Uday Prakash
Uday Prakash (born 1952) is without doubt one of the most important contemporary Hindi authors. The Italian Prakash translator Alessandra Consolaro describes him as a "trendsetter", above all for magical realism (jādūī yathārthvād) in Hindi literature. He originally hails from the village of Sitapur, Anuppur district, Madhya Pradesh, whose language and way of life shaped him and which he still regards as home and refuge to this day. Many of the plots in his short stories are set here. Stylistically, this also links him to the great masters of so-called regionalism (āṃcaliktā) in Hindi literature. Prakash has an ambivalent relationship with the metropolis of Delhi and the bustle of its literary scene.
Life and Career
After school and college he completed a master's degree in Hindi, for which he was awarded a gold medal by the University of Saugar in 1974. As a journalist and committed socialist, he ran into political trouble in his home region as a young man and consequently moved to Delhi, where he was a PhD student from 1975–76 and became an assistant professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1978. In between he worked as a government employee in the culture department of the Madhya Pradesh state government, as co-editor of the Hindi literary journal Pūrvāgrah, and as a staff member at Rabindra Bhawan in Bhopal. From 1982 to 1990 he built a rapid career as a journalist and editor, chiefly for the Hindi magazine Dinmān, and later also for the Sunday Mail as well as in television and film production. Since 1993 he has worked as a freelance and independent writer.
The eminent Hindi literary critic Rajendra Yadav (1929–2013) encouraged the young Uday Prakash to develop his own style, and published his short stories in the literary journal Hans, which Yadav edited. While classical progressive critics struggled with Uday Prakash's blending of imagination and dream sequences with social realism, politics and existentialist content, as well as his penchant for metafictional writing, his style soon found an enthusiastic readership. Some regard it as a substantial advance in Hindi narrative art.
Work
When the novel Das Mädchen mit dem gelben Schirm [The Girl with the Golden Parasol] (Pīlī chatrī vālī laḍkī) began to appear in instalments in Hans in 2001, Rajendra Yadav suggested to the author that the series, originally planned for three instalments, be extended to five — a suggestion Prakash accepted.
Numerous collections of short stories followed, including Tirich ("The Monitor Lizard"), Arebā-Parebā ("The Two Little Hares") and Waren hestings kā sāṃḍ ("Warren Hastings's Bull"). Several poetry collections also appeared, including Suno kārīgār ("Listen, Craftsman"), Abūtar kabūtar ("Pigeons and Other Birds") and Rāt men hārmoniyum ("Harmonium at Night"). In June 2020, the Hindi edition of India Today published a first attention-grabbing short story on the subject of the coronavirus in Hindi literature, titled Antim nīmbū ("The Last Lemon"), in which Uday Prakash's already pronounced cultural pessimism escalates to a virtually apocalyptic pitch.
Awards
Uday Prakash received major Indian and international literary awards, including the Pushkin Award, the Dvijdev Samman, the Bharat Bhushan Agrawal Puraskar, the Om Prakash Samman, the SAARC Literary Award, and, as the pinnacle, the coveted Sahitya Akademi Award (2010), which Prakash returned in 2015, however, in connection with the Sahitya Akademi's disappointing response to the murder of M. M. Kalburgi.
Heinz Werner Wessler
Published in German
- Ein Tag im Leben des indischen Iwan Denissowitsch [A Day in the Life of the Indian Ivan Denisovich], translated by Barbara Lotz, in: Die Horen, vol. 188, 1997 (in German)
- Der goldene Gürtel [The Golden Belt]. Stories, translated by Lothar Lutze, Draupadi Verlag 2007 (in German)
- Das Mädchen mit dem gelben Schirm [The Girl with the Golden Parasol], novel, translated by Ines Fornell, Reinhold Schein and Heinz Werner Wessler, Draupadi Verlag 2009 (in German)
- Doktor Wakankar, novel, translated by André Penz, Draupadi Verlag 2009 (in German)
- Mohandas, novel, translated by Ines Fornell and Gautam Liu, Draupadi Verlag 2013 (in German)
- Die Mauern von Delhi [The Walls of Delhi], two stories, translated by Anna Petersdorf and Barbara Lotz, Draupadi Verlag 2015 (in German)
Excerpt
The author portrait (PDF, below) contains the complete story Die Schachtel [The Box] from the volume Der goldene Gürtel — by kind permission of Draupadi Verlag. (in German)
Readings with Uday Prakash: see Readings (in German) (Bonn 2017).
Further Links
📄 Download this author portrait as PDF (in German) (with the excerpt "Die Schachtel")