Indian · 1876–1938
Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay was born in Debanandapur, Bengal, into poverty that interrupted his schooling repeatedly, and spent years in Rangoon as a clerk before his fiction found an audience. He became the most widely read Bengali novelist of the twentieth century, outselling Tagore, and his subject was the ordinary catastrophe: widows who cannot remarry, women whose reputations are destroyed by rumour, men who drink themselves to death over marriages their families arranged. He wrote about the village and the household with a sympathy for women that was radical in his time and a sentimentality that critics have never stopped complaining about. Devdas, Parineeta, Srikanta, and Palli Samaj have been filmed dozens of times across Indian languages, and Devdas alone has more than twenty screen versions. He joined the Congress movement in the 1920s and presided over its Howrah district committee. Readers across South Asia still know his plots without having read him.