This collection of twenty-one short stories, written by different authors, represents a cross-section of contemporary Indian short fiction. Twenty short stories are translations from twenty languages of India and one is a specimen of Indian creative writing in English.

Selected by the Sahitya Akademi's Advisory Boards of various languages, these stories provide fascinating glimpses into the panorama of Indian life. with its baffling variety, its rich contrast of the simple and the sophisticated, the ancient and the modern. Here is evidence if such were needed, that Indian literature is one though written in many languages its oneness consisting not of a stale uniformity but of a rich variety.

This is the fourth volume of Sahitya Akademi's series of such representative anthologies in English of contemporary Indian short story.

To write a preface for a collection of stories in twenty two languages is, I think, a challenging task In a pluralistic country like India, each literature has its own tradition and therefore, one is not quite sure how far a particular story represents that tradition. But since they belong to a pan-Indian cultural ethos, it is possible to say that they, more or less, belong to a large joint family, in which many traditions co-exist in an intimately interrelated pattern.

Although it is possible to pick out some artistic triumphs like Nirmal Verma's Birds or MT Vasudevan Nair's Little Little Earthquakes or Surendra Jha Suman's. The Her or Gopinath Mohanty's The Bed of Roses, what I am interested in while reading such an anthology is the pattern of pan Indian creativity in terms of recurrent themes, techniques and sensibilities. It is interesting to see, for instance, the theme of a woman's predicament in a changing society which is dealt with, say, in the Assamese story Evening Walk, the Kannada story Soliloquies of Saugandhi, the Hindi story Birds and the Oriya story The Bed of Arrows. These stories depict from the inside the various dimensions of the sociological tension that an Indian woman has to suffer from, in a society which is fast getting modemised Although the subtlest expressions of a modern woman's consciousness are to be found in Nirmal Verma's and Gopinath Mohanty's stories, the other stories are no less significant if we look at them from a broad sociological point of view.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages