Best Loved Indian Stories of the Century, Volume 1
Page 22
Nayantara Sahgal, daughter of Vijayalakshmi Pandit and niece of Jawaharlal Nehru, is best known for her eight novels which include The Day in Shadow, Rich Like Us, which won the 1985 Sinclair Prize for fiction and the Sahitya Akademi Award, and Plans for Departure which won the 1987 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Eurasia. She is a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has served on the jury of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. She lives in Dehra Dun.
Nergis Dalai, who wrote for many years under the pseudonym, ARIES, has been writing fiction and articles for about thirty years. Her stories have won many coveted prizes and have been broadcast by the BBC. She has also written books for children and on cookery. Among her outstanding works are Minari, Never a Dull Moment, A Birthday Present, The Sisters, The Inner Door, The Nude and The Girls From Overseas.
Padma Hejmadi, who has also written under the name of Padma Perera, was born in Madras. Her previous books include Birthday Deathday and Other Stories. Her next book, Room to Fly, will be published by the University of California Press, Berkeley, in autumn 1999. Also a photographer and visual artist, she has held solo exhibitions and provided art work for the cover of her own forthcoming book. Married to writer Peter S. Beagle, she now lives in California, USA.
R.K. Narayan was born in Madras, and educated there and at Maharaja’s College in Mysore. His first novel Swami and Friends and its successor The Bachelor of Arts are both set in the enchanting fictional territory of Malgudi. Other ‘Malgudi’ novels are The Dark Room, The English Teacher, Mr Sampath, The Financial Expert, The Man-Eater of Malgudi, The Vendor of Sweets, The Painter of Signs, A Tiger for Malgudi, and Talkative Man. His novel The Guide won him the Sahitya Akademi Award. He was awarded in 1980 the A.C. Benson Medal by the Royal Society of Literature and in 1981 he was made an Honorary Member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Besides, four collections of short stories, A Horse and Two Goats, An Astrologer’s Day and Other Stories, Lawley Road and Malgudi Days, he has published two travel books My Dateless Diary and The Emerald Route, two collections of essays, Next Sunday and Reluctant Guru, and a volume of memoirs, My Days.
Raja Rao was born in 1909 and has published five novels and two collections of short stories, among them the critically acclaimed, Kanthapura. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1961 for his novel, The Serpent and the Rope and was also awarded the prestigious Newstadt Prize.
Ruskin Bond was born in Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh, in 1934 and grew up in Jamnagar (Gujarat), Dehra Dun and Simla. His first novel, The Room on the Roof, written when he was seventeen, received the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957. Since then he has written over a hundred short stories, essays and novellas (including Vagrants in the Valley and A Flight of Pigeons) and more than thirty books for children. In 1992 he received the Sahitya Akademi Award for English writing in India. The first volume of his autobiography, Scenes from a Writer’s Life, which described his formative years growing up in Anglo-India, was published in early 1998, and a second volume of autobiographical writings, The Lamp is Lit, in 1999. He was awarded the Padma Shree by the Government of India in 1999.
Ruskin Bond lives with his adopted family in Mussoorie.
Santha Rama Rau was born in Madras in 1923. She was educated in England and the US. Although best known as a travel writer, she has made notable contributions as a novelist, biographer and dramatist. Much of her work is imbued with the personal perspective of autobiography. Among her best known works are Home to India, Remember the House, Gifts of Passage, East of Home, View to the Southwest, as well as the dramatization of E.M. Forster’s Passage to India. She is married and lives at presently in New York, USA.
Shashi Deshpande was born in Dharwad, India, daughter of the renowned dramatist and Sanskrit scholar, Shriranga. At the age of fifteen she went to Bombay, where she graduated in Economics; she then moved to Bangalore, where she gained a degree in Law. The early years of her marriage were largely given over to the care of her two young sons but she took a course in journalism and for a time worked on a magazine. Her writing career only began in earnest in 1970, initially with short stories, of which several volumes have been published. She is also the author of four children’s books and a number of novels—The Dark Holds No Terrors, If I Die Today, Come up and Be Dead, Roots and Shadozvs, That Long Silence and The Binding Vine, which won a prize for the best Indian novel of 1982-83. Shashi Deshpande lives in Bangalore with her pathologist husband.
Acknowledgements
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint copyright material:
To R.K. Narayan for ‘A Horse and Two Goats’ extracted from More Stories from the Raj and After: From Kipling to the Present Day, ed. Saroj Cowasjee, Indus; to Mulk Raj Anand for ‘A Pair of. Mustachios’; William Morris Agency for Santha Rama Rau’s story ‘Who Cares?’ extracted from Stories from India, ed. K. Natwar Singh, BI Publications; to Raja Rao for ‘The Cow of the Barricades’ extracted from One Friday Morning and Other Stories ed. Mahavir P. Jain, Sunita Jain, Wiley Eastern Ltd.; to Suresh Kohli for KA. Abbas’s ‘Sparrows’; to Khushwant Singh for ‘The Mark of Vishnu’ extracted from The Collected Short Stories of Khushwant Singh, Ravi Dayal; to Manohar Malgonkar for ‘Cargo from Singapore’ extracted from A Portrait of India ed. Shiv K. Kumar, Vikas Publishing House; to Ruskin Bond for ‘The Night Train at Deoli’ extracted from The Night Train at Deoli and Other Stories, Penguin Books India; to Shama Habibullah for Attia Hosain’s ‘Phoenix Fled’ extracted from Phoenix Fled and Other Stories, Rupa & Co.; to Anita Desai for ‘Games at Twilight’ extracted from Literature Reader, Class IX, CBSE; to Keki N. Daruwalla for ‘Love Across the Salt Desert’ extracted from The Web of Our Life, NCERT; to Shashi Deshpande for ‘The Valley in Shadow’ extracted from It Was Dark and Other Stories, Writers’ Workshop; to Padma Hejmadi for ‘Appa-mam’ extracted from Coigns of Vantage, Writers’ Workshop; to Manoj Das for ‘The Tree’ extracted from Farewell to a Ghost, Penguin Books India; to Bharati Mukherjee for ‘The Tenant’ extracted from The Middleman and Other Stories, Penguin Books India; to Jaico Books for Nergis Dalal’s ‘The Connoisseur’ extracted from Contemporary Indian English Stories ed. Madhusudan Prasad, Sterling Publishers; to Nayantara Sahgal for ‘Martand’ extracted from A Portrait of India, ed. Shiv K. Kumar, Vikas Publishing House; to Manjula Padmanabhan for ‘The Copper-tailed Skink’ extracted from Civil Lines 2, Ravi Dayal; to Anjana Appachana for ‘Her Mother’ extracted from Incantations and Other Stories, Penguin Books India; to Githa Hariharan for ‘The Remains of the Feast’ extracted from The Art of Dying, Penguin Books India.
While every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain permission, this has not been possible in all cases; any omissions brought to our attention will be remedied in future editions.
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