Translator’s Note

WHEN YASHPAL WROTE DIVYA IN 1945, HE HAD ALREADY PUBLISHED two novels, five collections of short stories, two collections of socio-economic essays, a book on the basic tenets of Marxism, and one of his best-known works Gandhivaad ki Shav-pariksha (Post-mortem on Gandhism). It was an impressive performance for a writer whose first book had been published only seven years previously, and even more creditable for one who had been released from prison in 1938 after serving seven years of a life sentence. Yashpal’s creative spirit, cramped by the constraints of his detention—for his role in the revolutionary movement to oust the British from India—was clearly ready to spread its wings. Viplava, the pioneering Hindi political monthly journal that he launched with his wife Prakashvati within months after his release, received an unprecedented welcome.

Up till the writing of Divya, all of Yashpal’s published work had dealt with contemporary social, economic and political issues. The literature of social reform and social protest in Hindi had found a worthy advocate in the author, who wielded a sledgehammer when writing about the exploited and the economically deprived. Therefore, when Yashpal began writing Divya, one of his motives may well have been to write about a different world, that of the remote past, a world away from the one he was familiar with. Although the world he had chosen to write about was perhaps not greatly different from the society in which he lived in terms of conflict, strife and oppression, in its portrayal he was free to exercise his imagination, and not simply to limit himself to the realities of contemporary society.

Yashpal was fascinated by that period in the history of ancient India known as the Classical Age. In each of his sixteen collections of short stories, there is at least one tale about that era, in a language and style similar to that of Divya. Yashpal’s novel based on historical imaginings, Amita (1956) is about Ashoka the Great’s conquest of Kalinga, circa 260 BC, the conqueror’s change of heart and his subsequent conversion to Buddhism. The novella Apsara ka Shap (1965), a retelling of Kalidasa’s Abhijnana Shakuntalam, is a tale from the Epic Age (c. 900–520 BC).

Since its publication more than sixty years ago, Divya has had a chequered history, not dissimilar to the tumultuous story of its eponymous heroine. Assertions by Divya such as ‘the mistress of a noble family is not a free woman; she is not independent like a disreputable courtesan’ outraged many of Yashpal’s contemporaries. Others tried to ignore it because they felt that a story about India’s so-called Golden Age could not be considered ‘literature’ if it expounded an unacceptable political ideology. Fortunately, a core of young critics and scholars of successive generations has continued to stand—and even swear—by Divya’s yearning for independence when she decides to be a prostitute, so as to be a free woman and have ownership rights over her body. Such thinking is clearly behind the general acknowledgement of the novel’s importance and of its impact on Hindi literature.