Not Looking Away

Four years ago Harsh Mander wrote a book called Looking Away. At the very beginning he quoted Martin Luther King. It’s a quotation worth remembering. King said, ‘Never, never be afraid to do what is right. Society’s punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our souls when we look away.’

In the first chapter Mander remarked on the ‘startling absence of compassion among a majority of well-to-do Indians towards the millions who have no advantages of birth to shield them from hunger, oppression, violence, squalor and humiliation.’ He went on, ‘A dispassionate external observer would be bewildered by middle-class India’s capacity to look away when confronted with enormous injustice and suffering; by our society’s cultural comfort with inequality.’

Harsh Mander is one of those who is profoundly uncomfortable with inequality. He walks untiringly on a Gandhian path of ‘radical love’.

In the world of fiction Uday Prakash demands his readers’ attention to all that the comfortable classes turn away from. He never looks away. He looks long and deep.He empathizes. He listens and he writes.The devastating bleakness of his gaze sometimes makes his stories difficult to stomach. They haul the reader out of any comfort zone with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, and yet the plots are so constructed that you have to know what happens next. And there within his masterly storytelling is the unapologetic truth that has made him a household name in the Hindi-speaking world.