11 Gujarati Novels and Story Collections You Can Read in English

Dhumketu was the pen name of Gaurishankar Govardhanram Joshi, who did for the Gujarati short story roughly what Premchand did for Hindi, and he wrote hundreds of them from the nineteen twenties onward. Jenny Bhatt selected and translated this volume, and for a long stretch it was the only serious English gateway into any of it. The stories are built the old way, with a situation, a turn and a closing line that lands like a door shutting. What surprised me is how little they preach. A servant, a widow, a musician past his best years, a clerk in a small town: Dhumketu puts a person in a corner and then simply watches what they do.

An angaliyat in Gujarati is a child brought into a marriage from a woman's earlier one, led in by the finger, and Macwan uses the word for a whole community treated as somebody else's leftover. The novel sits among the Vankar weavers of central Gujarat in the years around independence and follows two friends, Teeha and Valji, and what follows when a Dalit man refuses to step off the road. Macwan built the book out of oral accounts from people he knew, so it reads like a village telling its own story out loud, songs included. It is widely described as the first Dalit novel written in Gujarati.

Fateema Lokhandwala comes from a poor Muslim family in a Gujarat village, studies hard, gets herself a college job, and decides she wants to buy a home in the city. That search is the novel. Around it are a brother pulled towards anger, a father who trusted his neighbours all his life, and a state that has quietly learned to sort itself into areas where each kind of name belongs. Ila Arab Mehta tells it in unhurried little chapters with no villain anywhere in sight, which somehow makes the whole thing land harder than a book with one would.

Chauhan takes a killing that happened in a north Gujarat village in 1964 and builds outward from it: who owns the land, who is expected to clean what, who may draw water from which well, and who can be relied upon to look away at the right moment. His method is patient and close to documentary. He assembles the village as a working machine first, so that when the machine does what it was built to do, nobody in the book is surprised except the reader. The vultures of the title are the actual birds, and also everybody standing around watching.

This is a selection of Dalpat Chauhan's short fiction put together for English readers rather than a copy of one Gujarati volume, and the setting is the world of Vultures seen in slices. Most of the stories turn on a small everyday transaction, a road, a well, a cup of tea, a greeting, that carries the entire caste arrangement folded inside it. Nothing here runs longer than it needs to. Chauhan writes anger without ever raising his voice, which is a much rarer skill than the shouting kind, and in the short form it comes out sharper than it does across a novel.

Karan is the last Vaghela king of Gujarat, and the story opens with him taking his minister's wife, which sets off a chain ending with Alauddin Khilji's army and the close of Rajput rule in the region. It was written in 1866 by a school inspector in Surat who had decided that Gujarati needed a modern literature and that somebody had better start one. So it lectures a bit. There are pages on customs, clothes, food and ceremony that a modern editor would strike out and that I would keep, because they are the reason the book still feels like a window rather than a plot.

The Solanki capital at the start of the twelfth century. The old king is dying, Minaldevi is holding power for a child heir, and Munjal Mehta, the minister who actually runs Gujarat, is two moves ahead of everybody. Munshi wrote it in 1916 as a serial and it still reads like one, with cliffhangers, disguises, sword fights and constant political scheming. If you know Dumas, you know the temperature exactly. It is also nation-building in fancy dress, because Munshi was inventing a proud Gujarati past at the same time as he was entertaining people with it.

Four years on from the first book, the child heir is becoming the ruler Gujarat still names roads after, and Munjal Mehta is still holding the state together with one hand while fending off rivals with the other. There is a romance between Kaak and Manjari that Gujarati readers have been sentimental about for a century, a long rivalry that gives the book its spine, and battles that Munshi stages like theatre because he clearly enjoyed writing them. This is the volume most Gujaratis mean when they say they grew up on Munshi.

The last of the three. Siddhraj is at the top of his reign, the wars are bigger, and the argument underneath the story turns towards faith, since Munshi brings in the tensions between Jain and Shaivite interests at court and makes little secret of where his own sympathies lie. It came out in 1922, six years after the first volume, and the writer's confidence is visible on every page, sometimes to the book's cost, because he now stops for ideas where he used to stop for a duel.

Kalu and Raju want each other and the families have decided otherwise, which is an ordinary village tragedy until the drought comes. Pannalal Patel wrote it in 1947 from stories he grew up hearing about the Chhappaniyo Dukal, the famine of Samvat 1956, and the second half of the novel is where it becomes something else entirely. Hunger takes over the plot. People who were arguing about marriage begin calculating about grain, and the love story stops being the subject without ever being abandoned. It is generally held to be the finest Gujarati novel of the twentieth century.

The novel follows one woman from her marriage into a large joint household through the slow discovery of how completely such a house can absorb a person: the kitchen, the calendar, the opinions, the daily arithmetic of everybody else's needs before her own. Then she walks out, and the last stretch of the book is about what a woman builds when she starts again in her forties. Kundanika Kapadia published it in 1984 and it started an argument in Gujarati homes that has not entirely finished. The English cover carries the Sahitya Akademi Award.