Bangla Boi(Bangla E-books Free Download and All are taken from Web): SAMARESH BASU

A prolific writer with more than 200 short stories and 100 novels, Samaresh Basu spent his early childhood in Bikrampur, Dhaka, now in Bangladesh. He was in those days deeply influenced by Brata-kathas (a sort of ballads on the gods and goddesses) narrated by his mother. His adolescent years were spent in Naihati, a suburb of Kolkata, in West Bengal. He had to struggle in his early days – hawking eggs on the streets, a daily wage labor in an ordnance factory et al. He became an active member of the Communist party and was jailed during 1949-50 when the party was banned. While in jail, he wrote his first novel, Uttaranga, and thereafter he took to writing for his livelihood. His first story, ‘Adab’ appeared in the most respected magazine of the time, ‘Parichay’ (1946) and. then he serialized his novel ‘Nayanpurer Mati’ in the same magazine, Both brought him instant fame and popularity. He also wrote a number of outstanding books under the aliases ‘Kalkut’ and ‘Bhramar’. Samaresh Basu is a major figure in Bengali fiction. His life experiences populated his writings with themes ranging from political activism to working people’s individual struggle to sexuality, against which a section of the readers were dead against. Two of his novels were briefly banned on charges of obscenity. The case against one novel, ‘Prajapati’, was settled in the Supreme Court of India overturning the rulings of two lower courts. His ‘nom de plume’, Kalkut was adopted in 1952 to publish an overtly political piece. However the popular Kalkut was born as a writer with ‘Amritakumbher Sandhane’, a hugely popular autobiographical travelogue on the occasion of ‘Kumbha-mela’, a massive religious conglomeration. The many subsequent books by Kalkut took up a style of its own to dig deep into the psyche of India’s multi-religious flavor.

Awards

Samaresh Basu was awarded by the Sahitya Akademy in 1980 for “Shmba”, a book by is ‘nom de plume’, Kalkut.

Critics View

(Samaresh Basu) remains the most representative storyteller of Bengal's suburban life, as distinct from other well-known Bengali authors who had faithfully painted the life and problems of either Bengal's rural society or the urban middle class. Basu draws on his lived experience of Calcutta's `half-rural, half-urban,' industrial suburbs.--- Sumanta Banerjee, literary critic

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