16 Best Indian Short Story Collections (Where to Start in Each)

Lahiri's first book, written mostly in her twenties, and still the cleanest way into Indian short fiction in English. A couple in Boston use a week of scheduled power cuts to say things they have been avoiding for months. A tour guide in Konark, who also translates patients' symptoms for a doctor, mistakes a tourist's confession for intimacy. A woman in a Calcutta building sweeps the stairs until the neighbours decide she is a liability. Nothing explodes. People fail each other in small recognisable ways, and Lahiri is unusually good at finding the exact sentence where it happens.

Narayan invented Malgudi, a town somewhere in south India, and spent a career filling it with shopkeepers, tricksters, schoolteachers and men who talk too much. The stories are tiny. A fake astrologer under a tree meets the man he once believed he had killed. A postman holds back a letter because delivering it would ruin a wedding. A doctor decides that the kindest thing available to a dying friend is a lie. Narayan never raises his voice and never judges anybody, and after twenty pages of him you start seeing your own street the way he sees his.

Bond's stories run on near misses. A student passing through a tiny station on every holiday keeps buying a basket from the same girl on the platform and never once gets off the train to find her. A boy and an old man share a bench and a long silence. Somebody arrives in a hill town, notices the light on the deodars, and leaves before anything can happen. There is no cleverness in the prose, which is the trick, because writing this plain and this controlled is much harder than it looks. Most pieces run six or seven pages.

One building, many flats, and neighbours whose stories keep leaking into each other. Mistry's Firozsha Baag has a servant boy who sleeps on the stairs, a man who holds children spellbound with long confident lies, families arguing about emigration, and the particular comedy of a community that cannot stop watching itself. Squatter is the famous one: a Parsi man moves to Toronto, cannot manage the western toilet, and the story turns from farce into something genuinely sad about belonging nowhere. Mistry wrote this before the novels, and you can hear him warming up in it.

Mushtaq is a lawyer and activist in Karnataka who has been writing these stories in Kannada since around 1990, and Deepa Bhasthi selected and translated twelve of them into a single English book. The women in them are inside families, mosques, courtrooms and kitchens, arguing for room to breathe. What surprises people is the humour. Mushtaq is funny in the middle of grim material, and she stops a story the second her point has landed rather than rounding it off. Bhasthi keeps Kannada and Urdu words in the English instead of smoothing them away, and the book is better for it.

Chandra gives you a retired civil servant who tells a story a night to a younger listener over drinks, and the five stories are named for Sanskrit ideas: dharma, shakti, kama, artha, shanti. One is a ghost story about a general who comes home to a house he cannot sleep in. One is a social war between two women at the top of Bombay society. One is a police case, and the inspector working it is Sartaj Singh, who later carries Sacred Games. They run forty to seventy pages each, so they read like short novels, and the city in them is specific down to the whisky.

Manto wrote about 1947 while it was still going on around him, and this Penguin selection puts the Partition work in one place: full stories, and the one paragraph sketches that do the most damage. Toba Tek Singh is here, in which two new governments decide to exchange their lunatics along with everything else, and one inmate refuses to stand on either side of a line nobody can explain to him. Manto does not editorialise. He reports the thing, stops, and leaves you holding it. Some of these sketches are three sentences long and you will still have them in ten years.

Shekhar is a medical officer in Jharkhand and these stories come out of the mining belt: the small towns, the villages that lose their land to a power plant and receive a compensation cheque, the girls who go missing into cities. In one, a Santhal family transferred to Vadodara gives up meat to keep the neighbours comfortable, and then 2002 arrives. In another, a woman waiting for the labour train trades herself for a small note and some cold bread. Shekhar writes without the softening that usually attaches to Adivasi subjects in Indian fiction and without asking a city reader for sympathy.

These stories run close to twice the length of the ones in her first book, and the subject has moved on with her. Adult children now, with mortgages and marriages of their own, and immigrant parents ageing into a second kind of dependence. In the title story a widowed father visits his daughter in Seattle, spends the week planting her garden, and neither of them says the thing they are both circling. The last three pieces form one sequence that follows two people across decades, and it is the best sustained work Lahiri has done at this length.

Chughtai wrote about middle-class Muslim households from the inside, in the idiom women actually used with each other, which is exactly what made her dangerous. The Quilt is the story that got her prosecuted for obscenity: a child narrates what she sees happening under her aunt's quilt at night and does not understand it, while the reader understands it perfectly. The rest of the volume is broader than that reputation, with sketches and non-fiction sitting beside the stories. Chughtai is funny, impatient and completely unimpressed by respectability, and Asaduddin keeps her sentences quick in English.

Dhumketu was the pen name of Gaurishankar Joshi, whose first Gujarati collection came out in 1926 and changed what a short story could be in the language. Jenny Bhatt chose twenty-seven of them and translated them, which is the first time an English reader has had a real selection rather than a stray anthology piece. The title story follows a village drummer and the dancer he loves, and it goes where village love stories in that period went. Others turn on a letter that arrives too late, or a tea house near Darjeeling run by somebody with a history.

Rushdie splits the book in three: stories set in the East, stories that rewrite Western material such as Hamlet's Yorick and Columbus at the Spanish court, and stories where the two sit in one room. The third section is where the book comes alive. The Courter is about an Indian family in London, the ayah who came with them, and a Central European porter who plays chess with her and cannot pronounce her name, so she becomes Certainly-Mary. It is the least show-off thing Rushdie has written and probably the most moving.

Premchand wrote hundreds of stories in Urdu and Hindi in the first third of the twentieth century, mostly about villages, debt, caste and the daily arithmetic of not having enough. Rubin arranges his selection in three parts, the village, the town and the world, and it holds the pieces you will meet everywhere else. In The Shroud a father and son sit outside a hut while the woman inside dies in labour, then spend the money collected for her funeral cloth on food and drink. In The Chess Players two noblemen keep playing while their kingdom is annexed around them.

Tagore's best stories come out of the decade he spent looking after the family lands in East Bengal, travelling by boat, meeting tenants, and noticing exactly the kind of small domestic cruelty a celebrated poet is not supposed to notice. The Postmaster is where to begin: a city man posted to a village, an orphan girl who keeps his house, a friendship neither of them names, and then a departure. Kabuliwallah is in here too. Radice's translations are the reason this particular edition matters, because the older English Tagore is unreadably sweet and this is not.

Tharoor writes fables that behave like reportage. Ethnographers record the final speaker of a language and keep asking her for more words while the language runs out mid-interview. An elephant is sent as a diplomatic gift from Delhi to a Moroccan court and spends most of the story at sea. A besieged city holds a committee meeting about the terms of its own surrender. The settings hop across centuries and continents while the tone stays cool and faintly amused. It is the most stylistically ambitious book here and the least interested in making you feel anything.

Mahasweta Devi spent decades working with tribal communities in Bengal, Bihar and what is now Jharkhand, and these three stories come straight out of that: The Hunt, Douloti the Bountiful, and Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay and Pirtha. The Hunt is the accessible one. A young woman of mixed parentage lives in a village that holds a ritual hunt, and she uses the day in a way nobody expects. Douloti is about bonded labour and what a debt does to a body over a lifetime. Spivak's translation arrives wrapped in her preface, her footnotes and an interview, so you are reading an argument as much as a book.