Translator of
Gora by Rabindranath Tagore (New York Review of Books US and Vintage Classics UK, 2027)
Devapriya Roy is currently working on a new translation of godfather of Indian letters Rabindranath Tagore’s underappreciated 20th century masterpiece, Gora. In addition, she is the author of three best-selling novels: The Vague Woman's Handbook (2011), The Weight Loss Club (2013) and Friends from College (2019), which was serialized in The Telegraph, a national daily, over forty-two weeks. In 2015 she published The Heat and Dust Project, co-written with her partner Saurav Jha, the story of an epic journey across India on a very very tight budget. The book debuted at no.1 on the Hindustan Times–AC Nielsen list. In 2018 she published the acclaimed Indira, a unique graphic biography of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, in collaboration with artist Priya Kuriyan, primarily for a YA readership. Her most recent book is the edited collection Cat People, a tribute to felines, which includes contributions by many of India’s leading writers.
Roy is an alumnus of Presidency College, Calcutta, and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, where she spent many years in pursuit of her PhD on Bharata's Natyashastra, while reading whatever she could get her hands on—mostly novels. For the doctoral thesis, she translated several chapters from Sanskrit to English following a “resistive translation model” she now likes to live down. Before agreeing to teach undergrads (so she can basically spy on youth culture), Roy has been an editor, freelance writer and, briefly, the face of a pan-Indian hair-oil brand. She lives in Delhi where she works as a Senior Writing Instructor at Ashoka University. She writes regularly for Indian newspapers and magazines.
Devapriya Roy
Books by Devapriya
Gora by Rabindranath Tagore (New York Review of Books US; Vintage Classics UK, 2027)
In this lively new translation of Gora, Noble Prize-winning godfather of Indian letters Rabindranath Tagore’s masterful and tragically under-appreciated novel first published in serialized form in 1907, Tagore will finally assume the place he deserves alongside his great 19th century novelists peers: Tolstoy, Eliot, Stendahl, Dickens and Tanizaki.
Set in late 1870s and early 1880s Calcutta, the high noon of the British Raj, Gora tells the story of two young men, childhood best friends, the eponymous Gora, given to endless argument and theorizing, and the romantic Binoy, his loyal sidekick. Tagore ingeniously sets his characters ideologically apart, using their conversations to explore the debates of the day around India’s future, how best to cast off the shackles of colonialism, and the tension between indigenous values and modernity. It is, also, a classic coming-of-age novel anchored by two vivid and delightful love stories as these two passionate friends–conservative Gora (who unbeknownst to himself is the adopted son of British parents) and romantic Binoy– fall in love with sisters Sucharita and Lolita, modern, educated women raised in a family that has embraced western ways. In its intellectual concern over the battle between progress and fundamentalism, race and identity, and its spot-on depiction of the trials of coming-of-age — it is a novel, like all enduring classics, both very much of its time and speaks directly to our current times.
Friends from College (Tranquebar, 2019)
What happens when friends from college reunite after two decades, savouring the familiar streets, decaying mansions and timeless coffee houses of Calcutta—and the past catches up with them unbidden? Written in the robust tradition of serialised fiction and published in The Telegraph over forty-two weeks, Friends from College is a love-letter to Calcutta of the nineties – the decade in which ‘Gen X’ grew up, made friends, became lovers, drifted apart, and sometimes left the city for good. Much like our protagonist, Charulata Ghosh, who now lives in London and goes by Lata (to her mother’s great annoyance). Waiting impatiently for her to come home is Aaduri Bagchi, BFF, lapsed books editor trying to make sense of the new listicle school of journalism. Unaware of Lata’s return, her ex, star filmmaker Ronny Banerjee, is preparing to shoot his magnum opus. Until a family wedding throws them together, and sparks fly. Laughter follows, and heartbreak. And secrets tumble out of forgotten closets. Sunlit with hope and affection, this is a novel that quickly draws you into its evocative heart.
Indira (Context, 2018)
In a government school classroom in Delhi, young Indira Thapa is set an unusual assignment by her favourite teacher: to write an essay around her name. Who was Indira Priyadarshini, the person after whom her grandfather named her? And why her? What is her legacy as Indira's first - and only - woman prime minister ?
The Heat and Dust Project: The Broke Couple’s Guide to Bharat, with Saurav Jha (HarperCollins 2015)
Living in a sunny barsati in south Delhi, Saurav Jha and Devapriya Roy are your average DINK couple, about to acquire a few EMIs and come of age in the modern consumerist world. Only, they don't. They junk the swivel chairs, gain a couple of backpacks and set out on a transformational journey across India. On a very, very tight budget: five hundred rupees a day for bed and board. And the Heat and Dust project begins. Joining the ranks of firang gap-year kids and Israelis fresh out of compulsory army service, they travel across a land in which five thousand years of Indian history seem to jostle side by side. It is, by turns, holy and hectic, thuggish and comic, amoral and endearing. In buses that hurtle through the darkness of the night and the heat of the day, across thousands of miles, in ever new places, the richness of this crowded palette spills over into their lives. From rooms by the hour to strange dinner invitations, from spectacular forts to raging tantrums, this is a youthful account of wanderlust and whimsy, of eccentric choices that unfold into the journey of a lifetime ... and a supreme test of marriage.
The Weight-Loss Club: The Curious Experiments of Nancy Housing Cooperative (HarperCollins, 2013)
Set in a middle-class housing colony, this is the story of stay-at-home mum Monalisa, who cannot clean the kitchen counter enough times; Meera, who is bullied constantly by her traditional mother-in-law; college-going Abeer, who isnt sure how to impress the glamorous Mandy; academic Aparajita, who has no takers on the marriage mart; philosopher Ananda, whom no one takes seriously; and Treeza, a former school secretary now sunk in gloom. Into their midst arrives Oxford-returned Sandhya: half hippie, half saadhvi, full spiritual guru. Under her aegis is formed The Weight Loss Club, throwing the lives of our heroes and heroines into utter and delightful disarray. But while chemistry brews and equations change, one question remains: who is Brahmacharini Sandhya, and why on earth has she moved into Nancy Housing Cooperative?
The Vague Woman’s Handbook (HarperCollins, 2011)
They are bad with directions; they never know when the credit card bill is due. They have perfected the art of turning over a new leaf tomorrow. Meet the vague women in this delightful first novel that doesn't star a woman looking for the right man - because she's already found him! At twenty-two, Sharmila Chatterjee has just married her sweetheart of a few years, Abhimanyu Mishra, a somewhat eccentric if handsome twenty-three-and-a-half year old with obscure academic interests and a small fellowship that never arrives on time. They start a household in a tiny rented flat, learning to fend for themselves in the big, bad and snotty world of south Delhi, with penny-pinching landlords, some romance, and a lot of anxiety. At fifty-two, Indira Sen is not sure just how she meandered to where she finds herself now. A senior government officer and single mother, she lives with her daughter and three opinionated old people in a rambling house, drives a battered car, and has a history of credit-card induced shopaholism. The Vague Woman's Handbook is a story told with equal parts of humour, hysteria and tenderness, about the sparkling friendship between two women as they hurtle through life and its mini-crises while trading secrets in the art of survival.