In the world of popular culture, it is these film and television credits that immediately bring recognition. But Manohar Shyam Joshi was a brilliant man who excelled in many fields. He was an eminent journalist as well as one of Hindi’s leading fiction writers. He specialised in satire and, with his Sahitya Akademi Award-winning novel Kasap, successfully recreated the rural world of Kumaon in the ’50s. He himself came from Almora and was master of Kumaoni language, and indeed of every variety of Hindi under the sun.

This novel T’ta Professor is, like Kasap, set in Kumaon and revolves around a village school, recently upgraded from primary to high school. The eponymous “professor” is a teacher full of self-importance and pride in his own heritage but also with a great respect for the English language. His grasp of English is his claim to high status and is supported by his most prized possession — a pocket version of the Oxford English Dictionary. This is a humorous, satirical and serious novel all in one. It is autobiographical to some extent and to a greater extent not.

The professor, with his bad pronunciation and great respect for the Anglo-Saxon sense of order, is based on a teacher Joshi came across while staying in Mukteshwar. Joshi himself appears in the book as the narrator and as a character — a young writer, looking for a peaceful retreat, who takes on a job as a temporary teacher in Sunaulidhar village school. Joshi as novelist depicts the society he saw around him. In this role he mocks others but none so much as himself, the literary pretensions of his peers and the leftist progressive writers who had addas in Almora in his youth. What attracted Ira Pande to this novel and made her translate it is that although short, it works on so many levels.

Joshi was Pande’s uncle. Her mother was the best-selling Hindi writer Shivani. By coincidence, I have just finished one of Shivani’s highly readable novels, Mayapuri. It is about an educated but impoverished young woman — again from a village in the hills — who loves and is loved by a married man but remains virtuous to the end. T’ta Professor, in contrast, is a stranger to such virtue. Joshi deals with a more sordid, perhaps a more realistic, masculine world. Sexual abstinence is not a characteristic of T’ta Professor beyond a term he learns the meaning of during the course of the book — coitus interruptus. Romance is not his style either. Part of the book’s humour comes from the incongruity of T’ta Professor’s exalted position as a pillar in the community, and his low sexual exploits.

The self-styled professor is so learned that he discovers the meaning of hanky-panky and hocus-pocus. His sense of propriety demands that English should be treated at all times with respect. He even chides the young schoolmaster for reading an English novel lying down, instead of sitting up, properly dressed in shirt and trousers. But at the same time he devours pornography, and believes that his young son is taking his geometry book to the lavatory to help him masturbate better. Triangles, after all, he reminds the temporary schoolmaster, are ancient tantric symbols. Khushwant Singh has called the novel “hilarious and disturbing” and both adjectives fit very well. Joshi brilliantly recreates the staff-room politics of the school, the unspoken hierarchies in the village and the rivalry between the principal and the professor. Stepping aside from satire, he describes the changes over the past decades and brings aspects of uncertainty and tragedy to his story. This is perhaps the first of his novels to be translated — and it should not be missed.