Best Loved Indian Stories, Vol. 1

By Intirā Śrīnivācan

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140285083
• ISBN13: 9780140285086
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: South Asia Books
• Length: 242 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 0.5" x 5.0"

Customer Reviews

Worthwhile Anthology of Indian Writing in English

This book was published by Penguin Books India in 1999 and contained 20 short stories by as many writers. All the works were published originally in English. (Volume 2 in this series was devoted to stories by other Indian writers in other languages. It included translations into English from Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and various others, by writers such as Senapati, Tagore, Manto, Premchand and Bandyopadhyay.) For Volume 1, the editors sought to include the best-known and most enduringly popular short stories written in English in the 20th century, in terms of literary merit combined with universal appeal, emotional range and interesting situations. They mentioned in passing that in India at the time of publication, few native writers other than Tagore and Premchand had been studied at the school and college level until recent decades. And that until recently the Western short story writers read at school were authors like O. Henry, Saki, Mansfield, Maugham and Dahl. It appeared that the works in the collection were published between roughly the 1930s and the early 1990s, with most pieces from the later decades. The oldest writers were Mulk Raj Anand (1905-2004), R. K. Narayan (1906-2001) and Raja Rao (1908-2006), who were described as the "big three" in Indian writing in English. Among the youngest were Manjula Padmanabhan (1953-) and Githa Hariharan (1954-). Others included Attia Hosain (1913-98), K. A. Abbas (1914-87), Khushwant Singh (1915-), Santha Rama Rau (1923-), Anita Desai (1937-) and Bharati Mukherjee (1940-). Many of the authors in Volume 1 belonged to a later generation than the non-English-language writers in Volume 2, a number of whom were born before the turn of the century. Volume 1 was also one of the few books of short stories read for any region where the female writers outnumbered the men. In this, it differed greatly from Volume 2 -- the non-English writers -- which included only one female author. Another difference between the two volumes was that nearly half of the writers in Volume 1 -- Anand, Rao, Hosain, Rau, Desai and Mukherjee, together with Nayantara Sahgal (1927-), Padma Hejmadi and Anjana Appachana -- had spent some years living in the West or currently live there. There was nothing, though, from writers like Salman Rushdie (1947-), Rohinton Mistry (1952-), Shashi Tharoor (1956-), Amitav Ghosh (1956-), or others, many of whom made their names in the 1990s as novelists. The stories in Volume 1, like those in Volume 2, covered themes such as family relationships, childhood, growing up and the passing of time, and the relations between men and women. Some were set in cities like Bombay or Delhi, many were set in the countryside, one in the Great Salt Desert. Some of them referred to the horrors of partition in the 1940s, when villages were burned and violence was rampant (Hosain, Rao). To a refugee crisis in Kashmir in the early 1970s (Sahgal), a flood (Das), or the aftermath of Indira Gandhi's assassination (Padma