Diverse Vignettes
Edited by Arunava Sinha, The Penguin Book of Bengali Short Stories is a landmark new anthology which includes several previously untranslated works
In 2021, Delhi University quietly dropped Mahasweta Devi’s classic short story ‘Draupadi’ from its undergraduate English curriculum, prompting over a dozen members of the Academic Council to issue a note of dissent. First published in 1978, ‘Draupadi’ is about an adivasi woman from Jharkhand suering sexual torture in the custody of the Indian armed forces. The story is a part of The Penguin Book of Bengali Short Stories, edited by Arunava Sinha. The project brings together 37 stories across nearly 500 pages, including works by titans like Rabindranath Tagore, Ashapurna Devi, Sankar and Sunil Gangopadhyay, as well as contemporary writers like Manoranjan Byapari, Anita Agnihotri, Shahidul Zahir and Selina Hossain. This book has something in it for readers of every persuasion. As the last two names indicate, it includes Bangladeshi writers working in Bangla as well.
‘Draupadi’ is actually one of the few ‘automatic’ or ‘canonical’ selections in this remarkable volume. Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Dead or Alive’ (the opening story) and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s ‘Paradise of the Wretched’ are two others. As Sinha explains during a telephonic interview, this was part of the process. “I don’t think there are too many ‘shoo-in’ selections in this book,” he says. “I knew that this book will reach audiences in the UK and US so for me it was more about picking the right writers and then running with that selection. I knew that Mahasweta Devi had to be there and I picked ‘Draupadi’, which is one of her best-known stories. At the same time, I didn’t want this to be a representative collection or something that’s covering the region geographically.”
Delightful surprises abound in this collection. Moti Nandy’s ‘The Pearl’ is a beautifully-crafted tragicomedy about a chance encounter between football stars past and present. Purnendu Pattrea’s 30-page ‘Conversations’ treads the line between poetry and prose. Samaresh Basu’s ‘Aadaab’ is a cautionary tale about the madness of communal violence. But my personal favourite is Manik Bandopadhyay’s ‘Prehistoric’, a highly subtle and symbolism-laden story about a heavily wounded thief who’s all but abandoned in the forest by a man he considered a friend.
“Manik Bandopadhyay is considered one of Bengal’s finest writers,” says Sinha. “He was a Marxist and you can see those concerns in ‘Prehistoric’ without the story ever becoming pamphleteering. You can see how he shows the process of a oppressed man losing his humanity out of neglect.”
Sinha points out that stories published in the last decade or so are in the minority here. “Stories need at least a decade or 15 years to prove that they’ve stood the test of time,” he says. He hopes to assemble another volume of Bengali stories soon, this time focusing on stories written after 2010 or so. On the evidence of The Penguin Book of Bengali Short Stories, that book will be unputdownable as well.