রামকুমার মুখোপাধ্যায়ের নির্বাচিত ছোটগল্পে নারী পরিসর : একটি বিশ্লেষণী পাঠ/ Women's Spaces in Selected Short Stories of Ramkumar Mukhopadhyay: An Analytical Study

Abstract

Ramkumar Mukhopadhyay is a prominent and well-known fiction writer in twenty-first -century Bengali literature. He was born in Kolkata on 8 March 1956. After the death of his father when he was only one and a half years old, his family left Kolkata and returned to their ancestral village of Geliya in Bankura district. His childhood and adolescence were spent entirely in the rural environment of Rarh Bengal. Consequently, the lived experiences of the marginalized people and the realities of women in this region are reflected in his short stories and novels. His literary career began with the writing of short stories. His first short-story collection, ‘Madale Natun Bol’, was published in 1984 and consisted of fourteen stories. Since the late 1970s, Ramkumar Mukhopadhyay has been consistently engaged in literary pursuits as a fiction writer. To date, more than one hundred short stories have been published in his nine short-story collections. His short-story collection ‘Priyankar Chelei’, comprising twelve woman - centred stories, was published in 2008. The present study focuses on five stories from the collections— Piknik, Jatismar, Charoibeti, Sharirer Bhanga Garha and Sakhina— to examine the representation and spatial positioning of women in Mukhopadhyay’s short stories. The study particularly considers the socio-economic location of women, their experiences of marginality, domestic and social constraints, consciousness of right, quest for autonomy, and possibilities of economy self-reliance. An attempt has therefore been made to analyse how the selected narratives construct diverse forms of Women’s lived experience within rural and socially stratified contexts.