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.