Baby Halder

Source from Wikipedia

Baby Halder (or Haldar) (born 1973 or 1974 in West Bengal) is an Indian housekeeper and author whose autobiography Aalo Aandhari or A Life Less Ordinary (ISBN 81-89013-67-X) describes her harsh life. Abandoned by her mother at age 7, raised by a neglectful father and married off at age 12, she later left an abusive husband with her three children for a life as housemaid in New Delhi and then encountered several exploitative employers. Her sister was killed by her husband.
She wrote after work, using plain matter-of-fact language and writing in Bengali. Her last employer, writer and retired anthropology professor Prabodh Kumar, had encouraged her and aided in editing the book. He translated it into Hindi and this version was published in 2002. The Bengali original was published in 2004. A Malayalam version appeared in 2005 and the English translation was published in 2006. The book became a best-seller in India. Translations into French and Japanese are being planned. As of 2006, Ms. Halder continues to work at a home in Gurgaon on a sequel to her bestseller.
The book has been translated into German in 2008. It is expected that the author herself will be visiting Germany in the company of her publisher, Preeti Gill of New Delhi, India to present the book to audiences there and explain to them the present situation of women in India. The prestigious [Georg-August University in Goettingen, Germany]http://www.uni-goettingen.de/ has arranged for a seminar to be held with the author and her publisher on the 23rd October 2008. Further seminars are being arranged in Frankfurt, Dusseldorf, Krefeld, Halle, Kiel, Berlin and Heidelberg.

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Source from BBC News

From maid to bestselling author

An Indian woman who used to sweep and mop other people's floors found her life transformed overnight when she became a bestselling author.
Baby Haldar worked as a maid in a home in Gurgaon, in the state of Haryana, before turning her attention to a more creative passion.
Her first book, Aalo Aandhari (Light and Darkness), was published last year in Hindi.
Since then, two editions of the book have been printed.
Recently the Bengali edition of her book was published, with the release party hosted by famous Bangladeshi writer, Taslima Nasreen.

Literary benefactor

Ms Haldar's fortunes changed when she ran away from an abusive marriage and went to Gurgaon to make a new beginning.
She started working as a maid to support her three children.

" Society just saw me as a maid and did not even look at me and then suddenly everyone was eager to talk to me. -Baby Haldar "

Among those she worked for was Professor Prabodh Kumar, the grandson of one of the greatest literary figures of the Hindi language, Prem Chand.
The professor noticed she spent a lot of time dusting his large collection of tomes, especially those written in Bengali.

"One day he caught me handling one of the books and asked me to read out the title," Ms Haldar told BBC Hindi Online's Alok Prakash Putul.

"I was a bit hesitant. The book was Taslima Nasreen's Amar Meyebela [My Girlhood]."

Professor Kumar gave her the book and asked her to read it when she had time.

"Later he gave me a notebook and pen and asked me to write my life story."

Into the night

For Baby Haldar, who dropped out of school, putting pen to paper was a great trial - confronting the past that she had run away from.
She started writing after finishing her daily work and would continue late into the night.
She wrote about her uncaring father, the mother who abandoned her, her stepmother and the man double her age she was married to when she was just 13.

"Professor Kumar would read my writing, make corrections and photocopies.
"And I continued to write and write. I think I wrote for months."

The professor showed her writings to his friends who were moved by the memoirs.
He then translated her writing into Hindi and a Calcutta-based publisher decided to print it.
Attention

Ms Haldar has now completed her second book.
"My new book is about the sea change that took place in my life after Aalo Aandhari was printed.
"Earlier society just saw me as a maid and did not even look at me and then suddenly everyone was eager to talk to me."

Ms Haldar gets hundreds of letters every day.
Some are interested in translating the book into other languages and she has also received an offer to turn the book into a film.
Her life and the book have become a talking point in newspapers and on television.
Ms Haldar was taken aback by all the attention.

"I am not a writer, I am just a maid. I still cannot understand why my life story is causing such a stir." she says.

But one thing, she says, has changed.

"Earlier my children were ashamed to introduce me. But now they proudly say, 'My mother is a writer'. "

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Source from NY times

In India, a Maid Becomes an Unlikely Literary Star

NEW DELHI, Aug. 1 — Abandoned by her mother at 4, married off at 12 to an abusive husband, a mother herself at 13 — there is little in Baby Halder’s traumatic childhood to suggest that she would become an emerging star on India’s literary horizon.
A single parent at 25, struggling to feed her three children by working as a maid for a series of exploitative employers, Ms. Halder had no time to devote to reading or to contemplating the harsh reality of her existence until she started work in the home of a sympathetic retired academic, who caught her browsing through his books when she was meant to be dusting the shelves. He discovered a latent interest in literature, gave her a notebook and pen, and encouraged her to start writing. “A Life Less Ordinary,” this season’s publishing sensation in India, is the result of her nighttime writing sessions, squeezed in after her housework duties were finished, when she poured raw memories of her early life into the lined exercise books.
Prabodh Kumar, the retired anthropology professor who discovered her, was impressed with what he read and encouraged her to continue. After several months, he sat down with her and helped edit her text into book form. Written in Bengali and translated into several other Indian languages and English this year, Ms. Halder’s autobiography has become a best seller.
In a sense, this is an Indian “Angela’s Ashes”: Ms. Halder echoes Frank McCourt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning account of his miserable boyhood in Ireland with her story of a bleak upbringing in northeastern India in the 1970’s. Ms. Halder’s style will never win her literary prizes; even with Mr. Kumar’s editing, the narrative is rough, and the horde of characters who flit in and out can be confusing. Nevertheless, her book provides a moving depiction of life for millions of impoverished Indian women, and of aspects of Indian society not usually the focus of novelists’ attention.
Ms. Halder recounts her life story in plain language, without a trace of self-pity. She starts out with a snapshot of how her mother — exhausted by her husband’s extended absences and his failure to provide for the family — goes out to the market and never returns. She relates, unsentimentally, how her father beat her for telling a school friend that there was no food in the house, how he introduced one “new mother” after another into their household, how intermittent spells of schooling were cut short by money shortages and domestic chaos, and how her elder sister was abruptly married off because their father could no longer afford to keep her.
Ms. Halder was too young to understand the significance of the preparations for her own marriage, preferring to play with her friends in the street instead. After meeting her future husband, twice her age, the 12-year-old Baby tells a friend: “It will be a good thing to be married. At least I will get to have a feast.” Even in the hours before her wedding, she writes, “I’d sing and jump about and play.”
A realization of the horror of her new married life comes suddenly. Soon she is pregnant and, barely understanding what has happened, finds herself being rebuked by the doctor for “choosing” at so young an age to have a child. Two more children follow; then her husband splits her head open with a rock after he sees her speaking with another man, and her elder sister is beaten and strangled by her own husband.
Ms. Halder decides to walk out on her marriage. She flees on a train to Delhi, where, like many other desperate women, she seeks work cleaning the homes of the capital’s rising middle class. There she escapes destitution(빈곤) by sending her eldest son out as an under-age domestic servant and by working for abusive employers. Her bosses treat her harshly, forcing her to lock her children in the attic all day while she works.
She writes of one employer: “As soon as she sat down, I’d offer her tea, water, sherbet, whatever she wanted. Then I had to massage her head or her feet or whatever: the work was never ending.”
Ms. Halder never articulates her rage(격노,분노) directly and rarely blames her father or her husband for the cruelty she experienced, but the facts stand powerfully for themselves. This is a simple description of a grim existence that has no need of embellishment(임벨리쉬먼트,윤색,각색) with literary tricks.
During an interview at Mr. Kumar’s house in Gurgaon, just outside Delhi, where she still works as a housekeeper, she seemed initially at ease more with her role as maid than as writer, refusing to sit down until everyone was given water and offered tea.
Ms. Halder, now 32, said she wrote up in the servants’ quarters, once her tasks were finished and the children asleep.
“When I wrote, I felt like I was talking to someone, and after writing I would feel lighter, as if I had taken some sort of revenge against my father, who never took care of me as a father should, and against my husband,” she said. “I never thought that other people might be interested in reading my story.”

Mr. Kumar, however, said he was immediately struck by what she had written. “I was amazed; I knew it was very special,” he said. He photocopied the work and sent it to friends in the publishing world.
Ms. Halder added: “They liked it and said it reminded them of Anne Frank’s writing — she was a girl who wrote a diary and died young. I was encouraged to write down everything, my whole life. I had no plan to start a book; I was just writing.”
Hailed by Delhi’s literary elite as a groundbreaking work, “A Life Less Ordinary” has also found readers among women who have shared Ms. Halder’s difficulties.
“This is not a book that can be read and tossed aside. It raises questions about the fate of the millions of domestic workers in our country and their ill treatment,” a review in the newspaper The Hindu concluded. “Truly this is a story of courage under fire.”
It also illustrates how Indian society treats women who leave their husbands, stigmatizing(스티크거타이즈:비난하다.오명을 씌우다) them and pushing them to the margins of existence.

“It is the most difficult thing for a woman to do,” Ms. Halder said. “People in the villages say dirty things about you, but I wanted to give my children a better life, so I had no choice.”
“One woman told me that this was precisely her story too, which made me very happy,” she added. “There are so many other women in India who have left home like me. There is no support for them; life is not easy, and they are not able to speak out. If I can give them some confidence, then I will be satisfied.”

Mr. Kumar explained that he helped Ms. Halder reorder the text so it became a chronological account of her life, removing repetition and fixing grammar. He said that at first her spelling and handwriting were poor, but that she swiftly improved and gradually gained greater sophistication as a writer. Her later manuscripts show tidy handwritten Bengali, crushed into the lined pages of the notepad as if she were concerned not to waste paper.
Despite her book’s success, Ms. Halder says she has no plans to change careers. She is writing her second book, continuing the narrative of her life, in between domestic chores.
“I want to be a writer and I will continue to write,” she said. But for now, she said, she cannot abandon Mr. Kumar, “so I will go on working here.”
And then she left, to prepare lunch for her boss.

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Souce from http://www.hinduonnet.com/


A life less ordinary

This is no literary work of genius but Baby Halder's book, originally penned in Bengali and now translated into English by Urvashi Butalia, is both a societal and literary fence-breaker, says SANGEETA BAROOAH PISHAROTY
Her smile is certainly eye-catching. And those eyes! At the risk of being called a bit parochial, one would say they are typical Bengali eyes. Glowing and expressive. But that striking smile, those iridescent eyes can't be trusted fully. Because they are half way to her truth. They tell you that she is indeed at ease with life now. But what they hold back is her past. They don't tell you the full truth.
Baby Halder, as she begins talking about her life as she has penned in her debut book, "Aalo Aandhari", a memoir now translated into English, words gradually begin to ice-over, almost to the extent of numbing your senses. All you could manage to think is, how violence, when it becomes an everyday situation can make people stop reacting the way many others do.
Baby, a domestic help in a Gurgaon household, begins narrating shards of her life led in various parts of West Bengal, mainly Murshidabad, in almost the same flat tone as she is found throughout her book: "Where should I start? Should I begin with how when I was seven-years-old my mother suddenly left us by thrusting a coin each in our hands, or tell you about how my nephew told my Baba that he saw his father strangling his mother, my Didi, to death, or how my Baba used to suddenly vanish from our life and then resurface. Or should I tell you about my husband to whom I was married off when I was 12 and why I left him and came to Delhi with my three children?" Seeing her being so methodical about relating her sufferings to a stranger, and so gently, takes you more than an instant to absorb. "Many girls back home go through a similar life and yet nobody looks at it as anything different," she suddenly says, her raw honesty all-bursting.
The birth
Instead of choosing from the options that Baby has offered to talk, one begins by asking her about how the book was born.
"My employer Prabodh ji has lots of books, including many Bengali books. While dusting them, I always used to think if one day I could read them. Even as a child, I always wanted to go to school. Despite our poverty, my mother never stopped us from going to school and even after she left us, I continued going. I studied till class 7th. So when Prabodh ji once saw me a little lost while dusting the books he asked me whether I would like to read a Bengali book, to which I said yes. He gave me Taslima Nasreen's autobiography and soon I realised her life is so similar to me," she narrates. Not stopping at Nasreen, Baby soon picked books by Mahasweta Devi, Shanko Ghosh, Charat Chandra Bangopadhay, Rabindranath Tagore, Ashapurna Devi, Nasrul Islam and more such Bengali luminaries.
That destiny dropped her at that household in Gurgaon one hot afternoon seven years back can't be denied completely as her employer is no other than Prabodh Kumar, the grandson of the great writer Premchand. Himself a writer and a retired professor, Kumar gave her a notebook and a pen one day to try writing whatever comes to her mind. "I became very confused. I told him, I don't know what to write and then he said, why don't you write about yourself. And so I began writing," Baby relates.
And what happened thereafter is indeed history. From a faceless domestic help, Baby became a writer. From her sufferings she suddenly broke free to enter a new world of words.
"After seeing what I wrote, Prabodh ji said, someone called Annie Frank had once written something like that. On hearing that, I felt quite good," she says. Prabodh Kumar translated her memoirs, "Aalo Aandhari" into Hindi and got it published by a Kolkata-based publisher in 2002. In 2004 came her Bengali original by the same publisher. A year after, a Malayalam translation appeared and this past week came its English translation "A Life Less Ordinary" by Urvashi Butalia of the imprint, Zubaan. It is a Penguin and Zubaan publication.
Urvashi says, "She is not always flat in her tone in the book. She has her literary moments and from first person she at times goes to third person." Very soon, Urvashi informs, Baby's book shall be translated in French too.
"We are also talking about translating it in Japanese," she adds. Also, Baby is writing yet another book, "on things that I don't like in our society," as she puts it.
More than happy at the moment, Baby thinks the great purpose that her book has served is changing her father's attitude not just towards her alone but towards daughters in general. "He said nobody in our family has gone so far in life and that makes me feel very good. After reading the book Baba told me if time would have allowed him, he would like to go back to the days when we were kids and undo all the wrongs that he did towards us and my mother, I felt very good," she recounts. For a girl who doesn't even know her birthday, isn't it a great gift from a father?