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

Subimal Misra; V. Ramaswamy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9353023076 ISBN 13: 9789353023072

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2019

Synopsis

Subimal Misra anarchist, activist, anti-establishment, experimental anti-writer is a contemporary master, and among India s greatest living writers. This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar s Tale is a novella about trying to write a novella about a tea-estate worker 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 which 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 and snippets of 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 socio-political order. In V. Ramaswamy s translation, they make for difficult, challenging but immensely powerful reading.

About this title

About the Authors

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 took up literary translation from Bangla after two decades of social activism in favour of the labouring poor of Kolkata. He has translated works by Subimal Misra, Manoranjan Byapari, Adhir Biswas, Shahidul Zahir, Mashiul Alam, Swati Guha, Shahaduz Zaman and Ismail Darbesh. He was awarded the Translation Fellowship by the New India Foundation and the English PEN Presents award in 2022.

 

 

Edition details

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9353023076
• ISBN 13: 9789353023072
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 296