An anthology that falters

SHORT stories by various writers collected loosely into anthologies are innocuous in themselves and generally merit neither condemnation nor accolades. If the stories are worth even a single read, such paperbacks priced around Rs. 200 serve some ambiguous need in the market and can be (punningly) shelved pronto. My quarrel, however, is with the anthology that nurses pretentions, dreaming of a grand unifying principle that it promises but absolutely fails to deliver. A Storehouse of Tales is, unfortunately, one such: a bunch of stories - badly written in the main, carelessly edited, indifferently proofread - packaged under that heady saleable brand of women's writing. Indeed, one begins to despair: for how much longer are we expected to digest this juvenile anachronistic trick of selling women? Malashri Lal's introduction - a piece that ranges from Emily Dickinson to Mahasweta Devi, from feminist to womanist to woman as creatrix (this sounds new!), from ecriture feminine to naritwa and nariwad, from cyberspace, cable tv and Dolby sound systems to kites on Makar Sankranti and Ring Road traffic in all of five pages - tells us all and nothing about the stories that follow. When you get to the stories, you find out why: with very few exceptions, they tell you all and nothing too, and waste an inordinate amount of time and space doing it.

Perhaps the most pointless amongst the tales are two that are really essays in the original sense of the term (why are they here?). One, Ipsita Roy Chakraverti's catalogue of all the bigwigs she knows and socialises with in Lutyens' Delhi, so intimately that she knows the ghosts that haunt them too. Two, Mrinal Pande's puerile "Recollections of Motherhood" which takes pains to inform you that, despite the myths built around it by a patriarchal society, "Actual motherhood as women experience it, however, is an immensely personal and intense experience, that fuses mind and body as nothing also can". Here is juvenilia and bad writing fused as nothing ever can (and will, one hopes). Not to mention the sheer mawkishness of the take on motherhood, almost bile-producing in its earnestness and simplicity and thereby recreating certain less-than-happy moments in memories of the birthing process, probably a (postmodernist) effect that the collector of these tales did not quite envisage.

Indeed, there is so little to redeem this anthology that one is embarrassed by its posturing as a representative compendium of contemporary women's writing from India. Perhaps before continuing to address its woes one should quickly note the positives: Namita Gokhale's "Omens, Sacred and Profane" is an interesting and intelligent comment on the short story form; Manju Kapur's "Chocolate" is a delightful little tale that spins feminism out of adultery; Anuradha Marwar Roy's "Lifework" is a touching exploration of mother-daughter dynamics; Vandana Kumari Jena's "Cry, My Beloved Child", though overly-sentimental, has a sting in its tail.

To balance out these brief pleasures, I had difficulty searching for reasons why one would pay to wade through Shama Futehally's chronicle of (baby) Jani's "Morning" (eight pages), Lakshmi Kannan's inane ramblings about a woman writer's identity crises vis-a-vis Simone de Beauvoir (13 pages) or Madhu Kiswar's politically-correct mutterings about the exploited working class (15 pages) in "Twenty or Twenty-Five"? Which brings us to a pertinent question for Jehanara Wasi, editor of the collection. What (fuzzy) logic do these stories adhere to in a classification as cloudy as women's fiction? (How, for example, is Roy Chakraverti's "Ghostly Trail", or Bulbul Sharma's "Anadi's Journey", justified?) Unholy truisms about female creativity and private/public spaces aside, there surely must be some rallying point to this anthology, which I at least have failed to discover.

Lal begins her introduction with a homily about a mythic grandmother, "spartan and thin, a bundle of energy in the kitchen, a storm of words in the zenana, a storehouse of tales in the bedroom". Picking up the clear reference to the title, does the grandmother ever appear in the anthology? One does not remember, so obviously it is not her "storehouse of tales" we are listening to in any meaningful way. It is nearly enough to turn one "patriarchal" (oh, the horror!) and begin to wonder about this "creatrix" beast, really.

BRINDA BOSE

A Storehouse of Tales, Edited by Jehanara Wasi, New Delhi, Srishti, 2001, Rs. 195.

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