WHEN KESHAV PRASAD MISHRA’S novel Kohbar Ki Shart went out of print towards the end of 2012, very few people took notice. This is perhaps unsurprising, since the novel had never been a bestseller: first published in 1965, its second reprint in 2007 comprised a mere 1,100 copies, some of which remained unsold until last year. Yet, it is possible to imagine that it might have had a healthier commercial life, considering that it was the inspiration for the first Bollywood film to gross over Rs 100 crore: Hum Aapke Hain Koun.
“Aap keh sakte hain thodi hamari bhi galti hai” (You could say it’s partly our fault), Amod Maheshwari, the young, mild-mannered CEO of Rajkamal Prakashan, publishers of the novel, said apologetically when I met him in July. “Perhaps promoting the novel along with the films might have helped.”
Keshav Prasad Mishra began his career as an auditor in the office of the accountant general in Allahabad in the 1950s. A “shy, reserved man” who “wrote by night”, according to his son, Bhuvan, Mishra was in his late thirties when he wrote a short story inspired by an incident in his ancestral village, Balihar, in the Ballia district of Uttar Pradesh.
In his story, Gunja, 12, and Chandan, 14, belong to middle-class Brahmin families in the neighbouring villages of Balihar and Chaube Chhapra. They become acquainted with each other when Gunja’s elder sister, Roopa, is married to Chandan’s elder brother, Omkar; they gradually fall in love over the next few years. Roopa dies from complications in the middle of her second pregnancy, and Gunja is married to Omkar without her consent, so that she can look after Roopa’s first son. Here begins Gunja and Chandan’s struggle to come to terms with adulthood and family responsibilities while they’re tormented by each other’s presence in the same household.
Mishra was a regular at one of Allahabad’s most popular Hindi literary groups, Parimal, whose patrons included Sumitranandan Pant, Mahadevi Verma and Harivansh Rai Bachchan. According to Bhuvan, when Mishra narrated the story to the gathered writers at one of Parimal’s meetings sometime in the early 1960s, they were moved—“Ye kahaan se le aaye, yaar?” (Where did you bring this from?) an amused Bachchan is said to have asked him. It was Bachchan, Bhuvan added, who suggested that Mishra develop the story into a novel.
When the Bombay-based Rajshri Productions adapted the novel into Nadiya Ke Paar in 1982, though the makers retained parts of the novel (including the characters’ names) and the setting of the film mirrored the eastern Uttar Pradesh milieu, they made a few changes. In the novel, Omkar dies from a chicken pox epidemic that sweeps through the village. Gunja, whose health has been deteriorating, dies later, and the story ends with Chandan left to care for his infant nephew alone. In the film, however, Omkar overhears Gunja and Chandan talk about sacrificing their love for duty and decides to step aside and let them get married. This alteration took the story of a failed, traumatic love and its subtle critique of a regressive rural society, and turned it into a celebration of the joint family.
Hum Aapke Hain Koun, Rajshri’s 1994 remake of Nadiya Ke Paar, upped the merriment many notches. Village homes in the flood-prone Gangetic plain of Balihar were replaced by majestic bungalows in which Salman Khan and Madhuri Dixit flirt innocently over 14 songs, set in the beautiful outdoors, as well as in the kitchen and a swimming pool. Madhuri’s sister’s death from a fall leads to the same dilemma as Nadiya Ke Paar’s—which is similarly resolved, but this time with the able assistance of the family dog, Tuffy.
Sitting in Rajkamal’s Daryaganj head office in old Delhi, Maheshwari suggested that the Hindi media wasn’t sufficiently promoting literature. “Except for Jansatta, the size of book reviews in all the newspapers has shrunk down to five lines,” he said. In contrast, every time a book comes out in English, he added, many newspapers and magazines devote themselves to discussing it. “It’s important that [potential] readers get to know about books.”
Recently, Kohbar Ki Shart was given a new lease of life when the Hindi department of the Veer Narmad South Gujarat University in Surat decided to introduce the novel in their third-year undergraduate syllabus for the 2013 session. “We are soon coming up with another reprint,” Maheshwari said. But would he have reprinted it if it wasn’t for this new requirement? “Shayad nahi,” he said, sounding apologetic again. “Probably not.”