India: A Journey Through Stories

About The Book

India: A Journey through Stories will undoubtedly provide undergraduate students across Indian universities a pleasant experience of learning English. India is a vast country with rich and diverse linguistic, regional and cultural traditions and yet, we all share a common heritage and a natural affinity. Learning English enhances that underlying sense of unity. India: A Journey through Stories is a collection of ten short stories. focusing on different aspects of Indian life. Some of these stories were originally written in English and some were translated from regional Indian languages into English. This textbook is our first attempt to teach English to undergraduate students through Indian stories. This method has a two-fold advantage-students will not only learn and improve English but will also be able to understand India better. We hope the fraternity of Indian teachers of English will welcome this experiment and encourage us to come out with more English textbooks along similar lines in the future.

About the Author

Dr. Alkesh Patel has been teaching English for more than 25 years. He completed his Ph.D in ELT in July, 2001. He proposes to devote the next three years, besides teaching, to writing a book on Sikh Gurus and their timeless message for humanity.

Dr. Bhark Dave has been teaching English at the undergraduate level for the last 25 years. Her area of interest and expertise is Indian Feminism and Women Autobiographies. She has also been active in the field of translation. Dr. Dave has already translated eminent regional works into English and Hindi. Her ambition is to make regional Indian writings accessible to readers across the globe.

Dr. Nitesh Solanki has been teaching English for more than 20 years. He was awarded his Ph.D. for his research on ELT and Indian Writing in English. He has also completed a UGC Minor Research Project on ELT. Dr. Solanki conceptualised and currently runs a free website-www.englishgueta.in and a free Android App of English GUETA for the students of English language and literature of Gujarat University, Ahmedabad. He plans to edit/compile more books for Indian undergraduate students of English.

Preface

Introduction:

In 1950, the Indian Union adopted Hindi as the official language and decided to replace English with Hindi in the next fifteen years for the purposes of official communication. On the contrary, English has attained greater prestige and power in the last seven decades. The craze for English education has been growing steadily: English is valued for the prospects of progress and prosperity it offers.

Undergraduate students in Indian universities study an English language paper in addition to their main course of study in Science, Commerce or Arts stream. But one of the important reasons for our students' poor knowledge of English is that they do not read the language on a regular basis. While reading English stories by foreign authors, students quite frequently encounter difficulties in comprehending cultural connotations and socio-political allusions. Many Indian writers have written excellent stories in English and a good number of regional language stories are available in English translations.

An average Indian undergraduate student should find it easier to read stories, for example, by R.K.Narayan and Amrita Pritam than those by O. Henry and Katherine Mansfield. While reading stories with the Indian backdrop, our students can appreciate as well as relate to the context and the characters. If the purpose is to cultivate the undergraduate students' interest in reading English it is far more advisable to ask them to begin reading stories by Indian authors. India: A Journey through Stories has been prepared with exactly that purpose.

The selection of the stories in the textbook:

Reading exposes the language learners to a variety of words, idiomatic expressions and sentence structures, Great writers do not write with a conscious purpose to teach the language but reading their works invariably increases our proficiency in the language. There are ten stories by ten Indian authors-Rabindranath Tagore, Rudyard Kipling, R.. K. Narayan, Manohar Malgonkar, Amrita Pritam, Satyajit Ray, Chaman Nahal, Ruskin Bond, Gulzar and Sudha Murty-in India: A Journey through Stories. Of course, both Kipling and Bond, though born in India, were British by birth. These two authors have been represented in this volume because their stories deal with some aspect of life in India.

Four stories in this collection-those by Tagore, Ray, Pritam and Gulzar-were respectively written in Bengali, Punjabi and Urdu. But our concern is with the English language only. If a story appears in a standard English translation, then it is an English story for our purpose. Two female Indian authors-Amrita Pritam and Sudha Murty- have been represented in India: A Journey through Stories.

Most Indian universities follow the semester system. The usual practice is to divide the English language textbook into two parts to be dealt with in two semesters. So, we assume that the first five stories in this collection might be considered for the odd semester and the last five for the even semester.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages