My friend Gautam Sachdev, who has died aged 73, was Britain's leading Hindi litterateur. In the 1980s he was a broadcaster for the BBC World Service, presenting the flagship Hindi magazine programme Hum se Poochiye (Ask Us) with millions of listeners in India and around the world.
My relationship with Gautam grew after I joined the BBC Hindi service in the late 1980s. What brought us close were our long discussions in the Bush House canteen on Indian literature, theatre and cinema. Over the last decade it was amazing to see him effortlessly turning out books of poetry, stories and essays.
Born in Warburton, Punjab (now in Pakistan) in pre-partition India, Gautam and his family moved back into India during the division of the country in 1947. Many of his poems and stories reflect the trauma of partition. Years later, he recalled how his father had to abandon his flourishing business overnight amid riots in Warburton, and start from scratch in Delhi. His collection Sadhe Saat Darzan Pinjare (Seven and a Half Dozen Cages, 2005) contains many stories that deal with this upheaval. In 2007 Gautam was interviewed by the Guardian about his experiences of partition.
He started his career as a Hindi lecturer in 1962 at the University of Delhi. His PhD thesis dealt with the narrative and diction of the Indian author Munshi Premchand, was published in 1982 as Premchand – Kahani Shilp, and is considered a seminal work on Hindi literature.
Gautam moved to the UK in 1982 and started work at Bush House. He continued to write throughout his life. His poetry and story collections document the cultural conflicts of second-generation south Asians living in Britain. His fiction also exposes the hidden malaise of traditional Indian society.
Gautam was a regular columnist for the Hindi language newspaper Dainik Jagran. He was a painter, an amateur singer and an original thinker. He taught Hindi at Cambridge University in the late 1980s and was vice-chair of the South Asian Cinema Foundation, a London-based film education charity, from 2005 until his death.
He is survived by his wife, Manju, his sons, Rahul and Anshul, and a daughter, Divya.