Women's stories in India have been handed down from generation to generation, enriched and embroidered along the way. Political change and the arrival of print culture meant that storytelling was pushed into the background. But in more recent times, these voices have once again come centre-stage - confident, varied and complex. Spanning half a century, this collection covers many languages and cultures, and reflects the vast and complex cultures of the country and its diaspora. It offers a view of the changes that have taken place, both in terms of the subjects women choose to write about and their preferred way of writing about these subjects. From established names such as Mahashveta Devi to the newer generation of young authors, such as Tishani Doshi, Katha brings to the reader a vivid array of voices.

This collection, which gathers fifteen stories by contemporary Indian women representing the varied languages and regions of their subcontinent, is now available to an American audience for the first time.

Although Indian Women S Short Fiction Has Always Enjoyed Equal Importance And Popularity As Their Novels, Very Little Critical Attention Has Been Paid To It So Far. Indian Women S Short Fiction Seeks To Fulfil This Long Felt Need. It Puts Together Fifteen Perceptive And Analytical Articles By Scholars Across The World. The Articles, Which Are Focussed On Native Indian Writing As Well As Diasporic Short Fiction, Deal With Such Interesting Literary Issues As Construction Of Femininity, Disablement And Enablement, Bengali Heritage, Hybrid Identities, Nostalgia, Representation Of The Partition Violence, Tradition And Modernity, And Cultural Perspectivism.It Is Hoped That The Book Will Prove Useful To Scholars Interested In Short Fiction Studies In General And Indian Women S Short Fiction In Particular.

Twenty classic short stories from master writers across the country This superb collection contains some of the best Indian short stories written in the last fifty years, both in English and in the regional languages. Some of these stories – ‘We Have Arrived in Amritsar’ by Bhisham Sahni, ‘Companions’ by Raja Rao, ‘The Sky and the Cat’ by U.R. Anantha Murthy, ‘A Devoted Son’ by Anita Desai – have been widely anthologized and are well known. Others, like Premendra Mitra’s ‘The Discovery of Telenapota’, Gangadhar Gadgil’s ‘The Dog that Ran in Circles’, Mowni’s ‘A Loss of Identity’, O.V. Vijayan’s ‘The Wart’ and Devanuru Mahadeva’s ‘Amasa’, are less familiar to readers but are nevertheless classics of the art of the short story. This new and revised edition includes three additional classics: R.K. Narayan’s ‘Another Community’, Avinash Dolas’s ‘The Victim’ and Ismat Chughtai’s ‘The Wedding Shroud’. The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Short Stories is a marvellous and entertaining introduction to the rich diversity of pleasures that the Indian short story–a form that has produced masters in over a dozen languages–can offer.

Spark of Light is a diverse collection of short stories by women writers from the Indian province of Odisha. Originally written in Odia and dating from the late nineteenth century to the present, these stories offer a multiplicity of voices—some sentimental and melodramatic, others rebellious and bold—and capture the predicament of characters who often live on the margins of society. From a spectrum of viewpoints, writing styles, and motifs, the stories included here provide examples of the great richness of Odishan literary culture. In the often shadowy and grim world depicted in this collection, themes of class, poverty, violence, and family are developed. Together they form a critique of social mores and illuminate the difficult lives of the subaltern in Odisha society. The work of these authors contributes to an ongoing dialogue concerning the challenges, hardships, joys, and successes experienced by women around the world. In these provocative explorations of the short-story form, we discover the voices of these rarely heard women.