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Subrat SaurabhAuthor of Kuch Woh Pal
Golap Chandra Khound’s Girmit (‘Indenture’) is a collection of ten short stories based on the tea gardens of Assam. Khound earned notable fame as a short story writer of the Ramdhenu era (1951-1967) and he is at his dexterous best in this collection of short stories based on the highly idiosyncratic tea garden way of Assam. The word ‘Girmit’ roughly translates to ‘agreement’ or ‘contract’ and all the stories in this collection feature the indentured labourers and their lives as deeply woven with the tea plantations of colonial and post-colonial Assam. Girmit has stories of the exploiters and the exploited; of the British Sahibs and their Indian shadows or Babus; of a bountiful landscape and tea garden people; of hopes, horrors and terrifying consequences and of pathos and promise.
Golap Khound
Dr. Suranjana Barua is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Information Technology Guwahati, Assam, India. Prior to this, she worked at the Centre for Assamese Studies, Tezpur University, Assam. She is a member of the Editorial Committee for the journal ‘Language and Language Teaching’.
Dr. Barua has published research articles and chapters in various research journals and books; has been a language consultant for many organizations across India and has translated important works of key literary figures of Assam such as Rajanikanta Bordoloi, Bishnu Prasad Rabha, Chandraprabha Saikiani, Bhupen Hazarika and Arun Sarma. Her translation of Rajanikanta Bordoloi’s epochal novel 'Miri Jiyori' as part of a research project at the Centre for Assamese Studies, Tezpur University, was awarded the first Pallavi Barua Bhuyan Memorial Translation Award for Best Translation from Assamese to English for 2012–13. Her forthcoming book is titled Revelation of Self in Language: Narrative Identity as Emergent in Conversation (Tulika Books, New Delhi).
