‘The Greatest Tamil Stories Ever Told’: 'Greatest’ or not, creditable work for sure

GJV Prasad

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How does one review a collection of short stories translated into English and aiming to showcase the ‘greatest’ stories from another language? Does one talk of the quality of translation, or of the selected stories, the stories that don’t find place, or of the criteria for selection other than quality, or a little bit of all without sounding too critical since this is a book to celebrate? Perhaps, all of the above, even if briefly! For, it is one of immense significance to the language and to the writers included in it, as they find shelf space along with other books in the ambitious series of greatest stories ever told in various Indian languages.

The book that comes to one’s mind immediately is ‘The Tamil Story: Through the Times, Through the Tides’, edited by the renowned writer Dilip Kumar and translated by the award-winning Subhashree Krishnaswamy, that came out in 2016. It had a different agenda, to trace the history of the Thamizh short story. There was no claim to ‘greatness’, but you did expect the best short story writers to be included. It was a massive collection of 88 stories, and this one has 30. As one would expect, both books feature many of the same writers — only five of the 30 in the collection under review are different, though the featured stories are all different, making both volumes interesting buys.

The tales in ‘The Greatest Stories’ have been translated by different people even if more than a third are new translations by Malini Seshadri. The translators are all well known and the quality of translations is very high indeed. Covering the ‘modern’ period, from the 1930s, this collection aims to cover a wide range of issues — “religion, caste, class, and gender-based”, as Sujatha Vijayaraghavan states in her Foreword. The problem with such a statement is that it makes us look for that diversity. The editors have made a brave attempt, but caste and religion are served only through token appearances by a few writers. More significantly, the omissions make a significant reading list on their own — you won’t find Jeyakanthan here, a writer I grew up reading and respecting. And there is no story by Jeyamohan or Na Muthusamay or Salma or Sivakami or Cho Dharman, just to name a few. And, of course, most of the stories are by men.

However, the volume is an interesting introduction to Thamizh stories and writing, to be read at leisure. Sujatha Vijayaraghavan and Mini Krishnan have given us their take. Hopefully, it will show, along with the rest of the volumes in the series, how India comes together in the literary imagination, how each language writes its stories similarly and yet differently. If India is realised on the shelf in this series, even if imperfectly, these translations would have served their purpose.

Ultimately, one cannot quarrel with the editors about what they consider to be the ‘greatest’ stories, or perhaps one can, but nothing much can be done about it — so, we have to accept their selection as subjective and read the book to enter into their world and that of Thamizh literature. There are many interesting stories here and many significant writers, so go ahead and buy the book.