This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar’s Tale : Two Anti-Novels

By Subimal Misra| V. Ramaswamy

₹ 450.00 inclusive of all taxes

Buy Now

Warning

/var/www/html/harper_staging/wp-content/themes/harpercollins/woocommerce/content-single-product.php

399

Warning

/var/www/html/harper_staging/wp-content/themes/harpercollins/woocommerce/content-single-product.php

407

Or from your local bookseller.

We will notify you when the book is released!

We will email you when the book is released!

Please allow notification and avoid private mode for this feature to work.

About the book

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.

Pages: 296

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.

“

V. Ramaswamy

V. Ramaswamy has translated Subimal Misra’s The Golden Gandhi Statue from America: Early Stories, Wild Animals Prohibited: Stories, Anti-Stories, This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar’s Tale: Two Anti-Novels, and The Earth Quakes: Late Anti-Stories; Shahidul Zahir’s Life and Political Reality: Two Novellas (with Shahroza Nahrin), Why There Are No Noyontara Flowers in Agargaon Colony: Stories, and I See the Face: A Novel; Manoranjan Byapari’s novels The Runaway Boy and The Nemesis; and Memories of Arrival: A Voice from the Margins by Adhir Biswas. He was a recipient of the Literature Across Frontiers–Charles Wallace India Trust fellowship in creative writing and translation at Aberystwyth University in 2016, the New India Foundation translation fellowship in 2022, the PEN Presents award in 2022, and the Bangla Translation Foundation (Dhaka) prize for the best translated book of 2022. He lives in Kolkata.