The Girl Child in the Life, Lore and Literature of Bengal - Selected Writings of Sibaji Bandyopadhyay

Contemporary children-s literature in Bangla celebrates irreverent, defiant and deviant boys whose subversive doings critique the parenting and schooling they go through, while the girl child is neglected and marginalised. The rare fictional girls who show resilience and demand a normal childhood are consciously silenced, or contained and assimilated within unwritten masculinist norms. This book-a compilation of translated works of the author, critic and academic, Sibaji Bandyopadhyay-focuses on gender and childhood in Bengal.

The book includes a translation of his Bangla Shishusahitye Chhoto Meyera (Little Girls in Bangla Children-s Literature), as well as a translated essay on Thakurmar Jhuli (Grandma-s Sack), a collection of Bangla folk tales and fairy tales from early twentieth-century that underscores the subaltern role of adolescent female characters with hardly any agency or voice in the oral legends and folklore of Bengal. The translation of the piece -An