“Illuminating Explorations” – This series of digital exhibits is designed to promote and celebrate UT Libraries collections in small-scale form. The exhibits will highlight unique materials to elevate awareness of a broad range of content. “Illuminating Explorations” will be created and released over time, with the intent of encouraging use of featured and related items, both digital and analog, in support of new inquiries, discoveries, enjoyment and further exploration.
As a part of my Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, I was back in Delhi in early 2025, continuing research on “hidden archives,” namely the unpublished materials found in institutional settings (places like the Prime Minister’s Museum and Archive at Teen Murti or the National Archives of India) as well as private papers still kept in family homes. My fellowship allowed me to expand and nuance the work I regularly support here at UT such as the digital archiving projects related to 20th century politico-literary figures but also to delve a little deeper into UT Libraries’ growing distinctive collection related to South Asian popular and pulp fiction.
In research, like in crime thrillers, you never know where seemingly random clues might lead.
Early into my stay in Delhi, a colleague from the Fulbright office called me up to invite me to join him in attending a literary “salon” where I could meet some new people. The event was to welcome a visiting Greek poet, translator, and editor wherein she would read and discuss her poetry at the home of a prominent Indian literary editor. Poetry? Editors? “Salon”? I was in.
In addition to the lovely verse and food which both flowed freely throughout the evening, I was delighted to make multiple new acquaintances at the gathering. As we went around the room introducing ourselves—one person an activist, one a publisher, another a poet, and so on–one person identified himself as a translator at which point his jovial colleague interrupted him to reveal that he was also an author of pulp fiction. As I’ve been building UT’s pulp fiction collection for over 10 years now, my ears perked up and I set my sites on meeting this translator/author as soon as the group dispersed for more casual one-on-one conversation.
The author was lovely and humble about his own work and kindly asked me about which authors were included in UT’s pulp fiction collection. I started listing off the names—Ibne Safi, Ved Prakash Kamboj, Om Prakash Sarma, Anil Mohan—but when I got to Surender Mohan Pathak he casually asked, “oh, SMP? You want to meet him? My partner has helped edit and publish his work.” I tried not to reveal my excitement. Surender Mohan Pathak, with over 300 published novels to his credit, is one of the biggest, if not actually the biggest, authors of Hindi pulp crime thrillers. Yes! Yes, yes! I would in fact like to meet him.
With arrangements made through the generosity of new colleagues, a couple of weeks, multiple WhatsApp chats, and SMS texts later, I was greeted at the elevator gates to his Noida apartment by none other than Surender Mohan Pathak himself.
Over the course of the next hour or two, as I sat starstruck and in rapt attention in SMP’s home office, surrounded by a lifetime of memorabilia and shelves and shelves of his publications. SMP graciously answered all my questions, generously telling me about his pathway to becoming a writer, the challenges he has faced in getting published, and his expectations about his legacy. The highlights from this chance meeting, “Surender Mohan Pathak in His Own Words” are now available in the UT Libraries Digital Exhibits. It was nothing short of an honor to have been able to meet such a legend and I remain tremendously grateful to the kindhearted help of my new network of fellow fans.
Fans and rasikars of pulp fiction don’t just reside in India, however. A new faculty member to UT recently shared his admiration for the genre and our collection thusly,
[The collections] allowed me to reconnect with my own culture, which I could not even do in India. Given that English was the primary medium of instruction in the schools I attended, I ended up reading Rushdie before Premchand… [in the South Asia collections such as and including UT’s]… some of my most memorable moments have involved getting lost among the library stacks, and then suddenly stumbling upon a rare classic in [non-English Indian languages]… My intellectual life is much richer than it would have been otherwise. As I often mention to my friends, it is a different experience because “a different part of my brain lights up”, when I’m reading a [vernacular] novel, despite the fact that English was the first language that I learnt to read.
I invite everyone to explore the South Asia Popular and Pulp Fiction Collection, in a language of your choosing—Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali, Telugu, English–and consider what these mysteries, romances, and thrillers can teach us about research as well as about ourselves.
