1

First Chapter- Introduction

The short story has emerged as a significant genre in Indo-

English literature as well as in other Indian literatures. The impact of
English on short story writing in India, both in Indian English and in
Indian languages has been considerable. Insufficient critical attention
has been paid in India to this relationship if not to the genre. There
has been a marked increase in short story writing in recent decades.
There are many reasons for this. The short story can easily reach a
wide audience through popular magazines and newspapers.
Practically every major newspaper has a short story section as
standard fare. Literary journals like Indian Literature and the Yatra
series feature short stories on a regular basis. The Katha series is
specifically devoted to publishing Indian language stories in English
translation. Magazines have always been in the forefront in
promoting the short story- witness the example of The Illustrated
Weekly of India. More than any other literary form, the short story is
a ready and easily available barometer of human experience; that is
reason enough for its popularity.
Indian English short story has not been able to make much
headway in the literary world. Often it has been treated casually by
writers, resulting in the overall neglect of the genre. Mostly it has
come out as a by-product of Indian- English fiction. This should not
give us a surprise or jolt because both fiction and short story are the
 2

kindred branches of literature and both are related to each other in

the same way as the big and small sisters to their parents. According
to A.J. Merson, "If Indian- English fiction originated in the 20th
century, Indian-English short story can't be thought of earlier than
this time. Of course, the short story is a simpler and more popular
form of communication than the wide-ranging and complex fiction."1
The short story is deeply rooted in our Indian tradition, which used
to give us folk tales and fables from the earliest times. This tradition
has always been enriched by oral as well as written tales. It is
unquestionably as old as Indian society and culture.
The mid-thirties of the twentieth century saw the publication of
a genuine artistic work in the genre of short story. It is Mulk Raj
Anand's The Lost Child and Other Stories which proved to be a trend
setter. It was an immediate success. With Anand begins the era of big
names, such as Manjeri Isvaran, R.K. Narayan, Raja Rao, Khushwant
Singh, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala etc. in the field of short story. Anand is
with the poor and the downtrodden, voicing the concerns and
predicaments of the lower classes in our society and siding with the
lost ones and the sufferers. Prof. A.N. Dwivedi has rightly written
about Mulk Raj Anand in his book:
"The humanism of Anand is so evident in his short
stories, and he lashes at "the lies, shams and hypocrisies
of our people' with relentless vigour and robust satire.
The social injustices and the highbrow prejudices move
him most, and he forcefully ventilates his strong feelings
against them, as may be gathered from his stories like The
Cobbler and the Machine, Boots, The Old Watch, and The
 3

Story of an Anna. In his long short story, Lament on the

Death of a Master ofArts, Anand takes to satire to hit at the
rotten and inhuman social customs and conditions - the
proud parents, the child marriage, the stubbornness of the
elders, hypocrisy, insanitation, and cruelty in education,
and so many other things."2

Anand can be funny and humorous at times, such as in his stories The
Barber's Trade Union, The Death of a Lady and Lottery. It is, however,
regretted that Anand in some of his stories as well as in some of his
novels resorts to mere propaganda, as in The Power of Darkness and
The Tractor and the Com Goddess, and that he occasionally indulges in
self-pity and melodramatic situations, as in his Lament on the Death of
a Master of Arts. But he touches new heights when he discards the
mantle of propaganda or self-indulgence, and his story Lajwanti is a
moving tale of the hopeless situation of a young village woman who
finds no anchorage either at her in-laws or at her parental home. In
the depiction of the variegated pictures of modem India, Anand is
simply superb. His themes of the stories are wide-ranging and his
treatment of them is varied in accordance with the expediency of the
plot. He does not scruple to retain the flavour of the ancient Indian
fable in his tales if the occasion so demands.
Of 'the Big Three', R.K.Narayan occupies a prominent place as
a writer of short stories in a lighter vein and style. Without allowing
his stories to be loose in structure, he ends most of them on a happy
note. Narayan usually fixes his gaze on those aspects of an incident
or a character which are appealing to him. He is a fine painter of the
 4

ludicrous and the humorous in his stories like Attila, Engine Trouble.
and An Evening Gift. The stories contained in such collections as An
Astrologer's day (1947), Lawley Road (1956) and A Horse and Two Goats
(1970) represent Narayan at his best; bringing out as they do his
strengths as well as weaknesses. At times, Narayan is highly
engaging and entertaining while dealing with the various facets of
human life, but at other times he stoops to journalistic details and
sensationalism. Occasionally he even slips into incidents of suspense
and horror, as in Old Bones, An Accident, and The Snake Song. He can
also delve deep into child psychology and portrays children with
perfect sympathy and understanding, as in Swami and His Friends, but
he is decidedly weak in depicting women characters of flesh and
blood, as one may gather from Mother and Son or from A Willing
Slave. Like his novels, his stories do not have political overtones or
even undertones. To quote Prof. A.N. Dwivedi:
"Like Anand, he reveals his situations on characters by
means of narration and not by means of dialogue. His
cool-headed detachment is discernible almost in every
story. His beginnings are often good and casual, but his
ends are sometimes unconvincing. One of the typical
features of his technique is that he does not bother to
evolve an indigenous brand of English in order to cope
with the local atmosphere or the social milieu. The
sustaining power of a Narayan story is its unmixed comic
sense and its pure delight in the art of living."3

Raja Rao is definitely of a different make-up both in his novels

and short stories. He is soberer and more serious in evoking a proper
 5

atmosphere for the flowering of Indian thought and tradition. He

writes mostly on social and political scenes around him with a
natural ease and philosophical resignation. Though he is not so
prolific a writer of shorter fiction as Mulk Raj Anand or R.K.
Narayan, he has certainly made a mark in the genre with his two
collections known as The Cow of the Barricades & Other Stories (1947)
and The Policeman and the Rose (1978), both published by the Oxford
University Press. On The Ganga Ghat published in 1989 comprises
eleven short pieces, nine of which are narratives, and of the
remaining two, the first is purely introductory, and the second a
series of musings, mainly on the Ganga and Benares.
Raja Rao goes to the folk-tales and the epic legends to evolve a
form of his own with 'all the simplicity and credulity' of a myth-
maker. He often writes on such subjects as the popular myths,
national upsurge, and rural characters. His story, Narsiga, for
example, brings to the fore an orphaned village boy saturated with
Gandhism. He may not have a wide range of themes like Anand,
Narayan and Isvaran, but he commands greater depth and
philosophical probing in his works. His later short stories like The
Policeman and the Rose and A Fable confirm the statement. If Javni in
the first collection is the charming tale of an untouchable woman
widowed and despised by all and earning only a rupee per month for
her livelihood, the short stories of a later day probe deeper into the
metaphysical lodgings of man.
 6

Manjeri S. Isvaran is another major Indian-English short story

writer. Having published about ten volumes of short stories such as
Naked Shingles (1941), Isvaran "occupies a conspicuous place among
our pioneers."4 He is a typical Indian writer who confines himself to
the life of the low and middle classes in the erstwhile Madras State.
In his tales he observes fidelity to facts and his own experiences. He
manages to write skillfully, from different angles, on a wide variety
of subjects- the ravaging results of the Great Wars and the Indian
National Movement (as to be seen in Between Two Flags), the naivete
of children ( as in Kolu ), the love-affairs of a confirmed thief or a
motor driver (as in The Motorman ), the uninhibited exhibition of love
leading to sensual gestures and sexy word-duel ( as to be found in
Mango Lane ), the rape of the volatile Jagada by the crafty cartman (as
in Immersion ) . But of all the subjects, Isvaran seems to excel in the
sympathetic revelation of female psyche, ranging from a housewife
to a school going girl, a mother-in-law to a daughter-in-law, from a
young widow to a granny. In depicting the womankind, Isvaran is
close to earth and keenly alive. But he does not succeed so well when
he comes to deal with children and their delicate psychology.
With the dawn of Indian Independence, a new consciousness of
one's nationality and people arose in writers. Khushwant Singh is a
short story writer of free India, and he made his debut in this form
with the publication of his work, "The Mark of Vishnu & Other
Stories" in 1950, to be followed by The Voice of God & Other Stories
(1957), A Bride for the Sahib & Other Stories (1967), and Black Jasmine
 7

(1971), These four volumes greatly consolidated the position of

Khushwant Singh as a short story writer of outstanding merits - a
writer who moves from this genre to fiction in due course. He and
Attia Hosain are perhaps the two writers who began their creative
career with short story, - Hosain having produced Phoenix Fled and
Other Stories (1953). Khushwant Singh comes down heavily on what
is repugnant, repulsive, and hypocritical. His story The Mark of
Vishnu launches a scathing attack on blind belief which impels Ganga
Ram, a pious and devoted Brahmin, to worship and feed with milk
the black cobra (Kalanag) which eventually bites him to death. The
Voice of God highlights the inherent evils of a democratic system of
government in which elections play a dominant role, but these
elections are often won by hardcore criminals like Ganda Singh at
the cost of deserving candidates like Baba Ram Singh. Obviously, Mr.
Singh's forte is irony and comic sense. V.A. Shahane has rightly
pointed out that "The predominant quality of Khushwant Singh as a
short story writer is his comic spirit, informed by the sense of
incongruity and by the bewildering phenomena of contradictions in
life."5
Another notable name in the field of contemporary Indian short
story is that of Ruth Prawer Jhabva who is a Polish by parentage, a
German by birth, an English woman by education, and an Indian by
marriage. In a way, English is her mother tongue, and she writes her
novels and stories in it with command. Her portrayal of Indian life is
sensibly executed, with the added advantage of a somewhat
 8

detached observer. So long she has written four volumes of short

stories, namely Like Birds, Like Fishes & Other Stories(1956), How I
Became Holy Mother & Other Stories(1964), A Stronger Climate (1968),
and An Experience of India (1972), in addition to nine novels. From
these volumes, it is evident that Jhabvala gets totally depressed and
disillusioned in India, which she calls a country of 'heat and dust', of
slow movement and activity, of indolence and laziness. Her An
Experience of India is cast in the same gloomy mood and in the same
attitude of helplessness.
K.A. Abbas is a well-known name in the film industry, but he
has also created a place for himself in the niche of Indian English
short story by dint of his five collections. Abbas seems to be
important with the present-day social set-up, which is dominated by
poverty, ignorance, inefficiency, hypocrisy, selfishness, and
unemployment. He is no less disturbed by the prevailing political
problems like those of partition, bloodshed and refugee influx. His
two volumes Blood and Stones& Other Stories (1947) and Cages of
Freedom & Other Stories (1952), treat these political issues, whereas his
works like Rice and Other Stories(1947) and One Thousand Nights on a
Bed of Stones& Other Stories (1957) highlight some of the glaring social
evils, in whose portrayal he sometimes becomes enraged and furious
and at others sentimental and melodramatic. His technique of
narration is definitely coloured with strong urge for the visual
cinematic effects, and as such he offers us a series of striking and
memorable flashes of events and scenes.
 9

Another older short story writer for whom also Maugham was
a model is Manohar Malgonkar. To his three collections which had
appeared between 1974 and 1977, he now added Four Graves and
Other Stories in 1990. Seven of the fifteen stories here have already
appeared in Bombay Beware (1975). The eight new stories have mostly
a colonial colouring. The most interesting of these is perhaps the title
story Four Graves, an ironic presentation of how myths are made. The
graves of two dogs (Mags and Sherkhan) of a British officer in time
come to be respectively, a shrine of a Hindu deity (Mangash) and a
Muslim Pir; and since the graves are side by side, it does not take
long for communal trouble to erupt. Ruskin Bond(b.l934) and Manoj
Das (b.1934) are perhaps the only two noted Indian English short
story writers who have almost exclusively confined themselves to
this form, though each has been unfaithful to it at least once, by
trying to write a novel. Both began their career in the late sixties, and
continue to be active still. Bond has published four collections of
short stories: The Night Train at Deoli and Other Stories (1989), Our
Trees Still Grow in Dehra (1991), Collected Fiction (1996) and Friends in
Small Places (2000). Bond writes with feeling on all kinds of have-nots,
orphans, beggars, old men and lonely women, as in stories like The
Fight and The Woman on Platform No.8. Stories about tigers and
panthers (Panther's Moon and The Leopard) - the staple of popular
Indian English fiction- also abound, and so do ghost stories (A Face in
the Dark), another Indo-Anglian staple. But Bond's most memorable
stories are those in which he recalls nostalgically scenes from his
 10

early days in Dehra Doon and the Garhwal Hills (The Last Tonga Ride,
My Father's trees in Dehra).
Like Bond, Manoj Das also seems to have got into a groove. To
his four collections, published between 1967 and 1977, he has now
added: The Submerged Valley and Other Stories (1986); Bulldozers and
Fables and Fantasies for Adults (1990); The Miracle and Other stories
(1993) and farewell to a Ghost (1994). The supernatural in a rustic
setting continues to be one of his favourite ploys. Occasionally, Das
does succeed in achieving an O.Henry type of a surprise ending, as in
The Bridge in the Moonlit Night, where two rivals in love meet years
later, and a momentous secret is revealed. But on the whole, Das
seems to remain content with broad effects, making no attempt to
capture subtler nuances.
Another famous writer of short stories in English is G.D.
Khosla, who gives us a peep into the multifaceted personality of
Mother India through his wide-ranging themes. His characters are
both types and individuals, and he portrays them with sensitivity
done and objectivity. All walks of people- from rickshaw pullers to
businessmen, from film heroines to defiant loving ladies: all find a
berth in his creative world. With his four volumes - The Price of a
Wife(1958), The Horoscope Cannot Lie & Other Stories(1961),Grim fairy
Tales and Other Facts and Fancies(1966), and A Way of Loving & Other
Stories(1973) - steeped in humour and realism, Khosla has
undoubtedly earned an abiding place for himself in literature.
 11

Through them he hits hard at the social evils like xmtouchability and
ill-matched marriage.
Jug Suraiya (b.1946) had already published The Interview and
Other Stories in 1971. He has now followed it up with a far more
substantial collection A Chap Called Peter Pan (1992). Suraiya is well-
known as a seasoned journalist and especially as a writer of
"Middles" in a lighter vein. It is a pleasant surprise to find him an
accomplished short story writer as well. His best stories are those in
which a character is caught in a crisis and is shown reacting to the
situation.
Farrukh Dhondy's East End at Your Feet (1976) and Come to
Mecca (1978) have now been followed up by what is perhaps his best
collection of short stories so far: Poona Company (1980). Probably
largely autobiographical, the book brings to life a small segment of
life in the Poona Cantonment in the ‘'fifties. The narrator is a very
observant twelve year old Parsi boy. He introduces us to Soli, the
"Baron" of the Sarbatwalla Chowk, who is a bookie; Eddie,
nicknamed the "Inventor", who is always fiddling with his gadgets;
Samson, the strong man, who carries the Parsi dead up to the Tower
of Silence, and many others. Thus, "Poona Company", redolent of the
spirit of place, is a triumph of local colour.
More than half a dozen poets have tried their hand at writing
short stories, with varying degrees of success. The twenty five stories
in Shiv K. Kumar's Beyond Love and Other Stories (1980) show
considerable variety of setting and character. The scene shifts from
 12

India to Bangla Desh and also to the U.S.A., and the characters range
from a flirtatious husband to a Sanyasi, a soldier to a clergyman and
a constant wife to a nun. Short, slick and readable, the stories are,
however, thin in content. Only occasionally, a story like Beyond Love
stands out by its psychological interest. Here, a newly widowed
young woman goes into a trance-like state, in which she mistakes her
husband's best friend for her husband himself, and drags the
horrified man into her bed.
Another poet K.N. Daruwalla has also tried his hand in the
genre of short story. His first book of short stories The Sword and the
Abyss had come out in 1979. Seventeen years later, he has published
The Minister for Permanent Unrest and Other Stories (1996). The novella,
which gives the book its title, is set in an unspecified Latin American
country, and offers a graphic picture of life under a dictatorship.
Variety of locale is a special feature of the rest of the seventeen
stories. Along with U.P., the Punjab, Kashmir and Assam, Arabia and
Persia also provide the background.
Jayant Mahapatra began writing fiction in his early twenties,
but his first collection The Green Gardener and Other Stories appeared
in 1997. These eighteen stories deal mostly with middle class life.
They can hardly be said to enrich in any way our understanding of
life and human nature. In The Disappearance of Protima Jena, the
adolescent narrator tells the story of the love affair between his elder
brother and a neighbouring girl. The situation recalls that in L.P.
Hartley's The Go-Between, but the rich irony in the novel is totally
 13

missing in Mahapatra's story. The Mango Tree presents a crippled

grandmother, who is shocked to find the tree outside her window
planted by her husband cut down. This reminds us of a well-known
scene in Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders. Again, as in the case of
Daruwalla, we do not meet the poet anywhere in these stories.
Randhir Khare, also a poet, is seen to better advantage in his
two books of short stories: Return to Mandhata (1991) and Notebook of a
Footsoldier and Other Stories (1999). The first collection is divided into
two sections "The Survivors" and "Return to Mandhata/'Hie
"Survivors" are Anglo-Indians in today's India. Himself of Anglo-
Indian extraction (his mother was white, and he himself was
christened "Randolph", but changed the name to "Randhir" later),
Khare presents his fellowmen with great sympathy and
understanding. He sees them as "a group of dislocated
people....longing for a far-away home and unable to adjust to the
Indian environment, and not succeeding."6 Notebook of a Foot-soldier
registers a definite advance over Khare's first collection. The title
story narrates the colourful adventures of Christopher Alexander, a
drunkard, gun runner and ex-convict, now fugitive, dodging an
underworld gang.
The short stories of G.S.Sharat Chandra (1935-2000) are
distinctly inferior to his verse. His collection of short stories Sari of the
Gods (1998) contains nineteen stories divided into three sections
entitled "Here", "There" and "Neither Here nor There." As these
titles suggest, the scene shifts from India to the U.S.A. and back, and
 14

the characters include both Indian immigrants in America and

Indians in India. The stories are mostly situation-oriented, and the
situation is sometimes too much with them.
Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987) by Rohinton Mistry is one of the
most noteworthy short story collections of recent times. Himself a
Parsi, Mistry observes with great acuteness and detachment the lives
of about a dozen middle class Parsi families living in a block of fiats
in Bombay. Centuries of inbreeding have made the Parsis - a very
small ethnic group in India - prone to abnormalities of character
ranging from harmless eccentricities to madness.
A fellow Parsi, Kaizad Gustad(b.l968) has proved his talent as
a short story writer by publishing his collection of short stories Of No
Fixed Address(1998).The stories in Of No Fixed Address take us round
the world from Bombay to New York, with stops in London, Paris,
Spain, Denmark, Canada etc. The narrator tells us that his
peregrinations are in search of home, but the search narrows down to
concentrate on women : Meena, a Bombay prostitute, Rita, a Goan
who spurns the Englishman who falls in love with her, and a Chinese
woman called "Angel". According to M.K. Naik, "While the variety
of locale in these stories is admirable, none of them gives us the feel
of intimacy which Mistry7s stories indubitably possess."7
Ranga Rao's An Indian Idyll and Other Stories (1989) handles a
large variety of characters ranging from schoolboys to young lovers
and prostitutes to Eurasians. Rao can effectively sound a somber note
as in The Anniversary (an aged professor suddenly has a nervous
 15

breakdown at a party to celebrate his birthday), but his real strength

seems to lie in comic apprehension of situation and character. The
Grand Divorce Carnival presents a fat, nagging wife, who has been
induced to file a divorce petition, to circumvent the provisions of a
new Land-ownership Bill. The relieved husband is overjoyed at this
unexpected windfall; at the last moment, however, it transpires that
the bill has been amended, and a divorce is of no use. The helpless
husband now pleads frantically with the judge not to allow his wife
to withdraw the petition. The ironic reversal here is reminiscent of
R.K. Narayan, whose influence is plain in other stories as well and, as
in Narayan, there is a palpable thinness of content.
Another collection, which suffers from the same kind of
limitation, is Shashi Tharoor's The Five Dollar Smile: Fourteen Early
Stories and a Farce in Two Acts (1990).These stories are clearly
immature. Tharoor is supposed to have begun writing in his teens.
Immature in every way, the only reason for their publication seems
to be the conspicuous success of Tharoor's first novel, The Great
Indian Novel, the power of invention and verve of which they lack.
How Booby Chatterjee Turned to Drink is, as the author himself admits,
"a Wodehousian story set in Calcutta", and the shadow of
R.K.Narayan falls heavily on The Solitude of the Short Story writer."8
One more novelist of note proves equally disappointing as a
short story writer. Salman Rushdie's East and West (1994) contain nine
stories, none of which can be called a major effort. A Pakistani wife's
ordeal in getting a visa to join her husband in London (Good Advice is
 16

Rarer than Rubies); and childhood memories in London (The Courtier)

are hardly themes which can yield meaningful results if treated in
conventional ways. Rushdie's stories lack the irony and the surprise
ending. There is occasionally a typical flourish of the Rushdie style,
as when he talks about a Polish refugee with a first name full of
"Communist Consonants", but this does not adequately compensate
for the absence of the daring flights of imagination and the dazzling
experiments in technique which are the hallmark of Rushdie's longer
fiction.
The stories of another prominent practitioner of the novel of
Magic Realism are equally devoid of technical innovation. Vikram
Chandra's Love and Longing in Bombay (1997) contains five stories
which are linked together by a common narrator- a talkative old man,
spinning his yarns in a bar, which is a stock narrative device. Another
putative connection is supposed to be provided by the titles of the
stories: Dharma, Shakti, Kama, Artha and Shanti. These titles
immediately recall the four "Purusharthas" in Hindu thought. But
the titles are not strictly relevant to the stories in all the cases.
Nevertheless, at least two of these stories are among the better short
stories of recent times. "Dharma" begins as a conventional ghost
story, but develops into a subtle study in psychology. Major Antia
returns to his ancestral home after retirement, though he is warned
that the house, deserted for a long time, is haunted. He encounters
the ghost, which, he realizes, is his own boyhood self, with a guilt
consciousness about his having been responsible for the death of his
 17

brother in an avoidable accident. With this realization, the ghost

vanishes. The other story, Shakti is entirely different in spirit and
tone. This is a diverting account of high society politics.
A similar lack of technical innovation is also seen in Of War and
War's Alarms (1997) by R.W. Desai (b.1934), another short story
writer. In his Preface, To the Reader, Desai declares that his aim in
writing these stories is "to convey an impression with the maximum
economy and felicity of expression."9 These admirable intentions are
not however actually carried out in practice, as the title story itself
shows. In this narrative of over eleven pages, as many as three are
devoted to an introduction of the narrator. On the other hand, some
stories like Watch the Box, read like extended anecdotes. Most of the
stories depend heavily on situational developments and very few
have a psychological interest, like Thou Shalt Not, a sensitive study of
an aged father's incestuous relationship with his middle-aged, blind
daughter.
According to Shyamala A. Narayan, "Among the few short
story writers who have tried to experiment with the form, Amit
Chaudhuri is perhaps the most notable. In the nine short narratives
in A Strange and Sublime Address (1991), he discards the story element
altogether, and concentrates on quotidian life in Calcutta, noting
minute details."10 Some of his stories are beautiful character-sketches
like The Happiest Man in the World, which presents an old uncle living
alone in London and refusing to return to India, because he cannot
hope to find it unchanged, jadav and The New Maidservant are also
 18

character-sketches. There are narratives which comprise only a single

incident.
This Time I Promise it'll be Different (1994) by Makarand
Paranjape is a putatively experimental short story collection. In his
Afterword, the author says that a number of his stories are
"somewhat meta-fictional,... they are stories about writing
stories...(concerned with) the nature of the creative process itself."11
A careful reading of the stories themselves, however, does not seem
to substantiate these claims. Some of the stories are simple character-
sketches e.g. in Yayati, an eminent old scientist regrets he wasted his
youth in work, without enjoying himself; and the other story The
Local Writer presents an angry young man rebelling against the
establishment.
An interesting example of thematic experimentation is
provided by One Day I locked my Flat in Soul City (1995) by R. Raj Rao
(b.1955, not to be confused with Raja Rao, the author of The Serpent
and the Rope). In stories like Confession of a Boy Lover and Moonlight
Tandoori, the author boldly celebrates homosexuality. While this
brave attempt to widen the thematic horizons of the short story is
certainly commendable, one wonders whether the writer has been
fully successful in conveying to us the essence of the homosexual
experience, the distinctive way in which it differs from normal love,
and its psychological and other repercussions. He seems to remain
content with merely showing social responses to it.
 19

Tales of Old and New Madras (1989) by S. Muthiab. is a collection,

of stories which is almost a history book. Published just after the city
celebrated the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of its founding,
it contains thirty-five stories drawn from the history of the city, one
for each decade of the city's existence. Interesting historical events
come to life, while the newer tales provide a good commentary on
recent political events.
The leading new novelists of the last two decades have
generally been men with the exception of Arundhati Roy, but the
short story seems to be largely a feminine preserve. Most male
novelists seem to write short stories as a kind of subsidiary activity to
their novels, the situation seems to be reversed in the case of women,
whose favoured form is the short story. Some leading short story
writers like Bulbul Sharma, Anjana Appachana and Neelum Sharan
Gour have attempted writing novels; others like Nisha da Cunha,
have dedicated themselves to the shorter form alone.
Among the older women novelists, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and
Anita Desai are the only major ones to publish their stories in book
form. R.P. Jhabvala has been mentioned earlier. Anita Desai's second
volume, Diamond Dust (2000) is not as successful as her first
collection, Games at Twilight and Other Stories (1978). The earlier
stories were set entirely in India, but three of the nine stories here are
about life in the U.S.A., while one is set in Mexico. The last two
decades have witnessed the growth of a new category of Indian
English writing, which could be called "N.R.I." The work of these
 20

writers of the diaspora focuses on the "imaginary homelands" which

Rushdie calls migratory identities, and hybridity. The primary
concern of their work is the life of the immigrant - day-to-day life in
India is not so important. Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies:
Stories of Bengal, Boston and Beyond (1999) is the best known book in
this category. Anita Desai moved to America early in the nineties (at
present, she is a member of the faculty at M.I.T., Cambridge,
Massachusetts) and her work since then belongs to this category. The
best story in Diamond Dust, Winters cape' deals with the relationship
between a young American girl and her Indian mothers-in-law. The
women come all the way to America because they wish to help at the
birth of their grandchild. They realize soon enough that they are a
burden rather than a help to the American mother. The plight of the
Indian man trying to bridge two worlds is depicted with feeling,
though Desai introduces an unnecessary touch of the exotic by
making him have two mothers, the biological mother who bore him
and her sister who has brought him up. In The Artist's Life, a young
schoolgirl finds her illusions about artists shattered when she
observes the plight of the tenant living on their property . According
to Shyamala A. Narayan, "The stories set abroad are better than the
Indian ones, which are quite without merit. Desai's recreation of the
Indian scene seems to be based on memory. The descriptions are not
completely false, it is more as if we are seeing things through a lens
which is slightly out of focus."12
 21

Shashi Deshpande is one of the few writers who is equally

adept in both forms, the novel and the short story. She started her
writing career in 1970, with short stories published in magazines like
Eve's Weekly, Femina, The Illustrated weekly of India and Mirror. These
were later collected in The Legacy and Other Stories (1971), The Miracle
and Other Stories (1986), It Was Dark (1986) and It Was the Nightingale
(1986). Another collection, The Intrusion and Other Stories (1993)
contains old as well as newer stories. The authentic recreation of
India is the outstanding feature of her work; the Indian reader
especially the woman reader can identify with the characters and
their problems. She does not write about the India of Maharajas or
snake charmers, or the grinding poverty of the Indian masses. She
writes about another kind of deprivation - emotional. The woman
bereft of love, understanding and companionship is the centre of her
work. She shows how traditional Indian society is biased against
woman, but she recognizes that it is very often women who oppress
their sisters, though their values are the consequence of centuries of
indoctrination. Many of her stories are about familial relationships -
husband-wife relationships or the bond between mother and
daughter. One of her best stories, "The Intrusion", is about the
wedding night of a young educated girl who has submitted to a
marriage arranged by her parents. Most of the stories are woman-
centred, and derive a rare power and immediacy from being narrated
by the protagonist.
 22

Like Shashi Deshpande, Dina Mehta too started her writing

career with short stories, collected in The Other Woman and Other
Stories (1981). The title story has a touch of humour about it; it is not
about the usual love triangle, it is about the complex power balance
between husband and wife. Vimla, with a degree in English
Literature, looks down on her husband because he writes popular
screenplays, featuring an imitation of James Bond. Stung by her
contempt, Magan Lai starts working on an original script with such
dedication that the wife is sure that he is devoted to a mistress. The
husband's attempts to convince her are of no avail, but they help him
get the upper hand because the wife fears her "rival". Dina Mehta's
stories present Indian life with a focus on women. She has also
published her second collection entitled "Miss Menon Did Not
Believe in Magic and Other Stories (1994).
Vera Sharma (b.1926), a poet is the author of two collections of
short stories: The Unrepentant and Other Stories (1982) and Naina and
Other Indian Stories (1989) Mer characters are set in a specific Indian
community, with its linguistic and other peculiarities. She sensitively
portrays the changes that are slowly taking place in Indian society;
women get a chance to choose their husbands, though the traditional
opposition to such "love marriages" continues. Familial bonds are
investigated in all their complexity - possessiveness and selfless
service are both aspects of maternal love. Some other women poets
have published short stories. Sunita Jain, a leading poet in Hindi and
English, has published two collections of short stories, including The
 23

Eunuch of Time and Other Stories (1986).C. Vimala Rao and Malathi
Rao have one book of poems each, followed by short stories collected
in Different Ways (1996); and Come for a Coffee, Please (1982) and And in
Benares Flows the Ganga: Short Stories (1993) respectively.
Nisha Da Cunha's stories in Old Cypress (1991) are pervaded by
a sense of loss. Da Cunha (b.1934) has turned to fiction after teaching
English for almost three decades, but there is nothing academic about
her stories. She uses the language with the sensibility of a poet; the
imagery is never obtrusive, yet evokes the mood and sensibility of
the protagonist with great vividness. She does not limit the length of
her short story; some stories are the usual 2000-5000 words, but
others are novellas. The title story Old Cypress is almost 20000 words
long. The protagonist teaches English in a college, and her language
reflects her inwardness with English literature. Old Cypress is the
name of an old house on a tea estate chosen by the couple for their
retirement. But her husband prefers to continue in bustling Bombay
after retirement for he has a twenty-six year old mistress, younger
than their son. Nisha Da Cunha is bom in Gujarat, but she does not
write about Gujarati villages. She prefers to set her stories in Bombay,
or Goa, her husband's state. In her stories Nisha da Cunha
concentrates on the emotions of grief and loneliness, or the
frustrations of old age, rather than the heat, dust and poverty of
India.
A number of women short story writers have made their debut
in the 'nineties'. With the exception of Nisha da Cunha, all these
 24

writers were bom after Indian Independence, and English does not
have any colonial associations for them. Their work is marked by an
impressive feel for the language, and a first hand response to life in
contemporary India, with all its regional variations. They generally
write about the urban middle class, the stratum of society they know
best. Anjana Appachana, Manju Kak, Bulbul Sharma, Neelum Sharan
Gour, Subhadra Sengupta, Deepa Shah, Kalpana Swaminathan and
Anita Nair all made their debut with short stories.
Most of the stories in Anjana Appachana's Incantations and
Other Stories (1992) reveal the misery of being bom a girl in
traditional India. Even the men can find no happiness in personal
relationships; they are so busy conforming to traditional roles.
Almost all the stories are depressing, the exception being When
Anklets Tinkle. The educated girl's attempts to break out of the mould
are bound to fail, as in the story Babu. The narrator can remain herself
only by walking out of her marriage to Siddhartha, whom she loves.
The choice is between independence and fulfillment in marriage and
motherhood: being married is to be "fat, comforting, unexciting,
exacting, loving, practical, oozing security and discontentment."13
Bulbul Sharma is a naturalist and the author and illustrator of A
Book of Indian Birds. My Sainted Aunts (1992), her first book of fiction,
contains eight short stories. The stories are funny, but pathos lies just
under the surface. Her people belong to the older generation in
Bengal. The Child Bride, for instance, reveals the feelings of seven-
year-old Mini, a rich landowner's daughter; everyone in her
 25

husband's house looks down on her because she is dark-

complexioned, the only kind person is Uma, a child widow. All the
stories have women protagonists. Bulbul Sharma is realistic, she is
fully aware of the cruel customs which suppress women. But she
avoids the dark and melancholy portrayal of womanhood found in
Anjana Appachana's stories.
Neelum Sharan Gout's first book, Grey Pigeon and Other Stories
(1993) reveals a variety of literary styles and topics. The protagonist
in A New Year's Party Geoffrey Fernandes is a lonely widower
celebrating the New Year by throwing a party for old Alphonse and
teenager Sheena with a surprising twist at the end. Each of the stories
is remarkable in its own way. Gour's second collection, Winter
Companions and Other Stories (1997) is equally good. Unlike stories by
other women writers, it is not woman centred, though there are
stories like Two Women, Two Trees which express a woman's sense of
loss. The title story is about two old men who meet in a park in a
small town. Gour, unlike Vikram Chandra (Love and Longing in
Bombay), does not write about the metropolis.
Manjula Padmanabhan, a leading cartoonist, is another
outstanding short story writer. She generally favours somewhat
longer Stories in her first collection, Hot Death Cold Soup (1996), and
her work is notable for its humour. Many of the stories are about the
problems of communication between human beings, the difficulties
of overcoming barriers of culture, class and even gender perceptions.
 26

Manju Kak is a painter, but First Light in Colonelpura (1994) does

not contain disquisitions on painting. Through the consciousness of
the narrator, a young girl who grows up in the course of the book,
one sees the changes in the small town of Colonelpura, peopled by a
host of well realized characters.
Shobha De has earned the name of "Pom Queen" because the
social realism of her novels is drowned in salacious details. Her
collection of short stories, Small Betrayals (1995), is her most serious
work. Her roots in the middle class are revealed in this book, which
does not wallow in sex.
Esther David's first book was a novel about Jewish life in
Ahmedabad, The Walled City (1997). Her new book By the Sabarmati
(1999) contains twenty-two women-centred stories. The author claims
that they were recounted to her by poor women she met. The stories
are quite realistic, and present a vivid picture of Indian society. But
they are rather depressing; it is not woman's fate to be happy. All the
men are presented in a poor light. The exception is Ae last story, a
long one about a travelling "bahuroopi", an actor who impersonates
many roles.
Kamala Das has published some short stories in English, but
they are quite inferior as compared to her poetry. A Doll for the Child
Prostitute (1977) was poorly written with undue importance given to
sex; Padmavati the Harlot and Other Stories (1992) which reprints some
of the same stories, is no better. However, her fiction written in
 27

Malayalam (under the name Madhavi Kutty) enjoys a high

reputation.
Lakshmi Kannan has published three collections of short
stories, all based on work originally written in Tamil: Rhythms: A
Collection of Short Stories (1986), Parijata and Other Stories (1990) and
India Gate and Other Stories (1993). Real lives in contemporary India,
and the sensibility of the middle class, are presented in a style which
is poetic without drawing undue attention to it. The double
standards for children because of gender- bias are a recurring theme;
women of the older generation uphold this inequality. Lakshmi
Kannan's stories are complex, yet readable.
In recent times, the almost mass exodus of Asians and Africans
to the west has invited the attention of literary critics and writers
towards problems posed by the basic difference in the culture of the
West and that of the Non-West. As a natural consequence, the Indian
expatriates, in their writings have reflected upon what we may
consider today as an expatriate sensibility, which has been generated
due to the cultural disparity and emotional integration. A note of
alienation does exist in the expatriate sensibility, yet they refuse to
forget India. Expatriation basically differs from immigration in its
concept of assimilation. An expatriate will always carry his country
with him, betraying notes of nostalgia or aversion as the case may be.
Both V.S.Naipaul and Bharati Mukherjee have dealt with Indian life
realistically and poignantly in their fiction, depicting their dreams
and heart-aches with irony.
 28

Immigrants, though opposite of expatriates are both exiles in

their country; but whereas an expatriate, in trying to maintain his
identity voluntarily or due to racism, follows the mosaic pattern as in
Canada, the immigrant embraces assimilation and subscribes to the
melting-pot theory of America. Bharati Muldherjee e.g. after fifteen
years stay in Canada felt an expatriate and became an immigrant as
she became one with the Americans. Indian immigrant women, both
first and second generation have produced a sizeable body of short
fiction. It is distinguished by masterly use of the language. A
common weakness of the fiction written by non-resident Indians,
especially those of the younger generations, is their poor grasp of the
actual when writing about India. In spite of this drawback, the short
stories written by the Indian immigrant women have made a
significant place in the Indian writing in English. It is due to this
aspect that I have undertaken the task of writing a thesis on the
contemporary short story in Indian writing in English. In my thesis I
have undertaken to discuss the Indian immigrant women writers e.g.
Bharati Mukherjee, Uma Parameswaran, Mena Abdullah and
Jhumpa Lahiri. A separate chapter has been allotted to each of them
and that is why I am not going to discuss them in this introductory
chapter.
Thus a cursory glance at the state of affairs obtaining in Indian-
English short story convinces the reader that it has traversed a long
course of journey (nearly of one hundred years) and has now reached
a stage, through the salutary efforts of a few talented writers, where it
 29

can make a breakthrough by exploring certain new areas and

techniques. Despite the natural hardships of language and
expression, the short story has made some headway and has become
truly Indian after shaking off the initial foreign influences. The short
story writers have come to realize that their own tradition of both
folk- tales and fables has been rich enough to feed and support them
in moments of necessity, and that they have just to look around for
their keen and lively subjects, to which they have tailored their
modem techniques.
 30

References

1 A.J. Merson, Modem Short Stories: First Series(Bombay,

Macmillan India Ltd., 1981), p.9.
2 Prof. A.N.Dwivedi, Studies in Contemporary Indian English
Short Story, B.R.Publishing Corporation, Delhi,1991, p.13.
3 Ibid., p.13.
4 C.V. Venugopal, The Indian Short Story in English, (Bareilly:
Prakash Book Depot, 1976), p.31.5
5 V.A. Shahane, Khushwant Singh (New York: Twayne
Publishers Inc., 1972), p.67.
6 Randhir Khare, A Collection of Short Stories, Orient
Paperbacks, 2000, p. 16.
7 M.K. Naik, Indian English Literature 1980-2000, Pencraft
International, Delhi, 2004,p.l23.
8 Indian English Fiction 1980-1990 :An Assessment, Eds. Nilufer
E. Bharucha and Vilas Sarang, B.R.Publishing Corporation,
New Delhi, 1994, p.61.
9 R.W.Desai, The Collection of Short Stories, Kitab Mahal, New
Delhi,2000,p.15.
10 Shyamala A. Narayan, Indian English Literature, Pencraft
International, Delhi, 2004, p.126.

11 Ibid.p.126.
 31

12 Ibid, p.129.
13 Anuradha Roy, Patterns of Feminist Consciousness in Indian
,
Women Writers, New Delhi: Prestige 19 33 p.72-