Kunal Basu
Encyclopedia
Kunal Basu is an India
n author of English fiction who has written three novels – The Opium Clerk (2001), The Miniaturist (2003), and Racists
(2006). His most recent work is a collection of short stories, The Japanese Wife
(2008), the title story of which has been made into a film
by the Indian filmmaker Aparna Sen
.
) and Chabi Basu (an author and actress). Born to Communist parents, he was brought up on books and enriching conversations at home that was visited by a galaxy of prominent men and women of the day.
He attended South Point High School (India)
in Calcutta, and graduated in Mechanical Engineering from Jadavpur University
(1973–78), which was followed by an MS at the Florida Institute of Engineering (1978–79). He returned to the US again in 1982 to do a PhD at the University of Florida
. By this time, he had switched course from Engineering to Management.
In between he worked for an advertising agency, in freelance journalism, dabbled in filmmaking, and taught at Jadavpur University
for a brief period of 16 months. In 1982, he met and married Susmita. Their daughter, Aparajita, was born soon after.
After his doctoral degree, he was a professor at McGill University
, Montreal, Canada, from 1986–1999. His 13 years at McGill were interrupted only by a brief stint at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Calcutta, in 1989. Since 1999, he has been teaching at Oxford University's Saïd Business School
. He has also written financial pieces for business publications such as Fast Company
and MIT Sloan Management Review
.
(1838–94). Bankim (himself heavily influenced by Walter Scott
) was a writer of historical novels, as were many other Bengali writers of the 19th and 20th centuries whom Basu avidly read as a child, like Ramesh Chandra Dutta and Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay
. But more than anything, he has said what draws him most to this genre is the "romantic possibilities of the historical novel", the scope to inhabit other places and times and thus enable the reader to romance the strange.
Basu is the first writer to deal with the opium
trade in Indian fiction. This part of British colonial history is often ignored nowadays in British history textbooks.
The Mughal
court, once again, made its first appearance in Indian-English fiction in The Miniaturist. Basu has always had a great fascination for Mughal history. That innate interest coupled with several trips to Agra
and Fatehpur Sikri
helped him recreate the 16th century setting.
This Muslim novel by Basu was followed by Racists, a book which did not have a single Indian character in it. It was the first Victorian
novel to be written by a non-white and was nominated for the Crossword Book Award
.
Basu has said that there is certainly 'deep' (as opposed to 'surface') autobiography in his work, and cites Mahim – a member of 19th century's Young Bengal
– as the character that comes closest to him as a person. His first novel is also partly located in the city of his birth – though a Calcutta 100 years before his time.
Hiran, the eponymous clerk of the title, is born in 1857: the year of Mutiny and the year his father dies. Brought to Calcutta by his widowed mother he turns out to have few talents, apart from an uncanny ability to read a man's lies in his palm. When luck gets him a job at the auction house, Hiran finds himself embroiled in a mysterious trade, and even more deeply embroiled in the affairs of his nefarious superior, the infamous Mr. Jonathan Crabbe and his opium
addicted wife. An unlikely hero, Hiran is caught up in rebellion and war, buffeted by storms at sea, by love and intrigue, innocently implicated in fraud and dark dealings.
Set in the Mughal
court of Akbar the Great
in the 16th century, this novel tells the story of Bihzad, son of the chief court painter. A child prodigy, Bihzad is groomed to take his father's place in the imperial court but the precocious and brilliant artist soon tires of imperial commissions and develops a grand and forbidden obsession. He leads a dual life – spending his nights painting the Emperor as his lover, and his days recording the Emperor's official biography in miniatures. But rumours about the wild, passionate nature of his secret drawings bring his enemies out into the open, who use his art to destroy him.
1855: on a deserted island off the coast of Africa, the most audacious experiment ever envisaged is about to begin. To settle an argument that has raged inconclusively for decades, two scientists decide to raise a pair of infants, one black, one white, on a barren island, exposed to the dangers all around them, tended only by a young nurse whose muteness renders her incapable of influencing them in any way, for good or for bad. They will grow up without speech, without civilisation, without punishment or play. In this primitive environment, the children will develop as their primitive natures dictate.
An Indian man writes to a Japanese woman. She writes back. They fall in love and exchange vows in their letters, then live as man and wife without ever setting eyes on each other – their intimacy of words finally tested by life's miraculous upheavals.
The twelve stories in this collection are about the unexpected.
An American professor visits India with the purpose of committing suicide, and goes on a desert journey with the daughter of a snakecharmer. A honeymooning Indian couple is caught up in the Tiananmen
Square unrest. A Russian prostitute discovers her roots in the company of Calcutta revolutionaries. A holocaust victim stands tall among strangers in a landscape of hate.
The title story of the The Japanese Wife has been made into a film
by director Aparna Sen
. Narrated by the author over a casual conversation in Oxford, she found it "an improbable and hauntingly beautiful love story, almost surreal in its innocence". That, and "the potential for great visuals" was what impelled her to make the film, she said in a TV interview.
For Basu, this film represents a further tryst in his long affair with cinema, "the most magical of all the arts". He had acted in two of Mrinal Sen
's films – Punascha and Abasheshe – as a child; and was later involved in the making of two documentaries – Football (1980) and The Magic Loom (1997).
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
n author of English fiction who has written three novels – The Opium Clerk (2001), The Miniaturist (2003), and Racists
Racists
Racists is a 2006 novel by Kunal Basu about a scientific experiment in the mid-19th century in which a white girl and a black boy are raised together as savages on a small uninhabited island off the coast of Africa...
(2006). His most recent work is a collection of short stories, The Japanese Wife
The Japanese Wife
The Japanese Wife is a 2010 Indian film directed by Bengali filmmaker Aparna Sen. It stars Rahul Bose, Raima Sen and Moushumi Chatterjee, and Japanese actress Chigusa Takaku in the title role...
(2008), the title story of which has been made into a film
The Japanese Wife
The Japanese Wife is a 2010 Indian film directed by Bengali filmmaker Aparna Sen. It stars Rahul Bose, Raima Sen and Moushumi Chatterjee, and Japanese actress Chigusa Takaku in the title role...
by the Indian filmmaker Aparna Sen
Aparna Sen
Aparna Sen is a critically acclaimed Bengali Indian filmmaker, script writer, and actress. She is the winner of three National Film Awards and eight international film festival awards.-Biography:...
.
Biography
Kunal Basu was born in Calcutta to Sunil Kumar Basu (a litterateur and publisher and one of the early members of the Communist Party of IndiaCommunist Party of India
The Communist Party of India is a national political party in India. In the Indian communist movement, there are different views on exactly when the Indian communist party was founded. The date maintained as the foundation day by CPI is 26 December 1925...
) and Chabi Basu (an author and actress). Born to Communist parents, he was brought up on books and enriching conversations at home that was visited by a galaxy of prominent men and women of the day.
He attended South Point High School (India)
South Point High School (India)
South Point School is Kolkata's first coeducational school. In 1992, South Point group of schools, consisting of the junior and senior divisions, made an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest educational institute in the world...
in Calcutta, and graduated in Mechanical Engineering from Jadavpur University
Jadavpur University
Jadavpur University , is a premier educational and research institution in India.It is located in Kolkata, West Bengal and comprises two campuses - the main campus at Jadavpur and the new campus at Salt Lake...
(1973–78), which was followed by an MS at the Florida Institute of Engineering (1978–79). He returned to the US again in 1982 to do a PhD at the University of Florida
University of Florida
The University of Florida is an American public land-grant, sea-grant, and space-grant research university located on a campus in Gainesville, Florida. The university traces its historical origins to 1853, and has operated continuously on its present Gainesville campus since September 1906...
. By this time, he had switched course from Engineering to Management.
In between he worked for an advertising agency, in freelance journalism, dabbled in filmmaking, and taught at Jadavpur University
Jadavpur University
Jadavpur University , is a premier educational and research institution in India.It is located in Kolkata, West Bengal and comprises two campuses - the main campus at Jadavpur and the new campus at Salt Lake...
for a brief period of 16 months. In 1982, he met and married Susmita. Their daughter, Aparajita, was born soon after.
After his doctoral degree, he was a professor at McGill University
McGill University
Mohammed Fathy is a public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The university bears the name of James McGill, a prominent Montreal merchant from Glasgow, Scotland, whose bequest formed the beginning of the university...
, Montreal, Canada, from 1986–1999. His 13 years at McGill were interrupted only by a brief stint at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Calcutta, in 1989. Since 1999, he has been teaching at Oxford University's Saïd Business School
Saïd Business School
Saïd Business School is the business school of the University of Oxford in England, located on the north side of Frideswide Square on the former site of Oxford Rewley Road railway station. It is the University's centre of learning for graduate and undergraduate students in business, management...
. He has also written financial pieces for business publications such as Fast Company
Fast Company (magazine)
Fast Company is a full-color business magazine that releases 10 issues per year and reports on topics including innovation, digital media, technology, change management, leadership, design, and social responsibility...
and MIT Sloan Management Review
MIT Sloan Management Review
MIT Sloan Management Review is a web site and magazine focused on the management of innovation. Published at the MIT Sloan School of Management, MIT Sloan Management Review’s mission is to lead the conversation among thinkers, professors, and managers about the coming sea changes in management...
.
Influence and themes
Basu is one of the very few Indian practitioners of historical fiction. Apart from his love of history, it has something to do with the influence of his favourite author, the Bengali novelist Bankim Chandra ChattopadhyayBankim Chandra Chattopadhyay
Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay was a famous Bengali writer, poet and journalist. He was the composer of India’s national song Vande Mataram, originally a Bengali and Sanskrit stotra personifying India as a mother goddess and inspiring the activists during the Indian Freedom Movement...
(1838–94). Bankim (himself heavily influenced by Walter Scott
Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet, popular throughout much of the world during his time....
) was a writer of historical novels, as were many other Bengali writers of the 19th and 20th centuries whom Basu avidly read as a child, like Ramesh Chandra Dutta and Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay
Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay
Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay was a well known literary figure of Bengal. He was also actively involved with Bengali cinema as well as Bollywood. His most famous creation is the fictional detective Byomkesh Bakshi.He wrote different forms of prose: novels, short stories, plays and screenplays...
. But more than anything, he has said what draws him most to this genre is the "romantic possibilities of the historical novel", the scope to inhabit other places and times and thus enable the reader to romance the strange.
Basu is the first writer to deal with the opium
Opium
Opium is the dried latex obtained from the opium poppy . Opium contains up to 12% morphine, an alkaloid, which is frequently processed chemically to produce heroin for the illegal drug trade. The latex also includes codeine and non-narcotic alkaloids such as papaverine, thebaine and noscapine...
trade in Indian fiction. This part of British colonial history is often ignored nowadays in British history textbooks.
The Mughal
Mughal Empire
The Mughal Empire , or Mogul Empire in traditional English usage, was an imperial power from the Indian Subcontinent. The Mughal emperors were descendants of the Timurids...
court, once again, made its first appearance in Indian-English fiction in The Miniaturist. Basu has always had a great fascination for Mughal history. That innate interest coupled with several trips to Agra
Agra
Agra a.k.a. Akbarabad is a city on the banks of the river Yamuna in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, India, west of state capital, Lucknow and south from national capital New Delhi. With a population of 1,686,976 , it is one of the most populous cities in Uttar Pradesh and the 19th most...
and Fatehpur Sikri
Fatehpur Sikri
Fatehpur Sikri is a city and a municipal board in Agra district in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India. Built near the much older Sikri, the historical city of Fatehabad, as it was first named, was constructed by Mughal emperor Akbar beginning in 1570...
helped him recreate the 16th century setting.
This Muslim novel by Basu was followed by Racists, a book which did not have a single Indian character in it. It was the first Victorian
Victorian literature
Victorian literature is the literature produced during the reign of Queen Victoria . It forms a link and transition between the writers of the romantic period and the very different literature of the 20th century....
novel to be written by a non-white and was nominated for the Crossword Book Award
Vodafone Crossword Book Award
Vodafone Crossword Book Award is an Indian book award sponsored by Vodafone and Crossword Bookstores. It is India's biggest private sector award. The Award was instituted in 1998 with the intention of competing with The Booker Prize, Commonwealth Writers' Prize or The Pulitzer Prize.The award...
.
Basu has said that there is certainly 'deep' (as opposed to 'surface') autobiography in his work, and cites Mahim – a member of 19th century's Young Bengal
Young Bengal
The Young Bengal movement was a group of radical Bengali free thinkers emerging from Hindu College, Calcutta in the early 19th century. They were also known as Derozians, after their firebrand teacher at Hindu College, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio....
– as the character that comes closest to him as a person. His first novel is also partly located in the city of his birth – though a Calcutta 100 years before his time.
Novels
- The Opium Clerk, 2001
Hiran, the eponymous clerk of the title, is born in 1857: the year of Mutiny and the year his father dies. Brought to Calcutta by his widowed mother he turns out to have few talents, apart from an uncanny ability to read a man's lies in his palm. When luck gets him a job at the auction house, Hiran finds himself embroiled in a mysterious trade, and even more deeply embroiled in the affairs of his nefarious superior, the infamous Mr. Jonathan Crabbe and his opium
Opium
Opium is the dried latex obtained from the opium poppy . Opium contains up to 12% morphine, an alkaloid, which is frequently processed chemically to produce heroin for the illegal drug trade. The latex also includes codeine and non-narcotic alkaloids such as papaverine, thebaine and noscapine...
addicted wife. An unlikely hero, Hiran is caught up in rebellion and war, buffeted by storms at sea, by love and intrigue, innocently implicated in fraud and dark dealings.
- The Miniaturist, 2003
Set in the Mughal
Mughal Empire
The Mughal Empire , or Mogul Empire in traditional English usage, was an imperial power from the Indian Subcontinent. The Mughal emperors were descendants of the Timurids...
court of Akbar the Great
Akbar the Great
Akbar , also known as Shahanshah Akbar-e-Azam or Akbar the Great , was the third Mughal Emperor. He was of Timurid descent; the son of Emperor Humayun, and the grandson of the Mughal Emperor Zaheeruddin Muhammad Babur, the ruler who founded the Mughal dynasty in India...
in the 16th century, this novel tells the story of Bihzad, son of the chief court painter. A child prodigy, Bihzad is groomed to take his father's place in the imperial court but the precocious and brilliant artist soon tires of imperial commissions and develops a grand and forbidden obsession. He leads a dual life – spending his nights painting the Emperor as his lover, and his days recording the Emperor's official biography in miniatures. But rumours about the wild, passionate nature of his secret drawings bring his enemies out into the open, who use his art to destroy him.
- RacistsRacistsRacists is a 2006 novel by Kunal Basu about a scientific experiment in the mid-19th century in which a white girl and a black boy are raised together as savages on a small uninhabited island off the coast of Africa...
, 2006
1855: on a deserted island off the coast of Africa, the most audacious experiment ever envisaged is about to begin. To settle an argument that has raged inconclusively for decades, two scientists decide to raise a pair of infants, one black, one white, on a barren island, exposed to the dangers all around them, tended only by a young nurse whose muteness renders her incapable of influencing them in any way, for good or for bad. They will grow up without speech, without civilisation, without punishment or play. In this primitive environment, the children will develop as their primitive natures dictate.
Short story collections
- The Japanese WifeThe Japanese WifeThe Japanese Wife is a 2010 Indian film directed by Bengali filmmaker Aparna Sen. It stars Rahul Bose, Raima Sen and Moushumi Chatterjee, and Japanese actress Chigusa Takaku in the title role...
(Collection of short stories), 2008
An Indian man writes to a Japanese woman. She writes back. They fall in love and exchange vows in their letters, then live as man and wife without ever setting eyes on each other – their intimacy of words finally tested by life's miraculous upheavals.
The twelve stories in this collection are about the unexpected.
An American professor visits India with the purpose of committing suicide, and goes on a desert journey with the daughter of a snakecharmer. A honeymooning Indian couple is caught up in the Tiananmen
Tiananmen
The Tiananmen, Tian'anmen or Gate of Heavenly Peace is a famous monument in Beijing, the capital of the People's Republic of China. It is widely used as a national symbol. First built during the Ming Dynasty in 1420, Tian'anmen is often referred to as the front entrance to the Forbidden City...
Square unrest. A Russian prostitute discovers her roots in the company of Calcutta revolutionaries. A holocaust victim stands tall among strangers in a landscape of hate.
The title story of the The Japanese Wife has been made into a film
The Japanese Wife
The Japanese Wife is a 2010 Indian film directed by Bengali filmmaker Aparna Sen. It stars Rahul Bose, Raima Sen and Moushumi Chatterjee, and Japanese actress Chigusa Takaku in the title role...
by director Aparna Sen
Aparna Sen
Aparna Sen is a critically acclaimed Bengali Indian filmmaker, script writer, and actress. She is the winner of three National Film Awards and eight international film festival awards.-Biography:...
. Narrated by the author over a casual conversation in Oxford, she found it "an improbable and hauntingly beautiful love story, almost surreal in its innocence". That, and "the potential for great visuals" was what impelled her to make the film, she said in a TV interview.
For Basu, this film represents a further tryst in his long affair with cinema, "the most magical of all the arts". He had acted in two of Mrinal Sen
Mrinal Sen
Mrinal Sen is a Bengali Indian filmmaker. He was born on 14 May 1923, in the town of Faridpur, now in Bangladesh in a Hindu family. After finishing his high school there, he left home to come to Calcutta as a student and studied physics at the well-known Scottish Church College and at the...
's films – Punascha and Abasheshe – as a child; and was later involved in the making of two documentaries – Football (1980) and The Magic Loom (1997).