Search results for ""Author Arunava Sinha""

The seventh-most spoken language in the world, Bengali is home to some of the most distinctive poetry ever written anywhere. Starting with the later poems of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore, there has been a long and continuous line of modern poetry in the language, its span ranging from lyrical love poems to passionate political verse, from expressions of existential anguish to psychological explorations. This volume celebrates over one hundred years of this poetry from the two Bengals—the eastern Indian state and the country of Bangladesh— represented by over fifty different poets and a multitude of forms and styles.

Read more less

There are many ways to travel between India and the UK in general, and Calcutta and Norwich in particular. You could take a plane and then the bus or the train, or perhaps a taxi. You could even sail. But what if you traveled via literature instead? In Writing Places you will find such a journey. This collection draws together stories, poems, photographs, memoirs, confessions, and investigations from some of the most imaginative writers and photographers working in the UK and India today to create a journey between the two lands that you can savor with your mind, heart, and even body. A unique work for armchair travelers, Writing Places lets us move between two countries that share a long history in a first-of-its-kind collection of words and images.

Read more less

Ruhiton Kurmi has been in jail for seven years. Once a notorious Naxalite a militant leftist revolutionary he is now a withered shell; a man broken by police torture, racked with fevers and sores. The only way he can endure his life is by shutting out the past. But when Ruhiton is moved to a better jail and eventually freed, memories return to haunt him. Ruhiton inevitably looks back upon his youth, his marriage, his home in the Himalayan foothills and he remembers, too, the friends he has killed, the revolutionary colleagues he worked with, and the ideals he once believed in. Dark, powerful, and full of ambiguities, the classic novel Fever, originally written in Bengali in 1977, questions the human cost of revolution and its inevitable transience. A sensation in its time, it remains one of the greatest novels about the Naxalite movement. Fever is an intense look at the universality of militancy, violence, and civil war, and the power of revolutionary ideals to seduce young minds.

Read more less

Bhaskar Chakrabarti's poetry is synonymous with the romantic melancholia inherent to Calcutta. His trenchant poetic voice was one of the most significant to emerge in the 1960s and '70s perhaps the most prolific period of modern Bengali poetry. Spanning the rise of militant leftism, the spread of crippling poverty across India, the war in Bangladesh, the influx of millions of refugees, the dark, dictatorial days of Indira Gandhi's reign, and the disillusionment of communist rule in Bengal, Chakrabarti's poems plumb the depths of urban angst, expressing the spirit of sadness and alienation in delicate metaphors wrapped in deceptively lucid language. In this first-ever comprehensive translation of Chakrabarti's work, award-winning translator Arunava Sinha masterfully articulates that clarity of vision, retaining the unique cadence and idioms of the Bengali language. Presenting verses and prose poems from all of Chakrabarti's life from his first volume, When Will Winter Come, published in 1971, to his last, The Language of Giraffes, published just before his death in 2005, and collecting several unpublished works as well Things That Happen and Other Poems introduces the world to a brilliant and universal poetic voice of urban life.

Read more less

A strong and courageous novel that deftly tackles psychosis. In Melbourne, Australia, a woman in her late thirties is diagnosed with her third episode of psychosis, amounting to schizophrenia. What follows is a frenzied journey from home to a community house to a hospital and out again. Sanya, the protagonist, finds herself questioning the diagnosis of her sanity or insanity, as determined and defined by a medical model which seems less than convincing to her. Having studied psychology herself, she wonders whether, even if the diagnosis is correct to some extent, the treatment should be different. Sanya tells her story in a deceptively calm, first-person voice, using conversations as the primary narrative mode, as she ponders if and when the next psychotic episode will materialize. Based on real-life events and originally written in Bengali, Hospital is a daring first novel that unflinchingly depicts the precarity of a woman living with psychosis and her struggles with the definition of sanity in our society.

Read more less

Winner of an English PEN award With her days split between a passionate marriage and a high-octane television studio job, Homi is a thoroughly modern young woman – until one day she is approached by a yogi in the street. This mysterious figure begins to follow her everywhere, visible only to Homi, who finds him both frightening and inexplicably arousing. Convinced that the yogi is a manifestation of fate, Homi embarks on a series of increasingly desperate attempts to prove that her life is ruled by her own free will, much to the alarm of her no-nonsense husband and cattily snobbish mother. Her middle-class Kolkata life, and the relationships that define her identity, are disturbed to the point of disintegration. Following the inexorable pull of tradition, the mystic forces that run beneath the shallow surface of our modern existence like red earth beneath the pavements, Homi ends up in Benaras, the holy city on the banks of the Ganga, where her final battle with fate plays out.

Read more less

Bengali writer Riza Rahman is the author of more than fifty novels, as well as countless short stories, set in Bangladesh and bringing to life the difficult, mostly forgotten lives of its poorest and most disadvantaged citizens. Letters of Blood is set in the often violent world of prostitution in Bangladesh. Rahman brings great sensitivity and insight to her chronicles of the lives of women trapped in that bleak world as they face the constant risk of physical abuse, disease, and pregnancy, while also all too often struggling with drug addiction. A powerful, unforgettable story, Letters of Blood shows readers a hard way of life, imbuing the stories of these women with unforgettable empathy and compassion.

Read more less

A woman arrives alone in Kolkata, taking refuge in a deserted apartment while she waits to undergo an unspecified surgery. In this disorienting city, everything seems new and strange: the pavement-dwellers outside her block, the collective displays of religiosity, the power cuts and alarming acts of arson. Her sense of identity already shaken, when she finds a stained pair of leopard print panties in the otherwise-empty wardrobe she begins to fantasise about their former owner, whose imagined life comes to blur with and overlap her own. Pairing manic energy with dark eroticism, Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay's writing has a surreal, feverish quality, slipping between fluid subjects with great stylistic daring. Credited with being 'the woman who reintroduced hardcore sexuality into Bengali literature', Bandyopadhyay is neither superficial nor sensationalistic, equally concerned with debates on religion and nationhood as with gender and sexuality.

Read more less

In the early 1960s, the Hungry Generation revitalized Bengali poetry in Calcutta, liberating it from the fetters of scholarship and the fog of punditry and freeing it to explore new forms, language, and subjects. Shakti Chattopadhyay was a cofounder of the movement, and his poems remain vibrant and surprising more than a half century later. In his "urban pastoral" lines, we encounter street colloquialisms alongside high diction, a combination that at the time was unprecedented. Loneliness, anxiety, and dislocation trouble this verse, but they are balanced by a compelling belief in the redemptive power of beauty. This book presents more than one hundred of Chattopadhyay's poems, introducing an international audience to one of the most prominent and important Bengali poets of the twentieth century.

Read more less

A touching story of war, family, innocence, and memory from one of the top Bengali writers of all time. For the first time translated into English. Bangladesh, 1971: the war of independence from Pakistan has torn through peaceful villages and turned life upside down. In the midst of war, one young girl holds on as she discovers the world’s unpredictability. During her father’s prolonged absence, she reminisces about the essence of her abbu, an esteemed professor, loving community leader, and now unexpected warrior. She is moved by his quiet determination to preserve Bengali language and culture in a struggle for autonomy. In his diaries, her abbu describes the painful decisions he must make because of the threat of war, from embracing the brutality of taking up arms to the struggle of moving his family from the embattled city of Dhaka. Amid the tragedy is the unbroken bond between a father and daughter, which makes this powerful and historically faithful portrait of a family surviving the worst in the fight for independence all the more stirring.

Read more less

Bangladesh in 1971 showed vividly, and terribly, the deadly effects of war. Piles of corpses, torture cells, ash and destruction everywhere in the wake of the Pakistani army’s attacks on Bengali people. Blue Venom and Forbidden Incense, two novellas by Bangladeshi writer Syed Shamsul Haq, bear bleak witness to the mindless violence and death of that period. Blue Venom tells of a middle-aged middle manager who is arrested and taken to a cell, where he is slowly tortured to death for being a namesake of a rebel poet Kazi Nazrul Islam. Forbidden Incense, meanwhile, tells of a woman’s return to her paternal village after her husband was taken by the army. In the village, she meets a boy with a Muslim name whose entire family has been killed; as they attempt together to gather and bury scattered corpses, they, too, are caught by the killers.

Read more less