By Shana Susan Ninan
Murli Melwani is the perceptive author of Themes In The Indian Short Story In English: An Historical And A Critical Survey. Below is an email interview of his. Keen and crisp observations mark his answers.His remarks are insightful.
SSN: Besides Indian short stories in English being under-projected, what were your reasons to do a critical survey of the same?
MM: The reasons are both literary and personal. First, the literary. Look at all the cultures and sub-cultures we have in this huge country. You need flexible literary forms to convey the essence of these patterns of life. After poetry, the short story is the most flexible of literary forms. A short story can be anything the writer makes it. Something as fragile as Liam O’Flaherty’s sketch of the first flight of a black bird to something as heavily carpentered as Somerset Maugham’s plotted stories of atmosphere, interplay of motive and incisive characterisation. Conveying an unusual or a particular ethnic experience is best done by writing, to use Jane Austen’s phrase, on a “little bit – two inches wide –of ivory”. The short story is that two inches of ivory.
Also, collections of short stories have a tendency to disappear as easily from public memory as they do from library shelves. People are talking about Madhusree Mukherjee’s* portrayal of the Great Bengal Famine, but who remembers Ela Sen’s collection of short stories today?**. The famine occurred in 1943. Ela Sen’s book came out in 1944. Ela Sen’s portrayal is so very authentic. Almost as if she was walking among the starving skeletal figures.
The personal. I made a career change: from a college teacher in India to an exporter in Taiwan. In those days Taipei had only one English book store. Most of the books were on English as a second language! The conversation by and large centered round business charts, figures, targets. I needed to give myself an intellectual lifeline. H.E.Bates’s The Modern Short Story came to my rescue. This book gives us the author’s personal assessment of a number of great short story writers in England, Ireland, America and Russia. This book was my inspiration for a long-term project. I love short stories. I found there was very little critical work on Indian short stories in English. I asked myself, why not pioneer an historical and a critical survey? I got over collections of short stories from India. Made notes for the twenty five years I lived in Taiwan. I put the notes together when I moved to the U.S. The book came out in late 2009.
SSN: What gives short stories their richness? As in, when compared to other forms of writing.
MM; A number of qualities. Suggestiveness, for one. Brevity, for another. Compression, for a third. A short story is really a collaboration between a writer and a reader. The words are the code. The pages are the transmitter. The reader’s imagination is the transistor that receives the waves and reconstructs a whole. It is this elasticity of the short story that makes it such a great form.
SSN: Having been a short story writer yourself, was it easier to critically survey such a topic?
MM: Definitely. I could see how the short story writer was trying to create a character. Assume the author’s aim was to bring alive a character by means of her gestures: at one point he could show her smoothening back her hair with a casual brush of the palm; at another, using her hands to make a point. A skilful writer can suggest the atmosphere of a rainy day by indicating the dampness that permeated the walls. The point is I could read the writer’s intentions.
SSN: What was the inspiration for the cover of your book?
MM: When my publisher asked me what I’d like to emphasise on the cover, I told him to try to depict the traditional and the modern existing side by side. The co-existence of tradition and change are a fact of Indian life. How can short stories writers not tacitly or implicitly acknowledge them? The publisher’s artist did the rest.
SSN: What is the reception of Indian short stories in English abroad, not just the countries with a large Indian population?
MM: To be honest, collections of short stories sell less than novels. The American universities that offer Asian studies carry them. Mostly stories are eye openers for Americans. “There’s hardly anything about caste in this book.” This from a review of Vikram Chandra’s Love and Longing in Bombay. I would not know the situation in other countries.
SSN: Internet, social networking sites and ‘little’ publishers have given a renewed impetus to short stories. Do you think this’ll inspire up and coming writers?
MM: Without doubt. Just pull up e-zine sites. Look at these two online magazines Zoetrope and Narrative. In 2008, Penguin India brought a selection Blogprint: The Winners of the Sulekha.com-Penguin Online Writing Contest. I believe www.sulekha.com received over a thousand entries for the contest.
SSN: Qualities that a short story writer should possess.
MM: A very difficult question. I’ll try to answer it, anyway. He should compress language. He should suggest, rather than pencil in, character. He should hint at, rather than paint the setting. The theme should be self-evident, rather than stated. Raymond Carver’s stories are good models of a short story writer’s craft.
SSN: Any existing short story you think you should’ve written and why.
MM: I wish I could have written Padma Hejmadi’s The Uncles and the Mahatma. It’s a gem of a story. Why? Because it has richness of theme, a touch of comedy, finely etched characters, a deep understanding of Indian tradition.
SSN: Anything else you’d like to comment on.
MM: Two comments, if you will allow me. One, Women writers in India continue to amaze me with their unusual perspectives and experiences. A recent example: the stories by women in Shinie Antony’s anthology, Why We Don’t Talk. Two, I am pleased at the growth in the number of publishers in India in the last few years. This means more openings for writers.
Note:
*in her book, Churchill’s Secret War. Tranquebar
**Darkening Days. Sushil Gupta & Co
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Thursday, September 2, 2010
REVIEW IN THE JOURNAL OF INDIAN WRITING IN ENGLISH, July 2010 issue
Critical works on Indian Short stories are very rare, although the genre of short story is practiced by a large number of writers. Murli Das Melwani has done a great service to the academic world by offering his valuable historical and critical survey of the Indian short story from the earliest writer, K.C.Dutt (1835) to the latest one, Nikika Laloo Tariang. Though the genre of short story is neglected as if it is a step-child of literature, it provides a wealth of diversified material to the researcher, who is sophisticated in his approach. As Melwani rightly suggests, the vision of short fiction is diversified, mosaic, piecemeal and kaleidoscopic. Hence it offers a challenge to the researcher, if not to a common reader, to discern the hidden patterns of thought, behaviour and culture. Far from parroting the Western critical concepts, Melwani rightly goes to the Indian roots of the genre like the Jataka Tales and Kathasaritsagara and juxtaposes them with the Western masters like Maupassant, Chekhov and others. After offering a perceptive introduction to the theory of short story from a global perspective, he traces the growth of it by briefly discussing all the major Indian short story writers of different decades.
The chapter on the beginnings of the Indian short story during 1835-1935 is very valuable as it offers information on writers like Cornelia Sorabji, S. B.Bannerjea, A.S.P. Ayyar and Shankar Ram, who are not sufficiently known to modern scholars. The first flowering of the short story writers (1935-1945) is attributable to the celebrities like Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao and Manjeri Iswaran. The following chapters introduce the other short story writers, who are not easily visible in critical works, like Leslie Noronha, Nargis Dalal, Rishi Reddy and others. He has covered the works of writers published up to 2007. He must be congratulated for giving a legitimate place for these writers in the history of Indian English short fiction. But the present reviewer is surprised to notice that his own two short story collections like The Thief of Nagarahalli and Other Stories (1999, 2008, short listed for the Commonwealth Fiction Prize for the Best First Book from Eurasia in 2000), and The Rebellious Rani of Belavadi and Other Stories (2001) are conspicuously missing from Melwani’s otherwise excellent survey.
The greatness of Melwani’s survey is to be found in the fact that he has given the award of recognition to almost all the Indian English writers of short fiction; that he has made very insightful and candid remarks about the general qualities of each short story writer and particular features of important short stories of the same writer; and that he comments on the major concerns of each decade seen in the stories of the writers of that decade. On the whole, Melwani has shown how the short story has moved from fantasy to realism, from the supernatural to the social and from the religious to the secular and psychological dimension. He rightly pays homage to the little magazines and small publishers, who have nourished the genre of short story in India to a great extent. Similarly he deplores the absence of attractive literary awards and prizes in India exclusively meant for Indian English writers, especially short story writers.
Melwani’s book is happily free from the fashionable, trendy, stodgy, Western critical jargon and may be enjoyed by the academic scholar as well as by the common reader alike. He deserves our heart-felt congratulations for his hard won insights, which are a product of life-long dedication and cogitation and not of the hasty conclusions of a Ph.D. scholar. The book provides abundant material and direction to the M. Phil and Ph.D. scholars, who will be eagerly looking for fresh topics for fruitful research. One hopes that Melwani keeps on revising and updating his valuable book every year.
Reviewed by
Basavaraj Naikar
Professor & Chairman,Department of English
Karnatak University, Dharwad 580 003
The chapter on the beginnings of the Indian short story during 1835-1935 is very valuable as it offers information on writers like Cornelia Sorabji, S. B.Bannerjea, A.S.P. Ayyar and Shankar Ram, who are not sufficiently known to modern scholars. The first flowering of the short story writers (1935-1945) is attributable to the celebrities like Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao and Manjeri Iswaran. The following chapters introduce the other short story writers, who are not easily visible in critical works, like Leslie Noronha, Nargis Dalal, Rishi Reddy and others. He has covered the works of writers published up to 2007. He must be congratulated for giving a legitimate place for these writers in the history of Indian English short fiction. But the present reviewer is surprised to notice that his own two short story collections like The Thief of Nagarahalli and Other Stories (1999, 2008, short listed for the Commonwealth Fiction Prize for the Best First Book from Eurasia in 2000), and The Rebellious Rani of Belavadi and Other Stories (2001) are conspicuously missing from Melwani’s otherwise excellent survey.
The greatness of Melwani’s survey is to be found in the fact that he has given the award of recognition to almost all the Indian English writers of short fiction; that he has made very insightful and candid remarks about the general qualities of each short story writer and particular features of important short stories of the same writer; and that he comments on the major concerns of each decade seen in the stories of the writers of that decade. On the whole, Melwani has shown how the short story has moved from fantasy to realism, from the supernatural to the social and from the religious to the secular and psychological dimension. He rightly pays homage to the little magazines and small publishers, who have nourished the genre of short story in India to a great extent. Similarly he deplores the absence of attractive literary awards and prizes in India exclusively meant for Indian English writers, especially short story writers.
Melwani’s book is happily free from the fashionable, trendy, stodgy, Western critical jargon and may be enjoyed by the academic scholar as well as by the common reader alike. He deserves our heart-felt congratulations for his hard won insights, which are a product of life-long dedication and cogitation and not of the hasty conclusions of a Ph.D. scholar. The book provides abundant material and direction to the M. Phil and Ph.D. scholars, who will be eagerly looking for fresh topics for fruitful research. One hopes that Melwani keeps on revising and updating his valuable book every year.
Reviewed by
Basavaraj Naikar
Professor & Chairman,Department of English
Karnatak University, Dharwad 580 003
The Review in The Hindu newspaper, February 9, 2010
Aesop’s Fables, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Boccaccio’s The Decameron and the Indian Jataka tales, the Panchatantra, Somadeva’s Katha-sarit-sagara are among the forerunners of the short story. The advent of its present form can be traced to the early 19th century and of its parent, the novel, to the 18th century. The brevity of its narrative, single action, and thematic focus naturally met with a wordwide reception and thus short fiction matured into an artistic genre, casting its net across the world. Murli Das Melwani’s book makes a historical survey right from the beginning to the present-day. Such a wide-ranging critical survey has hitherto not been attempted. He raises two weighty questions that merit our attention. First, has the Indian short story writer contributed anything of value to it? and second, has his work made the form more flexible, as say, Hemingway’s or Chekov’s did? Melwani subjects all short-story writers — 66 in all — from 1835 to 2008 to a close scrutiny. The stories are not discussed individually, though some specimens are close-read and locally analysed. But a writer’s entire collection is examined and evaluated, with conclusions drawn at the end.
Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan, and Raja Rao, who represent the first flowering (1935-45) of this genre, responded to the nationalist movement, each in his own way — Mulk Raj Anand, the social activist, presenting a true vision of Indian life; R.K. Narayan, with his perception of the average as positive, exploring the nature of life and reality; and Raja Rao experimenting with form. The second flowering (1960-70) looked for answers to the question often raised in academic circles: can the Indian sensibility be expressed in English? Ruth Prawar Jabwalla’s “detached involvement with the Indian situation,” and Bhabani Bhattacharya’s professionalism and the easy readability of his stories supply some answers to that question. The 1970s more than fulfil the expectations of the ‘60s. The decade is marked by an endless variety in the handling of themes and variations, coupled with varying modes and techniques of narration influenced by Russian and American short fiction.
Galaxy of writers
We have a galaxy of writers — Keki Daruwalla, Anita Desai, Shashi Deshpande, Arun Joshi, Kamala Das and a host of others — participating in the ongoing process of openness in form, reliable and unreliable narration with multiple points of view, and shifting focalisation. The period between 1980 and 2008 reflects, in the words of Melwani, a “burgeoning creativity.” There are more women writers now than at any time in the past. Altering perspectives in man-woman relationships, alienation in modern life, and the impact of feminism and feminist theories on the academia have supplied meat and juice to a potential creative writer. As readership expanded across the world, Indian stories tended to get translated into foreign languages. The author is quite right in his assessment that the short story has covered a wider range of subjects with a larger gallery of characters and that the record of Indian life is more authentic in this genre than in the novel. The ‘little’ magazine that is most selective in choosing the material for publication — getting a story published in it is considered highly prestigious — has done much to improve the quality of this genre. Paperback print editions and online literary magazines too have helped a great deal in popularising this form. He suggests that instituting literary prizes and bringing out a collection of the best short stories every year will encourage new talent.
Melwani adroitly integrates his critical comments on the works with the short introductory remarks of each section on the evolving political and social mores of the times. On the whole, the book is absorbing and well-researched. It is a convincing, lively narrative history of the short story that still remains a developing literary form. We need more — and yet more — of such narrative histories that can discuss changes in artistic trends, materials, techniques, et al. The scope for the Indian short story is indeed boundless.
Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan, and Raja Rao, who represent the first flowering (1935-45) of this genre, responded to the nationalist movement, each in his own way — Mulk Raj Anand, the social activist, presenting a true vision of Indian life; R.K. Narayan, with his perception of the average as positive, exploring the nature of life and reality; and Raja Rao experimenting with form. The second flowering (1960-70) looked for answers to the question often raised in academic circles: can the Indian sensibility be expressed in English? Ruth Prawar Jabwalla’s “detached involvement with the Indian situation,” and Bhabani Bhattacharya’s professionalism and the easy readability of his stories supply some answers to that question. The 1970s more than fulfil the expectations of the ‘60s. The decade is marked by an endless variety in the handling of themes and variations, coupled with varying modes and techniques of narration influenced by Russian and American short fiction.
Galaxy of writers
We have a galaxy of writers — Keki Daruwalla, Anita Desai, Shashi Deshpande, Arun Joshi, Kamala Das and a host of others — participating in the ongoing process of openness in form, reliable and unreliable narration with multiple points of view, and shifting focalisation. The period between 1980 and 2008 reflects, in the words of Melwani, a “burgeoning creativity.” There are more women writers now than at any time in the past. Altering perspectives in man-woman relationships, alienation in modern life, and the impact of feminism and feminist theories on the academia have supplied meat and juice to a potential creative writer. As readership expanded across the world, Indian stories tended to get translated into foreign languages. The author is quite right in his assessment that the short story has covered a wider range of subjects with a larger gallery of characters and that the record of Indian life is more authentic in this genre than in the novel. The ‘little’ magazine that is most selective in choosing the material for publication — getting a story published in it is considered highly prestigious — has done much to improve the quality of this genre. Paperback print editions and online literary magazines too have helped a great deal in popularising this form. He suggests that instituting literary prizes and bringing out a collection of the best short stories every year will encourage new talent.
Melwani adroitly integrates his critical comments on the works with the short introductory remarks of each section on the evolving political and social mores of the times. On the whole, the book is absorbing and well-researched. It is a convincing, lively narrative history of the short story that still remains a developing literary form. We need more — and yet more — of such narrative histories that can discuss changes in artistic trends, materials, techniques, et al. The scope for the Indian short story is indeed boundless.
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