A Glimpse Into Masculinity and Domestic Life in Post-Colonial India
The following is an excerpt from Gyanendra Pandey's Men at Home: Imagining Liberation in Colonial and Postcolonial India, published by Duke University Press Books (January 2025).
Many aspirations found among modern South Asian elite groups are captured in Haribansh Rai Bachchan’s description of the homes his father, grandfather, and great grandfather lived in. Bachchan’s great-grandfather was a Nayab Kotwal or Deputy Inspector of Police under the East India Company, before formal British rule was established after 1857. He was posted in Allahabad, the prominent administrative and pilgrimage center at the confluence of the Ganga and the Jamuna, two of the largest and most sacred rivers of northern India.
Gyanendra Pandey's,
Men at Home: Imagining Liberation in Colonial and Postcolonial India,
Duke University Press Books (January 2025).
The memoirist conjures him up as a six-footer built of iron, skilled at wrestling, horse riding, lathi, and swordplay, a keeper of pet falcons, a spendthrift, and a philanderer. In keeping with this image, he built a grand four-sectioned house, which his sister, still alive in her nineties in Bachchan’s childhood, called a “fort.” As the collective family memory had it, one section of the house was enough for the police inspector and his immediate family: his wife, their two children, his sister Radha, and her daughter Maharani. He gave the second section to a cousin brother, a third to a Brahmin man he revered; the fourth part lay vacant, along with the open land behind it. This was the house in which Bachchan’s great-grandfather, his grandfather, and for the better part of his life, his father lived.
Bachchan’s nineteenth-century progenitors came from a line of small land owners who sought service opportunities to supplement the family income. The family encompassed a wide kinship network. Bachchan recalls from his early years that the family house in Allahabad was never closed to visitors from Babu patti, the ancestral village thirty-five miles to the north in the adjoining district of Pratapgarh, colloquially Partabgarh.
An annual Hindu festival that centred on a ritual bath at the spot where the Ganga and Jamuna met provided a striking illustration of the strength of these ancestral ties and open doors. The day before the most auspicious time for the ritual dip, at the peak of the cold north Indian winter, many men, women, and children traipsed barefoot from the village, in coarse clothes laden with food supplies and offerings: radishes and sugarcane they had grown, peas and parched gram, sweets made with sesame seeds, and pickles of many kinds.
The Brahmins and close relatives were accommodated inside the house; others spread out on the veranda. Separate units lit cooking fires on the open ground in front of the house. Before dawn, at an auspicious hour, the visitors set off for the river. They returned in the evening and left for the village the next day. Bachchan recalls this happening year after year, as long as the hereditary house stood in Chak Mohalla. Once more, “our severed links with the village were rejoined; from townsfolk, we became villag ers, from Allahabadis, Partabgarhias.”
Bachchan’s grandfather, Bholanath, was apparently very different from his larger-than-life policeman father, yet steeped in the same traditions of welcom ing all, and keeping some—especially women and servants—at a distance. He too trained in wrestling, lathi, and swordplay, but preferred the Arabic, Persian, and Urdu learning he got from a personal tutor. It was a world of Persian and Urdu poetry, and male gatherings in which poetry recitation and “educated” conversation—and Bholanath—flourished. Bachchan describes his grand father’s cherished lifestyle. He sat in the mardana (outer, men’s section) of the Allahabad home—in the veranda or a sitting room, depending on the weather and the hour—reclining on a large cushion placed on a bed, reading or writing. Near him, tied in a cloth bag, lay book manuscripts he had diligently transcribed, in an age when printed copies were not readily available. An inkpot lay by his side, a spittoon underneath the bed, and a large flat-bottomed hookah (water-pipe) on its other side: he smoked when he read or wrote. Bholanath was already married and head of the household, but still unem ployed, in 1857, when Allahabad became a center of British military actions and vengeance against Indian insurgents and many women of the neighborhood hid in their “fortress” home.
Sometime afterward, he was appointed a jailer in the revamped British colonial administration and posted to a small town 275 miles west-southwest of Allahabad. However, he retired early to return to the life of a gentleman of leisure in his home city. He had his bed set up in the mardana once more, with his bag of handwritten texts, spectacles, pen and ink, spittoon, and hookah at hand. At times, the bag of books gave way to a chessboard, with Bholanath and an opponent ranged on its two sides, utterly absorbed. Their concentration was broken only when his wife signaled from the kitchen, clang ing on some utensil, gently, then more loudly, or someone else—his son or an elderly aunt—was sent urgently to say that his meal was waiting. The women of the family would not eat until the men of the house had done so—a practice that continued through Bachchan’s father, Pratap Narain’s time, as we will see. As it happened, the grandeur of the family’s ancestral home had declined since the fabled time of Bachchan’s great-grandfather. “Grandfather [Bhola nath]’s life continued to be divided between books and chessboard,” writes Bachchan.
His household was run on savings, without a regular job or earnings, and his grandmother’s jewelry was pawned piece by piece. Bachchan’s grand father and father both experienced hard times and relative penury. Through it all, they insisted on maintaining the decorum of times gone by—not least, in the requirements and performance of men and women in the home. Bholanath returned to Allahabad at the end of the 1880s in part to ensure that his son, Bachchan’s father Pratap Narain, then thirteen, was properly educated. The daughter, Tulsa, aged fifteen, never went to school. Before Bholanath passed away, leaving his son as head of household, Pratap had matriculated, was married, and found himself in dire need of a job. His in-laws, long settled and well connected in the city, helped him find one at the English-owned Pioneer Press. Having witnessed the undisciplined ways of his father and his father’s companions, Pratap vowed not to duplicate their lifestyle. He worked at the Pioneer Press for thirty-five years, impressing the management with his disci pline and hard work, arriving punctually, staying late, and rising to the highest position available to Indians, who were confined to the printing and accounting sections: that of head clerk.
Bachchan cites his father’s unwavering timetable to show how frugally he lived. Rising at 3 a.m., walking seven or eight miles to and from the river Ganga for a ritual bath, he ate his morning meal at 8:30 and left for work at 9, walking to the press roughly four miles away. If his wife was late with the meal, “he was incensed. Mother shook with fear—but he didn’t even have the time to vent his rage.” Surasti would then finish cooking as quickly as possible, and find some one to take her husband’s food to the office. Until the carrier returned to say that the man of the house had eaten, the four women at home (Pratap’s wife, mother, paternal aunt, and grandmother) could not eat. On occasion, when no errand boy or man was found, they fasted all day, until Pratap Narain returned and ate.
In the early days, Bachchan’s father often returned at 8 or 9 p.m. or later, ate, and went to sleep. Later, once he felt more secure in his job and the children were older, he began returning earlier. His daily routine reflected his views on the assigned responsibilities and duties of men and women, the men working to earn, the women looking after the home and family. The design of a new house he built in the late 1920s, when the ancestral home fell prey to “urban develop ment,” provides further evidence of the desired arrangement.
In designing the two-storied house, Bachchan observes, “Father kept in mind the needs of the new age.” Yet, while more flexible and modest, it was conceptu ally not radically different from the old. The men’s section, abutting the street, had two sitting areas, “perhaps with the thought that there should be separate arrangements for the older and younger men, who may not want to sit together.” Pratap Narain had planned a covered veranda at the entrance, where the men and their visitors could sit, read, and converse; this was never built, presumably because the money ran out. The rear portion of the ground floor had two separate rooms for Pratap and Surasti, and spaces for other essential functions: a prayer room, store, kitchen, bathroom, inner courtyard (“who could conceive of an Indian home without a courtyard?”), and adjacent to that, “a small shelter where a cow could be tied if they got one.”
On the upper level were two large and two small rooms, adjoining two terraces with partially covered roofs: one set for Bachchan and the girl/woman he’d recently married, one for his younger brother and the latter’s (expected) future wife. The terraces provided each couple the opportunity to sleep beneath the stars or partially under cover, depending on the season. His younger sister had no designated room of her own: “she would go off to another [implicitly, her “real”] home someday.”
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