The four Stories in this collection are located in the urban and suburban underworld, and form an unusual segment of Mahasweta Devi’s oeuvre — ‘Fisherman’ (about Jagat who recovers bodies of young boys from the village tank so that the police can pass them off as cases of drowning), ‘knife’ (a tongue-in-check account of gang warfare in a suburban town of West Bengal, bordering Bangladesh), ‘Body’ (about a ‘young woman’, used by a politician and his cohorts until she makes her own protest against the exploitative establishment) and ‘Killer’ (in which Sona Alias Akhil, an unemployed middle-class youth, discovers himself after his first ‘Test’ killing).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Mahasweta Devi
Mahasweta Devi is one of India's foremost writers. Her powerful, satiric fiction has won her recognition in the form of the Sahitya Akademi (1979), Jnanpith (1996) and Ramon Magsaysay (1996) awards, amongst several other literary honours. She was also awarded the Padmasree in 1986, for her activist work amongst dispossessed tribal communities.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sumanta Banerjee
Sumanta Banerjee, born in 1936 and educated in Calcutta, was formerly with The Statesman newspapers. He is best known for his The Simmering Revolution: The Naxalite Uprising and The Thema Books of Naxalite Poetry, two seminal texts on the Naxalite Revolt. His milestone study, The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta was published by Seagull in 1989. He is at present based in New Delhi, doing research on the popular culture and religion of Bengal.
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