Uday Prakash is a fabulist whose intimacy with the Indian rural landscape is a protest against the rationalising arrogance of the western gaze, its abstract, and ultimately brute, powers of surveillance, and its defiling avarice. In his short story Warren Hastings ka Saand, Uday Prakash mixes history with a surrealist imagination to produce a moving account of the dehumanising encounter of the British East India Company and Indian peasantry. This work takes on the character of reportage and journalism, fiction and conventional historiography, art history and anthropology. Can we see in such formal innovations in narrative the marks of a canny response to the stunning, blinding developments of late capitalism itself? Does his faction of criticism not in some way mock what we have accepted so far as the criticism of fiction?”
