Dr. Dipak
Giri’s Indian Short Story: A Critical Evaluation
Reviewed by
Dr.
Swayam Prabha Satpathy,
Editor-in-Chief,
Rupkatha
Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences,
&
Associate
Professor in Communication,
Department
of Humanities,
Siksha
O Anusandhan University,
Bhubaneshwar,
Odisha, India.
Indian Short Story:
A Critical Evaluation | Literary Criticism | Dr. Dipak Giri |
Malik & Sons, 2024, INR 1050| $ 40,
pp. 260
ISBN: 978-93-92459-85-6
A Tapestry of Literary Voices and Multifaceted
Themes on Indianness
Dr. Dipak Giri’s Indian Short
Story: A Critical Evaluation is a potent academic compilation that explores
the rich and varied legacy of Indian short fiction. Twenty-six scholarly pieces
are included in the anthology, each providing a distinct perspective on the
short stories of both traditional and modern Indian writers. This book is
unique due to its multidisciplinary approach, which incorporates cultural,
ecological, and psychoanalytic critiques alongside feminist readings and
postcolonial perspectives.
- Plurality of voices: One of the book’s chief
strengths is its refusal of a unitary Indian literary identity. Giri
foregrounds multilingual and multicultural practices, bringing regional
literatures, oral traditions, and marginal voices into dialogue with
canonical texts. This approach resists reductive teleology and allows for
a textured, heteroglossic picture of Indian short fiction.
- Interrogation of
“Indianness”:
Rather than treating Indianness as a stable set of traits, Giri examines
how it is narrated and produced through history, gendered experience,
caste and class relations, migration, and the politics of language. This
makes the book especially useful for students who need to think critically
about national identity as narrative construction.
- Close readings paired with
context:
The text balances detailed formal readings (style, narrative strategies,
point of view, temporality) with contextual framing (colonial histories,
partition, caste dynamics, urbanization). These two registers strengthen
each other: formal observations are given political purchase, while
context is grounded in textual evidence.
- Attention to marginal and
gendered perspectives: The chapters addressing subaltern and
women’s writing are noteworthy for their sensitivity to how silence,
indirectness, or domestic scenes encode resistance. Giri often recovers
subtle narrative moves — irony, understatement, domestic detail — as
strategies of dissent or survival.
Conceptual and
Methodological Contributions
1.
A
Model of Comparative Short-fiction Study: By reading
stories across languages and regions, the book suggests methodological ways to
do comparative work without flattening difference. Giri’s framework — which
treats the short story as a site where the local and the national intersect —
is a helpful heuristic for future research.
2.
Thematic
taxonomy: Giri’s arrangement of themes (memory and history;
migration and displacement; caste and class; urban anxieties; gender and
domesticity; language and translation) provides a clear map for teachers and
scholars organizing syllabi or research agendas.
Identity, belonging, and displacement are
some of the anthology's other main themes. Dr. Shantanu Siuli's “A Study of
'Aag Ka Darya’ in Terms of Temporal and Spatial Dimensions” and Dr. Naseer ud
Din Sofi and Raheela Mohamad's “Critical Analysis of Short Stories of
Qurratulain Hyder” both go into great detail on the author's works. Both
chapters highlight Hyder's distinct storytelling approach and her deft handling
of memory, history, and ethnic diversity. ‘Aag Ka Darya’, according to Siuli in
particular, rewrites history as a complex cultural palimpsest that is full of
intellectual and spiritual truths rather than as linear chronology. Aryaa
Singh's interpretation of ‘The Courter’ by Salman Rushdie interacts with Homi
Bhabha's ideas about hybridity and imitation. Her analysis of Rushdie's
characters' articulation of postcolonial identities influenced by linguistic
hybridity and cultural displacement reveals how they live in
"in-between" settings.
Conclusion
Dr. Dipak Giri’s Indian Short Story: A Critical Evaluation is
an ambitious, thoughtful, and generative contribution to Indian literary
studies. Its chief achievement is to present the Indian short story not as a
static object but as a living, contested field in which multiple voices
negotiate belonging, memory, and power. For teachers, researchers, and advanced
students, the book provides a useful conceptual map and a rich set of close
readings.