Delhi is one of the most polluted cities on the planet, and is known for criminals who specialise in buffalo or ATM heists — but in mitigation, it has a centuries-old love of books, poetry and reading. In the teeming halls of the World Book Fair earlier this month, I was delighted to see readers in their teens and twenties buy books until their backpacks strained at the seams — and surprised that they reserved a special love for anthologies, in English or Hindi.
“It’s a short-cut and a long-cut,” said 23-year-old Bindiya Pandey, one of my new friends at the fair. For her, anthologies are a short-cut in that they offer quick introductions to writers across decades or centuries. And a “long-cut” because a really good compilation invites you to take a slow walk with multiple writers, spending weeks getting to know more of their work.
It is never an easy undertaking, this corralling of a nation, a particular subject or some centuries of writing within the bounds of a single book. I have given away anthologies that had lofty aims but remained overweight tomes gathering dust on high shelves because the editor forgot that an anthology should also be a feast for the reader. Some of them were, especially in the last century, “manthologies”, innocent of women authors entirely; some were what I gleefully dubbed “ranthologies” — collections intended to prove some obscure point or denounce rival literary schools; and some were so dire that you’d rather swat mosquitoes for an hour than read them.
Thankfully, two recent anthologies of Indian fiction — both suggested to me by avid readers at the Book Fair — sparkled and may redress an imbalance noted by a literary friend recently: Jaipur, and other literary festivals, welcome the world to India, yet so much of India goes unread in the wider world.
The first book, Ten Indian Classics, issued by the Murty Classical Library of India with a foreword by the scholar-poet Ranjit Hoskote, is a dance along 2,500 years of hymns, court epic poems, languid ghazals, the songs of early Buddhist nuns and rousing odes to magnificent empires, rising or falling in cadence.
Where previous anthologies, such as Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing (1997), concentrated on Indians writing in English, Hoskote reminds readers of the “multilingual plenitude” of a country that has 22 “scheduled” (official) languages in addition to 122 “major” languages and 1,599 “other languages” across this geographically diverse region.
“What the classics that transit across the world’s borders in translation really do,” he writes, “is invite us to step outside our zones of cultural comfort.” I found reading the selections in Ten Indian Classics more fun than it might have been reading each book on its own; the shift from romance to spiritual yearning, from the accounts of the Deccan’s vast empires to myths around legendary kings worked for me, as courts, forests, gurdwaras across the centuries came to life.
With the second anthology, 100 Indian Stories, edited by the poet and translator AJ Thomas, I felt, even in translation, the pleasures of cacophony, of multiplicity, the shouts and murmurs of a dozen different tongues. Almost 80 per cent of the stories have been translated into English from various Indian languages and arranged chronologically, from Fakir Mohan Senapati’s 19th-century Odia short story “Rebati” to Aravind Jayan’s briskly chilling English-language story “The Current Climate”.
Many of the anthologies I’ve loved and shared with other readers have two simple things at their heart: a solid organising principle, and a desire to collect not just the most representative writing, but the best. Some also break new ground — Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, published as a book in 2021, invited American readers to see 1619, the year that the first enslaved Africans were brought to the state of Virginia in the US, as the origin of the republic, rather than 1776, “because the practice of slavery predates the ideals of liberty”.
Widely acclaimed, the 1619 Project sparked a familiar and heated history war, attracting censure and ban attempts from Republican lawmakers. Donald Trump, in his first term as president, promised that states would ban the teaching of the book as he convened a 1776 Commission to promote “patriotic education”; Hannah-Jones was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2020 for her original essay, published in the New York Times.
One of the first anthologies I bought was the 1949 edition of 55 Short Stories from the New Yorker; steeped in Indian, British and Russian writing, this was a resounding flourish of trumpets from the US, a swinging door that invited me into a salon where EB White, John Cheever, Carson McCullers reigned, Shirley Jackson and James Thurber off to one side in a dimly lit corner.
Another, Alberto Manguel’s Black Water: The Flamingo Anthology of Fantastic Literature (1983), was my gateway drug to Julio Cortázar and Ursula K Le Guin, the literature of “the impossible seeping into the possible”.
These two new anthologies from my homeland are in good company. It doesn’t always happen this way, but some anthologies are, like beautiful, inviting homes, filled with rooms that you want to explore, going from one to another with your lamp held high.
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