A unique Pocket Classics collection of short stories from all of the major cultures and languages of India India has a long tradition of storytelling. To use Salman Rushdie’s phrase it is “an ocean of stories.” When British rule brought the Western forms of the novel and the short story to India, they were grafted onto more ancient and varied oral traditions. Rabindranath Tagore was the first to popularize this form of writing with the short story collections he published in the 1890s, but the form swiftly captured the imagination of literary figures across India and in every Indian language. India is not only rich in stories but also in languages, and the twenty stories in this collection are taken from all the major languages of India, including Tamil, Urdu, Hindi, Sanskrit, Bengali, and many more, as well as writers in some regions who wrote primarily in English (N. K. Narayan, for example). This anthology includes one story from each region or culture, notably including several areas that are traditionally marginalized. The stories reflect a variety of themes, ideas, and emotions, with subjects including the poverty aggravated by the dominance of landlords and the caste system; the position of women within the family; and the call of the city in a country that was and still is predominantly rural and agricultural. Indian literary fiction, born though it was under a Western star, reflected invariably realities that were distinctly Indian, and this unique anthology offers a dazzlingly varied overview of the rich cultures of the subcontinent. Everyman''s Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free, cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

Autorentext
RUDRANGSHU MUKHERJEE is an Indian historian and author of several books. He was formerly the opinions editor for The Telegraph newspaper in Kolkata and is currently the chancellor of Ashoka University, where he also serves as a professor of history.

Klappentext

A uniquely diverse Pocket Classics collection of short stories from all of the major cultures and languages of India

India has a long tradition of storytelling. To use Salman Rushdie’s phrase it is “an ocean of stories.” When British rule brought the Western forms of the novel and the short story to India, they were grafted onto more ancient and varied oral traditions. Rabindranath Tagore was the first to popularize this form of writing with the short story collections he published in the 1890s, but the form swiftly captured the imagination of literary figures across India and in every Indian language.

India is not only rich in stories but also in languages, and the thirty-seven stories in this collection are taken from all the major languages of India, including Tamil, Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, and many more, as well as writers in some regions who wrote primarily in English (N. K. Narayan, for example). This anthology includes one story from each region or culture, notably including several areas that are traditionally marginalized.

The stories reflect a variety of themes, ideas, and emotions, with subjects including the poverty aggravated by the dominance of landlords and the caste system; the position of women within the family; and the call of the city in a country that was and still is predominantly rural and agricultural. Indian literary fiction, born though it was under a Western star, reflected invariably realities that were distinctly Indian, and this unique anthology offers a dazzlingly varied overview of the rich cultures of the subcontinent.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free, cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

Leseprobe
PREFACE by Rudrangshu Mukherjee

India has a long tradition of story-telling. To use Salman Rushdie’s telling phrase, it is ‘an ocean of stories’. Listening to stories begins for all Indians on the lap of their grandmothers, mothers or some other relative. These stories take many forms – myths, lullabies, family anecdotes, fairy tales, fables and so on. The arrival of western education and western learning implanted in this tradition of oral story-telling the formal and structured art of writing a story in an established literary form. It was in the second half of the nineteenth century when creative writers in India began to present fictional narratives interweaving the unravelling of a plot and the development of characters over a period of time. The novel was the first genre that emerged, just as it had several centuries earlier in the western canon. Though if truth be told, that mother of all novels, Don Quixote (1605) has no formal structure – a great picaresque narrative tracing the character of a knight out of tune with time and history. By the end of the eighteenth century, if one sets aside an outstanding exception, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, the novel in English and in other European languages had come to acquire distinctive characteristics. The short story, in which the development of plot and character unfolds swiftly over a few pages rather than over hundreds of pages, followed on the heels of the novel. By the nineteenth century writers like Guy de Maupassant and Anton Chekhov had made of it a clearly recognizable genre. Both the novel and the short story arrived in the Indian literary landscape with the consolidation of British rule and the imposition of Anglophone education through the three universities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras and colleges like Presidency College in Calcutta and Madras and Elphinstone College in Bombay.

Historians of Indian literature have noted that the first short story to be written in India following the western model was probably ‘Madhumati’ by Purnachandra Chattopadhyay, published in 1873. But arguably Rabindranath Tagore was the first to master and popularize this form of writing. Witness the volumes of short stories (Galpaguccha) he published in the 1890s. But this form of creative writing very swiftly captured the imagination of literary figures across India and was embraced in every Indian language. [I should note at this point that this volume does not include any of the short stories of Tagore. The reason is simple: The Best of Tagore, edited by Rudrangshu Mukherjee (Everyman’s Library, 2022) includes a representative selection of Tagore’s short stories. The reader’s interest and attention are drawn to this volume.]

Short stories written in Indian languages adopted the familiar form of the genre by attempting to capture a slice of life. Given the conditions prevailing in India in the late nineteenth century right up to the present day, certain themes acquired salience. The grinding poverty that was aggravated by the dominance of the landlords, by the exploitation of the moneylender and by the operation of the caste system that arranged society according to purity and pollution and superiority and inferiority; the position of women within the family, their aspirations to fashion lives of their own, their suppressed sexuality; the call of the city in a country that was and still is predominantly rural and agricultural – all these themes among others were picked by writers to craft stories that were powerful and poignant.

It is important to note that Indian writers in English also produced fine stories. Some funny, some romantic, they are invariably well written. The name R. K. Narayan comes immediately to mind, and his tales of Malgudi Days.

This volume aims to present a sele…