In a Foreign Land, by Chance

The story refers to the Naxalberi period in India, and is situated in the communist Czechoslovakia of 1974 when the iron curtain was still hanging heavy. The resentment of the Czech people to their ruler’s language drew my attention to the handful who dreamt of writing in English came a decade before Salman Rushdie and the tide of Indian Writing in English touched our shore. The novella was published in 1977 in Krittibas, as a follow up of the novel Ami Anupam, the first novel on the Naxal Movement in West Bengal published in Sharadiya Ananda Bazaar in 1976.

Nabaneeta Dev Sen is one of the prominent Bengali litterateurs of our times with more. A student of Presidency, Jadavpur, Indiana, Harvard, Cambridge, and Berkeley Universites, an outstanding academic, she recently retired as Professor of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Her works reflect her intellections on an amazing array of social, political, and psychological topics, under different genres like poetry, novels, short stories, plays, literary criticism, travelogues, translations, and children’s literature. Her Radhakrishnan Memorial Lecture series at Oxford University, a pioneering work on women’s Ramayanas, has started a new school of studies on Sita across the world. Nabaneeta is the Founder President of Soi, Women Writers Association of West Bengal, President of International PEN, West Bengal, and President of Shishu Sahitya Parishad. She has received national and international awards including Padma Shri, Sahitya Akademi Award, and Bangla Akademi Lifetime Achievement Award.

Soma Das is a freelance editor and translates Bengali fiction and non-fiction literary works into English. Her translations include the works of some renowned Bengali authors like Shankar, Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, Nabaneeta Dev Sen , Gautam Bhattacharya, and Tilottama Majumder. She lives in UK.