क्याप

The bodies of police officer Medhatithi Joshi and the mafia boss Hardhyanu Batlagi, sworn enemies, are found together beside the shrine of a Bhairav in a newly created district of the central Himalayas; no poison or violence explains their deaths, and the press calls it divine intervention. Rejecting such talk, a narrator who is not the author takes it on himself to lay out the region's history and its rigid order, in which conquerors split the locals into untouchable Dooms, Khasiyas and high castes. Told as a rambling local yarn, a phasak, it is at heart a love story caught between a half-made modernity and the half-baked postmodernism of intellectuals. The Kumaoni title means something strange that cannot be made sense of.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Genres

Love (assigned by AI)

Set in

India

First published

2001 by Vani Prakashan

Author's age

68 when first published