ABSTRACT
The French version of A Life Less Ordinary, the autobiography of Baby Halder, appeared in 2007. Her work had already been translated into twenty-seven other languages. In India, this phenomenal publishing success story was characterized as ‘one of the best subaltern autobiographies ever written’, by K. Sachidanandan, a member of the prestigious Sahitya Academy; it was subsequently also praised in similar terms by the intellectual elite and by the English language Indian media.1 ‘Subaltern’ would, thus, characterize a literary genre of which A Life Less Ordinary would be a prime example. But what are the stories that it surpasses, and in what way does it surpass them? In the reception of the work, these questions remain unanswered. The silence points to a paradox. My objective here is to clarify the paradox, and to try to understand its significance.
