Short Stories from India

About this course:

In this course, we read stories from India that illuminate Indian life during the years before, during and after British colonial rule. One example is Anita Desai’s “Pigeons at Daybreak,” which deals with the power of family and human relationships, particularly the significance of love and care in times of need and ailments. Desai describes her own work as an attempt to reveal “the truth that is nine-tenth of the iceberg . . . submerged beneath the one-tenth visible portion we call Reality.” Another example is Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s “The Interview.” Writing for the New York Times, Pearl K. Bell characterizes Jhabvala as an “affectionately satiric observer of the conflict between traditional passivity and Westernized ambition within those battered by the indifferent tide of change in present-day Indian life.” Class discussion is intended to encourage what David Damrosch called “a back-and-forth movement between the familiar and the unfamiliar. A view of the world is always a view from wherever we are, and we inevitably filter what we read through our own experience. But if we don’t impose our expectations onto the new work, its distinctive qualities will enlarge our field of vision.” Course books: Other Voices, Other Vistas: Short Stories from Africa, China, India, Japan, and Latin America; and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies.