Commonwealth Short Story Prize
Cow and Company
Set in colonial India, this work interweaves a business built around a cow with the absurdities of community life. Social order is shaken from both commercial and religious angles.
Work Information
Activity around a cow exposes the order and absurdity inside the community.
The center of the story is not the cow itself but the distortions of institutions and desires that gather around it. Humor remains in place even as the story brings power and community into view.
Book Information
- Publisher
- India Viking
- Published
- 2019-08-26
- Pages
- 204 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 21.3 x 1.8 x 17.2 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780670092833
- ISBN-10
- 0670092835
- Price
- 2625 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/British/Humor & Satire
A brave and hilarious debut set in colonial India, Cow and Company begins with the British Chewing Gum Company setting up shop in Bombay with the mission of introducing chewing gum in the colonies. They declare paan, which is in all mouths at all times, as their enemy. A cow is chosen as the mascot. It is up on all the posters. Religious sentiments are hurt. What begins as a search for a cow ends up in a catastrophe. With laugh-out-loud moments, ingenious use of language, and a spellbinding interplay of fantasy and myth, Cow and Company uses satire to take stock of the state of the nation, religion and capital, then and now.
Parashar Kulkarni is a writer and an academic. He was raised in Mumbai. He teaches at the intersection of religion and politics at Yale-NUS College where he experiments with creative forms such as fiction and performance in his research and pedagogy. He has been a yoga practitioner for some time now and is interested in film-making and theatre. He has received several awards including the British Academy Brian Barry Prize and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.