Wild Animals Prohibited : Stories/Anti-Stories

By Subimal Misra| V. Ramaswamy

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About the book

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 the 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 formal daring.

Pages: 282

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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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.