– Sharmila Tagore, Aruna Chakravarti, Arunava Sinha and Amit Chaudhuri in conversation with Malashri Lal
Author and critic, Malashri Lal moderated this tribute to Sunil Gangopadhyay, which began with Sharmila Tagore’s reading of Those Days, a translation of Gangopadhyay’s book, Shei Shomoy. Tagore said that this was her first trip to the DSC Jaipur Literature Fest and was grateful to be present in this event, since she admired Sunil Da for his strong voice of reason during the time of turbulence amongst the naxals, and his use of images in his work made the reader really engage with the sheer intensity of it. Tagore read from Those Days, a novel about a woman ‘who hadn’t entered the portals of Hindu College before’ and whose son was being denied admission into the college on account of being a sex worker’s son. She talked about how Gangopadhyay distanced himself from the content and critiqued it himself. She found it riveting that what he had written in the times of the Bengali renaissance holds true even now in terms of gender discrimination. Translator of Shei Shomoy, Aruna Chakravati identified Gangopadhyay as Rabindranath Tagore’s literary successor on the basis of ‘prolificacy of work’ as well as ‘exploration of genres’. She said she found humor to be the most difficult to translate since it is ‘deeply entrenched in one’s culture’. Having known Gangopadhyay on literary panels, poet and author Amit Chaudhuri talked of the images of birds, flowers, constellations, and the pictures of life that abound in his writings. Author and translator, Arunava Sinha spoke from experience about how college students passed of Ganguly’s poetry as their own. ‘Gangopadhyay showed people an alternate way of living’ because he was part of an exciting generation of people who believed in the ‘possibilities of change’. The panel commemorated the life and death of Sunil Gangopadhyay with a film that visibly moved the audience with nostalgia and memories.
Jaipur Literature Festival 