Stories of Joginder Paul

Book Specification

Book Description

About the Book

Joginder Paul is one of the most significant voices of contemporary Urdu fiction. He brings to his work the expression of fresh experience and his work the expression of fresh experience and his fiction throbs with meaning, excels in artistic restrain and comes alive with all the simplicity and complexity of life itself. This collection selected by the author himself includes the sensitive narration of a rag-pickers life in the story Back Lane, the pulsating experience of a doe delivering a baby in the wilds of Kenya in Harambe, the magical realism of life shared by the living and the dead in Khodu Baba ka Maqbara, as also insightful portrayals of the consumerist and oppressive world in many stories.

About the Author

Sukrita Paul Kumar is a poet and critic, and teaches literature. Formerly a Fellow at the Indian Institute of of Poems, Her books on criticism include Conversations on Modernism, The New Story, and Man, Woman and Androgyny. Besides she has edited Ismat, Her Life, Her Times and a volume of short stories from India and Pakistan, Mapping Memories.

Naghma Zafir teaches English at Zakir Hussain College, Delhi and is a seasoned translator of fiction, poetry as well as critical writings from Urdu. Her translations include the stories of Jeelani Bano, Qurratulain Hyder, and Sajid Rashid, and essays of eminent critics from India and Pakistan.

Introduction

Almost half a century was wasted in debates on An for Art’s sake or Art for Life’s sake, generated by the Western academic hypotheses. In fact, literature does not exist in itself, nor has it to be instructive: like life, literature just happens to both writer and reader.

In other words, in the creation of a short story, the writer is not led by the need to give a lesson or to assert the value of its style in itself and demonstrate the sublime linguistic characteristics of his writing. However the story may shape up, the writer has to allow life to dwell and breathe in the story. And, just as the tension of confronting teal life is compelling in itself rather than presumed, the event of the short story, in the same way, gets completed in its own evolved form naturally and if necessary, urgently. In his short story, “A Boring Story”, Chekov gave an apt warning to the new writers: “Although it is you writing your story, don’t write it to consciously bring it to a certain ending,” I should perhaps here relate my little story, “Base Hue Log”, (Settled People) to make the point:

Both the hero and the heroine of my novel were upset with me. Just when the reasons and the circumstance for their marriage had very naturally emerged for their fulfilment, I completely demolished their world by imposing my own priorities on the novel; I was determined to keep them away from each other till the last page of the novel!

Indeed, both of them were extremely dear to me. The difficulty was that if I had offered them the opportunity to live with each other, I’d have had to abandon my own personal points of view. After all they were children of my fancy, and who they were or how