Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s Hansuli Banker Upakatha, or The Tale of Hansuli Turn, as I have translated it, tells the story of an India modernized by the forces of war in the mid-twentieth century. The novel was written across the cusp of India’s formal accession to independent nation-statehood and was published in various versions between 1946 and 1951. It first appeared in a much shorter version in a special annual Durga festival issue of Ananda Bazar Patrika in 1946. (During the celebration of Durga Puja in late October in Bengal, many periodicals bring out a special issue publishing new writing, often by...

At night in the thick jungle of Hansuli Turn someone’s whistling. No one knows if the spirit’s a god or a demon. Everyone’s terrified. Especially the Kahars.

Almost at the midpoint of the Kopai river there’s a famous river bend called Hansuli Turn—meaning that where the river doubles back on itself in a very tight curve, its figure is just like a crescent-shaped hansuli necklace. In the rains, as it encircles the green fields, the hilly Kopai’s redearth-filled, water-brimming bend looks like a golden hansuli on a dark girl’s neck. In the spring months, when the water flows clean...

Some days later.

In accordance with the laws of the world, night turns to dawn at Hansuli Turn. No transgression there. Birds call from trees; on grass tips, night’s dewdrops tremble like grains of pearl. From the tops of bamboo, from the tops of rain tree, neem, mango, berry, jackfruit, acacia, banyan, and fig, dewdrops drip down onto earth’s breast. To each season its own flowers in bloom. Eastward, open fields that run down to the river’s edge yonder—sun rises over branches on the far side of the Kopai where Gopgram village is ringed with trees. But the Kahars...

On the backs of great drums, crow, kite, heron feather decorations; yaktail plumes on rounded handle ends dance up and down with the beat. Gongs play, horns play, sweet incense smoke floats at Babathakur’s shrine; devotees dance in the “jutebit,” that’s to say the jute yard, cane sticks in hand, “scarfies,” or scarves, on their necks, wearing ochre wraps, rouge marks on foreheads, Ganges-mud “marksigns,” unoiled hair, faces drawn with fasting, yet dancing wildly the glory of Father. Hari, Dom, Bauri, Kahar: whoever wishes can take part as Father’s devotee. This time, the head devotee is Bonwari. That’s the foremost...

Pagol brought Bonwari home and laid him down. Bonwari was beside himself. The hamlet folk crowded in. What happened? How did it happen?

Pagol said—Fell down at the edge o’ Jangol village gaspin’.

—Edge o’ Jangol?

—Yeh. Pagol was saying this after much troubled thought. He saw almost everything that happened at the end. Seeing the moonlight, he’d gone down to the Kopai’s banks on a whim. Kalobou had then been singing. With boundless curiosity he climbed a tree so he could watch Bonwari’s love play. Then Porom came along and the whole thing was over in the blink...

Gajon festival’s drum sounded again. Bonwari lay on the Charak board looking up at the sky and paid obeisance to Kalaruddu. That’s it. Year’s over, year’s over, the Kahars’ year has passed very well, by grace of the most kind and angry Father. Bonwari’s terrors did not come to pass. Youths, elders, headmen of Kaharpara all made it through. No more “deeth,” that’s to say death. Well, there was some, but of the regular type, no more than usual. One little accident happened in Atpoure Para—that Kalobou died. And Noyan died suddenly too. Besides this, three or four children...

A long sixty days, that’s to say two months, later.

Strange sounds coming from all corners of Hansuli Turn, from Kopai river’s every bend. Khot-khot-khot-khot. That sound running through the river’s womb; running through, striking yonder turn, coming back this way. All at once tranquil Hansuli Turn is becoming noisy.

Today Bonwari got up from his sickbed. He was sixty days laid sick; unconscious for fifty of those days. He somehow managed to get up today with merely this skin-covered, big-boned frame.

Sixty days before, the Kahars had brought him home from the Kopai’s edge fevered and unconscious. No one...