<p>Amartya Sen has shown that the Great Bengal Famine of 1943, when millions of people died, was also an example of a `man-made famine', caused by the War time economy in India under the British Raj. Recent studies directly implicate Churchill, as referenced recently by Shashi Tharoor in an article (The Washington Post, March 10 2018). This famine forms the backdrop for the novel, a literary fiction, Ashani Sanket, written contemporaneously by the greatest portrayer of rural Bengal, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay.Through the eyes of Ananga, her husband Gangacharan and their compatriots, the author has drawn with deep sympathy their daily lives in a remote village as they face with utter bewilderment the onset of the famine--the distant thunder. Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay is an iconic and beloved Bengali writer of the twentieth century. His novels Pather Panchali (`Song of the Road') and Aparajito (`The Unvanquished') were made into the famous `Apu Trilogy¿ by Satyajit Ray, another iconic movie director (Life-time Oscar, 1992). Ray also made a movie based on this novel Ashani Sanket (`Distant Thunder') which conquered the Golden Bear in Berlin Film Festival and is claimed by New York Timesas being one of the "1000 best movies ever made". The translator, Dr. Chhanda Chattopadhyay Bewtra is Emerita Professor at Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska, Dr. Bewtra has published in both English and Bengali. Her other translations include novels by Nabaneeta Dev Sen and Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay--both winners of the Sahitya Akademi Award, given by the government of India.</p>

Distant Thunder

Literature & Fiction

Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay

Literary

Parabaas

<p>This book contains 35 poems of Jibanananda Das, translated into English from the original Bangla by Clinton B. Seely. It also includes a long introduction by Seely. Jibanananda Das, born in 1899 in the small town of Barisal north of Sunderbans, is one of the most quoted poets in both Bangladesh and West Bengal. Early in his life, he went off to Calcutta, the literary and political hub of the Bengali world, first to attend college and then to teach English literature at Calcutta's City College. Eventually, in 1930s, Das returned to his beloved Barisal, reaching his creative peak and writing some of his best poems. He developed his own very idiosyncratic style, a style no one could ever imitate but one that is now recognized as the epitome of what is called post-Tagorian modernism. Professor Emeritus of South Asian Languages and Civilization at the University of Chicago, Clinton B. Seely taught literature and the Bangla language for thirty-five years. His books include translations of Buddhadeva Bose's novel Rain through the Night; and of Michael Madhusudan Datta's epic poem, The Slaying of Meghanada: A Ramayana from Colonial Bengal, which received the A. K. Ramanujan Book Prize for Translation, awarded by the South Asian Council of the Association of Asian Studies, and Barisal and Beyond: Essays on Bangla Literature. He is also the author of A Poet Apart: A Literary Biography of the Bengali Poet Jibanananda Das (1899- 1954) which was honored with the "Ashoke Kumar Sarkar" Ananda Prize in 1993. The book also contains the Bangla originals, and detailed notes on translation.</p>

The Scent of Sunlight Poems by Jibanananda Das

Jibanananda Das

Poetry

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