L’arbre nagalinga. Nouvelles d’Inde du Sud

by F. Gros et Kannan M.

It is through the genre of short stories that contemporary Tamil attained world standards and entered modernity. This collection is not just an anthology. Coedited by the French Institute within its programme on Contemporary Tamilnadu, it offers texts very contrasted in style, written from 1935 to 1995. It is completed by a postface which chronicles critically different voices, from popular writers to literary establishment, and also reveals original authors, several of them not yet published in English. The reader, Tamil or Western, exposed to Ashokamitran or G. Nagarajan, to La. Sa. Ra. or Konanki, is invited to investigate lucidly the modern prose tradition in Tamil, and realises the need for additional contributions to a full-fledged history of Tamil contemporary literature.