Asghar Wajahat’s For the good of the nation is a set of ten brief, satirical tales that asks what patriotism means when it is declared, tested or used to judge other people. Translated from Hindi by Rakhshanda Jalil, the tales move from loud professions of loyalty to questions about political spectacle, material need and exclusion. Scroll published the full text and an author note on March 20, 2017: read the tales on Scroll.
What the ten tales are about
Each piece is a compact dialogue or reversal rather than a conventional realist story. Together, they scrutinize the gap between saying one loves the nation and showing what that love means in practice. The sequence also asks who gets to define loyalty, and whether a patriotic test is applied equally to the person administering it.
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- A person professes profound love of country but cannot explain how that love is expressed.
- A self-described patriot is asked whether patriotism requires action.
- A conversation turns the history of nationalist sacrifice into a joke about the present.
- An earlier demand for sacrifice is contrasted with contemporary political promises of goods and money in exchange for votes.
- A speaker is urged to shout ever louder that they are a nationalist, then told the effort failed because nobody’s ears were split.
- A person claims to love the country but not its people, on the unsupported assumption that the people do not love the country.
- A patriot’s machine tests other people’s nationalism, while its creator remains beyond its scrutiny.
- A courtroom exchange satirizes a supposed traitor-killer’s immunity through a judge’s questions about the dead person’s legal and social ties.
- An Adivasi keeps digging a well for water while a patriot asks whether they love the country.
- A Dalit says they can answer the patriot’s question after being allowed into the temple; the patriot treats exclusion as disloyalty.
How the satire tests patriotism
Declaration versus action
The opening tales make patriotic language itself an object of scrutiny. A declaration of love sounds emphatic, but the exchange asks what it amounts to beyond the declaration. The question about action presses the same point: loyalty is not made meaningful merely by naming it.
Political performance and selective standards
Other pieces turn patriotic gestures into performance: louder slogans, a machine that measures everyone else, or a killer shielded from judgment. The reversals expose a standard that can be imposed on others without being applied to the person who claims authority. The tale about political promises similarly contrasts appeals to sacrifice with the transactional language of goods and money for votes. These are satirical framings in the stories, not independently documented accounts of particular historical events.
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Belonging measured against people’s lives
The closing tales shift the emphasis from spectacle to conditions of life. The Adivasi’s continued work digging for water makes a material need more urgent than an abstract loyalty question. The Dalit’s answer turns on access to a temple: the story places exclusion at the center of the debate about who is treated as belonging. In both, the patriot’s question looks different when set against the way people are treated.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Translation and author context
Scroll credits Rakhshanda Jalil with translating the tales from Hindi. Its author note describes Wajahat as a Hindi fiction writer, dramatist, independent documentary filmmaker and scriptwriter, and calls Jis Lahore Nai Dekhya, O Jamyai Nai his best-known play. The page presents this work as an online article; it does not identify a print or ebook edition, ISBN, publisher or sales listing for the exact title.
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