Bengali ‘anti-novelist’ Subimal Misra no more

Bengali author Subimal Misra, 80, breathed his last at 4:50 AM on Wednesday. 

Lauded as the "anti-establishment" Bengali writer, Misra, born in 1943, went on to be influenced by the cinematic works of Sergei Eisenstein, Jean-Luc Godard and Ritwik Ghatak, as well as the literature of James Joyce, Jean-Paul Sartre, Kathy Acker, Samuel Beckett and Kurt Vonnegut. 

He incorporated the language of film in his writing, penning his first short story collection, Haran Majhi's Bou'er Mora or Shonar Gandhi Murti, in 1967. The text was translated to English by V Ramaswamy. Thirty volumes of novels, short stories, a play, and essays would follow. He started out with and wrote exclusively for little magazines, keeping his writing away from commercial magazines and newspapers. 

Misra believed in upending the structure and purpose of the modern novel. As in his book, This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar's Tale: Two Anti-Novels, translated from the Bangla by V Ramaswamy, the humans and their stories are pushed to the sidelines. Social structures become the main characters as they repeatedly interrupt the people portrayed in the book. 

The author had been suffering from heart disease for a long time.