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G. Kalyana Rao
G. Kalyana Rao జీ. కల్యాణ రావు
G. Kalyana Rao is a noted Telugu novelist, essayist, and playwright. He hails from a family of Dalit (formerly "untouchable") converts to Christianity. An active member of VIRASAM, a prominent organization of Telugu leftist writers, Rao is noted for his incisive perspectives on social inequality, particularly on issues of caste and class oppression in contemporary Telugu and Indian society. His novel, అంటరాని వసంతం, broke new ground in narrating the Dalit experience and was translated into English as Untouchable Spring in 2010.
Translated Titles by G. Kalyana Rao
Kalyan Rao's Untouchable Spring, cast in the mold of Alex Haley's Roots, is about the struggle of five generations of a Dalit (formerly untouchable) family for equality and dignity. It follows their efforts to desperately wrestle with the inhuman practices of caste in Indian society, particularly from Hindu caste elites who force them to live segregated from mainstream society. The novel is oriented around the past memories of Ruth and Ruben and highlights the predicaments of caste and class in post-colonial India.
Geetanjali Shree
Geetanjali Shree गीतांजलि श्री
Geetanjali Shree was born in 1957. She is a Hindi novelist and short story writer based in New Delhi, India. She is the author of several short stories and five novels. Her novel Ret Samadhi (2018) translated into English as Tomb of Sand (2022) by Daisy Rockwell awarded the International Booker Prize. Her novel Mai was shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award in 2001.
Translated Titles by Geetanjali Shree
A profoundly imaginative novel that traces the transformative journey of Ma, an elderly woman who becomes depressed after the death of her husband. She decides to reinvent herself and journeys to Pakistan, confronting trauma that has remained unresolved since she was a teenager who survived the partition of British India.
When a bomb explodes in a university cafe, nineteen students are killed. The Empty Space begins with the identification of these slain students. Slowly, each individual is claimed and taken away for a proper burial by their mourning family members. The final mother to enter the cafe identifies the nineteenth body as her eighteen-year-old son and brings him home in a casket. She not only brings home her dead son, though, but also the sole survivor of the blast, a three-year-old boy. By a strange quirk of fate, after the explosion he is found lying in a small empty space, alive and breathing. The Empty Space chronicles the memories of the boy dead, the story of the boy brought home, and the cataclysmic crossing of life and death.
Three generations of women and their men live different strategies of adjustment and achievement to accommodate or challenge patriarchy. They seem to fit in recognised frames, but what are the subtle machinations behind the apparent stereotypes? It is that which the novel uncovers, in a tale told in deceptively simple terms, using smells, sounds, tastes and flavours, scenes and tiny signs, and incidents of a daily and ordinary existence to build, weave by weave, a rich and layered tapestry, saying always more than is apparent. At the centre is mai, the mother, seemingly weak and silent, but it is she who holds together the subtle patterns of relationships and agencies, and quietly carves out a life for herself as also for those around.
Perumal Murugan
Perumal Murugan பெருமாள் முருகன்
Perumal Murugan was born in 1966 to a family of small farmers. He is an Indian author, scholar and literary chronicler who writes in Tamil. He has written ten novels, five collections of short stories and four anthologies of poetry. Five of his novels have been translated into English: Seasons of the Palm, which was shortlisted for the Kiriyama Prize in 2005, Current Show, Poonachi or the Story of a Goat, One Part Woman and Pyre. He is professor of Tamil Literature at Attur College, Tamil Nadu, India.
Translated Titles by Perumal Murugan
Wryly amusing, fable-like, and deeply poignant, One Part Woman explores a loving marriage strained by the expectations of others and attacks the rigid rules of caste and tradition that continue to constrict opportunity and happiness today. Murugan tells the story of Kali and Ponna, a couple unable to conceive. Desperate and looking for hope, Kali and Ponna attend the annual chariot festival, a celebration of the god Maadhorubaagan, who is one part woman, one part man. On the eighteenth night, the festival culminates in a carnival where the rules of marriage are suspended and consensual sex between any man and woman is permitted. The festival may be the solution to Kali and Ponna’s problem but it soon threatens to drive the couple apart as much as it does to bring them together.
With spare, powerful prose, Murugan masterfully conjures a terrifying vision of intolerance in this devastating tale of innocent young love pitted against chilling savagery. Saroja and Kumaresan are in love. After a hasty wedding, they arrive in Kumaresan's village, harbouring the dangerous secret of their intercaste marriage. Kumaresan naively believes that after an initial round of curious questions, the inquiries from their neighbors will die down and the couple will be left alone. But nothing is further from the truth. The villagers suspect that Saroja belongs to a different caste and it is only a matter of time before their suspicions harden into certainty. Outraged, they set about exacting their revenge.
Poonachi or The Story of a Black Goat
Perumal Murugan explores a side of India that is rarely considered in the West: the rural lives of the country’s farming communities. He paints a bucolic yet sometimes menacing portrait, movingly showing how danger and deception can threaten the lives of the weakest through the story of a helpless young animal lost in a world it naively misunderstands. The novel carries an allegorical resonance for contemporary Indian society and examines hierarchies of caste and color.