Rabindranath Tagore’s androgynous imagination finds fulsome expression in the two books under review. How he extended his understanding to the mysterious secrets of women silenced by patriarchy remains a conjecture. Periodic translations open up the question in various social contexts…
Partition narratives accommodate some of the most difficult and irreconcilable spaces of human experience within the contested ideas of home, nation, and sense of belonging. Samaresh Bose’s Bangla novella Khandita written in 1985, translated into English by Rani Ray as Dissevered in 2019, registers the need to comprehend…
‘Why can’t we be friends now?’ said the other, holding him affectionately. ‘It’s what I want. It’s what you want.’ But the horses didn’t want it—they swerved apart: the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temple, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House…
The Runaway Boy is a novel that packs a punch! It is a novel about the downtrodden. About oppression at various social levels. And, most of all, about the struggle for survival.The Runaway Boy, a trilogy, traces the lives of Garib Das and his son, Jibon. And through their lives, Manoranjan Byapari chronicles the tempestuous politics…
Women’s education was an important subject in nineteenth century Bengal’s intellectual circles. Many early Bengali novels had an educated man marrying an uneducated woman, and then educating her. In Manottama, the plot is reversed—an educated girl marries an older, uneducated man…
Rajshekhar Bose (1880-1960) aka Parashuram is quite well-known to Bengali readers, and outside Bengal also, as the greatest Bengali humorist of the twentieth century. But his younger brother Girindrashekhar Bose’s name is not quite familiar to the Bengali readership, although it is very well known in the world…