A CLUTCH OF INDIAN MASTERPIECES: EXTRAORDINARY SHORT STORIES FROM THE 19TH CENTURY TO THE PRESENT 
Edited by David Davidar,
Aleph, Rs 795

The OED gives one primary meaning of the word, 'clutch', when used as a noun, and two secondary or related usages. The word refers to 'a group of eggs fertilized at the same time, laid in a single session and (in birds) incubated together'. Following from this, it is also used as a collective noun for 'a brood of chicks' and can, by extension, denote 'a small group of people or things'. David Davidar's choice of this word in the title of his compilation of short stories by random Indian authors widely separated by time, geography, and most noticeably, merit, naturally makes one wonder which of these senses the editor intended to convey. The stories have definitely not been 'fertilized' at the same time - the collection begins with Rabindranath Tagore's 'The Hunger of Stones' (the original was first published in 1895) and closes with Kanishk Tharoor's undated 'Elephant at Sea' (the author was born in 1984). I guess all of the stories can be imagined as 'chicks' if one is feeling like a teenage American misogynist. And the collection can be called 'small' only if one considers 39 stories, in 515 pages, not to amount to much. But there is more to puzzle over.

If Davidar is to be trusted, then a story such as Amrita Narayanan's 'Stolen' (can't recognize the author? - nor could I, before googling her name to get just one trustworthy hit, where she is associated with the 'Return of the Erotic') can be called a 'masterpiece' in the same breath in which, say, Ismat Chughtai's 'Quilt' is so labelled. Or, Mahasweta Devi's 'Draupadi' is of the same class as Upamanyu Chatterjee's bored and frivolous story, 'Desolation, Lust'. The editor, of course, cannot be taken to task if he thinks generously that all of them are masterpieces, but a simple comparison of the aforementioned pairs of stories would make the reader feel sorry for Davidar, who, it seems, has no discernment whatsoever. This hunch plays in the mind when one reads about the rationale behind the collection, spelt out by Davidar in the introduction, 'Our stories': 'I decided to pull this anthology together on the basis of a very simple premise - it would only include stories that I loved, stories that had made their mark on me in the forty years or so that I had been attentively reading serious Indian literature'. Considered alongside the title, the introductory declaration can make for a nice little argument: all the stories in this collection are masterpieces; all the stories have been chosen/liked by Davidar; therefore, all the stories chosen/liked by Davidar are masterpieces. Only such solipsistic reasoning can explain the clubbing together of Tagore and Tharoor (both Shashi and his son, Kanishk), Manto and Cyrus Mistry, R.K. Narayan and Irwin Allan Sealy, among others.

However, Davidar has the humility to explain why he likes the stories he has chosen. 'Many of them are rooted in classical Indian forms of story-telling or unselfconsciously use Indian myth and legend in their narratives. In addition, they possess in great abundance the Indian sensibility.' And what is the 'Indian sensibility'? '...I think it is inherent to writers who were born here, or have lived here for enough time, for distinctive aspects of this country, this civilization, to have shaped their view of the world, their creative consciousness, and their style... [W]hen their subject matter is India, they tend not to exoticize, but deepen our understanding of the country.' This is still acceptable when applied to the stories, although it also unintentionally points to how shallow 'deep' becomes when one approaches some of Davidar's masters from contemporary times. While one can go on reading and re-reading a story such as Buddhadeva Bose's 'A Life' or Narayan's 'A Horse and Two Goats', and on each reading discover some new aspect not only of India but also of the storyteller's craft, of the expansive power of language, and of the capacity of banal life to amaze, the stories by, say, Githa Hariharan, Cyrus Mistry or Nisha da Cunha disappoint even on the first read. True, the latter do not 'exoticize' India - and that's about all. The stories by the last three authors are about the pains and joys of being exiled for work, of cross-dressing, and of being dumped by husband, respectively. Foreign readers may glean some facts about the state of affairs in India from these stories, but even that purpose would be better served by reading relevant news reports.

To count the small mercies, there are a few good stories here - apart from the famous ones that do not need any discussion - to balance out the trite lot. Davidar includes a lot of translated works in order to communicate the Indian sensibility. As a reader conversant only with Bengali among the regional languages of India, I can comment only on the translations by Amitav Ghosh (of Tagore's 'The Hunger of Stones') and by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (of Mahasweta Devi's 'Draupadi'). They are creations in their own right. The translations make a shadow story around the originals that is like the expressive darkness surrounding the characters in Rembrandt's paintings. The flavours of Khushwant Singh's own short story, 'Portrait of a Lady', and of his translations of Manto's 'Toba Tek Singh' and of Amrita Pritam's 'Stench of Kerosene' differ subtly, suggesting how he must have changed his style to tune in with the texts he is translating. The various other translated stories, rendered into English from Malayalam, Oriya, Kannada, Marathi, Rajasthani and so on, read smoothly, partly indicating their success.

The stories, of course, have no recognizable similarity of theme other than their Indian-ness. Yet, as one makes the journey from colonial to independent India through the stories, one notices the transformations happening in the lives of the people. Speaking in the voice of the unmarried daughter of the Diwan Sahib who locks the girl up in the same way as he hoards his faded moments of glory with the English, Nirmal Verma represents the past as something that has to be abandoned, not without regrets, if one has to live on ('Mirror of Illusion', translated from the Hindi by Geeta Kapur). But changing India is also merciless, as a people, suddenly set at liberty to pursue their aspirations without interference from an oppressive State, taste the devious fruits of freedom. Even innocuous villages, once associated with an unambitious way of life, now produce 'Hitlers', who can crush a person to death just to get a feel of the heady, money-fuelled power - symbolized by a shiny red tractor - they have acquired ('Countless Hitlers' by Vijaydan Detha, translated from the Rajasthani by Christi A. Merrill and Kailash Kabir).

In this atmosphere darkening with social and political corruption, the law-keeper becomes an important character, who keeps coming back in many of these stories. If he is the face of the independent State's brutality in 'Draupadi', in 'Inspector Matadeen on the Moon' (by Harishankar Parsai, translated from the Hindi by C.M. Naim) he is a figure of farce drawn with exaggerated features to highlight the gap between what he represents and what he is in reality. In one of the better stories from contemporary times, Vikram Chandra's 'Kama', the policeman is humanized. This story introduces Inspector Sartaj Singh, the protagonist of Chandra's novel, Sacred Games, who constantly watches himself playing his character and, as such, feels the gap that is brought out through satire in 'Inspector Matadeen on the Moon'. Sartaj's investigation of a mysterious death threatens to fall apart, mimicking the trajectory of his personal life, as he arrives with painful deliberation at the realization of the impossibility of arrival. ''I understand,' Sartaj said, and understood nothing.''

The stories are loosely strung together with another thread - of descriptions of changing Indian seasons, often presided over by the moon, whose moods reflect those of the human drama it gazes upon. In 'Draupadi', the indifferent 'moon vomits a bit of light and goes to sleep.' As the daughter listens to the dull sound of her father's footsteps going up and down the veranda in 'Mirror of Illusion', the outer world is shrouded in a 'pale moonlight' and 'the mounds of rubble [throw] long, thin shadows across the empty fields.' If 'Kama', set in Bombay, opens with a listless voice waiting 'for the monsoon to break, without faith, without belief in its powers, waiting only for something to change', the rains breath lush green life into the hills in Ruskin Bond's endearing story, 'The Blue Umbrella'. 'It was a beautiful season, except for the leeches.'

The best stories among those collected here are too well known for the reader not to have read them already. One does not need this anthology to realize the greatness of a story such as, say, Premchand's 'The Shroud'. It is doubtful whether all the lesser known stories can be called 'extraordinary'. As such, one wonders why one should spend time reading A Clutch of Indian Masterpieces, except to discover the editor's personal tastes. Given the breathtaking egotism with which Davidar announces the underlying principle of this collection - 'the basic criterion for featuring stories in this book would be whether I liked them or not' - perhaps he thinks that is reason enough.