Among the many narrative modes preva- lent in pre-modern India, the sthala-purana (or place-legend) enjoys a special stature. It is normally associated with a local temple and tells the story of how the temple came to be built on that site.
The eighteen stories by Basanta Kumar Satpathy, sampled and translated by a team of twenty collaborators in One-Eyed Chick and Other Stories, is a testimony to the belief that ‘Indian literature is one though written in many languages’.
In academic circles, all discussion of the In- dian novel as it emerged in the latter half of the 19th century revolves around questions of its adjustment with a ‘derivative’ form, that of the European realist novel.
The novella Tyanantar, translated by Maya Pandit as Thereafter, belongs to one of Saniya’s 13 short story collections of which the first appeared in 1980 and the most recent in 2010.
Defying Winter, Tutun Mukherjee’s trans- lation of Nabaneeta Dev Sen’s novella about women in an old-age home in Calcutta of the eighties captures the beginning of a social shift.
In the recent scramble to celebrate the 150th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore, a host of scholars and enthusiasts have tried to recreate his image in terms of their own individual perspectives.