KOLKATA: Two academicians, Sipra Mukherjee, professor of English at the West Bengal State University, and Mrinmoy Pramanick, professor of Comparative Literature, who recently joined Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi from Bengal for the first time, won the prestigious A K Ramanujan Prize for translating Dalit poet Kalyani Thakur Charal’s Bengali poems into English.
Charal’s works were published between the 1990s and 2020s and include her collections during this period. Mukherjee and Pramanick took two years to translate Charal’s Bengali poems into English.
Charal, 60, hails from Bagula town in Nadia district of Bengal, where her father worked as a security guard in a nearby school and her mother was a housewife but literate.
There is not much writing by Dalit women in Bengali available in English translation. With these English translations, Charal’s works on marginal lives will reach a wider audience.
“One naturally feels happy to be recognised. The recognition brings more attention to a book that deserves to have a larger readership than what the vernacular Bangla can give,” Mukherjee told TNIE.
The Association for Asian Studies announced the winners of this year’s prizes, which recognise outstanding scholarship and contribution to the field, on February 11. Winners will be given the award at a ceremony during the Association’s annual conference on March 13 in Vancouver.
This year, South Asian writers Rishad Choudhury, Charu Gupta, and translators Mukherjee and Pramanick are the winners of the Bernard S Cohn Prize, Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize, and AK Ramanujan Prize for Translation, respectively.