Gunahon Ka Devta was written by 23-year-old Dharamvir Bharati in 1949. I first read the novel several years ago and loved it; I read it again more recently, and couldn’t get it out of my mind. I was haunted by the story, the characters, the setting, the period.
It is a love story set in Allahabad in the 1940s – when the city was at the height of its beauty, with tree-lined streets, quiet bungalows, flower-filled parks and a gently-flowing Ganga. When I read the book, it seemed like a forgotten echo of a time I knew of only through family accounts and discussions.
Swept off my feet
The novel tells the passionate, tender love story of Chander and Sudha. I think one of the main reasons I decided to translate the book was because the love story just swept me off my feet. In these cynical, frenetic times, we rarely read love stories anymore; instead we pick our way through a chaotic clutter of relationship statuses, exes, dates, expectations, break-ups.
But Gunahon Ka Devta is set in another era and belongs to another world. Chander is the brilliant university student who falls in love with his professor, his mentor’s daughter, the impish, lovely Sudha. The two share a relationship that is as playful as it is deep and strong. But when Sudha’s father decides she must get married, it is a gut-wrenching moment of reckoning. Unable to express his love for Sudha, bound by duty and overwhelming gratitude to his mentor, Chander persuades Sudha to marry the man of her father’s choice – a decision that plunges their lives into turmoil and devastation.
I found Gunahon ka Devta not only an unforgettable love story but also a sharp, telling look at the restrictive social norms of the time and how they affected middle class relationships, particularly women’s lives. There are stirrings of change of course, and these do alter the destinies of some characters – but the weight of conformity and duty wears down individual aspirations for happiness.
What being apart meant in another era
Most of all, I found Sudha and Chander’s love story extremely moving and poignant – and so different (and maybe difficult to understand) – from today’s perspective. This was a time when there was no telephone, forget Facebook and twitter and email. When Sudha gets married and leaves Chander, it is a genuinely final, heart-rending parting.
There was no question of married women of the time just taking off to their maternal home for a visit. Permission had to be sought (and there was no guarantee it would be given). Nor could Sudha pick up a phone and talk to Chander. She had no contact with him – except for letters. Parting, longing, pining… these are words that have very little resonance today, because everyone is literally a phone call or click or tap away.
Also, in Chander and Sudha’s world, ‘real’ love didn’t necessarily have to culminate in physical attraction or even the sanctuary of togetherness. Real love meant sacrifice. It was untainted by selfish needs. You sacrificed your love for someone else’s happiness, for the sake of duty. You walked willingly through the very fire that would destroy your happiness. This is a motif that you see in many Hindi films of the time; indeed, the concept of love as sacrifice continued well into later decades too.
There was love – and then there was love
But Gunahon Ka Devta is also about other manifestations of love – love as friendship, purity, worship, constancy and confusion. There is also a discussion about the place that sex occupies in idealistic love. But above all, the novel is about love as Big Love, where you never stop loving someone, ever. Can we love like that anymore? Do we even want to?
It was another world in other ways as well – where mornings were meant for walks in Alfred Park (not yet called Chandra Shekhar Azad Park), afternoons for taking naps, and evenings for boating on the Ganga, reading poetry or listening to the radio. Dharamvir Bharati brings alive Allahabad beautifully, in all the seasons – whether it’s the scorching heat of summer or the arrival of rain-laden clouds in the monsoon. Descriptions of nature run like a silk thread through the entire book.
But is it a serious book?
Gunahon ka Devta became a monster best seller (it’s still in print, and continues to be one of the most widely read and loved Hindi novels). A very senior, well-respected journalist once told me that it was just a novel about ‘adolescent love,’ so why was I interested in the book? There were reasons why he said what he did. A novel about love and relationships is often not taken seriously by critics, especially here, given that Dharamvir Bharati’s other works are so different and hailed as literary masterpieces (novels like Suraj ka Satwan Ghoda, plays such as Andha Yug).
Also, as the introduction to Gunahon ka Devta in volume one of Dharamvir Bharatis’ Collected Works (Granthavali), points out, when a book becomes such an enormous commercial success and such a rage among the young people of the time (particularly young men), it enters the ‘popular’ category, and willy nilly becomes distanced from its more weighty brethren.
The writer
Dharamvir Bharati himself, much like his protagonist Chander, was a brilliant student who got his Bachelor’s, Master’s and PhD degrees in Hindi from Allahabad University. He taught there as a lecturer, before moving to Bombay in 1960 to edit the influential Hindi journal, Dharamyug, which he did for over two decades. He died in 1997 after being diagnosed with heart disease some years before.
During Dharamvir Bharati’s years in Allahabad, the city was home to a host of legendary Hindi literary luminaries – writers and poets such as Harivanshrai Bachchan, Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, Upendranath Ashk. Like many of his contemporaries, though Bharati wrote in Hindi, he was also an ardent lover of English poetry and world literature, whether it was Keats and Shelley or Tolstoy and Victor Hugo. At the same time, like a true intellectual, he was rooted in the cultural texts of his own country, from the Mahabharata to the poetry of Kabir and Sur.
His personal life was turbulent. In 1954 – much after he wrote Gunahon Ka Devta – he married a Punjabi refugee Kanta Kohli, a bride suggested to his mother by writer Upendranath Ashk’s wife, Kaushalya. But it was not to be a long relationship, and ended in divorce. After he moved to Bombay, he eventually married the beautiful, highly educated Pushpa, whom he had known since his Allahabad days. Two years ago, Pushpa Bharati, herself an accomplished writer, edited and published a stunning collection of Dharamvir Bharati’s love letters to her.
Much of his life finds an echo in Gunahon Ka Devta – in Sudha and Chander’s abiding love of poetry, for instance. I also can’t help but wonder how much of the book came out of Dharamvir Bharati’s own life and emotions – after all, he himself was only 23 when he wrote it.
When I look at his old black-and-white photographs – which show an intense-looking, gravely handsome man – I try and imagine him writing this piercingly sweet, painful love story. I wonder if he ever thought that the book would seduce readers more than 60 years after he wrote it. I know I decided to translate it because I couldn’t get it out of my mind. By now, I must have read the book more than a dozen times; yet every time I find some fresh nuance, some new meaning, and feel as if I’m discovering it all over again.
Poonam Saxena is a journalist. She works with the Hindustan Times and is the editor of its Sunday magazine, Brunch. The English translation of Gunahon Ka Devta has been published by Penguin Viking under the title Chander & Sudha.
We welcome your comments at
letters@scroll.in.
It is a love story set in Allahabad in the 1940s – when the city was at the height of its beauty, with tree-lined streets, quiet bungalows, flower-filled parks and a gently-flowing Ganga. When I read the book, it seemed like a forgotten echo of a time I knew of only through family accounts and discussions.
Swept off my feet
The novel tells the passionate, tender love story of Chander and Sudha. I think one of the main reasons I decided to translate the book was because the love story just swept me off my feet. In these cynical, frenetic times, we rarely read love stories anymore; instead we pick our way through a chaotic clutter of relationship statuses, exes, dates, expectations, break-ups.
But Gunahon Ka Devta is set in another era and belongs to another world. Chander is the brilliant university student who falls in love with his professor, his mentor’s daughter, the impish, lovely Sudha. The two share a relationship that is as playful as it is deep and strong. But when Sudha’s father decides she must get married, it is a gut-wrenching moment of reckoning. Unable to express his love for Sudha, bound by duty and overwhelming gratitude to his mentor, Chander persuades Sudha to marry the man of her father’s choice – a decision that plunges their lives into turmoil and devastation.
I found Gunahon ka Devta not only an unforgettable love story but also a sharp, telling look at the restrictive social norms of the time and how they affected middle class relationships, particularly women’s lives. There are stirrings of change of course, and these do alter the destinies of some characters – but the weight of conformity and duty wears down individual aspirations for happiness.
What being apart meant in another era
Most of all, I found Sudha and Chander’s love story extremely moving and poignant – and so different (and maybe difficult to understand) – from today’s perspective. This was a time when there was no telephone, forget Facebook and twitter and email. When Sudha gets married and leaves Chander, it is a genuinely final, heart-rending parting.
There was no question of married women of the time just taking off to their maternal home for a visit. Permission had to be sought (and there was no guarantee it would be given). Nor could Sudha pick up a phone and talk to Chander. She had no contact with him – except for letters. Parting, longing, pining… these are words that have very little resonance today, because everyone is literally a phone call or click or tap away.
Also, in Chander and Sudha’s world, ‘real’ love didn’t necessarily have to culminate in physical attraction or even the sanctuary of togetherness. Real love meant sacrifice. It was untainted by selfish needs. You sacrificed your love for someone else’s happiness, for the sake of duty. You walked willingly through the very fire that would destroy your happiness. This is a motif that you see in many Hindi films of the time; indeed, the concept of love as sacrifice continued well into later decades too.
There was love – and then there was love
But Gunahon Ka Devta is also about other manifestations of love – love as friendship, purity, worship, constancy and confusion. There is also a discussion about the place that sex occupies in idealistic love. But above all, the novel is about love as Big Love, where you never stop loving someone, ever. Can we love like that anymore? Do we even want to?
It was another world in other ways as well – where mornings were meant for walks in Alfred Park (not yet called Chandra Shekhar Azad Park), afternoons for taking naps, and evenings for boating on the Ganga, reading poetry or listening to the radio. Dharamvir Bharati brings alive Allahabad beautifully, in all the seasons – whether it’s the scorching heat of summer or the arrival of rain-laden clouds in the monsoon. Descriptions of nature run like a silk thread through the entire book.
But is it a serious book?
Gunahon ka Devta became a monster best seller (it’s still in print, and continues to be one of the most widely read and loved Hindi novels). A very senior, well-respected journalist once told me that it was just a novel about ‘adolescent love,’ so why was I interested in the book? There were reasons why he said what he did. A novel about love and relationships is often not taken seriously by critics, especially here, given that Dharamvir Bharati’s other works are so different and hailed as literary masterpieces (novels like Suraj ka Satwan Ghoda, plays such as Andha Yug).
Also, as the introduction to Gunahon ka Devta in volume one of Dharamvir Bharatis’ Collected Works (Granthavali), points out, when a book becomes such an enormous commercial success and such a rage among the young people of the time (particularly young men), it enters the ‘popular’ category, and willy nilly becomes distanced from its more weighty brethren.
The writer
Dharamvir Bharati himself, much like his protagonist Chander, was a brilliant student who got his Bachelor’s, Master’s and PhD degrees in Hindi from Allahabad University. He taught there as a lecturer, before moving to Bombay in 1960 to edit the influential Hindi journal, Dharamyug, which he did for over two decades. He died in 1997 after being diagnosed with heart disease some years before.
During Dharamvir Bharati’s years in Allahabad, the city was home to a host of legendary Hindi literary luminaries – writers and poets such as Harivanshrai Bachchan, Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, Upendranath Ashk. Like many of his contemporaries, though Bharati wrote in Hindi, he was also an ardent lover of English poetry and world literature, whether it was Keats and Shelley or Tolstoy and Victor Hugo. At the same time, like a true intellectual, he was rooted in the cultural texts of his own country, from the Mahabharata to the poetry of Kabir and Sur.
His personal life was turbulent. In 1954 – much after he wrote Gunahon Ka Devta – he married a Punjabi refugee Kanta Kohli, a bride suggested to his mother by writer Upendranath Ashk’s wife, Kaushalya. But it was not to be a long relationship, and ended in divorce. After he moved to Bombay, he eventually married the beautiful, highly educated Pushpa, whom he had known since his Allahabad days. Two years ago, Pushpa Bharati, herself an accomplished writer, edited and published a stunning collection of Dharamvir Bharati’s love letters to her.
Much of his life finds an echo in Gunahon Ka Devta – in Sudha and Chander’s abiding love of poetry, for instance. I also can’t help but wonder how much of the book came out of Dharamvir Bharati’s own life and emotions – after all, he himself was only 23 when he wrote it.
When I look at his old black-and-white photographs – which show an intense-looking, gravely handsome man – I try and imagine him writing this piercingly sweet, painful love story. I wonder if he ever thought that the book would seduce readers more than 60 years after he wrote it. I know I decided to translate it because I couldn’t get it out of my mind. By now, I must have read the book more than a dozen times; yet every time I find some fresh nuance, some new meaning, and feel as if I’m discovering it all over again.
Poonam Saxena is a journalist. She works with the Hindustan Times and is the editor of its Sunday magazine, Brunch. The English translation of Gunahon Ka Devta has been published by Penguin Viking under the title Chander & Sudha.