In Sesher Kbaita, Rabindranath\n Tagore knocks away social and familial props just to set a young man and a\n woman talking to one another. Tagore maps the emotional evolution through a\n series of scintillating conversations between the two protagonists, Amit Rai\n and Labanyalata. Seshar Kabita has many layers, it is an unusual love story\n on the surface, but the deeper one moves into the story, one realizes that\n Tagore is subtly slipping in other elements as well. Is love important in\n marriage? Does marriage leave space, physical and mental, for both the\n partners? And then there is Tagore's awareness of the Bengali language\n itself, with which he plays elaborate language games. The startlingly\n contemporaneous engagement with issues of romantic love and the responsibilities\n and everydayness of marriage is gripping there may be nods of agreement or\n skeptical headshakes, but to avoid reflection on the questions Tagore raises\n is impossible.
Somdatta Mandal is Professor and Head of English at the Department of English and Other Modern European Languages, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. Having a teaching career that spans 32 years, she has held several administrative posts in the university. Paper-setter, examiner and adjudicator for doctoral dissertations across several universities in India and the SAARC nations, she has lectured widely in national and international fora. A recipient of several prestigious international fellowships and awards from the Fulbright Foundation, Charles Wallace Trust, Rockefeller Foundation, Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute and Sahitya Akademi, her areas of interest are American literature, contemporary fiction, film and culture studies, diaspora studies and translation. She has published three books, five volumes of translation, edited and co-edited 22 books, published above 90 research articles in national and international journals and anthologies. Somdatta Mandal has published translations of several travel narratives, among which are Krishnabhabini Das?s A Bengali Lady in England (2015); Wanderlust: Travels of the Tagore Family (2014); Durgabati Ghose?s The Westward Traveller (2010) and Hariprabha Takeda?s The Journey of a Bengali Lady to Japan and Other Essays (2017).
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