I have just finished reading my friend Uday Prakash’s novel, The Girl with the Golden Parasol. It was translated by Jason Grunebaum and published this year by Penguin-India. The original had appeared in 2001 as Peeli Chatri Waali Ladki. I intend this as a compliment to Grunebaum’s skill as a translator that there were many moments, while reading the novel, when I could quite easily guess what the words in the original must have been. But there were also many other moments when I yearned to know what Uday Prakash had written in the original. Here’s the protagonist Rahul describing to his soon-to-be lover the water-tank next to the tubewell in his village: “During my summer vacation I’d run down there at night with a bar of soap and a towel and jump in. It was great fun. Even the soap had a strong scent there that it doesn’t have here… In the forest, near the fields and at night, soap smells sweeter.” It seemed to me that if I knew the words in Hindi that Uday had written, my childhood would be returned to me.

The publication of a work of literature that has been translated from Hindi to English can be a bit like inviting a poor cousin to your wedding. You suspect there will be awkwardness on both sides. And then, in the middle of the event, the cousin says something that makes you suddenly aware that he has got your number. Before the end of the evening, he has made the whole assembled cast of guests experience the humiliation that comes from unpleasant, never-uttered-before truths. I believe Uday has wanted to behave like that cousin. This is an angry book. At times, it is an invective against all the ills of globalization and also the corruption of Brahmanism. (Which other book by an Indian writer attends to both these evils, one ancient and the other contemporary? And with such force?) Those invectives gather a different, more powerful form when they deal with the small, decadent, purely feudal world of Hindi literature. The world that Uday depicts–the small world of a university department, the venal ways in which degrees and jobs are acquired, the system of insitutionalized patronage that gives away awards or organizes literary festivals–is a revealing portrait of a debased society. You only want to flee that world and it is to the writer’s credit that what you want more is to stay in it and see how his characters deal with the reality that they cannot easily, or ever, escape.

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