Putul Nacher Itikotha

Putul Nacher Itikotha is Manik Bandopadhyay’s masterpiece, written when he was still in his twenties. The novel is set in a small Bengali village and follows the doctor Shashi as he watches the people around him live, suffer, and die. Manik wrote with a coldness that was new in Bengali fiction and the book has the precision of a clinical eye.

It is one of the great modernist novels in any Indian language. Demanding but worth every page.