The novel employs stream of consciousness, a stylistic device used very effectively by Bimal Kar to capture the onward movement of the life, of not just one individual but of a whole group of people related to each other. The nodal point of the novel keeps shifting in tandem with the change of character through whom the story is being told. While Mohini and Abin are the two characters central to the novel, it is Sachipati and his sickness that connects them all. The frustrations and anxieties of the characters stem from a prevailing theme of his work—of acknowledging modernity and the flux it brings to society, but also the discrete ways in which tradition asserts or re-asserts itself (be it justified or not). It received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1975.

About the Author
Bimal Kar (1921-2003) was an eminent Bengali novelist and dramatist, known for his ability to modify his narration styles and techniques based on his subject matter. For example, he has written superb stories without any dialogue, and he has also written noteworthy ones almost entirely comprising dialogue—from almost entirely narration to entirely dialogic, female vs male narration, or even flitting across Bengali dialects and localities with near-perfect authenticity. According to the academic and sociologist Dhurjati Mukherjee, his form of realism is unique because it “is embedded in the subconscious mind and not in the material aspect of life”.

Dubbed as Ghosh’s magnum opus, Shesh Namaskar (translated as The Last Salute by Ketaki Datta), is an exploration of the role of death in human life, and how the search for meaning is intricately linked with family, and the role of one’s parents and ancestry in their own purpose. Written as a series of letters from a son to his recently deceased mother using the second person narrative technique, it foregrounds how the narrator is grappling with his lack of moral basis in his life through trying to find it in his childhood, in his mother, i.e., his creator. The essence of the novel lies both in its immaculate technical prowess and the author’s search for the meaning of life and of death through a confessional self-projection into the narrator’s persona. In the words of author Subhash Chandra Sarker, ‘[Shesh Namaskar] is a highly perceptive account of the most tender relationship of men whose poignancy leaves everybody profoundly affected.’ Shesh Namaskar, subtitled ‘Shricharaneshu Ma ke’ (To my Mother), which shines in its ability to make a vivid presentation of a complicated scene with the most common words was first published in 1971 and received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1972.

About the Author
Santosh Kumar Ghosh (1920-85) was a Bengali author and journalist. Although most renowned and remembered for his short stories and novels, he was a versatile artist who tried his hand in drama, poetry and essays. His first important publication was the novel Kinu Goyalar Goli (Kinu Goyala’s lane, 1950) which brought him immediate recognition as a powerful novelist and has been translated into most of the major Indian languages. His writings were famous at the time not only for their poignant, deeply empathetic portrayals of the sufferings of the Indian subaltern, but also for his constant experimentations with the limits of the novel – most famously with Renu Tomar Mon, written entirely in the second person, and the mix of poetry, essay, and story in Mile Omile. His novels also exposed the painful transition from the innocence of childhood into the sordidness of adult life in the city. Further, as the editor of one of the largest Bengali newspapers—Ananda bazar Patrika—for nearly two decades, he was responsible for expanding and supporting the careers of many Bengali writers through presenting their work in the paper

Nishikutumb—translated into English as I Come as a Thief—was released in 1966 and immediately received critical acclaim. A two-part novel, it follows the life of Saheb, who grew up in a brothel and received the training of burglary in his childhood, only to give away nearly everything he steals. As he grows old and begins to lose his abilities, poverty and starvation jeopardize his existence. Towards the end, he is freed by the police due to the intervention of a woman he had saved many years ago. Breaking from the trend of exploring the psychology of educated, urban men that was popular in Bengali literature at the time, Basu paints the life of this persona non grata through a distinctively humanist lens. He consistently attacks the idea that modernity and morality were things to be associated with respectability and decorum since Saheb ends up having the most compassionate actions and values in a society that would consider him the opposite. Basu presents the Indian version of Robin Hood and makes its current ethical and political questions. The novel received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1966.

About the Author
Manoj Basu (1901-87) belongs to a group of Bengali novelists of the social realist school, who came into prominence as early as the thirties when a band of devoted writers belonging to the Kallol Group started depicting harrowing pictures of Bengali middle- class and lower-middle-class in a Flaubertian manner. Basu’s short stories have often been compared with the romantic tragedies of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. He wrote 33 novels and dramas, travel stories, children’s books—comprising a total of 64 books. In the words of author Bhabani Bhattacharya, “Very few contemporary writers have succeeded better than he [Basu] in recording a constantly changing scene with indisputable honesty and integrity”.

Kolkatar Kachhei (Quite Close to Kolkata) is an in-depth exploration of the life of three generations of a middle-class family in a village near Kolkata, primarily through the eyes of the women in it. Mitra portrays how this family must grapple with its continuous precarious position between poverty and stability while trying to create and sustain pretensions of respectability. It shows how the women in the house must respond to these ideas of respectability, which for them entail staying at home, and for men translate to spreading their wings and finding external economic and social freedoms. However, across the generations of women, it underlines how stoic acceptance transforms into an almost existential battle for liberty, reflecting the larger social struggles of the time: of all people against colonialism, and of women against patriarchy. It received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1959.

About the Author
Gajendra Kumar Mitra’s (1908-1994) was a versatile author, translator, and publisher of Bengali literature. Focusing primarily on writing short stories, poetry and drama for the first half of his career, his first book only came out after 200 of his short stories had been published in Bengali journals. Besides his literary work, he co-founded Mitra & Ghosh Publishers in 1934, which continues to be a famous press today. According to literary critic J.N. Chakrabartti, Mitra’s writing style is defined by its raw “almost perfect illusion of reality… [seen] in the delineation of the subtler shades of human emotion”.

Arogya Niketan (House of Good Health) follows the life of Jeevan Masai, an aging man living through the emergence of a modern order to traditional life in his village in Birbhum. Considered to be one of the most compelling psychoanalytic representations of old age written at the time, Masai is shown as subjecting himself to relentless self-examination, through memories of his devotion to his father, his current role as the aging patriarch, his bitter marriage, his role as a physician trained in Ayurveda contesting with the newly-arrived, allopathic medicine. Despite the subject matter dealing so heavily with the clinical discussions with sickness and death, Bandyopadhyay transforms these discourses into the poetic, portraying how the constant fear of death and generational replacement gnaw at the deepest layers of human consciousness. According to literary critic, NE Sudheer, “Arogya Niketan is perhaps the best contribution that India has made in this category of novels that deal with death”, and ranks the novel among Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Herman Broch’s Death of Virgil. The book received the Sahitya Akademi Award and Rabindra Puraskar in 1956.

About the Author
Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay (1898 -1971) was a novelist and activist. He was involved in the Indian Independence movement, as well as in later Bengali politics, and vigorously pushed for social reforms. He wrote extensively during this period, often reflecting these experiences in his 65 novels, 53 storybooks, 12 plays, 4 essay-books, 4 autobiographies, 2 travel stories and music compositions. He also directed a Bengali feature film, Amrapali in 1959. Tarasankar’s works were very well-received in his time; he received the Padma Shri (1961), Padma Bhushan (1969) and Sahitya Akademi Fellowship (1969) for his contributions to Indian Literature.

Also read
Ganadevta
Ganadevata (God of the Masses) was published in 1942. Set in the 1920s rural Bengal, the novel is an empathetic portrayal of the lives of Indian villagers. The story revolves around some lower-caste villagers denying to do the dehumanizing and unsustainable labour that is imposed on them due to their hereditary status, and choose to set up their own cooperative mill separate from the village. This ignites furor amongst the upper-caste villagers and becomes the center point of debate and anxiety in their lives. Bandopadhyay masterfully portrays how the tenets of the traditionalist casteist discussion change due to the influence of new ideas, namely from Yatin Babu, a freedom fighter with abolitionist ideals, Debu—the urban intellectual with modernist aims but disconnect with rural lives, and Durga, the Chandal prostitute who encourages Debu to fight for emancipation in the village. He also displays how these movements for reform also face violent suppression, but he ends the story optimistically as a sign of the possibility of change. When it won the Jnanpith in 1966, it was called by the editor “one of the best books ever written”.

Hansuli Banker Upakatha
Set against the colonial depredations of the 1939–45 war and the oppressions of an agrarian caste system, Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s novel Hansuli Banker Upakatha (translated as The Tale of Hansuli Turn by Ben Conisbee Baer, 2011) depicts a difficult transition in which Kahars, inhabitants of Hansuli Turn, a forest village in Bengal, who belong to an untouchable “criminal tribe”, fragment and mutate while struggling to grapple with the loss of their culture within a revolutionized society as local and global forces infiltrate their lived realities. Lyrically rendered by one of India’s great novelists, Hansuli Banker Upakatha provides riveting insights into the dilemmas of rural development, ecological and economic exploitation, and Dalit militancy that would occupy the center of India’s post-Independence politics. In 1946, the novel first appeared in a shorter version in a special annual Durga festival issue of Anandabazar Patrika and was adapted into a Bengali film of the same name by Tapan Sinha (1962).

Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, in Hansuli Banker Upakatha, states that happenings on the bank of Kopai embodied history itself: “Small rivulet of stories (Upakatha) has joined the great river of tales.”

Bandopadhyay’s 1936 novel, Padma Nadir Majhi, narrates the story of a poor fishermen community residing on the banks of the River Padma in a fictitious village called Ketupur in present day Bangladesh. Perennially dependent on the river for fish, the lives of the fishermen community form the focal point of this river centric novel. The novel revolves around Kuber, a poor fisherman. Sole breadwinner of his family, he resides, with other members of the fishermen community on the fringes of Ketupur where he lives with his wife, daughter and two sons. In his daily quest for survival he befriends a local businessman Hossain Miya, a small businessman suspected of human trafficking and other clandestine activities. At the heart of Hossain Miya’s ‘rags-to-riches’ story stands Moynadip, a remote silt bed island or char. It is to this char that Hossain Miya takes settlers from different parts of the region to build up a settlement. The settlers, hapless victims of either natural calamities like floods and cyclones or social ostracism, accompany him in search of new beginning.

Ironically, in the end Kuber embarks on the journey to Hossain Miya’s river island to avert a false charge of theft. The Padma is at the centre of the lives of the marginalized communities of fishermen, boatmen and small peasants. The river silently witnesses their daily chores, small joys and sorrows. Written prior to World War II, the novel criticizes the society that supports the elites, while inhumanly exploiting the underprivileged and impoverished class of fishermen. Even for small matters the fishermen community depends on the local landowner’s mercy and charity. The importance of the novel lies in the fact that it ushers in a new hope for the inhabitants who are ultimately able to break away from the cruel nexus of corruption and exploitation at the hands of the social elites and begin a new life. Kuber’s journey to Moynadip clearly indicates the dawning of the new era where people like him have the choice whether or not to accept their destinies unquestioned. His transition marks the ultimate cross over to a new world order that abounds in equality and justice. Moynadip is thus a metaphor for liberation where people work together without being exploited by privileged classes.

The novel was transferred to celluloid in 1993 and remains relevant for its discussion of class politics but remains timeless for its engaging and emotional narrative.

About the Author
Prabodh Kumar Bandyopadhyay (1908-1956), best known by his pen name ‘Manik’, is often called the founding father of modern Bangla fiction. He wrote over forty two novels and two hundred short-stories in his short life, which was plagued with ailment and poverty. Putul Nacher Etikatha and Chatushkone are two of his distinguished works.