Böcker av Kalpana Bardhan

Until now the large body of socially focused Bengali literature has remained little known to Western readers. This collection includes some of the finest examples of Bengali short stories-stories that reflect the turmoil of a changing society traditionally characterized by rigid hierarchical structures of privilege and class differentiation.Written over a span of roughly ninety years from the early 1890s to the late 1970s, the twenty stories in this collection represent the work of five authors. Their characters, drawn from widely varying social groups, often find themselves caught up in tumultuous political and social upheaval.The reader encounters Rabindranath Thakur's extraordinarily spirited and bold heroines; Manik Bandyopadhyay's peasants, laborers, fisherfolk, and outcastes; and Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay's rural underclass of snake-charmers, corpse-handlers, stick-wielders, potters, witches, and Vaishnava minstrels. Mahasweta Devi gives voice to the semi-landless tribals and untouchables effectively denied the rights guaranteed them by the Constitution; Hasan Azizul Huq depicts the plight of the impoverished of Bangladesh.

Set in the forests of northern Odisha, Mahuldiha Days is the moving story of a young civil servant caught between her commitment to the tribal communities she knows are the original inhabitants of the forest and the monolithic state, oblivious to the diverse realities of life on the ground. The moonlit brahmani river snakes through the story with a life of its own while the city of the narrator's childhood comes to her in dreams. Agnihotri creates a poignant, intense narrative layered with an awareness of the pressures of motherhood and personal love.