Masters at Work

AMONG THE STORIES in 100 Indian Stories: A Feast of Remarkable Short Fiction from the 19th, 20th and 21st Centuries is Kanishk Tharoor’s ‘Swimmer Among the Stars’, a poignant tale of ethnographers recording snatches of language as spoken by its last speaker. There is nothing in the story that sets it unquestionably in India; it could be anywhere in the world. Even the elements (poverty, corruption, casteism, patriarchy) that find their way into most of the stories in this anthology are missing in this story. An odd choice, then, for a book that focuses on Indian stories?

But ‘Swimmer Among the Stars’ fits simply because it is so universal (a sign of good literature), and also because it celebrates languages. This book celebrates the short story in different tongues: the languages these stories were originally written in range from major ones like Bangla, Tamil, Urdu, Malayalam and Hindi, to those whose literary output is rather less-known to the average reader in English: Kashmiri, for instance, or Portuguese. The writers represented, all the way from the last years of the 19th century into the present one, are very diverse. There are stalwarts: Rabindranath Tagore, Munshi Premchand, Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, Mahasweta Devi, RK Narayan, et al but also many others who are new voices, or even (Jayant Narlikar, Shashi Tharoor) familiar names, but known for something other than the short story.

The diversity in language, local culture, and time period is reflected in the stories, which span a range of themes and styles. On the one hand, there are the more literary stories, the much-loved and popular ones like Tagore’s ‘The Kabuliwalhah’ or Premchand’s ‘Kafan’ (The Shroud) as well as dozens of others, running the gamut from hard-hitting, searing stories like Ismat Chughtai’s ‘Of Fists and Rubs’, Vijaydan Detha’s ‘Countless Hitlers’ and Bhabendra Nath Saikia’s Rats, to heartwarming tales, like Ruskin Bond’s ‘The Prospect of Flowers’. As an editor and compiler, AJ Thomas must be applauded for not giving in to the temptation of limiting this collection to literary stories. Ghost stories, stories of magic realism, science-fiction, humour and satire have their place in this book.

The stories are arranged in chronological order of the writers’ date of birth. What results is a fascinating glimpse of two simultaneous histories: the history of India as a nation, and the history of the Indian short story. From early in the collection— through stories like Kalki’s superb satire ‘The Governor’s Visit’ and Bhisham Sahni’s ‘A Feast for the Boss’—an image of a subservient India, where the Britisher is king, is built up; 200 pages in, these colonials are gone, but the scars of Partition are etched: in Rajinder Singh Bedi’s ‘Laajwanti’, in Mohan Rakesh’s ‘Lord of the Rubble’, and more. Other traumatic milestones in modern history— terrorism in Punjab, the unrest in Kashmir—find their place here too.

At the same time, you can see the form of the story changing, giving way to more fluid, experimental styles. More uninhibited, more open to interpretation.

AJ Thomas’s superb selection and arrangement of these stories allows for a very satisfying enjoyment of the diversity of Indian literary fiction in the short form. That, combined with the excellent work done by the many translators, makes this a book that is indeed the feast its subtitle refers to.

100 Indian StoriesBook ReviewJayant NarlikarMahasweta DeviMunshi PremchandRabindranath TagoreRK NarayanShashi TharoorVaikom Muhammad Basheer