Name Me a Word: Indian Writers Reflect on Writing

Description

A wide-ranging anthology of twentieth-century and contemporary writing from India and the Indian diaspora, curated by a distinguished scholar and poet Internationally renowned scholar, poet, and essayist Meena Alexander brings together leading twentieth- and twenty-first-century voices from India and the diaspora in this anthology. Contributors include English-language luminaries such as R. K. Narayan, Salman Rushdie, and Arundhati Roy and powerful writers in Indian languages such as U. R. Ananthamurthy, Mahasweta Devi, and Lalithambika Antherjanam. This book will make a thoughtful gift for poetry and fiction enthusiasts and fans of Indian literature, as well as an ideal volume for academics introducing writers from the subcontinent. Cover Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Contents Preface Rabindranath Tagore Letter From Boyhood Days From Final Poems “Sickbed 21” “Recovery 4” Sarojini Naidu To Arthur Symons From a Letter to Edmund Gosse To Rabindranath Tagore (1912) To Rabindranath Tagore (undated) Premchand (Dhanpat Rai) “Two Autobiographical Sketches” Nirad C. Chaudhuri From The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian From “My Birthplace” From “The English Scene” From “The Englishman in the Flesh” Jibanananda Das “The Professor” “Name Me a Word” “Poetry” “The Windy Night” R. K. Narayan From My Days: A Memoir Vaikom Muhammad Basheer From “Pattumma’s Goat” Raja Rao “Entering the Literary World” Lalithambika Antherjanam “Childhood Memories” Agyeya (Sachchidananda Vatsayan) “The Signs” “Words and Truths” “Three Words to Make a Poem” “The Revolving Rock XVI” “The Revolving Rock XXV” Umashankar Joshi “My Four-Sided Field” From “The World of Birds” Acceptance Speech for the 1968 Bharatiya Jnanpith Award Saadat Hasan Manto “First Letter to Uncle Sam” Ismat Chugtai “We People” Amrita Pritam “To Waris Shah” From The Revenue Stamp My Sixteenth Year A Shadow Nissim Ezekiel “Background, Casually” “Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher” Mahasweta Devi “So Many Words, So Many Sounds” Nayantara Sahgal “Rejecting Extinction” Qurratulain Hyder “Beyond the Stars” Jayanta Mahapatra From an Autobiographical Essay “Grandfather” “The Abandoned British Cemetery at Balasore” “Hunger” A. K. Ramanujan “Elements of Composition” “Saturdays” From “Is There an Indian Way of Thinking? An Informal Essay” Nirmal Verma “Returning to One’s Country” K. Ayyappa Paniker “Why Write?” “Upon My Walls” “Epitaph” From “Passage to America” Arun Kolatkar “From an Undated Sheet” From “Making Love to a Poem” U. R. Ananthamurthy From “Five Decades of My Writing” Kamala Das From My Story “The Bougainvillea” From “The P.E.N. Poetry Prize” “The Old Playhouse” From “An Introduction” Keki Daruwalla “The Decolonised Muse (A Personal Statement)” Anita Desai “On Being an Indian Writer Today” Girish Karnad From Author’s Introduction to Three Plays Nabaneeta Dev Sen “In Poetry” “Alphabets” “Combustion” “The Year’s First Poem” “Broken Home” From My Life, My Work Adil Jussawalla “Being There: Aspects of an Indian Crisis” Ambai (C. S. Lakshmi) From “Squirrel” Paul Zacharia From “Sinning in Mysore” K. Satchidanandan “Gandhi and Poetry” “Stammer” “Burnt Poems” “About Poetry, About Life” Arvind Krishna Mehrotra “Engraving of a Bison on Stone” “Distance in Statute Miles” “Where Will the Next One Come From” “Inscription” Salman Rushdie “Imaginary Homelands” Agha Shahid Ali From “In Search of Evanescence” Namdeo Dhasal “Approaching the Organized Harem of the Octopus” “Mandakini Patil: A Young Prostitute, My Intended Collage” “The Day She Was Gone” Meena Alexander From “Illiterate Heart” “Crossroad” Githa Hariharan “A Note on Writing When Dreams Travel” Vijay Seshadri “My First Fairy Tale” Amitav Ghosh From “The Testimony of My Grandfather’s Bookcase” Raghavan Atholi “The Poet with a Forest Fire Inside” Jeet Thayil “The Heroin Sestina” “Malayalam’s Ghazal” “Spiritus Mundi” Arundhati Roy From “Like Sculpting Smoke: Arundhati Roy on Fame, Writing and India” Amit Chaudhuri From “Interlude” Sudeep Sen “Photons, Graphite, Blood” “Postcards” Arundhathi Subramaniam “To the Welsh Critic Who Doesn’t Find Me Identifiably Indian” “First Draft” S. Sukirtharani “Night Beast” “Gigantic Trees” “Untitled Poem—2” “Pariah God” Acknowledgments Credits Notes