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 lives in Kolkata. This is his fourth book of Subimal Misra in translation, the others being The Golden Gandhi Statue from America: Early Stories, Wild Animals Prohibited: Stories, Anti-Stories, and This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar's Tale: Two Anti-Novels. He was a recipient of the Literature Across Frontiers–Charles Wallace India Trust fellowship in creative writing and translation at Aberystwyth University in 2016, the New India Foundation translation fellowship in 2022, the PEN Presents award in 2022, and the Bangla Translation Foundation (Dhaka) prize for the best translated book of 2022.