No products in the cart.
Return To Shop
₹399.00
The Flaming Flowers anthology, Volume 2, features a diverse collection of Bengali women’s stories, each weaving its own unique narrative thread through life, society, and the human condition. They converge to create a powerful collection that offers keen insights into the different perspectives we have of viewing the world and celebrates the strength, resilience, and indomitable spirit of not only women but humans everywhere.
In stock
| Publisher | The Antonym Collections |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Format | Paperback |
| Pages | 188 |
| ISBN | 978-81-971522-0-7 |
A bilingual writer and translator, Bishnupriya Chowdhuri holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Florida, USA. She completed her Masters in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University, and has Bachelor’s degree in English literature from Burdwan University, India.
She translates short fictions, creative nonfiction, memoirs and experimental-lyrical prose from Bengali to English. She has edited two anthologies of translated short-stories. Her first translated novel “No One as Rano Biswas” came out in 2023. She lives in Pune with her daughter and loves to paint.
Read some of her translation and other works.
Nadia Imam is based in Kolkata and has an English literature degree. Nadia aspires to change the world, one word at a time. She dreams of closing cultural divides through translation so that every tale she touches has a chance to connect, uplift, and leave readers a little more hopeful.
Share this product with others
Shayeri –
The second volume of Flaming Flowers is a collection of short stories by women writers from both sides of the Bengal-Bangladesh border, tracing multiple trajectories of experience, lives, and livelihoods. Nearly all of the stories included in the volume are, for the most part, narratives of unremarkable, seemingly mundane experiences of daily life in the rural and urban spaces across the borders of both the Bengals. Yet, in narrating these seemingly everyday spaces and practices, the writers are also attentive to the extraordinary violence and resilience embedded in the lives of those occupying the margins of caste, class, and gender.
The struggles for individual, economic, and bodily autonomy in these stories often leave us hanging between multiple possibilities- for instance, we do not know what happens to the hapless protagonist in “The Travails of a Kidney-Seller” by Nasima Anis, whether he is saved, betrayed, or erased by a system and its forms of class difference in which human bodies are rendered as commodities. Survival, however, is not a lost cause in these narratives. In Jaya Mitra’s “From the Depth of Darkness,” Santobala, forced into marriage as a child, takes the extreme step to prevent her husband from marrying off her young daughters, and thus from meeting the same fate as herself. There is a sense of agency, or at least the possibilities of it, but there is also loss, nostalgia, and the cruel hope of a young girl engaged in domestic service in an affluent Kolkata household in Mrittika Maity’s story. The reader confronts multiple worlds in the story- moving, as it were, from the safety and material comforts of Kolkata’s affluent households, to the pitch-dark roads of a village in Medinipur where the “White Man’s Christmas” offers no sock filled with presents. At other times, the stories are quietly contemplative, even confessional, drawing on themes of memory and belonging, be it inside the walls of a house by the Adi Ganga that once held life (That House Tr. Suchetona Pal), or in the intimate, gendered spaces of the women’s compartment (Ladies Compartment by Yashodhara Raychaudhuri Tr. Chirayata Chakraborty).
The book is a quiet, sometimes rupturous descent into the ordinary. Sometimes mythical and bizarre, and at other times painfully realistic, enabling (even urging) its readers to read into, and question the tensions and the contradictions that they encounter. Passing on a readerly responsibility, perhaps?