A rich harvest of women’s tales

Few would disagree that the most developed branch in Bengali literature is the short story. Though some of the short stories can rank among the best in this genre of world literature, to the large number of non-Bengali readers in India and abroad they remain inaccessible.
Therefore, translation of these stories into a global language like English is most necessary to redress the situation.Naturally, it is heartening to note that the publication of Harvest (Anustup) — a collection of translated Bengali stories — has come out.
Edited by Tapati Gupta and Anil Acharya, the anthology contains stories by eminent women writers of Bengal, past and present and also writings from pre-Independence Bengal, former East Pakistan, West Bengal and Bangladesh. The unique feature of this collection is that not only the writers but even the translators are all women. To quote the editors, “The writers being women, themselves representing the marginalised in a patriarchy, that uses the carrot and stick to deal with them.
These are women who throughout the last century have sought their own voice and finally succeeded in empowering themselves to share the cannon along with their more privileged male counterparts through the agency of the pen.They write about their counterparts, who are not so strong and fortunate...� The collection comprises stories by such old-timers as Rokeya Begum,Jyotirmoyee Devi, Sita Devi, Probhabati Devi Saraswati, Ashapurna Devi,Ashalata Singha, Begum Sufia Kamal, Protiva Bose, Bani Roy and the new breed of writers like Kabita Singha, Bani Basu, Selina Hussain, Purabi Basu. Jaya Mitra and Taslima Nasreen bring up the new generation.
While not all the stories are of equal merit, they are all concerned with the theme of women’s oppression. Of course not necessarily by men. As a matter of fact, some of the stories often paint women as women’s greatest tormentors. In Selina Hussain’s Motijan’s Daughters, Purabi Basu’s Saleha’s Desire and Taslima Nasreen’s Motherhood, one finds men’s depravity and exploitation of women being carried out by the women themselves, acting as agents of the oppressive patriarchal society.
In Kabita Singha’s Hunger, Ranjabati, the sanctimonious housewife, has to seek the help of her maidservant, Sumati, to get rid of the foetus inside her. The former, who in the past had rebuked Sumati for the killing of unborn children, now resorts to foeticide having fallen on hard times herself. Thus, hunger becomes a great leveller. Shantobala, the tortured wife in Jaya Mitra’s From the womb of darkness, kills her tyrannical and wife-beating husband, who is determined to marry off their minor daughters to men much older than them, ignoring his wife’s plea to send them to school.
Protiva Bose’s The Marooned is the tragedy of a refugee family the young members of which are sold to white slavery. In Ashapurna Devi’s A house of brick & mortar, we see the emergence of Ibsen’s Nora in the heroine Uttara. Despite Anatole France’s tongue-in-cheek observation that translation, like a woman, is either faithful or beautiful, here we find a happy combination of both.
Ketaki Datta’s translation of Bani Roy’s highly melodramatic Lucretia and Krishna Sen’s translation of Nabanita Dev Sen’s And the rains came again need special mention. This highly readable collection should interest both general readers and specialists in women’s studies.