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Tales of terror: An Aust-Indian collaboration

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In tune with June

In tune with June

Short stories from Indian and Australian writers on terrorism in its myriad forms

BY CHITRA SUDARSHAN

Fear Factor: Terror Incognito, edited by Meenakshi Bharat and Sharon Rundle, is an anthology of 20 stories by well-known and emerging authors from Australia and the Indian subcontinent. It includes names such as David Malouf, Salman Rushdie, Neelum Saran Gour, Tom Keneally, Rosie Scott, Jeremy Fisher, Susanne Gervay, Tabish Khair, Denise Leith, Andrew Y M Kwong, Devika Brendon, Gulzar, Meera Kant, Guy Scotton, Sujata Sankranti, Kiran Nargarkar, Temsula Ao, Jaspreet Singh, Janhavi Acharekar and Meenakshi Bharat, with a foreword by the well known Sri Lankan-Australian writer Yasmine Gooneratne.

Meenakshi Bharat is a translator, reviewer and critic. Her special interests include children’s literature, women’s fiction and English studies – areas which she has researched extensively. Currently, she is engaged in translating a volume of Hindi short stories. She is also getting a volume of short fiction ready for publication. She teaches at the University of Delhi. Sharon Rundle is a writer, editor and lecturer. Her stories, essays and articles have appeared in various publications and have been broadcast on radio, in Australia and internationally, since 1992.

The book is an attempt by Indian and Australian writers to react to the impact of terrorism and tyranny on the world. The works are strikingly diverse and, as Meenakshi notes in the editors’ foreword, an “assertion of a shared humanity”. What is interesting about the book is that it is a unique collaboration between Australia and India – something of a first. The theme that purportedly holds the stories together is modern terror: the collection, it is claimed, represents the writers’ protests against it: ‘they lead readers along the hidden paths of an unfamiliar psychology [of terror] to make their own discoveries’. A joint publication with Picador UK and Picador India, Fear Factor contains some excerpts from already published works [Salman Rushdie’s contribution is from his 2005 book Shalimar the Clown] and others that have been written especially for this omnibus. Bharat’s own short story Compensation is quintessentially small town India in its evocation of the wily lower middle class woman who uses her wits to make a quick rupee from a terrorist inflicted tragedy.

Some of the interesting stories – and most relevant to the title and intent of this anthology – is the short story In Search of Essar by Kiran Nagarkar, which is taken from his most recent book God’s Little Soldiers Nagarkar is unique among Indian writers in that he has written acclaimed novels in more than one language. His first novel, Saat Sakkam Trechalis (translated into English as Seven Sixes are Forty Three) was a critical success when it was published in 1974, quickly becoming recognized as one of the most important novels written in Marathi. His next novel, Ravan and Eddie, begun in Marathi but completed in English, was not published till 1994. His third novel, Cuckold (1997) won the Sahitya Akademi award. It has been translated into a number of languages and has become one of the most beloved contemporary Indian novels, both in India and in Europe. All his novels since Ravan and Eddie have been written in English.

He and Janhavi Achrekar - whose story A Good Riot is included in the collection - are both Mumbaikars. Whereas Nagarkar’s story will interest anyone interested in fundamentalist terrorism, Achrekar’s story is much more local and strikingly Indian: a kind of pop social psychology of the petit bourgeoisie basis of communal politics. Tabish Khair’s story – the very last one entitled Missing is hilarious – a cross between science fiction and comedy, written in the first person. Khair is a talented writer, whose latest novel, Filming: A Love Story (2007), examines memory and guilt against the backdrop of the Partition and the 1940s Bombay film industry. Ranked by Khushwant Singh as one of the best twenty novels in English by Indians or writers of Indian origin, it received positive and rave reviews in British and Asian publications and was short-listed for India’s main fiction award. A Danish translation, called Film, came out in the winter of 2009 to positive reviews in the Danish press. Born and educated mostly in Gaya, Bihar, India, Tabish Khair is the author of various books, most significant of which is the study, Babu Fictions: Alienation in Indian English Novels (Oxford UP, 2001) and the novel, The Bus Stopped (Picador, 2004), which was shortlisted for the Encore Award. He lives in Denmark and has become a thoughtful writer on Islam and Muslims in recent years. These are the short stories that sit well with the title of the book; so is the excerpt from Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown. The other stories like Sujata Sankranti’s An Eye for an Eye, Gulzar’s Kauf – and the section by well known Australian writers – are all eminently readable in their own right, although one needs to stretch one’s imagination to fit them into the “Terror Incognito” theme.

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