The Indian Short Story: Texts and Contexts

The short story as a narrative form is an ancient genre. In fact the short narrative has had a life in early poetry and oral literatures of the world. In the epics one finds a network of short narratives presented as a panoramic whole. In later times, collections such as the Jataka tales, Panchatantra and Arabian Nights from the East and Aesop’s Fables, the Decameron and The Canterbury Tales from Europe each presented a group of short stories, some within a framework of a bigger narrative structure. These stories have been essentially narratives of action. Plot was important.

 

In modern times, the short stories has focussed on character, consciousness and states of being. The modern short story is a stand-alone narrative that is not part of an interlinked structure as in earlier age. The Indian English short story has the double advantage of drawing from both Indian narrative forms such as myth and fable, as well as western forms such as the romance and mystery. In form and content the Indian short story is able to fuse modern concerns such as psychology and time with traditional concerns such as ethics and mythology.

Raja Rao

Jayanta Mahapatra

Ruskin Bond

Nayantara Sehgal

The short stories of India represent different types of narratives. Raja Rao’s ‘India – a fable’ uses the form of a dialogue to spin a ‘fable’ that subverts the distinction between myth and reality. Published in 1947, the story intersects the high tide of European modernism in the first half of twentieth century. Raja Rao uses myth and magic, fact and fiction, a European setting and an Indian imagination to push the form of the short story beyond mere narrative. Jayanta Mahapatra’s ‘Eyes’ on the other hand, gives to the modern exploration of the human psyche a new dimension with an intense first person narrative about a young wife gone blind. Ruskin Bond’s ‘The Eyes Are Not Here’, makes use of a common Indian narrative frame – a rail journey – to give us a tale with a twist. It uses the narrative persona of a blind person, to suggest that blindness is not just a matter of eyes. Nayantara Sehgal’s ‘Martand’ combines modern sub-continental history, myth, and an adulterous affair in a story that redraws the links between the personal and the political. This too is a first-person narrative.

Although born in the early twentieth century these writers give us vignetts of human experience that have a timeless relevance. They also represent the diversity of India in terms of linguistic, religious, class and educational backgrounds. Needless to say the four authors discussed here do not represent the vast canvas of the modern Indian short story in it’s entirety. No selection can. The stories of R.K.Narayan or Mulk Raj Anand for instance represent other facets of life in India. Recent short stories by senior writers such as Anita Desai or younger authors such as Vikram Chandra writing about Mumbai’s residents, or Amit Chaudhuri’s delicate and compassionate stories about ordinary persons are essential for a fuller understanding of the Indian Short Story as a genre.

Critical studies of Indian English Literature have ignored the short story. Even studies on individual authors such as Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao and R.K.Narayan focus on the novels and make a token mention of their short stories. Yet the short story in modern Indian literature in English as well as the regional languages is a more popular genre than the novel. Short stories appear in the weekend editions of English and regional language newspapers. These stories written by amateurs draw on contemporary life; that is their main appeal for readers. Periodicals are another major vehicle for short stories.

Until recently most Indian English short story collections in India were compilations of the works of a single author. In the last few decades a governmental institution such as Sahitya Akademi and a private initiative such as Katha have published Indian short story collections. These collections have been able to break the glass barrier between English and the regional languages by translating into English, good regional language stories. The Sahitya Akademi has also compiled a collection of Indian short stories in English. Apart from the collections of individual authors published by various local publishers such as Vikas, Hind Pocket Books or Jaico, and the local Indian outfits of foreign publishers such as Arnold Heinemann, Orient Longman, and Oxford University Press, Indian Periodicals such as Femina and The Illustrated Weekly of India (now defunct) and Indian literary journals such as The Indian Horizon or Indian Literature (a Sahitya Akademi journal) have also published new stories. Foreign periodicals such as London Magazine and Stand and foreign presses have published English stories by Indians.

Amit Chaudhuri

Jhumpa Lahiri

Vikram Chandra

In recent times writers such as Bharati Mukherjee, Amit Chaudhuri, Jhumpa Lahiri and Vikram Chandra have published their stories in foreign periodicals such as Playboy, Mother Jones, Chelsea, The Literary Review, London Review of Books, The Little Magazine, New Yorker, Times Literary Supplement, Louisville Review, Harvard Review, Salamander, Story Quarterly,Epoch and The Paris Review. The list indicates the readership of Indian English stories that exists in the West. Indian bhasha stories in English translation have somehow not impacted this readership. The the problem lies more in the process of dissemination than in any want of literary merit in bhasha stories.

Civil Lines, the Indian publication from Delhi, has brought out several volumes of good stories as well. Besides these there appearsporadically, anthologies of stories by miscellaneous authors compiled more often than not by Indian professors of English Literature.

To look for common patterns or traditions in Indian English short stories would be an absurd undertaking. The sheer range of themes and styles reflects the teeming pluralities and micro narratives that form the expeience of being Indian. Nevertheless sometimes there appear allusions and linkages between one story and another that strike the reader but do not really move towards a formulation. The stories by Indian authors reveals that each story stands on it’s own, delving in a unique way into a human experience, yet drawing upon the common pool of the land that is India and a language that is English.