Sarat Chandra at 150: Why Bengal’s Great Storyteller Still Matters

Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay was born 150 years ago this month. Readers across Bengal are marking the anniversary. They are still arguing about him too.

Sarat was born on 15 September 1876 in Debanandapur, in Bengal’s Hooghly district. He died in 1938. India’s prime minister paid tribute on the anniversary. In Bangladesh, The Daily Star ran a long essay asking how we should read him now.

Sarat Chandra, the writer of the overlooked

Sarat wrote about rural Bengal and people pushed to its edges. He wrote about poor farmers, widows, lower-caste women and the lonely. His prose was plain, warm and easy to read. That helps explain why his books reached every Indian language.

His stories also travelled well on screen. Devdas alone has been filmed again and again, in several languages. In Bangladesh, director Chashi Nazrul Islam adapted it twice.

The essay, by Oxford researcher Dr Madhurima Sen, starts with “Mahesh”. In that short story, a poor Muslim farmer named Gafoor kills his starving bull in a moment of rage. Sarat does not let the killing define him. The story ends with Gafoor under the night sky, asking God for justice.

Reading him with open eyes

Sen does not ask for worship. Sarat has faced fair criticism over caste and gender, she notes. His suffering women often lack agency. In “Abhagir Swarga”, a dying lower-caste woman longs only for her absent husband’s blessing.

Sen also rejects the old excuse that nobody could see further in his day. Begum Rokeya and B. R. Ambedkar did. Both imagined far more radical change during Sarat’s lifetime.

Her answer is a middle path. Argue with him. Read him against the grain. But read him, because he makes it hard to look away from suffering.

That is a useful model for any freethinker facing a cultural icon. Criticism and affection can live together. Bengal’s reformers, from Sarat back to the young radicals of Young Bengal, rarely fit neat labels.

Read Dr Sen’s essay in The Daily Star.

Fact basis: “Reading Sarat Chandra at 150, with empathy” by Dr Madhurima Sen, The Daily Star (21 Sept 2026); Prime Minister of India’s tribute (15 Sept 2026), reported by The Statesman; biographical dates from standard references.