‘Courtesans Don’t Read Newspapers’ by Anil Yadav: Desent, misspelled indecency

In any other book, to say that courtesans don’t read newspapers would be a provocation. They must read, a progressive drawing room conversation might conclude. In Anil Yadav’s stories, this seemingly common phrase acquires a strange charge. What sounds like crude evidence of the illiteracy of prostitutes is really a record of how they are erased by newspapers, which in turn are run by the ‘graces’ of the powerful.

Rather than reporting the truth, the newspaper actively works to craft lies, refusing a voice to the prostitutes of Manduadih, even though it runs on their sexuality, lore and labour. This upside-down world is no fantasy; we live in it. The author makes sure the irony reaches our ears — his fiction leaves the reader unsettled, bitter, and even riled up.

‘Courtesans Don’t Read Newspapers’, a collection of stories written by Yadav and translated from Hindi (‘Nagarvadhuyen Akhbar Nahi Padhtin’) by Vaibhav Sharma, is a document of many deceits, and the wretched place from where they all emerge — the desire for respectability.

The eponymous novella is a resistant cry against the very gaze of journalism, which often puppets the social orthodoxy and perversion of the majority. Prakash, a photojournalist named after light, fails to illuminate the dark corners of Varanasi. As he ventures into a neighbourhood of prostitutes that has been shut down from all sides for reasons of public morality, he finds out that things are not as they seem.

The truth rests in an old photo album that the prostitutes dote over, not in his own camera and reporting. These are photos of powerful people who patronise the women of Manduadih; the same people who are now forcing the women to stop their business. Prakash can’t write this in the newspaper, which is run by the same powerful people. Yadav is walking a tightrope here — he refuses both reformist morality and regressive values, showing us that these two modes of seeing emerge from the same elites.

The other stories in the collection follow a similar style. The sentences are long and winding, contradictory and true. In ‘Lord Almighty, Grant Us Riots!’, the floodwater speaks, and children of Mominpur pray for a riot. In ‘The Magic of Certain Old Clothes’, Nalin’s facade of respectability is crushed by his desire for cheap clothes that cost merely ‘painti painsath’. All of these stories leave the reader with no resolution, only an affect that lingers after.

This unmissable affect also tells us that the Hindi of these stories has fallen into the hands of a brilliant translator. Meaning and context merge seamlessly throughout the book, without taking us away from the heart of each tale. Songs and jingles are translated keeping their charm intact, and their presence in the translated text takes the reader back to the musicality of their Hindi. ‘Nagarvadhu’ becomes ‘courtesan’, while ‘vaishya’ becomes ‘prostitute’, carefully highlighting a world of difference between these nouns.

A board in Manduadih says: “This is not a brothel, desent people live here.” The italicised ‘desent’ marks that it was an English word in the original text, symbolic of the crooked, misspelled decency exercised by respectable people in English. We are morally upright, unlike the prostitutes, they are saying. The courtesan knows the world is upside down, or at least tilted sideways like desent. And, therefore, she refuses to read.

— The reviewer, a translator and poet, teaches at Ashoka University