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DR. SANJUKTA DASGUPTA
Poet, Critic, and Translator

ADDRESS:

E-mail: sdg81@cal2.vsnl.net.in

ILLUSTRIOUS CAREER:

Distinguished scholar and Head of Department of English, Calcutta University, Dr. Dasgupta has had many of her articles, poems and translations published in reputed journals in India and overseas.

Her publications include 'The Novels of Huxley and Hemingway: A Study in Two Planes of Reality' and 'Snapshots'.

Recepient of various important Fellowship

On my seventeenth birthday
My mother gave me a silk saree
The soft swish of the silken pleats
The shimmering, seducing cloth
Caressingly clung to my lissom limbs
Shielded my ripening bosom from hungry stares.

The saree folded me with care
I folded myself into the saree
Till years later I suddenly saw
My legs were lost alas
Shrouded in five metres of graceful cloth-
Draupadi's textile trap!

"Shame" is the glutinous lotion
Clogging the woman's breathless pores
Stepping out of textiles
Stripping to be herself at last
She is the sky-clad dusky Kali
Shining rapier in uplifted arm.

A garland of skulls round her neck
The dark woman warrior
In tempestuous rage
Flings off the shame-shielding textile
Night-shawled Kali on the kill-
Woman Terminator annihilating shame-enforcing demons.

Where oh where are my legs
Those strong, long limbs
That made me race through the fields
Playing with the gusty spring wind
Climbing guava trees
Perching in the comforting hollow of a banyan tree.

Now enfolded, slowed, shackled in cloth
Lifelong imprisonment of shameful vulgar limbs
I hide and seek lifelong.
Saree shackled woman
Crippled but with limbs intact-

Waits and waits and waits
For that midnight hour
Of metamorphosis-
I am now stark dark Kali
With flying tresses
Unbound.

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