Author: Kaliprasanna Sinha
Translator(s)/ Editors(s): Swarup Roy
Publisher: Permanent Black
Year: 2008
Language: English
Pages: 196
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8178241986
Description
Hootum Pyanchar Naksha (literally ‘Sketches by Hootum the Owl’), a set of satirical portraits in Bengali of ordinary life in nineteenth-century Calcutta, is so popular that it has never been out of print since its publication in 1862. This it it’s first ever translation.
The author of the sketches, Kaliprasanna Sinha, ran several literary journals, wrote play, donated generously to charities, translated the Mahabharata, and died in debt at the age of thirty.
The Observant Owl is his bawdy, scatological, joyously irreverent portrait of the city he lived in. The writing is so vivid that there is within these pages a sense of walking through a nineteenth-century city as fishwives call out their wares, housewives hurry to the river for baths, thieves pick pockets, and carriages creak through slush and rotting banana peel carting passengers high on ganja.
The translator, Swarup Roy, is Reader in English at Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandir, Belur Math, West Bengal. His areas of interest are postcolonial studies and translation studies.
COMMENTS:
Hootum Pyanchar Naksha is utterly urban in style and spirit. The range of characters one encounters in the sketches encompasses an astonishing variety of urban classes, occupations and ethnic group from the old to the new rich, lawyers to clerks, moneylenders to peddlers, devotees to drunkards, fishwives to prostitutes. Often flippant, but sometimes profound, evoking raucous laughter but at times bitter sweet irony, I think, is the predominant rhetorical style of Hootum's sketches.
- Partha Chatterjee
Contents
List of Illustrations
Foreword by PARTHA CHATTERJEE
Translator’s Preface
A Word by Way of Introduction
Calcutta’s Charak Festival
Calcutta’s Community Pujas
Gossip and Rumours
Charlatanry
Babu Padmalochan Dutta, Alias ‘Chance Avatar’
Snanayatra at Mahesh
Rathayatra
Durga puja
Ramlila
The Railways
Glossary