A Master Storyteller

It’s amazing to read about Hindu beliefs and iconography – narrated, as it were, from the inside – in the national language. It makes you realise how free of iconoclasm, and therefore how neutered and ‘circumcised’, the language has been over the decades.

If Uthaya were merely a spokesman for his race, this would not make him an interesting writer. What counts for more: His supple and surprising uses of plot and perspective, his sense of irony and the absurd, his occasionally breathtaking endings.

Amir Muhammad reviews Uthaya Sankar's collection of short fiction Rudra Avatara: Kumpulan Cerpen Bahasa Malaysia.