Editor's Note

Thus, The Tale of Miss Tapna by Arun Prakash is the single work presented in this issue of Out of Print. It is translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, who first brought the story to our attention.

A young woman uses a beauty contest as a means to find liberation from her situation. She is an orphan with no prospects of her own. She dreams of release, and circumstances lead to her to determine that the means to her independence is to own a beauty parlour. She achieves this by participating in the first ever beauty contest the town holds, which she wins by walking the ramp in a swimsuit, something no other contestant dares to do.

In parallel, on the Out of Print blog, we are running a contemporary contextualisation of the story by Snigdha Poonam It addresses the remarkable role that beauty contests are beginning to play in breaking social norms, particularly outside the metropolitan milieu. We are grateful to have her insight given her recent article Small-town Sashay.

The Tale of Miss Tapna is remarkable in that the characters in it, including the city of Patna where it is set, are richly developed entities, flawed and funny. In A Matter of Rats, his book on Patna, Amitava Kumar talks about the ‘pleasure of discovering Patna’ through writing in Hindi and laudshow, in this story, Arun Prakash evokes the atmosphere of Patna and its social politics. We are privileged to feature the relevant excerpt from A Matter of Rats on the Out of Print blog.

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The image by Clare Arni,was part of an exhibition entitled Accent on Faith. The cover design by Yamuna Mukherjee contains images from a piece of Kalamkari or crafted-by-pen fabric depicting stories from Indian mythology.

Clare Arni is a photographer based in Bangalore, India. Her work encompasses architecture, social documentary and cultural heritage. She has been published by Phaidon, Thames and Hudson and Dorling Kindersley. Her solo and collaborative work has been exhibited internationally at the Essl Museum, Vienna Austria; Grosvenor Vadehra, London; Bose Pacia, New York; Berkeley Art Museum, California, and is in the permanent collection of the Saatchi Gallery, London; the Freer/Sackler gallery of the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

Selected stories may contain language or details that could be viewed as offensive. Readers below 18 are cautioned to use discretion. Views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily supported by Out of Print.