Nabarun Bhattacharya (23 June 1948 – 31 July 2014) was an Indian writer in
Bengali language
Bengali ( ), generally known by its endonym Bangla (, ), is an Indo-Aryan language native to the Bengal region of South Asia. It is the official, national, and most widely spoken language of Bangladesh and the second most widely spoken o ...
. He was born at
Berhampur
Brahmapur (; also known as Berhampur) is a city on the eastern coastline of Ganjam district of the Indian state of Odisha. Bramhapur is most famous for its street food, silk sarees or pato sarees, temples and many historical places. Bramhapur al ...
,
West Bengal
West Bengal (, Bengali: ''Poshchim Bongo'', , abbr. WB) is a state in the eastern portion of India. It is situated along the Bay of Bengal, along with a population of over 91 million inhabitants within an area of . West Bengal is the fou ...
. He was the only child of actor and playwright Bijon Bhattacharya and writer, activist
Mahashweta Devi
Mahasweta Devi (14 January 1926 – 28 July 2016) ''
. His maternal grandfather was the writer from the
Kallol
''Kallol'' ( bn, কল্লোল) refers to one of the most influential literary movements in Bengali literature, which can be placed approximately between 1923 and 1935. The name ''Kallol'' of the ''Kallol group'' derives from a magazine of t ...
Ritwik Ghatak
Ritwik Kumar Ghatak (; 4 November 19256 February 1976) was a noted Indian film director, screenwriter, and playwright. Along with prominent contemporary Bengali filmmakers Satyajit Ray, Tapan Sinha and Mrinal Sen, his cinema is primarily rememb ...
was his great uncle.
His novel, ''Herbert'' (1993), was awarded the
Sahitya Akademi Award
The Sahitya Akademi Award is a literary honour in India, which the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters, annually confers on writers of the most outstanding books of literary merit published in any of the 22 languages of the ...
, and adapted into a film of the same name in 2005, by Suman Mukhopadhyay.
Bhattacharya regularly edited a literary magazine ''Bhashabandhan''. He was secretary of ''Ganasanskriti Parisad'', the cultural organization of CPIML Liberation.
Personal life
Bhattacharya studied in
Kolkata
Kolkata (, or , ; also known as Calcutta , the official name until 2001) is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal, on the eastern bank of the Hooghly River west of the border with Bangladesh. It is the primary business, comme ...
, first Geology, then English, from
Calcutta University
The University of Calcutta (informally known as Calcutta University; CU) is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate State university (India), state university in India, located in Kolkata, West Bengal, India. Considered ...
. Nabarun married Pranati Bhattacharya, who was a professor of political science.
Works
The characters called Fyataru
His magic realist writings introduced a strange set of human beings to Bengali readers, called '' Fyataru'' (fyat: the sound created by kites while they are flown; otherwise, fyat has also a hint of someone worthless, deriving from the words foto, faaltu; uru: related to flying), who are an anarchic underclass fond of sabotage who are also capable of flying whenever they utter the mantra fyat fyat sh(n)aai sh(n)aai''' (this mantra was later made into a song by the popular bangla band
Chandrabindoo
Chandrabindu (IAST: , in Sanskrit) is a diacritic sign with the form of a dot inside the lower half of a circle. It is used in the Devanagari (ँ), Bengali-Assamese (), Gujarati (ઁ), Odia (ଁ), Telugu (ఁ), Javanese ( ꦀ) and other scr ...
in one of its albums). They appear in his books ''Mausoleum'', ''Kaangaal Maalshaat'', ''Fatarur Bombachaak'', ''Fyatarur Kumbhipaak and Mobloge Novel''. Suman Mukhopadhyay, who was basically from a theatrical background, dramatized ''Kaangaal Maalshaat'' in a movie of the same name.
In 2019, a new English translation of ''Harbart'' was published by New Directions, reviewed for ''Words Without Borders'' by Arka Chattopadhyay. In 2020, Sourit Bhattacharya, Arka Chattopadhyay and Samrat Sengupta co-edited a Bloomsbury volume of Nabarun's short stories, poems, interviews and a set of critical articles on his works: ''Nabarun Bhattacharya: Aesthetics and Politics in a World after Ethics''.
intestinal cancer
Colorectal cancer (CRC), also known as bowel cancer, colon cancer, or rectal cancer, is the development of cancer from the colon or rectum (parts of the large intestine). Signs and symptoms may include blood in the stool, a change in bowel ...
at Thakurpukur cancer hospital,
Kolkata
Kolkata (, or , ; also known as Calcutta , the official name until 2001) is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal, on the eastern bank of the Hooghly River west of the border with Bangladesh. It is the primary business, comme ...