Customer Reviews

Penguin New Writing in India

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This collection is perfect for those who love Indian literature as well as novices. It strikes a good balance between featuring male and female authors, and has a diverse selection of poems and short stories (as well as Mahadevi Varma's brilliant essay on feminism). Some background knowledge on Indian culture and society might be required, though, as the footnotes did not often explain nuances.

This book was published in 1994 and contained 65 works by 55 writers. There were 50 poems, 12 short stories, 1 excerpt from a novel, 1 essay and 1 excerpt from an essay. The poetry took up about one-third of the book, though it felt like much more.

The collection was intended to introduce the reader to the wide range of contemporary Indian writing, while also providing some older works and preserving some linguistic balance. The editors stressed India's existence as a multilingual nation, with a bewildering variety of authors working in many languages and dialects. Ideas of coherence, unity or a fixed literary canon couldn't apply to the range of activity.

Sixteen of the selections were written originally in English. The rest were translated from Hindi (15), Bengali (8), Marathi (5), Tamil (5), Kannada (4), Oriya (4), and a smaller number from Gujarati, Malayalam, Punjabi, Sindhi, Telugu and Urdu.

The oldest authors included were the Hindi poet Mahadevi Varma (1907-87), the Marathi poets P. S. Rege (1910-78) and Vinda Karandikar (1918-), and the novelist/poet Amrita Pritam (1919-2005). Among the youngest were the novelist Shashi Tharoor (1956-), the Marathi poet Aruna Dhere (1957-) and the poet Gagan Gill (1959-).

The introduction said the works ranged from the 1930s through the 60s and the 90s. Very little specific info was provided, but most appeared to be from the 1980s and early 90s. The oldest appeared to be an excerpt from an essay from the 1930s on feminism by the poet Mahadevi Varma. An excerpt from a novel by Krishna Sobti was from the 1960s, as apparently were a short story by the satirist Harishankar Parsai and a poem by Vinda Karandikar. Tharoor's short story was from the 1970s. Nearly half of the works were written by women.

For a number of the short stories, poverty, changing traditions, or unequal relations between the sexes served as the background. Works I appreciated most included a story by Surendra Prakash in which an adult narrator recounted various memories from childhood and troubles in the present, as he visited a temple in connection with the death of a parent. Tharoor's story, written from the point of view of a deprived boy flying to the United States to visit his financial sponsors. And the story by the social satirist Parsai that mocked the institution of the hunger strike and how society responded to it, by having the protagonist go on strike for possession of his friend's wife.

There was also an atmospheric story by Satyajit Ray in which the narrator witnessed a skeptic's possession by a spirit. The setting and other elements of this story seemed completely Indian (a visit to a holy man to see a king cobra, with reference to a parallel incident in the Mahabharata), but at the same time the tale read as if it'd been written by the Indian counterpart of W. W. Jacobs or Lord Dunsany.

For the poetry, themes included a son's relation with his mother (Dahake), a man's description of his beloved (Rath), the hints, looks and gestures of attraction (Patel), a woman's longing for a word or glimpse from her loved one (Kushari Dyson), or the ending of a relationship (Pritam). The stoicism of women (Pande), a young woman's desire to live differently from the older generations (Usha), a woman's relation to her husband (Gill) and a wife's resentment of her husband's limitations (Chandrakanti). There were also a reenactment and protest against the act of sati (Chattopadhyay), and a protest, using the voice of a patronizing husband, of a wife's unequal status (Hiranandani).

Other themes included the creative act (Nandkumar, Singh, Nara), an individual's consciousness, with fragmented images vaguely related to each other (Dev Sen, Alexander, Parthasarathy, Grover). And writers' insight on some other aspect of existence, such as how a question affects us (Rege), the passing of time (Singh), the behavior of American tourists (Sharma) or the type of psychology that continually looked for enemies (Narayan).

Only a small number of the poems referred explicitly to figures from Indian religion, legend or romance. The best of these, for me, was Bhavani's comparison of the avatars of Krishna with a shabby, modern man. Other poems referred to the performance of a ritual to ensure rain and a good harvest (Divakaruni), Los Angeles, detectives, and the Satanic verses (Ali) or mixed the names of Keats, Wordsworth and Shelley with Indian sights and smells (Ramanujan).

A handful of the works by women impersonated the voices of men (Banerjee, Hiranandani), or vice versa (Rath). Sometimes the poems were so abrupt or cryptic that grasping clearly what they were about was beyond me (Kolatkar, Karandikar, Mahapatra). As far as could be judged, caste wasn't explicitly the subject of any pieces in the collection, nor, except in Parsai's satire, was any kind of political activity. One poem in Bengali pictured a murdered boy in the countryside and referred obliquely to a "harvest of violent clashes" (Mukherjee).

As one of the justifications for this anthology, the editors noted the unprecedented interest outside India in writers like Seth, Mukherjee and Rushdie. Yet such authors are known for their prose, not their poetry. In this anthology, fewer than one-quarter of the writers were chosen for their prose fiction; the rest were poets. So the book was really more of an intro to the range of India's poetry than its prose. For readers not that interested in poetry, there was less here, though the few stories included certainly were worthwhile. A drawback for some might be that context on most authors' work was lacking, and the pieces appeared in no particular order.

For prose, more comprehensive anthologies with a bit more background include the Penguin Book of Modern Indian Short Stories (1990, revised 2001), Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing 1947-1997 (1997), Best Loved Indian Stories of the Century (1999) and the Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature (2001, republished in 2004 under the Vintage name). For poetry, the Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry (1995).