Prasenjit Gupta

prasenjitgupta.com

welcome to guptobari,

prasenjit gupta’s home page.

Prasenjit is a graduate of the
University of Delhi, IIM Kolkata,
and the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
A former Fulbright scholar,
he writes fiction in English
and translates fiction and poetry
from Hindi and Bengali into English.

Prasenjit's work as a translator appears
in Indian Errant, a collection of stories
by Nirmal Verma, a leading writer
who was awarded the Gyanpeeth
and the Padma Bhushan.

The stories in Indian Errant deal with the
themes of identity, dislocation, and exile.
The hardcover book contains a substantial
critical introduction by the translator and
also includes the stories in the original Hindi
in addition to the translations. The paperback
edition contains a brief introduction and
the stories in translation.

"To the subjects of exile, loss, and displacement,
Nirmal Verma brings a uniquely tender sensibility
as well as a vision that is profoundly informed
by the specificities of a wider historical experience.

"This is a major new collection from one of the
contemporary world's finest writers."

Amitav Ghosh

Prasenjit's collection of short fiction,
A Brown Man and Other Stories, arose
out of his experience of many years as a brown man
in a predominantly white world: an experience
often leading to profound changes
in character and outlook.

These are stories about immigrants, people finding
their place in a new country. The characters
in these stories survive—they live and laugh
and grieve and remember—always in between:
suspended between two continents,
two language and cultures, two different lives.

Sometimes this crossing of cultures results
in positive changes, but often it also brings
the knowledge that life in another place
is challenging in many ways. How different people
deal with these challenges in their different ways
is the subject of these beautifully crafted stories.

These stories will fascinate those who left home
as well as those who stayed.

"I find extremely striking and emotionally rich the stories
in Prasenjit Gupta's book A Brown Man. In one unaffected tale
after another, stark motifs develop into a sort of living terrain
that I can only pull myself from with great force.
Through some mysterious prestidigitation,
Gupta manages to fill the few pages of a short story
with the depth of novels.

"Not all the stories are tragic, but even the strangely moving optimism
of 'Supriya at Fifty' leaves me feeling fully immersed
in a life yet filled with an enervating compassion.
To name another story, 'Partho's Home' may be the only story
I've read six times, and I've left it with tears
in my cynical eyes more than once.
. . . Highest recommendation."

Rick Harsch, author of the Driftless Zone trilogy

These books are available in the U.S. from the Parabaas.com bookstore.

Some examples of Prasenjit's work:

A translation of a Bengali short story by Rabindranath Tagore

A translation of a Hindi short story by Nirmal Verma

A translation of a Bengali poem by Sukumar Ray

A short story