Academic literature on the topic 'Kolkata (India) – Fiction'

A filmmaker, a comics writer, a short-story author, and a novelist, Samit Basu is unquestionably a wide-ranging artist and one of the most interesting voices in contemporary Indian speculative fiction. Born in Kolkata in 1979, he earned a degree in Economics before dropping out of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, to pursue a writing career. He furthered his education in London, where he took a course in broadcasting and documentary filmmaking at the University of Westminster. He is now based in India and works between Delhi and Mumbai. He has also penned children’s and young adults’ narratives, as well as being a columnist and essayist.

The edges of Indian cities have become nebulous, their morphology uncertain. They appear to extend for miles in Mumbai and Kolkata as an ‘assorted chaos’ of middle-class residences, slums and bazaars, blurring into smaller provincial towns. The latter seem to distinguish themselves through the sameness of their ‘taste for strident politics, violent films, ostentatious architecture, lewd music, rumour-mongering newspapers and overcooked food’. The stretch between Delhi and Gurgaon is a series of real estate fictions of spurious capital and inadequate infrastructure. Spurred by the liberalization of the economy in the early 1990s and supported by state policies that have lifted many of the restrictions on rent and land use, the structural transformation of Indian metropolises manifests itself on the edges of the city as a struggle between vast slums and corporate developers’ vision of up-scale real estate, between landscapes of rice and wheat fields and expanding airports and golfing greens.

Sharmila Ray is an Indian poet and non-fiction essayist writing in English, anthologised and featured in India and abroad. Her poems, short stories and non-fictional essays have appeared in various national and international magazines and journals since the late 1990s. She is an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of History at City College, Kolkata. She was on the English Board of Sahitya Akademi. She was the editor of The Journal (Poetry Society India) and looked after a column ‘Moving Hand Writes’, Times of India, Kolkata. Currently she is the vice-president of the Intercultural Poetry Performance Library, Kolkata and a Board Member of the Poetry Society India. She writes in English and has authored nine books of poetry (listed below). She also writes on Partition and her articles have been published in Bengal Past and Present and Glimpses of Partition in South Asian Fiction: A Critical Re-Interpretation, edited by Farzana S. Ali. She has conducted poetry workshops organized by British Council, the Poetry Society of India and Sahitya Akademi. She has read her poems at various poetry festivals in India. She had been invited to International Struga Poetry Evenings in Macedonia, where she represented India, and International Poets Meet in Kerala to share the stage with Ben Okri. She was the only poet writing in English from West Bengal to participate in VAK –the first poetry biennial held in New Delhi (2017). Her poems have been translated into Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Manipuri, Slovene, Hebrew and Spanish. Currently she is working on a manuscript of non-fictional essays and poetry.The interview took place at ICCR, Kolkata during our meeting in the month of April 2018.