This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar's Tale Two Anti-Novels

Subimal Misra anarchist, activist, anti-establishment, experimental anti-writer is a contemporary master, and among India s greatest living writers. This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar s Tale is a novella about trying to write a novella about a tea-estate worker turned Naxalite named Ramayan Chamar, who gets arrested during a worker s strike and is beaten up and killed in custody. But every time the author attempts to write that story, reality intrudes in various forms to create a picture of a nation and society that is broken down and where systemic inequalities are perpetuated by the middle- and upper-classes which are either indifferent or actively malignant. When Colour Is a Warning Sign goes even further in its experimentation, abandoning the barest pretence of narrative and composed entirely as a collage of vignettes and snippets of dialogue, reportage, autobiography, etc. Together these two anti-novels are a direct assault on the vast conspiracy of not seeing that makes us look away from the realities of our socio-political order. In V. Ramaswamy s translation, they make for difficult, challenging but immensely powerful reading.

Subimal Misra (b. 1943) has been called the only anti-establishment writer in Bengali. With his very first collection of stories in 1971, he signalled his departure from conventional narrative fiction. The Golden Gandhi Statue from America (2010) and Wild Animals Prohibited: Stories, Anti-Stories (2015) were also published in Perennial. V. Ramaswamy lives in Kolkata. He has been engaged in a multi-volume project to translate the fiction of Subimal Misra.