Top bengali books
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She says, “ Chuk And Guk was my favourite. Rigvedita Parakh, now a pathologist working in Washington, was a little girl in a small town in Maharashtra in the 1980s. Of course, the Soviet books were reaching other parts of India as well. Progress published books such as Duniya Knapano Dosh Din ( 10 days That Rocked The World by John Reed), and Khnora Raajkumar ( The Lame Prince by Alexie Tolstoy).
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But the English translations brought out by Russian publishers were absurdly cheap, as were the Bengali ones.” Majumder, who teaches comparative literature at Jadavpur University, recalls Raduga Publishers some of the other publishers were Progress and Mir that published scientific and technical titles, including children’s science books. He adds, “The average middle-class family could not afford English children’s books. “They were always beautifully illustrated,” says Aveek Majumder, who grew up in the 1970s surrounded by English and Bengali translations of Russian literature. It was for the Soviets part of their soft power expansion. Beautifully illustrated children’s books were made possible by the offset printing press, which India didn’t have at that point. Books on politics, economics and literary classics - translations of Gorky, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Chekov, Dostoevsky - followed. The Soviets were more than happy to supply these books at minimal cost. There was a great demand for books on maths, the sciences and education as developing these fields was top priority. Post Independence, paper was in short supply in India and to own a book was to hold a privileged status.
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She said, “The Soviets translated texts from all the different Soviet languages into 13 Indian languages as well as English… They had the largest translation programme in the world.” She has explained in more than one interview how in the years after Joseph Stalin’s death, the Soviet Union made a concerted effort to distribute books to India and many other postcolonial nations, offering them at low or no cost. Jessica Bachman of the University of Washington’s department of history has studied the Indo-Soviet literary exchange closely. To date, generations of Bengalis know the stories of Ma (Maxim Gorky’s Mother), Ispat (Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How The Steel Was Tempered), Juddho aar Shanti (Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace), Mishka Bhaluk ( Misha the Little Bear), Anari ( Dunno’s Adventures) and Altajoba ( The Scarlet Flower), though they may have well forgotten the Russian connection. When Three Seas was translated into Bengali by Purabi Roy sometime in the mid-1990s, Teen Samudra Parer Kotha became one of the most popular Russian books in translation. The curved back wall of the pavilion had a single row of foot-high illustrations from Afanasy Nikitin’s A Journey Beyond the Three Seas, the story of a Russian merchant from Tver who travelled to India in the 15th century.
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Inside, there was a table laden with books on sale - Hindi, Bengali and English versions of Russian books - and another wall full of those in Russian, one of which was a translation of Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate. The outer walls of the boxy pavilion adorned with illustrations of the Kremlin Grand Palace and the Bolshoi Theatre against a spliced pastel blue and green horizon mimicked beautifully illustrated Russian children’s books such as those several generations of Indians have grown up with. This year, the Calcutta Book Fair had Russia as its theme country.