Extraordinary Tales of Ordinary Women

The Owl, the River and the Valley is the latest collection of short stories by the Assamese writer Arupa Patangia Kalita, and has been translated into English by writer, columnist and translator, Mitra Phukan. The collection comprises a dozen stories by the Sahitya Akademi award-winning writer which have never been published in English before and offers an enriching glimpse into Kalita’s unflinchingly feminist and uniquely narrated stories of ordinary women from contemporary Assam. Kalita is perhaps best-known for her novel The Story of Felanee which is set against the backdrop of the language wars that erupted into violence in Assam of the late seventies. Many of her well-known stories such as ‘Ayengla of the Blue Hills’, ‘Suagmoni’s Mother’, ‘The Storyteller’ or ‘Arunima’s Motherland’ are feminist tellings about women caught in the snare of violence resulting from ethnic or communal strife and insurgency.