The Girl with the Golden Parasol

INTRODUCTION

Rahul, a non-Brahmin college boy, falls in love with Anjali, a Brahmin girl. This shouldn’t be a problem in today’s modern India of shopping malls, cell phones, and high tech, right? Surely the new forces of progress have begun to level the ancient hierarchies of caste.

The news of these new forces — vast changes unleashed by the economic reforms of the 1990s — has steadily reached our shores. Liberalization has brought a steep rise in capital influx and mass consumerism to an Indian society that is, in many ways, now utterly transformed. Call centers, cheap cars, job growth from outsourcing, and a flourishing IT sector have shaped a new image of India in the eyes of the West, while tales of Indians on the move and romantic rags-to-riches stories still compete with familiar pieces about the “old” India: poverty, corruption, riots. Those who can keep up with the aggressive market prosper, while others who don’t get with the program may be marked for extinction, according to Uday Prakash in his short story “The Walls of Delhi”: “The poor, the sick, the street corner prophets, the lowly, the unexceptional — all gone! They’ve vanished from this new Delhi of wealth and wizardry, never to return, not here, not anywhere.”

The visible changes in India are apparent to everyone, and lend themselves to vivid contemporary accounts across fiction, cinema, and journalism. The Girl with the Golden Parasol joins this conversation as a dark statement warning of the fragile human riches in danger of being eradicated by hungry capitalism. In the meantime, those on the move and those left behind are engaged in a struggle for India’s future. Uday Prakash asks which of the two will be ascendant in the next generation: “The one with a Pepsi in hand, half-naked model on his arm, Visa card in the pocket; or him, the one with red eyes, whose parents have been plundered for fifty years by successive regimes, who has a weapon in hand and is killed every day in [police and paramilitary] ‘encounters’?”

Change, as always, comes with stasis, and the visible coexists with the hidden, the concealed. The Girl with the Golden Parasol is an invective against the destructive power of predatory markets, but what gives the book its “weight and wings,” to borrow a phrase from Susan Sontag, is its foregrounding of caste. Caste is the thing that hasn’t changed, but is much more difficult for Western observers of India to make out. Is it like class? Race? Both? Neither?

The deep examination of caste in The Girl with the Golden Parasol is news from a world not to be found in popular accounts of exotic India flush with overripe mangos. It’s true that in big cities and particularly among the cosmopolitan beneficiaries of liberalization and globalization, caste can matter a great deal less, or not at all. But the uncomfortable reality is that for a great majority of Indians, despite modernization and widespread access to consumer goods, it still matters quite a bit.

One of the accomplishments of The Girl with the Golden Parasol is the fictional space created by Prakash that allows those getting ahead and those left behind to face off against one another, but with a significant twist: the battle lines of conflict aren’t drawn between the usual “us” versus “them”: rich and poor, landowners and the landless, modern and traditional, developers and slum dwellers. It’s all of these groups versus all of these groups simultaneously, but with the dynamics between expected foes infinitely complicated by the fact of caste.

It’s difficult to find an analogy that comes close to capturing the feelings of vulnerability among the students depicted in The Girl with the Golden Parasol, but imagine a group of educated, Western, cosmopolitan kids from various socioeconomic backgrounds and of different races trapped in a brutal summer camp run by corrupt zealots. This might be a start. What Prakash dramatizes so well throughout the novel is how caste can intrude into every facet of Indian society, from love and sex to language and literature — and does intrude in ways largely absent from today’s tales of India.

The writing of The Girl with the Golden Parasol began with some arm-twisting. Hans, the premier Hindi literary magazine established in 1930 by Premchand, the father of modern Hindi and Urdu fiction, was revived in the mid-1980s by the writer and editor Rajendra Yadav. The magazine was publishing a fifteenth-anniversary issue in 1999. Yadav asked Prakash if he would contribute to the issue, but at the time Prakash, though by then already a well-known Hindi fiction writer and poet, was busy doing what paid the bills: filming a documentary. After much insisting, Yadav prevailed upon Prakash, and he began writing what he thought would be a humorous love story. But as he wrote with the deadline looming, “everything began oozing out,” in Prakash’s words: a failed youthful love affair with a Brahmin girl (Prakash is a non-Brahmin) and caste politics that “do not allow love or anything humane to happen.” He couldn’t settle on an ending, so it was decided that the story would continue in serialized form.

Reader response to the story, as it unfolded over four issues in Hans, was dramatic. An extraordinary number of low-caste readers sent postcards, text messages, and even called Prakash to express their enthusiasm. (It’s a near-universal practice to publish cell phone numbers of Hindi writers with their bios.) Hans was bought in bulk and distributed among this group of readers, many of whom began referring to The Girl with the Golden Parasol as their Bible.

This reaction made it clear to Prakash, who had not yet finished the serialized novel, that “it could not remain a love story. . it was becoming something else.” In an interesting interplay between an author and his readers, and perhaps fortified by their reaction, Prakash forged ahead with his full-throated critique of how the forces of globalization in India, instead of providing people with means of empowerment and mobility, have rather served to further strengthen the centuries-old domination of those at the top of the caste ladder — what Prakash in the novel calls “Brahminism” as a shorthand.

At the same time, Prakash realized that he had unintentionally done something “blasphemous” when he received quite a different kind of response in various Hindi newspapers and magazines. Stern words were used against him in the media. He was called a “mad dog” and “insane” not only by critics and academics but also by police officers and high-ranking officials in the Indian civil service. (People from all walks of life in India take part in public conversations about literature.) Unhappy with Prakash’s novel, they targeted him personally. More disturbingly, over two dozen of his freelance TV, film, and writing assignments were cancelled almost overnight. Prakash, by foregrounding caste in his book, had clearly touched a nerve.

Here, as in many of his stories, Uday Prakash shows how those who dare to dissent against a suffocating system are punished. But the gloom and pall that hangs over the world in The Girl with the Golden Parasol is hardly the full story. With his biting satire and ambitious narrative detours Prakash also demonstrates how humor and compassion can provide one means to fight back and escape. Rahul, the protagonist of The Girl with the Golden Parasol, reconsiders the field of organic chemistry as his career path:

What would he do with this degree? He’d become a chemist in a brewery or in a food-processing plant owned by some multinational company. Or he’d get a teaching position at a college or university. When he thought about his future, Rahul saw the image of a certain type of man take shape: fat, whiny, gobbling pizza slices like a pig, gnawing on morsels of scrumptious fish marinated in yogurt and vinegar, drinking and partying with a teenage girl he was paying by the hour, enticing her with a little dance of his by shaking his pot belly and gyrating his pumpkin-sized saggy ass.

This type of man — a bottomless pit of lust and greed, a decadent cheat, gluttonous, licentious, corrupt — that’s who this country and system were set up to serve. All the shiny stores and legions of police and battalions of soldiers all exist to feed pleasure and stimulation to that man. If I work as an organic chemist, Rahul thought, I’ll spend my whole life churning out yummy, lip-smacking, good-for-you consumables for him. This life, which the compassionate creator of the universe, acting with great kindness, has given, once and only once, to most negligible me.

The humor, polemics, and meanderings in the book are like The Book of Laughter and Forgetting blended with Tristram Shandy—and told by one of the most naturally gifted storytellers writing in any language. Among Hindi writers, Prakash, with his postmodern sensibility, has broken from a strict model of social realism that dominated Hindi fiction for much of the twentieth century, though his prose is full of lapidary detail from rural and mythical India that can only come from the mind of a writer deeply rooted to the land and its people. Prakash continues a tradition of satire recalling Hindi writers like Manohar Shyam Joshi, while inventing a humor that is all his own. As Robert Hueckstedt has written about Prakash’s work in the introduction to his translation of Prakash stories entitled Short Shorts Long Shots, “Despite the seriousness of his purpose and commitment, he has never written a story, no matter how short, that does not make the reader smile or laugh.”

After the backlash following The Girl with the Golden Parasol, life began to improve for Prakash. He published a wildly successful novella entitled Mohandas about a Dalit — untouchable — who tries to reclaim his identity stolen by an upper-caste identity thief. An English translation of The Girl with the Golden Parasol was published in India, and the Indian national literary body, the Sahitya Akademi, awarded Uday Prakash its highest honor in Hindi for Mohandas. Kindle magazine named him a top South Asian youth icon, and his work continues to be translated into Urdu, Malayalam, Panjabi, Marathi, German, and Japanese.

I have had the great pleasure of knowing Uday Prakash personally since 2005, and over a series of my visits to India and his to the United States, we have developed an extraordinary working relationship and friendship. I am extremely grateful for his unwavering support of my translations of his work, and I am thrilled that American readers finally have the chance to hear the voice of one of India’s most important and original writers.

Note on the Translation

Translation is a series of challenges and strategies, leading to possible solutions and, ultimately, choices, both large and small.

One of the challenges in translating The Girl with the Golden Parasol was the question of how to balance the needs of readers not particularly familiar with India with those who come to the book with a deeper knowledge of India and South Asia. What should I do in cases, for example, when I decided that there was a compelling reason to keep a word in Hindi? Footnotes and glossaries are two possible solutions. My general rule of thumb with footnotes is that if there were none in the original, I won’t use any in the translation. Furthermore, footnotes suggest academic writing rather than literature. Glossaries divide the readers into two groups: one that needs to use the glossary, and the other that doesn’t. Since I believe translation is an act of enlarging the conversation of literature, dividing readers into those who know and those who don’t isn’t in the spirit of why I translate. The solution I prefer, and the one I have broadly chosen to use in The Girl with the Golden Parasol, is to incorporate the needed information into the writing itself — a gloss within the text, a kind of “stealth gloss.” Ideally, this gives readers who need it enough information and context to make sense of an unfamiliar word, while those who don’t won’t find the text too intrusive or “prechewed.”

A related question is which English to write the translation in. American English? Indian English? If I were translating from, say, French or German, it wouldn’t be necessary to consider the 250 million English speakers, and potential readers, of the English translation in France or Germany — or consider that the English spoken by these 250 million people has its own history, and is different in meaningful ways from North American and UK English idioms. Translators from Hindi and other South Asian languages do need, however, to think about what kind of English is most suitable. In The Girl with the Golden Parasol, I have written with an American audience foremost in my mind without, hopefully, neglecting the needs and expectations of a South Asian audience: I have called upon Americanisms as needed, and have drawn upon phrases and cadences from Indian English when appropriate. What I hope to have achieved is a creative hybridization — necessary for any work of translation from any language — that rewrites Prakash’s Hindi into an English that realizes the voice, originality, and vitality of his prose.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the following people for their help in making this book possible: Uday Prakash and Kumkum, Becka McKay, Bob Hueckstedt, Esther Allen, Michael Henry Heim, Jennifer Lyons, John Donatich, Ulrike Stark, Valerie Ritter, Karen Hudes, Kelly Austin, Clint Seely, Idra Novey, Amit Chaudhuri, and Amitava Kumar.

I would also like to acknowledge the generous support of the PEN Translation Fund, whose award allowed me to travel to India to meet Uday for the first time.

Jason Grunebaum