In seven grim, macabre and sometimes darkly comic tales, Madavane traces France’s forgotten colonial presence, playfully reinterprets Hindu myths and recounts the many ways to die in postcolonial India. Recalling the pitiless world of Maupassant and animated by ghosts, gods and holy men, these haunting stories offer a fresh perspective on India’s past and present, its many ironies and idiosyncrasies.

Mourir à Bénarès was first published in French in 2004 and received critical acclaim for its depiction of complex postcolonial identities. Now available in English for the first time, To Die in Benares brings to the fore characters and subjects oft ignored or disregarded by mainstream English literature.

Born in Pondicherry, K. Madavane went to school at the Lycée Français de Pondichéry. He received his PhD from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, where he explored the theme of death in the Theatre of the Absurd. He taught in JNU for years before retiring in 2011. Madavane’s plays include The Mahabharata of Women, The Veritree or the Falsity of the Gods, A Monologue for a Woman on Stage, and 1947: The Man from Lahore, which was shortlisted for The Hindu Playwright Award in 2017. To Die in Benares was first published in French as Mourir à Bénarès in 2004 and is one of his most acclaimed works. Madavane currently lives in Delhi with his wife.

The working-class district of Kurusukuppam is not the Pondicherry of tourist brochures. Here, residents are a bewildering mix of Creoles, colonial war veterans, proud communists and French citizens who have never left India's shores. It is a place of everyday tragedies, melodramatic occurrences and stubborn, absurd hope.

But life in Kurusukuppam is upturned by the arrival of a curious tramp, Gilbert Thaata, a wizened Frenchman who has clearly seen hard times. Settling down on the narrator's verandah, his thinnai, Gilbert Thaata begins to earn his keep by recounting the tale of the rise and fall of his family's fortunes as the custodians of a mysterious diamond, the Stone of Sita. The fanciful story that unfolds is one that stretches across centuries and encompasses the history of France's colonial legacy in India. As entranced as they are by the raconteur, his listeners cannot help but ask - just who is this old man and how did he fall on such misfortune?

Masterfully translated from the French original by Blake Smith, Ari Gautier's The Thinnai offers a panoramic view of Pondicherry's past, the whimsical eccentricities of its present and shines a light on the quirks of history that come to define us.

Praised by Voltaire and admired by Pushkin, Évariste Parny (1753-1814) was born on the island of Réunion, which is east of Madagascar, and educated in France. His life as a soldier and government administrator allowed him to travel to Brazil, Africa, and India. Though from the periphery of France's colonial empire, he ultimately became a member of the Académie Française. Despite his reaching that pinnacle of respectability, some of his poetry was banned after his death.

This edition includes poems from the Poésies érotiques and Élégies, which established Parny's reputation; the Chansons madécasses ("Madagascar Songs"), which were influential in the development of the prose poem; five of his published letters, written in a mixture of prose and verse; the narrative poem Le Voyage de Céline; and selections from his sardonic, anticlerical later poetry. A substantial introduction discusses Parny's poetry in connection with its literary context and the themes of gender, race, and postcoloniality.

About the Authors

Françoise Lionnet is professor of Romance languages and literatures, comparative literature, African and African American studies, and women, gender, and sexuality at Harvard University. Her recent books include The Known and the Uncertain: Creole Cosmopolitics of the Indian Ocean and Writing Women and Critical Dialogues: Subjectivity, Gender, and Irony. Peter Low is a senior adjunct fellow at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. He has translated many French poems and recently published Translating Song. Blake Smith is a Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago and the translator of K. Madavane's To Die in Benares.