Nabarun Bhattacharya: An Introduction

Nabarun Bhattacharya was born in Calcutta in 1948 to Bijan Bhattacharya and Mahasweta Devi, both noted literary personalities. Devi left family for a career in activism and literary writing at a very early age when Nabarun was a kid. He grew up under the guidance and immediate artistic inspiration of Bijan Bhattacharya, whose 1943 Bengal Famine based play Nabanna (New Harvest) had already made a huge impact in the Indian theatre world, and his uncle Ritwik Ghatak, the noted auteur, whose films captured the despairing social conditions of poverty, joblessness, and political bankruptcy in a recently liberated nation. Nabarun’s literary writings were highly alert to the immediate social and political concerns and marked by an ideological faith in Marxism.