Panchlight and Other Stories

Renu’s world is rural Bihar—a world of poverty, ignorance, helplessness, superstition and exploitation. The characters in his stories are the landless, the disenfranchised and the marginalized. He writes of passions spent, hurts unresolved, dreams unfulfilled, in the context of a changing world and a crumbling social order. But his work is anything but bleak. Its universality and the energy comes from Renu’s ability to rise above the human condition and look deep within, into the human heart.

The diversity of the stories in this collection is representative of the works of Renu (1921-1977) – one of the foremost writers in Hindi..

Rakhshanda Jalil’s translation brings to the reader a writer and storyteller in supreme control of his craft.