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The Stream Within: Short Stories by Contemporary Bengali Women

Translated and edited by Swati Ganguly and Sarmistha Dutta Gupta

 

Spanning a period of fifty years since India independence, this thought-provoking selection explores a direct link between women's writings-from India and some from Bangladesh too-and the turbulent milieu that inspired them. The stories speak of the tragedy of violent displacement, of Partition, of riots, of wars, of deprivation, of middle class and working class lives, on both sides of the border. They speak of women as agents who reclaim the history of the time as their own, revealing, as the editors suggest, how women's writing creates an alternative discourse that has the power to destabilize the status quo.
The editors present thirteen writers: Jyotirmoyee Devi, Ashapurna Devi, Sabitri Ray, Sulekha Sanyal, Chhabi Basu, Rajlakshmi Devi, Jahanara Imam, Mahasweta Devi, Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Purabi Basu, Bani Basu, Selina Hossain, Anita Agnihotri and Nasreen Jahan.

About the editors
Swati Ganguly teaches English at Viswa-Bharati University, Santiniketan.
Sarmistha Dutta Gupta is an independent researcher, book-editor and publisher of Ebang Alap.

Fiction Demy Octavo Paperback 127pp ISBN 81-85604-42-8 February 1999 Rs 130.00

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Kharemaster

Vibhavari Shirurkar
Translated from the Marathi by Yashodhara Maitra

'Hailed as [a] great autobiographical novel.'
- The Statesman

'[Kharemaster] did not cease to dream just because every dream
could not be made true.'
- Indian Review of Books

An extraordinary true story of Anant Khare who appeared to be an ordinary drawing teacher, living and working near Pune at the turn of the century. He decided that his contribution to the nationalist movement would be to ensure that his daughters were educated to the highest level. And that is what happened. By the twenties his daughters were independent, single, career women at a time when their peers had been married by the age of ten. His wife too was running a flourishing dairy. Everyone was successful. Yet Kharemaster felt inadequate against his better-educated daughters and sons, all adept in a world seemingly out of his reach.

Writing about her father at the age of 88, his daughter Balutai, under her penname 'Vibhavari Shirurkar', tells us the story, which she begins as a biography and then turns into a novel. She is as unflinchingly honest about herself as she is about her father. She relates how she and her sisters all embodied their father's dream; of how after witnessing their achievements he felt increasingly isolated and lonely. Were the children responsible? Quite simply there was no undoing the past.

About the author and the translator
Malatibai Bedekar, ('Vibhavari Shirurkar') was born Balutai Anant Khare in 1905. She graduated from Karve University at the age of seventeen and went on to do her Ph.D. in Sanskrit. She is a distinguished writer and her main focus is on women's issues and social oppression. Among her books in Marathi are Kalyanche Nishwas (1933), Hindolyavar (1934), Bali (1950). She died in 2000. Yashodhara Maitra is a scientist who lives and works in the USA

Fiction Demy Octavo Paperback 146pp ISBN 81-85604-27-4 Feb 1998 Rs 120.00

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The Impermanence of Lies: Stories of Jyotirmoyee Devi

Introduction by Mahasweta Devi
Translated from the Bengali by a group of translators

This first-ever collection of Jyotirmoyee Devi's short stories in an English translation from the original Bengali spans forty years of the author's career. Her interests ranged from the feudal world of the princely state of Jaipur, to East Bengal at the time of Partition, to the urban world of  our cities. The stories reflect her concern with many issues painfully relevant even today: how traditional cultures try to cope with change and how individuals navigate their way between the old and the new, the causes of female infanticide, women caught in the crossfire of communalism and the commodification of women in various ways. Humane yet unsentimental, sometimes quite stark, the author is extraordinarily modern in tone and style. Her vision shows us a host of characters, often caught between the past and the future, the home and the world outside.

About the author
Jyotirmoyee Devi (1894-1988) was born into a distinguished Bengali family of Jaipur. She was awarded the Rabindra Puraskar in 1973.

Fiction Demy Octavo Paperback 158 pp ISBN 81-85604-21-5 February 1998 Rs 130.00.

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In Search of Freedom: An Unfinished Journey

Manikuntala Sen
Foreword by Tapan Raychaudhuri
Translated from the Bengali by Stree

'Her personal struggle is representative of the lives of those hundreds
of women who came out of closed doors to be part of active politics.
- The Statesman

In the 1930s, a young woman broke free of family and social bonds to reach out for a cause. As Manikuntala Sen says, 'The dream of socialism was in the air and the young shared it.' Beginning her political journey as a young college student, she soon became a full-time member of the Communist Party, involved in clandestine activities, mobilizing women throughout Bengal, helping them to articulate their needs, learn marketable skills and take part in the freedom movement against British rule. After independence in 1947, she fought three elections and rose to become the deputy leader of the Opposition in the West Bengal Assembly with Jyoti Basu as the leader.
She recounts the changes within the Party, many of which she disagreed with. She writes of the terrible man-made famine under the British in 1943, of the sharecroppers revolt--the Tebhaga movement--of the those whom the trauma of Partition turned into working women who became the main financial support for their families. Manikuntala writes of the joy of living and working for an ideal, of the many committed fellow Communists she knew, and of her painful, self-imposed exile when the Communist Party split and she could not accept either faction.

About the author
A lifelong nonconformist, Manikuntala Sen was born around 1911 (she was uncertain of the exact date). One of the prominent women leaders of the Communists, she was deputy Leader of the Opposition, 1951-1957, West Bengal Legislative Assembly. She died in 1987, without ever returning to politics.

Memoirs Demy Octavo Hardbound 326pp black and white photographs ISBN 81-85604-26-6 January 2001 Rs 450

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Gender, Culture, Politics Series

Editor Susie Tharu
Formerly Professor, School of Critical Humanities, Central Institute of English and
Foreign Languages (CIEFL), Hyderabad

This series is envisaged as a forum for scholarship and critical reflection that has been energized by new movements in historiography, cultural and political theory, cinema studies and, most important, women's studies. Full length works and edited collections that investigate the articulation of gender with historical formations of caste, class and religious denomination are of particular interest; as are theoretical reflections on these and related issues.
Among the titles are studies and edited collections on aspects of cultural history, popular film, visual politics, personal laws, labour and health. The interdisciplinary frame in which they are translated and presented makes these literary texts of interest to scholars in the humanities and the social sciences. We hope they will also introduce the general reader to the pleasures of the new, non-canonical modes of reading.

A distinguished feminist scholar and activist, Susie Tharu is one of the two editors of Women Writing in India, 2 vols (The Feminist Press, New York, 1991, 1993; Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1992; 1993). Her current research is in the area of cultural history/theory. She was among those who started Stree Shakti Sanghatana, an autonomous women's group, and is also a founder-member of Anveshi, a centre for research on women in Hyderabad.

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Nabankur: The Seedling's Tale

Sulekha Sanyal
Translated from the Bengali by Gouranga P. Chattopadhyay
Introduction by Himani Bannerji, dept of history, York University, Toronto

'A modern Bengali classic.'
- The Telegraph

Translated for the first time from the Bengali, this astonishingly radical novel is about Chhobi, a gutsy, misfit girl from a rural landowning family, who questions injustice, fights to share the privileges offered to her brother and male cousins, and refuses to see her future as just another submissive household drudge. 'Nabankur' means a new seedling, which is personified by Chhobi, who is growing up in the late 1930s and the early 1940s in Bengal where anti-colonial struggles against British rule are in full swing. As her political awakening gains maturity, thoughts of personal freedom fill her heart.

About the author and the translator
Sulekha Sanyal was born in 1928 in an impoverished family that had once been indigo planters. She became a communist while a student. At thirty-five she died of leukemia, leaving a number of short stories and novels characterized by their passion and subtlety.
Gouranga P. Chattopadhyay retired as Professor of Behavioural Science, Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta. He is a practicing psychologist.

Fiction Demy Octavo Paperback 254pp ISBN 81-85604-06-1 Aug 2001 Rs 250

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Whom Can I Tell? How Can I Explain?

Selected Stories by Saroj Pathak
Translated from the Gujarati and with an introduction by Shirin Kudchedkar

These English translations from the Gujarati bring Saroj Pathak's work to a wider audience, giving it the greater attention it deserves. Delving deep into the human mind, the stories depict the pitfalls of communication, the infinite possibilities of misunderstanding, of doubt and despair. At the same time they celebrate the human psyche's ability to bridge these chasms and made connections, of love, understanding, and friendship. Pathak considers the predicaments of both women and men as they grapple with the modernity that has been thrust upon them. Indeed, Pathak's interest in men as well as women characters distinguishes her from many other women novelists.

About the author and the translator
One of Gujarat's leading women writers, when Saroj Pathak died in 1989 at the age of sixty, she had published seven collections of stories and six novels. Her columns in Samachar and Gujarat Mitra aroused violently mixed reactions. She was keenly interested in theatre and dance productions.
Shirin Kudchedkar, a feminist critic, is now Director of the Canadian Studies programme at SNDT. She edited the Gujarati section of Women Writing in India, 2 vols, edited by Susie Tharu and K. Lalita. She has taught English for forty years and is an experienced translator.

Fiction Demy Octavo Paperback 138 pp ISBN 81-85604-14-2 2002.

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The Dark Sun and The Woman Who Wore a Hat

Kamal Desai
Translated from the Marathi by Sukhmani Roy

This translation provides access to the major works of a leading Marathi writer. The stories embody a witty and subtly felt understanding of the tensions and cross-currents of an indigenous modernity even as they deconstruct it. Kamal Desai's fiction is focussed on the micro-levels of inner life where experience is held together by the compelling and never predictable struggle for selfhood. Nearly always, subtle and ongoing antagonisms structure and threaten Kamal Desai's imagined communities.

About the author and the translator
A distinguished student and teacher of Marathi literature, Kamal Desai was born in 1928. Among her major books are Ratrandin Amha Yuddhacha Prasanga (We Are Confronting the War, Day and Night); Ranga (1962); Kala Surya and Hat Ghalnari Bai (1975). Sukhmani Roy is head, Department of English Literature and Language at P.N. Doshi College of Arts and K.U. R.Shah Women's College of Commerce, Ghatkopar, Bombay.

Fiction Demy Octavo Paperback 186pp SBN 81-85604-07-X 1999 Rs 140.

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Cast Me Out If You Will: Stories and Memoir

Lalithambika Antherjanam
Translated from the Malayalam and with an introduction by Gita Krishnankutty

Offering a rich account of women's lives in twentieth-century Kerala, these stories and the accompanying autobiographical fragments give invaluable insights into the little documented social reform movements in the south of India. Lalithambika Antherjanam's stories throb with the tormented reality of the Namboodiri illam or household: unbearable social restriction, rigid sexual mores, lives ruled by the maintenance of ritual purity, the extreme oppression of widows. She also wrote passionately on the trauma of Partition in the Punjab and Bengal. The introduction places Lalithambika Anterjanam in the cultural history of modern Kerala.

About the author and the translator
Lalithambika Antherjanam (1909-1985) came from the world she depicts so dramatically in her writings, and started writing as a very young girl.
Gita Krishnankutty is an independent scholar and an experienced translator of Malayalam and French, who has won many literary awards.

Fiction Demy octavo paperback 200pp July 1998 rpt Oct 2000 ISBN 81-85604-11-8 Rs 140
US edition The Feminist Press, New York, 1998

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Joothan: A Dalit's Life
New India Foundation Best Book Award 2004

Omprakash Valmiki
translated by Arun Prabha Mukherjee

For the first time, Dalits are writing about their lives themselves. They have long been written about by others, by anthropologists, historians and novelists. In fighting against the gross and tremendous injustice that has been their heritage for centuries, Dalit writers give voice to their aspirations for achieving equality. Translated into English for the first time from the original Hindi, Valmiki's autobiography talks of growing up in a village near Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh, in an untouchable caste, Chuhra, well before the defiant term 'Dalit' was coined.

'Joothan' refers to the scraps left on plates that are then given to Dalits to eat, a symbol of the demeaning existence imposed on the Dalits. Valmiki's story is one of terrible grief and oppression, of survival and achievement, of his emergence as a freer human being in a society that remains 'compassionless towards Dalits.

About the author and the translator
Omprakash Valmiki, a poet and a literary critic, is an established name in Hindi literature. He works at the Ordnance Factory, Dehradun.
Arun Prabha Mukherjee is Associate Professor, Department of English, York University, Toronto. She is a well-known scholar of postcolonial studies and also a literary critic.

Nonfiction Demy Octavo Paperback ISBN 81-85604-63-0 Feb 2003 Rs 185 translation rights available.

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