Coming Communities and Vacillating Definitions: The Case of Censorship and Swadeshi Jatra

Abstract

Harnam Singh was not well. ‘Evil’ had overshadowed his daily existence. But he recovered when he followed the principles of personal conversion, renunciation of sins and cultivation of higher life that Shri Guru Dev Bhagwan, the founder of Dev Samaj, expounded. Dev Samaj founded in 1887 in Lahore by Pandit Shiv Narayan Agnihotri, the guru who soon came to be known as Bhagwan Dev Atma or Guru Dev Bhagwan, was one of the several organizations that aimed at social reform in Colonial India. Its members were mostly the upper middle class of the society like the ‘graduates, magistrates, doctors, pleaders, moneylenders, landholders and government servants’. One could become a member or a sympathizer by annually paying a fee of 10 rupees or turn into a Nava Jiwan Yafta, i.e. one who had found a new life by following moral codes, which laid stress on honesty, cleanliness, vegetarianism and temperance. A third category of the members was of those who had taken strict religious vows in the pursuit of Dev Dharm. Shiv Narayan Agnihotri was initially a member of another social reform organization called the Brahmo Samaj. He later had differences with the organization and thereafter became part of the offshoot of the organization called the Shadharan Brahmo Samaj and subsequently founded the Punjab Central Brahmo Samaj. Moving from the Brahmo Samaj , he later established the Dev Samaj at Lahore. But what had happened to Harnam Singh? The article ‘An Instructive Example of Regeneration and Self-Sacrifice: People Saw This Wonderful Change in His Life’ published in April 19, 21 explores this matter:

The people who knew Harnam Singh before noticed a wonderful difference between his previous course of life and the new one that he had taken, under the action of higher-life forces upon him. What did they see? They saw that this young man who was so fond of theatres that no sooner, he read a notice or handbill he was mad after it, and having spent all his monthly allowance, he would pawn his clothes and his watch, to attend the theatre, and who in the event of failing to attend it hovered at night round the place, began carefully to avoid even to pass by that road so that he may in course of time be free from the theatre mania which had ruined his health, money and studies. They saw that this young man who was so gaudy and showy, who was so fond of singing obscene songs himself and before others when evil friends wished it, had closed his tongue tight and was determined not to utter those impure words again for anybody’s sake… For when Harman Singh went home in summer vacations, his behaviour bore such a contrast to his former life in respect of his reverence for and service of elders that his aged mother came to Dev Ashram and having seen Mata Puniaji (our Venerable Perceptor’s wife) heartily thanked Shri Dev Guru Bhagwan for reforming her child.

Harnam Singh’s ailment that was ‘theatre-going’ and talking and singing the obscene was not part of a reformed-educated behaviour that the colonial middle class, informed with Victorian moral codes, aimed at. In the nineteenth century, the colonial urban Indian population was thoroughly concerned with society insofar as it was transformed into something that was acceptable by the educated section. Being educated could include the knowledge of English/Sanskrit literature, the engagement with which was initiated largely by colonial education. Although theatre in Colonial India often staged canonical texts, what went on in the theatre especially in the early years was often seen with suspicion. There would be antagonism towards certain performances as Kathryn Hansen notes in the essay ‘Ritual Enactments in a Hindi “Mythological” Betab’s Mahabharat in Parsi Theatre’. In 1916, for example, there were communal disturbances surrounding the performance of the Mahabharat of Pandit Narayan Prasad Betab in Lahore. But what kind of theatre Harnam Singh was addicted to and whether this addiction was solely an affair of ‘going to the theatre’ is not quite apparent from the published article which clearly seems to be in praise of Agnihotri’s or Guru Dev Bhagwan’s abilities in the transformation of social evil – which was theatre in general in this case. What we know from the article are the visible symbols of a malady, which involved ‘obscene’ singing and social immoralities that were caused by ‘theatre-going’.