Khwaja Ahmad Abbas (1914-87) was a prolific political commentator, short story writer, novelist, scriptwriter and a film-maker who preferred to call himself a communicator. He published seventy-three books in English, Urdu and Hindi, including an engaging autobiography, I Am Not an Island, and two semi-autobiographical novels, Inquilab and The World Is My Village, detailing contemporary Indian history. His works have been translated into several Indian and foreign languages including Russian, German, Arabic, Italian and French. Abbas received several state and national honours, including the Padma Shri in 1969, and was involved in the making of sixty Hindi films. Suresh Kohli (b. 1947) is a poet, writer, translator, editor, literary critic and film historian with more than twenty-five published works. He is also a short and documentary film-maker, with over a hundred films to his credit. He lives in Delhi. Khwaja Ahmad Abbas was that rare Hindi film-maker who had an equally successful career as a journalist, novelist and short-story writer.
This collection brings together seventeen of his best-known stories, from ‘The Sparrows’, which nearly every schoolchild in India has read, to ‘The Umbrella’, a quiet tale of a modest proof-reader in Mumbai vying for the attention of a European girl. True to his view that ‘writing inspires not only social reform but also social revolution’, Abbas writes of caste and class exploitation, and of superstition, with an unerring sense of timing and irony. In
‘The Sword of Shiva’, an untouchable saves the life of a young girl, in ‘An Evening in Lucknow’, a nasals son attempts to shake off the apathy that is part of his lineage, in ‘Sylvia’ a nurse finds solace with her patients in the absence of family—in each of these stories we recognize the voice of reason, of a strong social conscience, and above all, a deep sense of compassion for human frailty Drawing upon his rich experience in journalism and film-making, Abbas explores in his stories, situations both real and imagined. The partition of India and Pakistan, the new nationalism of the mid-twentieth century, the struggles centered on race and gender discrimination all over the boric—Abbas writes with equal felicity of both home and the world, constantly reinforcing his belief that ‘the improvement of mater mission of a writer’.
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