PORTRAYAL OF RURAL SOCIETY IN PANNALAL PATEL’S MANVINI BHAVAI

Abstract

Pannalal Patel (1912-1989) is an innate and prestigious quality literary artist. His literary work Manvini Bhavai is considered the masterpiece of a regional novel. The translator professor V Y Kantak who translated the novel as Endurance: A Droll Saga in English is an eminent academician and critic, has very successfully retained the essential simplicity, the regional flavor and the original spirit of the novel in English translation as closely as possible. Pannalal‟s sensitive heart comprehends the various experiences of rural life in such a way that we feel human life breathing and beating in a natural way and in his novels. Manvini Bhavai is a great masterpiece of Gujarati literature because of his inborn literary spontaneous talent and potential. He has successfully spread the fragrance of native land in the novel. Each novel of Pannalal is the reflection of society in its naked form and Manvini Bhavai is not an exception. Each chapter of the novel puts a mirror before the society that gives us the exact picture of the time in which it has been penned. The characters, setting, and every aspect of the novel is bubbling through the rural life.
Pannalal in Manvini Bhavai describes the people of North Gujarat of Sabarkantha region, their life style, festivals, customs, rituals, communal ceremony etc. The novel is written with a focus on the Degadia village and a hilly area to it in the North-East region of Idar in Gujarat. It describes the great famine of Chhappaniyo of 1900. The contemporary society is filled with life style and culture of the farmers and other local communities such as Thakarada and Patels. Each and every page, chapter, character, setting, plot are full of rural description. The novelist has realistically depicted different aspects of rural Gujarat. In fact no other writer can describe rural life so naturally and artistically as Pannalal because he was born and brought up in rural atmosphere, so he had observed rural life style closely.