Meeting a favourite writer can be exhilarating. I met two young leading Bengali writers within a week. Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay is one of the most talented original writers to have emerged in the Bengali literary scene in recent times. Her personal life is as romantic as her stories. Sangeeta lost her parents at a tender age and was brought up by her maternal uncle. Her first prose writing and her first novel “Sankhini” was written in self-imposed exile. She lived a solitary life in Santiniketan for a year doing nothing but writing and her first novel took shape in the form of Sankhini. Those who have read Sankhini will know how powerful, frank and open her writing is. It had created a huge stir when it was being published as a serialised novel in the Bengali magazine Desh .
There are autobiographical traces in Sankhini. The leading protagonist is a hugely exploited and betrayed woman who is at the same time a victim of her own sexual passions. The double life of men in her life who she thinks love her completely only to discover that they have their own parallel lives and never really belong to her wholly, tears her apart. It is a poignant tale and very much a woman’s tale. How many times have women been victim of such circumstances, every woman probably has a similar story to narrate. Cheated by husbands, lovers, and partners – women are duped again and again. Sankhini brings out the pain of the betrayed woman. It also explores boldly the theme of sexuality from the female perspective. Rarely do we come across women handling such themes so freely. I asked the writer whether the theme evolved spontaneously or was it a deliberately thought out narrative. She said it was a conscious decision. I felt the sexual theme is only one of the vehicles to explore the deep down pain which engulfs a woman’s soul eternally.
Sangeeta’s writings are being translated and hopefully her writings will touch many more lives.
