Many Indias

Indian literature and the short story are literary terms that are highly contested, theorised and yet have shifty definitions. A Clutch of Indian Masterpieces , edited by David Davidar, is an attempt to bring both these literary terms into the lexicon of modern reading. A collection of 39 stories, this book endeavours to chronicle and curate an introduction to the modern Indian short story practice.

The anthology begins with a story by Rabindranath Tagore and ends with one by Kanishk Tharoor — thereby charting the entire course of the modern Indian short story tradition in its temporal reality. In the fairly extensive introduction, Davidar explains the process of shortlisting these 39 stories from the larger oeuvre of the Indian writing tradition.

He talks about the challenges of curating the contents of this ‘clutch’, including problems of claiming stories from the oral to the written form, issues of translation and the loss therein, re-translation of some stories, choosing what to include and what to discard. The introduction is a primary component of the book, before one begins to make sense of the stories and what they are trying to say.

Davidar has carefully picked those Indian stories that have stayed with him through years of reading.

The collection includes popular heavyweights like RK Narayan, Sadat Hasan Manto, Khushwant Singh, the controversial Ismat Chughtai, Amrita Pritam, the budding Kanishk Tharoor, and other writers such as Shashi Tharoor, Upmanyu Chatterjee and Githa Hariharan. This book covers a wide range of literary writing and themes.

While Tagore’s and Vaikom Muhammad Basheer’s stories touch upon supernatural experiences, Premchand, Gopinath Mohanty and Anna Bhau Sathe give a glimpse into poverty. UR Ananthamurthy, Vijaydan Detha and Mahasweta Devi speak of the rural, tribal and indigenous experience through their stories. At the same time, Amrita Pritam and Nisha Da Cunha talk of infidelity.

Simultaneously, stories of Ismat Chughtai and Amrita Narayanan give an insight into homosexuality and explore women’s sexuality. Stories like that of Vikram Chandra and Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai detail the craft of writing and reveal the delight in expanding an experience into words.

The anthology includes stories that have been translated from numerous Indian languages, including Malayalam, Urdu, Oriya and Marathi apart from, of course, stories written in English.

However, inclusions of literature from the north-east region, Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Goa and Gujarat would have made the anthology more comprehensive. Nevertheless, with its wide array of themes and the ability to capture the universal struggles within India, the collection serves as a guide to Indian consciousness.

While dealing with supernatural experiences in Tagore’s The Hunger of Stones and Basheer’s The Blue Light , the reader learns how susceptible we can be to hearsay and rumours. In Anita Desai’s Games at Twilight , nostalgia gently runs through a reader’s mind. Similarly, there is an ache and longing for the old world in Sundara Ramaswamy’s Reflowering and the romanticisation of a simple tribal life in Ruskin Bond’s The Blue Umbrella .

Premchand’s The Shroud and Anna Bhau Sathe’s Gold from the Grave , while dealing with issues of poverty and religion, also tell of the starkness between the haves and have-nots. Mahasweta Devi’s Draupadi complicates this struggle by introducing the gender factor into a battle between tribes and the administration. Hari Shankar Parsai’s Inspector Matadeen on the Moon satirises the political and administrative system and launches a scathing attack on corrupt governance in a fictional world through the introduction of police reforms on the moon.

The book is sensitive to the pulse of realism and, at the same time, it offers moments of introspection, romance and nostalgia. Just like India, the book too is eclectic, varied and wide-ranging. Each of the stories is a representation of an Indian reality. Therefore, there are many Indias created in the book — each one unique and different from the others. Each story gives a sense and flavour of its rootedness, which no book of history or anthropology could.

The stories encourage the reader to explore the authors and writings from their respective regions. For example, after reading the Oriya story in the book, a reader will be tempted to read other Oriya writers, such as Tapan Kumar Pradhan’s award-winning Kalahandi .

A Clutch of Indian Masterpieces prises open the entire world for a reader interested in Indian writing. It gives a snapshot into the various worlds India inhabits within it and encourages readers to read more. Davidar’s painstaking curation has the potential of defining India’s literary canon.

( Shubhrasthais a freelance writer based in Delhi )

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