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Gandharvi: Life of a Musician, by the Sahitya Akademi Award-winning novelist Bani Basu (and translated by English scholar Jayita Sengupta), tells the story of Apala, a gifted singer of Hindustani classical music. She was born into an old, middle-class family of limited means in north Calcutta. To her family, her music meant little, as it did not fit their idea of ‘respectability’. Her husband ‘chose’ her after hearing her sing at a public ...
This translation from the Bangla Antarghat is the story of a group of young friends who had committed themselves idealistically and politically to the Naxalite movement that rocked Bengal in the 1960s. Many years later, they still carry the scars beneath their lives of surface calm. But they also share the secret of a betrayal, one that was fatally injurious to some. Into this fragile, obscure universe arrives their betrayer, ironically seeking anonymity. Jagged ...
This selection of fifteen stories by five exceptional Bengali women writers looks at the lives of women who are neither stars nor martyrs in the feminist cause: The are voices, individual and particular, of women leading their everyday lives, nursing their joys and sorrows. These women write out of their bodies and the intimate spaces around them; they write the history and mathematics of their lives; they compose deeper reality; they give us an atmosphere, a ...