Saurav Kumar Chaliha Anuragi Samaj, a city-based organization, on Friday hosted an event at Guwahati Press Club to celebrate the 1st day of the New Year as ‘Bhal Khoboror Din’ (The Day of Happy Tidings).
The objective of the event was to throw light on the literary works of celebrated Assamese writer Saurav Kumar Chaliha.
Speaking at the event, noted critic Dr. Bibhas Chaudhury highlighted the facets of Chaliha’s writing that often remain concealed under the surface.
Choudhury elaborated how, for a discerning and probing reader, such hidden facets open up a whole new world of unexpected treasures.
He gave various examples from Chaliha’s stories to underscore his contention.
The lecture was very well appreciated by the large audience.
Renowned scholar Dr. Hiren Gohain while releasing a collection of translated stories of Saurav Kumar Chaliha, Barcarolle and Other Stories translated into English by Jiban Goswami, highlighted various aspects of Chaliha’s writings.
He cited some of his stories and spoke at length of the mastery with which Chaliha had covered the entire gamut of human emotions.
Chaliha had also written a few stories like Basantika with an undercurrent of tragedy and such tragedy, he felt, was inevitable in life and can have no solutions, but have to be accepted, at best, with the compassion of a Buddhist.
While commenting on the translations, Dr. Gohain lauded Goswami for translating with a lot of patience and diligence and for trying to bring out apparently difficult ideas from the domain of science to make them easily understandable by all.
Goswami, he said, has done a great service by trying to introduce non-Assamese readers to the genius of this great short-story writer from Assam.
The book Barcarolle And Other Stories released on the occasion, has a foreword by Arup Kumar Dutta and is the first collection of translated stories of Chaliha to be published in English.
Highly appreciating the quality of the translations Dutta in the foreword has mentioned, “Assam has a number of powerful writers writing in Assamese and these need to be presented to a wider audience. Jiban Goswami’s translation should be a yardstick for any translator aspiring to such a laudable objective.”