Hats and Doctors: Stories

Hats & Doctors offers English readers the opportunity to savour, for the first time, the work of Upendranath Ashk, one of Hindi literature’s best-known & most controversial authors. The stories in this collection often display a wry sense of humour, such as ‘The Dal Eaters’ in which a family of cheapskates journeys to Kashmir. 

While Ashk’s satirical eye is employed to great effect in ‘The Cartoon Hero’, where a hapless traveller encounters a petty politician on a train, his talent for capturing human frailties is amply evident in ‘Furlough’ & ‘In the Insane Asylum’—two thought-provoking stories that later became part of his  novel Girti Divarein. And finally, stories such as ‘Mr Ghatpande’ & ‘Hats and Doctors’ give the reader a glimpse of some of Ashk’s primary personal preoccupations: his health & his hats. 

Exhibiting a lightness of touch & a deep engagement with the human condition, these stories come alive in Daisy Rockwell’s delightful translation.

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Daisy Rockwell is a painter, writer & translator living in the US. She has translated a number of classic works of Hindi & Urdu literature, including Upendranath Ashk's Falling Walls, Bhisham Sahni's Tamas, & Khadija Mastur's The Women's Courtyard. Her 2019 translation of Krishna Sobti's A Gujarat Here, a Gujarat There was awarded the Modern Language Association’s Aldo & Jeanne Scaglione Translation Prize. She is the winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize.