New collections of Manto, Ruskin Bond short stories, talking to Vauhini Vara and more

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To celebrate the birthdays of Saadat Hasan Manto (May 11) and Ruskin Bond (May 19), new collections of their short stories are being published. Manto’s stories, written in Urdu, are available in several English editions ( Mottled Dawn: 50 Sketches and Stories of Partition, translated by Khalid Hasan/Penguin Modern Classics;  Bitter Fruit: The Very Best of Saadat Hasan Manto, also edited and translated by Khalid Hasan/Penguin,  Stars from Another Sky:  The Bombay Film World of the 1940s); in  The Pity of Partition (Princeton University Press) , Ayesha Jalal draws on Manto’s stories, sketches, essays and letters to write a biography as also the history of partition and its devastating impact. To coincide with his birthday,  The Collected Stories of Saadat Hasan Manto, Volume 1: Poona and Bombay (Aleph) is out, translated by Nasreen Rehman. The first of a three-volume series, it has all of Manto’s 255 known stories translated into English. Volume I collects 54 stories and two essays written by Manto about his time in Bombay and Poona in colonial India, and includes well-known stories like ‘Mummy’ and ‘Janki’. “Manto wrote several Bombay stories after 1948, across the border in Lahore, Pakistan, which read like dystopian love letters to the city he claimed to embody, describing himself as, ‘Bombay in motion’,” writes Rehman in her introduction. Volume Two has stories set in other parts of India before 1947, including some rather well-known stories of partition in Punjab, such as ‘Cold Flesh (Thanda Gosht)’; Volume Three has all the stories set in Pakistan, but it opens with ‘The Drawstring (Khol Do)’, which begins in India and ends in Pakistan. “His lexicon is everyday Urdu, and his style has the spontaneity of informal conversation, amplified by his regular appearance in his narratives,” she says. A new collection of short stories by Ruskin Bond ( Song of the Forest: Stories from Here, There and Everywhere/Aleph) gathers the best of his recent fiction, written over the past 10 years or so. In his foreword, David Davidar calls it a “feast of fiction” from a literary master, in which “hilarious stories about crooks and conmen rub shoulders with horror stories, murder mysteries, and diaphanous literary marvels.”

In reviews, we read Pramod Kapoor’s book on the last war of independence, Kavery Nambisan’s memoir, Suresh Menon’s essays on reading and writing. We also talk to American journalist Vauhini Vara whose debut novel  The Immortal King Rao is “a clear-eyed chronicle of a Dalit success story, and more.

Talking about Pramod Kapoor’s  1946 Last War of Independence: Royal Indian Navy Mutiny (Roli Books) , filmmaker Shyam Benegal says a footnote in the history of the freedom movement has been turned into an exciting and important account. Kapoor himself stumbled onto this forgotten story while researching for his book on Gandhi. When Kapoor began his research, he discovered hundreds of reports by British admirals, commanding officers of ships and shore establishments, cables and letters exchanged between London and Delhi, proceedings in the British parliament and debates in the Legislative Council in India. They were “honest,” but were told from the British point of view. To get to the truth, Kapoor waded through hundreds of newspaper reports and documents at libraries, met people with knowledge of the mutiny and toured HMIS Talwar, the signal school of the Navy at Colaba, where “inflammatory slogans” had been written on the walls and “seditious pamphlets” were circulated. In his review, K.R.A. Narasiah writes that the chapter, ‘Planning the Mutiny: The Secret Heroes’, reads like a thriller. “The initial planning took place in a flat belonging to Pran and Kusum Nair on Marine Drive. The Nairs were friends with two of the key planners, Rishi Dev Puri and Bolai Chandra Dutt, and Kapoor profiles the ‘heroes of the mutiny’ in great detail. He also adds an extensive Epilogue providing a glimpse of the life of the key protagonists post-mutiny as also notes on some of the ships and shore establishments. It is an exceptional book and a must-read for anyone interested in the freedom struggle.”

1946 Last War of Independence Royal Indian Navy Mutiny review: The 1946 naval uprising

Kavery Nambisan’s  A Luxury Called Health (Speaking Tiger) is an engaging sort of Bharat Swastha – Ek Khoj, a discovery of the Indian health care system. In her review, Ramya Kannan says that Kavery takes readers on a well-documented journey with medicine, from the classroom to the hospital, and the life lessons she derived. “Sometimes it is about the right bedside manner, even about the right skillsets for surgery; it exposes avarice, other times lethargy, sheer stupidity, and is often about the increasing dominance of the private health sector, and harps on inequities in health care.” Most of all, having working in poor resource settings in remote Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, she shakes her fists at the powers that be, with concerns about serving everyone with the same level of care and a burning desire to enforce an ethical and scientific medical practice.

A Luxury Called Health review: A discovery of India’s fragile health care system