The Indian Pulp Fiction

Being married makes you familiar with TV channels you never knew existed courtesy off course your wife. There are many channels which interests my wife, but the channel which has managed to grab her eye balls for the longest time {good job to the marketing guys} happens to be colors, while surviving the various scheming saas-bahus I came across a small teaser ad for an upcoming serial “Keshav Pandit” the name sounded familiar Infact very familiar but I let it pass, the next day while proof-reading rediff.com’s pages {Iam way above the ‘reading’ types}I got to know that the serial was based on a character from Ved prakash sharma’s novel that explained the familiarity. I grew up on Ved prakash Sharma’s novels.


Ved Prakash Sharma is prominent names in the Hindi belt / norths India for his James headly chase style novels in Hindi. According to Hindi novel trade pundits his novel is sold in millions of copies in single edition and even publishers don’t know how many editions have been taken. He has 156 novels to his credit accord to himself. He is highly popular for Vijay-Vikas series. All the characters are larger than life persona. His most famous characters areVijay,Alfanse,Vikas,Watan,Tumbaktu,Singhai,Jackson,Nusrat-Tughlak,Bagharof,Harry and Keshav Pandit,Vibha Zindal etc.

His character Keshav Pandit is also very famous story of a normal guy who had to go through many hardships and had been sentenced to jail. After getting released he vows to fight for people who are not aware of the Indian Judicial process; interesting isn’t it?? There are various characters and characterizations that Ved Prakash has successfully created for years.

Surendra Mohan Pathak is what a Ruskin Bond is to English books. Pathak is an author of Hindi-language crime fiction with nearly 300 novels to his credit. His writing career, along with his full time job in Indian Telephone Industries, Delhi, began in the early 1960s with his brilliant Hindi translations of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, and the works of James Hadley Chase. He also wrote his own James Bond series.

His first short story, 57 saal puraana aadmi (The Man aged 57), was published by in 1959, and his first full length novel, Operation Budapest, came out in 1969.

His major work began with what is called the "Sunil" series, which consists of at least 115 novels. Sunil, a debonair and upright investigative journalist for the fictional daily newspaper Blast, lives in the fictional city of Raj nagar. Sunil has a quixotic nature when it comes to damsels in distress, which happens too often and in pursuit of justice, mostly with help of his best friend Ramakanth Malhotra, a dipsomaniac and owner of a bar called Youth Club. Sunil often ends up on the wrong side of the law and has to face Inspector Prabhudayal, the exceptionally strict and incorruptible officer in charge of the homicide division.

The "philosopher" detective Sudhir Kumar Kohli is another series character of Pathak. This series is totally reciprocal likewise Sunil as in this dilli ka khaas kism ka haraami is the hero and likewise Inspector Devender Kumar Yadav who can easily be persuaded to do something dishonest.

However the best-known series of novels of Pathak is Vimal, a.k.a. Sardar Surender Singh Sohal. another dozen names he uses to camouflage his identity in the Mumbai underworld. He has taken up arms against gangsters like Rajbahadur Bakhia, and after killing him, his next avatar Iqbal Singh and then Vyaas Shankar Gajre. The Sardar has associates like Tukaram and his henchmen, like Wagle and Irfan, etc. Vimal is not a private detective or police inspector but a criminal wanted in seven states.

If we look down south in Tamil Nadu, novelist Rajesh Kumar is more fertile than scriptwriters could imagine. In forty years Kumar has written and published over 1250 novels and over 2000 short stories.

So why are these people still limited to certain areas or belts as some people would call it despite having sales figures which would put the majority of the books on the shelves of landmark to shame. On doing a little fact-finding what I found was that the publishers of these novels don’t have decided volumes, its depending on the feedback, the other fact is that priced at Rs 20 to Rs 50 these books hardly provide the margins a landmark would like to have. On the internet I have found several requests from people looking for these novels which as of now are restricted to news agencies and railway station hawkers for now. The market is huge and the volumes are higher restricted to a certain area or belt and these regular writers who have regular jobs to support their families don’t seem to find it odd that within the country people have not even heard of them. These are the stories which are fulfilling the reading needs of the masses providing them with a larger than life hero jumping out of the badly printed cheap paper books that flush them with action, emotion, sex and crime. Iam sure the auto driver in Delhi or Chennai wouldn’t complain.

As India today is swarmed with writers with people leaving high paying jobs to get into writing example Chetan Bhagat, I feel its people like Ved Prakash Sharma and Surendra Mohan Pathak who are the real heroes who have survived and did well for themselves taking writing as their part time hobby and still surviving an unfriendly terrain called literature or pulp fiction as its called by pundits. With Keshav Pandit turning into a serial and couple of Pathak’s novel being translated into English I feel the time has come that due credit is given to these little known masters of the craft.