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Nirmal Verma (b. 1929) is one of the few
best-known writers outside India. A pioneer of
the New Story Movement (1956) in Hindi
literature, his fiction explores the arid
silence that lies between people who have lost
faith in each other and the imaginative drought
that renders it impossible for us to make moral
discriminations. In 2000, he was honored with
the highest award for literature in India, the
Jnanpith. He has published five novels, eight
collections of short stories and nine books of
essays and travelogues. He was also nominated
for the well-known Neustadt Award of the
magazine The World Literature, University of
Oklahoma, in 1996. He was recently awarded the
Padma Bhushan. He is married to the poet Gagan
Gill and lives in Delhi.
Prasenjit Gupta
Prasenjit Gupta, son of Pratima Gupta and the
late Dr. Paresh Ranjan Gupta, is a graduate of
the University of Delhi and the Iowa Writers'
Workshop. He lives in Iowa City and Delhi and
translates fiction from Hindi and Bengali into
English.
Prasenjit Gupta translated these stories as a
dissertation project for his Ph.D from the
University of Iowa. The stories were translated
in close cooperation with the author during his
one-year stay in India. Moreover, being an
Indian settled in the West, he has been able to
capture the essence of the original works
beautifully.
Indian Errant
Indian Errant is a translated selection of short
stories originally written in Hindi by the
leading contemporary Indian writer Nirmal Verma.
These translations are accompanied by an
incisive and substantial critical introduction.
The volume is available both as a paperback and
as a hardback. The hardback is accompanied by
the original Hindi stories.
The fourteen stories in this collection deal
with the theme of exile and dislocation. All the
stories except "Last Summer" are set outside
India with most of the protagonists located
outside their native country. Thus they describe
one possible arc of an exiled life, from the
journey to the West to the return to India, and
the separation from family both in India and
abroad.
The stories explore the questions that haunt the
exiles, especially those who are not banished
from their homeland but have chosen to emigrate.
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