<p>MATCHBOX <br />Ashapurna Debi, translated by <br />Prasenjit Gupta<br />Hachette<br />2015, pp 300, Rs 399<br /><br /></p>.<p>Ashapurna Debi has never provided dull fare, and so Prasenjit Gupta is extremely lucky. For, there are no complications in the telling by the Bengali author.A translator is on easy wicket. But why this needless knot with the determiner: ‘a Bengali English’? As the book is already weighted with a glossary of Bengali terms (with helpful diacritics for those who may like to pronounce the language properly), it passes my comprehension why the translator has chosen to retain the original and used the almost apologetic term, Bengali English. Obinash for Abinash, Rojoni for Rajani. I open the first story and get stalled. What is this Oishorjo? The glossary does not have it. But I cannot be easily defeated. <br /><br />There is an untitled section in the ‘Notes’ which deals with the titles separately. So this word means wealth. Aha, Aishwarya. That is good. Probably there was no need to make us go to and fro searching among the pages. The Bengali title in the Notes was enough. Usually that is the practice in translated works. We have loved Tagore’s Kumudini and Rashmani and Subhashini in English. But, I guess novelty is welcome.<br /><br />For the rest, Debi works diligently on her hand span of domesticity with her choice of semi-comic and semi-tragic ladles recording the goings-on within the four walls. Despite the insistence upon Bengali linguistic element in the translation proving to be a drag, the story-teller keeps us going. Nothing seems out of the ordinary in this world. We are no strangers to the practical Oporna or the anxious Abha and the last sentence of ‘Oishorjo’ tells all: “Who knows her husband better than she does?”<br /><br />Tragedies, comedies, tragi-comedies are a-plenty in these stories. Only farce is missing. But then there is no place for careless laughter in these lives. Women in general go on with their lives of silent desperation, almost always withdrawing from setting the matches alight. This is the society that gave Swami Vivekananda life-long pain due to his married sister’s suicide. And Debi is a ring side watcher of it all, happening in rural and urban Bengal.<br /><br />Realism so pure and unveiled has no place for open-hearted laughter. Realism that personifies the generational sufferings of impoverished girls in back-biting villages as Poddolata or Aroti. <br /><br />“…. For the girl who gets nothing but water for breakfast to sustain herself from morning till noon, and whose only hope at lunch time is a neighbour’s squash or some edible root with rice, and who must then save part of the root of squash — as though it were the fanciest delicacy — so that she can have it with two brown rutis and call that dinner; wouldn’t spring be ashamed to even glance at her ?”<br /><br />Poverty is not the only villain in these stories. Wealth can maim persons as easily. That is the theme of the title story. However, what is most striking in these stories is not the author’s insights into the female world, but her study of the male psyche. It is no easy task to map out the heart of persons like Keshob, the terror of silence in Boloram and Tribhubon, and the guilt-ridden silence of Shaktipodo. The keen intelligence of Debi misses no detail of living beings and even inert matter.<br /><br />Yet, it has been a sore point with many of us that the gender-constrained critics of our times have failed to recognise Debi’s Indian feminism. She blossoms from the tilled lands of India and does not fly on a handful of critical tools drawing their utility from the ways of the West or the leftist ideologies. <br /><br />Matchbox is an important publication because it carries the well- analysed, scholarly introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri. She has seen the significance of Debi’s work on her “two inches of ivory” with perfect understanding, What have we to do with “theoretical hotbeds as gender, ethnicity, caste and class” to push ourselves into “contemporary academic agendas, and their pursuit of multicultural, ‘socially based’ texts”? Debi gives the real India. Dhanyabaada, Debiji!<br /><br /><br /></p>
<p>MATCHBOX <br />Ashapurna Debi, translated by <br />Prasenjit Gupta<br />Hachette<br />2015, pp 300, Rs 399<br /><br /></p>.<p>Ashapurna Debi has never provided dull fare, and so Prasenjit Gupta is extremely lucky. For, there are no complications in the telling by the Bengali author.A translator is on easy wicket. But why this needless knot with the determiner: ‘a Bengali English’? As the book is already weighted with a glossary of Bengali terms (with helpful diacritics for those who may like to pronounce the language properly), it passes my comprehension why the translator has chosen to retain the original and used the almost apologetic term, Bengali English. Obinash for Abinash, Rojoni for Rajani. I open the first story and get stalled. What is this Oishorjo? The glossary does not have it. But I cannot be easily defeated. <br /><br />There is an untitled section in the ‘Notes’ which deals with the titles separately. So this word means wealth. Aha, Aishwarya. That is good. Probably there was no need to make us go to and fro searching among the pages. The Bengali title in the Notes was enough. Usually that is the practice in translated works. We have loved Tagore’s Kumudini and Rashmani and Subhashini in English. But, I guess novelty is welcome.<br /><br />For the rest, Debi works diligently on her hand span of domesticity with her choice of semi-comic and semi-tragic ladles recording the goings-on within the four walls. Despite the insistence upon Bengali linguistic element in the translation proving to be a drag, the story-teller keeps us going. Nothing seems out of the ordinary in this world. We are no strangers to the practical Oporna or the anxious Abha and the last sentence of ‘Oishorjo’ tells all: “Who knows her husband better than she does?”<br /><br />Tragedies, comedies, tragi-comedies are a-plenty in these stories. Only farce is missing. But then there is no place for careless laughter in these lives. Women in general go on with their lives of silent desperation, almost always withdrawing from setting the matches alight. This is the society that gave Swami Vivekananda life-long pain due to his married sister’s suicide. And Debi is a ring side watcher of it all, happening in rural and urban Bengal.<br /><br />Realism so pure and unveiled has no place for open-hearted laughter. Realism that personifies the generational sufferings of impoverished girls in back-biting villages as Poddolata or Aroti. <br /><br />“…. For the girl who gets nothing but water for breakfast to sustain herself from morning till noon, and whose only hope at lunch time is a neighbour’s squash or some edible root with rice, and who must then save part of the root of squash — as though it were the fanciest delicacy — so that she can have it with two brown rutis and call that dinner; wouldn’t spring be ashamed to even glance at her ?”<br /><br />Poverty is not the only villain in these stories. Wealth can maim persons as easily. That is the theme of the title story. However, what is most striking in these stories is not the author’s insights into the female world, but her study of the male psyche. It is no easy task to map out the heart of persons like Keshob, the terror of silence in Boloram and Tribhubon, and the guilt-ridden silence of Shaktipodo. The keen intelligence of Debi misses no detail of living beings and even inert matter.<br /><br />Yet, it has been a sore point with many of us that the gender-constrained critics of our times have failed to recognise Debi’s Indian feminism. She blossoms from the tilled lands of India and does not fly on a handful of critical tools drawing their utility from the ways of the West or the leftist ideologies. <br /><br />Matchbox is an important publication because it carries the well- analysed, scholarly introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri. She has seen the significance of Debi’s work on her “two inches of ivory” with perfect understanding, What have we to do with “theoretical hotbeds as gender, ethnicity, caste and class” to push ourselves into “contemporary academic agendas, and their pursuit of multicultural, ‘socially based’ texts”? Debi gives the real India. Dhanyabaada, Debiji!<br /><br /><br /></p>
