A literary glimpse into the early decades of independent India.

Drawing influences from Indian folktales, French existentialism, and the Bengali Hungryalist movement, Rajkamal Chaudhary’s œuvre is like a secret back alley in an old city—not completely forgotten but existing only for the few. Even though Chaudhary also wrote in Maithili and Bengali, it was his writings in Hindi that established him as the bold new experimentalist of Indian literature. His India of the 1950 and 60s is populated with hopeless literature professors, scattered alcohol bottles, prostitutes, hysteria patients, and sell-out painters. His unconventional life and writing place him outside the mainstream, and so he remains as uncategorizable as the characters and lives he wrote about. Bringing together twelve of his most representative short stories, translated for the first time in English, Traces of Boots on Tongue and Other Stories allows a glimpse into the early decades of independent India and its weariness, which many readers will find in today’s India as well.

Written during the final stages of the Indian Independence movement, between the gloom and angst of the interwar period and at the cusp of the beginning of modern India, Bhuwaneshwar’s short stories both capture the melancholy of the time and ask what it means to be human in an indifferent and amoral world. These stories are truly an event in the history of modern Hindi literature—his work marks a complete break from the neo-romanticism and mysticism of his predecessors and contemporaries and establishes him as the definitive founder of the modern Hindi short story. His stories are populated with lonely characters from all walks of life: doctors, students, nomadic communities, acrobats, single mothers, soldiers returning from war, neglected children, and more. They are people living on the margins, introspecting their own anxieties and existence in an increasingly uncertain world set in places as far apart as hill stations, anonymous Indian villages, highways, railway compartments, and small towns in France.

This new collection includes all of Bhuwaneshwar’s twelve published short stories, none of which have been translated into English before now. Cinematic and peerless, these tales combine images, sketches, sounds, fragments, dialogues, and frame-narrative techniques of Indian folktales, ultimately creating a montage of modern Indian psyche not found in any other work of Hindi literature. Nearly a century old, Bhuwaneshwar’s stories read like they were written in modern day, dealing with questions and anxieties that continue to haunt and reappear, much like his iconic wolves, in the twenty-first century.  
 

A prominent Hindi poet’s compelling testament to the struggles and resilience of India’s marginalized communities.

A voice of the marginalized and a staunch critic of the establishment, Alok Dhanwa brilliantly captures the ethos of a turbulent era in India through his poetry. Born in 1948, in Munger, Bihar, he witnessed the rise and fall of political movements and wrote against the backdrop of the Maoist and Naxalite struggles. This collection, the first book-length translation of his work into English, brings a glimpse of a volatile nation coming to grips with its own existence to new readers.
 
His poetry highlights the ongoing fight for justice and identity in an ever-changing state that remains starkly relevant to the contemporary Indian polity. Dhanwa’s writing is a beacon for the working class, a testament to resistance, and a reminder that the struggle for a better world is both eternal and essential. In his universe, love, rebellion, armed resistance, and the everyday coexist. With World Is Made Up Every Day, he paints a vivid portrait of rural India’s landscapes and humanity’s capacity to defy power in all its forms. This book is not just a collection of poems; it is a call to keep the spirit of resistance alive and to live meaningfully in a world that constantly evolves but often remains unchanged.