Book review: Anil Yadav's 'Courtesans Don't Read Newspapers' explores layers of hypocrisy in society
Hindi journalist Anil Yadav’s short fiction in translation throws light on corruption, hypocrisy and everyday absurdities in Varanasi, and beyond
If you’re Indian, you are in all likelihood familiar with the concept of double lives hidden in plain sight. Due to the entrenchment of sociopolitical orthodoxies, people resort to the most comically transparent ruses. Your mother uses separate utensils for certain guests because she’s organised and fastidious. The lads from the mohalla are definitely not drinking away the chanda (donations) they collected for Durga Puja. And your widower uncle is simply a “well-wisher", wink-wink, of the woman he visits like clockwork on weekend evenings.
We Indians don’t need narrative crutches like Santa Claus or storks dropping babies off—right from birth, we operate in far more sophisticated realms of hypocrisy and cultivated delusion. The titular novella in Hindi journalist and writer Anil Yadav’s collection Courtesans don’t Read Newspapers, titled Nagarvadhuyen Akhbar Nahi Padhtin, translated into English by Vaibhav Sharma, is a masterful, three-dimensional portrayal of one such realm.
The setting in question is Varanasi, where a famously crooked cop named Ramashankar Tripathi is trying to sanitise his public image by driving the city’s sex workers out of Manduadih, the neighbourhood they’ve inhabited for several decades. Tripathi, widely believed to have killed his socialite wife Lovely years ago, is aided and abetted by a nexus of local politicians, real estate developers and compliant journalists skilled in the art of propaganda (especially of the religious persuasion).
To heighten the irony and the poignancy of the situation, Yadav narrates the action through a pair of young lovers, photo-journalist Prakash and his girlfriend Chavi, who runs a beauty parlour. Their names are indicative of their respective narrativesymbolic purposes—chavi literally means “image" and that’s precisely what Chavi does for a living, concealing the bruises and black eyes of battered wives (like the late Lovely) and protecting the images of their husbands. Prakash means light, and for much of the story, Prakash tries and fails to shine a light on the corruption around Manduadih, or Ramashankar Tripathi’s role in his late wife’s death.
Even when he does manage to collect evidence for both scoops, the newspaper’s corporate owners shut him down rapidly—turns out their business interests are intertwined with the real estate serpents looking for a quick land-grab in Manduadih. Yadav’s ironic nomenclature of characters is stretched to the limit with “C. Antaratma", Prakash’s skinflint senior colleague who is revealed to be super-corrupt, willing to support any degree of fabrication for the right price (antaratma is the Hindi word for conscience).
Yadav repeatedly comes up with emotionally devastating one-liners, especially sentences offering oblique, omniscient commentary on the events unfolding before the reader’s eyes. Sometimes, these lines are laugh-out-loud funny despite the deadly seriousness of the situation. For example, Yadav does not flat-out tell us that a lot of the people currently condemning sex workers were, in fact, their regular customers until last month. Instead, he writes, “The old accountant at the police station stopped dyeing his hair." It’s well-executed minimalism.
The novella takes up about half of this 200-page collection; the other half is divided up between five short stories. The Magic of Certain Old Clothes is a wicked post-mortem of a romance that unravels because of an unlikely tipping point—a visit to a second-hand clothes market that ends up betraying the couple’s divergent attitudes towards class and etiquette. The Road to the Other World is a slender, nostalgia-soaked eight-page missive about gender dynamics told through the eyes of a man reminiscing about his childhood, especially his late maternal aunt who suffered from tuberculosis.
Lord Almighty, Grant Us Riots! is a biting satire on the plight of Mominpura, a ghettoised Muslim neighbourhood in Varanasi, where the government is invisible—until, of course, there are communal riots. RJ Saheb’s Radio, which concludes the collection, is an experimental tale written in a markedly different register from the others, leaning into an almost magical-realist style to depict the middle-aged male protagonist Ratanjot’s Proustian reveries about his childhood Impressive as these short stories are, the one that really stayed with me was The Folk Singer’s Swan Song, an indictment of the way in which indigenous artistic traditions are co-opted, commercialised and cynically deployed to shore up petty electoral math and ensure the unencumbered march of Big Capital.
At 35 pages, it is the second-longest entry after the titular novella, and it’s clear that Yadav rolled out his full array of narrative and rhetoric techniques for this one. The protagonist Janam is a talented birha singer—birha is a folk music tradition popular among Bhojpuri and Awadhi speakers. Structurally, a birha is always a song about missing the beloved. But birha singers use newspaper headlines, popular sayings, and so on to comment on current affairs and socio-political injustices while staying within the formal constraints of the medium. The inception of Janam’s art, his development as an artist, and the eventual corruption of his soul, are all depicted with compassion and pathos, without once resorting to saccharine.
The Folk Singer’s Swan Song is perhaps the only “pure" tragedy in a collection where tragicomedy is the norm, and for that reason it stands out. For the most part, Vaibhav Sharma’s translation is elegant and acutely aware of the subtleties of Yadav’s language. In the original titular novella, Yadav uses several different Hindi words and phrases to describe sex workers, and in each case, the choice is quite deliberate, intended to highlight hypocrisies in a contextual, quicksilver manner. Sharma, too, keeps pace with this demanding linguistic game, rolling out “prostitute", “sex worker", “courtesan" et al as and when required. In a cheeky bit of translator-polemic, Sharma also chooses to italicise the English versions of folk songs and leave the originals in the regular font (it’s usually the other way round).
These are all excellent signs for a translator still in his late 20s who has just finished his second full-length translation. However, Sharma’s relative lack of experience does come through here and there. In The Folk Singer’s Swan Song, Sharma trusts his readers enough to leave bathua (a kind of winter-growing leafy green plant used to make saag) as is, untranslated. And yet, in the titular novella, arhar and chana (kinds of pulses) are rendered as “black gram" and “pigeon pea", respectively. Mind you, this is a very small complaint because this kind of dissonance is (I have now come to accept) par for the course for not only translated Indian literature, but also Indian English-language fiction. On the first page of a recent, well-received English-language work of Indian queer fiction, Durga Puja is explained in a tortuous fashion (“the annual worship of the mother goddess over five days") while the phrase “kalboishakhi clouds" whizzes past uninterrogated. Minor quibbles aside, Courtesans don’t Read Newspapers is a hugely enjoyable collection, one that represents the best work of one of Hindi literature’s most distinctive contemporary voices.
Aditya Mani Jha is a writer based in Delhi.
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