Rosinka Chaudhuri’s latest work, India’s First Radicals: Young Bengal and the British Empire, is the first book-length study of the Young Bengal movement and the contribution of its members to the history of India’s anti-colonial struggle. In this book, Chaudhuri delves deep into their activism, examines their socio-political agenda and analyses the neglect and misrepresentation…
Originally written in Bengali, Shabnam presents a passionate love story set in 1920s Afghanistan. What is love? asks author Syed Mujtaba Ali: a dream or a dreamy reality? Maybe, it is like an overnight train journey through a long tunnel, in which the traveler stays awake to catch a glimpse of the sun’s first rays,…
Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976), aka “Dukhu Mia” and known as the “rebel poet” of the Bengalis, was born in Churulia, a village in the Bardhaman district of West Bengal. A litterateur, lyricist, revolutionary, communist and freedom fighter, he was declared the national poet of Bangladesh in 1987. These Collected Short Stories are a joint endeavour…
Set in the metropolis of Kolkata, A House of Rain and Snow describes the struggle of a section of middle-class Bengali society to cope with the effects of globalization during the early 1990s. It tells of their passion for art and culture, which too was affected by changing times. The author, Srijato, an eminent Bengali…
“How,” starts the marketing literature for Noorjahan Bose’s recent autobiography, “does a girl from a tiny Bangladeshi island end up reading Tagore, Marx and de Beauvoir and become a leading feminist campaigner?” How indeed?
Jyotirmoyee Devi Sen (1894-1988), a pioneering Bengali feminist writer in the first part of the 20th century, is well-known for her novel Epar Ganga, Opar Ganga (The River Churning: A Partition Novel) and her short story collection Sona Rupa Noy (Not Gold and Silver) for which she received the prestigious Rabindra Puraskar, the highest honorary…
Needle at the Bottom of the Sea, five Bengali romances from the 17th to 19th centuries in English translation, reflect on the folkloric world of the Sunderbans “where tigers talk, rocks float and waters part, and faeries carry a sleeping Sufi holy man into the bedroom of a Hindu princess with whom the god of…
Yamuna’s Journey is the English translation of Baba Padmanji’s 1857 Marathi novel Yamunaparyatan. “Yamuna” is both the name of the female protagonist of this novel as well as a reference to the river Yamuna in India; “paryatan” means journey or travel. “Yamunaparyatan” (“Journey to the Yamuna”) can be interpreted as travel to Vrindaban, a holy…
The history of Indian queens—or ranis—has so far been left largely unexplored because mainstream history deals primarily with the annals of the kings. Queeny Pradhan’s Ranis & the Raj presents a perceptible shift in focus as it views the British Raj in 19th-century India from the perspective of six Indian queens—Rani Chennamma of Kittur, Rani…