Raag Darbaari

Book Review by Saahil Sharma

Funny, brutally sarcastic yet very reflective!

Book: Raag Darbaari

Author: Shrilal Shukla Genre: Social and Political Satire

The thought of being able to speak four languages but not having flair over any always made me shudder. And in a society that equates knowing English to a person's intellect, made it tough for other vernacular languages to get its due importance. A second-order effect of it is that some great literature in vernacular languages got buried down under the weight of the latest, crappiest English books. But I am still choosing to write the review of a Hindi Classic in English. The irony shouldn't be lost on anyone.

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Raag Darbari is a satirical narrative which through the life of a village, shows the decaying morals of the modern Indian society. Ranganath, a research scholar who is an idealist, is visiting his uncle in a village called Shivpalganj and witnesses first hand of how despite the promises of a progressive and a developed India, the collective consciousness of the society has become so moralistically corrupt that people have accepted this to be a new reality and the promised idealism at the time of independence by our fore-fathers now seems a distant reality. Corruption, nepotism, factionalism has deeply entrenched in our society.

The book was written in 1968 and was awarded the Sahitya Academy award for the same in 1970. But the timelessness is not lost on the reader. The relativity quotient is very high even in 2020. It is humorous, brutally sarcastic yet very reflective. Give it a try, preferably in Hindi. If not translations are available which are also good.