Rimi B. Chatterjee

Infobox Writer
name = Rimi B. Chatterjee


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birthdate = 1969
birthplace = Belfast, United Kingdom
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occupation = Novelist
nationality = Indian
period = Modern, Sixteenth-century India
genre = General, science fiction, historical
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website = http://rimibchatterjee.net/

Rimi B. Chatterjee is an author based in Kolkata (earlier Calcutta), India. She was born in Belfast in 1969, grew up in England, and later came to live in India. She studied at Jadavpur University, Kolkata and at Oxford University, where she did a D.Phil. in the area of book history titled 'A History of the Trade to South Asia of Macmillan and Company and Oxford University Press, 1875 -1900'.

Biography

Rimi B. Chatterjee got her D.Phil in 1997 and returned to India. She began working in 1998 as an editor with Bhatkal and Sen, a small publishing house which produces scholarly titles in English and Bengali in the social sciences and in gender studies under the imprints 'Samya' and 'Stree'. There she oversaw authors like Kancha Ilaiah, Bani Basu and Gail Omvedt. She contributed to the process of translating into English, several important works by women such as Sulekha Sanyal's "Nabankur" ("The Seedling"), Manikuntala Sen's "Shediner Kotha" ("In Search of Freedom") and Jyotirmoyee Devi's "The Impermanence of Lies". She also published a translation of "Titu MIr", a novella by Mahasweta Devi for Seagull Books, Kolkata, which was shortlisted for the 2001 Crossword Book Award for translation.

She began her career as an academic at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur in 2000, then moved to the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, where she was a fellow from 2003 to 2004. Much of the writing of her history of Oxford University Press was done there. She also published a translation of Abanindranath Tagore's autobigraphy "Apon Katha" (as "Apon Katha: My Story") in 2004. The following year her novel "Signal Red" appeared. She now teaches English at Jadavpur University.

Books

Histories

While in the UK she gathered material from various archives on the histories of Macmillan and Oxford University Press and their relationship with India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma covering the period up to 1947. The data on Oxford University Press is mostly hitherto unpublished archival material from confidential records generated by the Press. Her book "Empires of the Mind: A History of the Oxford University Press in India During the Raj" is the first in-depth account of a large-scale European publisher interacting with Indian markets and authors, and raises several significant questions about the nature of the colonial encounter in India though the medium of print, particularly in the later stages of British Rule. [Rimi B. Chatterjee, "Empire of the Mind: A History of the Oxford University Press in India During the Raj", (New Delhi: OUP, 2006)] For instance, in the case of Oxford University Press, its status as an academic press that had supported several key Indological publishing ventures in the mid-nineteenth century gave it a cachet in the eyes of Indians that other presses could not have, and it was seen as pro-India as a result. At the same time its self-imposed custodianship of Indological study was questioned, not just by nationalist groups but also by many of its own authors. Furthermore, Oxford University Press often tried to tone down the imperialism of key authors such as Vincent Smith. These findings go against more 'hegemonic' readings of Indian encounters with print, by scholars such as Gauri Vishwanathan [ Gauri Vishwanathan, "Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India", (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989)] .

"Empires of the Mind" won the [http://www.sharpweb.org/bookprize.html SHARP deLong Prize] for 2007, an international academic prize awarded annually by the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing for outstanding work in the history of the book. [ [The SHARP website http://www.sharpweb.org/intro.html] ]

A second history, tracing the very different interactions of Macmillan and Company with Indian cultures of print, is on the way. [Expansion and rewriting of part of unpublished thesis, 'A History of the Trade to South Asia by Macmillan and Co. and Oxford University Press, 1875-1900', doctoral diss., University of Oxford, 1997.] This is based likewise on unpublished material from the Macmillan archives and will deal with the genesis and reception of iconic series such as Pyari Charan Sarkar's Books of Reading, which helped teach a whole generation of Bengalis how to read English.

Novels and Stories

"The City of Love" is a historical novel set against the spice trade in sixteenth century India ten years after Vasco da Gama's landfall at Calicut in 1498. The story begins in 1510 with the fall of Malaka to the Portuguese under Afonso de Albuquerque and ends in 1540 with Sher Shah Suri's capture of Bengal. Much of the action takes place in and near Chittagong and Gaur. The four main characters are Fernando Almenara, a Spanish spice trader who is forced to join a pirate ship, Daud Suleiman ibn Majid Al Basri, a pirate turned politician, Chandu, the son of a Shaivite priest who becomes by a twist of fate a Sufi qawwal, and Bajja, a tribal girl who becomes a spiritual leader and eventually turns her back on the world. Other minor characters include a Sufi pir and a Tantric wise woman, Dhumavati. All the characters are in search of the City of Love, which is similar to the concept of Prem Nagar in Baul and Vaishnav thought and the Ashqabad of the Sufis. In May 2008 "The City of Love" was shortlisted for the Vodafone Crossword Book Award 2007 for fiction.

"Signal Red" is a science fiction novel set in the near future in a world where totalitarian Hindutva-style politics has gained control of India. It is about an Indian defence scientist working in a semi-secret state laboratory, who gradually discovers that his work is being used to develop highly unethical weapons. At first he tries to ignore the ethical implications of what he does, but eventually starts to question his bosses and go against the rules. He then discovers the extent of the rot in the system that controls him, and his own weapons are turned against him.

A short story, 'The Key to All the Worlds', appeared in "Superhero: The Fabulous Adventures of Rocket Kumar and Other Indian Superheroes", published by Scholastic India in 2007. [ISBN 81-7655-821-4]

Bibliography

*"The City of Love" (fiction) (New Delhi: Penguin, 2007) [Penguin's page http://penguinbooksindia.com/Bookdetail.aspx?bookId=6890] ISBN 0-14-310381-4
*"Empires of the Mind: A History of the Oxford University Press in India During the Raj" (publishing history) (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006) ISBN 0-19-567474-X
*"Signal Red: A Novel" (fiction) (New Delhi: Penguin, 2005) ISBN 0-14-303262-3
*"Apon Katha: My Story" by Abanindranath Tagore (translation from Bengali to English) (Chennai: Tara, 2004)
* "Titu Mir" by Mahasweta Devi (Bhattacharya) (translation from Bengali to English) (Calcutta: Seagull, 2000) ISBN 81-7046-174-X

Notes

External links

* [http://rimibchatterjee.net/ Rimi B. Chatterjee's blog, "Live Like a Flame"- Her personal website]
* [http://sufinews.blogspot.com/2007_11_01_archive.html Sufi News]

Reviews of "The City of Love"

* [http://www.hindu.com/lr/2008/01/06/stories/2008010650270500.htm "The Hindu"]
* [http://www.telegraphindia.com/1071130/asp/opinion/story_8603536.asp "The Telegraph" ]
* [http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=e6f728aa-16aa-49d8-9081-48bc4701a914&&Headline=The+fantastic+voyage "The Hindustan Times"]