seagull_books

'The hero of our story, Dewana,
appears in the very first episode.'
'What does dewana mean?'
'Someone who's mad.'

The image of this love-crazed hero haunts Khoimala, the gentle brahman girl, and her low- caste sweetheart, the young boatman, Golak, as they live out their doomed love story: doomed because social and religious taboos damn their forbidden love. On the one hand, eighteenth century rural Bengal, quickening to the pace of urban development, undergoes swift changes, as local markets thrive and traders flourish; on the other; a destitute young woman who is trapped in the darkness of harshly prescriptive custom to the despair of the boatman lad who can neither rescue her nor declare his love.

In this masterful and deeply sensitive tale, Mahasweta Devi once again inter-weaves a social tapestry and the detail of human lives, creating a powerful tale of love, longing and passion set in a rime when the British are beginning to consolidate their hold on Bengal.

Mahasweta Devi is one of India's foremost writers. Her powerful, satiric fiction has won her recognition in the form of the Sahitya Akademi (1979), Jnanpith (1996) and Ramon Magsaysay (1996) awards, amongst several other literary honours. She was also awarded the Padmasree in 1986, for her activist work amongst dispossessed tribal communities.

In the Name of the Mother : four stories
Intro. and Tr. by Radha Chakravarty

His mother's gone, there's no one to cook hot rice when it's evening . . . No one to say, 'Son, sit near my lap and eat.'

'Ma, from Dusk to Dawn' is the story of a woman from a nomadic tribe, catapulted by her circumstances into the role of a spiritual mother whose so-called mystical powers depend upon her denial of maternal affection towards her own son during daylight hours. 'Sindhubala' describes the anguish of a childless woman forced to play the role of a semi-divine healer called upon to save other people's offspring. 'Jamunabati's Mother' offers a stringent critique of a consumerist society indifferent to those on the margins and 'Giribala' presents the plight of a village woman whose daughters are trafficked by their own father, to pay for the house he dreams of building.

The stories in this volume are linked by a common thread: the idea of the mother. They represent a range of responses to the concept of the maternal, exposing how the traditional deification of motherhood in India often conceals a collective exploitation and attempt to restrict women to their socially prescribed roles while denying them the right to articulate their individual needs and desires. At the same time, they also show the strategies evolved by women to survive and circumvent the repression inflicted on them by social norms. The maternal thus emerges as an ambivalent concept, with both restrictive and emancipatory potential.

'It is these hoodlums and desperadoes, the derelicts and drifters of the Bengali underworld as well as their political patrons and protectors in the police, whom Mahasweta brings to life with her caustic pen in the pages of these stories. As she pillories the respectable representatives of power in our political system who sustain this underworld, she offers us the extraordinary chance to watch a lifelike effigy of the bizarre structure of Indian democracy burning in the background'-Sumanta Banerjee

Unlike most of her works, which focus on tribals and the rural dispossessed, the four stories in this collection are located in the urban and suburban underworld, and form an unusual segment of Mahasweta Devi's oeuvre-'Fisherman' (about Jagat who recovers bodies of young boys from the village tank so that the police can pass them off as cases of drowning), 'Knife' (a tongue-in-cheek account of gang warfare in a suburban town of West Bengal, bordering Bangladesh), 'Body' (about a 'young woman', used by a politician and his cohorts until she makes her own protest against the exploitative Establishment) and 'Killer' (in which Sona alias Akhil, an unemployed middle-class youth, discovers himself after his first 'test' killing).

The indepth introductory essay by veteran cultural historian Sumanta Banerjee, who himself, from his crime reporting past, has a firsthand familiarity with the milieu being depicted, puts the stories in context and goes on to discuss the development of the new criminal underworld in Bengal today.

Romtha : The Selected Works of Mahasweta Devi
Tr. by Pinaki Bhattacharya

'. . . one day, Sharan arrived. His virile body, his golden hair, the look that glowed in his pale eyes, intense, brooding-all of this threw her into a turmoil. Subhadra fell madly in love.'

A beautiful young man condemned to death for a crime of passion; his lover, the beautiful courtesan whom he kills but continues to mourn and yearn for; and a lonely young widow burning with unrequited desire. This love triangle set in twelfth century Bengal, moving between the royal city of Gaur and the forests and rivers of rural Bengal, centres on the fate of the romtha, the branded criminal who awaits his own death. Ironically named Sharan-refuge-there is no refuge for the protagonist of this tale of passion, vengeance and the overwhelming hunger for life.

MAHASWETA DEVI is one of India's foremost writers. Her powerful, satiric fiction has won her recognition in the form of the Sahitya Akademi (1979), Jnanpith (1996) and Ramon Magsaysay (1996) awards, amongst several other literary honours. She was also awarded the Padmasree in 1986, for her activist work amongst dispossessed tribal communities.

PINAKI BHATTACHARYA is a consultant, teacher, writer and actor who lives and works in Calcutta.

'Aranyak, composed between 1937-1939, was based on Bibhutibhushan's long and arduous years in northern Bihar, where he came into contact with a part of the world that, even now, remains unknown to most of us. In Aranyak, Bibhutibhushan weaves visionary poetry with a stark and uncompromising documentation of the day-to-day lives of the dispossessed�subsistence peasants, penurious brahmans, migrant landless labourers and adivasis. To this world the writer brings his own lifelong interest in the natural sciences and astronomy, his study of historical records and surveys and his familiarity with the lore of travel books.

This classic novel will be of much interest to all lovers of literature and to those involved with environment/displacement issues the world over. Aranayak has been translated into many Indian languages. This is the first complete translation of the novel in English.

Balaichand Mukhopadhyay (1899-1979) adopted the pseudonym Banaphool, or wildflower, the name by which he is widely known to the Bengali reading public.

These forty-five pieces by Banaphool are representative of his multifaceted talent. There are plainly whimsical tales, several ghost stories, a few morality fables, some bitterly critical political stories, and a number of stories which examine the consequences of religious belief when taken to levels of bigotry and exclusionism.

Colours of a New Day is a sparkling collection of new writing from across the English speaking world and a powerful expression of support by some of the finest writers of our time for a multiracial South Africa. Short stories, poems and extracts from novel in progress come together to make an anthology which is sometimes funny, often provocative, frequently moving.

'�.The range of the book is exhaustive and includes questions on all aspects of India� a miniature encyclopaedia.'
––The Hindu

'�.There's more information than most quiz books provide. But interestingly presented.'
––Pritish Nandy

Quizzing on television or any other kind of competitive quizzing for that matter has its own imperatives. A quiz book can be free of such compulsions. This book has been planned not so much to find out what and how much you know, but more as an aid to find out about things you may not know of, or might be interested to find out.

This is the story of Pramod, a young Indian, who, like many others, goes to the USA hoping to live a more 'meaningful' life, but is quickly disillusioned and, in desperation, opts for a totally unknown place, which happens to be Basrain Iraq. This is an area of the world known as the 'cradle of human civilization ', the land of Enki, who was an all-powerful Sumerian god-the ancient, mythical equivalent of today's totalitarian dictators. Pramod's existential concerns quickly fade away as he awakens to the political reality around him. Observing the effects of a repressive regime on everyday human life, he begins to think of individual freedom as the most essential value, till subsequent experiences make him feel that the alternative to an iron order is often not freedom, but chaos. It seems to be a 'choice of nightmares'.

Pramod's gradually deepening awareness is a process anyone can easily identify with just as the absence of easy solutions is a condition we have come to accept. A political novel in the broader sense, In the Land of Enki, in a quiet, probing manner, raises more questions than it answers.