Exploring Love, Sex, and Loneliness in Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay's "Panty"

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Mohammad Shafiqul Islam

Abstract

Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay (b. 1974), a modern feminist writer, promotes and celebrates women’s freedom that the women seek to enjoy both physically and psychologically. Bold and candid, Bandyopadhyay exposes “hardcore sexuality” into her work, going against the flow in society. Panty, one of her best-known works, is a novella about a nameless woman who goes through surreal experiences. The novella is set in contemporary Kolkata, a boisterous metropolis, where women work at part with men, but still the women feel a sense of inferiority. The woman in the novella enters a dark apartment, owned by a mysterious man with whom she has a complicated relationship, at night and finds a soft and silky panty in leopard-skin print. Circumstances force her to wear the panty, and just then she begins to imagine its original owner along with her wild sexual life. The rest of the story evolves around the woman’s imagination, her love, sex, loneliness, uncertainty, fear, anxiety, and so forth. This article analyzes how a woman struggles to achieve a secure space in society as well as an established identity. The article also explores how a woman navigates between love and sex, freedom and dependence, and continues to search for a life that she has not yet lived. 

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Author Biography

Mohammad Shafiqul Islam, Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Bangladesh

Dr. Mohammad Shafiqul Islam (ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9880-4645)is an associate professor in the Department of English, Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Sylhet, Bangladesh. The areas he is interested in include poetry and literary translation. In addition to postcolonialism and translation studies, he likes to work on Modern and South Asian literatures. Dr. Islam is the author of Wings of Winds, and translator of Humayun Ahmed: Selected Short Stories and Aphorisms of Humayun Azad. In February 2017, he was a poet-in-residence at the Anuvad Arts Festival, India, and his poetry, translation, and academic articles have appeared in Critical Survey, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, South Asian Review, Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies, The NEHU Journal, Poem: International English Language Quarterly, Crossings: A Journal of English Studies, Chaos, Dibur Literary Journal, Lunch Ticket, Reckoning, Stag Hill Literary Journal, Bengal Lights, and elsewhere. His work has been anthologized in a number of books, including The Book of Dhaka: A City in Short Fiction. He has also presented a good number of papers in international conferences, and participated in workshops on literary translation and creative writing. Poetry editor of Reckoning, Dr. Islam is currently at work on his second collection of poetry and a few translation projects.