The Life And Times of Banka Harichandan – Dipti Ranjan Pattanaik, Tr. Himansu S Mohapatra

Description

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.