Manohar Shyam Joshi

Manohar Shyam Joshi invented the Indian television serial with Hum Log and Buniyaad, and wrote some of modern Hindi's most inventive novels. Behind the Delhi media man stood a Kumaoni imagination: his masterpieces are set squarely in the hills.

He was born in 1933 in Ajmer into a family of scholars from Almora district. A journalist by trade, he edited Saptahik Hindustan and became one of Hindi's sharpest prose stylists, equally at home in satire, screenwriting and the novel.

When Doordarshan wanted an Indian soap opera in 1984, Joshi wrote Hum Log, the country's first serial and a national event; Buniyaad, his Partition saga, followed. In fiction he was bolder still: Kasap and Kyap play out in Kumaon, Hariya Hercules ki Hairani turns a Himalayan pilgrimage into dark comedy, and his layered, gossiping narrators are unmistakably of the hills.

He received the Sahitya Akademi award in 2005 for Kyap, a year before his death in 2006. Between the serials and the novels, he shaped how a whole country tells stories to itself.