Husbands and Pumpkins and Other Stories

By Gangadhar Gadgil

About The Book

What happens when a young Saraswat bride begins life in a Chitpavan Brahmin household or when gossip spreads faster than wildfire in a Girgaum chawl or when a person from the Vidharbha region feels like a fish out of water when he visits Mumbai for the first time – these and numerous such stories make up the collection in this book. The stories bring out so accurately the idiosyncrasies of typical Maharashtrian families residing in Mumbai that one cannot help identifying with the characters. Humourous to the core, the stories nonetheless hold forth a critique of various aspects of society and the lampoons do not fail to hit their mark.

The stories have an old – world charm and bring to life people and events. They also bring alive a different Mumbai – Mumbai as our parents and grandparents knew it. Mario Miranda’s distinctive cartoons complement Gadgil’s easy style of story telling and add colour to the characters. The book is thus a delightful combination of words and images and does not fail to leave a lasting impression on the reader’s mind.

About The Author(s)

Gangadhar Gadgil was born on August 25, 1923, in Mumbai. He is an economist by profession and a leading Marathi writer who is recognized as the creator of the new Marathi short story. His work in the field of criticism, humour, travelogues, novels and personal essays is groundbreaking. His first short story was published in 1941. Since then, he has published over fifty books consisting of collections of short stories, humorous stories, travelogues, novels, plays, one act plays. Literary criticism, stories and plays for children. Three collections of his short stories have already been published in English. These are, The Woman and Other Stories, Crazy Bombay and The Throttled Street and Other Stories.

He is the recipient of numerous State and other literary awards, including the Sahitya Akademi Award and the prestigious Janasthan Award. His writings, both in Marathi as well as in translations, have been published in leading newspapers and journals in India and abroad. His works are prescribed for study in the school and university level in Maharashtra. Some of his short stories and humorous writings have been selected for Australian and Canadian textbooks. Gangadhar Gadgil was appointed as an Honorary Professor of Marathi for three years by the University of Bombay. He was the Vice-President of Sahitya Academy and of Mumbai Marathi Grantha Sangrahalaya. He is also in the committees of various literary bodies.

The US Library of Congress had recently chosen Gangadhar Gadgil as one of the writers whose voice it wished to record and preserve.

ISBN : 81-7154-869-5

Format : Book