Sane Salvage: Re-reading the Dissemination of Indian Values in Sudha Murty’s The Magic Drum and Other Favourite Stories

Moral values are sets of socio-culturally wrought guidelines for human behaviour that ensure acceptance of individuals as honest and valued members of a given community. Since literature reflects society and defines morality, it often operates as a medium for disseminating moral values specific to an age and a place. Sudha Murty, the chairperson of Infosys, an Indian multinational information technology company, is also a significant Indian writer in English with more than twenty published books to her credit. Though one of life’s achievers, Murty has remained grounded in her roots of Indian tradition and Indian values. In the intended study, I want to analyse selected short stories from Murty's story collection, The MAGIC DRUM and other favourite Stories (2006), to underscore how Murty tries to salvage Indian values for her target readership of children and young adults. As will be shown, her purpose is to regain and retain moral sanity in the face of severe value erosion. I shall briefly discuss stories like The Seed of Truth; A Bottle of Dew and The Lucky Purse on the one hand and The Last Laddoo; The White Crow and Haripant the Wise on the other to foreground her praise of the positive values of truthfulness, diligence, and kindness in the first set of stories and her opposition to the negative traits like niggardliness, exaggeration, and avarice in the second set. I will try to show how Murty highlights values promoted and vices decried. Attempts will also be made to indicate the significance of the author’s invocation of a rural past and invectives against a consumerist culture in the selected short stories.