Sandipan Chattopadhyay

Sandipan's first publication was a book of short stories, ‘Kritadash Kritadashi’ (1961); his second collection of short stories ‘Shamabeto Protiddwandi o Anyanyo’ was published after a hiatus of nine years. In the late 1960s he initiated a series of self-published works, including ‘Biplab O Rajmohon (1969)’, ‘Shomen Paliter Boibahik (1970)’ and ‘25she Boishakher Shurjo (1970)’. Called ‘the prince of little magazines’ by friend and fellow poet Shakti Chattopadhyay, Sandipan's novel ‘Ekhon Amar Kono Ashukh Nei’ was published in the annual Anandabazar Patrika in 1977, after which his novels and short stories were published by big houses such as Protikhhon and Ajkal.

Soon after the publication of his early masterpiece ‘Bijoner Raktomangsho’, when everyone started to compare him with Albert Camus, Sandipan declared, he had not read Camus. However, he called himself ‘Camus-kator’(i.e. in awe of Camus) after reading him later. His other favourite European writers were Franz Kafka and Jean Genet. Poet Shankha Ghosh called him the ‘only contemporary European-minded Bengali author’. Fellow writer Shyamal Gangopadhyay jokingly said that Sandipan always wrote great French in Bengali and also considered his novel Hiroshima, My Love (1989) to be the first truly international novel written in the language.[2]

 An avid admirer of Kamalkumar Majumdar and his inheritance of a Bankimi brand of Bengali modernity as different from the Tagorian model on the one hand and someone steeped into the European avant garde on the other, Sandipan's aesthetics has within it, an ambivalent dialogue between the indigenous and the Western. While he held himself as a true Indian writer on the ground of writing in the vernacular, he also expressed his wish of undergoing his own funeral journey not with a Gita, but a copy of James Joyce's Ulysses on his chest.

Sandipan's reception in the 60s was marked with the European existentialist ambit of Kafka, Camus, Sartre and so on.Sandipan's works indeed have echoes from these authors and narrative situations that can be seen as a representation of the absurdist human condition. Rubi in Rubi Kakhan ashbe (1993) is reminiscent of Samuel Beckett's Godot as a principle of absence and Rajmohon in Biplab O Rajmohon is definitely influenced by Camus's notions of suicide.

Sandipan joined Ajkal as an employee in the 1980s and his novels became a regular feature in the Pujo-shankhyas of Ajkal from then on until his death. As the Ajkal edition of his complete novels testifies, he received two of the most coveted awards of the literary establishment — Bankim Purashkar in 1995 and Shahityo Academy Purashkar in 2002.[3] As representative of an aggressively experimental postmodernist avant-garde, Sandipan Chattopadhyay alternated between the mainstream and the parallelstream, the establishment and the anti-establishment, blurring their distinctions in the process.

• 1995: Bankim Puraskar
• 2002: Sahitya Akademi Award for the book Aami O Banabihari

Sandipan was the seventh child of Upendranath Chattopadhyay and Narayani Chattopadhyay. In 1965 he married Rina Chattopadhyay. Trina Chattopadhyay, their only child, was born in 1966.

• Sunil Gangopadhyay
• Shakti Chattopadhyay
• Samir Roychoudhury
• Subimal Basak
• Basudeb Dasgupta
• Malay Roy Choudhury
• Tridib Mitra
• Hungry generation
• Binoy Majumdar

• Litterateur Sandipan Chattopadhyay dead Times of India – 12 December 2005
• The Unfininished Autobiography of Sandipan Chattopadhyay on Boipara-r Blogpara
• Patricide and Historical Neurosis in Sandipan Chattopadhyays Novel Swarger Nirjan Upokule