Here, labour had value.” The story ends in tragedy, and yet the reader is convinced that this tragedy is preferable to the horrors the character had left behind. The very thing that made me want to die back in the village was considered ‘work’ here. “For the first time I understood that labour had many meanings in the city. In ‘Scream’, the protagonist leaves his village in Dantewada for the big city lights of Mumbai to pursue his studies. They also remind us why so many Dalits and members of other un-empowered backward castes flee the feudal choke of villages and small towns to move to cities. Most of the stories deal with a character’s attempts to break out of a traditional power structure. The actual flesh-and-blood divisions between individuals that caste identities bring is what Navaria digs into in Unclaimed Terrain. Hindi writer Ajay Navaria turns the light on a set of people who don’t usually figure in our English language inquiries outside newspapers and scholarly works. Matters like caste don’t fit well into this narrative, and when they briefly make their way in, they tend to be cloying, maudlin and seem part of a manifesto rather than a stand-alone piece of writing that can be admired for its own sake. The world of English language Indian fiction is, rather understandably, populated heavily by the kind of characters who do its reading - whether they be the Hinglish-speaking 21st century urban Indian or the desi cultured magpie comfortable with his or her self-description as a ‘person of taste’.
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