Contemporary Maithili Short Stories: the 30 short stories in this collection present a cross-section of contemporary shorter fiction in Maithili, being the end product of a Sahitya Akademi translation workshop held at Patna. Except for a few classic stories, acknowledged works of art from the forties and fifties, most of them are from among the work of the finest and most distinguished young crop of writers of the last four decades of the twentieth century. We have here for the first time in English, representative specimens of Maithili shorter fiction today. Both in the experiences they embody and the techniques they use, they show a vigour, variety and realism that stand witness to their being rooted in the soil of the Mithila region and to their truth to contemporary experience. Their power and beauty spring from their truth to life with their accent on Dalit life as also a rich variety of tensions between tradition and modernity, leading to true creativity.< /p>
Murari Madhusudan Thakur (b.1932), born in Singhwara, Darbhanga in Bihar, was educated at Patna University and taught English there from 1955 to 1963 and later at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, Nepal (1963-1965). He was a Fellow at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario in Canada (1965-1967), and later, Visiting Professor of English in Nepal (1983-1984). Professor Thakur has also distinguished himself as a translator (Sahitya Akademi Translation Prize, 1999). Notable among his Maithili translations are Arogya Niketan, Tarashankar's Bengali novel; Shabdasab, Jean-Paul Sartre's childhood memoirs Les Mots; and Selected Poems of Lakshmi Prasad Devkota, the Nepali poet. He is also the author of Thus Spake Bhisma, a novel based on the Mahabharata story.
It is with a sense of privilege and pleasure that I present this collection of thirty Maithili short stories including those of some of the most talented young writers of shorter fiction, to a wider circle of readers, the Indian English reading public. These short stories were rendered into English at a Translation Workshop at Patna, sponsored by Sahitya Akademi in collaboration with Samprati, Patna, from December 25 to December 29, 1999. The Akademi had kindly asked me to direct the workshop: I remember the occasion with special pleasure as I had a chance to meet for the first time, among the participants, a few of the finest young talents engaged in creative writing in Maithili today. It was inspiring on the inaugural day of the Workshop to hear Professor Damodar Thakur on the value and significance of translations, and to have Pandit Govind Jha present not only on December 25, but on several occasions later at the Workshop during the last days of December, 1999, in freezing weather. The occasion has become unforgettable for me today as I happened to meet my old-time friend Bholanath Jha Dhoomketu for the last time: Dhoomketu participated in the Workshop as a language expert, and passed away only some six months later. I take this opportunity to pay my tribute to him not only as a master of Maithili, but also as one of the great masters of the shorter fiction in the language; May his soul rest in peace! Among the short stories presented here, the first three, Five Letters, a tour-de-force in the epistolary form; Madhurmani, a touching vignette of a handicapped old man and his loving, though sharp-tongued wife, their little tiff and their reconciliation, and Evening Tree, a deeply moving portrait of a lost generation in all its anguish of loneliness and desolation, are all acknowledged classics and immortal creations. Among the rest of the writers represented here, Braj Kishore Varma and Radhakrishna Baher appear a little later in the same generation. Among the remaining twenty-five writers, there are broadly two generations: the first, born in the 1930s and 1940s; the second in the '50s and '60s.
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