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by Nabarun Bhattacharya
A hilarious and absurdist take on the political landscape of West Bengal, India.
Beggar's Bedlam is a surreal novel that unleashes the chaos of the carnival on the familiar. Part literary descendent of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita and part a reconstruction of lost Bengali history, Nabarun Bhattacharya's masterpiece is a jubilant, fizzing wire of subaltern anarchy and insurrection.
Marshall Bhodi Sarkar and his lieutenant Sarkhel surreptitiously dig on the banks of the Ganges River looking for crude oil reserves. Instead, they unearth curved daggers, rusty broadswords, and a Portuguese cannon. Bhodi is an occasional military man and the lead sorcerer of the secret black-magic sect named Choktar. He joins forces with the flying Flaperoos—men with a predilection for alcohol and petty vandalism—to declare outright war against the Marxist–Leninist West Bengal government. In a bloodless revolution that is fascinating in its utter implausibility, a motley crew of yet more implausible characters come together in a magic-realist fictional remapping of Calcutta.
"This uproarious novel from Bhattacharya exemplifies the author's penchant for freewheeling magical realism and rollicking revolutionary narratives... . Bhattacharya smoothly shifts between high and low registers, zagging from erudite references to Kolkata's political history and its poets to scatological barbs, and he makes every sentence fizz with the spirit of insurrection. It's an absolute blast." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
This information about Beggar's Bedlam was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Nabarun Bhattacharya (1948–2014) was a prominent Bengali writer who enjoyed cult following in his lifetime and beyond. A journalist from 1973 to 1991 at a foreign news agency, he gave up that career to become a full-time writer. Novelist and short-story writer, he was also a prolific poet.
Rijula Das is a novelist and translator. Her work has been translated into French, Russian and German.
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