Description
‘To save me from following in the footsteps of my older brothers who had taken the road to the next world, it was decided . . . to sell me as soon as I was born. No part of the money that was the price of my life fell to my share. All I got was the name pinned on me like a badge indicating my sold status’
“Bechan.’ Pandey Bechan Sharma Ugra’s memoir, Apni Khabar, is considered the first autobiography written in modern Hindi that displays striking originality in its tone and style. It marked a radical departure from the established autobiographical and biographical conventions of its time and is now regarded as an example of a new genre of writing because of its intrinsic modernity and individualism.
An eccentric and controversial writer Ugra was familiar with many prominent men of his day, including Premchand and Nirala. That he gloried in his extremism is evident in his choice of a pen name (ugra means ‘extreme’) and his tendency to wilfully damage his reputation and social standing. As a child, he was expelled from school; and as an adult, he defied everyone’s advice when he published stories on male homosexuality. Translated for the first time into English by Ruth Vanita, About Me depicts Ugra’s exploration of the making of the modern, North Indian male intellectual self, with layers drawn from urban and rural, orthodox and radical, Hindu and Muslim cultures. Beginning with his birth in 1900, Ugra intimately describes worlds that have either disappeared or been transformed beyond recognition, such as those of indigenous urbanity, the milieu of the itinerant religious theatre in which he was a child actor, and social reformist education. He is one of the first Indian writers to openly depict domestic violence and child abuse from the viewpoint of a child victim. Suffused with his distinctive blend of amiable sarcasm, pungent satire, and self-deprecating humour, this disarmingly candid and illuminating memoir reveals how present-day India.
ISBN 978-0143101802
Raised and educated in India, Ruth Vanita divides her time between Gurgaon and Missoula. Her first novel, Memory of Light, appeared from Penguin in 2020. Her next book of poems, A Hidden Player, will appear from Copper Coin in 2022. She taught at Delhi University for 20 years; for 13 years, she was active in the women’s movement and worked as co-editor of India’s first nationwide feminist magazine, Manushi, of which she was a founder. She is the author of many books on same-sex sexuality in Indian and British literature; her next book, The Dharma of Justice in the Sanskrit Epics: Debates on Gender, Varna and Species, will appear from Oxford University Press in 2022.
