India, July 11 -- In the Bengali film Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest, 1970), directed by Satyajit Ray, four young men from Calcutta drive to Palamau (in what was then Bihar and is now Jharkhand) for an impromptu holiday. Adapted from Sunil Gangopadhyay's novel of the same name, it opens with Sanjoy (Subhendu Chatterjee) reading from a 19th-century Bengali travelogue, Palamou, by Sanjib Chandra Chatterjee. "Bengalis are accustomed to seeing plains, so the slightest suggestion of hillocks fills them with alacrity," reads Sanjoy, as the landscape outside changes. Described by American filmmaker Wes Anderson as "criminally underseen", a 4K restored version of the film was scree-ned at the Cannes Film Festival last year. If the screening sparked any interest among those without access to Bengali culture, they could turn to the recently published The Bengali Reader: The Finest Fiction, Non-Fiction, Poetry and Plays from the Bengali. Translated and edited by Arunava Sinha, it includes an extract from Palamou, poetry by Gangopadhyay, and an extract from Ray's screenplay for his 1976 film Jana Aranya (The Middleman). At nearly 600 pages, it is the definitive, canon-making anthology of Bengali literature for our times. It performs three essential tasks. First, it provides an ambitious collection from across a little over 200 years, starting in 1800. And it uses translation as an instrument for canon-making. It is, therefore, important for the editor of such a volume to be inclusive. Sinha performs this task in two ways: first, by the inclusion of genres such as recipes, screenplays, speeches, sketches and songs; and second, by also including writing by people traditionally excluded, such as folk singers, 19th-century women writers, and Dalit and queer writers. I call them "unusual suspects". Sinha organises his material chronologically into five uneven periods: The Argumentative Bengali (1818-90), The Home and the World (1891-1930), Independent Voices (1931-49), Revolutionary Fires (1950-80) and Modern Times (1981-2019). Each of these, naturally, includes the usual suspects too. The first two sections feature long-canonised writers such as Rammohun Roy, Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Rabindranath Tagore, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, Kazi Nazrul Islam and Swami Vivekananda. At the same time, these sections include folk singer Lalon Fakir, who rejected strictures of religion and caste, and influenced Tagore. Also included is Binodini Dasi, arguably the first stage celebrity of Bengal. As with Binodini, the inclusion of Manada Devi, an educated Brahmin woman who entered sex work in Calcutta in the early 20th century and then wrote a memoir, challenges the patriarchal framing of the public sphere, and challenges ideas of canon-making. Another notable inclusion is an extract from food writer and cook Bipradas Mukhopadhyay's Pak Pronali (Methods of Cooking), providing recipes of gul-kebab, ginger jelly and Chinese pineapple chaatni. The most satisfactory inclusion of "unusual suspects" for me are the Hungry Generation writers, such as Malay Roy Choudhury, Subo Acharya, Shaileswar Ghosh and Falguni Roy, in the fourth section of the book. A definitive anthology like this one will also be read for its exclusions. One notable exclusion is Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, whose novel, Lajja, has been translated into English as Shameless by Sinha. In fact, there are few writers from post-Partition East Bengal in the collection. Similarly, while Sinha includes screenplays, Bengali theatre has not been well-represented. Playwrights such as Girish Ghosh, Utpal Dutt or Badal Sircar are notable exceptions. Exclusions like these are often a function of quotidian reasons, such as permissions or author contracts; however, it is always helpful for a reader to be made aware if such is the case. In the introduction, Sinha writes: "I have ended up with writings that I personally responded to strongly..." Unlike a typical translator's note, the introduction is a letter to Swati and Satyen, the protagonists of Buddhadeva Bose's 1949 novel Tithidor. In it, Sinha asks the intended readers to imagine they are time travellers going through 200 years of Bengali literature, becoming "my Bengali reader". It is a process of creating an identity through literature. Sinha's choices as translator and editor imagine this identity to be inclusive, cosmopolitan and democratic. This is an essential political act for our troubled times....