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India Booked | Kolkata: A Literary Lens
105 Plays4 years ago
A prolific translator, the Books Editor at Scroll.in, and professor of creative writing and literary journalism; Arunava Sinha is one of India’s most important literary figures.
In this episode of India Booked, Ayushi Mona and Sinha discuss Bengali literature and how he came to translation (part awareness, part accident, part design), the city of Calcutta (“The theatre of the vast drama of human life” as Sinha puts it) in the literary imagination of readers and writers both in Bengali and English, how the city’s literary, political, and sporting culture has directly or indirectly influenced so many of our writers, the "shrinking of our literary and artistic arcs" and much more.
Tune in now.
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Transcript
Introduction to India Booked Podcast
00:00:11
Speaker
I'm your host Ayushi Mona and you're listening to India Booked, a podcast where we lean into the idea of India through its literature and we speak to authors who bring this to life.
00:00:28
Speaker
Hello everyone, I am Ayushi Mona, your host at India Booked, a podcast where we discuss India through the eyes and voice of its literature.
Meet Arunabha Sinha: Translator & Professor
00:00:38
Speaker
Today, I have on the show with me, Arundhava Sinha. Those of you who don't know, Arundhava is a literary translator with
00:00:47
Speaker
around 50 books under his belt as well as the associate professor of creative writing and literary journalism at Ashoka. He is the book's editor at Skrull. In his past life he was a journalist
00:01:23
Speaker
Thank you Ayushi. Thank you for having me here.
Podcast Themes: Cultural Context over Books
00:01:27
Speaker
So Arunabha for me this show is particularly interesting because so far all the episodes that I have done typically follow this pattern of you know me reading one particular book or two particular books by the author and then you know speaking to them about it and then it's very driven by the theme that they've written on so whether it's an insurgency or whether it's history
00:01:52
Speaker
In your case, I think this is my first session where we're not discussing a specific book, but really a city and a culture through the dozens and dozens of books that you've reviewed. So I think for me, the first question to you is, what made you want to translate and bring Bengali
00:02:19
Speaker
literature into the mainstream in English? I don't think any translator can actually answer that question with accuracy because it is something that you and I've exchanged notes with translators all over the world.
Arunabha's Translation Journey Begins
00:02:32
Speaker
It is something that you find yourself doing because of an accident or a request or circumstances. In my case, I think I was aware of the fact that much of what I was reading of world literature was translated. So it did tickle my
00:02:48
Speaker
curiosity in terms of who are these translators? How do they do what they do? It was there in college. But immediately after college, I became part of a team that launched a city magazine in Calcutta. It was called Calcutta Skyline. And one of the things we did there was to publish one Bengali short story in translation in English every month. And that was how I actually started translating. So the objective was not very grand in terms of taking
00:03:16
Speaker
Bengali literature into English to readers the world over anything. It was just to ensure that we had a literary section in our city magazine.
Calcutta's Literary Influence
00:03:28
Speaker
However, you know what is really interesting to me is that while you might not have started with these grand designs, in the process and in this journey, you've managed to translate a lot of Bengali greats. I read Chwarangi years ago.
00:03:46
Speaker
And of course, I would not have been able to read it without your magical touch on it. For me, what is really fascinating, and since you did mention the literary section, you know, in the magazine, in that Calcutta does feature very prominently in even the imagination of non Bengalis as a city of literature.
00:04:08
Speaker
So whenever my book needs very often the authors that are and you know, the most popular commercial authors that I discuss, I say Ajumpa Lahiri or Amitav Ghosh. And these are of course people who while no longer live in Calcutta or Kolkata or Bengal, right of Bengal. However, it's not a very contemporary picture.
00:04:33
Speaker
For say somebody like Jhumpa Lahiri, it's more personal and it's a middle class interior life in a Bengali home versus somebody like an Amitav Ghosh for whom the city is really like a plot catalyst and something like a shadow lines. For you, having read the
00:04:54
Speaker
Obviously, the volume of books you have that feature the city and worked on translating them. What does Calcutta in the literary imagination mean for you specifically? Yeah, well, that's that that could entire books could be written to answer that.
00:05:13
Speaker
It's interesting that a lot of the writing in India, fiction writing both in Bangla and in English, has come from people who started their lives or have some relationship with Calcutta. So, you not only have the two writers, you mentioned Jhumpal idea and Amitav Ghosh, but you also have Amit Chaudhuri, for example, who did not grow up in Calcutta, who grew up in Bombay, but whose roots in Calcutta were so strong that he went back to live there.
00:05:39
Speaker
later on in his life and almost all his books have something to do with Calcutta. You have other writers like Rajkamal Jha who is from Calcutta, does not overtly write about Calcutta but again you can see the sensibilities in whatever he writes in his fiction and you have a bunch of other people who will turn out to have despite not having Bengali surnames who will turn out to have some connection with the city.
00:06:01
Speaker
So that's fairly obvious given the fact that Bengal and Calcutta in particular was a strong seat of learning and education and reading and culture up until I think maybe the 90s at least. So then naturally this has produced a whole stream of writers.
00:06:21
Speaker
For me, Calcutta is the seat of many of the books that I have translated and despite the fact that we talk about Bengal and Bengali, the Bengali language, it is a little bit of a sad truth that almost all of the writing is concentrated in Calcutta. I mean, there's a great deal of writing from elsewhere in the state.
00:06:42
Speaker
But not much of it has made it to the mainstream in either the Bengali language or for that matter for the translation. So inevitably almost every Bengali writer who's been translated into other languages has ended up in Calcutta even if they were not born there. It is interesting that a lot of the classic writers in Bangla actually were not from Calcutta. So let's say Bibhuti Bhushan was not born in Calcutta, Tara Shankur was not from Calcutta.
00:07:09
Speaker
Sotenad Bhaduri was not from Calcutta. Sotenad Bhaduri, in fact, was from a part of what is now Jharkhand or Bihar. I'm not sure, one of the two. So he grew up very much in the speaking area. Sharodindu Bhandapada, the creator of Bumkesh, spent a lot of his time in what is now Bihar.
00:07:26
Speaker
So you know the hinterland was culturally very rich at one point but from the 1950s or 60s onwards largely it became Calcutta centric. So for me Calcutta is the theatre of this vast drama of human life which has yielded
00:07:42
Speaker
a great deal by way of literary material and if you look at the different arenas and I'm sure we will explore some of these in greater detail as we go along but if you look at the different arenas it's quite fascinating so you have the corporate world which was very strong and
00:08:00
Speaker
Vibrant up until the late 1970s, early 1980s. You have politics, of course. You cannot have Calcutta without politics. You have left politics. You have ultra-left politics. You have the high life. You have the middle class life. You have the low life even. I'm the low life in a not in a derogatory sense, but I'm just talking about different sections of society.
Shift in Bangla Writing: Introspection & Individualism
00:08:23
Speaker
You have entire novels set in slums, entire novels set in grand hotels, entire novels set in middle class areas. You have sports which plays a very significant part. You have one of the finest writers or finest women writers in the country ever writing about middle class life within four walls in Calcutta homes. I'm talking about Ashapurna Devi.
00:08:47
Speaker
You have people writing a great deal of historical fiction who look at the history of Calcutta and the history of Bengal, but Calcutta is always in there.
00:08:57
Speaker
is the focal point no matter what they're writing about. You have Tagore himself setting some of his fiction in Calcutta. So the city has been a crucible and the motivator of for writers over what more than 120 or 130 years now.
00:09:23
Speaker
You know, while I was listening to you speak right now, I was also scribbling furiously because I think just the volume of names that you threw Arun Nava was such a good guide on what to read next. I have found that increasingly people discuss the same 20 or 30 books on social media.
00:09:46
Speaker
and booksheps can aren't really optimized for giving recommendations to enthusiastic readers. So I think while I was listening to you speak about why Calcutta grew and has this presence in the literary imaginations and what it means, I also thought that the kind of recommendations and authors you mentioned
00:10:12
Speaker
such a good place for you know an amateur reader or somebody who enjoys even reading or calls themselves a hard and bibliophile would find fascinating.
00:10:24
Speaker
would you say that the whole contemporary aspect I think that you spoke of in terms of the character's growth is something that is perhaps missing today? Is there a certain I don't know a nostalgic hangover or that perhaps sees less of contemporary writing and is it due to say the whole you know flux of most writers writing about Bengal or Calcutta writing
00:10:51
Speaker
not while living in Calcutta because obviously, conducted in Calcutta is a place that has not really grown
00:11:02
Speaker
You know, in some ways, so we don't see emergence of a lot of Mumbai based books recently, you know, whether it's a Katharine Fu or Amitah Mahalay. There's a lot of writing about Bombay in the now. I and perhaps this is my ignorance. Is there a lot of writing about Calcutta in the now or is it is it largely driven by writers who already written about Calcutta or who are writing or living in other cities?
00:11:32
Speaker
Well, you're right. If you're talking about Indian writing in English, which is that many of the writers who were from Calcutta now moved on. They live their lives elsewhere and therefore their relationship with Calcutta has changed. Either they are visitors, they have occasional intersections with the city and its present reality.
00:11:48
Speaker
or they delve into their own memories and they come up with combination of personal history and nostalgia and perhaps in some cases cold, clear-eyed look and a critical look at the past. But that is not the case with writers who are writing in Bangla. They're still very much living their present lives into their, you know, sort of building their present lives into their fiction. So you do see those settings being contemporary
00:12:13
Speaker
Unfortunately, perhaps present day life is not as interesting and exciting as it was 20 or 30 years ago. I'm not sure why, but it does not seem to be, which is why many people's arcs, literary and artistic arcs have shrunk rather than embracing a whole cross section of an urban milieu. They have shrunk to smaller spaces, both physically and emotionally. So much of the writing is now self-obsessed and more concerned with
00:12:42
Speaker
what an individual is going through, what their hopes and aspirations are, what their conflicts are and sometimes some of that can get quite annoying to read to be honest because how many stories of personal difficulties and personal journeys and so on would you be interested in. But on the other hand there are equally a number of writers and some of them are quite experimental writers in Bangla who are out of the mainstream.
00:13:06
Speaker
who are writing, who are pitting, locating their fiction in very interesting spaces. Like, for example, there's been a number of stories featuring youngsters or featuring petty criminals or featuring the mafia that the collusion between politicians and, you know, land agents and local young men who are recruited by politicians to perform their
00:13:33
Speaker
violent tasks so these earlier which were limited really to newspaper reports have now become the stuff of fiction and some of it is producing some really fascinating arcs because not only are we looking at the interior lives of people who would normally not feature in fiction at all and still does not when it comes to Indian writing in English I mean other than Vikram Chandra I can't really think of any really fantastic gigantic I don't mean in terms of length but in terms of ambition
00:14:03
Speaker
a book that looks at the underworld for example or at criminals and then looks at individual characters there so there are there's quite a lot of not quite a lot but several interesting books that are being written in in that kind of space these I am particularly interested in equally you know voices which you could not hear before because they were suppressed by the mainstream are now beginning to be heard you have Dalit writers you have Manuranjan Bapari for example who's leading the charge
00:14:30
Speaker
in now writing about. Yeah, there's gunpowder in there. Yes. And he's written about close to 20 novels in Bangla already. And, you know, he truly represents how you can now finally you're in that happy space where people from no matter which section of society they're from, people are able to write their own stories and be heard. It no longer needs somebody else to go in and write their stories for them.
00:14:57
Speaker
as used to be the case earlier.
Translating Children's Literature
00:14:59
Speaker
So we are seeing wide divergence in voices and quite frankly many of these voices are writing about such raw and authentic experiences that the MFA school of writing which tends to cerebralize things a lot looks quite pale and anodyne in comparison sometimes.
00:15:20
Speaker
So I think this particular excerpt, Arunabha that you spoke was very interesting for me because I was of course going to actually ask you a question about Dev Ganpanda in the air and your experience and if you intend to translate any more of Manarajan's work but I was also very happy to hear you mention Vikram Chandra because I'm interviewing him later tonight
00:15:43
Speaker
and it was just a very happy coincidence. I'll actually pass my question about this Ganpada in the air and ask you a question on Haber Jaber law or writing you know for truncating for children.
00:15:58
Speaker
How is the experience different? And of course, this has nothing to do with the thematic discussion that we're having today on Bengali literature and Calcutta there on. But I'm just very fascinated by how is the journey different for you when you translate for yourself.
00:16:18
Speaker
But the thing about children's literature is that it's perhaps the trickiest of all kinds of literature when you are trying to take a book written in one era and republish it in another.
00:16:28
Speaker
because children's lives change so much more right and their markers change so much more that sometimes what seems very exciting to one generation of kids is going to be quite boring for the next generation right their worlds are perhaps the fastest to change there's always that that concern that you know something that you read as a child and enjoy it might not be
00:16:51
Speaker
any good you know might not be a great experience for experience for children reading today and yet you are hanging on to your nostalgia or your memory and you think that oh just because I enjoyed it in my time everyone after me must enjoy it in their time as well which is absolutely pre-cris expectation. So first and foremost you have to see whether and you know equally the editors and publishers who are commissioning when it comes to translations are also looking at their own memories of what they enjoyed.
00:17:21
Speaker
So, it's very, very tricky and something like habajabala or hajabarala in the original, therefore, can be a huge step in the dark because either your translation will prove that yes, the work was so fantastic and quote, timeless unquote, that it works with readers
00:17:40
Speaker
at any point of time or you may feel, oh no, it really was firmly located in a particular Iran culture and it does not appear attractive at all later on. So it's an interesting test and there is no way I think anyone can predict beforehand whether it's going to be accepted or not. I mean, other than Habu Jabal of, for example, I worked on other children's stories, I worked on
00:18:04
Speaker
One of my favorites is a character named Kala Boti who was written by Moti Nondi who I think is the world's greatest writer of sports fiction. By the way, nobody has written a fiction set in the field of sports with such depth and passion.
00:18:25
Speaker
anywhere in the world I mean people have written the occasional novel but he almost every not almost a large part of his hoof is actually set in the football fields and cricket fields and gymnasiums and boxing rings and running tracks of lower middle class Bengal at that none of his characters is from the upper middle class except this one Kala Boti. Kala Boti is a girl in a school she lives in a house of males her mother has it appears has passed on
00:18:54
Speaker
and she lives with her grandfather even her father is not around it's her grandfather and her uncle whom she lives with and she is a remarkable character she plays cricket she is quite a mistive maker at school but also also loved by her teachers because she's very very bright and she does great things
00:19:14
Speaker
And I was very interested in knowing whether Kalabwati would appeal. Kalabwati was written in a time in the 90s, but she was written in a pretty digital, pretty internet era. And I was very interested in knowing whether she would appeal to young readers in the post-digital world or in the middle of the digital world. So I don't know if she has. Scholastic published the book.
00:19:38
Speaker
but I was quite pleased at least to get the book out there and maybe have some people reading it. So yeah, children's stories are a different ballgame really. I'm hoping at some time to be able to do an anthology like I did for stories for adults, for children as well from Bengali.
00:19:56
Speaker
that would be absolutely lovely and i find increasingly and largely because you know i mean i run a reading community i find people obviously are more frantic about looking for books for their children and not really finding something closer home
00:20:13
Speaker
And of course, all of us grew with Enid Britain's and Roald Hull's and, and, or a Ruskin Bond or obviously like a Tinkle or a Punches Antra. But, but then there's so many of these untapped stories of course, that, that really deserve to be told and enjoyed. I think
00:20:30
Speaker
One question that I have Arunavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavav
Calcutta's Reading Culture and Societal Shifts
00:20:52
Speaker
to the populace that the city has but in general Calcutta is a very fascinating city because of say College Street or these bookstores or the Calcutta bookshed and I've lived for three years there and I really and I've lived in multiple cities in India. I haven't yet to live in a city that loves reading as much as Calcutta does
00:21:16
Speaker
What do you think of the reading Calcutta versus the writing Calcutta? Where do writers who write in Bangla versus writers who write in English or other writers from the world today stand in terms of popularity amongst the reading populace?
00:21:43
Speaker
Okay, so first of all, I have to point out that I've been, I've not lived in Calcutta for over 20 years now. So I cannot claim any authentic understanding of current reading practices or habits over there. It is also a little sad that we have to think about reading something so basic and activity as reading as an intellectual pursuit. To me reading is not an intellectual pursuit at all. It is a very natural, normal and
00:22:11
Speaker
and kind of middle level way of interacting with the world around you. But having said that, somehow the act of reading or possessing books has acquired this intellectual dimension, which I am very, very uncomfortable about. It seems to, you know, it's like virtue signaling, look, I read, I'm special. And, you know, we'll never get anywhere that way. Everyone should ideally be reading and not feeling special about it. Yeah.
00:22:37
Speaker
I guess I don't know that it was any different in Calcutta when I grew up from other cities. I mean, the people I met afterwards who were from Bombay or Bangalore or Delhi were all readers in my generation. So I think it was a generational thing. I mean, we grew up without television. Certainly there was no internet. So what did you do other than play with your friends?
00:22:58
Speaker
and you know, telephones were hard to come by, so you weren't chatting with them, you read. And books were widely available, all homes had books. And so it was quite normal. But there was one very interesting practice in Calcutta, which I think contributed greatly to reading, which is that it was quite the done thing to give books as gifts at birthdays, at weddings, at wedding anniversaries, at any parties, if you had to take a gift, it was quite the normal thing to take a book.
00:23:27
Speaker
And that I think had said a great deal about the fact that both the recipient as well as the giver of the gift were clearly in a world where books were seen as valuable things, not
00:23:41
Speaker
expensive beyond reach but valuable and you know a measure of your esteem if you give someone a book it means you cared for them it was not sort of unthought through casual gift because you were also making a choice which book to give which writer has the person read this already so there was a lot of love and attention and care that went into making that choice and it led to people having books without necessarily having bought themselves
00:24:06
Speaker
I mean, every time a wedding inevitably led to a cache of about anywhere between 100 and 200 books. So, you know, married life started with the collection of, say, 100 books. That's fantastic, isn't it? So I think this was a practice that has sadly died. And I'm very, very sad that this is no longer the norm anymore. People now do classy things like taking bottles of wine and so on and dessert.
00:24:30
Speaker
But it would be lovely, even we do, but it would be lovely if we continue to give books instead as gifts. But yeah, I think the reading culture was strong because you had books at home. You grew up with books at home. And if there's a
00:24:48
Speaker
millennials, those who were born around the turn of the century and afterwards, are not reading today. It is because their parents, many of whom in urban centers have moved away from their own home, so the joint family gave way to nuclear families after liberalization as employment opportunities arose and people moved out of their own cities.
00:25:07
Speaker
or could earn enough to start living on their own. And I feared that this post liberalization generation, those who got good jobs and made money and suddenly started living much grander lifestyles than their parents did not see books as part of their lives. So, you know, I teach the 18 and 19 year olds, and I find that many of them, while they love reading and they want to read book, they have grown up in homes without books. And that is really sad.
00:25:39
Speaker
I agree with you. I grew up reading from a very young age and now that you've put this in perspective, I always had books around me. Somebody was always reading. There was always a book to be picked up from a book shelf. So absolutely. Arunabha, thank you so much for this conversation. It's been absolutely fascinating. Before we go,
00:26:04
Speaker
A couple of last questions. The first question is to do with, I think, a little bit of my own personal journey.
Growth of Translation in Indian Literature
00:26:14
Speaker
Is that, you know, in good writing in India, right?
00:26:19
Speaker
And good Indian writing is something that's very difficult to tap into if you don't reach out for translation. So Prakriti and I, when we started this project, we of course know she knows Gujarati or I know Punjabi and we have exposure to a couple of languages. But really Indian literature is so vast in its imagination.
00:26:43
Speaker
Is there a community of say translators which you think are today doing good work to bring certain writers or cultures out of vernacular imagination into just a more accessible language which is English for us?
00:27:03
Speaker
I don't know Nandini, Krishan has recently done some good work on Paramannamaragan, but if there are any translators, apart from in Bangalore that you have read or recommend, we would love to hear.
00:27:17
Speaker
Yeah, well, the number of translators is growing, growing quickly, and that is fantastic. So certainly as a result, much more of hidden literature is coming, as you said, into an accessible space. I'll contest the term Indian literature because I'm not sure there is such a thing as Indian literature. There are many literatures from the geography of India. It happened to be in a politically unitary system, and therefore we are a single market.
00:27:41
Speaker
But we are really culturally more like Europe than, let's say, the UK or the USA. We are not as monolithic or as homogenous at all. So it needs, and you know, we are in that unique space of having more than a dozen languages in which very flourishing, thriving literatures of their own.
00:27:59
Speaker
So it's a treasure trove. I mean, you know, we can despair at it or we can say, wow, we have enough books being written and that have been written that can ensure that we can enrich the literatures of every language in India with translations for years and decades and centuries to come.
00:28:16
Speaker
So I see it as a fantastic situation to take advantage of. Fortunately, publishers too are very aware of this and are taking advantage of it and have really added translations to their lists in a way that now makes it possible for the reader to go and read contemporary modern and classic works from different non-English languages of India in English translations. Unfortunately, translations are mostly limited to English right now. There's almost
00:28:45
Speaker
There's very little translation happening between the different languages of India. And that's something that needs to be perhaps fixed. But I don't know about the community in the sense of whether the translators are working together as a group or community. Maybe not. But as individuals, they have added to a mass of translators. And you now have really excellent translators working from many different languages. And I'm particularly envious of translators who work from Malayalam.
00:29:13
Speaker
because they are working with some of perhaps the best contemporary writing in fiction in India right now. I mean, if you read the books that are now being written in Malayalam and if you're fortunate enough to read them in translation, it is thanks to the fact that there is a growing number of translators who are throwing themselves into it. I mean, you had Devika and Ministry originally. Now you have Shana Habib who's been translating Benjamin.
00:29:38
Speaker
You have Jai Shri Kalatil, who's translated two fantastic books, including what for me has been the book of the year so far, S. Hadish's Mischa or Mustache. And you're getting great translations from Tamil as well, and not just Penamil Murugan, fortunately, others too, Kannada. In fact, if anything, I really want to see more translations coming out of Hindi and Gujarati and Punjabi and Nurdu, I don't think.
00:30:03
Speaker
There's enough translations coming out of those languages. And certainly, Bangla is going strong. It has been at the vanguard in terms of translated literatures of India from a very early time, from the 1980s onwards. But it's still going strong with a number of new translators coming into the space. And I'm very happy that they are. And they are also looking not just at fiction, but also at poetry.
00:30:30
Speaker
and they're beginning to look at non-fiction as well. There is a huge body of work in the Indian languages of non-fiction, some of which really need to be translated into other languages for everybody else to read. So it's a very exciting time for translations and translators. No doubt about it. That is lovely. Thank you so much. And before we sign off the last question, what is one book from your own list of works would you recommend?
Recommended Reads: Ashapurna Devi
00:31:01
Speaker
I know all, I mean, I know there's literally a deluge of them, but I had to tell people that, okay, once you sign out of whatever your Spotify podcast or your Google podcast or whatever, you know, what is that one book that you need to go and buy right now and definitely read? What was that book?
00:31:24
Speaker
Yeah, well, it depends on what stage of the reading readers are at. But I would say that perhaps one book I'd love for them to read would be my translation of Ashapurna Devi's short stories. I am particularly fascinated by her writing.
00:31:39
Speaker
in the sense that she tells so many truths in such a powerful way without in any way sort of softening the blow or without in any way trying to make people look better than they are. She brings out the semi-side of individuals in a most ruthless and yet bloodless fashion and her books just don't date. I mean irrespective of when she wrote the stories or what the
00:32:07
Speaker
specific material circumstances are we recognize ourselves with so much fear and sometimes revulsion in the stories that it is perhaps, you know, they make us very, very uncomfortable. These are stories that you do not walk away from feeling good. You feel very, very troubled and you look deeply into your own lives. Most of all, you introspect a lot.
00:32:28
Speaker
And you acknowledge that we as people are not only mean, but we have become more mean because of the circumstances in which we live. So, you know, as they say, art is meant to bring comfort to the troubled and trouble the comforted. In this case, I'm going for the latter.
00:32:49
Speaker
So now I'm going to be greedy because I just absolutely love this answer.
Cinematic Hopes for 'When the Time is Right'
00:32:54
Speaker
Which one of your books would you really really love to see as a cinematic adaptation?
00:32:59
Speaker
Oh, that's a good question. Well, one of them has actually been bought for cinematic adaption. It's a novel named Boom by Bani Basu, which is set in a Marwari family and a Marwari society in Calcutta, which is unusual again for a Bengali writer to write about. So that's definitely going in there. But the one I would really like is a novel I'd mentioned earlier when the time is right, Tithi Dora in Bangla, which as I told you was set in the 1940s and it is a
00:33:25
Speaker
vast look at a time and a space through the through the lives through the arcs of a single family but it's not family drama in that sense because it is really a father and his five daughters and the youngest daughter is the central character so it's her journey a very soft gentle person she loves books
00:33:46
Speaker
and then she does that very Bengali thing of falling in love with a professor but it really brings out I don't know in some way it fascinates me so much and it's also written in a very visual despite going deeply into the interior lives of the characters it is written with enormous visual and sensory inputs that to me I think makes for a very in fact not even a film I think it would make a very nice long long playing series
00:34:13
Speaker
which are quite the thing these days but you need patients to watch it you know it's not going to be cliffhangers and much drama so I you know as I talk about it I'm beginning to have second thoughts
00:34:26
Speaker
Wonderful, Arunawa. Thank you so much for speaking to us. And for everyone listening in, all of Arunawa's books are available on Amazon, Flipkart, at independent bookstores near you. Do give and, you know, these are read, go through his Goodreads account. It's absolutely eye-opening and mind-boggling and
00:34:51
Speaker
a perspective that you often do not see because we are unfortunately only constrained to very commercial or popular fiction. Once again, Arunabha, thank you for speaking to us. Thank you so much for having me, it was a pleasure coming to you. Do not forget to tune in to us on Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Ghana and HT Smartcuts.