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An anthology of translated Bengali women’s short fiction. Flaming Flowers Vol 2 offers keen insight into life, society, and the strength of the human spirit.
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| Publisher | The Antonym Collections |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Format | Paperback |
| Pages | 188 |
| ISBN | 978-81-971522-0-7 |
Flaming Flowers, Volume 2 gathers a luminous and unflinching collection of short stories by women writing in Bengali, brought into English by a dedicated circle of translators. Each story is its own thread—drawn from the textures of everyday life, the quiet violences of society, and the deep, often unspoken interior worlds of its characters—and together they weave a tapestry that is at once intimate and expansive.
These are stories that refuse to look away. A woman on a crowded Dhaka bus watches a boy beaten by a mob and is forced to confront the limits of her own sympathy. A desperate man takes out posters to sell his kidney, narrating his ruin with grim, disarming humour. Across the anthology, characters move through migration and exile, faith and disillusionment, tenderness and cruelty—and through it all runs an insistence on dignity, on the irreducible fact of being human.
Featuring the voices of Nasima Anis, Ahana Biswas, Mrittika Maity, Jaya Mitra, Shahnaz Munni, Yashodhara Raychaudhuri, and Ishrat Tania, with translations by Rituparna Mukherjee, Padmakali Kar, Aritrik Dutta Chaudhury, and others.
What emerges is more than a showcase of women’s writing. It is a meditation on resilience—on the strength it takes simply to endure, to witness, and to remain whole in a world that so often demands otherwise. Flaming Flowers, Vol II offers readers keen insight into the many ways we see and survive the world, celebrating the indomitable spirit not only of women, but of humans everywhere.
A vital addition to any collection of translated literature, contemporary South Asian fiction, or women’s writing.
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.
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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?