1st Edition

Niranjan Mondal’s A Tale of High and Low Tides Dalit Literature from Bangla

Edited By Sucheta Bhattacharya Copyright 2025
172 Pages 4 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge India

172 Pages 4 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge India

Niranjan Mondal is one of the most prolific writers of Dalit literature in Bangla known for his immersive fictions that root themselves in the lives of people from the Sundarbans, the mangrove forest in east India. This volume of the translation of his novel, A Tale of High and Low Tides (Ujaan Bhatir Kathokata) , along with critical essays and an interview of the author, introduces his work to... Read more

Introduction 1. A Tale of High and Low Tides 2. Historicizing Marginal Ecology: Roots and Narrative, the Dynamics of the Traditional Fishing Mechanism through the ‘Popular Prism’ of the Sundarbans 3. Village Gods and the Dance of Death in the Sundarbans 4. The Relentless Tide of History: Human Ecology in A Tale of High and Low Tides 5. Interview with Niranjan Mondal

Biography

Niranjan Mondal, the author of Ujaan Bhatir Kathokata, was born in the village Kochukhali, adjacent to the Sundarbans, in 1955. He used to work in a nationalized bank in India, but his passion has been literature. He has published several volumes of poetry including Ofuran Aranyaneel (1988) and Bishonno Canvas (2014). A collected volume of his short stories has been published with the title Badaboner Padaboli. He lives and breathes the history, nature, anthropology, and ecology of the Sundarbans.

Sucheta Bhattacharya the translator as well as editor of this volume is currently Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. Her research interest includes mid-nineteenth century English and Bangla literature, with focus on the ‘marginalized’ authors and texts. She is also a keen translator and has contributed to several translation anthologies, both fiction and non-fiction. She is a co-editor of the series ‘Studies in Comparative Literature’ published by Jadavpur University Department of Comparative Literature and Orient-Blackswan. She is also currently editing a volume of translations of Bangla short stories focusing on Indo-Bangladesh border experiences as part of the same series, to be published in 2025.