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, but falls asleep just before dawn. When he wakes up frustrated, he comforts himself by thinking that the soft light had touched his skin and its warmth had seeped into his veins through the pores. The elusiveness of love is a potent theme in this classic novel now available in an English translation from Nazes Afroz.
Bengali
Set in the early to mid-19th century in British-occupied India, Sayam Bandyopadhyay’s Carnival, at the outset, focuses on a middle-aged recluse living in Calcutta. Despite becoming a landowner at his father’s death, Rajaram Deb prefers a monotonous life confined to the walls of his bedroom—often at the cost of his responsibilities—barring rare moments of socializing. This self-imposed seclusion is made all the more notable by the initial sparks of public uprisings in the world beyond those walls, culminating in the Indian Rebellion of 1857.
Anita Agnihotri’s newest novel, translated from Bengali by Arunava Sinha, traces the trajectory of salt from its use as a symbol of resistance against the British Empire in the 1930s to the exploitation of salt farmers in modern-day India. Spanning generations and juggling various points of view, A Touch of Salt is an ambitious novel that questions the fruits of Indian independence. Equally historical and politically relevant, the novel shines a much-deserved light on the Agarias, an often neglected community in western India.
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 of editors and translators from India and Bangladesh.
Detective fiction in the West is often grouped with crime fiction and thrillers; but in detective fiction, the focus is on a puzzle and the process of solving it. It’s a game with the reader in which a mystery needs to be unraveled before the detective figures it out. In some places, the detective becomes a figure of interest in himself—detective figures have been, traditionally if less so at present, more often than not, men—a complex personality whose story is interesting and deserves an independent treatment of its own. It is a genre that solves problems, finds answers, holds the culprit accountable: all very attractive attributes for those who just like a good story.
In 2015, author Sanya Rushdi was hospitalized after her third psychotic episode and was subsequently diagnosed with schizophrenia. Hospital, first published in 2019 in Bengali and then in an excellent recent English translation by Arunava Sinha, is an attempt to make sense of what had happened to her and the things around her during that period of time. This is not however a straight-up memoir but rather a work of auto-fiction. While most characters might share names and trajectories of their real-life counterparts, it would be wrong to read it as an unvarnished factual account of true events.
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 poet and lyricist, is known for his Anando Purskar-winning poetry collection Udanto Swab Joker: All Those Flying Jokers, just one of his many well-known books of poetry.
“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?
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 fate, Bidhata, has ordained his marriage.” Named after the local “Sundari” tree, the Sunderbans, locally known as atharobhati or the land of the eighteen tides, is the planet’s largest delta, formed by the merging of large rivers: the Ganges, the Brahmaputra and the Meghna in the Bay of Bengal region of India and Bangladesh.
With climate change and environmental conservation on many minds these days, it’s only fitting that the late Manindra Gupta’s 2016 short novel, Pebblemonkey, told from the point of view of an adventurous monkey, has recently been translated into English by Arunava Sinha. The story takes on magical realism and weaves it into a cautionary tale about humans who exploit nature and think nothing of it.
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