Rare, Regional, Remarkable

 

Short stories have been getting the short end of the stick, with publishers refusing to even consider carefully curated collections in this format favouring anthologies with big names instead. This has changed with Kannada writer, Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp: Selected Stories getting longlisted for the Booker Prize. Countless short stories are now being unearthed from regional languages and this reviewer got to sample classic collections sourced from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries and lovingly edited by Mini Krishnan.

The Second Marriage of Kunju Namboodiri and other Classic Malayalam Stories translated by Venugopal Menon is flavoursome as they come. Some of the fare sparkles with gentle wit or a touch of romance and others are filled to bursting with pathos or passionate outrage, with most caustically addressing the stupidity that characterizes much of the human race, especially the male of the species and the far from sensible strictures, customs, and traditions that were tyrannically enforced.

C. Chinnammu Ammal’s A Case of Homicide written in 1913, interestingly enough has a similar denouement to Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Problem of Thor Bridge (1922). Both are about vengeful characters seeking to frame an innocent person for murder using an ingenious trick with a gun. M. Saraswatibhai’s Witless Women, T. Devaki Nethyaramma’s An Ideal Wife and V.T. Bhattathirippad’s Illusion or Delusion are moving accounts of the tortuous conditions women endured despite Kerala’s famed matrilineal tradition. In these tales, women are saddled with weak men who in addition to their many inadequacies have monstrous egos that are committed to actively harassing the women in their lives irrespective of whether they were relatively nice men or downright nasty. But it was an age when women were taught to shut up and put up with a smile even when they were being grossly abused and to stay loyal to their husbands unto death and beyond because widowhood was worse and the ill – treatment freely meted out to these ‘inauspicious’ women usually drove them to madness, penury and a slow death.

A Teashop in Kamalapura and other Classic Kannada Stories translated by Susheela Punitha is a humdinger of a collection with tales so potent and poignant you will find yourself unable to put the book down despite buzzing notifications. K. Vasudevacharya’s Malleshi’s Sweethearts about a bumbling search for a spouse is delightful. Many of the stories address social evils targeting women and the poverty stricken.

A.Sitaram’s The Girl I Killed features a temple slave who is a victim of a patriarchal tradition that exploits female bodies and shames them to death for it. K. Srinivasarao’s The Master’s Satyanarayana is a heartbreaking tale about rich people’s greed which deprives the poor of the little they have. Saraswathibai Rajawade’s The Battered Heart exposes sleazy Godmen who preach about the virtues of celibacy while grooming underage girls to be brainwashed into becoming willing bed mates. Belagoankar’s short sheds light on the Niyoga tradition sanctioned by epic lore where women desperate to become mothers after being berated for their ‘failure’ are pressured into setting aside rules of chastity to welcome a man of proven fertility to impregnate them. In Between Rules and Regulations, Sara Aboobacker excoriates the triple talaq.

Maguni’s Bullock Cart and other Classic Odia Stories translated by Leelawati Mohapatra, Paul St-Pierre and K.K. Mohapatra include tales from the pens of those who risked a lot to raise their voices against oppression. Fakir Mohan Senapati has two stories featured here with the first addressing how challenging it was back in the day to provide an education for a girl child in almost unbearably melodramatic fashion and the second, which is in a lighter vein recommending a form of treatment for husbands prone to heavy drinking, drug use and womanising. U. Kishore Das writes about a ghost whose husband and former suitor were unmitigated jerks who ended up being the end of her. Biswanath Rath’s tale has a widow who is a victim of a baseless canard that makes her already wretched existence immeasurably worse. Suprabha Kar’s The Long Wait shares the plight of a young wife whose husband subjects her to savage beatings after he blows up her dowry which sends her hurtling down the path of whoredom and worse. Routeray’s Flower of Evil about an abandoned wife who dies while trying to abort her illegitimate child is a sock to the solar plexus.

These stories written with touching simplicity sans the artifice and stylistic literary devices that are liberally employed today by the literati to espouse causes endorsed by the privileged are redolent with emotional honestly and far more effective in striking a blow against social injustice. They wrack the conscience and make one glad to be alive in a world where we are more aware of individual rights even if we couldn’t care less about the greater good.

This book review was originally published in TNIE Magazine