A collection of some of the best short stories of the Jnanpith Award Winner, Gurdial Singh, written over the past four decades or so, Earthy Tones creates a mosaic of images of both rural and urban Punjab that seethe, simmer and linger in the memory of the people of Punjab. These stories chronicle the cultural history of the Malwa region with an unerring sense of verisimilitude and incomparable poetic exuberance. With its stubborn, unyielding land, sandy soil, low-roofed mud houses and prickly air thick with stifling, caste prejudices and land related hostilities, Malwa comes alive as a microcosm of pulsating human reality. A minimalist to the core, Gurdial Singh explores all shades of earthy tones with utmost restraint and almost classical simplicity. In their incessant struggle against the social and historical forces, his characters often display a rare resistance and resilience. Holding their ground, they prefer to go down fighting rather than capitulate or cower under. And it’s invariably the dialectics of tradition and modernity that gives an overarching expression to Gurdial’s irrepressible social concerns.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Rana Nayar
Scholar, critic, translataor and theatre artist, Rana Nayar teaches at the Department of English, Panjab University, Chandigarh. His translations of Gurdial Singh include two novels, Night of the Half-Moon (Macmillan, Chennai, 1996) and Parsa (NBT, New Delhi, 1999), and a collection of stories, Earthy Tones (Fiction House, New Delhi, 2002). From Across the Shores (Sterling, New Delhi, 2002), a collection of stories written in Punjabi by Asians in Britain, is his path-breaking work in translation, which he did at the British Centre of Literary Translation, University of East Anglia, Norwich in 1999, on a Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship. His forthcoming publications are: The Eye of the Doe and Other Stories in English translation, and The Curse of a Tree (Creative Circle, Chandigarh), a collection of Biba Balwant’s poems in translation. He is currently researching a book, (Mis) readings of the Mahabharata: ideology, Narrative, History and Culture and also translating Gurdial Singh’s novel, Anhoe. He has directed several plays and published more than three dozen articles, reviews and research papers in journals of national and international repute.
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