Wild Animals Prohibited : Stories, Anti-stories

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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