Selected Stories: Manik Bandyopadhyay

Manik Bandyopadhyay (1908-56), India's first important Communist novelist, offers in his stories a penetrating insight into the changing times that saw the disintegration of colonial rule in India, in a setting of famine, communal riots and peasant uprisings. With his uncompromising commitment to realism, he studies an urban middle class losing its older values in its struggle to survive, and rural masses driven by ruthless exploitation and deprivation to virtual marginalization and dehumanization. While he never loses sight of the socio-economic pressures at work, he concentrates on how human relationships are affected and only too often distorted in the process, and how rebellion grows.