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100 Indian Stories: A Feast of Remarkable Short Fiction from the 19th, 20th, and 21st Centuries, edited by writer, translator and poet AJ Thomas, is an ambitious collection of Indian short fiction. Thomas has previously edited The Greatest Malayalam Stories Ever Told and is the former editor of Indian Literature, the Sahitya Akademi’s bi-monthly journal. His latest anthology, spanning more than 800 pages, brings together 100 selected stories written by some of the finest writers in various Indian languages, from the 19th century onwards. Thomas notes in his introduction that almost 80 per cent of the stories in this collection have been translated into English from various Indian languages. The collection includes stories from the 20th century and concludes with stories by contemporary writers from the 21st century, offering a wide range of stories from almost every part of the country.
In an conversation with Scroll, AJ Thomas discusses the idea behind the mammoth anthology, the evolution of the short story form from the 19th century onward, the growing need for quality translations and translators of stories published in various Indian languages, and why he believes Indian literature has an “exotic value” in the West.
How did you come up with the idea of this anthology that brings together a diverse collection of 100 Indian short stories? What was the selection process and criteria in terms of genre, time period, themes and body of work of each individual writer whose stories ended up being included in this anthology?
First of all, I will have to make a statement about my background here. I edited Indian Literature, the bimonthly English journal of Sahitya Akademi, the National Academy of Letters, India, as Assistant Editor, and then Editor, over a period of nearly 20 years between 1997 and 2020, with a three-year gap when I had to be away from for teaching English in Libya.
However, before I joined Indian Literature, I had the opportunity to be acquainted with the great names in fiction in the various Indian languages, through a lucky introduction to the Indian literary scenario. I was commissioned by my friend Rubin D’Cruz, then Assistant Editor for Malayalam in National Book Trust as the copy editor for their three-volume book project titled, Masterpieces of Indian Literature, headquartered in Thiruvananthapuram, in the early 1990s, under Dr KM George’s editorship.
Once I joined Indian Literature, I was able to have actual contact with several senior writers like Bhisham Sahni, Amrita Pritam, Qurratulain Hyder, Krishna Sobti, Nirmal Verma, Ashokamitran, Sundara Ramaswamy, Vijaydan Detha, Kamaleshwar, Mahashweta Devi, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Mamoni Raisom Goswamy, Khushwant Singh, KS Duggal, Manoj Das, Ambai, Damodar Mauzo, Pratibha Rai, Uday Prakash, Shashi Tharoor, Bama, Navtej Sarna, Vivek Shanbag, and many younger writers too. I had developed personal friendships with quite a few of the older generation writers like Vijaydan Detha. I had known Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, Thakazhi, OV Vijayan, MT Vasudevan Nair, UR Ananthamurthy and Paul Zacharia early on. The latter two have played very special roles in the development of my career as a writer and translator. Ajeet Cour has given me opportunities to read my poetry in her poetry gatherings for the last 25 years.
What I mean to say is that it is not just the impersonal textual acquaintance that I have with these writers as an editor; but I am aware of the creative universes of several of them, through personal interaction. I have read and selected the short stories of many of these authors for Indian Literature over two decades.
Another advantage I had was that I was given the opportunity by Sahitya Akademi, to compile and edit Best of Indian Literature, a two-book, four-volume publication in crown size, hardcover, encompassing the best of short stories, poetry, and literary criticism published in Indian Literature, over fifty years from its inception: 1957 to 2007. The stories carried in translation in Indian Literature during this period were from the very beginnings of the short story in many of our literatures spanning over more than half a century when IL was established in 1957 and progressing over half a century till 2007. Several of the authors chosen for the present volume, were featured in those volumes too. This was a special exposure I gained by virtue of my lucky placement in the editorial team of the National Literary Journal of India.
Therefore, it is my overall awareness of Indian short fiction, from the vantage of an editor who has had the privilege of dealing with the English translations of the short stories from 24 national literatures of India over two decades, that the bringing out of the present selection straddling roughly the last 125 years happened.
In the selection process, the chronology reckoning the dates of birth of the authors comes first. Then, their stature was accepted unequivocally in the annals of the literary history of our nation; next comes the consideration of the different phases of that literary history, for example, beginning with the nascent nationalist struggle, its progression over the next four decades reaching its culmination in the gaining of India’s Independence, but before that, the political, social and cultural mobilisation to its run-up, as marked by the exhortation to educate the girl child, empathy towards the sufferings of housewives and women in general, and later on, the uplift and valorisation of the Dalits and all kinds of subaltern people, mainly through Gandhi and Ambedkar. Then we have the post-independence/Partition, Nehruvian, post-Emergency, post-liberalisation, run up to the millennium, post-millennium kind of divisions.
Another way of looking at it is by following literary movements like the Renaissance, the various hues and shades of realism, beginning with Socialist Realism, as in the case of the Progressives, the sentimental romantics, romantic realists, leading to modernism, after-modernism (not “postmodernism” in the Western sense, as it is not applicable in our context), then the various stages of modernism past the 1980s and 1990s, then the millennials, and the post-millennials, in that order.
Broadly humanist themes only hold the readers’ interest in the long run, with a sprinkling of the experimental, sci-fi, etc. Women’s lives, Dalit, tribal and environmental themes were followed, mainly post-independence.
The stories featured cover a long time period from the 19th century to the present times. How has the short story evolved over the decades in India across different languages and what are some broad trends in the evolution of the short story form in India?
The short story originated and developed and reached maturity mainly over the last one hundred and fifty–plus years in our country. In the “big” literatures like Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, Odia, Gujarati, Assamese, Punjabi etc., prose settled into modernity around the mid-19th century, mostly through the promotional activities of Christian missionaries.
Newspapers and magazines made the use of prose a regular affair, and it became a stable form of written expression, especially among the commoners. Western fiction models like the novel and the short story developed in the big Indian languages, through their by-now-established prose usage. The earliest short story in the Western form was published in Bengali, in 1873, followed by Malayalam (1891), Assamese (1892), Odia (1898), Kannada, (1900), Hindi (1901), Tamil (1905), Urdu (1908). Telugu, (1 910), Sindhi (1914), Gujarati (1918) etc.
The Age of Enlightenment in Britain, the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity propagated by the French Revolution, and the subsequent great Western Romantic Movement in literature had reached and spread in our country through English education, notably in the Bengal Renaissance, beginning with the early 19th century, and spreading to the various provinces of British India. The gradual spread of Western education in our country ensured the entry of modern ideas that showed feudalism and caste discrimination as regressive. This ended up modernising bhasha literatures in their developing stage, mainly through fiction, short fiction, drama, biography and autobiography, travelogue etc. The short story, as a form, gained from this revolutionary transformation of literatures in the 19th century.
Next, a few decades later, the socialist ideals spread through the Russian Revolution, and furthered the humanist influences that had manifested early on. The Progressive Literature Movement from the mid-1930s, which celebrated stories of the poor, downtrodden, marginalised and outcast found their way into mainstream literatures like Bengali, Malayalam, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Urdu, Hindi etc. Thus, Socialist realism gained a firm foothold.
While it is well-nigh impossible to delineate the contours of the evolution of short fiction in the different languages of our country, certain broad trends are discernible, as described earlier. In the seventy or more years since the birth of the short story, until independence, it was mainly social realism, nationalistic themes, social issues and plot-character-action narration models that determined the short story. Then after the various realisms, short story writers transitioned into modernism. In the ten-plus big literatures of the country, roughly beginning with the mid-1950s, it gathered strength in the next decade and a half, generally speaking. Then came the Emergency and “after-modernism” or “post-modernism,” (since “postmodernism” as understood in the West may not have relevance in our context, as described earlier).
Satire, employment of irony, dark humour etc had been introduced early in the short story, but the post-independence scenario witnessed the adoption of a whole range of different themes –existentialism, absurdism, magic realism, expressionism, stream-of-consciousness writing, crime, science fiction and such.
The years since independence witnessed a phenomenal increase in the number of Indian women writers as women’s education became fashionable and their lot improved socially, as reflected in the short stories they wrote and got established, like Lalithambika Antarjanam of Malayalam who began writing in 1929, followed by K Saraswathi Amma, Rajalakshmi and Madhavikkutty (Kamala Das), to just quote from one language.
Dalit and tribal fiction, notably short fiction, became a force to reckon with in languages like Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Gujarati, Malayalam etc.
Short stories with the theme of conservation of environment and ecology, balancing the new life of scientific and technological advancements and IT revolution, followed. Mobile phone and social media revolution are the concerns of the millennials and Gen-Z. Stories of groups like LGBTQ+ and the differently gendered also came into prominence at this time. I published a special issue of Indian Literature in 2012 on this theme.
This is a short narration of the development of the short story over the late 19th, 20th and early 21st centuries.
Do you think Indian publishing houses bring out enough short story collections of high literary merit, also in translations? Is there a growing need for quality translators and translations so that a lot of excellent short stories written in different regional languages can be translated into English for a wider readership?
My understanding is that in the big literatures of India, short story collections and anthologies are published and sold well; at least that is the impression I get from close association with literatures like Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi, Odia, Assamese, Kannada, Gujarati etc. In all these languages there are literary and cultural magazines, like weeklies, fortnightlies, monthlies etc, which have special Puja/Diwali/Onam/Vishu/Bihu/New Year numbers, with a glut of high-quality short stories.
When it comes to translations, I feel that there are good English translators for most of these languages; also, there are Hindi translators who can deal with many of the big language short stories. When it comes to translating into each other, among these literatures, I think language zones, like the southern zone with the four Dravidian languages, the eastern one with Bengali, Assamese and Odia, the northern one with Punjabi, Dogri and Kashmiri, the western zone with Gujarati, Sindhi, Marathi and Konkani, the all-pervasive ones like English, Hindi and Urdu serve this purpose.
There indeed is a growing need for quality translators into English from all these languages, to take our short story among ourselves nationally, and also hopefully to present them internationally in due course of time.
You have served as the editor of Indian Literature, the Sahitya Akademi Journal, for nearly two decades. From your experience as an editor, writer and translator, and having edited some short story anthologies, which Indian language and region has a more popular short story writing tradition and a rich body of short fiction that you think should be translated more into English to make it accessible to the English readership?
Having been the editor of Indian Literature, the bimonthly English journal of Sahitya Akademi, the Indian National Academy of Literature, which attributes equal status to all its 24 recognised literatures, it will be unbecoming on my part to single out one or more literatures, to promote their short story through improved means of translation into English. However, I can, for sure give my opinion as to which of these languages have a strong tradition of the short story – beginning with my own literature Malayalam, you have Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Odia, Assamese etc., which have very strong short story bases.
You write in your introduction that many masterpieces in different languages that were pointed out to you for this anthology hadn’t been yet translated or translations were less than satisfactory. How important are quality translations and translators to bring to the fore more short stories from different regional languages. How challenging was it to find the right translations that did justice to the stories originally written in different Indian languages that were included in this anthology?
Indeed, quality translation into English is all the more important in view of the increasing readership, and possibilities of international exposure to our short story.
The process of assessing the strength of the selected stories, and the quality of their translation is indeed challenging; but we also have had a wealth of good translations that came to us, especially from the early, progressive and modern periods, and the later phases too, from various previous publications of great quality that were already embraced and cherished by the reading public, as you can see from the Acknowledgments.
What are some of your favourite short stories from this anthology? Any particular stories that you wanted to include in the anthology but didn’t in the end due to space constraints or other reasons?
“Rebati,” the Odia story by Fakir Mohan Senapati, and the first to be featured in this anthology. “The Kabuliwallah” by Tagore, “Mahesh,” by Sarat Chandra Chatterjee, “The Shroud,” by Munshi Premchand, “The Blue Light,” by Basheer, “The Flood,” by Thakazhi, “On the Riverbank,” by SK Pottekkad, “Laajwanti,” by Rajinder Singh Bedi, “The Hanging,” by OV Vijayan, “Vision”, by MT Vasudevan Nair, “The Prospect of Flowers,” by Ruskin Bond, “A Sheet,” by Salam Bin Razzaq, “Coinsanv’s Cattle,” by Damodar Mauzo, “Reflections of a Hen in Her Last Hour,” by Paul Zacharia, “The Adivasi Will Not Dance,” by Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, “For the Greater Common Good,” by Aruni Kashyap, “The Devouring Sea,” by Amal and a few others touch you deeply, leaving their impression permanently in your heart. This is not to say that the other stories are in any way less worthy, but that subjectively speaking, these stories have given me an unforgettable personal experience. The Malayalam ones among them are, all except two, my translations, and so, they are there within me.
I had wanted to include at least two Malayalam stories by women, and at least one Dalit story, but the space constraints came in the way.
Being an expert on the Indian short story, how do you see the contemporary short stories being published in India and does it reflect the social and political realities and the times we live in? Is the modern Indian short story finding enough readership in mainstream literary publications and publishing houses compared to the novel form?
I think the short story and poetry are two genres that reflect quotidian realities most effectively. The novel being the longer form fiction, and as it involves great planning and deliberation, it can hardly be spontaneous, reflexive, and reactive like poetry or shorter forms fiction can.
I think in the bhasha periodicals that carry literary and cultural sections, the short story is an unavoidable feature, and their readership among the common people, not particularly scholars or the literary-oriented ones, is enthusiastic, to say the least, as far I have been able to sense.
Finally, what can a non-Indian reader – those not familiar with the diversity and tradition of Indian storytelling – take away from this anthology in terms of a broader understanding of Indian literature, culture and society?
This is a hard question, indeed. In my experience, our literature primarily has an exotic value in the West, and also in industrialised societies like Korea, Hong Kong and Australia, where I have attended literature festivals/conferences. In the UK, the US and Europe where I have had the occasion to take a collection of short stories of Paul Zacharia I had co-translated and read in select audiences in the summer of 1997, when I did a four-month tour of these parts of the world, I was actually surprised to note the look of incomprehension on the faces of the typical western literature enthusiasts.
I am sure many of you would readily recall the comments an American lady living for the last few years in India is making, saying that it is strange and hard to understand certain Indian ways of living. I am mentioning it merely to contextualise my argument. Cultural peculiarities are hard to comprehend, irrespective of their exotic value; and so is literature which is heavily laden with cultural ethos, which is the way it should ideally be.
I believe translations into English and Hindi should serve mainly for our national reading. The fiction and non-fiction publishing in India is one of the biggest in the language worldwide, but it caters mainly to our internal readership. And that is good enough. Our English is truly an Indian language with two-centuries-old literature. Older than may young Bhasha literatures of our country!
However, great narrations which are not bogged down too much by cultural specificities, in the context of the changed lifestyles and aspirations over the last three decades in our languages, will be appreciated in the West, I believe. The stories that appear in The New Yorker from Asia are examples.
Yet, the old Kipling quote sounds true even now:
Oh, East is East, and West is West,
and never the twain shall meet.”
However, he also goes on to say:
“But there is neither East nor West,
Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face,
Tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!”
Simply, the strength of the narrative will carry the day!
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