A few Fridays ago at Crosswords in Mumbai, the novelist, blogger, and friend of Out of Print Chandrahas Choudhury launched ‘India: A Traveller’s Literary Companion’, a collection of short fiction which aims to be geographically representative of India, which he edited. At the launch, he discussed the emergence of Indian literature in English, as well as the difficulty of presenting an accurate picture of the richness of Indian literature in all the languages it exists in, simply because of the difficulty of finding good translations of vernacular literature.
The discussion was based largely around the novel and its evolution. It makes one wonder what place the short story occupies in the history of Indian literature and how the modern short story relates to the rich history of subcontinental writing? In Chandrahas’ opinion, the format has commonalities with the Jataka tales and folk storytelling in the oral tradition. It will be interesting to see whether this is visible in the stories we receive for our next issue, which has the theme of mythology.
by Mira Brunner, editor, Out of Print 