Aruna Chakravarti
Biography of Aruna Chakravarti :
Aruna Chakravarti is a noted academic, writer and translator. Prominent among her nine published works are her translations of Saratchandra Chattopadhyay’s Srikanta and Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Those Days and its sequel First Light. She is the recipient of the Vaitalik Award, the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award and the Sarat Puraskar. Her first novel The Inheritors was short listed for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2004. The Way Home was published in 2006 and Secret Spaces in 2009.
Aruna’s academic record has been a distinguished one. She took her Master’s and PhD degrees in English literature from Delhi University. Her doctoral dissertation on Ruth Prawer Jhabvala being described as a ‘valuable contribution to Anglo-Indian studies’, by one of her examiners. She then taught in Delhi University for many years and retired as the principal of Janki Devi Memorial College.
Achievement’s galore
Aruna Chakravarti’s translation of Srikanta fetched her the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award. Those Days, a translation of Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Sei Samai, published by Penguin Books India in 1997, received rave reviews and became a bestseller. This was followed in 2001 by First Light, a sequel to Those Days.
She has also written a novel, The Inheritors (2004), and has edited a volume of Bengali short stories, The Way Home (2006) followed by Secret Spaces (2009).
The protagonists of this collection of short stories are strong women, generally without men, who scheme to conceal family secrets and shield the vulnerable. In some of the stories the very houses that the characters live in become the site as well as the metaphor for the hidden spaces of the human mind.
The Way Home
The Way Home brings together in one volume 14 stories representing contemporary Bengali short fiction. Some of writers showcased here include—Bibhuti Bhushan Bandopadhyay, Rajshekhar Basu, Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay and Ashapurna Devi. This collection has stories on various human emotions - greed, gluttony, violence and revenge. Sensitively translated, the stories in The Way Home effortlessly convey the lyricism and imagery of the original.
From the ritual-bound household of an orthodox scholar in a small village in Bengal in 1897 to Germany and Mumbai at the turn of the new millennium, The Inheritors traces the lives of members of a family residing in different eras and countries. Here Chakravarti uses history, myth, religion, folklore and rituals in abundance to reflect upon what happens in a society caught on the cusp of conservatism and modernity.