ABSTRACT
Jayant Kaikini is a Kannada writer who lived in Mumbai and stories in the collection examined are set in that city. Kaikini’s range in the characters he puts into his stories is enormous – movie stuntmen, prostitutes, cinema hall ushers, municipal employees, household employees who could be of any origin in the cosmopolitan milieu – although successful people rarely enter his universe. He uses metaphors drawn from everyday life which means that they are virtually devoid of cliché and his stories are also vivid. But as one scrutinises them one is struck by how so much drastic action in them leads to so little of consequence, and if his stories are invariably open-ended, as if their trajectories cannot be completed because the author cannot imagine it. This leads us to question whether the writerly class in India – being predominantly from the educated middle-class – has the requisite social experience to imagine those outside it, especially those people situated well below the class, socially. It draws attention to tendencies exhibited by many other writers examined in this book who write as if from above (which Kaikini does not do) because they do not know the kind of lives they are depicting.
