Who says Swadesh Deepak has vanished into thin air?
On a summer morning in 2006, Swadesh Deepak- the prized storyteller, joined the list of missing persons as he never returned home but the visibility, translation, and appraisal of his work and has grown manifold
Our friend and cherished writer Swadesh Deepak was a cherished professor of English and his students have still not forgotten the charm and depth of his lectures, formally in the classroom and informally in the cafeteria or the little garden of his home in Ambala Cantonment. Looking back at his life and times, it is little wonder that he had a bit of James Joyce in him, who held that he had put so many puzzles and enigmas in his works that he had ensured his immortality for critics would keep arguing for centuries over them. Our own “swadeshi” writer goes many steps further with adding so many more puzzles and enigmas in his life too that immortality is better assured far longer than that of Joyce.
Of not seeing Mandu and more
Recently there has been heartening news that a leading publishing house in Paris has bought the rights of translating Swadesh’s famous memoirs of the tight-rope walk with his mental depression. Titled “Maine Mandu Nahi Dekha” ( I have hot seen Mandu) is one of its kind book and has been widely appreciated by littérateurs as well as psychiatrists on a brilliant mind’s experience of mental illness that drives him to make suicide attempts as he encounters hallucinations and finally be treated to come back “retreaded and recycled”, the words of Sylvia Plath. This masterpiece by Swadesh takes the reader to the twilight zone of existence reported as it was while adding his own dark humour to it. It must have taken great courage for the writer to go back to the times as he was recovering and advised by a writer friend to pen it all. It required a writer of sensitivity to do it and he accomplished it in the short-lived phase of recovery. Yes, it did not last too long and then one fine day he walked out of his home to never return. All kinds of stories and myths were propounded by his fans while the family and friends bore it in silence.
Present in his absence
A new set of books of the writer’s plays and stories, translated by Jerry Pinto and his gang, that has been just released by Speaking Tiger publishers, once again marks the persistence of interest in his writing and journey with us and away from us. This is indeed an evidence to the merit of his short fiction and he remains one of the most uncompromising of Hindi prose writers that are searing critiques of society, system and common stereotypes. The stories included in this collection in English translation include Hunger, Jungle, No News of Untoward Events, Pears from Rawalpindi, Name a Tree, Any Tree, Horsemen, Dread, Dead End, For the Wind Cannot Read and The Child God. These stories mark the wide and varied canvas of the writer and each one has something to say that had been overlooked before.
A radical playwright
The second book “Court Martial and Other Plays” has the radical best trio including Kaal Kothri and The Saddest Poem Ever Written mark the radical playwrighting phase of Swadesh. The three mark the phase in which one of the most intense writers of our times acted out the impulse to erase tyranny once and for all. While Court Martial is the play which gave the author the great fame, it was widely enacted all over South East Asia and brought the playwright the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award. Yet Pinto points out that the other two are no less interesting in different ways as they question injustice and masculinity. These two books offer his readers yet another chance to see the tragic vision of life as encountered by Swadesh and laid bare in words.
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