Arunava Sinha translates classic, modern and contemporary Bengali fiction and non-fiction into English. Sixty-one of his translations have been published so far. Twice the winner of the Crossword Translation Award, for Sankar's Chowringbee and Anita Agnihotri's Seventeen, respectively, and the winner of the Muse India Translation Award for Buddhadeva Bose's When The Time Is Right, he has also been shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction prize for his translation of Chowringbee, and longlisted for the 2018 Best Translated Book Award USA for his translation of Bhaskar Chakravarti's Things That Happen and Other Poems. He is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Ashoka University. He was born and grew up in Kolkata, and lives and writes in New Delhi.
I will go out on a limb and claim that the short story is the brightest jewel of Bengali literature. Nurtured by a profusion of magazines, Sunday news- paper supplements and innumerable literary journals throughout the twentieth century, and read avidly by millions with virtually no other form of quick entertainment available, the short story tells the many stories of Bengali literature like no other literary form can.
And yet the irony is that it is Bengali novels that people remember. Perhaps this is true of all languages - many classic novels are etched permanently in the collective memory of readers, but there is no such collective memory for short fiction, except for a handful of stories. I will now go back out on that same limb and state that Bengali short stories are living testimony to the injustice of this act of remembering and forgetting, remembering and misremembering.
The Bengali language is spoken and read by some 250 million people, largely in two countries - the Indian state of West Bengal and the country of Bangladesh. Both these regions were part of the original province of Bengal, albeit with fluid boundaries, even before the advent of British colonization in India. The spoken and the written language had evolved over the centuries from one of the offshoots of the ancient tongue of Sanskrit. By the time the East India Company and then the British Crown took over the administration of Bengal and, gradually, other parts of India-the Bengali language were much closer to its current versions. With the coming of the printing press in Bengal in the second half of the eighteenth century, the language gradually acquired a standard version - with, of course, a fair amount of regional diversity in the vocabulary - that became the one in which literature began to be produced. This, with some evolution, is the version that has persisted.
As with most of the literatures of India, Bengali literature also began in oral form, which in turn meant that verse was the primary medium.
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