RAG Demo

Tag: Translated from Hindi

  • Aadha Gaon

    Aadha Gaon, meaning half a village, was published in 1966 and is set in Gangauli, the author's own village in the Ghazipur district of eastern Uttar Pradesh. It portrays the Shia Muslim zamindar families of one half of the village, their feuds, marriages, scandals and Muharram mourning rituals, from the late 1930s to the early 1950s.

    There is no single hero; the village itself is the protagonist, observed by a narrator who grew up there. When the Muslim League's campaign for Pakistan reaches Gangauli, most villagers cannot see why their home should be anywhere else. Partition divides families nonetheless, and then the abolition of zamindari strips the landowners of their status, leaving them adrift in the new republic.

    Written in Hindi but full of the Bhojpuri and Urdu of everyday speech, the novel was controversial for its frank language and its insistence that Indian Muslims belong to their soil. It is now recognised as one of the great Hindi novels about Partition from a Muslim village's perspective. Gillian Wright translated it as A Village Divided.

    Book details

    AuthorRahi Masoom Raza
    First published1966
    Original languageHindi
    Translated byGillian Wright
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)360
    SettingGangauli village, Ghazipur district, Uttar Pradesh, late 1930s to early 1950s

    Themes

    • Partition
    • Belonging and homeland
    • End of zamindari
    • Shia Muslim culture
    • Village community

    Who should read it

    Readers who want a rarely told Muslim village view of Partition and its aftermath in North India.

  • Gunahon Ka Devta

    Gunahon Ka Devta, published in 1949, is set in Allahabad among university people. Chandar is a brilliant research student who owes much to his professor, Dr Shukla, and spends his days in the professor's house. The professor's daughter Sudha is playful, affectionate and utterly devoted to Chandar, and everyone around them senses a love that neither will name.

    Chandar has built an ideal of pure, almost worshipful love and refuses to let it become ordinary romance or marriage, partly out of loyalty to his mentor and partly out of fear of his own feelings. His choices draw in other women: Pammi, an Anglo-Indian divorcee who offers a frank physicality he both craves and despises, and Binti, Sudha's cousin. The cost of his idealism falls hardest on Sudha.

    The novel's lush, emotional prose made it a phenomenon among young Hindi readers, and it has gone through a vast number of reprints. Read today, it is also a critique of a hero whose high-mindedness masks cowardice and whose purity damages those he claims to adore. An English translation by Poonam Saxena appeared as Chandar and Sudha.

    Book details

    AuthorDharamvir Bharati
    First published1949
    Original languageHindi
    Translated byPoonam Saxena
    GenreRomance
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)280
    SettingAllahabad, 1940s

    Themes

    • Platonic versus physical love
    • Sacrifice
    • Idealism and hypocrisy
    • Duty to mentors
    • Youth

    Who should read it

    Readers who enjoy intense, bittersweet love stories and want a Hindi classic that defined a generation's idea of romance.

  • Raag Darbari

    Ranganath, a history postgraduate, comes from the city to recover his health in Shivpalganj, a village in Uttar Pradesh where his uncle Vaidyaji lives. Vaidyaji is an Ayurvedic physician in name, but his real practice is power: he controls the village college, the cooperative society and, through allies, the panchayat. Ranganath's idealism wilts as he watches how things actually get done.

    The novel follows a parade of characters: Vaidyaji's sons, the strongman Badri and the swaggering student leader Ruppan, the hanger-on Sanichar who is installed as a puppet village head, the harried principal and squabbling teachers, the police, the clerks and the litigants who spend their lives in court. Every institution of the new republic is shown being bent to faction and self-interest.

    Published in 1968 and awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1970, the book is wickedly funny line by line, with an irony that never lets up. It has been read as the definitive portrait of rural India's political culture, and much of it still feels current. Gillian Wright translated it into English, and a television serial was made in the 1980s.

    Book details

    AuthorShrilal Shukla
    First published1968
    Original languageHindi
    Translated byGillian Wright
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)340
    SettingShivpalganj, a village in Uttar Pradesh, 1960s
    AwardsSahitya Akademi Award 1970

    Themes

    • Corruption
    • Rural politics
    • Decay of institutions
    • Education system
    • Disillusionment

    Who should read it

    Anyone who wants to understand, and laugh bitterly at, how power works in small-town India.

  • Tamas

    Tamas, meaning darkness, opens in a town in the Rawalpindi district in the months before Partition. Nathu, a poor tanner, is paid to kill a pig for what he is told is a veterinary purpose. The carcass is left at a mosque, and within days the district is consumed by fear, rumour and killing between Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims.

    Sahni moves among many characters rather than following one hero: Congress volunteers trying to keep peace, young men trained for militancy by communal organisations, a British deputy commissioner who could intervene but prefers administrative caution, Sikh villagers preparing to defend a gurdwara, and refugees in camps. Nathu's guilt and bewilderment give the book its moral centre.

    Drawing on his own memories of riots in Rawalpindi, Sahni wrote in plain, restrained prose that makes the violence more disturbing. The novel won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1975, and Govind Nihalani's 1988 television adaptation provoked national debate. Sahni's own English translation is the best known, and the book remains essential reading on how communal hatred is manufactured.

    Book details

    AuthorBhisham Sahni
    First published1974
    Original languageHindi
    Translated byBhisham Sahni
    GenreHistorical fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)350
    SettingA town and villages in Rawalpindi district, Punjab, early 1947
    AwardsSahitya Akademi Award 1975

    Themes

    • Communal violence
    • Partition
    • Manipulation by elites
    • Colonial indifference
    • Guilt

    Who should read it

    Readers who want to understand how Partition riots were provoked and spread, told without sensationalism.

  • Madhushala

    Madhushala, the house of wine, is a sequence of a little over one hundred and thirty rubai-style quatrains, each ending on the same refrain word. Published in 1935, it was inspired in part by Bachchan's reading of Omar Khayyam through FitzGerald, but it is no imitation. The tavern, the wine, the cup and the server become symbols for life's journey, for divine intoxication and for the search for meaning.

    Across the poem the drinker is a seeker, the tavern a place where caste, creed and status fall away, and the wine an image for passion, poetry and spiritual ecstasy. Some readers in the 1930s were scandalised, taking it as a celebration of drinking, but Bachchan, himself a teetotaller, insisted on its symbolic reading. Death and transience shadow the revelry throughout.

    The poem made Bachchan a star of Hindi literature; he recited it to packed audiences for decades, and his son Amitabh Bachchan has kept those recitations alive. Its rhythm makes it easy to memorise, and it remains among the most widely read Hindi poems. An English verse rendering, The House of Wine, was made by Marjorie Boulton and Ram Swaroop Vyas.

    Book details

    AuthorHarivansh Rai Bachchan
    First published1935
    Original languageHindi
    Translated byMarjorie Boulton and Ram Swaroop Vyas
    GenrePoetry
    TypeNon-fiction

    Themes

    • Life as intoxication
    • Transience
    • Equality beyond religion
    • Longing
    • Mysticism

    Who should read it

    Lovers of Hindi poetry and anyone curious about the most recited verse sequence in modern Hindi.

  • Tomb of Sand

    After her husband's death, Ma, an elderly woman in a north Indian family, takes to her bed and turns her back on the household gathered around her. When she finally rises, it is as a changed person: playful, unpredictable and keen to do things her family never imagined, including moving in with her unconventional daughter, Beti, a writer who lives independently.

    Ma's new friendship with Rosie, a hijra, adds to the family's confusion, and her desire to cross the border into Pakistan leads her back to a past from the time of Partition that she has never spoken about. Beti, who has always been the free one, finds herself watching her mother outdo her in rebellion.

    Originally published in Hindi as Ret Samadhi, the novel is playful and digressive, with talking crows, puns and stories within stories. Daisy Rockwell's translation won the International Booker Prize in 2022, the first time the award went to a book translated from an Indian language.

    Book details

    AuthorGeetanjali Shree
    First published2018
    Original languageHindi
    Translated byDaisy Rockwell
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    SettingDelhi and northern India, and Pakistan, present day
    AwardsInternational Booker Prize 2022

    Themes

    • Old age and renewal
    • Mothers and daughters
    • Partition memory
    • Borders
    • Gender

    Who should read it

    Adventurous readers who enjoy playful, experimental prose and stories about women reclaiming their lives.

  • Godan

    Hori Mahto is a peasant farmer in the village of Belari in the United Provinces, struggling to keep his small plot and pay off debts to landlords, moneylenders and priests. His one dream is to own a cow, a symbol of status and religious merit, and the cow he finally acquires sets off a chain of jealousy and misfortune within his own family.

    His wife Dhaniya is outspoken and fearless where Hori is cautious and anxious to keep up appearances, and their son Gobar defies village customs and leaves for Lucknow. A parallel plot follows the city's educated elite, including a philosopher, a doctor and a landowner, contrasting rural hardship with urban debates about reform.

    Published in 1936, the year of Premchand's death, Godan is often considered the greatest Hindi novel, an unsentimental portrait of exploitation in colonial village India. Gordon C. Roadarmel's English translation appeared as The Gift of a Cow. It remains essential reading in Indian schools and universities and is a touchstone for rural fiction.

    Book details

    AuthorMunshi Premchand
    First published1936
    Original languageHindi
    Translated byGordon C. Roadarmel
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    SettingBelari village and Lucknow, United Provinces, 1930s

    Themes

    • Rural poverty
    • Debt and exploitation
    • Caste
    • Dignity
    • City and village

    Who should read it

    Readers who want the essential classic of Hindi literature about peasant life under colonial rule.

  • Nirmala

    Nirmala is a teenage girl whose engagement collapses after her father's death leaves the family unable to pay the expected dowry. Her mother arranges a match with Totaram, a lawyer about twice her age with three sons from his first marriage, and Nirmala enters his household as a wife barely older than his eldest son, Mansaram.

    Totaram, insecure about his age, grows jealous of Nirmala's friendly relationship with Mansaram, and his suspicion sets off events that slowly poison the entire family. Premchand shows how each person, including Totaram's widowed sister, is trapped by customs they did not choose. Gossip and rumour do as much damage as any villain.

    First serialised in the magazine Chand in the mid-1920s and later published as a book, the novel is a powerful critique of the dowry system and marriages between young girls and older men. Alok Rai's English translation is widely read, and the story was adapted for Doordarshan television.

    Book details

    AuthorMunshi Premchand
    First published1927
    Original languageHindi
    Translated byAlok Rai
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    SettingA town in north India, 1920s

    Themes

    • Dowry
    • Child marriage
    • Jealousy
    • Women's oppression
    • Social reform

    Who should read it

    Readers interested in classic Hindi fiction and early literary critiques of dowry and child marriage.