When he and I had first emailed a couple of years earlier about my translating his novel The Girl with the Golden Parasol (Penguin India, 2008), I had little idea about the ‘dark days,’ as Prakash puts it, he was passing through — a period in his life he alludes to at least once in all three stories of this volume. Prakash has always been a popular writer with a huge base of readers: before mobiles, and even in 2005, he received stacks of one-rupee postcards every day from admirers spread across the most forgotten corners of India. (After the publication of ‘Mohandas,’ many postcards simply read, ‘I am Mohandas.’)
Despite his huge, grass-roots fan base, Prakash has always had an uneasy relationship with the Hindi establishment, or any other (in a phrase he likes to use) ‘power centre.’ For most of his professional life, he has worked as a freelance writer, journalist, poet, critic, film maker and producer: anything to provide for his family, at the mercy of the kindness of assignments, rarely able to enjoy the stability that an academic job or government post would have provided. Accused of stirring up caste unrest, called a ‘rabid dog,’ Prakash sustained many attacks from both left and right after the publication of The Girl with the Golden Parasol in 2001 (the novel tells the story of a non-Brahmin boy who falls in love with a Brahmin girl). The plug was pulled overnight on nearly all his freelance jobs. The dark days had begun — and only began to lift years later after the publication of ‘Mohandas’ and the winning of a PEN American Center Translation Fund Award for The Girl with the Golden Parasol in translation.
Uday Prakash was born on New Year’s Day, 1951, in Sitapur, a village on the Son river in the state of Madhya Pradesh. Hindi is his second language: he grew up speaking Chhattisgarhi, a regional language of north India now with its own state, Chhattisgarh. His family were thakurs, or landlords of the village, in a system that was, and is, quite feudal. I have seen Prakash regale a wide-eyed five-year-old in San Francisco with the true tale of the pet elephant he called his companion as a child — and how the elephant used to assist in bathing the young writer with its trunk. Prakash’s own childhood is filled with astonishingly detailed memories of close friends from the village, and the surrounding forest he used to explore — much of which has been decimated after years of deforestation, development, and the forcing off the land of indigenous inhabitants.
Prakash’s mother, Ganga Devi, had come from a Bhojpuri-speaking area near Mirzapur, and had brought with her not only many Bhojpuri songs she often sang at home, but also a facility and abiding love for traditional drawings and illustrations from her region. She painted on the walls and sketched in a notebook she’d kept since she was a teenager. She was skillful, and her art made a deep impression on Prakash, the youngest of her four children, to whom she was very close. After suffering from tracheal cancer, she died two days before Prakash’s thirteenth birthday.
Prakash’s father was an avid reader, had a good education for the time, subscribed to many Hindi magazines, and wrote poetry — all of which spurred Prakash’s own reading and writing habits. After the death of Prakash’s mother, his father began drinking heavily, and it soon became difficult for Prakash to stay at home. Prakash was taken in by a teacher at a nearby town, Shahdol, sixty kilometres away: a tiny hamlet by Indian standards, but as big and strange as a foreign country to Prakash. In an age with bad roads and few bridges, it was quite far from home. He considers the teacher who looked after him a second father, and credits him for helping to guide his studies.
Prakash’s father later developed carcinomas on his cheek and mouth, and Prakash travelled and stayed with him in the city of Indore as he underwent treatment. Before slipping into a coma, his father wrote a letter to a relative, kept by Prakash’s youngest sister, about his fears of what would happen to Prakash. His father was worried that his son lacked sensibility in the ways of the world, and would face terrible problems in the future.
When Prakash’s father died in September 1969, he left to study at the university in Sagar, Madhya Pradesh, and later, in 1975, just after the Emergency period began, moved to New Delhi where he soon began teaching comparative literature and Hindi at Jawaharlal Nehru University. For the next thirty years, he rarely travelled back home. Only recently has Prakash begun returning to Sitapur for longer periods in order spend time with his relatives and childhood friends.
‘The Walls of Delhi’ and ‘Mangosil’ — the two ‘city stories’ in this collection — are clearly the work of a writer who has trod extensively through the bylanes of India’s sprawling capital. Still, Prakash shines greatly in his village stories. His poem Tibet, which earned him a prestigious poetry prize at a young age, was inspired by the chanting of Tibetan monks resettled near his village after fleeing the Chinese invasion. ‘Heeralal’s Ghost,’ expertly translated by Robert Hueckstedt, is a fable of a low-caste servant of the village landowner who dies from overwork, then returns as a ghost to terrorise his former employer’s family in episodes both hysterical and tragic. And here, in ‘Mohandas,’ Prakash provides a harrowing portrayal of the caste dynamics and corruption that are still a powerful force in India.
After Prakash picked me up from the airport on that sticky monsoon night in 2005, we spent a week in New Delhi discussing the translation of The Girl with the Golden Parasol. We also spent half a day with his longtime Hindi publisher drinking some twenty cups of tea while in tense negotiations over a decade’s worth of unpaid book royalties. Prakash and I then packed up the car for the three-day trip to Sitapur. From there, we had been invited to the inauguration of a museum in the capital of Chhattisgarh, Rajnandgaon, to be dedicated in part to one of the most important twentieth-century Hindi poets, Muktibodh — a favourite of Prakash’s, and a fellow struggler. At first, Prakash was reluctant to accept the invitation, since the museum and ceremony and publicity all fell under the auspices of the right-wing BJP state government of Chhattisgarh; the Chief Minister of the state — by coincidence, a distant relation of Prakash’s — would be cutting the ribbon. In the end, Prakash decided that it was more important to support recognition of Muktibodh, a man marginalised in his own time, than to keep away from politics he disagreed with.
Muktibodh is the name of the independent-minded judge in ‘Mohandas,’ and we were joined on the trip to Rajnandgaon by Virendra Soni, to whom the story is dedicated. So I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that as we were leaving town, Prakash, seeing a man on the road walking toward us, said, ‘Oh, there’s Mohandas.’ And so it was: the man who he had based his character on, looking just as haggard and resilient as described in the story. We stopped, spoke at length, took some photos and went on.