Resuscitating a Text
Avinash Kumar
CHOCOLATE AND OTHER WRITINGS ON MALE-MALE DESIRE by Pandey Bechan Sharma Oxford University Press, 2007, 103 pp., 395
February 2007, volume 31, No 2

There are three texts waiting to be discussed here: the ‘original’ Chaklet, a collection of eight Hindi stories written by Pandey Bechan Sharma ‘Ugra’ published in 1927 after five of them were serialized in Matvala, a Calcutta based Hindi weekly; its translation into English by Ruth Vanita titled Chocolate and also a detailed introduction by her, contextualizing both the texts in their different time zones i.e. 1927 and the present. While the emphasis on a different reading of the text within the milieu of 1927 is clearly articulated, the translator also insists on its relevance for the present context by drawing a historical genealogy of the kind of politics, especially sexual, that the text represented. As if to buttress her argument, the translator has also added two extracts from Ugra’s novels Chand Hasinon ke Khutoot and Phagun ke Din Char.

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