Brahma's Weapon: Stories

Each of the twenty-one stories in Brahma’s Weapon, carefully selected from the great writer Ashapurna Debi’s extensive oeuvre and brilliantly translated from Bengali, highlights the tensions inherent in a society of close-knit and interdependent families. Focusing on the charged relationships between men and women, Ashapurna illuminates every facet of her heroes’ lives with the light of her intellect, insight, and compassion. And her hero is the Bengali woman, in many ways the everywoman of a changing world, powerless yet powerful, challenged at every turn yet challenging the world of men, fighting back, spirited, indomitable.

In “Poddolota’s Dream,” the title character returns triumphant and magnanimous to the scene of a harrowing childhood; it is only at the very end of the story that we find out exactly where her triumph lies. In “Glass Beads Diamonds,” a woman attends a wedding reception at her estranged in-laws’, bearing a gift for the bride; and such is the author’s skill that without being told we know how much that gift has cost the giver. In “Grieving for Oneself,” told from a man’s point of view, a midnight scare shows the protagonist, immobile in his bed, precisely how he fits into his world, this world he’s worked his life to build. It is, as in so many of Ashapurna’s stories, a compelling insight, natural and shocking, terrible and human.

Ashapurna is one of those rare writers able to render the voice of an entire culture, to capture its deepest and most abiding traditions indelibly, as also its revealing moments; to bring forth an entire society fully formed and unforgettable. Her created world is Bengal, her creature the Bengali woman within the Bengali family, her creation all the ebb and flow of the Bengali woman’s universe, a world cartwheeling through the stars, dancing among the eternal truths. Her hero is this woman, this middle-class warrior, among her husband and children, among her sisters and neighbors, tight in this web of attachment, utterly indispensable yet utterly alone, reaching for understanding, for sustenance. But she is the provider, not the provided for. She is the sustainer, not the sustained.

The characters at the center of these stories pay a price for their knowledge; but it is the price we all pay, as we live our lives, in measures of disappointment, grief, anger—lit by moments of laughter and connection. It is Ashapurna’s triumph, her gift of diamonds to the reader, that she shows us all of this in the compressed spaces of these stories. Reading Ashapurna, we come away understanding, sympathetic, illumined—not only about her characters but also about ourselves.

These translations by the critically acclaimed translator Prasenjit Gupta seek to preserve the flavor of the original Bengali as much as possible, to carry across the meanings and metaphors of Ashapurna’s world. The translator has avoided the too-familiar path of hackneyed English idiom in order to create an English that serves the Bengali writer and the Bengali characters, a fresh new dialect that gives the reader an insight into the Bengali language and, since language is shaped by and shaper of tradition, into Bengali culture. Translations from Bengali—and perhaps from any language—have seldom been so effective and powerful; this collection is a glorious example of the translator’s art.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s superbly thoughtful introduction to the collection prepares the reader for the grand sweep of the stories, for the universal verities embedded within their narrow domestic walls. This well-researched essay by the accomplished writer and scholar acquaints the reader with the time and place of these tales and presents to the English-speaking world a literary genius, admired for decades in her own country but only now being given her rightful place in the pantheon of world literature.

Ashapurna Debi (1909–95) was born into a conservative Calcutta family. She was married early and plunged into the domestic life that she soon began to depict masterfully in her work; her writing career extended more than seventy years.

Ashapurna’s writings express perfectly the grace and dignity of women and men of the middle class. Her work remains unparalleled in its realism, its acuity, its depth of perception and compassion; and her output was prodigious, with dozens of novels, short-story collections, and children’s books. Her most popular novels were the trilogy of Pratham Pratishruti, Subarnalata, and Bakulkatha, which spanned the period from the ’twenties, before Independence, to the ’sixties, and in which she led the way in tackling universal women’s issues in their Bengali manifestations.

Ashapurna Debi’s work has been repeatedly honored with significant awards at the regional and national levels. In 1978 her work was recognized with India’s highest literary honor, the Gyanpeeth Award, and in 1994 she was chosen a Fellow of the Sahitya Akademi. Ashapurna Debi is widely regarded as one of the greatest Indian writers of the twentieth century.

Prasenjit Gupta is the author of A Brown Man and Other Stories and the children’s novel To the Blue King’s Castle as well as a critically acclaimed collection of stories translated from Hindi, Indian Errant: Short Stories by Nirmal Verma. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a former Fulbright scholar, he writes fiction in English and translates fiction and poetry from Hindi and Bengali into English. He was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for translating the stories in Brahma’s Weapon.

Jhumpa Lahiri is the author of the new novel The Lowland. She was born in London and raised in Rhode Island. Her debut, bestselling collection, Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was translated into twenty-nine languages. Her first novel, The Namesake, was a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. Her second collection, Unaccustomed Earth, was a #1 New York Times bestseller and named a best book of the year by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, among others. Lahiri was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002 and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012.