This selection of fifteen stories by five exceptional Bengall women writers looks at the lives of women who are neither stars nor martyrs in the feminist cause. They are voices, Individual and particular, of women leading their everyday lives, nursing their joys and sorrows. These women write out of their bodies and the Intimate spaces around them; they write the history and mathematics of their lives; they compose a deeper reality, they give us an atmosphere, a sky, and a house with many doorways, helping us to reclaim their original energy and wonderful Darity.
The manushi created by the woman writer speaks In several voices and addresses issues, emotional and psychological, that affect their lives and control their decisions: from the low-caste woman of Mahasweta Devi's story to the teenage Immigrant In America of Nabaneeta Dev Sen's, from the girl child battling humiliation in Bani Basu's to the victim of marital exploitation in Ashapuma Devi's, and the women of the old-age home in Suchitra Bhattacharya's tale. These women form a small strong chorus, which testifies that women's writing is more than a literary act-it is Imagining a world Into being.
It is through the battles that they must fight daily that the women explore their emotional, social, and economic selfhood. The stories, at once linear and circular, offer fewer closures than the work of male writers, and carry with them the echoes of loss.
This book will appeal to students and scholars of regional Indian literature, as well as general readers.
RANSLATING A DREAM PROJECT INTO A VIABLE, BUYABLE REALITY IS NO easy task, for between the 'word' and its conversion into 'flesh' lie innumerable obstacles, which 1, in my 'greenness' was unaware of. It was Prof. S. Ramaswamy, Rhodes scholar, writer, translator, who initiated me into this task, even as he has mentored me in many others and introduced me to Mini Krishnan of the Oxford University Press. To him, my gratitude knows no bounds.
The task of translating and compiling fifteen stories by five well-known women writers of Bengal today, proved formidable, for reasons both literary and practical. During the course of this daunting task, Mini has stood by me like a rock, never losing patience, steering me past the many obstacles that arose during the course of this journey. Our relationship has not ended with that between translator and publisher, she has been more than a friend and guide and helped me with many cheering words through my most despairing moments. I am immensely grateful to her and to her colleagues at the Oxford University Press, both in the offices at Chennai and New Delhi. I express my heartfelt gratitude to Dr Tutun Mukherjee for stepping in so graciously at short notice to write this scholarly introduction and for being so accommodating to our every new demand. I must acknowledge the timely help rendered by Anjum Katyal of Seagull Publishing House in making the three stories of Mahasweta Devi of my choice available to me to suit the theme of this book. I should be failing in my duty if I do not acknowledge my debt to the reviewers whose painstaking correction and suggestions have taught me much about the task of translation. I am grateful to the authors whose works are being translated in this volume, at least two of whom I have had the honour of getting to know personally during the course of this work.
L ITERATURE CANNOT BE CONFINED FOR LONG WITHIN BORDERS, THE HUMAN experience that the creative imagination captures as a text must cross these borders whether of a nation or a language to find its readers, configure a place for itself in a new cultural imaginary, and try to fulfil its potential of being able to travel through space and time. Fiction elaborates the close links between life and imagination and perhaps that is why fictional narratives are liable to cross borders quickly The treasure house of Indian literature, for instance, is replete with stories of all kinds, of varying taste and colour, from different regions and with different cultural affiliations. But the corpus is in its great majority, like most discourses, masculine. Till the late nineteenth century, stories were written mostly by men and formed a part of and contributed to the prevailing patriarchal normative order. Except for a few rare instances, women did not write, at least, they did not write stories to be read by the general-mostly male-readers. This, however, should not suggest that women were totally voiceless. Actually, they remained unfailingly close to the oral traditions of story-telling and found hidden and subversive ways to exercise their agency even while appearing outwardly to remain within a repressive social grid. Women narrated until they could write them down-stories which comprise a vast archive of 'subjugated knowledges Indeed, being able to tell stories often marked the line between life and death, whether for a Scheherazade or for the anonymous woman choking with untold tales, because narrating stories made available a mode for realizing one's communal and historical identity since 'who one claims to be often gets subliminally woven into one's stories.
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