Subimal Misra - anarchist, activist, anti-establishment, experimental 'anti-writer' - is a contemporary master, and among India's greatest living authors. This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar's Tale is a novella about a tea-estate worked turned Naxalite named Ramayan Chamar, who gets arrested during a worker's strike and is beaten up and killed in custody. But every time the author attempts to write that story, reality intrudes in various forms to create a picture of a nation and society that is broken down, and where systemic inequalities are perpetuated by the middle- and upper-classes who are either indifferent or actively malignant. When Colour Is A Warning Sign goes even further in its experimentation, abandoning the barest pretence of narrative and composed entirely as a collage of vignettes, dialogue, reportage, autobiography, etc.Together these two anti-novels are a direct assault on the 'vast conspiracy of not seeing' that makes us look away from the realities of our sociopolitical order. In V. Ramaswamy's translation, they make for difficult, challenging but ultimately immensely powerful reading.
Subimal Misra may be the most important Bengali writer alive whom you have never heard of.' - The Statesman 'Long before Roberto Bolano, Misra had captured the disturbing, enigmatic landscape of the counterculture in a way that is subversive without being pretentious, Indian without being exotic, and somehow both contemporary and classic at once.' - The New Indian Express Audacious experimentalist and self-declared anti-writer, Subimal Misra is the master of contemporary alternative Bengali literature and anti-establishment writing. This collection brings together twenty-five stories that record the dark history of violence and degeneration in Bengal of the seventies and eighties. The mirror that Misra holds up to society breaks every canon of rectitude with unfailing precision. The stories also plot the continuous evolution of Misra's writing as he searches for a form to do justice to the reality that confronts us.Deeply influenced by Godard, Misra uses montage and other cinematic techniques in his stories, which he himself calls 'anti-stories', challenging our notions of reading and of literature itself. Brilliantly translated by V. Ramaswamy, Wild Animals Prohibited: Stories/Anti-stories startles with its blasphemy, its provocative ideas and its sheer formlessness.
Subimal Misra - anarchist, activist, anti-establishment, experimental 'anti-writer' - was a literary genius, and among India's greatest contemporary masters. Misra's works are confrontational, and challenge and provoke readers morally, politically, and in their expectations of literature. The Earth Quakes: Late Anti-Stories brings together his final creations: twenty stories written between 1991 and 2010, their subjects ranging from the 'global' - the Gulf War of 1991, which heralded the post-Cold War unipolar world - to the very 'local' - the Singur movement of 2006 that led to the unseating of the all-powerful CPI(M), which had ruled the state of West Bengal since 1977. As unique and unprecedented as each of the earlier volumes, The Earth Quakes is a fitting finale to the groundbreaking Subimal Misra translation project undertaken by translator-activist extraordinaire V. Ramaswamy.
An unemployed young man is invited to his lover's wedding and decides to gift her a bottle of his own blood. Rumours of a great big flood or the end of days or a rebellion of refugees in Calcutta fly through the country. Haran majhi's starved widow's corpse floats down rivers and swamps and drains as the nation awaits eagerly the unveiling of the golden Gandhi statue from America. The early stories of Subimal Misra took the Bengali literary world by storm upon their publication in the late 1960s. Distinct from the conventional modes of storytelling that preceded him, Misra's pieces are more anti-stories than stories, a montage of images that flow into each other and tell a tale with greater power and urgency than narrative fiction. Every story hits hard, gripping the reader with intensity and an underlying fantastical horror that is firmly rooted in reality. V. Ramaswamy's exceptional translation brings to the fore the contemporaneity of Misra's work while retaining the verve and pungency of the original. Anti establishment and revolutionary,t hese stories by a writer whom many consider to be a cult figure in Bengali literature resonate with truths that are undeniable even today, forty years after they were written.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.