In Translation – Assamese
By Arupa Patangia Kalita. Translated from the original Assamese by Mitra Phukan
‘Rajmao: The Queen Mother’ traces the journey of Komola whose motherhood confers on her the identity of being Purobi’s mother, and it is in the attempt to fulfil her duties as a mother that she attains the grandiose name of Rajmao but only after paying a terrible price for it. ‘By the Clock’ introduces us to Ghori-Koka-Aita and the tyranny of the grandfather’s clock which becomes a metonym for the authoritarian presence of her husband.
By Harekrishna Deka. Translated from the original Assamese by Navamalati Neog Chakraborty
In a similar vein, the text also serves to convey a merger of the canonical and kitsch: ‘My acquiescence to the belief of these innocent people in the hands of a divinity sending this book for their spiritual solace, got a rude jolt. What the priest believed to be a religious book was in fact a book of pornography!’ (p. 47; translator’s italics). By enacting such reversals, the novel emerges as a specimen of the postmodern critical enterprise that seeks to uncover the ways in which artefacts acquire cultural underpinnings.