“Of course they do,” he chuckled. “But look at the inside back cover.”
The books were published by , Moscow, but printed in elegant, flawless Bengali script . The translations were not clumsy. They were lyrical, often done by respected Bengali left-leaning intellectuals of the 1970s and 80s who admired the Soviet Union’s support for anti-colonial movements. raduga publishers bengali books
“Raduga,” the professor said, tapping a faded cigarette case, “means ‘rainbow’ in Russian. And for a generation of Bengali children, that rainbow brought stories from Moscow to Maniktala.” “Of course they do,” he chuckled
That was the missing link. never had a store in Kolkata. Instead, they collaborated with Allied Publishers (and later, the state-run Bookland in Esplanade) to distribute their translated books in India, including Bengali titles, as part of a cultural outreach program. They were lyrical, often done by respected Bengali
She did. There was a small, rubber-stamped oval: “Allied Publishers Private Ltd., Calcutta – Sole Distributors.”
Here’s a short, helpful story that explores and their connection to Bengali books. In the quiet, book-lined flat of an old professor of comparative literature in Kolkata, a young researcher named Mitali was struggling. She was studying the reception of Soviet children’s literature in post-independence Bengal. Her supervisor had mentioned a name she couldn’t find in any modern database: Raduga Publishers .
Mitali’s research became a small exhibition. Older visitors wept seeing the covers. “This book taught me that snow exists,” one said. “We never saw snow in Bengal, but we felt it through Raduga.”