Abstract
Issues of community, audience and address are crucial to the possibility and performance of satire. They both depend upon a delicate and fluctuating relationship between the objects of satire—the targets, so to speak—and the intended audiences. Too close an identification between the two and the performance veers towards sermonising or ranting. On the other hand, too little identification, too great a perceived distance, so that the audience of satire does not feel at all implicated in the critique, produces relatively crude satire, a mere mockery. James Sutherland described this kind of satire, a propos Ben Jonson and Samuel Butler, thus:
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- 1.
James Sutherland, English Satire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 18.
- 2.
Alvin Kernan, The Plot of Satire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 15.
- 3.
Manfred Pfister, A History of English Laughter: Laughter From Beowulf to Beckett and Beyond (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), cited in Susanne Reichl and Mark Stein, eds., Cheeky Fictions: Laughter and the Postcolonial (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 9.
- 4.
Ibid.
- 5.
Black Dwarf 4 (1817), 59–62, cited in Marcus Wood, Radical Satire and Print Culture 1790–1822 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 1.
- 6.
Black Dwarf 4,, 60, cited in Wood, Radical Satire, 1.
- 7.
Ibid., 61, cited in Wood, Radical Satire, 1–2.
- 8.
Wood, Radical Satire, 2.
- 9.
Cited in Kernan, Plot of Satire, 8.
- 10.
Gilbert Highet, The Anatomy of Satire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 15.
- 11.
Richard Altick, Punch: The Lively Youth of a British Institution, 1841–1851 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997), xx.
- 12.
Reichl and Stein, Cheeky Fictions, 2.
- 13.
Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India 1850–1922: Occidental Orientations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); also see Hans Harder, “The Modern Babu and the Metropolis: Reassessing Early Bengali Narrative Prose,” in India’s Literary History: Essays on the 19 th century, eds. Stuart Blackburn and Vasudha Dalmia (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002).
- 14.
Mitter, Art and Nationalism, 139.
- 15.
Mushirul Hasan, Wit and Humour in Colonial North India (Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2007).
- 16.
Pratāpˡnārāyaṇ Miśra, Pratāpˡnārāyaṇ granthāvalī, ed. Vijayˡśaṃkar Mall (Vārāṇasī: Nāgarī Pracāriṇī Sabhā, 1992), 82–83.
- 17.
Ibid., 122.
- 18.
Ibid., 126.
- 19.
Pīlī pīlī pagˡṛī, lāl lāl gāl, moṭe moṭe toṃdˡvāle sabhī īmānˡdār nahīṃ hote. jo vyavahār ke sacce hote haiṃ veh jhūṭī banāvat nahīṃ rakhˡte. Yahāṃ kyā hai, hamˡne samajh liyā, damˡṛī kī ha˜ṛiya¯ phūṭī, kutte ki jāt pahˡcānī. This complaint pertained to those people who subscribed to the journal but refused to pay up when the time came. Ibid., 35 (my translation).
- 20.
Francesca Orsini, Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2010), 274. Also see pp. 168–169.
- 21.
Orsini credits David Lelyveld with the formulation, ibid., 275.
- 22.
Barjorjee Nowrosjee, ed. The Indian National Congress Cartoons from The Hindi Punch (from 1886 to 1901) with a selection of the Indian Social Conference Cartoons (Bombay, circa 1902).
- 23.
Alok Rai, Hindi Nationalism (Delhi: Orient Longman, 2000).
- 24.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (New York: Neale Publishing Company, 1911).
- 25.
Miśra, Pratāpˡnarāyaṇ grathāvalī, 51.
- 26.
Ibid., 54.
- 27.
Ibid., 51–55.
- 28.
Ibid., 316 (my translation).
- 29.
Ibid., 76.
- 30.
Ibid., 341.
- 31.
Ibid., 381.
- 32.
Ibid., 317.
- 33.
Ibid., 422.
- 34.
burī cīz (Urdu/Hindi): ‘bad thing’.
- 35.
sifāriśī (Urdu/Hindi): ‘depending on recommendations’.
- 36.
Facsimile edition of Harischandra Magazine, ed. Satyaprakash Misra (Allahabad: Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, 2002): 214–215.
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Rai, A. (2013). The Possibility of Satire: Reading Pratap Narain Misra’s Brāhmaṇ, 1883–1890. In: Harder, H., Mittler, B. (eds) Asian Punches. Transcultural Research – Heidelberg Studies on Asia and Europe in a Global Context. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28607-0_4
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