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 centered 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 to 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.”
