Domoruchorit: Stunning Tales from Bengali Adda

Troilokyonath Mukhopadhyay (1847-1919) is one of the foremost writers of fiction of nineteenth-century Bengal. He is a master of the genre of fantasy writing.Domoruchorit, posthumously published in 1923, is a book which contains seven tales that are suffused with hilarious narration, sparkling wit, and cutting-edge satire. The tales capture the adda spirit of nineteenth-century Bengal and caters a disinct old world charm. Each of the stories comes up with a vignette of nineteenth-century Bengal with its politics of swadeshi movement and the social reality comprising casteism, child marriage, premature widowhood, feudal tyranny, and colonial oppression. And in each of these stories Troilokyonath Mukhopadhyay blends facts and fiction so magically that some critics have preferred to call him the first magic realist author of Bengal, even if he wrote at a time when magic realism was not even remotely known anywhere in the world. The stories purvey the flavour of a long-lost community life and homosocial male bonding which was once a distinctive part of Bengali culture.