Red Ant Black Ant [Girindrashekhar Bose | Translator : Sukanta Chaudhuri]

Lal-kalo, a book for children written nearly a hundred years ago in 1930, is one of the most curious examples of Bengali juvenile literature. Its author, Girindrasekhar Basu, is regarded as the father of Indian psychoanalysis. In 1911, he began a decade-long correspondence with Sigmund Freud on cultural variations in psychoanalytic concepts and founded the Indian Psychoanalytic Society in Calcutta in 1922. Lal-kalo, a delightful story about the battle between the red ants and the black ants, with an allsinging and dancing cast of owls, geckos, frogs, snakes and the like, has remained a perennial children’s favourite ever since.