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Voice of the underdog Naresh Pandit is at
the forefront of modern Hindi writing from the region
Naresh Pandit, then a young student of Government College of Art, Chandigarh, was thoroughly disturbed by the bloody experience. He wrote a letter to poet Kumar Vikal, who on reading it was so moved that he said to his friends, "This boy is not going to be a painter, but a writer." Meanwhile Naresh retreated to his native town of Mandi for a while in order to distance himself from the incident. But the images of dying men would not leave him. The experience had not only transformed the sensibilities of the young artist, but also his medium, for, as predicted by Kumar Vikal, Pandit began to express in short stories his disgust and impatience with the passively suffering masses and the lethargic system that did not seem to care. We get a glimpse of Naresh’s own helplessness from his early works such as Pahad ka Dukh. Always a rebel, Naresh first directed his caustic pen to expose the hypocrisy of the upper castes and the rich. Even now his creative work speaks about the underdogs of society: prostitutes, beggars, lepers, untouchables, criminals and so on. Always seen in the company of Leftist friends, no one was surprised when he became member of the CPI. During the height of Panjab’s militancy, he wrote a story Fata Hua Poster, about a man who gets shot as he is trying to paste a poster. This eternal rebel soon began to ask uncomfortable questions about the CPI. As a result, he was asked to leave the party. A married man with two daughters, Naresh is now an architect and builder by vocation and a writer, painter and cartoonist by avocation. With two novels and over 90 short stories to his credit, he represents the avant garde writers and artists from Himachal Pradesh. Even now he is a champion of the underprivileged, but he is no longer Marxian. "My approach is more humanistic now. My characters as before are the lowliest of the low, and their first concern is their burning hunger. They try to fight back, as well as realise the odds stacked against them." Naresh’s latest novel will be published in English as Mountain Mantra. It is based on the true story of an American girl who is raped in Dharamsala by local boys. She cautions them against raping her for she is an AIDS patient, but no one listens to her. She later goes to the police, not to register a complaint, but to request the police to find the boys and tell them to take medication. His short story Nani’s
Lantern was published by the Sahitya Akademi, and has been
translated into Punjabi, Kannada, Assamese, Marathi and English. Naresh
is also a cartoonist, and makes the daily pocket cartoon for the
Himachal edition of a Hindi daily. |
Even
after 30-odd years, the nightmare still haunts him. It started with a
shootout on a cold winter night in the late seventies in Chandigarh’s
Sector 15 market. The violent brawl ended with the loss of three or four
lives. But that night, a writer was born.