The rediscovery of Yashpal’s early stories reveals a fusion of writer and patriot

In Yashpal’s short story “Sāg”, the patch of ground by the riverbank hides a gory truth. The fertile soil always yields a succulent crop of vegetables (hence the story’s title, referring to a leafy green vegetable), but this is where three young revolutionaries have been buried secretly by the police after their judicial hanging. It’s a short and complex tale.

The prisoners, guilty of having planned and carried out a series of bomb attacks on the British government, were arrested following a manhunt and a shootout. For their injuries, they are treated by a hesitating, and often foul-mouthed, prison doctor. But British justice, which has just sentenced the prisoners to death, must ensure the provision of humane medical service to death row prisoners.

It’s a story, as translator Corinne Friend explains in her introduction, with a direct link to Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru, revolutionaries and members of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army, a group to which Yashpal also belonged. Yashpal was indeed actively involved in the HSRA and its activities. In 1929, he was sentenced to imprisonment for life and it was while in prison that he turned to writing. It was here that he also made the conscious decision of writing in Hindi. In 1935, he was released on grounds of clemency after the Congress apparently petitioned the British-Indian government.

Author and patriot

Yashpal’s two identities, however, were always inseparable. He was never just a writer. Friend’s translation of some of his short stories describe him as “author and patriot”. He was, as she wrote in a 1977 article, soon after Yashpal’s death in 1976, a “fighter for freedom – writer for justice”. This translation, among the first of Yashpal’s works to be translated into English, was published in 1969; and the University of Pennsylvania Press has only recently, in December 2016, issued a digital imprint.

“Sāg”, the oldest story in this collection, was written in 1946. Friend explains that it is the only story whose original title she retained. The others have prosaic, even preachy titles, and most are tinged with an inevitable, even necessary, political consciousness and social awareness. This only heightens the impact of these stories.

As translator, Friend, encompasses several roles as she explains the stories, Yashpal’s life during the time he wrote them, and his reasons, and then she places each story in the context of a time and place, making them vital and timeless in the process. She is translator, biographer and ethnographer all rolled into one.

In “Two Desperate Souls”, a man, hungry and starving, somehow finds his way to a brothel, where a particularly scrawny young woman takes him for a client. Though he wants to know her story, the young woman is starving and then is left teary in a frustrated way, as she realises her client has nothing to give her. From Friend’s introduction, we learn that Yashpal remembered well the dizziness, the agonising sensation, one has from going hungry for a long time – which did happen to him when he was on the run from the police – and he evoked it in this story, highlighting the hallucinatory effect a cigarette has on the protagonist after he decides to spend his last few coins on one.

Living in the Kangra Valley

Despite their brevity, these stories are layered; the end sometimes comes soon and always holds a surprise. A woman from Kashmir comes all the way to Peshawar to look for her errant husband in “The Essence of Love”. Narrated from the viewpoint of the police inspector who has nabbed her for vagrancy, and who does not understand her language, it’s a story of love lost, found and lost again.

As the police soon figure out, the man she is looking for, is a known criminal. When the long-estranged couple are brought face to face, the woman refuses to have anything to do with him. It is only then, Yashpal seems to suggest, that she understands how much time has elapsed, the years she has lost in waiting for him, and how it has been for nothing.

Friend’s introduction and a certain sociological context helps the stories travel, no matter that these translations date to the late 1960s. She cites Gerald Berreman’s work on the Hindus of the Himalayan Valley in the introduction to “The Name of Experience”. It evokes not merely the relative autonomy women in the Kangra region appear to enjoy, compared to women in the plains, but also the different value systems at work, and the widespread suspicion in which the government is regarded.

Yashpal writes in the first person and he was born in the Kangra region, but it isn’t clear if this story draws on his own life. While on a journey from Almora to Lohaghat, the narrator is drawn to two people who have evidently been resting by a tree for a long time. They mistake him for a government official – someone is expected to visit their village after the particularly scandalous behaviour of a woman. After all, as the woman explains, the government is like a fly, it gathers and comes only to watch “people’s dirt”.

“The Emperor’s Justice” is a story with a fabulist touch, set in the time of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir, whose sense of justice had him place a bell right by his palace window. The heavy presence of guards around it inevitably preempted the common citizen from pulling the bell, and calling the emperor’s attention to justice. An errant bullock, however, does so, with unforeseen consequences for its owner.

The lives of women

“To Uphold Righteousness” is a quixotic story of a strict headmaster, devoted to the Vedic texts, who has shunned all intimacy in his quest for the right knowledge. Yashpal shows how religion and ancient knowledge can save and yet scar. The last two stories have women, from different class backgrounds, as their protagonists.

In “One Cigarette”, Damati, humiliated by her in-laws, goes all the way to the army cantonment, determined to find her husband, only to find herself lost, in bad company, and finally shunned by her husband. The Sethji in “Purchased Happiness”, enamoured of the married Mrs Madan, endeavours to buy her affection, albeit in an honourable way, by bestowing favours on her family. It shows up the loneliness in both their lives.

As Friend says, the stories show Yashpal’s compassion for women, but also highlight their limited choices. These short stories, written over a decade, 1946-1957, provide us a glimpse of the early, thoughtful Yashpal, who is rightly, as Friend writes, one of the greatest writers in Hindi literature, and an apt successor to the great Premchand. His forte was clearly the longer form, evident in his memoir and then the novel, Jhootha Sach, which Yashpal wrote in two parts, published in 1958 and 1960. It was translated into English by Yashpal’s son Anand and published as This is Not That Dawn in 2010.

Short Stories of Yashpal, Author and Patriot, Yashpal, Translated by Corinne Friend, University of Pennsylvania Press