Indian Writing

Via email from Hemali Sodhi at Penguin India, details of an event for Shama Futehally’s death anniversary (Futehally died of cancer in 2004). At the Habitat Centre, New Delhi, on December 2. Please do attend.

Penguin Books India and Ravi Dayal Publisher
present the works of one of India’s finest writers in English

SHAMA FUTEHALLY

Frontiers: Collected Stories

and

The Right Words: Selected Essays, 1967-2004
(posthumous collections of fiction and non-fiction)

and the novels

Tara Lane
and
Reaching Bombay Central

on Saturday, 2 December 2006 at 6.30 p.m.
at Gulmohar Hall, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi

Keki Daruwalla, Githa Hariharan and Gillian Wright will read from Shama’s work

FRONTIERS: COLLECTED STORIES

‘[Shama Futehally’s] short stories . . . are moving, full of atmosphere, and have their “point” or “moral” properly indicated (as in any good story). I enjoyed reading them and felt transported to India’ —Iris Murdoch

One of India’s finest prose stylists, Shama Futehally (1952–2004) was also among the country’s most accomplished writers of short fiction in English. This posthumous collection brings together all her short stories, written over two decades. The first and title story—also the last that she wrote—is a fictionalized account of the Uphaar Cinema tragedy in Delhi and was originally intended as a novella. Yet, even in its present form we see the exceptional skill with which Futehally presents people and events—whether it is the wealth of intimate details that make up individual lives, or the subtle but always effective awareness of larger social realities. Such skill, and the ability to lay open whole worlds of experience in spare, pared down prose, is evident in all the other stories, where we enter the lives of maidservants and memsaabs, riot victims and victims of fate, wives and husbands, mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law.

Shama Futehally (1952–2004) was born in Bombay, and studied English at the universities of Bombay and Leeds. For more than three decades she combined a career in teaching with writing and translation. Her short stories appeared in several anthologies, including The Inner Courtyard and In Other Words, and her numerous book reviews and essays were published in all the major Indian newspapers and journals. Futehally’s published books include the novels Tara Lane (1993) and Reaching Bombay Central (2002), a selection of Meerabai’s bhajans in translation, In the Dark of the Heart: Songs of Meera (1994), Slivers of a Mirror: Glimpses of the Ghazal (2005), and her collected short stories—Frontiers—and collected essays—The Right Words—both published posthumously in 2006.

Rich and generous tributes to Shama Futehally from the Indian writing community, here and here and here. From Shashi Deshpande’s tribute:

Almost everyone who speaks of Shama will use words like “poise”, “grace”, “elegance” and “propriety”. Yes, one saw all of them in Shama. But these were not superficial qualities kept for public display; they came out of her strong sense of right and wrong. “We have our standards,” Munni says in Tara Lane. So had Shama. She adhered to her standards, whatever the cost — yes, even during her last illness.

Some of Shama Futehally’s writing is available online. Here is a tribute to Busybee, and to Indian English writing long before Rushdie and Ghosh:

It all takes me back to hot afternoons in Bombay (sorry, when talking of Busybee one somehow forgets to say ‘‘Mumbai’’) and to packed dusty compartments in suburban trains — all made easier to bear because one had bought Mid-Day and Busybee’s column was inside it.

That column did many things. It turned life in our crazy city into something gentle, humorous, middle-brow — in a word, sane. And like all sane things it reminded you that you were not alone — that others, like yourself, were always out when the gas cylinder came and always looking for a taxi on the wrong side of the road…

Busybee’s ill-assorted imaginary family had returned from a trip to Delhi, and his column spoke of cruising the Delhi streets and of seeing its acres of greenery. Then came this gem of a sentence: ‘‘And then there are all these government houses, filled with government families.’’

As far as I was concerned, the language barrier had been broken. Here was a sentence which could only come from an Indian speaking to Indians. It followed the laid-back, seemingly purposeless rhythm (‘‘And then there are all…’’) of the Indian vernaculars. At the same time it was packed with witty suggestion, because the concept of a ‘‘government family’’ can be understood by us and by nobody else on this planet. A government family means a certain type of worthy family which follows the two-child norm and which owns an ancient Fiat. It may not be the most exciting company possible but it is finally — I belong to a government family myself — not so very bad…

This delightful weekend in Kasauli. This one about the subjective experience. And this nice little piece about “the world’s most complex job”.

Picture of Shama Futehally courtesy The Hindu.