A Short History of Reading: David Davidar’s anthology of Indian stories

David Davidar’s anthology of Indian stories is a mix of the predictable and surprising.

Davidar has edited many Indian writers, from Arundhati Roy to Vikram Seth

Long, long ago in a publishing industry that now seems far, far away, a London publisher asked David Davidar to edit an anthology of Indian stories. Presumably, they wanted to enlarge the trail blazed by Adil Jussawalla’s New Writing in India (Penguin, 1974). Davidar turned down the offer on the plea that he had not read enough of Indian writing — yet.

A quarter of a century’s worth of reading later, he has finally published that book from his own house, Aleph. A Clutch of Indian Masterpieces consists of 39 short stories, and the urge to rename it “A Clutch of Indian Miniatures” is physically intense. The authors range from the late 19th century to the present, from Rabindranath Tagore to Kanishk Tharoor. Such collections tend to be shaped like the arrowhead of time. The further back they go, the more predictable and solid the editor’s choices become, since the world has had more time to develop an unspoken consensus on the best work. And so, Rabindranath Tagore heads up the collection, no contest, with one of the finest ghost stories ever, Khudito Pashan. Amitav Ghosh’s translation of the title as The Hunger of Stones disregards grammar for no obvious reason, though. Just to be different, perhaps, since dozens of other translations are uniformly, boringly and accurately titled The Hungry Stones.

Book cover

There’s a lot of predictability about what we may call the ancient period of Indian writing in translation. Munshi Premchand is here with Kafan (The Shroud), Saadat Hasan Manto with Toba Tek Singh and Ismat Chugtai with Lihaaf (Quilt). However, some of the stories are unexpected — one usually anticipates a Swami story from RK Narayan, but he is represented by A Horse and Two Goats, a fine tale about what is gained from failed translation. The editor makes pointed choices nearer our times, when there are excellent writers without number, no consensus on a pan-Indian pecking order, and he cannot be faulted for leaving someone out. Cyrus Mistry and Vilas Sarang are notable unexpected inclusions.

Davidar has provided a personal introduction, instead of the pedantic taxonomies of literary history which often preface such collections. A slice of the readerly life in multicultural India, it will be eerily familiar to his contemporaries. It suggests that almost everyone of a certain class and a curious disposition developed in more or less the same way, whether they were in Kolkata or Vijaywada. Many of them, like Davidar, had no English in their childhood. They learned it from abridged versions of A Tale of Two Cities and Lorna Doone (does anyone read that stuff anymore?), and Davidar found “the names, the customs and the mannerisms of the characters… bizarre.” The Famous Five and Billy Bunter followed, along with the bewilderingly irrelevant Tom Browne’s School Days, while the stream of “vernacular” continued uninterrupted, from relations and the domestic help, and from the street. And finally, decades later, the poor subject of this multicultural experiment read AK Ramanujan, who made sense of it all, and reconciled the estranged father-tongue and mother-tongues forever.

E-mail author: pratik.kanjilal@expressindia.com

📣 For more lifestyle news, click here to join our WhatsApp Channel and also follow us on Instagram