Review: The Dead Fish, A Fugitive Novel For Our Times

Rajkamal Choudhary (1934–1967) has long occupied an uneasy space in modern Indian literature, celebrated as a daring iconoclast, yet too often relegated to the margins of the Hindi and Maithili canon. Born in Saharsa, in the Mithila region of Bihar, Choudhary wrote with astonishing velocity in two languages, producing poetry, novels, reportage, and criticism that consistently unsettled the comfortable pieties of his time. His work was restless, erotic, political, and often scandalous, a literature that refused silence.

Machhli Mari Hui (1964), newly translated into English by Mahua Sen as The Dead Fish (Rupa, 2025), is perhaps his most provocative novel. Written just three years before his untimely death at the age of thirty-seven, the book detonated polite literary conventions with its unflinching portrayal of urban alienation, fractured desire, and same-sex longing, themes that Hindi literature of the 1960s neither welcomed nor forgave.

In the City of Disquiet

If the village was once the sanctum of Hindi fiction, The Dead Fish drags us unapologetically into the metropolis. Here, the city is not a backdrop but a character, restless, unforgiving, and complicit in the disquiet of its inhabitants. Rajkamal Choudhary renders Kolkata not as a space of promise but as an arena of estrangements, where commerce replaces communion and intimacy is measured against the pressures of survival.

Set in Kolkata, The Dead Fish refuses romanticism. This is not the Calcutta of Tagore or the Renaissance salons, but of steel and commerce, of smoky cafés and boarding houses, of men who count their ledgers more carefully than their desires.

Its protagonist, Nirmal Padmavat, is ambitious in business but brittle in spirit. He once loved Kalyani, who instead marries Dr. Raghuvansh; her daughter Priya lingers in the narrative as a spectral emblem of what was lost. And then there is Shireen, restless, unmoored, unnamed in her desire and in society, the ‘dead fish’ of the title, suspended between numbness and hunger.

Rajkamal Choudhary gives us no clean resolutions. The city is a labyrinth of fractured souls: a man torn between commerce and compassion, a woman between longing and shame, a society that sees neither clearly.

Audacity and Controversy

When Machhli Mari Hui first appeared in 1964, Hindi literature was far from openly discussing homosexuality. Same-sex desire existed either in silence or in clinical dismissal. To bring Shireen into the centre of the novel, not as allegory or pathology but as desire itself, complicated and raw, was nothing short of radical.

Critics then, and even now, have been uneasy. Shireen is sometimes drawn with neurotic intensity, her sexuality marked by psychological unrest. Yet to reduce her to pathology is to miss the novel’s deeper defiance: visibility. Shireen exists without apology, not as a moral lesson but as wound, as hunger, as presence. That alone was a rupture in mid-century Hindi fiction, one that still reverberates.

Language, Translation, and Fractured Beauty

Mahua Sen’s translation preserves the jagged rhythms of Choudhary’s prose. The English is at times spare, at others startlingly imagistic, a deliberate unevenness that mirrors the novel’s own collision of registers. Business ledgers and tax filings are described in a flat, almost bureaucratic tone; moments of erotic longing break through with sudden poetic force. The result is a book that constantly unsettles the reader’s ear, never allowing comfort.

The lines exemplify this intensity:

‘Like a bride switching off the light in her bedroom on the first night.’

A simile both physical and melancholy, crisp yet resonant.

‘Love dies. Lust dies. Not compassion. Only compassion never dies.’

An aphorism with the cadence of scripture, harsh in its simplicity.

Further, to underline this intensity. In one passage, Nirmal attempts to reconcile the cold arithmetic of capitalism with his inner turmoil ‘Fish are swimming in darkness, leaping to grasp each other. But there are no arms. Fish are desperate to cling to each other, but there are no feet… Time stops… Place is erased… Characters end.’

This is not ornamentation but the novel’s haunted core, longing without form, desire unrecognised, life pressing against silence.

Sen’s achievement is to let these jagged textures stand, resisting the temptation to smooth them for English readers. The translation reads not as domestication but as revelation, allowing the novel’s fractures to remain visible.

Why The Dead Fish Still Bites

Sixty years on, the novel still refuses to be tamed. Its urgency lies not just in its queer undertones but in its anatomy of urban loneliness, its exposure of the fissures between business and morality, longing and shame, tradition and modernity. Choudhary anticipated conversations that Indian society, and Indian literature, has only recently begun to hold in the open.

The novel also defies narrative convention. It denies readers the arc of redemption or catharsis. Compassion flickers, but it does not transform. Longing surfaces, but it does not settle. The book ends not in closure but in ambiguity, leaving an aftertaste of discomfort that resists forgetting.

Shadows and Radicality

Like all works of audacity, The Dead Fish is imperfect. Shireen’s characterisation may feel uneven; Nirmal’s inner monologues sometimes lapse into excess; the blur between desire and pathology risks reinforcing stereotypes. Yet these are not flaws to be edited out but integral to the novel’s radicality. Choudhary was not writing comfort; he was writing fracture. The discomfort is the point.

To engage with The Dead Fish is to accept its rawness as form, not failure. Rajkamal Choudhary’s jagged narrative resists polish because life itself, especially at its margins, resists neatness. The novel’s power lies precisely in its refusal to console.

A Recovered Voice

This translation is more than literary archaeology. It is the recovery of a voice that Indian letters badly need to remember unsentimental, unafraid, jagged with contradiction. In an age when queer identities demand recognition and when the hypocrisies of commerce and morality remain unresolved, The Dead Fish speaks with unsettling clarity.

Rajkamal Choudhary wrote for the fissures, for the wounds, for the silences that polite literature would rather ignore. To read him now is to be reminded that modern Indian writing has never been monolithic; it has always been, at its best, unruly and unafraid.

Much of this revival owes itself to Mahua Sen, whose translation bringslyricism of Choudhary’s prose without diluting its raw edges. Her work ensures that The Dead Fish speaks to contemporary readers with the same urgency that unsettled its first audience six decades ago.

A hard, essential read, one that lingers less like a novel consumed than a scar carried, an echo in conscience.

Book: The Dead Fish (Machhli Mari Hui) by Rajkamal Chaudhary, translated by Mahua Sen

Published by: Rupa

Price: INR 495/

(Ashutosh Kumar Pandey is a journalist based in Ara, Bihar)