The Caged

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Pari (fairy or angel], the heroine, is exquisitely beautiful. Throughout her life, the male gaze objectifies and fetishizes her. As per patriarchal practice, she is called to surrender her splendor to the service of men. But Pari turns the situation on its head. She weaponizes her beauty and deploys it against the men in her life to meet her own needs. Her allure becomes her ultimate tool of vengeance. Pari is sexual, manipulative, subversive, ruthless, power-hungry, and self-centered everything that the hetero-patriarchal society forbids in women.

Ahana Biswas, a professor by profession, was born in West Bengal, India. She studied at Shantiniketan in West Bengal and now has settled there. Apart from being a prominent Bengali poet and writer, she is also a painter. Her published books in Bengali include Meyeder Hostel Jiban: Andarer Kathamala, Asatijiban, Ladies Compartment, and Ujjwal Lalmani. She has received several awards including West Bengal Bangla Academy- Somen Chanda Award and Bharat Vyas Award, to name a few.

Shamita Das Dasgupta is a cofounder of Manavi, the first organization to focus on violence against South Asian women in the U.S. She has taught Psychology, Gender Studies, and Law at the Rutgers University and NYU, authored five books, written several academic papers and monographs, and currently conducts training for domestic and sexual violence practitioners in the U.S. and India. In her retirement, she is enjoying writing mystery stories in Bengali.

The ancient Greek dramatist, Euripides, offers gendered mistreatment as the justification for his heroine's murderous actions in the eponymous tragic play, Medea. Although a sorceress of divine lineage, Medea is subjected to the same wanton rejection by her human male lover that is often meted out to mortal women. However, she is not someone to bear such unjust punishment silently. Medea intentionally wrenches power and control of her life by viciously removing the obstacles that keep her from grasping her desires and ambitions. Her story is that of a woman who seeks revenge for the slights that her loved ones uncaringly heap on her. In Karabas, I found the reflections of a sari-clad Medea in modern Bengal.