ISBN: 9781911284000
Author: Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay

Translated from Bengali by Arunava Sinha

Publisher Information: Tilted Axis Press

Publication Date: 2016/06/06

Topical Subject Header: Fiction

Panty

C$20.00

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.
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.