"Set in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Ashapurna Debi's widely acclaimed Pratham Pratisruti, translated as The First Promise, attempts to commemorate the struggles and efforts of women, of the mute domestic space, starkly neglected by history. This book, about one of the many unknbown women from the ignored interiors of Bengal, also captures the larger social and cultural transformations of the colonial era....

Indira Chowdhury's confident translation, with its conscious choice of Indian English equivalents over British and American colloquialisms, carries across the language divide, the flavour of Ashapurna's unique idiomatic style.""     (-- from the back cover)

Pratham Pratisruti is the first volume of the famous trilogy by Ashapurna Debi, who received the Jnanpeeth Award in 1976 for this.