Great Stories From Modern India

Book excerpt: Not long ago, several naysayers readied to write the epitaph of the short story. The novel, and the odd-novella, indeed appeared to relegate the short story to oblivion. Fortuitously, the short story slipped through with fresh and unexplored angularities to reclaim its rightful place in the corpus of world literature. Today, the short story’s robustness continues to baffle the heretics and delight the believers. In India, particularly, hundreds of authors practise this craft in a multitude of languages, exploring a variety of themes, often in the face of stiff opposition from State-sponsored ideologues. Great Stories From Modern India brings under a single awning some of the most celebrated Indian writers who have excelled in the craft— SH Vatsyayan ‘Agyeya’, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Khushwant Singh, Amrita Pritam, Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, Premendra Mitra, Mulk Raj Anand, Balwant Gargi, Kamleshwar, Krishan Chander, Qurratulain Hyder, Ruskin Bond, and Indira Goswami, among others. While each story presents yet another unfathomable spectrum of human emotions in the writer’s unique voice, this anthology, like an orchestral piece, culminates in the shared quest of the meaning of existence, adversity, survival, annihilation, election, exile, crime, redemption and finally, homecoming.