Baromaas: Twelve Enduring Months

Baromaas: Twelve Enduring Months, a Sahitya Akademi Award winning novel of 2004, presents a gripping tale of a farmer’s family in contemporary India. Its realism is so convincing, content so genuine and near perfect, form so aesthetically pleasing that it could become one of the best regional novels in World Literature. A representative tale of Indian farming that depends on the erratic rain-god on the one hand and the expectancy of high market returns on the other—both of which rarely come to the farmer’s aid—the tale develops a point of no return.

Deeply rooted in the Vidarbha soil, Sadanand Deshmukh, a regional novelist of repute in Marathi, captures the tragedy of the honest, god-fearing but hard working Tanpure family so faithfully that it could even be compared to the poignancy and realism of the Joads in John Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize winning American regional novel The Grapes of Wrath. The tragic inevitability of the plot, its down-to-earth characters and its near perfect realism helps reach the novel to a pinnacle of artistic achievement.

About the author : 

Born in a highly traditional farmer’s family in Vidarbh, Maharashtra, Sadanand Deshmukh is M.A., Ph.D. in Marathi literature. He teaches in a college at Amadapur, Taluka Chikhali, District Buldhana. He has written short stories, novels and poems and has indulged in occasional literary writing. His writing primarily deals with the lives of farmers and peasants in rural India. An ardent supporter of human values at the core of Indian agriculture, he deals with variegated agricultural issues that farmers have to face in contemporary rural India, the pathetic condition of which we have not been able to improve after five decades of Independence. In addition to his novels, Tahan andBaromaas, he has published short story collections Lachaand, Uthaawan, Mahaloot, Ragadaa, Gabhoolgabha and Khundalghaas. Dr. Sadanand Deshmukh’s works are prescribed for study in the M.A. syllabus of University of Pune—an honour rarely bestowed on contemporary living writers. His upcoming ambitious novel Charimera will soon be published by Popular Prakashan, Mumbai.

About the translator:

Dr. Vilas Salunke, a retired Professor of English, has been a senior academician and literary translator. During his long teaching career of 38 years, he taught English at Pune, Kolhapur, Mumbai and Nashik. He has published several research articles in reputed journals on Modern British and American literature and Translation Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in English from Karnatak University and studied at Cambridge, U.K. on a Cambridge University scholarship in 1993.

For the last two decades, he has been active in the field of literary translation, particularly fiction and poetry. He has published English translation of selected poems of Kusumagraj, a Gyanpeeth award winning litterateur, entitled Blooms of the Earth(Writers Workshop, Kolkata, 1999) and 14 Short stories of G.A. Kulkarni, a Sahitya Akademi Award Winning Author, entitled A Journey Forever : Iskilaar and Other Stories (Frog Books, Leadstart Publishing Pvt. Ltd, 2010). He has also translated into Marathi the authoritative biography of Steve Jobs (2012) written by Walter Issacson. He can be contacted at vilasalunke@gmail.com.