ABSTRACT
Nirmal Verma along with Mohan Rakesh is a stalwart of the ‘Nai Kahani’ movement in Hindi literature and his response to Nehruvian modernity was, like many other writers, to explore interiority. Verma lived for many years in the West and has been criticised for being too elitist and western. In the novel, the protagonists are a diverse group in Delhi putting together a play by Strindberg. The narrator is a boy who has come from Allahabad to live with his cousin Bitti in her apartment in Delhi. The boy – who may be narrating in his adulthood as a writer himself – describes the activities of the group, who seem afflicted by a strange malaise, perhaps anxiety or despair, and their feelings are never articulated even to each other. There is a sense of disillusionment pervading the group, although they are committed to their project. If they are committed, there is little sense to be got of an interest in a public response to their work. There is a sense of solitude being desirable (as in Hindu belief), but the solitude portrayed is more like alienation, a malaise. Overall, there is deep disenchantment with Indian modernity in Verma’s views, but, unlike in Mohan Rakesh, one does not get a sense of what is wrong in social terms. It is treated as an inner condition without a perceptible external cause.
