Around 1990, I happened upon a copy of the Hindi novel Raag Darbari and took it up with me to the deodar-clad Shimla hills. I laughed aloud as I read, delighting in the deadpan humour the author used to lay bare all the failings of the Indian system. There was no book so funny, so true or so rooted anywhere in the English language, of that I was quite sure.On my return, I contacted the author, Shrilal Shukla, and then Penguin India, and before I knew, I had embarked on my first ever work of translation. Every now and then I would board the train to Lucknow and make my way to Indiranagar to meet Shrilalji and ask his help, and he good-naturedly looked out for ‘howlers’. We shared a sense of humour, and he told me how he had come to write this satirical epic set in the fictional UP village of Shivpalganj.Shrilal ShuklaRaag DarbariPenguin Books Ltd, 1968Shrilal Shukla himself came from a village near Lucknow and became a Uttar Pradesh civil servant. Literature, though, was always his first love. Much of his writing was serious, but he had an undeniable gift for satire. In the 1960s, he and his friends, talented writers and journalists, would enjoy leisurely lunches on the wide lawns of Lucknow’s Carlton Hotel. During these, he read out a collection of 30 or 40 village tales, and it was his friends who insisted that there was something very special about them. They loved the tales’ natural iconoclastic attitude which was the antithesis of contemporary Hindi writing on rural life. That contemporary writing either tended to show rural life as unmitigated misery or an idyll.Encouraged, Shukla took his stories and wove them into a novel. United by the rural ethos of Shivpalganj and by the story of Rangnath, an educated young man from the city comes to the village to stay with his uncle and becomes exposed to ground reality for the first time. His uncle, known simply as Vaidyaji, is the power-centre of the village, from the college to the co-operative to the panchayat, and the Darbar of the title is his durbar – though the darbaris often wear only a vest and underpants.The beverage served is the finest bhang. One of Vaidyaji’s sons is a student leader, and the other – the unforgettable Badri Pahalwan – is a wrestler whose chelas are constantly getting into trouble. Shivpalganj is like the Mahabharat – everything that there is, is contained within it. Or at least what Shukla called every ‘distortion’ of the male-dominated system, whether political, administrative, judicial, private or public sector, religious or social. And although set in Nehruvian era, its appeal is unconstrained by time.Fifty years since publication, this Sahitya Akademi award-winner still sells thousands of copies each year. In his regular programme on NDTV India, Ravish Kumar called it the first ‘sidha prasaran’ (live broadcast) from Indian villages – one that continues to this day.The anchor proceeded to read from the book about the Shivpalganj inter-college with matching visuals of present-day colleges in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, including one where the current home minister of India, Rajnath Singh once taught – concluding that netas had wrought an educational system sufficient to destroy the future of millions of students.Also read: ‘Raag Darbari’ Tells Us That Trust in Political Authority Can Never Be AbsoluteAs Ravish Kumar’s coverage indicated, the novel has not only successfully crossed languages but also disciplines. It was, therefore, the Department of Political Science, not Hindi, at the University of Delhi that held a conference to celebrate the book’s 50th anniversary. The convenor, professor Satyajit Singh believes that Raag Darbari has multiple insights for students of public administration. For him, it is perhaps the first critique of the developmental state, showing that local, not national, politics and their interplay with local institutions disperse nyaya and vikas to the people.Recently in Delhi, to mark the 50th year of publication, Raag Darbari’s Hindi publishers, Rajkamal Prakashan held a celebration of their long-term bestseller. The hall was packed, largely with young people. The economist Jean Dreze, speaking in Hindi and cracking quite a few jokes himself, compared Shivpalganj with the village of Palanpur that he and his colleagues have studied over five decades, and concluded that there has been a positive change. Other speakers argued that Shivpalganj represented an age of innocence compared with the realities of today.Shrilal Shukla (1925-2011). Credit: FacebookThe high point of the evening, however, was a contemporary take on Raag Darbari especially commissioned for the occasion. The novel has already been adapted for television and for the theatre. Its influence has been traced not just on Hindi literature but on Indian literature written in English. And then, of course, there is its influence on film – Anusha Rizvi’s Peepli Live being one notable example. But it had, until that evening, never been interpreted as a dastaan.Written and performed by Mahmud Farooqui, with Darain Shahidi as his partner, Dastaan-e-Raag Darbari was a two-man tour de force and the clearest evidence there could be that here was a tale for all seasons and for all generations. For two hours we laughed until we cried, applauding its spirit of undiluted and devastating honesty.As for me, I really consider it a great stroke of luck that I picked up that book and have been part of Raag Darbari’s journey. I only wish Shrilal Shukla, who died in 2011, was still with us and could have shared in this year’s celebrations.Gillian Wright is a translator and writer based in New Delhi.