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Ashapurna Debi was born in 1909. Her conservative family did not send her to school, but encouraged by her mother, she learnt to read and write on her own and published her first poem in the children's magazine Shishu Saathi. Married at fifteen to Kalidas Gupta of Krishnanagar, She continued to write with his support. Pratham Pratisruti(1964) is the first of a trilogy that includes Subarnalata (1966) and Bakul Katha (1973). Translated here as The First Promise, it won her the Rabindra Puraskar in 1966 and the Bharatiya Jnanpith award in 1977. Ashapurna published 181 novels, 38 anthologies of short stories, and 52 books for children. She died in 1995. Indira Chowdhury has a Ph.D from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, and is a Professor at the Department of English, Jadavpur University. She is the author of The Frail Hero and Virile History: Gender and the Politics of Culture in colonial Bengal(1998), which won the Rabindra Puraskar in 2000. Her wide-ranging interests include cultural history, lexicography, and the history of science and medicine in India. She is currently on deputation leave at the National Center for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, where she is involved in setting up an oral history archive for the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.