Indian Short Stories Research Articles

Subalternity and everyday solidarity in contemporary Indian short stories

ABSTRACT In recent decades, subaltern communities have initiated and sustained significant social reforms and movements, challenging the nation’s social hegemonies and political configurations. Since the 1990s, mutual solidarities between subalterns, demonstrated during combative socio-political movements, have played pivotal roles in reasserting their space within the nation’s legal and political landscape. Besides social movements and momentary alliances, subaltern solidarity forms the basis of their everyday existence. This essay examines contemporary Indian short stories to explore how solidarities are expressed in the everyday affective alliances between communities, particularly Dalits and Muslims. It intervenes by bringing the notions of belonging and space into the debates of solidarity in postcolonial India. It analyses short stories by four contemporary authors–Skybaba, Noor Zaheer, Razia Sajjad Zaheer, and Hansda Sowvendra Shekar–whose writings focus on the quotidian lives of subalterns. Reading the narratives in the context of debates on belonging and nationhood, the essay addresses the following questions: how does solidarity cut across caste and class in the case of Dalits and Muslims? How is affective solidarity expressed through spatial and dietary solidarity? How do unstructured and unorganised spaces felicitate expressions of solidarity? Lastly, can affective alliances between subalterns be viewed as an unwritten, uncodified solidarity contract?

Inessential objects: Cherished possessions in late life in Indian fiction

Through close readings of three Indian short stories, this essay seeks to show how cherished possessions, such as a bed, a blanket and books, are not stable repositories of past memories but a means of materializing intergenerational relations within the family in the lived present and, perhaps even more interestingly, catalysts for new and hitherto unforeseen possibilities of self-discovery and connections with the world beyond. Part of the apparatus of self-care that older people can summon in the moment to supplement their selfhood, objects as presented in these stories appear to exceed their limited understanding as passive recipients of externally imposed meaning, with their complex and unstable signification finally shown to emerge through their mutually transformative entanglement with people.

Existentialist Perspective: A Study of Bharati Mukherjee’s Fiction The Holder of the World

The present study explores and analyses the existential perspective in Bharati Mukherjee’s novel The Holder of the World; she tries to represent the fluid nature of immigrants due to frequent dislocations and relocations, which facilitate the characters to transform and assimilate into a new environment. The protagonist, Hannah Easton, discards nostalgic feelings and celebrates the latest opportunities in a liberal environment. Being a fearless, brave, and bold, spirited woman, she chooses her ways of life freely and accepts the consequences frankly. Bharati Mukherjee, one of the path breaking Indian American novelists and short story writers, has constantly made efforts to voice the immigrant experience of women. Hannah initially suffers from cultural shock, but being resourceful establishes her authentic existence by understanding the new environment utilising her full potential via free choices.

Experiences of Old Age in Indian Fiction: A Study of Two Indian Short Stories.

In India, where around 19,500 dialects are spoken, there is a great abundance of fiction quite rich in varied descriptions of old age and aging. While scholars like Pramod K. Nayar and Ira Raja have recently begun studying Indian literary texts written in English from the perspective of literary gerontology, those literary experiences of aging (which are originally in languages like Bengali, Tamil, Hindi, Oriya, etc.) are yet to be analyzed from a gerontological point of view. The present paper aims at studying the experiences of old age in 2 Indian short stories (one from Bengali Literature and another from Tamil Literature)-Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay's "Drabomoyee Goes to Kashi" ("Drabomoyeer Kashibash" in Bengali) and T. Janakiraman's "The Puppet" ("Vilayattu Bommai" in Tamil). Regarding "Drabomoyee Goes to Kashi," the paper interrogates the problems in the emplacement of Hindu older widows to Kashi and explores the possibilities in Drabomoyee from ecofeminist and creatural perspectives. The discussions on "The Puppet" chiefly reflect on the social exclusion of the aging bodies of people living with dementia. Through the story of Venu, the paper shows that what the society or family generally expects from the older persons suffering from dementia may not do any good to them, and may instead lead to their institutionalization and other forms of exclusion.

Translation of Krsna Text and Ideology

The recent interest in the relation between translation and ideology led to the following research based on the translation of Krsna text. The Indian short story for Krsna; The Supreme Personality of Godhead and its translation for Krsna: Personalitas Tuhan Yang Maha Esa (English to Indonesia) to highlight how the translation ideology applied in transferring the meaning of emotions. If external influences cannot be avoided, a translation should respect its main scope of being the source for a cultural change. Therefore, the two questions that have eventually to be answered are how does the translation ideology related to the word of emotions in the common culture reader. Reasoning about the factors underlying the translation ideology applied towards Indonesian culture.

The Effectiveness of Peer Pressure on Students’ Career Decision Making in Secondary Schools in Kenya

The beginnings of the Indian short story in English were made under the influence of the Britishers. English Short Story began towards the close of the nineteenth Century in India. It is the distinct from the fables of the ‘Hitopadesh’ and the tales of Panchatantra’. The short Story has become the major expression of literature in India which is used as a weapon to rise the voice of Indians against the Britishers culturally and Politically. The Fragmentation of experience as a result of the increasing complexity of social changes, seems to make the short story an apt vehicle for exploring the dark places of the human spirit and disembodied states of being. It is a voyage of discovery of self-discovery, of self – realisation for the character.

The Significance of the Short Story in Indian English Literature

The beginnings of the Indian short story in English were made under the influence of the Britishers. English Short Story began towards the close of the nineteenth Century in India. It is the distinct from the fables of the ‘Hitopadesh’ and the tales of Panchatantra’. The short Story has become the major expression of literature in India which is used as a weapon to rise the voice of Indians against the Britishers culturally and Politically. The Fragmentation of experience as a result of the increasing complexity of social changes, seems to make the short story an apt vehicle for exploring the dark places of the human spirit and disembodied states of being. It is a voyage of discovery of self-discovery, of self – realisation for the character.

Gender Discourse in 20th Century Indian Short Story Writers

Gender Discourse in 20th Century Indian Short Story Writers

Not Just Prose

This essay argues that when reading Amitav Ghosh's Anglophone novel The Calcutta Chromosome we should be attentive to the genre of the non-Anglophone short story in South Asia. Doing so offers the reader insights into the current limitations of postcolonial studies, as well as a vision for what avenues the field might pursue in the future. Postcolonial studies has come under frequent attack for the excessive attention it bestows upon the novel, a gesture which in turn generates readings linking the novel to questions of nationhood and modernity. Taking this critique as its point of departure, this essay deliberately engages the Indian short stories that Ghosh references in his novel. The short story is a genre whose specific literary qualities are all too often neglected by subsuming them under the blanket term ‘prose’. This essay shows that attention to the short story is crucial not only because of the important role it plays in South Asian literary history, but also because it allows, indeed requires, the postcolonial literary critic to ask of it an entirely different series of questions than those that would be appropriate for the novel.

Can the subaltern eat?: modernity, masculinity and consumption in the Indian family

This article looks at three post-Independence Indian short stories to do with masculine guilt about eating. Looking to alleviate the boredom of their clerical existence, the male protagonists in this fiction seek refuge in a fantasy of consumption focused on foods such as milk, ‘chicken fry’ and sweets. Right when their desires look to be met, however, a clamour of alternative claims on the food compels them to forego fulfilment. What does this narrative pattern say about the postcolonial experience of modernity for lower-middle-class men? Does the inability to consume signify their inability to be subjects in their own right? Or can we see the stories as offering an alternative model of agency located in self-denial? This article examines the complex relationship between masculinity, modernity and consumption to argue for the significance of a provincial masculinity as a subaltern position.

Rethinking Relationality in the Context of Adult Mother–Daughter Caregiving in Indian Fiction

This article seeks to examine how far mainstream moral concepts, such as rights and contracts, which came in for a strong critique from feminist ethicists in the 1980s, may still be relevant to the dynamics of intergenerational relations in old age. Through close readings of three Indian short stories about adult daughters' caregiving to their critically ill or dying mothers in a manner that recalls maternal caregiving to young children, it demonstrates how the maternal paradigm does not engage sufficiently with notions of reciprocity and is therefore unable to capture the dynamic nature of intergenerational exchange between adult children and their aging parents. Finally, it argues that neither the social contract theory of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Rawls with its basis in a notion of a self-interested individual, nor the maternal paradigm theory of feminist scholars such as Carol Gilligan and Sara Ruddick with their emphasis on an other-focused relationality provide an adequate model for capturing th...

Ageing Subjects, Agentic Bodies: Appetite, Modernity and the Middle Class in Two Indian Short Stories in English

Ageing Subjects, Agentic Bodies: Appetite, Modernity and the Middle Class in Two Indian Short Stories in English

Embodied History: Intergenerational Conflict in Indian Fiction

This article builds on the existing critique of the modernization paradigm, and its particularly Indian manifestations, to propose that the relationship between disadvantages in later life and modernization be situated within the context of class-based imbalances of access and exclusion at the intra-familial, intergenerational level. Following Pierre Bourdieu, I adopt a model of class which is based on ‘capital’ movements through social space. Capital here functions as an economistic metaphor referring to the resources distributed throughout the social body. The value of Bourdieu’s ideas is reflected in two Indian short stories I will examine (one each from Hindi and Bengali), here chosen as representative instances of a widespread preoccupation of contemporary Indian fiction.

'Voicing the Text': The Making of an Oral Poetics in Olive Senior's Short Fiction

Long before West Indian literature became a legitimate category of writing— brought about mainly by support for and publication of novels by West Indians living in Britain in 1950s and 1960s—among new literatures in English, West Indian writers had already begun to produce an impressive body of short fiction; short fiction is, indeed, as Kenneth Ramchand describes it, the founding of West Indian literature (2). The rise of small magazines in 1930s and 1940s in Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, and Guyana, and existence of influential Lon- don-based Caribbean Voices Programme (1945-1958) helped to support a regional creative writing community in which short story writing thrived. The emergence of West Indian novel in 1950s and 1960s somewhat overshadowed short story writing, but since 1980s, shorter genre has been enjoying a renaissance. The publication of Olive Senior's first short story collection Summer Lightning and Other Stories (1986) —the inaugural winner of Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1987— is generally regarded as point at which West Indian short story re-emerged from literary underground. Since then, single-authored collections been published with encouraging regularity, as short story anthologies. The re-emergence of West Indian short story has also brought a revival of interest in oral traditions in region and promotion of local oral contexts as artistic resources for creative writers. Speaking of recent trends in West Indian short story writing, Stewart Brown and John Wickham note in The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories that many, probably most, West Indian short story writers been conscious of, and to some extent influenced by, those oral forms and stories spun around figures like Anancy, West Indian trickster, or Amerindian spirits like Ol' Higue or Mantop (xvii). E.A. Markham makes a similar observation in The Penguin Book of Caribbean Short Stories, noting that West Indian short story writers have taken stories and characters out of oral and reimagined them in a literary context (xviii). The making of an oral poetics or development of an aesthetic of orality, as it is variably termed, in modern West Indian fiction turns on transposing folk figures into literary works where they function as tropes for a number of conditions and issues pertinent to postcolonial period: wily spider Anancy and his significations often form metaphoric center of works—from authors as diverse as Andrew Salkey, Pauline Melville, and Narmala Shewcharan—highly ambivalent about political achievements and climate of postindependence West Indian nations; and

The Inner Courtyard: Stories by Indian Women

A selection of Indian short stories by women writing in Britain, India and the United States, ranging from a ghost story to an animal fable. The contributors range from Anita Desai to Suniti Namjoshi, Kamala Das and Mahasveta Devi.

Review Article : Indian Fiction and Criticism K.H. Nandan Sinha, Mulk Raj Anand, Twayne, New York, 1972; G.S. Balarama Gupta, Mulk Raj Anand: A Study of His Fiction in Humanist Perspective, Prakash Book Depot, Bareilly, 1974; M.K. Naik, Raja Rao, Twayne, New York, 1972 ; Una Parameswaran, A Study of Representative Indo-English Novelists, Vikas Pblg. House, New Delhi, 1976; C.V.

Review Article : Indian Fiction and Criticism K.H. Nandan Sinha, Mulk Raj Anand, Twayne, New York, 1972; G.S. Balarama Gupta, Mulk Raj Anand: A Study of His Fiction in Humanist Perspective, Prakash Book Depot, Bareilly, 1974; M.K. Naik, Raja Rao, Twayne, New York, 1972 ; Una Parameswaran, A Study of Representative Indo-English Novelists, Vikas Pblg. House, New Delhi, 1976; C.V.

Modern Indian Short Stories: An Anthology. Edited By Suresh Kohli. New Delhi: Arnold Heinemann (India), 1974. x, 164 pp. $9.95 (Dist. by InterCulture Associates)Modern Indian Poetry. Edited By Pritish Nandy. New Delhi: Arnold Heinemann (India), 1974. 231 pp. Indexes. $11.20 (Dist. by InterCulture Associates)

Modern Indian Short Stories: An Anthology. Edited By Suresh Kohli. New Delhi: Arnold Heinemann (India), 1974. x, 164 pp. $9.95 (Dist. by InterCulture Associates)Modern Indian Poetry. Edited By Pritish Nandy. New Delhi: Arnold Heinemann (India), 1974. 231 pp. Indexes. $11.20 (Dist. by InterCulture Associates)

Modern Indian Short Stories: An Anthology. Edited By Suresh Kohli. New Delhi: Arnold Heinemann (India), 1974. x, 164 pp. $9.95 (Dist. by InterCulture Associates) - Modern Indian Poetry. Edited By Pritish Nandy. New Delhi: Arnold Heinemann (India), 1974. 231 pp. Indexes. $11.20 (Dist. by InterCulture Associates)

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Indian Short Story in English: A Survey

Indian Short Story in English: A Survey

Contemporary Indian Short Stories. Series II

Contemporary Indian Short Stories. Series II