Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland by Olive Schreiner- 1897 - 25 Pages

 Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland by Olive Schreiner- 1897 - 25 Pages

(This story is available at no charge as a Kindle Edition.)

Olive Schreiner

Born: March 24, 1855 South Africa

Died: December 11, 1920 (aged 65) Cape Town South Africa

Although Schreiner had no formal education, she read widely and was taught by her formidable mother. From early childhood she had an active fantasy life. From 1874 until 1881 (when she went to England, hoping to study medicine) she earned her living as a governess; during this time she wrote two semiautobiographical novels, Undine (published 1928) and The Story of an African Farm (1883), and began From Man to Man (1926), at which she worked intermittently for 40 years but never finished.

Her brother William Philip Schreiner was prime minister of Cape Colony from 1899 to 1902.

I am currently reading an amazing book, Insurgent Empire : Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent by Priyamvada Gopa

In wbich she mentions today's story Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland by Olive Schreiner as an example of a literary work dealing with the horrors of British colonialism in South Africa (Mashonaland was given its name by Europeans in the mid-19th century. In 1890 the British South Africa Company, a mercantile company based in London, established a fort at the spot where the Company’s Pioneer Column halted its march northward into Mashonaland. The fort 

 was named for Lord Salisbury, then British prime minister, and used as a foothold for further British occupation of the territory. Later in the 1890s, what is now Zimbabwe was divided by the British South Africa Company into two provinces, Mashonaland in the east and Matabeleland (the lands inhabited by the Ndebele people) in the west. Mashonaland, part of self-governing Southern Rhodesia after 1923, became part of independent Zimbabwe in 1980.- from The Enclopedia Britanica)

This is a very powerful story, I was amazed by the vivid portrait it presents of the rapicious cruelty, Greed, and hypocrisy behind British rule.

Peter Halket is 20 years old, the son of a widow who did washing for others and a common laborer. He enlisted to go to South Africa, entertaining a fantasy that he would return as rich as Cecil Rhodes. He has no problem burning villages, keeping indigenous women in near slavery, repeatedly raping them. He is very offended when the women escape, including a 15 year old girl he had impregnated.He subscribes to the prevailing view that the residents are incapable of ruling themselves and lack proper gratitude to the English.

One day he is separated from his troop, with barely enough food to survive. He is in fear of wild animals and natives. Schreiner does a marvellous job letting us into his mind.

Then one day he is joined by a mysterious stranger. Peter knows he is not quite white, definitely not black. The man reveals he is from Palestine. This is just such a beautiful story that I do not want to detail the miraculous transformation the stranger brings onto Peter. The thoughts of the stranger are deeply disturbing to Peter at first.

Yesterday I had never heard of Olivia Schreiner, now I see "Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland" as among the greatest of all short stories.

I offer my thanks to Priyamvada Gopa for bringing this story to my attention.

"A Wife's Letter" by Rabindranath Tagore

"A Wife's Letter" by Rabindranath Tagore (1922, 5 pages)

Real Wisdom from Asia's First Nobel Laureate

রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর

"My mother was always very troubled by my intelligence; for a woman it’s an affliction. If she whose life is guided by boundaries seeks a life guided by intelligence, she’ll run into so many walls that she’ll shatter her forehead and her future".

Rabindranath Tagore on The Reading Life

Gandi came to Rabindranath Tagore (1861 to 1941-Calcutta) for moral counseling.    Einstein pondered at length his metaphysics.    W. B. Yeats stood in awe of the depth of his wisdom.    He reshaped the Bengali language and revitalized a 1000s of year old literary tradition.   Born into truly kingly wealth he wrote in deep sympathy with the poor and especially the women of India.    He was the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1914).   Tagore was, happily for us, a prolific writer of short stories.    "A Wife's Letter" will be the 8th short story by Tagore that I have posted on and I think it is my favorite so far.

"A Wife's Letter" is, not surprisingly, in the form of letter from a wife, in this case a minor second wife, to her husband, addressed  as "To Thine Auspicious Lotus-Feet".
The wife opens the letter by saying in fifteen years of marriage she has never written a letter to her husband even though they have shared many confidences.   The wife is deeply religious.  I was very moved by these lines:

"I am Mejo-Bou, the second bride in your joint family. Today, fifteen years later, standing at the edge of the ocean, I understand that I also have other relationships, with the world and the World-Keeper."

It is almost as if her acceptance of her role as second wife is so deep within her psyche that she almost sees her relationship with the World-Keeper (an expression I like a lot) as a form of infidelity.

Her husband's first wife was considered quite plain, so plain his mother insisted that he redeem the family name by taking a beautiful second wife.      Mejo-Bou is considered incredibly beautiful by all, even the envious other women of the household.  She never has any sense of her own beauty.    These lines are heartbreaking:

"Long ago, in my childhood days--in the days when my preordained marriage to you was known only to the Omniscient One who writes our fates on our foreheads--my brother and I both came down with typhoid fever. My brother died; I survived. All the neighborhood girls said, “Mrinal’s a girl, that’s why she lived. If she’d been a boy, she couldn’t have been saved.” Jom-Raj is wise in his deadly robbery: he only takes things of value."

Even death does not want a young girl.

As she writes the letter she is alone on a religious pilgrimage.    Her husband is so devoted to his work that he cannot leave Calcutta.    She talks about how lonely she was when she first went to the house of her husband.   (She was 12, the first wife was 27 and not really happy about this new arrival!)    For a long time her only friends are three cows.  

The wife has a curse,  she is intelligent:

"That I had beauty, it didn’t take you long to forget. But you were reminded, every step of the way, that I also had intelligence. This intelligence must have lain deep within me, for it lingered in spite of the many years I spent merely keeping house for you. My mother was always very troubled by my intelligence; for a woman it’s an affliction. If she whose life is guided by boundaries seeks a life guided by intelligence, she’ll run into so many walls that she’ll shatter her forehead and her future. But what could I do? The intellect that the other wives in the house lacked, the Lord in a careless moment had bestowed upon me; now whom could I return the excess to? Every day you all rebuked me: precocious, impertinent girl! A bitter remark is the consolation of the inept; I forgive all your remarks."

To quote once more,  there is so much beauty and depth in this story:

"My daughter was born--and died. She called to me, too, to go with her. If she had lived, she would have brought all that was wonderful, all that was large, into my life; from Mejo-Bou I would have become Mother. And a mother, even confined to one narrow world, is of the universe. I had the grief of becoming a mother, but not the freedom."

An interesting and dramatic development is revealed in the letter and I will leave it unspoiled for potential readers.

"A Wife's Letter" was translated from Bengali by Prasenjit in 2009.

You can read it online HERE.

I think this might make a good first Tagore.

To me the short stories of Tagore are a world class treasure.

Please share your experiences with Tagore with us

Mel u

Khushwant Singh ਖ਼ੁਸ਼ਵੰਤ ਸਿੰਘ Two Short Stories About Indian Life under the British Raj

"Karma" (5 pages, 1957)
"Portrait of a Lady" (6 pages, 1969)


Indian Literature on The Reading Life

A Darkly Humorous Look at Life Under the British Raj

Khushwant Singh (1915-Hadali, Khushab, British India-now Pakinstan) is one of the best known Anglo-Indian writers.   At ninety six years old (I think he still has a weekly newspaper column) he is one of the  premier Anglo-Indian authors.   He was born into a Sikh family and initially pursued a career as an attorney.    He was driven to begin writing in a reflective often acerbic way about life in the Indian subcontinent by his experiences of the 1947 Partition of India.   He was very traumatized when just prior to the Partition of India he encountered a platoon of soldiers of his faith who boasted to him that they had just completely massacred a  peaceful village of Muslims, men, women and children.   I am glad I found a collection of his short stories online at Google Books.   I enjoyed the works I read, all were very intelligent, highly perceptive and in some cases, wickedly funny, perfectly written stories that I think most potential readers would really enjoy.   He has published over twenty five books so this is just a very small sample of Singh's work.  (There is more information on him here.)

"Karma" is very acid, almost cruelly funny story about Sir Mohan Lal, a man who is portrayed as being in love with the British and every thing about their culture. He can be said to be an Indian version of "Uncle Tom".    He regards anything Indian as inferior.   He sees anything from India as stupid, dirty and inefficient compared to an English counter part.   This contempt extends to the people of India and his own wife.   You can almost feel the bloated way he insists to himself that he is "Sir Lal" and he is sure the English see him as their equal.     He and his wife are going on a train trip.   His wife does not feel comfortable in the first class cabin that Sir Lal insists he must ride in so she rides in the back in second class.    Two English soldiers board the train in the first class section.   They are very annoyed when they see Lal in the compartment.   He tries to speak to them but they cannot figure out what he is saying (the English soldiers are from the bottom rank of society based on their dialect).   The soldiers look upon him almost as if he were a monkey trying to speak English.  Then one of them says "throw the  nigger off the train".   The next thing "Sir Lal" is seen face down on the train platform as his astonished wife looks out on him from second class as the train pulls away.  

 "Portrait of a Lady" is a much gentler story.   It looks at the very long term relationship of a young man to his grandmother.   It is beautifully done and gives us a good look at family life and the falling away of cultural traditions.   There are deep layers of irony in the title's echo of Henry James.

I will post on  more of his stories in November, I hope.

If you do a search you can find these stories at Google Books.

Please share with us your experience with South Asian short stories.

Mel u

"The Landing" by Anita Desai

"The Landing" by Anita Desai (1978, 7 pages)

An Odd Haunted House Story

Anita Desai's (1937, Mussooire, India) mother was German, her father was a Bengali business man.   German was the language of her parents household but she also grew up fluent in Bengali, Urdu, Hindi and English.   Her literary language is English.   She has been short listed three times for the Booker Award and her daughter, Kiran Desai won the award.   Anita Desai has taught creative writing in numerous high prestige American colleges.   She is a fellow The Royal Society of Literature and Girton College in Cambridge.   She has also won numerous awards in India.   Much of her fiction deals with the lives of ordinary people in India and the hardships created by the 1947 Partition.    

"The Landing" is a very simple story.   It could be set almost anywhere.  It is well written and interesting.   As the story opens a woman is moving into a very old house she has just bought.   You can tell she is proud to own a house built in 1743.   The date was carved into the wooden roof beam.    (That one could buy a house that old does begin to fix what are the possible locations of the story.)    As the woman enters the house she seems to feel strongly that she is not alone.   At first she thought she was in command of the house but soon she began to feel she was in fact under the command of the house.    Soon she began to feel something or someone was watching her.   She would return home from work to find the door unlocked when she knew she had locked it or double locked when she never did that.   She tried to talk to the presence but she got no answer.   Of course she began to doubt her sanity also.   She left out food for the presence but it was not consumed.   I will leave the rest of the plot untold.

This is just a simple story.   "The Landing" is not a powerful first rate story and it does not pretend to be.    I saw it as way to introduce myself to the work of Desai.   I will say I like the style but I am assuming there is much more to be found  in some of her other work.    I hope to read some of her novels soon.   

Please share your experience with the work of Anita Desai with us-what is her best novel?

Mel u

"The In-Between-Woman" by Rabindranath Tagore রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর

"The In-Between-Woman"  by Rabindranath Tagore (1923, 6 pages)

Marriage as Child Raising?

रबिन्द्रनाथ ठाकुर

Tagore at 17

My Posts on Rabindraanath Tagore

Indian Literature on The Reading Life

Rabindranath Tagore (1861 to 1941-India) was the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1911).    Gandhi came to him for moral advise, Einstein was intrigued by his metaphysics and W. B. Yeats was amazed by his sheer depth.   He reshaped the Bengali language.    I am so glad that a few months ago by sheer luck I read one of his short stories, of which I am pleased to say there are many.    I see him as a great world wide cultural treasure and a source of  real wisdom.   

A number of Tagore's short stories deal directly with the lives of South Asian women, often with those from the poorer segments of society.    He writes with complete empathy and realism without a hint of condescension.   Before I post on the story I just want to bring up one question.

There is something that is must bother a lot of people as they read for the first time South Asian short stories about marriage.  The women in the stories are from eight to twelve when they marry, often as second or more wives to a man much older than they are.    Custom seems to dictate that the marriages  are not be consummated until the girl had her first period.     This is not treated as an evil thing but as just normal.   Do we adopt an attitude of ethical relativism and say well it was OK in their culture or do we reject it as intrinsically repugnant?     I think this is one of the questions brought up in "The In-Between Woman".    We also have to think how does a woman who was married at 12 feel at age 32 when she is asked to help in the raising of a 12 year old junior wife.

The wife in this story was married at 8, she is 35 now and had never had a child.   She loves her husband very much but she knows he wants a child.   She tells him it is time for him to find a second wife.    He loves her also and at first he is very against the idea.    In time, knowing he is really expected by all to produce an heir he agrees to take another wife.    In a very moving and sad moment he tells his wife he does not have time with his work to "raise" a new wife from childhood to an adult.   He tells the wife she must do it and she agrees out of love for her husband.

"One day, he introduced the subject himself and said, “If I marry a girl child at my age, I won’t be able to bring her up.”

“You don’t have to worry about that,” Harasundari replied. “The responsibility of raising her properly rests with me.” As she announced this, the outline of a young, gentle, bashful, newly wedded bride, lately separated from her mother’s bosom, formed in the mind of this childless woman and her heart melted"

  In time she begins to feel love for the new wife, who is really a  child.   When the child bride displaces her in the husbands bed she feels a profound sadness but she accepts it.  We sense the child bride knows she has more sexual power over the husband than the older wife.    In time the new wife develops into the most horrible of spoiled brats.   Tagore makes us feel how the man and older wife feel.   I will say it feels terrible for the wife and really not much better for the man.    I will leave the rest of this story untold.   It is perfectly done and plotted I think anyone who reads it will be moved and made to think.   It would probably make a good class room story as it should generate a lot of discussion.

You can read it on line HERE.   It is newly translated (2011) by Nivedita Sen

I will be reading and posting on Tagore on a regular basis.  

Let us know of your experience with Tagore

Mel u

Mulk Raj Anand-Two Brilliant Short Stories About Life in India Under the British Raj

"The Lost Child"   (1940, 5 pages)
"The Tractor and the Corn Goddess" (1938, 6 pages)

Two Short Stories by Mulk Raj Anand

A Pioneer Anglo - Indian Author

Indian Literature on The Reading Life

There is no literary tradition with roots older than that of India.   I will always admire Edmund Burke (Anglo-Irish-1729 to 1797) for telling the English Parliament that England had no right to rule a country with a culture much older than their own.    

Mulk Raj Anand was a founding father of the Indian novel in English.    He along with R. K. Narayan (on whom I have already posted), Ahmed Ali and Rajo Rao was one of the first writers from India to gain an international readership in English.    Anand (1905 to 2004-99 years-Peshanar, India) after graduating from college in India went to England to receive his PhD.     While at Cambridge (the university of choice for Bloomsbury) he became friends with people like E. M. Forester  and George Orwell.   He was a passionate admirer of Gandhi and a strong supporter of the movement for Indian independence.   His first novel, Untouchable (1935) brought him world wide acclaim as the Charles Dickens of India.   He was a friend of Pablo Picasso.    His literary output was very large including several novels, lots of poetry and numerous highly regarded short stories.   He was a strong force for good in the world. 

In April I read and posted on two of Anand's short stories, "The Price of Bananas" and "Old Bapu".   I really enjoyed both of these stories.   Anand's stories brought life in rural India during the reign of the Britisth Raj to life for me and as a bonus were very entertaining and beautifully written.   

"The Lost Child" is, I think, one of the most read and taught of Anand's short stories.    It is set at a religious festival celebrating Shiva.    The crowds are huge, overpoweringly large.    The people in the story are a married couple and their young son, maybe eight or so. The parents are devout followers of Shiva.  Like any child he wants everything   for sale by the many vendors.    In the crowd there are 1000s of devotees to Shiva dressed in ritualistically correct  Orange Robes.     There is a merry go round set up at the festival.   The boy is very attracted to it and runs to ride it.   I am assuming the merry go round is meant as a symbol for the wheel of life.   Every parents worst nightmare   happens (and this is in the days with no cell phones etc to track children).   I will leave the rest of the plot unspoiled.    Anand did a great job of making me feel  what it would be like to be at the festival.

"The Tractor and the Corn Goddess" is a fascinating story that tells us a lot about how the ordinary Indian felt about his English rulers and the coming of western technology to rural India.   I really liked the treatment of the conflict of Indian religious traditions and the British Raj.    It also shows the very conservative attitudes of many that in effect worked to keep the British in power.    I will tell a bit of the background setting and the plot but I really hope this story will be widely read.    As the story opens, the leading landlord in the area has died.    His oldest son, who has been in Europe studying (in theory!) and falling into what the residents of the area see as decadent ways is now the major land owner.    He proposes something very radical.   That he will give most of the land to a collective owned by the people who work the land.    The richer people in the area are all totally opposed to this idea and horrified by the suggestion of large scale social change.   The people in the area really get upset when the son buys a tractor.     Everyone is at first horrified by it and sees its plowing as a blasphemy toward the Corn God.    Also they are concerned with the long term implications for the livelihood of the people in the area when they learn it can do the same amount of plowing in one day that it would take 100 men using the traditional methods.     There is a lot in this story I have not relayed.

You can read both of these stories at Google Books.   Just do a search for Mulk Raj Anand:   A Reader and you can read both of these stories and a number more online.   

I hope to read in the not too distant future his two most famous novels, The Untouchable and The Private Life of an Indian Prince.   

Please share your experience with Anand.  Or any South Asian short story author!

Mel u

"Befriending the Wild Elephant" by Sarmaresh Basu সমরেশ বসু

"Befriending the Wild Elephant" by Sarmaresh Basu সমরেশ বসু (1962, 5 pages)

An Enjoyable Story from a Leading

Author from Bangladesh

The Reading Life South Asian Short Stories Project


Posts on the Literature of Bangladesh

Before the 1947 partition of India and the subsequent 1971 War for The Independence of Bangladesh there was no such thing as Bangladeshi literature.   Works written in Dhaka were part of the venerable Bengali literary tradition.    The terrible events of history have helped to create a separate cultural tradition for writers from Bangladesh to draw on and at same time to help create by their work.

Saramash Basu (924 to 1988-Dhaka, Bangladesh) wrote over 200 novels and is credited with 100 longer works of fiction.    Prior to becoming a  full time writer in  1950 he worked for several years in an arms factory and also sold eggs as a street hawker.   In 1 949 he was placed in jail for a year as a member of the communist party, illegal at the time.     He was fascinated since youth by folk tales.   Unlike most of the other South Asian authors I have posted on, he was not born into a life of privilege.

"Befriending the Wild Elephant" centers on a young boy, maybe 15 or so, whose father wants to take him into a jungle preserve area that will allow them the opportunity to observe lots of wild animals, including if they are lucky, wild elephants.   I have learned recently that stories like this were very appealing to the very urbanized readers of South Asia longing for simpler days.    

As the story opens the father and son pass on a bus through places hurt badly by war and see lots of soldiers.    They see elephants tied up in the military camps where they are used kind of like living bulldozers!    They were on their way to a resort in the Darjeeling region, known for its great natural beauty and vast tea plantations.   In an interesting note, the boy's name is "Gogol".    The story is short and easy to read.   It really gets to be fun when the boy meets and becomes friends with a wild elephant (that speaks to him).    There is an exciting moment when  a wild elephant with the boy on his back charges a group of tame elephants.

"Befriending the Wild Elephant" by Sarmaresh Basu (translated by Atreyee Gusta) is a simple, well done half parable story that is sort of typical as a nostalgia for the past of South Asia story.    

You can read it HERE.    It is a fun story worth your time.

Mel u

Gujarat, India Dalit (Outcaste) Short Stories

"A Brief Introduction to Dalit Literature" by Meena Kandasamy (5 pages, 2007)
"The Flame" by Harish Mangalam (6 pages, 2008)
"The Hell" by Dharmabhai Shrimali (5 pages, 2006)
"Untouchables" by Chadu Maheriya  (5 pages, 2007)

Dalit Short Stories from Gujarat India

Documenting the Outcaste Experience
More on Poverty Porn

Indian Literature on the Reading Life

I have recently been posting on the five short stories that are short listed for the Caine Prize for African literature.    In reading posts by others on these stories I learned a new to me literary term,  "African Poverty Porn".    The meaning of this term is still in flux but basically it refers to works written about and by people from Africa that use the poverty of many African people to sell stories to western readers who find stories about child soldiers, pregnant ten year old girls, refugee camps and starvation somehow exciting.   This is a huge topic but as soon as I read of the term I could see there was something very interesting in this concept.   My first thought was, "well then was Charles Dickens writing poverty porn when he described the orphanage in Oliver Twist or was Victor Hugo doing so in the wonderful parts of The Hunch Back of Norte Dame that  depict the mock court trials of the underworld in Paris in the 15th century?      Of course poverty porn could be great literature or hum can it be?  

My recent venture into the South Asian Short Story, a now life time interest and permanent part of The Reading Life, has opened up many new exciting reading and learning windows for me.    There are dozens of cultures and languages just in India alone, each with its own literary tradition and its own relationship to the English literary tradition.    I am partially finding this a bit overwhelming but I am taking it one story at a time with each work read leading me to the next one, hopefully with a greater appreciation and understanding as I go along.    Stimulated by claims of other bloggers that some of the Caine stories (and the whole Caine enterprise by some) are "poverty porn" I wanted to look at some short stories by people born into the Dalit (Untouchable) caste from the Gujarat region of India that portray the life experiences of the most poverty stricken people in India, some 165 million.    I choose stories from this part of India because there are two brilliant editions of Muse India (2007) that focus on Dalit Literature from the Gujarat region (North Western) of India.  (There is a good background article on Gujarat here)


"A Brief Introduction to Dalit Literature" by Meena Kanasamy  is an excellent place to start.    She is the editor of The Dalit, is an award winning poet, a translator of numerous works on Dalit studies into English, has a PhD in linguistics, and was a writer in residence in 2009 at the University of Iowa International Writers Program.   She is very active as a political writer and speaker in the area of Dalit and Women's rights in India.   I want to quote a bit from her essay (which you  should read if you are at interested in the concept of "poverty porn"-here is the link  She has a very interesting blog that I now follow.)




"A Brief Introduction to Dalit Literature (by Meena Kanasamy)
Mahatma Jotirao Phule was the first to use the word Dalit in connection with caste. However, the word Dalit came into popular currency with the advent of the militant Dalit Panthers. In Marathi, the word Dalit means ground crushed, broken down and reduced to pieces. This name was chosen by the group itself, and it contained in it an inherent denial of pollution, karma and caste hierarchy. The Dalit Panther movement, was a self-conscious movement among the ‘Depressed Classes’ who sought to follow the militant and revolutionary Black Panthers of America. Dalit literature grew out of the Dalit Panther movement which was established by two writers Namdeo Dhasal and Raja Dhale in April 1972. Like Black Literature, Dalit writing was characterized by a new level of pride, militancy, sophisticated creativity and above all sought to use writing as a weapon. 

Today's Dalit Literature that occupies a pride of place is actually born out of the heinous system of untouchability and caste discrimination that have been practiced in India for the past millennia....

Dalit writers were quick to point out that the 2000 year old history of oppression has not been documented at all: it is a literal holocaust that has slipped by without being put into words! 

Marathi Dalit literature is the forerunner of all modern Dalit literature. It was essentially against exploitation, and made use of writing as a method of propaganda for the movement. It was not immediately recognized by the mainstream which was obsessed with middle class issues."

.

I think we can see from this that one can write literature about the experiences of the very poor that does not simply pander to the needs of richer readers.   All three of the stories I will briefly post on today were written by people of Dalit backgrounds (someone correct me if this is wrong please) who have educated themselves.   (Two of the authors are Medical doctors).   All of these stories have been translated from Gujarati.    As I read these stories,  I thought of Frank O'Connor's central thesis in The Lonely Voice: A Study in the Short Story that short stories are about people in "submarginal groups", those who have no one to speak for them.    (O'Connor's book has some real flaws but is also flat out the best thing written on the short story as a literary genre.)    The Dalit of India are are 165 Million people who fit (or did)  this idea perfectly.


Dalit's were only allowed to do the most undesirable kind of work.   For 1000s of years it was illegal for them to learn to read and write.    Much of their work was devoted to waste disposal and the cleaning of toilets.  (Imagine 600,000,000 people with no access to toilets with sewers and you see the immense amount of very hard, very nasty, unhealthy and dangerous work to be done.    This is a long way from Ballywood.    Dalit  women were widely employed as toilet cleaners.   There lives were shortened by diseases and they suffered terrible abuse by their husbands and worse if widowed or abandoned.  
  


"The Hell" by Dharmabhai Shrimali is about a woman teaching her daughter how to go from house to house picking up what ever needs to be disposed of.   Human waste was placed in a tin can, often a leaky one.     In a very well done scene the mother tells her daughter she will not be well received by her future mother in law if she is not used to picking up rotten carcases of dogs and cats.    The only life the daughter can hope for is to marry into another Dalit family and slave away as a garbage woman until she is old enough to be a mother in law herself (if she is lucky enough to make it to that age.)   "The Hell" lets us see for ourselves what the lives of the people in this story were like (You can read it Here)




"The Flame" by Harish Mangalam is an interesting story that gives us some insight into the kind of medical care Dalit people received.    It is kind of in the form of a rant of an older man about the inability of doctors to cure his eczema.   It is interesting and his cynical observations about the financial motivations of the medical establishment were really spot on and funny.    Mangalan is the General Secretary of the Gurarat Dalit Association, a government official, and the author of numerous works of fiction, essays and translations.  You can read "The Flame"  HERE.


"Untouchables" by Chadu Maheriya is a near heartbreaking story.    Those of us interested in post-colonial literature need to stop for a moment to reflect that in the case of the Dalit people of India, a horrible institutionalized millennium old form of internal colonization was in place when the English arrived.   This story deals directly with the lives of female toilet cleaners.   To put it mildly, there is deep sadness in the idea that for 1000s of years millions of seven year old girls knew they were going to grow up to be toilet cleaners just by an accident of birth.   When very lucky, they will be married into another Dalit family where people work together to survive.   With all to common bad luck, she will be abandoned or widowed with children at a young age and considered little better than a "public woman" (a term I learned in The Man Eater of Malgudi by R. K. Narayan).   Mahariya is a government official in Gujarat, the editor of a well known collection of Dalit poetry and an anthology of memoirs of Dalit mothers.    "The Flame" can be read HERE.

I did not get any feeling of "poverty porn" from these stories.    I think their core first audience was other people from a Dalit background.    The stories are a small way out of oppression by people whose ancestors were not allowed by law to learn to read or write.    


Do you have any thoughts on "Poverty Porn" or do you find it a useful concept?-Do the Caine Stories feel more live "poverty porn" than these three outcaste stories do?


Mel u

"A Horse and Two Goats" by R. K. Narayan

"A Horse and Two Goats" by R. K. Narayan (1970, 10 pages)

A Top of the Mark Short Story 

The Reading Life R. K. Narayan Project

Indian Literature on the Reading Life

R. K.  Narayan (1906 to 2001-India) is rapidly becoming one of my favorite authors.   In the last two months I have read and posted on thirty of his short stories from his 1947 collection The Astrologer's Day and Other Tales and two of his novels.     All of them are set in an imaginary  community he created, Malgudi, India (located in South Indian).    The more I learn about Malgudi,   the more I like it.    (There is some background information on Narayan in my prior posts.)

"A Horse and Two Goats" is just a flat out delightful in every way short story.   It is about an elderly,  poor man with two goats, a wife, little money and no children. He used to have a herd of forty goats, numerous sheep and even a few cows.    His  name is Muni.  Hard luck  has reduced him down to two scraggly goats.    He and his wife live in a small very minimal house next to a "drumstick tree".     I was not sure what a "drumstick tree" was so I checked.    It is a tree with super  nutritious seed pods in the shape of chicken drumsticks (OK we could have guessed that).    You can also boil the leaves for a tasty soup.     Though it is much tastier if you can throw in a vegetable or two or when very lucky a bit of meat.    The couple in part lives from this tree.

Narayan does a very good job depicting the relationships of long married couples.   In just a few lines he can make us understand their lives.   Maybe there was a time when the man was the boss  but those tines are long ago.    Muni's main occupation now is taking his goats for long walks where they can hopefully find something to eat.    His wife tells him do not come back until the goats are fed and he knows if he is gone long enough she will find some way to put together a meal for him.    If he stays out longer  maybe she will be in a good mood when he gets home.

One day the man is out for his walk with his goats.     Muni speaks no English.    A red-faced man in khaki shorts standing next to a fancy car asked him "where can I get some gasoline for my car.    I am out".    Muni has no idea what he is talking about but he knows a white man in khaki shorts next to a fancy car  probably means trouble if  upset so Mani more or less nods at whatever he says.    When the man offers Mani a cigarette, a pleasure he has not been able to indulge in for a long time, he begins to talk back to him but of course the man has no idea what Mani is saying.  The cigarette broke the ice for them.   Now the story just gets so funny when Narayan shows us what each of the men thinks the other is thinking.    As I read this I marveled at how Narayan could make the white man (an American on holiday with his wife) sound so right in his conversations.   We also see what each one of them is thinking the other is saying.   Anyone who has ever head a long  "conversation" with someone who they did not share a language with will love this story.    

As the story proceeds the American asks Mani about a very old mud statue next to his car.    Mani has no idea what the man is talking about.   Somehow the American thinks Mani owns the land he is standing on so he is trying to negotiate a purchase price for the old mud statue (which nobody cares a thing about) which the Anerican thinks is an amazing artifact of an ancient culture (and it may well be such).    As they talk on and on Mani starts to think the man wants to buy his goats (he had shown him some money).    The American assumes Mani is very knowledgeable about the old statue and is trying to drive the price up.    The American wants this statue so badly he will go home to American in a boat while his wife flies back just to be sure the statue makes it back safely.    Mani never has a clue he is interested in the statue.    When they part the American gives Mani more money than he ever had in his life, enough for he and is wife to live on for years.    He leaves the goats with the man, thinking that is what he has sold.    What he really sold was the statue that he never owned in the first place.    I have already told a lot of the plot of this story but I have left untold the great ending.   Narayan is a genius at ending a short story (not always an easy thing to do).

I think this is my favorite Narayan short story so so.    (And that is saying a lot!)

Do you have a favorite Narayan work?

Mel u

It's Cat Story Day!- "Toontochaudhurioni and the Naughty Cat" by Upendrakishore Raychaudhuri (উপেন্দ্রকিশোর রায়চৌধুরী )

"Toontochaudhurioni and the Naughty Cat" by Upendrakishore Raychaudhuri (উপেন্দ্রকিশোর রায়চৌধুরী -1910, 4 pages, translated by Indrani Chakraborty)

A Cat Story from the Father of

Sukumar Ray and Grandfather of Satyajit Ray

A Great Bangladesh Author

Upendrakishore Raychaudhuri (1863 to 1915-Mymensingh, Bangladesh) is probably more known now for being the father of a famous writer, Sukunar Ray (who shortened his last name) and the grandfather of the very highly regarded film director and author, Satyajit Ray.   (I will, I hope, post on short stories by both of them soon.)  

Upendrakishore Raychaudhuri had a lot of accomplishments in his life.     Hid family was friends with the Tagore family and he worked with them to revitalise and preserve Bengali folklore.   He was an accomplished painter and musical composer. He was also an expert in land deeds and became very affluent through this expertise.  He helped people to establish title to their land in accord with old deeds and the rules of the British laws.   He greatly updated the printing process in South Asia.    He also wrote a number of short works of fictions and poems.    He is held in  esteem behind only Rabindranath Tagore as a Bengali Language poet.   He also wrote a very nice cat story!

"Toontochaudhurioni and the Naughty Cat" is very close to a parable.    A bird has built a nest that the household cat can see from the window.   It now has baby birds that look like a great lunch to the cat.    The cat hatched a plan.   For several days he would salute the mother bird in the most respectful fashion fitting an elder mother.   Here is what happens next:

"And then, Toontooni’s babies grew up a bit; they sported nice little wings. They didn’t keep their eyes shut anymore. So, Toontooni called out to them and said, ‘My little ones, can you fly?’ The chicks said, ‘Yes, mom, we can.’

Toontooni said, ‘Great, then why don’t you try and fly to the palm tree there?’ The little birds flew right away and sat on the branch of the palm tree. Toontooni smiled and said, ‘Now I know what to do with that horrible cat.’
And before long, the cat was there. She asked, ‘What’s up, O Toontooni?’
Toontooni put up her feet, threw a kick in the air and said, ‘Off you go, you mean, wretched Pussy!’ And then she took off in a jiffy and disappeared.
The naughty cat bared her teeth, climbed up the tree, but she could neither catch the toontooni nor eat her chicks. She got pricked by the thorns of the tree and came home bruised and battered."

This story is just a simple tale  about a mother protecting her children from a predator.   I enjoyed reading it and it could be a 2000 year old work.

It can be read HERE

Mel u

"New Doll" by Rabindranath Tagore- A Link to a Great Source of South Asian Short Stories

"New Doll"  by Rabindranath Tagore (1922, 5 pages, translated by Bhaswath Ghosh)

A New Translation of a Tagore Story Plus a

Link to an Excellent Source of Bengali Short Stories

There are a number of very good online literary magazines that publish quality South Asian Short Stories.     One I like a lot is Parabash, which focuses on Bengali literature and culture.    Some of the stories are in Bengali and some of them are translations of short stories that you cannot find anywhere else, including 19th century short stories that represent the very start of the short story in India.   The background of each author is explained in detail.    Geographically the authors are from India and Bangladesh.      Prior to the Partition of India, there was simply Bengali literature.     The towering giant of Bengali literature is Rabindranath Tagore (1861 to 1941-there is background information on Tagore in my prior posts for interested readers) who was the first Asian Nobel Prize winner and whose songs are the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh.   

Tagore shorter fiction are often on the border between the parable and the short story.    A few days ago I was happy to get a notice from Parabash that they had just posted a special edition devoted to Tagore which included a brand new translation of one of his stories, "The New Doll".    

As "The New Doll" opens we meet an eighty year old man who makes dolls for royal princesses.    We are at the annual doll festival held in the royal court yard where all of the doll makers of the region always defer to the eighty year old man.   This year a new craftsmen has entered the event.   To the older man he seems to lack discipline.   

"However, new times meant new demands. Today’s princesses say, “We want these dolls.”

The followers of old times said, “Arre! What bad taste!”
This only increased the obstinacy of the younger lot.

Crowds didn’t flock the old man’s stall this year. His dolls sat inside the basket and kept gazing wistfully like people waiting for a boat to reach the other shore.
A year passed by, then two; everyone forgot the old man’s name. Kishanlal became the master craftsman at the royal doll fair."

The old man can no longer make a living from his dolls so his daughter and son-in-law invite him to live with them where he will keeps wandering cows out of their garden.    He has a sixteen year old granddaughter he loves with all his heart.   One day the girl asks him to make her a doll.   He reluctantly agrees to make her one after he tells her he is no longer considered the master doll maker.   He begins to get into making dolls again when his daughter, whom he is very much afraid off, tells him he is neglecting his duties in the garden at that his granddaughter at 16 is too old for dolls (girls were entered into arranged marriages at less than 16).

The granddaughter shocks her mother by selling the doll for a gold rupee.   Now the daughter has a bit of respect for the doll maker.   She tells her daughter if she can sell 16 dolls it will be enough to buy her daughter a gold necklace to wear at her wedding.   To the old man she is just a little child and he cannot conceive her getting married.   One by one the granddaughter is able to sell the dolls.   She presents her shocked mother with 16 rupees to buy her a wedding necklace.   The mother tells her all that is missing now is the groom.    The granddaughter says she has the groom.   It seems when she went to the doll fair for the first time she was told the doll would not sell because it was too old fashioned.    She was leaving the festival in tears when the man who had replaced her grandfather as master doll maker to the royal family saw her and told her he would fix her dolls up in the modern style so they could be sold.   The girl and the man fell in love and now he is being presented to the old doll maker.

"The old man asked, “Where is he?”
“There, under the Piyal tree,” replied the granddaughter.
The groom-to-be entered the room; the old man said, “Arre! This is Kishanlal!”
Kishanlal touched the old man’s feet and said, “Yes, I am Kishanlal.”
The old man embraced him tight and said, “My dear, one day you had snatched my hand's doll, now you are taking away the doll of my life.
The granddaughter put her arms around the old man’s neck and whispered to him, “Dada, with you in tow.”

"The New Doll' is a simple touching story about the love of an old man and his granddaughter.


Mel u

R K Narayan-"Under the Banyan Tree" and Four Other Stories from The Astrologer's Day and Other Tales

"Under the Banyan Tree"  (1947, 8 pages)
"Engine Trouble"  (1947, 9 pages)
"Avoid all Avoidable Talk (1947, 8 pages)
"Crime and Punishment"  (1947, 9 pages)
"Fruition at Forty"   (1947, 8 pages)

The Reading Life R. K. Narayan Porject


Indian Literature on The Reading Life

The Closing Stories in

The Astrologer's Day and Other Tales

by R. K. Narayan

Many terrible things happened in South Asia in 1947.   Millions died as a result of the Partition of India.    You would never really know this from reading the short stories of R. K. Narayan (1906 to 2001-India)   set in an imaginary small town in India, Malgudi.    Aside from a few references to motor cars and trains, these stories might have been set in 1047.

I have already done several posts on the 30 stories in this collection.   He was the first Indian author to have achieved a large audience world wide for works written in English.   (There is additional background information on him in my prior posts.)

He is considered one of the geniuses of the short story.   I know a lot of my readers are very into Narayan and I hope more will have the pleasure of discovering his work.     His stories were almost all first published in a magazine format for readers whose first language was not English.    

I liked everyone of these stories a lot.    I found once I started reading them it was hard to stop.    The stories in the collection can be read  as stand alone works but they take on more power read as a group.    Narayan gives us a real feel for life in pre-Partition India.    There is a complex moral theme to these stories and I admit I am still pondering it so I will not say more on it now.

All of the stories can be read online HERE or you can download it to a reading device.    

I will soon be posting on some of his longer works of fiction and other short stories.   

This does conclude my posts on The Astrologer's Day and Other Tales.   I enjoyed it tremendously and recommend it to all without reservation.

Mel u

R. K. Narayan-"The Axe" and "Attila" and two more stories from The Astrologer's Day and other Tales

"The Axe" (1947, 10 pages)
"Attila"  (1947, 8 pages)
"Out of Business" (1947, 6 pages)
"Old Bones"  (1947, 6 pages)

Four More Stories from

The Astrologer's Day and Other Stories by R. K. Narayan

age eight

The Reading Life R. K.  Narayan Project

Indian Literature on The Reading Life

I have now read and posted on 24 of the 30 stories in R. K. Narayan's  (1906 to 2001-India) collection of short stories,  The Astrologer's Day and Other Stories.    Almost all of the stories in this collection were first published in the newspaper The Hindu.    Most all of the first readers of the stories read English as a second (or 3rd or 4th) language.   (There is some background information on Narayan in my prior posts.)     Jhumpa Lahiri has said that Narayan is one of the 20th century geniuses of the short story.   I will just post briefly on two of his stories today

"The Axe" is very interesting captivating story.   It has exposition, drama, and development and a moving ending.   It is fully in accord with Frank O'Connor's thesis that the best short stories deal with people from "submarginal groups".    The central character worked all his life as a gardener for  a large mansion.   

"Attila" is a flat out fun shaggy dog story.    The plot is so much fun I will leave it unspoiled.

There are six more stories in this collection.   I will probably post on the best one or two of these stories.

I will also post fairly soon on two of  Narayan's novels.   

Mel u

"Dashi the Bride Groom" and Three Other Stories by R. K. Narayan

"Dashi the Bride Groom" (1947, 8 pages)
"Snake-Song" (1947, 6 pages)
"45 Rupees" (1947, 6 pages
"The Old Man of the Temple"  (1947, 5 pages)

Four More Stories From

The Astrologer's Day and Other Stories

by R. K. Narayan

The Reading Life R. K. Narayan Project

Indian Literature

I hope others will have the pleasure of reading for the first time the work of R. K. Narayan (1906 to 2001-India).   He is for sure among the great short story writers of the 20th century.   (There is background information on Narayan in my prior posts, for those interested.)

Today I will just post  briefly on two of the four stories I read since my last post on Narayan.

"45 Rupees", like some of Narayan's other stories, is about people trapped by their economic circumstances into doing what they know is not really right for them or their families.    The wrongness is not horrible or criminal but a question of lives made much less than they might have been by a bit of money.   In this story our lead character works in an office in the accounting department.    His boss works 15 hours a day seven days a week and he expects at least 12 hours a day from his employees.    The relationship between the man and his wife is really well done.   I  admit I cringed when his wife yelled at him and told him he was neglecting his daughter for his job.    All his little daughter wants is some tine with her father.   He is all set to quit his job when his boss refuses to let him leave early for a special occasion he promised to share with daughter.  The ending is totally perfect and a little heart breaking.   Anyone who has ever felt they were a slave to their job will relate to this story.

"Dashi the Bride Groom"  is a really great story.   It has great opening exposition, there is a very interesting development and some powerful drama and a lesson can be learned from the story.   Dashi is a big bull of a man, strong and powerfully built.   He has the mind of a child .    No one is real sure of his age, maybe 30.   He stays in the house of a man that maybe is his older brother or might just be someone who took him in off the streets many years ago.   He sleeps on the kitchen floor and does things like bringing in water and wood.   As he makes his way around Malgudi (the imaginary town where this and the other stories of Narayan take place) the village boys and retired lay abouts taunt him asking him when his bride will come.    Dashi very much wishes he could have a bride and his own family.   The boys tease him with descriptions of  the great beauty of his imaginary wife.  One day a famous actress comes to stay in town for a while as she has relatives there.    The boys tell Dashi about her and tell him she has come to town to marry him.    He believes them.     Things get very exciting now and I will not spoil the terrific ending.

All of the stories in The Astrologer's Day and Other Stories can  be read HERE
Mel u

R. K. Narayan-Four Stories from a Master of the Short Story

"A Snake in the Grass"  (1947, 5 pages)
"Accident" (1947, 6 pages)
"Such Perfection" (1947, 6 pages)
"A Career"  (1947, 7 pages)

Four More Great Short Stories by

R. K. Narayan

The Reading Life R. K. Narayan Project

South Asian Literature

I am more and more convinced Narayan (1906 to 2001-India)  belongs among the great 20th century short story writers,  certainly in the top twenty, maybe top ten.    I have never seen him on any of the many such lists I have looked at in the last year and I think this is a  reflection of the very Euro-centric education almost all of those in the reading life have had.   This for sure extends to those raised in Asia as well.    When I first began to read his stories set in the imaginary town of Malgudi, India I thought to myself, OK,  he is kind of the Sherwood Anderson of  India.   I still think this is a potentially illuminating comparison but now I think Narayan is more than that.   

Anyway I am reading though his 1947 collection of short stories (most of the stories were first published in The Hindu and have length requirements because of that)  The Astrologer's Day and other Tales.   There are 30 stories in the collection.   I have 14 to go.   He has other collections of short stories but it is mostly these that can be read online.   As I have already posted a lot on him I will keep the rest of my posts on the stories brief.

"A Snake in the Grass" made me feel the very strong fear a king cobra loose in the neighborhood would produce.   Everything more or less has to stop until the snake can be captured.   In the story see what happens at a house where the snake is seen going into the yard.   At first the houseman is blamed for not taking care of the yard and letting it get over grown with bushes.   The the college student chimes in telling everyone exactly how many people are killed in India every year by cobras.   Narayan shows his very deft touch when he describes the family as a mother, 3 daughter and a son with no mention at all of the father.   At once we begin to wonder what happened to him and it brings the family to life for us.  

"Accident" is a really fun ghost story that reminded me of part of the plot of a the plot of a Jerry Seinfeld show.   (The episode where Kramer goes to California and is picked up by a truck driver that was killed in an accident years ago but still rides the road.)

"Such Perfection" is about an artist who carves such a beautiful image of a God that  the statue is considered almost demonic as it will itself be worshipped.    This sort of reminded me of a Hawthorne short story.

"A Career" is simply a great very wise short story that puts a huge amount of life in a few pages.   It has a great ending.   As I said before, Narayan really knows how to end a story

All of these stories can be read HERE.

As these stories were all published before the 1947 Partition of India they are very relevant to the Passage to the Raj Project.   

Mel u