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Gandharvi: Life of a Musician

 
Bani Basu (Author) Jayita Sengupta (Translator)
Synopsis

Gandharvi: Life of a Musician, by the Sahitya Akademi Award-winning novelist Bani Basu (and translated by English scholar Jayita Sengupta), tells the story of Apala, a gifted singer of Hindustani classical music. She was born into an old, middle-class family of limited means in north Calcutta. To her family, her music meant little, as it did not fit their idea of ‘respectability’. Her husband ‘chose’ her after hearing her sing at a public concert, yet her marital life proved loveless. Her in-laws were insensitive and exploitative. Her children grew up learning to ignore their mother’s music. Shorn of freedom, love and, above all, music, Apala’s life moved towards a tragic end.

Surrounding Apala’s story are the interlinked lives of other practitioners of music and classical art, like Soham, Mitul, Rameshwar Thakur, Dipali and Shekharan. Their lives intersected with Apala’s in ways that profoundly affected all of them. Written in lilting prose that draws on the idioms of Hindustani classical music, Gandharvi is also musical in its form, where in the end the movement of music and the life story of Apala become one and the same. A thinly veiled depiction of the classical music scene of Calcutta in the 1960s, this modern Bengali classic is also a celebration of the indomitable spirit of music.

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About the authors

Bani Basu

Bani Basu, is a prolific writer her novels have been regularly published by Desh, the premier literary journal of Bengal. She was awarded the Tarashankar Award for Antarghaat. Translated by Jayanti Datta

Jayita Sengupta

Jayita Sengupta teaches English Literature in South Calcutta Girls College under Calcutta University. She completed her Master of Arts from Calcutta University and M.Phil. and Ph.d from J.M.I., New Delhi. She was the recipient of the Charles Wallace Grant in 2000, which enabled her to do research in U.K. and was a British Council Fellow at the Oxford Conference in the same year. Her publications include research articles on post-colonial literatures, critical theory and feminist literatures in journals of repute. Her translations from Bangla to English include, Relationships, short stories by Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay (Kolkata: Writers Workshop, 2003) and In The Other Bengal, a creative travelogue by Ramkumar Mukhopadhyay (New Delhi: Foundation for SAARC Writers and Literature, 2005). She has edited a collection of stories from various Indian languages in English translation, The Muffled Heart: Stories of the Disempowered Male (New Delhi: Rupa, 2005) and translated Bani Basu's Novel, Gandharbi, forthcoming from Katha.

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Bibliographic information

Title Gandharvi: Life of a Musician
Format Softcover
Date published: 15.03.2017
Edition 1st. ed.
Language: English
isbn 9788125064237
length 288p.