Adivasi Will Not Dance

In this collection of stories set in the fecund mineral-rich hinterland and the ever-expanding squalid towns of Jharkhand Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar breathes life into a set of characters who are as robustly flesh and blood as the soil from which they spring where they live and into which they must sometimes bleed. Troupe-master Mangal Murmu refuses to perform for the President of India and is beaten down; Suren and Gita a love-blind couple wait with quiet desperation outside a neonatal ward hopingfor different reasonsthat their blue baby will turn pink; Panmuni and BiRAM Soren move to Vadodara in the autumn of their lives only to find that they must stop eating meat to be accepted as citizens; Baso-jhi is the life of the village of Sarjomdih but when people begin to die for no apparent reason a ghastly accusation from her past comes back to haunt her; and Talamai Kisku of the Santhal Pargana migrating to West Bengal in search of work must sle