topics: |  fiction-short | india | anthology

A number of interesting stories, many of them hard to come by today. 

In any anthology, the discerning reader must find at least one voice that's
missing. For me, the absent voice here is Kamala Das.  In the 1980s,
shortly after the publication of her explicit autobiography, My Story,
she acquired a reputation as the spoilt girl of indian literature. 

Shiv Kumar's introduction has perhaps, too much of Britain and too little
of India. 

Excerpts

from Shiv K Kumar's Introduction

Though often considered a derivative of its western counterpart, [the Indian
short story in English] is not a hot-house plant but manifests a striking
resemblance in its genius to the story written in any Indian language.  No
wonder. our literary historians trace its genesis to ancient Indian classics
like the Panchatantra, the fables of Brihatkatha Kathasaritsagar or
Yoga-Vashistha. These ancient stories for the most part conform in their
structure to the Aristotelian prescription -- an incisive beginning, middle
and end -- with their story-line suggestive of a palpable moral. Their plots
are not elliptical or metaphoric. as defined by critics like Suzanne
Ferguson.  Their primary impulsion is didactic: their endeavour is to instruct
rather than entertain.

The short story in the Indian languages ... emerged in the nineteenth
century, influenced by Western writers.  If, for instance. Bankimchandra
Chatterjee could be said to have been influenced by Sir Walter
Scott. Rabindranath Tagore could be found susceptible to the influence of
his own favourite British writers.

In fact, before the end of the century, most short fiction written in the
Indian languages, particularly in Hindi, Urdu, Bengali or Tamil, carried the
impress of such masters as Chekhov. Tolstoy. Maupassant. O'Henry or Kipling,

It is not surprising, therefore, that the early short story, written in
English or any Indian language, kept close to the formulistic in design,
hardly ever delving deep into the character's psyche. The entire structure
was patently conditioned by the author's own penchant-moral, religious,
sociological or political. Consequently, it groaned under such constraints as
would not allow the characters to breathe freely. Further, the author's
concern with consistency kept his characters always on the leash, and within
the restrictive range of the story-line. The result was that the story read
more like an 'argument' than an 'impression'- to use Thomas Hardy's terms to
emphasize the impressionistic freedom of a genuine work of art which,
incidentally, his own work lacked.

	[AM: I am not sure the above holds for many Indian short story
	writers in the Indian languages.  I can't tell for others, but
	certainly Tagore's stories are peopled with many finely-delineated
	characters, and while there must have been considerable influence
	from western authors, it is hard to pinpoint the style from the
	tradition. ]

So the early short story, whether written in English or any Indian language,
grew under Western tutelage. The only difference was that while the writer in
the Indian language breathed in the Western influence as a part of the
zeitgeist, the writer in English was ostensibly conscious of his indebtedness
to the Western masters. 

"There was the impact on me of Maupassant, Frank O'Connor and Theodore
Powys," observes Mulk Raj Anand, one of the pioneers of this art. Similarly,
one may trace the influence of Chekhov on R.K. Narayan, or of the French
masters on Raja Rao.  But one must hasten to add that although this
distinguished triumvirate -- Anand, Narayan and Rao -- had used a foreign
medium for creative expression, and often displayed Western technical
virtuosity in their craft, their innate genius never felt smothered. If
Tagore wrote as a folk story-teller, never refracting the psychology of his
characters to suit a Western audience, Mulk Raj Anand remained firmly
committed to social reality, investing his coolies and untouchables with a
vibrant humanily that he found lacking in the upper classes. As for Raja Rao,
he shaped the English language to suit the Indian sensibility, investing it
with a fluidity and suppleness that was foreign to it. In his Foreword to
Kanthapura; he brilliantly expounds his concept of what might be called
Indian-English, and the Indian 'tempo':

    One has to convey in a language that is not one's own the spirit that is
    one's own. One has to convey the various shades and omissions of a
    certain thought-movement that looks maltreated in an alien language. I
    use the word 'alien'. yet English is not really an alien language to
    us. It is the language of our intellectual make-up-like Sanskrit or
    Persian was before-but not of our emotional make-up. We are all
    instinctively bilingual, many of us writing in our own language and in
    English. We cannot write like the English. We should not. We cannot write
    only as Indians. We have grown to look at the large world as part of
    us. Our method of expression therefore has to be a dialect which will
    some day prove to be as distinctive and colourful as the Irish or the
    American. Time alone will justify it.

Raja Rao then proceeds to discuss the problem of style. "The tempo of Indian
life must be infused into our English expression, even as the tempo of
American or Irish life has gone into the making of theirs. We, in India,
think quickly, and when we move we move quickly. There must be something in
the sun of India that makes us rush and tumble and run on.”

This accounts for the fluid style in his story 'India-A Fable', the
folklorish run-on speech rhythms in Mulk Raj Anand's story The Liar', and the
limpid flow of sentences in RK. Narayan's 'Green Sari'. These writers have
tried to capture what may be termed the parole interieur of their characters,
their stream of consciousness-its ebb and flow, its mobile lines and
contours, its teasing ambiguities- using a style that is markedly Indian.

It is encouraging that some of our younger writers, who are comparatively
unknown, manifest a refreshing urge to seize reality 'with the least possible
shrinkage' (to borrow a phrase from Marcel Proust). While they display ample
technical virtuosity, they also impress their readers with an unprecedented
aplomb and spunk in confronting experience in all its multiplicity. Their
treatment of sex is bold and their comment on the contemporary human
condition is incisive and unrelenting. At a national conference organised by
the Sahitya Akademi in February, 1986, Raja Rao, the renowned Vedantin
fiction-writer, took his audience by surprise when he exhorted the new writer
in India to recognise the imperative validity of physical relationship
between man and woman. Why should we continue to feel inhibited by orthodox
morality, spinning around ourselves a cocoon of hypocrisies and self-denials?
It is this freedom that one now encounters in some of our new writers. Take,
for instance, 

Anita Mehta's story "Letters 4, 5 and 6," which presents an
ingenious montage of snippets from the letters written by the protagonist's
lovers, each of whom being imprisoned within the confines of his ego, never
touches the quick of her inner being. 

	Images always accompanied her memories of him - she thought of
	ghazals, and how she'd grown to love them when she'd realized that
	they'd made his loneliness come alive, epitomized his bitterness at
	her many deviations -- of his face when they made love. the violence
	that almost attracted her because she couldn't conceive (in the
	confines of her all-too-fine intellect) of something so raw and
	whole, the way he always made as if to strangle her after the act of
	love (because, as he said, he was always reminded, and reminded
	uncontrollably much, of those who had done and would do the same to
	her), the way in which she was never quite sure if this wasn't just a
	bit theatrical and always thought not in the end because he was the
	least contrived person she had met-of the hard lonely set of his
	face, his stoic gait, one that unhappiness, she'd thought flippantly,
	always suited more than the lack of it. Life, rather than art with'
	all that implied. The richness in knowing that all gestures, all
	words, were meant, weren't derived, out of a film or novel, and
	correspondingly the frustratingly complete unawareness in him of all
	the classics!  You could be 5's complement, she thought dismally."

It's obvious that Anita Mehta has, like Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, tried
to isolate a subtle moment of experience and transmit it to the reader with
all its multiple nuances -- boldly and candidly. No compromise here with
social constraints-its all transparent authenticity. Such is the stuff that
true art is made of. So haven't we travelled far beyond the regimented
Aristotelian structure of the early Indian short story?

Or take Ajoy Sen's story, "If it were not for the Child", which seems to
embody a tenuous emotion, transient but throbbing with a rare vitality. Here
we encounter a woman ambushed by her anguish, seeking release through the
touch of a cobra who awaits her, in his deep, dark hole in the garden, almost
like a lover. But the climatic moment in the story is skilfully shorn of
anything that would savour of melodrama-nor is there any palpable suggestion
of the Lawrentian sexual symbolism. In fact, the story just trails off into
an awareness of imminent death, offering the woman the promise of an easy,
blissful passage into oblivion.

	The soft tufts of thin blades slid smoothly beneath your pudgy palms
	and soon the agony was replaced by a strange bliss, because your
	fingers had at last come on the hole. You leaned over and put your
	ear to it but could hear nothing because snakes do not sing. Which
	was a pity because somehow you felt that a beautiful snake ought
	to. So next you put all your fingers into the hole and shivered and
	recalled the odd husky tone of Joel the gardener. 'One kiss from the
	devil does it.' You waited, shivered with the throbs of an ultimate
	bliss and looked up at the starry sky. A feathery cloud drifted by,
	parting the milky way into two luminous patches. They were like a
	pair of glazed, anxious faces that had magically, come together,
	gasping at you, fuced in an awkward huddle.

So this is how it all ends, not with a flourish, but with a whisper that is
almost a caress, a beckoning into the life beyond, without any fretting and
fuming over what is left behind.

Contents

Introduction    				     1
Cold Wave : K.A. Abbas  			     9
The Liar : Mulk Raj Anand  			    21
The Betrayal : Sujatha Balasubramanian  	    27
The Eyes are not here : Ruskiin Bond    	    36
Versus the Godman : Upamanyu Chatterjee  	    40
The Jahangir Syndrome : Keki Daruwalla  	    53
Fish Mayonnaise : Kishori Charan Das    	    61
The Submerged Valley : manoj Das  		    71
Heavy is Gold : Sunita Jain  			    80
The Boy with the Flute : Arun Joshi  		    85
To Nun with Love : Shiv K. Kumar  		   100
Eyes : Jayanta Mahapatra  			   107
A Pinch of Snuff : Manohar Malgaonkar   	   115
Letters/4,5, and 6 : Anita Mehta  		   123
Absolution : Dina Mehta  			   132
The Womb : Chaman Nahal  			   141
Green Sari : R.K. Narayan  			   157
A Toast to Herself : Raji Narasimhan    	   178
Afternoon of the House : Padma Pereira  	   186
India- A Fable : Raja Rao  			   201
Martand : Nayantara sahgal  			   210
If it were not for the child : Ajoy Sen  	   217
The Bottom Pincher : Khushwant Singh    	   223
Not to be Loose Shunted : Ashok Srinivasan  	   232

author bio

Shiv K. Kumar (b. 1921, Lahore), is a literary critic, poet, novelist, short
story writer, playwright and translator. He received his doctorate in English
Literature from Cambridge. He was chairman of the Department of English at
Osmania University and subsequently Professor of English and Dean of the
Faculty of Humanities at the Central University of Hyderabad from where he
retired as its Vice Chancellor.

He has to his credit 12 collection of poems Articulate Silences,
woolgathering, Woodpeckers, Trapfalls in the Sky, Cobwebs in the Sun,
Subterfuges, Thus Spake the Buddha, Thus Spake Lord Krishna, Voice of the
Buddha, Losing My Way, Intizar (Urdu & Hindi) and Tum Kaho Mein Sunoo (Urdu &
Hindi) etc. Several of his poems have been broadcast over the BBC. He is also
the author of 5 novels The Bone’s Prayer, Nude Before God, A River with Three
Banks, Infatuation and the most recently published Two Mirrors at the
Ashram. He has authored 2 collections of short stories Beyond Love and other
stories, one play The Last Wedding Anniversary and a translation of Faiz
Ahmed Faiz. His research papers have appeared in such internationally known
journals as Modern Language Review, Notes and Quaries, Modern Philology,
journal of Art and Aesthetics, English Studies and Toronto Review of English
Studies.

In 1978, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literary (London),
and in 1987 he received the Sahitya Akademi award for his collection of poems
Trapfalls in the Sky. In 2001 he was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2001 for
his contribution of literature.