Summary Of Shiv Subramaniam's Dharma

In “Dharma”, we are introduced to Major General Jehangir Antia or Jago Antia, a man “Famous for his stare, for the cold blackness of his anger, for his tactical skill and his ability to read ground, his whole career from the gold medal at Kharak vasla to the combat and medals in Leh and NEFA” (1997:5), but with a missing leg. He was forced to save his life through a terrible act of self- mutilation:
SHAKTHI
Subramaniam’s second story is titled “Shakti”, the basic premise of which seems to be, “That the beginning and end of everything is a marriage” (1997:33). Shakti tells us about a love story, between the son and the daughter of two powerful business families, which in the end are able to overcome the conflicts, due to appearances, power and …show more content…
The imputed language – i.e., the language in which the tales ‘would have been’ told were the characters ‘real’ – of the stories narrated by Subramaniam is not an Indian language but English, allowing for snatches of dialogue, phrase or song imputedly in other languages. It is the job of the frame-narrator Ranjit, acting as stand-in for the author, to transmit the stories to the reader, again in English. In Love and Longing in Bombay, Vikram Chandra has adopted a new technique of story-telling: the five stories in this collection are told by the same person and are interlocked with a dozen of shorter narratives, fused together as it were, by a ‘story-within-the-story’ technique. One reads these stories to see Bombay inside out. Violence, crime, activities in the underworld, club-culture, witch-hunting—all the negative qualities that dehumanize the modern man are highlighted in these stories with consummate skill. What seems to be more important in this collection of stories, is the use of Indian words by way of code mixing, that successfully recreates, the characters in our own