Satkahon

Satkahon (Seven Tales) is Samaresh Majumdar’s most widely read novel — a multigenerational story centred on Deepaboli, a young woman growing up in tea-garden Bengal in a Bangladeshi-Hindu household at a transitional moment in twentieth-century history. The novel follows her from childhood, through marriage and motherhood, to the choices she eventually makes about her own life.

What makes Satkahon distinctive in Bengali fiction is its unwavering interest in what its central woman actually wants. Samaresh Majumdar gives Deepaboli room to be intelligent, contradictory, sometimes wrong, and always recognisably real. The other characters around her — her father, her husband, the men who circle her over the years — are written with the same attention.

The novel is long, but the prose is quick, and the chapters are short. It is widely taught in Bengali literature courses, and remains in print decades after its first publication. For readers looking for a serious modern Bengali novel about a woman’s life, this is one of the obvious places to start.