THE LIFE AND TIMES OF BANKA HARICHANDAN

A tremendous portrait of the hopes and horrors the threads of delicate perception and the pangs of fear and illusion of a growing boy''s life in a provincial town in Odisha. Banka Harichandan returns us to the unique atmosphere at once particular and universal of our own childhood. - Chandrahas Choudhury Author of Arzee the Dwarf and My Country Is Literature Dipti Ranjan Pattanaik creates a masterly tale of coming of age in Odisha’s pious rustic heartlands. Deftly translated into English from Odia The Life and Times of Banka Harichandan carries the reader into a delightfully immersive experience of young Banka’s heady confrontation with adolescence—and with the relentless world of grown-ups…. Dispassionate and compassionate at the same time ‘Banka Harichandan’ is a heart-warming tribute to the eternal reenactment of growing up. - Paul Zacharia Author of Bhaskara Patellar and Other Stories and The Reflections of a Hen in Her Last Hour and Other Stories In this tour-de-force of a coming-of-age narrative the story of an ordinary but precocious boy named Banka Harichandan is told afresh using a mixture of childhood perception idiolect and anecdotes. The stories evoke a child’s restless and questioning mind constantly pushing against the restrictive limits of his placid and conformist times. Presented in a series of discrete tales the narrative—best thought of as a ‘composite novel’—takes the reader on an odyssey through the whole gamut of emotions that light up the passage from innocence to experience in a small-town lower-middle-class setting. Unfolding at a leisurely pace and studded with epiphanies The Life and Times of Banka Harichandan is a remarkable contribution from Odisha to literature centred on children.