Soulful Tales - By Kuntala Sengupta and Sanghita Sanyal

Translation of Six Short Stories of Rabindranath Tagore

Soulful Tales is a collection of translations of six of Rabindranath Tagore’s seminal short-stories that have one woman in the centrality of human struggle, against a greater structure of power. The woman would be a figure standing alone against the normative behavioural pattern that is pre-conceived and standardised as ‘societal’ and is expected out of them as individuals or the fairer sex, usually always meant to be oppressed, suppressed and depressed.

The course of life that each of the women protagonists of this collection traverses, ends either in death or in separation from the mainstream, referring to the final loss that the woman incurs in her life, as an integral part of collective living. As an individual, they come to the scaffold as transgressors, out-stepping what society has earlier sensitised them with. Tagore’s subtle art of narration strikes a chord in each story that pushes the ambit further for these women, and very skilfully brings out the conditions that had in reality victimised them, before they could attempt to subvert the undue pressure. In this strength they rightfully become soulful tales of Bengal.