Book Reading: “The Diary of a Maidservant”

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Past Event ....... March 26^th, 2008 — 7:00 pm

Wednesday, March 26, 7 p.m. in the Couture Room, a program of readings from the Indian novel “The Diary of a Maidservant,” presented by its English-language translator Sagaree Sengupta, a member of the Asian Studies faculty at Bates College. Free.

Written by the prominent modern Hindi novelist Krishna Baldev Vaid, The Diary of a Maidservant tells the story of Shanti, a young woman who works as a domestic for middle-class families living in a new area of a major Indian city. She leaves her familyâ€™s one-room home every morning to make a cleaning and cooking tour of several wealthier households. When a benevolent mistress, Mrs. Varma, gives her a notebook to use as a diary so that she can improve her writing skills as well as her understanding of herself, Shanti complies and thus a habit is begun which will become a compulsion. In her journal, Shanti examines herself, her family, her masters and mistresses, her circle of friends, and relations between men and women. The novel describes the limits of good intentions in a society where firm class divisions still exist, while giving evidence of the power of writingâ€”and of the creative arts in generalâ€”to lift an individualâ€™s consciousness.

A senior writer of modern Hindi with over 40 volumes of fiction, drama and criticism to his credit, Krishna Baldev Vaid is known for his tendency to challenge Indian readers with his bold writing on relations between the sexes and uncomfortable class realities. Although translations of some of his previous works exist in English and other languages, his fiction merits much greater attention and recognition in the world outside India, says Sengupta.

â€œMarked by urbane sophistication and experimentalism enhanced by judiciously chosen social details, Vaidâ€™s polished, crisp Hindi style rises out of an eventful and deeply experienced life in India, yet his writing does not exoticize that country,â€ she says. Vaid spent some 20 years as an English professor in the U. S., and this immersion in European literature, says Sengupta, served to sharpen rather than dull the author’s focus on Indian subjects.

Sagaree Sengupta is an independent writer, scholar and translator who has taught part-time as a member of the Asian Studies faculty at Bates College since 2004. She was born in India and came to the U.S. with her family at the age of eight. She holds a Ph.D. in Asian Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in South Asian Studies from the University of Wisconsin and a B.A. in English from Cornell University. She has taught numerous courses in South Asian literature, languages and civilization at the universities of Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin prior to moving to Maine.

While specializing in Hindi, Urdu and Bengali poets of medieval and colonial India, Sengupta is interested in the wider literary and artistic traditions of South Asia. She has published research articles on the path-breaking 19^thc. Hindi/Brajbhasha writer Bharatendu Hariscandra, and on more recent Indian and Pakistani authors. In addition to her English translations of poems, short stories and novels from Hindi, Urdu and Bengali, she has contributed her original poetry to Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English (Wesleyan University Press, 2000; edited by Agha Shahid Ali), as well as to various literary journals. Her translation of The Diary of a Maidservant was funded in 2002 by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. On another front, Sengupta is an avid textile artist who, inspired by tradition, often works with recycled fabrics.

Copies of The Diary of a Maidservant, which was published in 2007 by Oxford University Press, will be available for purchase at Sengupta’s presentation.

Posted: Friday, February 22nd, 2008 in Read Aloud