‘Life doesn’t have a plot. We don’t know what is going to happen next year, so I let the story develop like that. I like to write it that way, as the unknown unfolds’ It is thus that Ananda Mukerji commented on the unfolding of his first novel And Where, My Friend, Lay You Hiding?
The book under review is a notable addition to the canon of literature in translation. It showcases fourteen stories of Raghbir Dhand who occupied a prominent place among the pioneer writers of the Punjabi diaspora, settled in England. His fictional world as represented in these stories offers a great range in terms of variety of themes, ideas, technique and craft.
Strangeness and surprise, endorsed by academic approval, are Lehman’s basic criteria of choice here. Realizing Americas multiplicity of taste and culture, he prefers to call the corpus ‘American poetries’ (p. viii) instead of just ‘American poetry’, and consequently offers a much wider canon than before.
There are three texts waiting to be discussed here: the ‘original’ Chaklet, a collection of eight Hindi stories written by Pandey Bechan Sharma ‘Ugra’ published in 1927 after five of them were serialized in Matvala, a Calcutta based Hindi weekly; its translation into English by Ruth Vanita titled Chocolate
The East-West encounter literary genre is an axiomatic creative manifestation of our colonial/post-colonial inheritance. Both Indian English and Anglo Indian literary historiography is indelibly etched with the contours of this encounter.
It would be unfair to place the present volume of ‘A History Of Indian Literature: From The Courtly To The Popular, 500-1399’ by Sisir Kumar Das in the context of his earlier well-received, critically acclaimed, scholarly yet reader-friendly volumes covering the period 1800-1910 (Western Impact: Indian Response)