Manjul Bajaj, Outlook Magazine, 14 February 2014 | Read the full review here >>
Witchcraft and tribal rituals loop through Santhal lives in a Jharkhand doctor’s richly textured debut novel.
Hansda Sowendra Shekhar’s debut novel The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey is a loving and careful recounting of the Santhal way of life. Spanning several decades and four generations in the lives of the Hansda clan in the East Singhbhum district of Jharkhand, the novel centres on the theme of dahni-bidya, or witchcraft, and traces the lives of the increasingly dysfunctional descendants of Somai-haram, the majhi of Kadamdihi village. It is remarkable that the author, a doctor working for the Jharkhand government, has not let his training interfere with or add scepticism to this story about the paranormal. […]
The Rupi Baskey of the title is the wife of Putki’s older son Sido, and her mysterious ailment is seemingly the work of Sido’s colleague’s wife, Gurubari, another dahni. The rest of the narrative focuses on Rupi’s helplessness in the face of a debilitating condition which responds to no treatment and the slow crumbling of a once illustrious family.
The triumph of the novel lies in its vivid and authentic detailing of the physical and cultural landscape of the region. […]
The prose is dense with words from the Santhali language and not easy to navigate but this adds texture and flavour to the story, making the text earthy in places, musical in others. Care has been taken to weave in the meaning in English within the sentence or paragraph. […]
The characters, dramatically drawn and strangely beautiful, stand out like a spectacular mural but don’t yield to a deeper probing. […]
A very promising debut, but it leaves the reader wishing for more. […]
Source: Dark Arts From Singhbhum | Manjul Bajaj
Address : http://www.outlookindia.com/article/Dark-Arts-From-Singhbhum/289433
Date Visited: Mon Mar 09 2015 17:04:57 GMT+0100 (CET)
ANUMEHA YADAV, The Hindu, November 8, 2014
Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s novel, The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey, is remarkable for a deep and masterful observation of lives and descriptions of a tribal village. The author, a doctor with the government of Jharkhand, lives in Pakur along the border with West Bengal. With the book being shortlisted for The Hindu Prize 2014, Shekhar talks about how his work as a doctor influences his writing. […]
The Santhal village I have shown in my novel is how I see my village Kishoripur — where I revised Rupi Baskey — and my hometown, Ghatsila — where I wrote the book — are just 40 km apart. We were always at our village every 10-15 days. Sometimes I would be at Kishoripur in the morning and return to Ghatsila in the evening. There was no question of being close or distant here. I was both. What I have written in Rupi Baskey is from my own life. […]
While writing Rupi Baskey, though, I felt neither a doctor nor a writer. I used my experience as a doctor in writing the childbirth scene in Chapter 1, but never tried to consciously put my knowledge of medical sciences into the book. […]
Source: ‘Doctors see things, not just ailments’ – The Hindu
Address : http://www.thehindu.com/features/magazine/writer-hansda-sowvendra-shekar-talks-to-anumeha-yadav/article6574437.ece
Date Visited: Mon Mar 09 2015 17:28:29 GMT+0100 (CET)
ESTHER ELIAS, The Hindu, January 16, 2015
Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar wrote The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey in the dead of the night, from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m, between May and October 2011, while his family was fast asleep, for they had no clue he was writing a book. […]
Back then, a doctor at Jamshedpur’s medical college, Hansda spent his time writing all night, mentally taking notes while he observed patients all day, saving stray sentences and ideas in the SMS drafts folder of his mobile phone during his 40-km commute to Jamshedpur each day, only to come home and revise his draft by midnight. Rupi Baskey is broadly a story Hansda had heard spoken of often by his parents and relatives in his village among the Santhal community in Jharkhand. “Before I even began telling this story, I knew it through and through, down to the chapters I would write, for the retellings had fictionalised the tale in my head over a long time,” says Hansda. Each night, he strove to write a thousand words, and often went to sleep “guilty and defeated” if he didn’t, but all along Hansda had one aim — to not write of the Santhals as other novels occasionally had — as backdrops to greater events. “I was reading Alice Walker’s A Colour Purple while writing Rupi Baskey, and that’s the tone I wanted for the Santhals — an in-your-face telling of their tale.”
Source: And a book is born – The Hindu
Address : http://www.thehindu.com/features/lit-for-life/and-a-book-is-born/article6793951.ece
Date Visited: Mon Mar 09 2015 17:22:15 GMT+0100 (CET)
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- For details on Hansda Sowendra Shekhar’s book, see worldcat.org >>
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