’.

¹⁷ D.G. Mukerji, Mahlon Blaine (illus.), Chief of the Herd (1929) (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. Inc., rpr. 1952), p.32.

¹⁸ D.G. Mukerji, ‘Pigeons of Paradise’, in his Hindu Fables for Little Children (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1929).

¹⁹ Prithwindranath Mukhopadhyay, Dhanagopal Mukhopadhyay (in Bangla) (Calcutta: Paschim Bangla Akademi, 2003), pp.32–3.

²⁰ Rimli Bhattacharya, ‘Transnational Scouting and Dhan Gopal Mukerji's Gay-Neck: The Story of a Pigeon, 1927’, paper presented at the Department of English, University of Delhi, September 2008.

²¹ D.G. Mukerji, ‘Tagore's India’, in Asia, Vol.XX, no.8 (1920), pp.798–80 (accessed by kind courtesy of Gordon Chang, Stanford University).

²² Kipling's poem is found in his story ‘Toomai of the Elephants’.

²⁴ Buddhadev Bose, Sujit Mukherjee (trans.), The Book of Yudhisthir. A Study of the Mahabharat from Vyas (Hyderabad: Sangam Books, 1986).

²³ The Mahabharata is divided into 18 parvas or books. Book 12 is ‘Santi-parva’ meaning ‘The Book of Peace’. After the Great Battle of Kurukshetra, the newly-crowned Yudhisthir is guilt-ridden and despairing, and hence in need of counselling in order to be ‘at peace’.

²⁵ Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Letter of 31 Aug. 1927’ (trans. Indiradevi Chaudhurani & Supriya Roy), in Supriya Roy (ed.), Letters from Java. Rabindranath Tagore's Tour of South-East Asia (Calcutta: Visva-Bharati, 2010), p.73.

²⁶ Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Epigraph’, in Letters from Java.

²⁷ Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, ‘Gandhi, Nehru and the Ethical Imperatives of the National-Popular’, in Elleke Boehmer and Rosinka Chaudhuri (eds), The Indian Postcolonial. A Critical Reader (Delhi: Routledge Indian, rpr. 2011), pp.238–60.

²⁸  Ibid., p.250.

²⁹  Ibid.

³¹ Jawaharlal Nehru to Indira Gandhi, 6 May 1935, in Sonia Gandhi (ed.), Freedom's Daughter: Letters Between Indira Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, 1922–1939 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1987), pp.159–60. Nehru pokes fun at his own ‘professorial’ diktats in the course of this long letter.

³⁰ Though beyond the scope of this paper, one notes the fairly intense friendship and correspondence between the two which reveals equally striking differences, and not only in their respective locations.

³² Javed Majeed, Muhhamad Iqbal, Islam, Aesthetics and Postcolonialism (New Delhi and London: Routledge, 2009), p.61.

³³ Sibaji Bandyopadhyay offers a lyrical and ruthless reading of the intertextualities of modernity, via the yaksha of Kalidasa's Meghadutam, Rabindanath Tagore's ‘takes’ on the former, and Ritwik Ghatak's ‘responses’ to ‘Kobiguru’! See ‘Dis-membering and Re-membering the Art of Ritwik Ghatak’, in Sibaji Bandyopadhyay Reader: An Anthology of Essays (Delhi: Worldview Publications, 2012), p.239.

³⁴ Mukerji, Caste and Outcast, p.15.

³⁵ In a letter of 23 Sept. 1930, Mukerji proposes to Dutton that both ‘Nehru and Mrs. Mukerji's’ books on Indian history be printed ‘in one volume under the title India, Ancient and Modern for children or Young People's India. Information courtesy of Dhan Gopal Mukerji Jr.'s personal collection.

³⁶ Mukerji actually remembers his mother's deity-like appearance during his childhood: ‘At last, much to our relief, our mother appeared upon the scene and we felt secure at once, for nothing ever frightened mother’. Mukerji, Caste and Outcast, p.37.

³⁷ ‘Macduff was from his mother's womb untimely ripp'd’. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, Scene 8.