Apon Katha : My Story – Abanindranath Tagore

Description

The thread of memory does not flow like a river; it spools off the reel and finishes some day. It is true enough to say that the boys and girls of this house have hardly any sense of those times. If somehow through me – in pictures, or writings, or stories – some fragment of those days reaches them, then a little bit of the past lives on in the present. Or else, like an old spider’s web, one day it will just float away on the breeze, taking leave of no one when it goes.

From one of colonial Bengal’s most famous families, Abanindranath Tagore is considered a pioneering modern painter in India. A nephew of Rabindranath Tagore, he grew up in an exceptionally creative household, which he recreates unforgettably in Apon Katha: My Story. Abanindranath wrote as much as he painted, but always with a painterly eye. This elegiac memoir of an unusual childhood brings alive an incandescent – yet receding -moment in the history of modern India.

Rimi Chaterjee’s elegant translation of the original Bangla text is accompanied by an introduction from the noted critic Tapati Guha Thakurta.