While the world in which Ghana-da is the bard and the hero took time to fully develop, we get a chance to develop directly into it. Who is Ghanashyam Das? He first appeared as a character in a short story, Mosquito or Mosha, in 1945 in an annual called Alpana and the last one in 1987. And this collection surpassed by expectations. I expected to feel as an adult what I had while reading Roald Dahl books as a child. The inherent joy of reading is also the inherent joy of listening to crazy, hilarious, heroic adventures that are told and lived with panache.
This line at the back of this slim but packed edition (published by Penguin, translated by Amlan Das Gupta) blew me away. Part of the loot of five books I picked up was Mosquito and Other Tall Tales by Premendra Mitra, featuring his “legendary Ghanashyam Das – Ghana-da”, a narrator of “tall tales that strade the thin line between make-believe and truth, drawing upon science, history, geography to conjure up exotic locales, other worlds and peoples, their habits, lifestyles and languages.” When I asked I was looking for translations, she even helped. I reached minutes before the closing time, but the owner was gracious enough to let me browse for a bit. In Goa in November last year, I headed to the quaint but well-stocked and extremely well-maintained Literati Book Cafe in Bardez. To do this, I make sure to visit local bookstores wherever I am travelling, go to libraries and read up syllabi of Indian Literature at various universities. The one joy of curating a website that focuses on Indian literature is also the amazing literary gems, classics and otherwise, that one encounters in the process. A must-read classic of Bengali Literature The Context
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