Category: Memoir/Translation
Publisher: Penguin Random House India (forthcoming)
Rajendra Yadav’s Mud Mud Ke Dekhta Hoon is written in his customary irreverent, ironic style. Yadav grew up in a lower-middle class household in Agra, a milieu he described masterfully in his novel Sara Akash (1952). Because of an injury to his leg in his childhood that was not treated, he had a physical disability all his life and developed something of a complex about it.
Leaving his small-town days behind him, he moved to Calcutta where he lived for several years, before eventually making Delhi his home. His early fame as one of the legendary three who launched the influential Nayi Kahani movement in the ’50s (the other two being Mohan Rakesh and Kamleshwar), and as an impactful short story writer and novelist was later matched by his fame as the daring and iconoclastic editor of the literary journal Hans. Always a fearless voice against tradition and conservatism, Yadav’s years as editor of the magazine founded by Premchand in 1930, saw him giving institutional space to feminist and dalit writing, even as his own provocative editorials Meri Teri Uski Baat garnered a huge following.
Mud Mud Ke Dekhta Hoon opens with a near-brush with death when Yadav’s train to Kanpur has an accident and many passengers die or are critically injured. In the middle of the terror and mayhem, Yadav recounts how he felt no fear and the only thing that bothered him was – where was his pipe?
The book describes the genesis of some of his best-known short stories, such as Jahan Lakshmi Qaid Hai, Prateeksha, Ek Kamzor Ladki ki Kahani, Abhimanyu ki Atmakatha and others, and also how his novels like Ukhde Hue Log, Kulta or Ek Inch Muskan (that he co-wrote with Mannu Bhandari) came about. Many of them were triggered by real-life incidents, places or people.
He doesn’t pull his punches either – he attacks the leading Hindi literary lights of Calcutta (the writers who were around when he was living there) as being mediocre, ignorant, scrambling for radio contracts, each one under the delusion that Calcutta would make him the next Suryakant Tripathi Nirala.
Yadav also describes – with great candour – his long-standing relationships with women, whether it was Hemlata (whom he called Didi), a wealthy widow he corresponded with and met off and on for years, or Meeta, whom he knew since his Agra days and continued to be in close contact with even after his marriage. And then there are brief interludes, which he doesn’t shy away from writing about either – such as the time a friend of a friend, a girl called Kamal, moved into his flat in Calcutta, creating something of a scandal among his friends.
He writes about his marriage, acknowledging that he was unfair and unjust to Mannu. “She fulfilled every responsibility – college (Mannu was teaching in Miranda House), tuition and Tinku (their daughter), her own writing, looking after friends and visitors – everything was left to her… there wouldn’t be enough money for the house but I would take advances from publishers and go away to the hills with Meeta.” He says he became the khalnayak among all his friends and relatives, whose sympathies were squarely with Mannu. He left home for long durations, taking off to Kasauli or Ranikhet or sometimes just to a friend’s place, in Ghaziabad or Delhi’s Shankar market.
He admits he was never able to hold a job for long. Mannu always accused him of running away from his responsibilities, from life itself. But Yadav says he didn’t run away from life as much as he ran away into life. That’s why he remained in thrall of the crowds, chaos and kaleidoscopic nature of big city life.
Towards the end of the book, neither Didi, Meeta, or Mannu are in his life. He lives alone in a small flat in Mayur Vihar, with his Man Friday, Kishan, to look after him. He says he identifies himself with Albert Camus’s Outsider, someone whose ability to feel sympathy and compassion has dried up.
The translator: Poonam Saxena