Bengal's Charles Dickens

Well, almost.

Sunil Ganguly, a well-regarded Bengali writer from India, passed away.

One of Ganguly's books Shei Shomoi (Those Days/Times) sits on my bookshelf, half-unread. It's a fictionalized account of the nineteenth-century Bengal Renaissance that attends to details of the lives of Bengali aristocrats and the burgeoning middle-class with the fidelity of a Charles Dickens.

As an adolescent I consumed Ganguly's fiction voraciously and felt that he had lost his touch in his later writing. They had got a bit pornographic and pornography doesn't do well in Bengali.

But Ganguly was not just a "Bengali" writer. He was a global writer of his time. In the 60s he was personally hand-picked by Paul Engels, the director of the trailblazing Iowa Writing Workshop, as writer-in-residence.

One of the best works by Ganguly, in my eyes, is Aryaner Din Rattir (Days and Nights in the Forest). I thought it was a fantastic adaptation of Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, rendered more fantastic by film maestro Satyajit Ray.