To me the Bengali title that alludes to an older well known work, Rajnarayan Basu’s Sekaal O Ekaal, seems more appropriate than the English title. Ekaal Sekaal —Now and Then—would lead the reader to expect a story meandering between the present and the past. Daughters, on the other hand, gestures towards the much-interrogated…
This book is a collection of a hundred short stories by the popular Bengali writer who wrote under the pseudonym Banaphool (flower from the forest). The stories, whether set in urban or rural Bengal, contain the romantic whiff of nature in its broadest sense, including human beings. There is an old world charm about them…
Atranslator has to be faithful to the text he/she is translating into another language. A translator has to observe not only the linguistic practices of the language into which he/she is translating the text but also keep in perspective the cultural norms of the recipient society. He/she has to stick to the stylistic devices employed…
The House with Five Courtyards is an epic family saga, quietly told and sensitively translated. The novel Paanch Aangano Wala Ghar, written originally in Hindi, won Govind Mishra the Vyas Samman in 1998.
Ashish Khetan’s cover story, ‘Dazed & Confused Again’ (Tehelka, Vol.8, Issue 37, 17 Sept, 2011) traces the growth of one Abu Faizal Khan, an IM operative from Hansapur village in Azamgarh, UP. The tenor of Khetan’s report is no different from the reality of Jamal Ansari, Omair Ahmad’s protagonist in Jimmy The Terrorist…
Jaishree Misra’s new book, A Scandalous Secret, her seventh work of fiction and the third in her ‘Secret’ series testifies to the popularity of this genre of Indian fiction. The book is set in the present, and has at its core some universal themes—social pressure, problem of rejection, mother- daughter relationship and urban musings….