Book Review: Stayed Back, Stayed On- Short Stories by Bengali Muslim Writers by Epsita Halder
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Namrata reviews Stayed Back, Stayed On- Short Stories by Bengali Muslim Writers by Epsita Halder (Orient Blackswan, 2025), calling it an indispensable volume.
Stayed Back, Stayed On: Short Stories by Bengali Muslim Writers (Orient Blackswan, 2025) by Epsita Halder is a landmark in the literary and cultural history of Bengal. As the first anthology of its kind in English translation, the volume intervenes in both Partition studies and South Asian literary historiography by retrieving voices that have long been marginal in mainstream accounts of twentieth-century Bengal. While the Partition of 1947 has generated a vast body of fiction and scholarship, the experience of Bengali Muslims who remained in India, choosing not to migrate to East Pakistan, has rarely been accorded equivalent literary visibility. This anthology, therefore, functions simultaneously as an archive, a corrective, and a critical provocation.
The nineteen short stories assembled here span multiple decades and generational positions, producing a polyphonic narrative of Muslim lives in post-Partition Bengal. They explore quotidian intimacies like love, labor, faith, and kinship, while also bearing the imprint of larger structures of marginalization, suspicion, and negotiation. Halder’s editorial framing situates these stories against the background of the “minority condition” in India, making the anthology a vital contribution to the discourse on subaltern subjectivity.
