The Golden Gandhi Statue From America

By Subimal Misra

₹ 299.00 inclusive of all taxes

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About the book

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.

Pages: 192

Available in: Paperback

Language: English

Subimal Misra

Subimal Misra was born in 1943 and his writing career spanned over four decades. The cliched label, ‘anti-establishment’, is often applied the moment his name is mentioned. But since ‘anti-establishment’ now seeks to become the establishment, he opposed that too. He was entirely a little-magazine writer, not having written a single letter outside little magazines in his career. Some say Misra brought a different genre into Bengali literature, which made his writing distinctive. From a stance of all-round opposition he said, ‘I try to think differently and yet people make an uproar about me – the two can’t coexist, that can’t be. If I attain instant recognition and popularity, then I would think that what I’m doing is not new.’ When the way of saying becomes the subject was one of his favourite expressions, with a debt to Jean-Luc Godard, of course. He also said that he didn’t believe in any prevalent one-dimensional label: Whatever is accepted as correct is what has to be examined much more. Misra passed away in February 2023.

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