Three Sides of Life

This selection of fifteen stories by five exceptional Bengali women writers looks at the lives of women who are neither stars nor martyrs in the feminist cause. They are voices, individual and particular, of women leading their everyday lives, nursing their joys and sorrows. These women write out of their bodies and the intimate spaces around them; they write the history and mathematics of their lives; they compose a deeper reality; they give us an atmosphere, a sky, and a house with many doorways helping us to reclaim their original energy and wonderful clarity. The manushi created by the woman writer speaks in several voices and addresses issues, emotional and psychological, that affect their lives and control their decisions: from the low-caste woman of Mahasweta Devi's story to the teenage immigrant in America of Nabaneeta Dev Sen's, from the girl child battling humiliation in Bani Basu's to the victim of marital exploitation in Ashapurna Devi's, and the women of the old-age home in Suchitra Bhattacharya's tale. These women form a small strong chorus, which testifies that women's writing is more than a literary act-it is imagining a world into being. It is through the battles that they must fight daily that the women explore their emotional, social, and economic selfhood. The stories, at once linear and circular, offer fewer closures than the work of male writers, and carry with them the echoes of loss. Writers include Ashapurna Devi (1909-1995), winner of the Rabindra Award from Calcutta University and the Bharatiya Jnanpith, has written over 150 novels and several volumes of short stories. Mahasweta Devi (1926- ), is the recipient of every major social and literary award, such as the Padmashree, the Sahitya Akademi, the Jnanpith, and the Ramon Magsaysay. Eminent scholar, teacher, poetess, critic, short story writer and novelist, Nabaneeta Dev Sen (1938- ), is at the helm of literary and research activity in Bengali literary circles today, and is the recipient of the Rabindra Award, the Sahitya Akademi, and the Jnanpith Awards. She is a visiting lecturer in several foreign universities including Harvard and Oxford. Bani Basu (1939- ), a student of English Literature and a lecturer in a women's college, began writing as a student. She has received awards such as Shiromoni Puraskar and Ananda Puraskar. Suchitra Bhattacharya (1950- ), has several collections of short stories to her credit and is the recipient of the Nanjungud Thirumalamba award for the best woman writer of the year, as well as the Katha Prize.