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 sky, and a house with many doorways, helping us to reclaim their original energy and wonderful clarity. The manushi created by the woman writer speaks in several voices and addresses issues, emotional and psychological, that affect their lives and control their decisions: from the low-caste woman of Mahasweta Devi’s story to the teenage immigrant in America of Nabaneeta Dev Sen’s, from the girl child battling humiliation in Bani Basu’s to the victim of marital exploitation in Ashapurna Devi’s, and the women of the old-age home in Suchitra Bhattacharya’s tale. These women form a small strong chorus, which testifies that women’s writing is more than a literary act–it is imaging a world into being. It is through the battles that they must fight daily that the women explore their emotional, social, and economic selfhood. The stories, at once linear and circular, offer fewer closures than the work of male writers, and carry with them the echoes of loss. This book will appeal to students and scholars of regional Indian literature, as well as general readers.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ashapurna Devi
Ashapurna Debi was born in 1909. Her conservative family did not send her to school, but encouraged by her mother, she learnt to read and write on her own and published her first poem in the children's magazine Shishu Saathi. Married at fifteen to Kalidas Gupta of Krishnanagar, She continued to write with his support. Pratham Pratisruti(1964) is the first of a trilogy that includes Subarnalata (1966) and Bakul Katha (1973). Translated here as The First Promise, it won her the Rabindra Puraskar in 1966 and the Bharatiya Jnanpith award in 1977. Ashapurna published 181 novels, 38 anthologies of short stories, and 52 books for children. She died in 1995. Indira Chowdhury has a Ph.D from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, and is a Professor at the Department of English, Jadavpur University. She is the author of The Frail Hero and Virile History: Gender and the Politics of Culture in colonial Bengal(1998), which won the Rabindra Puraskar in 2000. Her wide-ranging interests include cultural history, lexicography, and the history of science and medicine in India. She is currently on deputation leave at the National Center for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, where she is involved in setting up an oral history archive for the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Bani Basu
Bani Basu, is a prolific writer her novels have been regularly published by Desh, the premier literary journal of Bengal. She was awarded the Tarashankar Award for Antarghaat. Translated by Jayanti Datta
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Nabaneeta Dev Sen
Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Padma Shree, is one of the most well-known contemporary writers in India with more than seventy publications.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Saumitra Chakravarty
Saumitra Chakravarty, is a gold medallist inEnglish Literature from Calcutta University. She did her Ph.D., from the same university on the topic, “Search for Identity in Contemporary British Fiction – 1950-79â€. She has presented research papers at numerous national and international seminars and attended a workshop on “Teaching of Shakespeare’ at Stratford-on-Avon, England. She is currently Vice Principal and Head of the Department of English in a Bangalore College. She has brought out a collection of self-composed poems and is bringing out a book of translated short stories from Bengali literature.
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