Question

A fictitious interview with Nabaneeta Debsen

Answer 1

Nabaneeta di, you are an enormously popular writer, and yet people say that your writing is subversive. Do you agree?

I have been very, very fortunate as far as receiving love from my readers is concerned. And it is also true that I have been trying to be subversive, and it has sometimes it has worked and sometimes hasn’t. At times it’s gone over people’s heads…I don’t know whether I should mention one of our famous Bengali critics, a woman – very few women critics in Bengal, she is one of them – she did a long review of Volume One of my Collected Short Stories and massacred it in a way that I didn’t expect, and all the subversion was completely submerged in her reading. She hadn’t been able to read me, unlike the common reader…so it doesn’t always work.