The girl who ate book summary
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That a Bengali should write a book titled The Girl Who Ate Books seems like the most natural thing to do. Bengalis, after all, eat everything. Khai, the all-weather verb for eating, unites such disparate things that the distinctions between what constitutes food and what cannot be eaten seem not to exist at all. Bengalis “eat kisses” (chumu khelam), and one could, just on the basis of that, categorize their lives as overwhelmingly erotic had they also not eaten the proverbial opposite of the kiss—the kick. Laathi khelam—the Bangla equivalent of “I was kicked” is “I ate a kick”; lathi jhaata khelam, meaning “kicked and beaten with a broom”, being a modified version of the same; maar khelam, “I ate up the beating”; thappor khelam, “I ate a slap”; chimti khelam, “I ate a pinch”; pyaak khelam, “I was teased”. But Bengalis also eat good things, like lyadh, their “leisure”. The most outrageous thing in the Bengali’s diet would certainly be “False”—“False khelam”, “I was duped” or “I was cheated”. Giving it close competition is “Case khelam”, “I was fooled” or “I was booked for a mistake”
After such conditioning, then, eating a book must be the most matter-of-fact thing to do. In Ogo Bodhu Shundori, one of the first Bengali films I watched in a theatre, which I later learnt was the celebrated Bengali film actor Uttam Kumar’s last film, I watched a woman eating up her books. In this story, based on Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, Moushumi Chatterjee plays the Bengali Eliza Doolittle, she without reading and writing skills, forced to acquire a primary education as an adult. Later, when I would teach Francis Bacon in class, his essay “Of Studies”, which contains the oft-quoted lines, “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested”, I would once again grow aware of reading as ingestion.
The difference between eating food and eating books, then, must be only in the directions of digestion: food moves southward through the gullet; the books northwards to the head. I found myself using these words as a joke in an examination hall conversation with a student in Darjeeling: He would put his “cheating material”, tiny pieces of paper with helpful notes in them, inside his mouth when the invigilator walked past.
After such conditioning, then, eating a book must be the most matter-of-fact thing to do. In Ogo Bodhu Shundori, one of the first Bengali films I watched in a theatre, which I later learnt was the celebrated Bengali film actor Uttam Kumar’s last film, I watched a woman eating up her books. In this story, based on Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, Moushumi Chatterjee plays the Bengali Eliza Doolittle, she without reading and writing skills, forced to acquire a primary education as an adult. Later, when I would teach Francis Bacon in class, his essay “Of Studies”, which contains the oft-quoted lines, “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested”, I would once again grow aware of reading as ingestion.
The difference between eating food and eating books, then, must be only in the directions of digestion: food moves southward through the gullet; the books northwards to the head. I found myself using these words as a joke in an examination hall conversation with a student in Darjeeling: He would put his “cheating material”, tiny pieces of paper with helpful notes in them, inside his mouth when the invigilator walked past.
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The Girl Who Ate Books, published in January 2016, is her third and most autobiographical offering yet: an eclectic collection of essays that range from tales of her bookish Kolkata childhood to conversations with the who's who of Indian literature to meditations on plagiarism and freedom of expression.
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