Foreign Exchange

Two inadvertently related classics of Polish and Hindi literature.

- Keshava Guha

TWO NOVELS THAT APPEARED within two years of each other in the mid 1960s— one set in Czechoslovakia and written in Hindi, the other set in north India and written in Polish—are like literary half-siblings. It is difficult to think of two books simultaneously so alike and so dissimilar. The first, Nirmal Verma’s Ve Din (translated into English, by Krishna Baldev Vaid, as Days of Longing), was published in 1964. The setting is Communist-era Prague, the narrator an Indian student. Wojciech Å»Zukrowski’s Kamienne tablice (Stone Tablets, in the English translation from the Polish, by Stephanie Kraft), appeared in 1966. Its protagonist, Istvan Terey, is a Hungarian consular official in Delhi in the mid 1950s.

Both novels are products of an era of cultural exchange between India and the Eastern Bloc that began in the 1950s. Verma, like his nameless narrator, spent many years in Prague, first as a student of Czech, and subsequently as a translator. In 1959, he was invited by the Czech Institute of Oriental Studies to initiate a programme of translation of modern Czech fiction into Hindi, and he lived in Prague until 1968. Å»Zukrowski was a cultural attaché in Delhi, like Istvan Terey, though, unlike his protagonist, he was with not the Hungarian embassy but the Polish one, from 1956 to 1959.