Rijula Das

INFO

Name	Rijula Das (she/her)
Born	1987
Country of Birth	India
Place of Residence	France
Ethnicities	Indian (Bangladeshi)
Artform	Literature
Decades Active	2010s, 2020s

ABOUT

Rijula Das is a writer and Bengali-to-English translator currently based in southern France. She is the author of the novel Small Deaths (2022), which was first published as A Death in Shonagachhi (Picador India, 2021). Her writing captures contemporary India through the lens of women in towns and cities that Das herself has lived in, featuring characters shaped by her own experiences and extensive research.

Das was born in a small town in West Bengal and moved to Calcutta at the age of 15 to continue her education. She went on to study at the University of Calcutta, gaining a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English Literature, which she completed in 2008. She completed a Master of Philosophy and a Master of English Literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2010 and 2012, respectively. She received her Doctor of Philosophy degree in Creative Writing (Fiction) in 2016 from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Although her lifelong love of books fed Das's aspiration to be a writer, her journey to accept this career path was complicated. She explains that:

All the usual cliches apply to me –– I read a lot, I thought books and writers were magical things, I was a lonely child. But not all bookish, lonely children grow up to be writers. What turns us into writers is a mystery to me. We like to imbue writing with mysticism, but the actual fact of writing can be a fairly humdrum experience. To call oneself a writer, however, takes a certain amount of privilege and arrogance. My socio-economic circumstances didn’t groom me to own that label quite so readily. It was always meant to be a side talent, and the praise of friends was reward enough. Writers have always been writers, there is something in the wiring that’s preset, but it wasn’t till I started my doctoral work in creative writing that I was able to say aloud that I’m a writer. It was thrilling but also very exposing.

Das began writing her first novel, Small Deaths, in 2014 while undertaking a PhD in Creative Writing at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. After graduating in 2016, she relocated to Pōneke, initially to work as a campaigner for Amnesty International and later as a bookseller and fiction buyer at Vic Books. Following this role, Das worked for three years as a consultant for Write, a plain language consultancy company based in Pōneke

Small Deaths was written over the course of eight years, during Das’s time in Singapore, the UK, and Aotearoa. At the 2022 Jaipur Literary Festival, she mentioned that she rewrote that book while longing for her hometown of Calcutta—especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, when she was unable to return there—and she wrote the novel to summon this place in her mind.

Small Deaths drew on Das’s doctoral research, exploring sexual violence against women in relation to public space. This contemporary noir fiction is set in Sonagachi, a neighbourhood in Calcutta that is known to be a red-light district. Lalee, a woman sold into sex work as a child and now in her early 20s, is still working at a brothel. After Lalee’s friend and co-worker is murdered, she and another woman she works with pursue justice by trying to find her killer while navigating a corrupt police system. Das portrays Calcutta with a sense of familiarity that stems from the years she spent in the city. It has since been translated into German and Russian and will soon have a French translation. As noted by Karin Salvalaggio for Bookanista, “Calcutta transcends the role of setting and steps effortlessly into the realm of character. The city is vibrant, complex, corrupt and stratified, with one foot firmly rooted in its colonial past while the other is racing toward its future.”

In reviewing Small Deaths for The Spinoff, Sam Brooks stated:

Maybe noir and Shonagachhi are a perfect marriage not because Das has decided it to be so, but because the heart at the core of noir, the one that pumps black blood into its veins, is a perfect match for Shonagachhi’s soul. If that’s the case, then the compassion and the grace that Das gives her story and its characters is a relief, a quiet defiance, in itself.
As well as writing her own books, Das works as a translator and was the festival programmer for the 2022 Verb Readers and Writers Festival. In 2024, she translated Nabarun Bhattacharya’s novel Kangal Malshat (2003) from its original Bengali to English for Seagull Books, with the translated title of Beggar’s Bedlam. Das credits Bhattacharya as being a big influence on her when writing Small Deaths. She now lives in the South of France and continues to work on her short fiction while being a mother to her young son.