Beloved children’s writer Subhadra Sen Gupta dies of covid

Beloved children’s writer Subhadra Sen Gupta dies of covid
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Beloved children’s writer Subhadra Sen Gupta died of covid-19 on Monday night in New Delhi, her cousin Suddhabrata Sengupta, the artist, writer, and part of the Raqs Media Collective, announced on Facebook. In a heartfelt tribute, he spoke of Sen Gupta’s extraordinary gifts, both as a writer and human being - especially, her “remarkable sense of how the past remains alive, as story, as history, as memory.”

Subhadra Sen Gupta was the author of 60-plus books - fiction, non-fiction, ghost stories, adventures, mysteries picture books—for young readers, including bestsellers like A Bagful of History.

Sen Gupta,  took children “very seriously” (as she once said in an interview), explained ideas like secularism, republicanism, sovereignty, and democracy in her inimitably lucid style, bolstered by Guha’s zany illustrations. She celebrated the roles played by Dalit leaders, women politicians, and tribal rights activists in the making of our Constitution. It is because of her 60-odd books that India’s children (and adults too) have a rich insight into the complexities of their past. Her novel, Mystery of the House of Pigeons, was adapted into a TV series. Her legacy will be hard to rival.