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Journalism of Courage
Manohar Shyam Joshi8217;s hilarious satire on the literary pretensions of his peers and the Left progressive writers is out in English
Manohar shyam joshi died just two years ago at the age of 73. A whole generation has grown up since the early 1980s when he wrote, and an exceptionally talented cast enacted, India8217;s first soap opera, Hum Log. What made Hum Log special was that it was about ordinary people and was designed to carry positive public messages. It was real public service broadcasting in stark contrast to the bulk of today8217;s serials of which the less said the better. Joshi followed Hum Log with Buniyaad, a television serial about a refugee family, which was also immensely successful, as was the popular comedy Mungeri Lal Ke Haseen Sapne. His film credits vary from the 1979 hit Manzil, starring Amitabh Bachchan, to Kamal Hassan8217;s controversial film Hey Ram, released in 2000.
In the world of popular culture, it is these film and television credits that immediately bring recognition. But Manohar Shyam Joshi was a brilliant man who excelled in many fields. He was an eminent journalist as well as one of Hindi8217;s leading fiction writers. He specialised in satire and, with his Sahitya Akademi Award-winning novel Kasap, successfully recreated the rural world of Kumaon in the 8217;50s. He himself came from Almora and was master of Kumaoni language, and indeed of every variety of Hindi under the sun.
The professor, with his bad pronunciation and great respect for the Anglo-Saxon sense of order, is based on a teacher Joshi came across while staying in Mukteshwar. Joshi himself appears in the book as the narrator and as a character 8212; a young writer, looking for a peaceful retreat, who takes on a job as a temporary teacher in Sunaulidhar village school. Joshi as novelist depicts the society he saw around him. In this role he mocks others but none so much as himself, the literary pretensions of his peers and the leftist progressive writers who had addas in Almora in his youth. What attracted Ira Pande to this novel and made her translate it is that although short, it works on so many levels.
Joshi was Pande8217;s uncle. Her mother was the best-selling Hindi writer Shivani. By coincidence, I have just finished one of Shivani8217;s highly readable novels, Mayapuri. It is about an educated but impoverished young woman 8212; again from a village in the hills 8212; who loves and is loved by a married man but remains virtuous to the end. T8217;ta Professor, in contrast, is a stranger to such virtue. Joshi deals with a more sordid, perhaps a more realistic, masculine world. Sexual abstinence is not a characteristic of T8217;ta Professor beyond a term he learns the meaning of during the course of the book 8212; coitus interruptus. Romance is not his style either. Part of the book8217;s humour comes from the incongruity of T8217;ta Professor8217;s exalted position as a pillar in the community, and his low sexual exploits.
The self-styled professor is so learned that he discovers the meaning of hanky-panky and hocus-pocus. His sense of propriety demands that English should be treated at all times with respect. He even chides the young schoolmaster for reading an English novel lying down, instead of sitting up, properly dressed in shirt and trousers. But at the same time he devours pornography, and believes that his young son is taking his geometry book to the lavatory to help him masturbate better. Triangles, after all, he reminds the temporary schoolmaster, are ancient tantric symbols. Khushwant Singh has called the novel 8220;hilarious and disturbing8221; and both adjectives fit very well. Joshi brilliantly recreates the staff-room politics of the school, the unspoken hierarchies in the village and the rivalry between the principal and the professor. Stepping aside from satire, he describes the changes over the past decades and brings aspects of uncertainty and tragedy to his story. This is perhaps the first of his novels to be translated 8212; and it should not be missed.
