Why does a writer write a short story? “Writing a short story is very different from writing a novel,” says David Davidar. “They are completely different disciplines.” Speaking at The Hindu Pavilion in Lit for Life 2015, he explained how short story collections don’t sell better than novels. “It just comes down to what you’re good at.”
Take, for instance, R.K. Narayan’s A Horse and Two Goats , from which Sarvesh Sridhar read out an excerpt at a session titled ‘From Tagore to Tharoor: A Clutch of Indian Masterpieces’, named after David’s new anthology of short stories. The story itself can be read as the dilemma a translator faces. A poor, elderly farmer in the tiny village of Kritam comes across a businessman from New York. The catch is that neither speaks the same language. As the cliché goes, hilarity ensues.
Contrast and juxtaposition play an important role in the translator’s job, and as David opines, “A successful translation is one that works in the translated language, in this case, English. That’s why Gabriel Garcia Marquez makes for such wonderful reading in English too.” While selecting stories for the anthology he edited,
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Indian short stories, he defines, are those with certain civilisational things we as Indians bring to English writing. “If one is steeped in India, one doesn’t need to interpret it to suit the tastes of someone in New York or London. That’s what these stories, I felt, have. I call them Indian, not based on location, but on something that is ineffably Indian.”
The book features short stories by R.K. Narayan, Rabindranath Tagore, Ismat Chughtai, Saadat Hasan Manto, Vikram Seth, Vikram Chandra, Khushwant Singh, Shashi Tharoor and Mahasweta Devi among others.