Debi’s distinct perspective

While dizzying in quantity, the bulk of Debi’s short stories adheres to a single subject: private life within the homes of Calcutta

Ashapurna Debi, one of the most celebrated, admired, and prolific Bengali writers of the twentieth century, is virtually unknown to readers outside India. Her first short story was published in 1936, when she was twenty-seven years old; in the course of her lifetime she published over one hundred novels and innumerable works of short fiction.

Her stories were gathered into dozens of collections and were regularly featured in Bengali literary magazines for over fifty years. She was the recipient of several prestigious awards, including a Gold Medal from Calcutta University in 1963, a Tagore Award in 1966, a Golden Lotus Award from the Indian government in 1976, and the Jnanpith Award — India’s most coveted literary prize – also in 1976. In 1994, she was selected as a Fellow by Calcutta's highly distinguished Sahitya Bharati Academy. She held honorary degrees from three Indian universities.

While dizzying in quantity, the bulk of Debi’s short stories adheres to a single subject: private life within the homes of Calcutta, the city in which Debi lived most of her life. Her stories mine, with scrupulous care, commonplace trials and trifles typical to Bengali domestic life, and unearth the sheltered follies and frailties of the city’s colossal middle-class population.

Although Calcutta’s presence — its diversity, adversity, incongruities, and energies – unmistakably shape Debi’s imagined world, the stories themselves take place almost exclusively behind drawn curtains and locked doors, inside the city’s millions of flats, quarters, bungalows, and other dwellings.

It is Debi's tendency to isolate a small spatial unit, such as an apartment, a neighbourhood, or a city block, and to explore in microscopic detail the manner of life identified with that place. To read Ashapurna Debi is to cross the thresholds of Calcutta’s inhabitants, to witness intimately their private scenes and struggles, and to encounter life in the city from a distinctly interior perspective.

Another notable feature of Ashapurna Debi's work is the spirit of emotional insurgency in the lives of her characters. Moments of intense confrontation are a trademark of her world; seemingly trivial disputes contain the seeds of enormous, and often disproportionate, conflict in her hands.

Her stories expose private clashes between husbands and wives, parents and children, in-laws and brides, servants and residents. The architectural borders of the domestic world create an enclosed arena for Debi to depict the discord commonly at play in the lives of ordinary people, and to reveal the often unspeakable skirmishes which seldom surface beyond the opaque peripheries of the home.

The home itself, as both physical setting and symbolic space, is the most central feature of Ashapurna Debi's stories, and it frequently plays a complex and contradictory role. At times the home represents an adversary, a physical prison, a site of constraint beyond which the truth about a family cannot be disclosed.

At other times her stories endorse the home as a haven, a refuge representative of ownership, comfort, and escape, which protects the individual from the danger and disorder rampant in city life.

This polarised notion of home, as both prison and sanctuary, provides perpetual grist for Debi’s fictional mill; a simultaneous defiance and embrace of private life and space provokes dissent both within and amongst her characters, and informs her tales with a complex dynamic between interior and exterior, secrecy and disclosure, isolation and community, captivity and release.

The significance of private life in Debi’s fiction is not only underscored by her consistently domestic settings but also by her painstaking attention to the hidden, internal lives of her characters. An explorer of introspection and sensitivity, she has been described by one Bengali critic as a ‘deep-sea diver of human emotions.’

In Debi’s world, the home’s enclosure of the body is analogous to the body’s ‘enclosure’ of inner conscience. For just as a home contains private life, so does a character’s outward mien house private thoughts, motives, and feelings. By combining internal monologue with omniscient narrative, and by often shifting points of view within the course of a single story, Debi repeatedly discerns between the internal desires and external actions of her characters.

The reader is aware of the stunning and often comic discrepancies that exist between one's public and private behaviour, for Debi is a master at isolating situations that betray that very discrepancy. The stories are written in a laconic, concentrated, yet whimsical style.

Often the time frame occupies little more than two or three hours, and the core of the tale is almost always encapsulated within the first handful of sentences. Deceptively small in scope, these pithy encounters illuminate the private lives of her characters with astonishing lucidity, and reveal domestic nuances and vicissitudes with extraordinary depth and amplitude.

Debi’s straightforward prose is so unadorned, so agile, that it frequently sounds conversational in tone, but it is at the same time polished, poetic, and graceful. Her narratives maintain a steadfast balance between authorial concern and detachment, between urgency and restraint.

(An excerpt from Jhumpa Lahiri's master’s thesis on Ashapurna Debi, completed at Boston University in 1995, published as introduction in ‘Matchbox’ stories by Ashapurna Debi, translated by Prasenjit Gupta)