Bleak House

Primal Woman, a collection of translated short stories by the late Sunil Gangopadhyay reveals his preoccupation with man’s inhumanity: Open

Sunil Gangopadhyay is a literary institution. An atheist, a radical, co-opted by the establishment. Happily co-opted, it must be said, and by the end a pillar of that establishment—Poet Sunil, as Ginsberg called him in September on Jessore Road, turned president of the Sahitya Akademi. This is literary life (or perhaps just life): at one time, you’re the firebrand, dismissing Tagore as soft and sentimental, founding experimental literary journals, inveighing against the status quo; and then, before you know it, you’re ‘the man’, an abuser of power, rapacious, venal; a toad squatting balefully atop ‘Literature’.