Manohar Shyam Joshi’s hilarious satire on the literary pretensions of his peers and the Left progressive writers is out in English
Manohar shyam joshi died just two years ago at the age of 73. A whole generation has grown up since the early 1980s when he wrote, and an exceptionally talented cast enacted, India’s first soap opera, Hum Log. What made Hum Log special was that it was about ordinary people and was designed to carry positive public messages. It was real public service broadcasting in stark contrast to the bulk of today’s serials of which the less said the better. Joshi followed Hum Log with Buniyaad, a television serial about a refugee family, which was also immensely successful, as was the popular comedy Mungeri Lal Ke Haseen Sapne. His film credits vary from the 1979 hit Manzil, starring Amitabh Bachchan, to Kamal Hassan’s controversial film Hey Ram, released in 2000.

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.

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