Novel
রত্নদীপ
Not translated into English
Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhyay · 1915
Synopsis
The estate of Basuligram is in mourning: it is fourteen years since the crown prince Bhuvan left the house, and his mother and his young wife have waited in vain. That evening, at a nearby station, Gopal, a dismissed stationmaster, discovers the body of an ascetic who looks exactly like him, and understands that it is the vanished prince. He takes his place and enters the palace amid the rejoicing, where the innocence of the young queen begins to make him measure his deception.
Context
The novel appeared in 1915, six years before the affair of the Bhawal sannyasi broke out, in which an ascetic claiming to be the prince of a great estate near Dhaka held Bengal in suspense until 1946: reality seemed to imitate fiction. Debaki Bose made a film of it in 1951, in Bengali and Hindi. Its author, a protégé of Tagore, remains known for this novel and for a short story, Devi, from which Satyajit Ray made a film in 1960.
Who it is for
A novel of intrigue and period setting, with no French or English translation. A few of the author's short stories exist in English.
Prizes and reception
The best known of its author's fourteen novels, and one of the two works by which he is remembered.
Sources for this page 6
The pages consulted to check this page.