The late Indian writer Rajkamal Chaudhary (1929–1967) came to prominence in the first two decades of independent India in the 1950s and '60s, producing a prolific number of works in his 37 years. His oeuvre includes 11 novels, seven collections of short stories and hundreds of poems, written primarily in Hindi. Yet English-language speakers are likely not familiar with the work of this experimental, provocative writer: the first translation of Chaudhary’s work into English, Traces of Boots on Tongue and Other Stories, was just published in October.
This collection of 12 short stories, translated by Saudamini Deo and distributed in the U.S. by the University of Chicago Press, provides a representative look at Chaudhary’s work and an India grappling with newfound independence and personal freedoms. In Deo’s introduction, she notes Chaudhary was “the first rebel or avant-garde writer of Hindi literature” and yet “never quite fully accepted… always considered too vulgar, too immoral, too degraded to be deemed a writer of importance.” And yet some of Chaudhary’s more taboo subject matter—a woman who makes sexual advances on her son’s teenage friend, men hiding in a brothel with prostitutes, a young woman who unwittingly has sex with a dead man—seem less shocking by today’s standards, such as they are.
The protagonists throughout this collection are nearly all young men, perhaps proxies for Chaudhary himself, attempting to make sense of a meaningless world. Frequently the text is fragmented and absurd, a sort of stream-of-consciousness prose poem. In the story “Still Life,” a young man contemplating death and suicide goes to meet his girlfriend, Shirin, at Connaught Place (a bustling shopping and dining hub in New Delhi), and considers her thus:
"I think she is slowly getting bored. This thirty-year-old melancholy and innocent girl! Thirty years are not few. But Shirin is still wrapped in the books of childhood. She wants dreams, not sleep. Not death. She wants death, but she also wants a Taj Mahal to be built on her grave. Is it not possible? Nothing is possible in this era of democracy. Everything is impossible. Even that which happens. What doesn’t exist is also impossible. Socialism. Sunlight. Sharp light. A crawling crowd on the streets. A procession chanting savage slogans. Man."
In the shifting world of Traces of Boots on Tongue and Other Stories, even the existence of man is impossible, his future uncertain.
As for women, their changing roles in society and sexual freedoms are often cause for alarm, such as in the satirical “Sisters-in-Law,” in which one young widow comments to another, “When there is no shame in sleeping with a living man, why feel shame in sleeping with a dead one?” Several women in this collection are referred to as snakes by male protagonists, and the weight of various female characters is commented on, which was off-putting to my contemporary sensibilities. Yet Chaudhary indicates in one story that he is aware of the double-standards that exist in Indian society where women’s behavior is concerned. In “A Champa Bud: A Venomous Snake,” a mother attempts to convince her wealthy 62-year-old neighbor, Shashi-babu, to marry her 13-year-old daughter Champa, lacking the cash dowry to marry her into another family and improve their circumstances. When the older man realizes what is being proposed and confronts the mother, he is terrified, “as if it was not a woman standing in front of him but a venomous snake, in a vicious stance.” Then in a turn of phrase, the narrator comments of the wealthy landowner, “what is this law of the universe that, in this social situation, it is not Shashi-babu who is the venomous snake,” indicating the inequities of the Indian class system are perhaps more sinister than a woman doing what she must to save her family from poverty.
Deo has written about the problems and inherent biases of comparing Hindi literature and other artistic works to Western counterparts, and I agree with many of her points, however for Anglophone readers such as myself unfamiliar with the Hindi canon, I think it can provide an entry point. Reading Traces of Boots on Tongue and Other Stories, I was reminded at times of the American authors Kurt Vonnegut and Chuck Palahniuk—their satirical, absurdly horrific and sometimes crass styles, their explorations of the meaninglessness of human existence and what men do to survive. Fans of these writers will find much to admire in Chaudhary’s story collection.
Traces of Boots on Tongue and Other Stories was published by Seagull Books in October 2023 and is available from the University of Chicago Press and your local independent bookstore.
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