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About the Book

Subodh Ghose’s stories are marked by a strong, vigorous narrative style and a lively universe of people and places drawn from the writer’s formidable range of life experiences.

This collection of translations into English presents a number of his better-known stories. Romantic lovers, desperate peasants, eccentrics, conmen and patriots, persons with strong convictions or strange obsessions: all act out their lives in settings rural and urban, making the reader a witness to several segments of reality in a vividly evoked world.

It is no surprise that several of his stories were made into classic Bengali and Hindi films, and that the awards he received came from both the literary and film worlds.

About the Author

Subodh Ghose was born on 29 September 1909 in Bikrampur, Dhaka, now in Bangladesh, and educated at St. Columba’s College, Hazaribagh. His early career was varied, to say the least. ‘Starting as a schoolmaster’, he wrote, ‘I had the following occupations: performance on the horizontal bar of a circus; district board health inspector on the Haj Pilgrimage Service; sanitary inspector; bus conductor on the Ranchi-Gaya Motor Bus Service; confectioner; hotel-keeper; mica-mining prospector; vaccinator; poultry farmer; butter merchant; sannyasi ... gypsy ... union volunteer ... political worker ...’

In 1941, Subodh Ghose took to writing; his first few stories won him immediate recognition. His vivid and vigorous prose style and the formidable range of experience on which he could draw made a powerful and winning combination.

While he worked, rising to a senior level, on the editorial staff of the Bengali newspaper Ananda Bazar Patrika, he continued to write fiction; many of his stories were made into classic Bengali and Hindi films, so that his awards came from both the literary and film worlds. Several such stories have been included in this collection.

Subodh Ghose was prominent too for his editorials in the press; his last editorial appeared on 9 March 1980. He passed away the next day.