After a hesitant start towards the end of the nineteenth century, short fiction in Malayalam came into its own in the 1930s. Since then, writer after writer has experimented with content, style and language to give the genre a unique standing in contemporary Indian literature, as perhaps the most translated, not just into English and other Indian languages but also into other media such as film and television. From Vaikom Muhammad Basheer and O.V. Vijayan to Kamala Das and Sarah Joseph, this volume brings together an extraordinary range of writers and themes. There are, among others, M.T. Vasudevan Nair’s ‘Oppol’, a story about childhood innocence and loss, which was made into an award-winning film; Paul Zacharia’s ‘Bhaskara Pattelar and My life’, a brilliant psychological examination of the master-slave dialectic; Lalithambika Antherjanam’s path-breaking ‘Goddess of Revenge’ in which a young Namboodiri woman becomes a prostitute to expose the hypocrisy of her husband and their rigidly orthodox community; and N.S. Madhavan’s Classic Story of an Upper-Caste Widow who finds redemption in the forbidden touch of a Pulaya. Translated with flair and integrity, these stories capture the vibrancy of a literary culture at its creative best.
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