A hundred years of the short story

ONE hundred years, 21 languages, 43 stories. Divided into two equal halves of 50 years each. In bald terms, this is the design of the current anthology, intended to be a one stop shop for the best Indian short stories money can buy.

Part One (1900-1950) is prefaced by an editorial essay entitled "Fictionalising India". In it, Ramakrishnan admits that his choice of stories was limited to those which are already available in English translations. Not surprisingly, most of the stories in the first half are much anthologised, especially Premchand's "The Shroud", Manto's "Toba Tek Singh", Chugtai's "The Quilt" and Sivasankara Pillai's "In the Flood". In his first essay, Ramakrishnan draws our attention to the role played by the periodical press in providing a congenial climate for the short story, especially in the 1930s, just as the periodical boom in Britain in the last quarter of the 19th Century had directly led to the consolidation of short fiction and genre fiction. Ramakrishnan also argues that languages like Dogri, Maithili, Rajasthani and Kashmiri "were late in discovering the potential of this popular form" due to the "slow pace of the development of the periodical press in these languages".

As far as the choice of stories in the first half are concerned, there is little to be said. Some eyebrows may be raised at the omission of Tagore, but as Ramakrishnan points out, some of his best short stories were written in the 19th Century, and anyway, Tagore's work has been much translated into English. The inclusion of a rather pedestrian story by Raja Rao - and the consequent exclusion of R. K. Narayan - is baffling. Again, there are only two women writers in the first 50 years - Lalithambika Antherjanam and Ismat Chugtai - out of a total of 19. Significantly, both stories deal with women's sexuality in a rigidly patriarchal society. But what unifies most of the stories in the first half is an engagement with rural life, at a time when the nation was being largely imagined "from the point of view of the marginalised and the oppressed".

Predictably, Ramakrishnan situates these stories squarely within the framework and rhetoric of emergent Indian nationhood, though one sometimes wonders if he does not overstate his case. In anthologies with a very large catchment area, there is often a strong editorial compulsion to posit an over-arching grand narrative, sometimes by sacrificing the element of diversity. This tendency is less pronounced in the second half of the anthology, featuring 24 stories. Ramakrishnan acknowledges the "bold innovations" of form and notes that the post-Independence short story became "inward and introspective in the 1950s and the 1960s" and that the "plotted story with its well-defined beginning, middle and end has become a thing of the past". What Ramakrishnan hints at, but does not quite spell out, is the fact that the coming of modernism taught us not to hanker after the pleasures of the narrative, and the satisfaction of closure. Rather, it is the process of telling the story which now began to receive attention from its practitioners. Perhaps the best example of this shift in focus is M. T. Vasudevan Nair's early 1990s short story "Sherlock", a meandering, almost static exercise in story-telling, stalking the reader as stealthily as the cat in the story.

While most of the stories in the first half were concerned with the rural milieu, urban - or more correctly, metropolitan - India becomes the focus, if not the locale, of the post-Independence short story. According to Ramakrishnan, the migration of writers from the country to the city in the 1950s and the 1960s resulted in an "elitist bias" which made the short story inaccessible to the larger readership. This, I feel, has less to do with the "self consciousness of the modernist idiom" than with the harsh realities of publishing, and the strange inability of the Indian short story to branch out into more popular genres. For instance, the short story in turn-of-the-century England and America found a secure habitat in such genres as crime fiction and science fiction. This has never happened in any Indian language and the current anthology reflects this by not including a single story which can be considered genre fiction.

During the last quarter of the 20th Century, the Indian short story entered a new and radical phase in the hands of its dalit practitioners. Only one of the ilk, Baburao Bagul, is represented in the anthology. In fact, the youngest writer in the second half is Githa Hariharan - apart from her, there is no one who's born after 1950. Perhaps Ramakrishnan would have done well to include one or two younger writers in the collection.

The translations are of a uniformly high standard - not surprising, considering that they have been extracted from some of the best collections of translated short stories. The same cannot, however, be said about the copy-editing and the production standards of the book. The whole book is littered with typos and the typesetter has routinely omitted the space between a period and the first letter of the next word. In "Toba Tek Singh" the word madman has been repeatedly spelt as "mandman". Such depressing lack of attention to the basics of book production does not show Sahitya Akademi in a favourable light.

ABHIJIT GUPTA

Indian Short Stories (1900-2000), edited by E. V. Ramakrishnan,

Sahitya Akademi, p. 536, Rs. 250.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Features
Previous : Flavour of life
Next     : From Mutiny to Partition