ਇੰਗਲਿਸ਼ ਲੈਸਨਜ਼ ਅਤੇ ਹੋਰ ਕਹਾਣੀਆਂ

About the book

English Lessons and Other Stories, published by Goose Lane Editions in Canada in 1996, is the first book by Shauna Singh Baldwin, the Montreal born, India raised writer who went on to write What the Body Remembers and The Tiger Claw. It collects fifteen short stories, many of them first written for radio and heard on CBC, and it announced its author at once: the collection received the 1996 Friends of American Writers Award, and its publisher also lists a CBC Canadian Literary Award for the book. Indian editions followed from HarperCollins India in 1999 and Rupa in 2009, and a reader's guide edition from Goose Lane in 2008 reprinted the fifteen stories with an interview with the author, an original afterword and her suggested reading list.

Baldwin was born in Montreal and grew up in India, and the collection lives in both her countries. Its stories move between India, Canada and the United States, and between the intimate sphere of the family and the worlds of office and university, as her publisher describes them. It is, in the Edmonton Journal's phrase carried by her publisher, a book about immigrant Sikhs learning how to live in English speaking North America. The English lessons of the title are lessons in a whole new language for living, not only in words.

What is English Lessons and Other Stories about?

The fifteen stories revolve around Sikh women in three countries, India, Canada and the United States, ranging, as one widely cited review puts it, from a ten year old girl in Indian Punjab, through mothers whose children are studying abroad, to young immigrants in Canada and the US, to an elderly lady in a retirement home in Canada. Across the book Baldwin dramatises the lives of Indian women from 1919 to the present day, and a scholarly study of the collection describes its women expanding their world from the family circle to offices and universities, in India and in North America.

Behind the domestic surfaces, two public griefs are never far away. Her publisher's summary notes that for the Sikh women of these stories the massacres of Partition and of 1984 shadow the work of keeping an identity and asserting it. The subtler subject is the cost of fitting in: how colonial habits of mind survive in the colonised, and how the women confront what the same summary calls the twin fear of freedom and fear of the other. In Montreal 1962, the story that opens the scholarly study, a Sikh wife in Canada resolves that her hands will tie her husband's turban every day and that she will work, rather than let him cut his hair to be hired by men who do not know what a turban means.

Stories and themes: silence, kept and broken

In the title story, Kanwaljit, an Indian woman brought to the United States by the American she married, lives almost underground while her immigration papers are controlled by others, and takes English lessons from a teacher her husband warns not to teach her too many American ideas: language itself is the ground on which her freedom will be won or lost. In Simran, a mother in India, Amrit, receives her nineteen year old daughter home from study in America and reads disaster into a copy of the Quran in her bag and a Muslim boy's phone calls, until suspicion itself becomes the tragedy. In Jassie, a sixty five year old immigrant mother shares a room with Elsie, her American son in law's mother: the two women, as Jassie explains, have little in common except that both are mothers and their children are married, and the dying Jassie helps the other woman come to terms with death. In A Pair of Ears, a servant woman takes her revenge on an old woman's feckless son, and in Nothing Must Spoil This Visit, western and eastern women find unexpected candour and passion.

The collection's great theme, its reviewers agreed, is silence. Baldwin's women inhabit silence and learn to use it, sometimes as a refuge and sometimes as a weapon; some remain prisoners of it, choking on their own knowledge, and others harness its power to seize their freedom. Reviewers from Books in Canada to the Toronto Star praised the array of views across generations and social spheres and the loving attention to tradition and culture, and the Georgia Straight, quoted on the author's site, noticed that almost all the stories end with a last line that ironically reverses what has come before. There are, as Biblio put it, no dragon slaying heroines here, merely ordinary women who find their courage in the most paradoxical of places.

ਲੇਖਕ

Shauna Singh Baldwin was born in Montreal and grew up in India, in her publisher's words a hybrid of the three cultures, Indian, Canadian and American, she writes from. She holds an MBA from Marquette University and an MFA from the University of British Columbia, and from 1991 to 1994 she was an independent radio producer, hosting Sunno!, the East Indian American radio show, the radio years that stand behind this collection's storytelling voice. What the Body Remembers, published in 1999, was awarded the 2000 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book in the Canada and Caribbean region, and The Tiger Claw, in 2004, was a finalist for Canada's Giller Prize; both novels are in this Kosh. English Lessons came first, and it already holds the subjects she would spend her career on: Sikh memory, women's silence and speech, and Punjab carried across the world. Her full story is in her Kosh entry.

Reception and legacy

The reviews of 1996 read now like a roll call of discovery. India Currents called it a fine first collection, marking the entry of a promising writer into the expanding world of Indian fiction in English. Outlook called it an unusually assured fictional debut, combining the feel of an old family album with the uncensored stories behind the happy snapshots, and noted that many of the stories were first written for radio, giving them the immediacy of a conversation with the next door neighbour. The Pioneer judged the stories significant both as fictional documents giving the inside story of what the diaspora has meant to ordinary people, and as accounts of the rising awareness and strength of women entering new worlds, emotional and material.

The book has stayed in print and in study. It is examined in university scholarship on Sikh diaspora writing and on the silencing of women, and its reader's guide edition was made for that classroom and book club life. For readers of this Kosh it is the necessary first chapter of Baldwin: before the Partition epic of What the Body Remembers, these fifteen small rooms, kitchens, offices and retirement homes are where she learned, and taught her readers, to listen to Punjabi women who had been spoken about but rarely heard.