My Readings & Rural Attraction

May be owing to my childhood years, when atleast a quarter of an year would be spent in a village, I have a very strong attraction towards rural India. Rather the folklore, customs and traditions, conflicts which are a trademark of rural life. A very vivid, rich & colorful life is out there in rural India.

This fascination of rural India is also reflected into my reading habits. My favorite writers in Indian literature are not who write about metropolitan life or hassles of a city dweller. I rather like Sri. Naa. Pendse and Go. Ni. Dandekar (Marathi), Mahashweta Devi (Bengali), S.L. Bhyrappa and K. Shivram Karanth (Kannada) and notably Premchand (Hindi). All these writers have very beautifully portrayed rural Indian life, especially a rural India in transition in first half of century, when the city-ward migration has just begun. Their works depict the rural fabric getting disturbed due to the arrival of all that we see as established today - the so called 'modern' things (Indian standards of modernism). One more thing I which i have observed about my reading habits is that I really like the literature about the Western Ghats region of India - Konkan & Coastal Karnataka especially. The Marathi I mentioned have written numerous books about the life in this region. Sometimes I have this irrestible feeling that This is the region where I belong...