The Virgin Fish of Babughat: Babughater Kumari Maachh

By Lokenath Bhattacharya and Bhattacharya Lokenath Bhattacharya

This is the first English translation of Bhattacharya's novel. Set in a detention camp where men and women are divested of their clothes and individual identities but provided with an array of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195665775
• ISBN13: 9780195665772
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 5.8" x 0.7" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

A great work of fiction

Lokenath Bhatcharya a great author but didn't get his due recognition in the Bengali literary circle. This is only works of his that was translated in Bangla. Most of the other stuff was transtated in French. I have read the Bangla version as well. This is a great work, haven't read antything like this in Bangla before. The translation is pretty amazing as well. Parts of it reminded me of Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, which was written almost twenty some years after Virgin Fish. What I really liked was his unorthodox narrative style. The narrator digresses a lot (couple times it was bit annoying), but somehow he doesn't loose you and always comes back to the point and finishes it nicely. The story was bit disturbing, but the style made it readable. It doesn't have a happy ending, the prisoners don't get out: "What happens at the end of the novel -- however feeble, is a protest worthy of human beings. It does not achieve freedom -- in any case freedom might forever be an elusive goal -- but the aspiration for freedom gets articulated" (Introduction, xii). Mr. Bhattacharya was a student of Sanskirt in Santiniketan. After studying French for a while, he attended University of Paris. He translated several works of Rimbaud in Bangla. A literary critic had to say this about his work: "The literary world of Kolkata is still confined to the kennel of English. When Indians, specially Bengalis, write novels in English, the literary and journalistic community go overboard in their excitement, greedily mentioning even the amount of money they earn. But when a Bengali writer, living in France, enriched by the literary culture of that language still continues to write in Bangla, we do not bother to think about him. Yet, when he gets translated in French, the French critics discuss his work seriously. Such is the extent of our colonial slavery." Unfortunately, Lokenath Bhattacharya was killed in a car accident in Egypt in 2001.