Fiction
Read it if you like Village Life Novels
I picked up this novel because it proclaimed "Masterpiece of Hindi Literature" on the cover. I figured that I would check it out. While a little slow in places and extremely fatalistic, it's a good read.
The story takes place in a small village somewhere in northern India outside of Lucknow. Anurag Yadav has a field day pointing out the differences in class and mentality between villagers, the village head leader, and a group of cosmopolitan friends who occasionally run into the villagers. It's all done in a very matter of fact way without excuses for anyone.
Hori, our main character, is a farmer. He has a wife and 3 children who are almost grown. Hori struggles to improve his situation throughout the book with no success, dragged down by circumstance, malice, and taking loans, a common plight of farmers who end up paying interest long after the loan should have been done. He fights tooth and nail - usually with only his pride left - to hold on to his land and his status as farmer, only to be trample on until all he can claim is that he is a laborer. The village head makes all his excuses about how difficult it is for Zamindars and how he should be excused from any responsibility at all for collecting taxes and fines. The cosmopolitan friends soar above it all, neither worried about money nor how their actions affect anyone.
Spoiler alert - Hori dies in the end from being over worked, a condition that I'm sure many farmers and laborers can understand well. There's absolutely no happy ending for any of the characters, so typical of Indian authors, nor is there any feel good about Hori or his circumstances and how people remain in poverty. Since not many of the people reading this book will be from a village or living in such poverty, it's an interesting exercise in awareness.
Read it.
~Becky~
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