At the launch of her debut collection of short stories, The Second Wife and Other Stories, at the Rising Asia Literary Circle, author Nandini C. Sen spoke feelingly about why her collection of short stories featured Bengal and more specifically, Calcutta. The event was curated and anchored by professor and author Julie Banerjee Mehta. Sen, a professor at Delhi University, revealed that she had been a ‘probashi Bangali’ but her roots with the city were strong enough for her to say, “Calcutta is home.”
Nandini Sen
“It’s a place I visited once a year but it remained with me and has grown within me — the people, the cultural spaces, the crowds, the Rabindrasangeet, the intimate spaces where discrimination happens and cries out to be resolved, has been etched in my mind and that is what has given birth to these stories.”
Summarising the book, Mehta said: “An exploration of brutality and subjecthood of women, the 11 stories are deeply investigative of not just ways of how virtually powerless women from middle and lower-middle classes have risen up against the horrors of patriarchy, but also the collection is a celebration of how talented young people on the margins, such as people from the LGBTQ+ community, have broken ceilings to assert their identity.”
Explaining how the stories were born, Nandini said, “I was very young but I realised that women were not treated well within society. It wasn’t always men who discriminated against women but it was quite often that women internalised patriarchy and became their own worst enemy. In order for the woman to progress in society, she needs to be educated, have agency, and a circle of women around her holding her up. The circle of sisterhood is extremely important for a woman’s development.”
A stimulating discussion was sparked by the panellists where professor Sanjukta Das Gupta, former HoD of English and dean of the Faculty of Arts at Calcutta University, said, “Though written in English most of the stories are deeply rooted in the tradition and customs that are inherent in Bengali culture. They read like Bangla stories written in English. While some of the stories are strongly feminist, others are women-centric. In fact, gender and class are foregrounded and intermeshed in the texts. Remarkable attributes of the stories are their readability, lucidity, spontaneous grace, unpretentiousness, and sincerity.”
Panelist Suddhadeep Mukherjee, doctoral scholar at Rutgers University, said, “What I find particularly of interest in Nandini’s collection is both perhaps an advantage and a disadvantage to the stories. The author is very much aware of her location — not just her geographical location, but also of the locations of her class and language. All the stories are about the middle class, often the upper middle class. Nandini seems to have no intention to appropriate the voice of the subaltern women. They are always seen, read, and written about, from the lens of the third person. While this may seem ethical at first, the unresolved bond of intimacy (an incomplete decentering) immediately and urgently questions the ethical. No doubt, the narrator and the mother in the Thammi story, respond to the crisis of the subaltern, but they end up becoming a pair of NGO-driven saviours — the good women whose complexities of intimacy remain hidden and perhaps lost in the lucidity of the story’s language.”
From the audience, writer Anasuya Pal made all note that there was a sad absence of the feminist man, or supportive men, in the stories. “There are many supportive fathers and male characters who could have been more than just the backdrop but were not given a chance. Also, there’s an absence of millennial women, who certainly don’t think that they need a male ‘protector’ throughout their lives.”
Anju Munshi, an adolescent counsellor and writer, added, “For me to have come from the North, from Kashmir to Bengal some 30-odd years back, was a moment of liberation, to be part of a place where women rejoiced in being women. An absence of patriarchal expectation made the climate healthy, and the air mostly clean of male prejudices. Didi and boudi were words of endearment and dignity.” She concluded with: “With Professor Nandini’s stories that revolved around simple yet strong women, this feminist consciousness came alive once again, where these women had no fear of any finger pointing at them.”
Rising Asia Foundation chairperson Harish C. Mehta declared Nandini’s book as the first event of the Rising Asia Literary Circle at the Lake Temple Road art gallery Chobi-o-Ghor. “We are encouraging a conversation between authors and readers in accessible spaces,” he added.