The Open-Winged Scorpion
Date: 28 March 2025
Time: 5:30 – 7:00 PM
Venue: KCC Library
Join us at the KCC Library for an insightful conversation on the contemporary Bengali author Abul Bashar, known for unflinching and deeply human portrayal of the marginalized lives of Muslim communities in West Bengal.
Highlighting Abul Bashar: The Open-Winged Scorpion and Other Stories published by Seagull Books, this session will have researcher, translator and associate professor of comparative literature Epsita Halder offering her insights alongside editor, graphic designer and co-translator Sunandini Banerjee.
The discussion will be bilingual (Bengali and English).
ABOUT THE BOOK
The ten stories collected in this volume portray the dreams, hopes, fears and anxieties of their protagonists, brutally exposing their human frailties. A wife is forced into her husband’s cross-border trafficking business; a fakir is tortured for not following scriptural norms; a Hindu widow times her evening prayer to the tune of the Muslim azan; a horse-cart driver performs the ritual dance of the horse of Karbala; a part-Muslim part-Hindu man loses his mind over a small plot of farmland ‘owned’ by a dog . . . . Enmeshing religion with sexuality, exploring caste hierarchies, and engaging with the nuances of party politics and conflicting ideologies, Bashar brilliantly mines his land for striking narratives and infuses them with remarkable sensuality, lyrical energy, piercing irony and profound philosophy. At once an archive and a testimony of a marginalized people as well as a fascinating window into a rarely witnessed world, The Open-Winged Scorpion and Other Stories marks the long-awaited and much-needed introduction of a trenchant voice of Bengali literature to a wider, global readership.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Epsita Halder is an associate professor at the Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, Calcutta. She researches and writes on Muslim sonic-visual piety, mediatization and the Shi’i transterritorial networks. She was a visiting fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.
Sunandini Banerjee is Senior Editor and Graphic Designer at Seagull Books. She is also an occasional translator from Bengali to English, and a digital-collage artist. She lives and works in Calcutta.
