short stories
If an old-fashioned liberal humanist excuse were needed for revisiting Kipling’s “The Gardener” it could be found through combining Phillip Mallett’s contention that “Kipling is the greatest English writer of the short story” with Edmund Wilson’s roundabout confession that he is “not sure that [The Gardener] is not really the best story that Kipling ever wrote.”[1] Greatness and hierarchies aside, the cultural materialist might find reasons enough for promoting a re-evaluation of the story in the wake of the centenary of the end of
The post-World War II novels of the Bengali writer S. N. (Sudhin or Sudhindra Nath) Ghose (1899–1965) received critical recognition in India, Europe, and the United States; however, the short stories and plays he published in London in the early 1920s have been largely neglected. He published stories in Sylvia Pankhurst’s East London newspaper, the Workers’ Dreadnought, and literary magazine, Germinal, which comprise some of the earliest examples of fiction written in English by a South Asian author and published in Britain.[1] They appeared several years before his more famous contemporary Mulk Raj Anand published his first short story, “The Lost Child,” produced on Eric Gill’s handpress in County Buckinghamshire.[2] While Anand’s interactions with writers in Britain have recently been recognized within modernist studies, Ghose’s literary activities in London in the 1920s have been almost entirely forgotten.