As a little child my mother told me the story of the founding of Panja Saheb: Guru Nanak once came into wilderness with his disciple. It was hot. The disciple thirsted for water. But water was nowhere except on top of a hill where a dervish lived.
The political appropriation of Mahatma Gandhi’s legacy has been going on for decades. Now the trend has spread to unlikely quarters. Gandhi peersat us from posters, sharing space with his ideological opponents. Even artifacts associated with him, like his spectacles, have been used as logo in government propaganda. Commercialization has been a parallel process, initially for marketing products purportedly of cottage industries, and then for a whole range ofother things. The powers that be appreciate the brand value of the
name Gandhi.
According to Elizabeth Cook, ‘myths are about gods, legends are about heroes, and fairy tales are about woodcutters and princesses.’
Here is a collection of sixteen short stories including one by Ka Naa Subramanyam himself. Not all are short stories—at least one is an epic in a terse form: Ramapada Choudhury’s Festal.
The Magadha King Dhana Nanda had become unpopular because of his vile tongue, bad temper and greedy ways.
This collection of essays by Indian academics on American literature ranges in quality from the solitary brilliance of V.Y. Kantak’s essay on Faulkner’s Technique, through the competent and interesting (Neila Seshadri’s Leslie A. Fiedler: Critic as Mythographer, Isaac Sequeira’s Essay on Sylvia Plath), to the (alas!) majority that is mediocre, or, at best, stolid and painstaking.