Jhaverchand Meghani’s at his newspaper desk
(Photo: www.jhaverchandmeghani.com)
I had written this piece on August 28, 2016 on Jhaverchand Meghani's 120th birth anniversary. It works just as well today on his 76th death anniversary.
August 28, 2016
There are those who are more than the sum of their parts. The great Gujarati folklorist, poet, novelist, journalist, singer and thinker Jhaverchand Meghani (August 28, 1896-March 9, 1947), whose 120th birth anniversary falls today, was one of them.
Speaking of his parts, he wrote 14 novels, four plays, nine collections of poetry, 19 biographies, 11 short stories, 11 folk songs, 13 folk tales and 13 collections of folklore and literary criticisms. These add up to create a Gujarati cultural icon whom Gandhi described as “Krishna’s flute” and a “national poet laureate.” While he was creating all those works, he was also immersed in India’s campaign for independence. Sardar Patel called him a leading figure in India’s struggle for independence who spent his entire life in that pursuit.
Meghani led an enormously rich literary, cultural, political and social life that led him to the colossal figures of his time, including Rabindranath Tagore sometime in 1933 in Bombay. According to Meghani’s official website, the great painter Nandlal Bose had heard Meghani sing his own Gujarati folk songs and was enraptured. He persuaded Tagore to meet Meghani while in Bombay. Their meeting was an unqualified success with Tagore being spell-bound by Meghani’s literary and musical passion. The website quotes Tagore as saying, "Much as I wish to visit Gujarat again, I am afraid I won't be able to make it. Why not, then, you come over to Santiniketan ? We shall compare notes and publish jointly English translation of selected things. Do therefore come. But, yes, in winter --- not summer when the heat is scorching over there."
Meghani’s journalistic connection came in the form of his assignment as a columnist at the Janmbhoomi newspaper in 1934. As part of his passion to “raze the walls of discrimination” between the educated and the unlettered, Meghani’s column titled ‘Kalam ane Kitab’ (The Pen & the Book) encouraged readership outside the scholarly domain to get involved with literature.
When one thinks of Gujarati literary giants such as Meghani and scores of others one feels how skewed the reputation of the state has been because of its historically flourishing mercantile and entrepreneurial culture. There is a legion of non-Gujaratis who would never suspect the state of having any connection to a world-class literary tradition. Meghani and many like him would be happily counted among world-class figures.
I have a collection of his novellas. This morning I chose a random short story titled ‘Shikar’ (The Hunt). It is a story about how a group of men are tasked with having to scare a leopard out of a forest into the open so that a local governor—presumably English—can then hunt it down. It is a simple story but Meghani tells it with such literary relish even though it barely stretching 2000 words. In describing a patch of an extraordinarily fertile land, he begins by saying, “Time must have used lightening as a plough here.”
He vividly describes the leopard, which is resting in the morning after a rich nightly hunt. “A long leopard is panting and resting in the hollow of a tree, its white stomach spread and puffing like a cushy mattress.” The leopard, of course, has to be driven out of its slumber without being harmed because the governor must not be denied the pleasure of having hunted it while it was alive. As the advance hunting party approaches the forest with much commotion, Meghani writes, “He (the leopard) does not respond to every noise but does occasionally bare its dagger-like teeth and shake his head as if mocking and saying ‘With which cow have you set up my engagement (In the sense of wedding) today?’”
The leopard is very hard to move away of its domain and out into the the thinning forest line where the governor and his party is waiting ready to shoot. Eventually, a member of the advance hunting party has to skillfully shoot the beast into one of its legs. He limps out to be shot by the governor and others. As the animal emerges from the woods, Meghani has the governor say out triumphantly in English , “Yes! There..there’s the milk white stomach. Shoot.” They all do indiscriminately because there was no need to take a precise aim on a wounded leopard.
“Before the day-end at the edge of the forest ten motors (motorcars) kicked up clouds of dust. The dust settled back again into the lap of the earth. The sun went to the sun’s house…..” And then Meghani ends with a characteristic literary flourish about those last remaining men of the advance party: “The villagers carried the carcass of the dead day and returned to their village.”
Here is to the great Jhaverchand Meghani.