Four angry young women of Bengal speak out in Kabita Singha's debut novel

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Four angry women, in Bengali writer Kabita Singha’s eponymous novel, decide to go “out flying for a whole day” one winter in Calcutta (now Kolkata), most likely in the 1950s. Suman, Bulan, Renu and Chuni are fashionably bedecked as they walk from Dalhousie towards Park Street.

On the verge of adulthood, they evoke a lurid curiosity among the public, especially in the men who flock around them. But the girls do not care.

They plan to get a drink at the famous Olympia bar (though drinking is forbidden to them), have a hearty meal, and enjoy their outing, come what may.As they walk down Chowringhee, the women take a nosy uncle to task, mock the young men trailing them, and venture into places where girls from good families should not—at least not on their own. Their adventures are told by the garrulous Chuni, who also offers vignettes into her friends’ pasts.

By the end of the novel, the reader has learnt about slices of their lives, the sorrows they nurse in their hearts, and their raging desire for freedom from the fetters of patriarchy, which have doomed them to a future not of their choosing.This is the broad arc of Four Angry Women, Singha’s debut novel, first published in 1956 and recently translated into English by Shamita Das Gupta. Born in 1931, Singha was, until her death in 1998, one of Bengal’s pre-eminent modernist poets, a feminist who showed the way to women writers who followed her.A broadcaster with All India Radio for much of her life, she married against her family’s wishes, raised children while managing a prolific writing career, but never got her due during her lifetime.