South Asian Short Fiction

Introduction

What was once known as India now consists of several political entities, including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bhutan. The larger area is generally called South Asia or the Indian subcontinent. The writers who are classified as South Asian, however, may not have been born on the subcontinent or may have moved elsewhere. In a few cases, their connection to the continent is not by blood but through marriage to a South Asian.

Some important South Asian writers spent their lives in the area where they were born, Shashi Deshpande, Mrnala Pande, and R. K. Narayan, for example. However, at the partition of colonial India in 1947, the violence that followed sent millions fleeing to safety, and among the refugees were several writers. For instance, Qurratulain Hyder left her longtime home in Lucknow, India, for Muslim Pakistan, where she lived for some time, eventually returning to India to escape Pakistan’s increasing repression of women. Hyder became one of Bombay’s most influential journalists, an authority on Urdu literature, and a prize-winning author, who in 1967 was awarded the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award for her short-story collection in Urdu, Patjhar ki Awaz (1965; The Sound of Falling Leaves, 1994).

Expatriate South Asians

Other writers left the subcontinent for political reasons or professional advancement. Some left because, as Salman Rushdie notes in his introduction to Mirrorwork: Fifty Years of Indian Writing, 1947-1997 (1997), many are wanderers by nature. Among those who took up residence in the United States were Anjana Appachana, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Bharati Mukherjee, and Padma Perera. Rohinton Mistry moved to Canada, and Attia Hosain and Rushdie settled in England. Some had more than one home. Anita Desai divided her time between England and the United States; Vikram Chandra lived in Washington, D.C., and his native Bombay. After 1975, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and her husband were commuting between New York and New Delhi.

As Rushdie points out, if one applied a residence test to writers, Ernest Hemingway and Henry James might not be considered American, Graham Greene English, or James Joyce Irish. The writers discussed in this essay are classified as South Asians because they all draw upon their experience of the Indian subcontinent for the characters, settings, and themes of their short fiction.

Shashi Tharoor and Jhumpa Lahiri

Given the broad definition above, a writer does not necessarily have to be a native of the subcontinent to be classified as a South Asian writer. For example, Shashi Tharoor was born in London, though he grew up in Bombay and Calcutta. Although his work for the United Nations took him around the world, Tharoor’s fiction reflects the experiences of his formative years.

Jhumpa Lahiri was also born in London, but she grew up in Rhode Island, seeing India only when her parents visited her extended family. Although her parents always referred to India as home, she said she felt like an outsider there as much as she did in the small American town where she lived. Lahiri’s awareness of her cultural history, her perspective on the immigrant experience, and her preoccupation with alienation justify her inclusion in this essay.

Robbie Clipper Sethi and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Robbie Clipper Sethi (b. 1961) and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1927-2013) are not South Asian by blood but are considered South Asian writers. Sethi is an American who was reared in New Jersey, Indiana, and California. She met and married a Punjabi Sikh. When she published her first book, she was teaching in New Jersey. In The Bride Wore Red: Tales of a Cross-Cultural Family (1996), Sethi describes three marriages, all between American women and South Asian men. However, one of the strengths of Sethi’s book is her empathy with all her characters, not only the men. By choosing their wives, they defy their culture and their parents, who feel the loss of their ties to cultural tradition and their future as a family.

Jhabvala was South Asian neither by birth nor by blood, but she is included in every list of major Indian fiction writers. Born in Germany to Jewish Polish parents, then reared and educated in England, Jhabvala moved to India only after marrying an Indian architect in 1951. In “Introduction: Myself in India,” which prefaces her volume Out of India (1986), Jhabvala insists that every year, she becomes less Indian. Nevertheless, India has such a strong claim on her that she must periodically leave if she is not to be swallowed up by it. Like Sethi, Jhabvala understands cross-cultural conflicts; like Lahiri, Jhabvala understands alienation. However, while she is capable of empathy, Jhabvala distances herself from her subject more than either of them does and probably more than any other Indian writer. Her voice is one of the most distinctive in South Asian fiction.

One Subcontinent, Many Languages

Though partition drove vast numbers of people to areas dominated by those of their faith, it did little to alter one of the basic characteristics of the subcontinent: its cultural and linguistic diversity. As A. K. Ramanujan pointed out in his introduction to Folktales from India: A Selection of Oral Tales from Twenty-two Languages (1991), the people of India alone speak one hundred different languages and sixteen hundred distinct dialects. In addition to Sanskrit, the language of ancient written texts, and English, which is read and spoken throughout the entire subcontinent, India has fifteen “major” vernacular languages, each used by several million Indians. One of the most difficult decisions each South Asian writer must make is whether to write in a local language or English, which is familiar throughout the subcontinent.

The Argument for Writing in English

When India became independent from Great Britain, many nationalists believed that English was too tainted by colonialism to be appropriate for discourse, let alone for literary purposes. However, Rushdie argues that, like Urdu, which came to India with early conquerors, English in the subcontinent should now be considered just another South Asian language.

Rushdie insists that authors who write in English are no less “Indian” in voice and perspective than those who utilize one of the native languages. Furthermore, to reach a broad audience, works written in the vernacular must be translated into English, often suffering in the process. Rushdie contends that since independence, the best works the subcontinent has produced have been written in English.

The Argument for the Vernacular

Aditya Behl and David Nicholls, editors of The Penguin New Writing in India (1994), disagree with Rushdie’s assessment. They point out that, even if English-language authors produce some international best sellers, their works are not necessarily better than those written in native languages. Behl and Nicholls offer the selections in their anthology as proof of the high quality of vernacular works and as evidence that any distrust of South Asian translators is unfounded. They are also convinced that, in an area with so many different cultures, only through vernacular literature can each be appreciated, understood, and perhaps even preserved.

A writer’s decision about language is more than a choice between nationalism or the hope of an international blockbuster. One of India’s most respected playwrights and fiction writers, Mrinal Pande, was a college English teacher for many years, but she also served as editor of Hindi periodicals. She began writing in Hindi to reach more people, specifically more women. However, Pande changed to English for her short-story sequence, Daughter’s Daughter (1993), so that she could distance herself from her autobiographical subject matter and even access lost memories from her past.

South Asian Writers and Genre

Though the short-fiction writers of the Indian subcontinent may face more complex language issues than those in other parts of the world, they have the same problems in getting their works published. South Asian writers are only too aware of the facts. Most short stories are still published in periodicals. A few make it into anthologies, but most publishers are hesitant to take a chance on a book-length collection of short fiction until an author is an established novelist.

Thus, Jhabvala, Mukherjee, Rushdie, and Chandra all published successful novels before bringing out collections of short stories. Similarly, it was not until after the success of two novels, The Great Indian Novel (1989) and Show Business (1991), that Tharoor’s early short fiction was accepted for publication. Although Tharoor warns readers that these stories were written when he was a relatively inexperienced writer and designed for mass-circulation Indian magazines, reviewers found much to admire in The Five-Dollar Smile: Fourteen Early Stories and a Farce in Two Acts (1990; reissued in 1993 as The Five-Dollar Smile, and Other Stories).

If a writer’s long fiction captures the public’s interest, critics may seek out earlier collections of short fiction by that writer. When Attia Hosain’s novel Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) was reissued in 1988, it almost immediately became the subject of scholarly studies. However, at least one reviewer pointed out the virtues of another volume by Hosain, which was reissued at the same time. Phoenix Fled (1953) was a collection of stories that originally appeared in Indian newspapers, and a good case can be made for its being superior to Sunlight on a Broken Column. Nevertheless, the scholarly community focused almost exclusively on Hosain’s novel, neglecting her fine short fiction.

Fiction Genres and the American Market

Because the American publishing industry found long fiction to be more marketable than short fiction, for a long time, book-length collections by many of South Asia’s finest short-story writers were unavailable in most American bookstores or even in many libraries. Krishna Baldev Vaid and the noted filmmaker Satyajit Ray, who died in 1992, for example, were admired in India for their collections of beautifully crafted short fiction, but in the United States, one would have to look for their short stories either in anthologies or in an occasional issue of the Chicago Review.

This bias in favor of the novel meant that anyone who wrote long and short fiction was almost certain to be introduced to American readers as a novelist. The award-winning author Shashi Deshpande, for example, published five collections of short stories in India and several novels before any of her fiction became available in the United States. Significantly, the work selected for her American debut was a novel, A Matter of Time (1996).

Unlike Deshpande, many writers are comfortable in only one genre. For example, Anita Desai chose the novel form not because it was easier to market but because she disliked writing short stories. Though critics found much to admire in her collection Games at Twilight, and Other Stories (1978), Desai published no more volumes of short fiction until 2000 but turned her attention exclusively to the novel for a while. She explained her reasons in an interview in Literary India (1995): Shorter forms, she said, such as poems and short stories, made her feel pressured, while the novel gave her ample time to develop her ideas and enough scope to explore all their complexities. Desai continued publishing short story volumes into the twenty-first century, including Collected Stories (2008), The Artist of Disappearance (2011), and The Complete Stories (2017). She also continued writing novels, publishing Rosarita in 2024.

New Hope for Short Fiction

There was an increased interest in short fiction in the late twentieth century. Critics were looking more closely at the genre. For example, Bharati Mukherjee had long been admired both for her novels and for her nonfiction publications, but it was her collection The Middleman, and Other Stories (1988) that brought her the 1988 National Book Critics Circle Award for best fiction. Anjana Appachana, too, was gaining an international reputation based on her short fiction. After winning the O. Henry Award in 1989 for a short story entitled “Her Mother,” Appachana won high praise from critics for her first book, Incantations, and Other Stories (1991).

At this time, it was not just the novels of a few famous South Asian writers that were being featured in bookstores; their short story collections were also popular, and there was a marked proliferation of books by lesser-known writers. By the spring of 2000, one had no difficulty buying paperback editions of Mukherjee’s The Middleman, and Other Stories, Jhabvala’s Out of India and East into Upper East: Plain Tales from New York and New Delhi (1998), Rushdie’s East, West: Stories (1994), Chandra’s Love and Longing in Bombay (1997), and several Narayan’s volumes, including The Grandmother’s Tale, and Selected Stories (1994).

Paperback Originals and a Pulitzer Prize

During the 1990s, some publishing industry members noticed that sales of short-story collections were increasing. They hypothesized the cause was new young writers in the academic workshops were writing more short stories or more polished stories; perhaps they were submitting them in book form because there were fewer magazines where their works could be placed. The publisher, Houghton Mifflin, decided to try an experiment. It would issue short-story collections by new or relatively unknown writers as paperback originals, reasoning that its customers would be more willing to take a chance on less-expensive books. One of the collections selected by Houghton Mifflin for this experiment was Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies. The volume appeared in 1999 as a Mariner Original. In 2000, it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

As Interpreter of Maladies went into a second printing, Lahiri recalled the comment of an agent who had rejected it, suggesting that she come back when she had a novel and a warning from the agent who did accept the book to the effect that short fiction did not sell well. According to conventional wisdom, both agents were right. Since Interpreter of Maladies was Lahiri’s first book, she has not assured the audience that an earlier novel might have provided. Its success was clearly because of her genuine talent. However, those who enjoy reading and writing short fiction hoped that it might also signal the arrival of a long-overdue renascence for short fiction.

The Storyteller and the Story

In Gods, Demons, and Others (1964), R. K. Narayan, whose death in 2001 ended a long writing career, describes how a storyteller provided his village with entertainment and moral and religious instruction. As A. K. Ramanujan, who died in 1993, observed, folktales still permeate South Asian culture. They are familiar in cities and villages, among those of every faith and every caste or class. The subcontinent’s receptivity to short fiction owes much to this ancient tradition.

Narayan recognizes his indebtedness to the oral tradition by habitually describing himself as a storyteller. In Malgudi, the small fictional community where his works are set, Narayan shows humans at their best and worst and dramatizes the cosmic conflict between good and evil.

The community where Rohinton Mistry set his Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987; published in the United States as Swimming Lessons, and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag, 1989) is a Parsi housing complex in Bombay. Like any village, it has a resident storyteller, Nariman Hansotia, who interprets events for his community and sometimes serves as its conscience. Subramaniam, the civil servant and teller of tales in Chandra’s Love and Longing in Bombay, fulfills a similar function.

Traditions and Themes

A. K. Ramanujan classified the folktales that pervade South Asian society by subject matter. Some feature strong men. Others feature strong women. Many deal with family relationships. There are stories of the supernatural and animals, grim and humorous stories, and stories about storytelling. Ramanujan’s list could serve as the basis for studying subjects and themes in South Asian short fiction. For example, in Chandra’s Love and Longing in Bombay, one finds family conflicts and conflicts between families, strong and weak men, women who play power games, violence and degradation, satire and humor, and even a ghost.

Old folktales in which humans show themselves as animals or vice versa are metaphors for identity issues. In Ismat Chughtai’s “Sacred Duty,” from The Quilt and Other Stories (1990), a young couple attempts to placate their parents by being married in both Muslim and Hindu ceremonies. When it becomes evident that their families will never let them be themselves, the newlyweds disappear. Naturally, the parents are devastated.

Throughout her works, this courageous writer called for an end to all forms of tyranny, including the patriarchal system, which she believed enslaved women and deprived them of their identities. Her death in 1991 represented a significant loss among Urdu women writers. Among the other South Asian female writers who focus on women’s issues are Attia Hosain, who died in 1998; Deshpande; Mukherjee; and Divakaruni. In Arranged Marriage (1995), Divakaruni dramatizes the plight of women immigrants, bound to husbands they barely know and too fearful of their displeasure to venture into the new world outside the door. However, even if these women break free of their traditional prisons, they may not find happiness. As Mukherjee shows in works such as The Middleman, and Other Stories, it is not easy for anyone to adapt to a strange land and an alien culture.

Given the multicultural nature of the subcontinent itself and the fact that so many of its people immigrate to other areas of the world, it is hardly surprising that the conflict of cultures continues to be a major theme in South Asian short fiction, as is evident in the titles of two volumes by prominent writers who appeared in the 1990s, East into Upper East: Plain Tales from New York and New Delhi, by Jhabvala, and East, West: Stories, by Rushdie. In both books, there is one section for stories set in the East and another set in the West, though Rushdie does have a third group called “East, West.” Nevertheless, the two worlds are not as separate as the divisions suggest, nor are the characters as different. While no good writer will ignore the influence of culture on one’s life, in the end, the best authors manage to transcend the particular. Tradition and change, rebellion and dislocation, conflicts within families and conflicts between cultures, and the yearning for spiritual certainty in an ever-changing world—these themes pervade South Asian short fiction just as they pervaded the storyteller’s myths because they affect not just one people or one part of the world but all of humanity.

New Works in English in the Twenty-first Century

One of the foremost South Asian short-story writers in English and published in the United States has been Anita Desai. Desai’s return to short fiction in her collection Diamond Dust: Stories (2000) offers her reader nine stories whose wide geographical range, from India to Canada and Mexico, indicates the author’s global approach to storytelling. In “The Rooftop Dwellers,” a young New Delhi woman seeks independence by finding her marginal but own room on a bungalow roof. In “Winterscape,” a first-generation South Asian Canadian man tries to make his European Canadian wife understand some of the intricacies of his Indian heritage, particularly the fact that, as a baby, his mother gave him to her childless sister to raise as her own. In “Tepoztlan Tomorrow,” Desai describes a young Mexican’s alienation upon returning to his rural hometown after studying in the United States. The story is typical of Desai’s stated desire to approach non-Indian subjects for her storytelling.

A writer much beloved by feminist literary critics, Deshpande had her best short stories published by Penguin in India in Shashi Deshpande: Collected Stories, Volume 1 (2003). Covering thirty years of her writing, it solidified her reputation as a premier South Asian short-story writer. She continued writing, publishing In the Country of Deceit (2008), Shadow Play (2013), and Strangers to Ourselves (2015).

Jhabvala’s My Nine Lives (2004) is a set of nine original short stories that imagine a different life for the narrator, loosely modeled after the author. The stories reflect personal character, historical circumstances, fate, and destiny against a geographical backdrop ranging from London to New Delhi. She later published "The Teacher" (2008) and "A Judge's Will" (2013) in The New Yorker, and in 2018, she published a short story collection entitled At the End of the Century: The Stories of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

Rishi Reddi's debut collection, Karma, and Other Stories (2007), offers seven short stories set primarily in the South Asian American community of Boston, sometimes juxtaposed with a look at Hyderabad, India, home to some of the immigrant characters. Reddi’s work was warmly welcomed by critics and readers, quickly establishing her as a promising short-story writer in the United States.

Lahiri’s second collection, Unaccustomed Earth (2008), analyzes with a careful eye for telling details some of the cultural and personal challenges faced by different generations of Indian immigrants in the United States. This is done masterfully in the title story. It is set in Seattle, where a completely assimilated grandson begins to bond with his traditional grandfather. In turn, the widower suddenly shows some very nontraditional attitudes to his daughter and his grandson. Lahiri also published works in Italian, such as Il quaderno di Nerina (2020; Nerina's Notebook), Dove mi trovo (2018; Whereabouts), and the short story collection Racconti romani (2023; Roman Stories).

New Translations of Urdu Stories

Seven years before Hyder’s death in 2007, Oxford University Press published her collection A Season of Betrayals (2000), making her best Urdu work available in English translation. The three stories, two of them of novella length, look at three women protagonists who are strongly affected by the key postcolonial event of South Asia, the partition of colonial India into Pakistan and India in August 1947. Hyder’s stories shed light on the personal effects of religiously and politically motivated upheavals with a timeless human dimension. “Sita Haran” (1960; “Sita Betrayed”) looks at the alienation of a Hindu woman who fled to India as her native province of Sindh became part of predominantly Muslim Pakistan, “The Housing Society” (1963) follows its two young women protagonists in the opposite direction, from India to Pakistan. “Patjhar Ki Awaz” (1965; “The Sound of Falling Leaves”) represents Hyder’s most famous story of a young Muslim woman exiled to Pakistan when her native province of Uttar Pradesh became part of India.

However, South Asian writers of short stories in Urdu still found it hard to have their latest works translated and published for an English-speaking audience. A notable exception was Intizar Husain, whose collections A Chronicle of the Peacocks: Stories of Partition, Exile, and Lost Memories (2002) and Circle, and Other Stories (2002) center on the partition of colonial India in 1947 and incorporate various religious and oral storytelling traditions and themes of the Indian subcontinent. However, even the latest stories of writers with as high a literary standing as Syed Qasim Mahmood of Pakistan, who died at age eighty-one in 2010, and which were collected in Urdu in Syed Qasim Mahmood kay Afsaney (2007; short stories of Syed Qasim Mahmood). This was symptomatic of the fate of other contemporary Urdu writers' short stories. Typical was the prolific Pakistani writer Rasheed Amjad, who published three collections of short stories in Urdu—Sat Rangay Prinday Kay Taaqub Main (2002), Aik Aam Admi Ka Khwab (2006), and Aam Admi Kay Khwab (2007). The same holds true for the horror stories of Khakan Sajid (pen name of Muhammad Sajid), collected in Wahoosh (2006; the animals), and the short stories of Adamzad (2008; sons of Adam), which were popular in his native Pakistan and Urdu. He continued his career by writing an Urdu column for a Pakistani newspaper entitled Daman-e-Koh.

Mahmoud Yasien's Contemporary Urdu Short Stories from Kolkata (2023), translated by Afif Shams Siddiqi, highlights the diversity of contemporary Urdu short stories. The eighteen-story compilation features the work of eight authors from Kolkata who offer English readers a new perspective on literature and life in their city. Urdu: The Best Stories of Our Times (2023) also provides Urdu works translated by Rakhshanda Jalil in the twenty-first century.

The Journal Indian Literature and New Anthologies in English

While short stories continued to be written and published in all of India’s twenty-two officially recognized languages, they were almost unknown in the United States because of a lack of translations and publications. A good source for translations of contemporary short stories by Indian writers working in non-English languages has been the bimonthly journal Indian Literature. It is published by India’s national literary academy, Sahitya Akademi. Its editors aim to make Indian and international authors aware of works written in indigenous South Asian languages through the common shared medium of English translations. Sahitya Akademi also bestows a prestigious annual literary prize for one writer in each major Indian language, including English and Sanskrit, for which it collects texts. In 2007, Desai became a Sahitya Akademi Fellow honored for lifetime achievement, including her short-story writing work.

In 2011, there were also new publications of short-story anthologies featuring the work of a diverse group of South Asian writers. Among those was editor Geeta Dharmarajan’s Separate Journeys: Short Stories by Contemporary Indian Women (2004), featuring fifteen writers. In 2012, she received the Padma Shri award for her work in literature and education. Similarly, translator and editor Achamma C. Chandrasekaran's anthology Daughters of Kerala: Twenty-Five Stories by Award-Winning Authors (2004) makes available to English readers a fascinating look at the life challenges of woman protagonists from India’s southwestern state of Kerala through texts written from 1931 to 2001. Editor Shyam Selvadurai’s anthology Story-Wallah: Short Fiction from South Asian Writers (2004) collects famous stories written by many of the most prominent South Asian short story writers and represents an excellent introduction to the field. Similarly, Selvadurai published Many Roads Through Paradise: An Anthology Of Sri Lankan Literature in 2014, outlining important Sri Lankan authors and works. He later published a novel entitled Mansions of the Moon (2022). Editor Nurjehan Aziz published Her Mother’s Ashes 3: Stories of South Asian Women in Canada and the United States (2009), the third volume of her successful series, after 1994 and 1999. Later, in 2015, Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar published The Adivasi Will Not Dance, which was nominated for The Hindu Literary Prize for Best Fiction in 2016. It was well-received globally and was translated into several languages. Other important contributors to South Asian short fiction in the twenty-first century include Amrita Pritam, one of the first well-known female Punjabi authors, Lakshmi Holmstrom, and Anuk Arudpragasam.

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