Panty

By SANGEETA BANDYOPADHYAY / TRanslated from bengali BY ARUNAVA SINHA 

A young woman arrives alone in Kolkota, an unfamiliar city in which she knows no-one, and moves into a guesthouse. Her sense of identity already shaken, when she finds a worn pair of leopard print panties in the otherwise-empty wardrobe she begins to fantasise about their former owner, whose imagined life comes to blur with and overlap her own.

Darkly glamorous and ferociously erotic, Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay’s writing is reminiscent of Katherine Anne Porter’s fever dreams or the surreal paintings of de Chirico. Credited with being ‘the woman who reintroduced hardcore sexuality into Bengali literature’, Bandyopadhyay may be sensational but she is never superficial, with her feminism encompassing debates on religion and nationhood as much as sexuality.

CONTRIBUTORS’ DETAILS

Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay is the author of Panty, Abandon and The Yogini. She has written nine novels and over fifty short stories since her controversial debut Shankini was first published in Bengali in 2006. Also a newspaper columnist and film critic, Sangeeta is based in Kolkata.

Arunava Sinha is the translator of Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay's Panty, Abandon and The Yogini. He has translated over thirty books from Bengali. Winner of the Crossword translation award, for both Sankar’s Chowringhee and Anita Agnihotri’s Seventeen, and of the Muse India translation award for Buddhadeva Bose’s When The Time Is Right, his translation of Chowringhee was also shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

Praise

‘Panty is dreamlike yet visceral, surreal but intimate. In these fragments of life, loneliness, curiosity, defiance and sexuality blend to create an uneasy picture of contemporary India. Divided from themselves, Bandyopadhyay's beguiling creations are as fractured and incomplete as contemporary life itself.’ — Nina Power, author of One Dimensional Woman

‘Vivid, beguiling, passionate, and never less than urgent, with Panty, India has found its Ferrante. You must read this book.’ — Niven Govinden, author of All the Days and Nights 

‘Delightfully subversive.’ — Joanna Walsh, author of Vertigo

‘Bandyopadhyay conjures something illusive, erotic, and gorgeously warped: a fractured revelation of self, of city. But for all of its deft surrealistic flourishes, this fever dream of Kolkata is never less than deadly serious about engaging with contemporary India’s fragmented soul. An auspicious beginning for Tilted Axis.’ — Dustin Illingworth, Lit Hub

More information

• Publication date: 6 June 2016

• Format: B-format paperback (198mm × 129mm)

• Extent: 128pp

• ISBNs: 978-1-911284-00-0 (print) / 978-1-911284-01-7 (ebook)

• Rights held: WEL