[4] France Bhattacharya, holder of a doctorat d’état in Indian Studies, is emeritus professor, Inalco, member of the Centre for the study on India and South Asia, CEIAS, and was till recently director of the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme programme for India and South Asia.

She has translated several Bengali novels into French such as: Le monastère de la félicité (Ânandamath) (Paris, Le serpent à plumes, 2003) and Celle qui portait des crânes en boucles d’oreilles (Kapâlkundalâ) by Bankim Chandra Chatterji (Paris, « Connaissance de l’Orient », Gallimard, 2005), Quatre chapitres (Châr adhyây) and Chârulatâ (Nasta nîr) by Rabindranath Tagore (Paris, Zulma, 2004 and 2009), La complainte du sentier (Pather Pâncâlî) by Bibhuti Bhushan Banerji, (Paris, Gallimard, 1969), as well as several fictions by her late husband Lokenath Bhattacharya, and his prose poems Ghar.

Here's the description from the back flap of Meenakshi Mukherjee's translation: "The novel is set in a sinister detention camp where men and women are divested of their clothes and their past, but provided with all the luxuries of life including unlimited sexual gratification.

The narrator, a writer before he was brought to the prison, has been meted a unique punishment: he must fill up a stack of paper with words every day.

He turns this task into a life line, writing frantically to recapture a world that is he has lost, to resuscitate the very language that he is in dance of forgetting, and to record the systematic dehumanization which is taking place around him.

Kiranmoy Raha, a critique wrote this after Emergency was declared in India in 1975 (cited in Mukherjee): "'Babughater Kumari Maachh' is a futuristic allegory which projects the culmination of what the author feels to be present tendencies.