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A Visit to Kolkata Book Fair Jackie Kabir About 1.6 milion people visited this year’s Kolkata Book Fair. A group of Bangladeshi writers and readers were in Kolkata to attend the Book Fair from January 26 to 29 this year. The fair is held every year for 12 days starting on the last Wednesday of January as a tradition. The visit was organised by The Reading Circle known more commonly as TRC and Gantha, a platform where people writing in Bangla and people writing in English meet every month to exchange their views and ideas. Sometimes they read from their work, at other times they invite famous writers to conduct workshops on creative writing. The Reading Circle, on the other hand, meets once every month to read a chosen book or some books by a certain author depending on the availability of the book. The group gave a talk at the AC hall in Kolkata about the book club. Speakers mentioned that they regularly met for the past five years and that they successfully read 60 books within these

Razia Sultana has been teaching Bangla literature since the early 1970s. She has carried out research on many different aspects of Bangla folklore. Shahitya Bikkhon is one such book where the author has brought in nine essays which range from women depicted in the Old and Middle Ages in Bangla literature, baromashi songs describing the anguish of separation in the lives of rural women and the famous poem Bidrohi by Kazi Nazrul Islam. There are essays on the works of giants like Nawazish Khan and Mozammel Haque in Bangla literature. The hard work of the author is visible in the writing. It gives one an insight into the subjects that she deals with. Women in the Middle Ages were very simple, as the book notes. They hardly used any make up. The only things that were available locally, herbal products, were used for beautification. A special kind of smoke was used to perfume them. The weather also had effects on the mood of Bengali women as it was neither too hot nor too cold and the women