Madhupur Bohudoor and Other Stories

Madhupur Bohudoor is one of Sheelabhadra's most celebrated literary works. Through the mythic rediscovery of his native homestead Madhupur, Sheelabhadra has assigned a historic-cultural legitimacy to a locale that has perpetually been in the adjunct of Assam's narrative landscape. As a master story- teller, Sheelabhadra has been amazingly frank in delineating his characters and recreating the lost lore of the place. His stories betray a deep sense of nostalgia, yet they are never sentimental; they are urbane yet not unimpassioned; humorous but not detached. Like all other works, Madhupur Bohudoor is elegantly intimate and abidingly universal.

Sheelabhadra (Rebati Mohan Dutta Choudhury, 1924-2008) writing in Assamese, is one of the most significant writers of our time. He won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1994 for his short-story collection, Madhupur Bohudoor. He was also the recipient of the Bharatiya Bhasha Parishad Award (1990), Assam Publication Board Award (1990), Assam Valley Award (2001) and other literary accolades. His novels and short- stories have been widely translated.

Jyotirmoy Prodhani is a Professor of English at North- Eastern Hill University (NEHU), Shillong. He has been translating Assamese and Rajbanshi literary works into English and Bengali. He is the author of Creativity and Conflict in the Plays of Sam Shepard and his papers have been published in several edited volumes and research journals. He is the editor of a research journal Protocol: Journal of Translation, Creative and Critical Writings.

Among contemporary Assamese writers, Sheelabhadra (Revati Mohan Dutta Choudhury), belongs to a different geo-cultural locale. He draws on the landscape of pastoral disquiet, and keeps going back deep into the recesses of his memories of a home now away from his physical reality. Yet he remains a spirited troubadour traversing the bucolic terrains within, along the rhythms of Madhupur's musings-his reinvented home, refashioned by his imagination.

The locale that Sheelabhadra keeps returning to is his native village, mythically renamed Madhupur. His narrative, deceptively unpretentious, flows easily, forming a universe where history and memory happily dissolve into each other. In Madhupur Bohudoor, stories and characters of the past become part of a mythology and the landscape, that form the backdrop of the tales reaching out to the ontology of his nostalgia. His , creative position is, unlike the claim of a romantic, not defined by any chance encounter with an epiphanic surge; rather, he is a conscious artist, aware of and alert to what he is to write about. At the same time, he can speak of a lost landscape without degenerating into sentimentality, for his strength lies in his ability to tell his stories with dispassionate cerebral grit and urbane humour.

Sheelabhadra, through his narrative, evolves a discourse like that of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, R.K. Narayan or O.V. Vijayan. Here myth, memories, nostalgia, oral history, the lore and the people together form a texture that magically achieves immediacy with our present-day universe.