Traces of Boots on Tongue

Name : Traces of Boots on Tongue

Drawing influences from Indian folktales, English art, French realism, existentialism, and the Bengali Hungryalist movement, Rajkamal Chaudhary’s oeuvre is like a secret back alley in an old city, not completely forgotten but existing only for the few, far from traffic. Even though Chaudhary also wrote in Maithili and Bengali, it was his writings in Hindi that established him as the bold new experimentalist of Indian literature.

His work reads like a mix of Emile Zola, Albert Camus, and Satyajit Ray in its recognition and examination of the existential ennui with its accompanying horror. His India of the 1950 and 60s is populated with hopeless literature professors, scattered alcohol bottles, Park Street pubs, Japanese geisha turned Calcutta business-women, bitter physics students, prostitutes, hysteria patients, sell-out painters, repeated visions of snakes, black and Siamese cats, sexual encounter with a dying body in the forest, young boys exploring their homosexuality, a converted Hindu woman searching for her past in cemeteries, violent still-life dreams in Connaught Place coffeehouses.

His unconventional life and writing places him outside the mainstream, and so he remains as uncategorizable as the characters and lives he wrote about. Bringing together twelve of his most representative short stories, translated for the first time in English, Traces of Boots on Tongue an

Country of Origin : India