The Penguin book of modern Indian short stories

By: Stephen Alter

Book Overview

20 classic short stories from master writers across the country, this collection contains some of the best Indian short stories written in the last 50 years both in English and in regional languages. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0143027751
• ISBN13: 9780143027751
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: Penguin India
• Length: 351 Pages
• Weight: 0.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.7" x 0.9" x 5.2"

Customer Reviews

Worthwhile

This book was published originally in 1989 and contained 17 short stories by as many authors. The revised edition came out in 2001 and added just three more pieces, by two older writers (Narayan, Chughtai) and a younger one (Dolas). As far as could be determined, all the stories in the revised edition were published originally between the 1950s and the 1980s. The editors aimed to present some of the best examples of Indian short stories for this period, celebrating diversity and avoiding conformity to cultural stereotypes and expectations. They were covering a body of writing preceding authors like Rushdie, Mistry, Tharoor and Ghosh in the 1980s or those who followed. The balance of stories was heavily in favor of vernacular languages: Marathi, Hindi, Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, Oriya, Tamil, Gujarati, and Urdu. Four stories in the collection were written originally in English. Older writers were also heavily favored. The earliest were Premendra Mitra (1904-88), R. K. Narayan (1906-2001), S. Mani (1907-85) and Raja Rao (1908-2006). Others included Bhisham Sahni (1915-2003), Amrita Pritam (1919-2005), Nirmal Verma (1929-2005), O. V. Vijayan (1930-2005), Sunil Gangopadhyay (1934-) and Anita Desai (1937-). The youngest writers were Bharati Mukherjee, (1940-), Devanuru Mahadeva (1949-) and Avinash Dolas (1950-). Not included were even earlier authors like Senapati, Tagore and Premchand, or ones like Anand, Bandyopadhyay, Manto, Khushwant Singh, Ray, Abbas, Bond, Manoj Das, or Ambai. Tagore, Premchand and Manto were excluded intentionally because they'd already been published comparatively widely elsewhere. The works in this collection had stylistic and thematic variety. Some of them felt fairly traditional in terms of realistic style and concern with poverty, oppression or heartbreak (Pillai, Mohanty, Gadgil). Several focused particularly on the experience of women (Pritam, Chughtai) or the Dalits and tribal people (Dolas, Mahadeva). Two dealt with partition (Narayan, Sahni). Sahni's story was interesting for the way it used passengers in a train compartment to demonstrate the consequences of the fear and suspicion accompanying the upheaval. Other works were more varied in content or style (Murthy, Gangopadhyay, Verma, Mitra, Mowni, Vijayan). Murthy's overlong tale concerned a son who sought to understand his dying father, a lawyer who'd worked all his life for the wealthy, subordinating his own dreams. Gangopadhyay's was about a simple man from the country who ended up working in Calcutta but retained his naivety and simplicity. In Verma's story, the narrator traveled from Delhi to a remote town in the mountains to see a long-lost brother on family business. The narrator was living in the world, while the brother was apart from it as a religious ascetic. Though difficult to interpret, this tale blended references to Indian religious life and concerns, the narrator's restlessness and uncertainty, and an interesting structure that set